Tell-All

on someone’s earlobe or lips. Despite such training, my Miss Kathie peers down the length of the table, her lashes fluttering. The slender fingers of one famous white hand toy with the auburn tresses of her wig. The jeweled fingers of Miss Kathie’s opposite hand touch the six strands of pearls which contain the loose folds of her sagging neck skin.
    In the next instant, while the footmen pass the finger bowls, Lillian twists in her chair, shouldering an invisible sniper’s rifle and squeezing off rounds until the clip is empty. Still just dripping with Hebrew and Communist babies. Lugging her cargo of Semitic orphans. When the rifle is too searing hot to hold, Miss Hellman howls a wild war whoop and hurtles the steaming weapon at the pursuing storm troopers.
    Snarl, bark, screech
… Peter Lorre .
Oink, bark, squeal
… Averill Harriman .
    It’s a fate worse than death to spend eternity in harness, serving as Lilly Hellman’s zombie, brought back to life at dinner parties. On radio talk programs. At this point, Miss Hellman is heaving yet another batch of invisible babies, rescued Gypsy babes, high, toward the chandelier, as if catapulting them over the snowcapped peak of the Matterhorn to the safety of Switzerland .
    Grunt, howl, squeal
… Sarah Bernhardt .
    By now, Lillian Hellman wraps two fists around the invisible throat of Adolf Hitler , reenacting how she sneaked into his subterranean Berlin bunker, dressed as Leni Riefenstahl , her arms laden with black-market cartons of Lucky Strike and Parliament cigarettes, and then throttled the sleeping dictator in his bed.
    Bray, bark, whinny
… Basil Rathbone .
    Lilly throws the terrified, make-believe Hitler into the center of tonight’s dinner table, her teeth biting, her manicured fingernails scratching at his Nazi eyes. Lillian’s fists clamped around the invisible windpipe, she begins pounding the invisible Führer’s skull against the tablecloth, making the silverware and wineglasses jump and rattle.
    Screech, meow, tweet
… Wallis Simpson .
    Howl, bray, squeak
… Diana Vreeland .
    A moment before Hitler’s assassination, George Cukor looks up, his fingertips still dripping chilled water into his finger bowl, that smell of fresh-sliced lemons, and George says, “Please, Lillian.” Poor George says, “Would you please
stuff
it.”
    Seated well below the salt, below the various professional hangers-on, the walking men, the drug dealers, the mesmerists, the exiled White Russians and poor Lorenz Hart , really at the very horizon of tonight’s dinner table, a young man looks back. Seated on the farthest frontier of placement. His eyes the bright brown of July Fourth sunlight through a tall mug of root beer. Quite the American specimen. A classic face of such symmetrical proportions, the exactly balanced type of face one dreams of looking down to find smiling and eager between one’s inner thighs.
    Still, that’s the trouble with only a single glance at any star on the horizon. As Elsa Maxwell would say, “One can never tell for certain if that dazzling, shiny object is rising or setting.”
    Lillian inhales the silence through her burning cigarette. Taps the gray ash onto her bread plate. In a blast of smoke, she says, “Did you hear?” She says, “It’s a fact, but Eleanor Roosevelt chewed every hair off my bush.…”
    Through all of this—the cigarette smoke and lies and the Second World War —the specimen’s bright brown eyes, they’re looking straight down the table, up the social ladder, gazing back, deep, into the famous, fluttering violet eyes of my employer.

ACT I, SCENE TWO
    If you’ll permit me to break the fourth wall, my name is Hazie Coogan .
    My vocation is not that of a paid companion, nor am I a professional housekeeper. It is my role as an old woman to scrub the same pots and pans I scrubbed as a young one—I’ve made my peace with that fact—and while she has never once touched them, those pots and pans have always belonged to the majestic, the glorious film actress Miss Katherine Kenton .
    It is my task to soft-boil her daily egg. I wax her linoleum kitchen floor. The endless job of dusting and polishing the not insignificant number of bibelots and gold-plated gimcracks awarded to Miss Katie, that job is mine as well. But am I Miss Katherine Kenton ’s maid? No more so than the butcher plays handmaiden to the tender lamb.
    My purpose is to impose order on Miss Kathie’s chaos … to instill discipline in her