Tell-All

and snaps it open, removing two cigarettes, which he places, together, between his lips. Terry flicks a flame to jump from one corner of the chrome case, and lifts it to light both cigarettes. With a snap of his wrist, the flame is gone, and Terry replaces the thin case, returned to inside his coat. He plucksone cigarette from his mouth, trailing a spiral of smoke, and reaches to place it between the red lips of Miss Kathie.
    This flashback takes place before the crow’s-feet caused by Paco Esposito . Before I scratched the frown lines related to the senator into this mirror of Dorian Gray .
    Wielding the diamond, I get to work drawing. I trace any new wrinkles, adding any new liver spots to this long-term record. Sketching the network of tiny spider veins puckered around the filter of Miss Kathie’s burning cigarette.
    Terry says, “A word of warning, Lady Kath.” Sipping his filthy champagne, he says, “If you’ll take my advice. You need to be careful.…”
    As Terry explains, too many lady stars in her situation have opened their doors to a young man or a young woman, someone who’d sit and listen and laugh. The rapt attention might last for a year or a month, but eventually the young admirer would disappear, returning to another life among people his own age. The young woman would marry and vanish with her own first child, leaving the actress, once more, abandoned. On occasion a letter might arrive, or a telephone call. Keeping tabs.
    In the same manner Truman Capote kept in touch with Perry Smith and Dick Hickock while they sat on death row. Biding his time. Capote needed a finale for
In Cold Blood
.
    Every major publisher in America harbors a book, the advance money already paid to some pleasant young person, a handsome, affable listener, who’d spun a few evenings of dinner into a movie-star tell-all biography and needed only a cause of death to complete the final chapter. Already, that pack of stage-door hyenas waited on Mae West to die. They phoned Lelia Goldoni , hoping for bad news. Scanned theobituary pages for Hugh Marlowe, Emlyn Williams, Peggie Castle and Buster Keaton . Vultures circling. Most were already finagling introductions to Ruth Donnelly and Geraldine Fitzgerald . At this moment, they sit in front of a fireplace in the parlor of Lillian Gish or Carole Landis , vacuuming up the thorny anecdotes they’d need to flesh out two hundred pages, their vulture eyes committing to memory every gesture of Butterfly McQueen , every tic or mannerism of Tex Avery that could be sold to the ravenous reading public.
    All of those future best-selling books, they were already typeset, merely waiting for someone to die.
    “I know you, Kath,” says Terry, turning his head to blow smoke. The stale air of the crypt heavy with the smell of smoke and mold. He takes the wedding ring from the dusty stone shelf, saying, “I know you’re a sucker for an audience, even an audience of one.”
    Some grocery delivery boy or a girl conducting a door-to-door survey … these ambitious stray dogs, they each sit
clack-clacking
on a rusty typewriter at home. A pretty, wide-eyed, starstruck youngster will steal Miss Kathie’s life story. Her reputation. Her dignity. Then pray for her to die.
    With the diamond, I cut the furrows of sadness across her forehead. Updating Miss Kathie’s life story. The map of her. The mirror already scratched with years of worry and grief and scars documenting Miss Kathie’s secret face.
    Judy Garland , Terry says, and Ethel Merman never again walked out, not in public, not with as much of their previous pride and glamour, after Jacqueline Susann cast them as the fat, drunken, foulmouthed characters Neely O’Hara and Helen Lawson in
The Valley of the Dolls
.
    In response, the diamond shrieks against the glass. The high-pitched, wailing sound of funeral keening.
    Dropping to one knee on the cold stone floor, Terry looks up at Miss Kathie and says, “Will you marry me? Just to keep you safe?” He reaches out to take her hand. He says, “At least until something better comes along?”
    This, a sodomite and a faded movie star, is what Walter Winchell calls a “match made in resignation.” Terry proposes becoming her emotional bodyguard, a live-in placeholder between real men.
    “Just like your portrait here,” says Terry, nodding at the mirror in its silver frame, “any friendly young biographer is only going to showcase your flaws and faults in order to build his own