Tell-All

Tallulah long enough to learn her mannerisms. Tallulah’s delivery and how she walked. How she’d enter a room. The way Tallulah’s voice got screechy after one bourbon. How, after four of them, her eyelids hung, half closed as steamed clams.
    Of course, not everybody was in on the joke. It could be some Andy Devine or Slim Pickens farmers in Sioux Falls couldn’t see Davis doing a minstrel-show version of Tallulah, but everybody else saw. Imagine a real performer watching you drink at a hundred parties, memorizing you while you’re upset and spitting in the face of William Dieterle , then making you into a stage routine and performing you for the whole world to laugh at. The same as how that big shit Orson Welles made fun of Willy Hearst and poor Marion Davies .
    The Webster specimen holds the percolator in the sink, filling it with water from the faucet. He assembles the basket, the spindle and the lid, plugs the female end of the electric cord into the percolator base and plugs the male end into the power socket.
    Folks in Little Rock and Boulder and Budapest , most folks don’t know what’s not true. That bunch of Chill Wills rubes. So the whole entire world gets thinking that cartoon version Miss Davis created is the real you.
    Bette Davis built her career playing that burlesque version of Tallulah Bankhead .
    Nowadays, if anybody mentions poor Willy Hearst , youpicture Welles, fat and shouting at Mona Darkfeather , chasing Peel Trenton down some stairs. For anybody who never shook hands with Tallulah, she’s that bug-eyed harpy with that horrid fringe of pale, loose skin flapping along Davis’s jawline.
    It boils down to the fact that we’re all jackals feeding off each other.
    The percolator pops and snaps. A splash of brown coffee perks inside the glass bulb on top. A wisp of white steam leaks from the chrome spout.
    The Webster specimen’s got it backward, I tell him. Thelma Ritter is a copy of me. Her walk and her diction, her timing and delivery, all of it was coached. At first Joe Mankiewicz turned up everywhere. I might sit down to dinner next to Fay Bainter , across the table from Jessie Matthews , who only went anywhere with her husband, Sonnie Hale , next to him Alison Skipworth , on my other side Pierre Watkin , and Joe would be way up above the salt, not talking to anyone, never taking his eyes off me. He’d study me like I was a book or a blueprint, his diseased fingers bleeding through the tips of his white gloves.
    In his movie, Thelma Ritter wearing those cardigan sweaters half unbuttoned with the sleeves pushed back to the elbow, that was me. Thelma was playing me, only bigger. Hammy. My same way of parting my hair down the middle. Those eyes that follow every move at the same time. Not many folks knew, but the folks I knew,
they
knew. My given name is Hazie. The character’s called Birdie. Mankiewicz, that rat bastard, he wasn’t fooling anyone in our crowd.
    It’s like seeing Franklin Pangborn play his fairy hairdresser. Al Jolson in blackface. Or Everett Sloane doing his hook-nosed-Jewroutine. Except this two-ton joke lands on only you, you don’t share the load with nobody else, and folks expect you to laugh along or you’re being a poor sport.
    If you need more convincing, tell me the name of the broad who sat for Leonardo da Vinci’s painting the Mona Lisa . People remember poor Marion Davies , and they picture Dorothy Comingore , drinking and hunched over those enormous Gregg Toland jigsaw puzzles on an RKO soundstage.
    You talk about art imitating life, well, the reverse is true.
    On the scripted page, John Glenn creeps down the outside of the space capsule hull, embracing Lilly Hellman and pulling her to safety. Inside the window of the orbiting capsule, we see them kissing passionately. We hear the buzz of a hundred zippers ripping open and see a flash of pink skin as they tear the clothes from each other. In zero gravity, Lilly’s bare breasts stand up, firm and perfect. Her purple nipples erect, hard as flint arrowheads.
    In the kitchen, the Webster specimen places the percolator on the morning tray. Two cups and saucers. The sugar bowl and creamer.
    When I met her, Kathie Kenton was nothing. A Hollywood hopeful. A hostess in a steakhouse, handing out menus and clearing dirty plates. My job is not that of a stylist or press agent, but I’ve groomed her to become a symbol for millions of women. Across time, billions. I may not be an actor, but I’ve created a