Tell-All

foyer. He wears the double-breasted Brooks Brothers tuxedo cited in the last chapter of Love Slave . An orchid in his lapel buttonhole. The two ends of a white bow tie hang, looped and loose around his collar, and Webster Carlton Westward III says, “We’ll need to hurry to stay on schedule.” Looking down on us, he holds each end of his tie and leans forward, saying, “Would it kill you to help me with this?”
    Those hands, the soft tools he would use to commit murder. Behind that smile, the cunning mind that had planned this betrayal. To add insult to injury, the lies he’d written about my Miss Kathie and her sexual adventures, they would eventually be cherry-picked by Frazier Hunt of
Photoplay
, Katherine Albert of
Modern Screen
magazine, Howard Barnes of the
New York Herald Tribune
, Jack Grant of
Screen Book
, Sheilah Graham , all the various low-life bottom feeders of
Confidential
and every succeeding biographer of the future. These tawdry, soft, sordid fictions would petrify and fossilize to become diamond-hard, carved-stone facts for all perpetuity. A salacious lie will always trump a noble truth.
    Miss Kathie’s violet eyes waft to meet my eyes.
    A bus roars past in the street, shaking the ground with its weight and trailing the stink of diesel exhaust. Around us the air swirls, gritty with dust and heavy with the threat of imminent death.
    Then Miss Kathie steps up to the stoop where the Webster specimen waits. Standing on her tiptoes, she begins to knot the white bow tie. Her movie-star face a mere breath from his own. For this moment and for the immediate future, placing herself as far as possible from the constant, marauding stream of omnibuses.
    And Webb, the evil, lying bastard, looks down and plants a kiss on her forehead.

ACT II, SCENE THREE
    We cut to the interior of a lavish Broadway theater. The opening mise-en-scène includes the proscenium arch, the stage curtain rising within the arch, below that the combed heads and brass instruments of musicians within the orchestra pit. The conductor, Woody Herman , raises his baton, and the air fills with a rousing overture by Oscar Levant , arrangements by André Previn . Additional musical numbers by Sigmund Romberg and Victor Herbert . On the piano, Vladimir Horowitz . As the curtain rises, we see a chorus line which includes Ruth Donnelly, Barbara Merrill, Alma Rubens, Zachary Scott and Kent Smith doing fan kicks aboard the deck of the battleship USS Arizona , designed by Romain de Tirtoff and moored center stage. The Japanese admirals Isoroku Yamamoto and Hara Tadaichi are danced by Kinuyo Tanaka and Tora Teje , respectively. Andy Clyde does a furious buck-and-wing as Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki , the officialfirst Japanese prisoner of war. Anna May Wong tap-dances a solo in the part of Captain Mitsuo Fuchida , and Tex Ritter fills in for General Douglas MacArthur . With Emiko Yakumo and Tia Xeo as Lieutenant Commander Shigekazu Shimazaki and Captain Minoru Genda , the principal dancers among the Japanese junior officers.
    Choreography by
moo, cluck, bark
… Léonide Massine .
    Staging by
tweet, bray, meow
… W. MacQueen Pope .
    As the orchestra pounds away, the USS Oklahoma explodes near the waterline and begins to sink stage right. Burning fuel oil races stage left, moving upstage to ignite the USS West Virginia . Downstage, a Japanese Nakajima torpedo lances into the hull of the USS California .
    Japanese Zeros strafe the production number, riddling the chorus line with bullets. Aichi dive bombers plunge into Pearl White and Tony Curtis , prompting an explosion of red corn syrup, while the cruising periscopes of Japanese midget submarines cut back and forth behind the footlights.
    As the Arizona begins to keel over, we see Katherine Kenton clamber to the position of port-side gun, wrestling the body of a dead gunner’s mate away from the seat. Embroidered across one side of her chest, the olive-drab fabric reads: PFC H ELLMAN. My Miss Kathie drags the dead hero aside, laying both her palms open against his chest. As grenades explode shrapnel around her, Miss Kathie’s lips mutter a silent prayer. The eyelids of the dead sailor, played by Jackie Coogan , the eyelashes flutter. The young man opens his eyes, blinking; cradled now in Miss Kathie’s arms, he looks up into her famous violet eyes and says, “Am I in heaven?” He says, “Are you … God?”
    The Zeros screaming past, the Arizona sinking beneath them into the oily, fiery water of