Tell-All

seduced by Sammy Davis Jr . and parachuted onto Waikiki Beach with nothing but a bottle of sunblock and orders to stem the Imperial Army’s advance. Along the way she falls in love with Joi Lansing . According to Webb, this starring role had Tony Award written all over it.
    According to Terrence Terry , the Webster specimen was merely grooming my Miss Kathie. These past few years, she’d fallen into obscurity. First, refusing stage and film projects. Second, neglecting her gray hair and weight. A generation of young people were growing up never hearing the name Katherine Kenton , oblivious to Miss Kathie’s body of work.No, it wouldn’t do for her to die at this point in time, not before she’d made a successful comeback. Therefore, Webster Carlton Westward III coaxed her to slim down; in all likelihood he’d bully her into a surgeon’s office, where she’d submit to having any new wrinkles or sags erased from her face.
    If this new show was a hit, if it put my Miss Kathie back on top, introducing her to a new legion of fans, that would be the ideal time to complete his final chapter. His “lie-ography” would hit stores the same day her newspaper obituary hit the street. The same week her new Broadway show opened to rave reviews.
    But not this week, I tell Terry.
    Daubing with the hem of my starched maid’s apron, I wipe at the face of the infant I hold. I lean near the floor and pick out a thin sheaf of papers tucked beneath the diaper of a nearby baby. Offering the printed pages to Terry, I ask if he wants to read the second draft of Love Slave . Just the closing chapter; here’s the blueprint for Miss Kathie’s most recent brush with death.
    “How is it our homicidal hunk has landed himself in the hospital?” Terry says.
    And I toss the newest, revised final chapter at his feet.
    Onstage, Lilly demonstrates to Miss Kathie the correct way to
tour en l’air
while slitting the throat of an enemy sentry.
    Terry collects the pages. Still holding the orphan on his knee, he says, “Once upon a time …” He props the baby in the crook of one arm, leaning into its tiny face as if it were a radio microphone or a camera lens, any recording device in which to store his life. Speaking into this particularfoundling, filling its hollow mind, filling its eyes and ears with the sound of his voice, Terry reads, “ ‘Perhaps it’s ironic, but no film critic, not Jack Grant nor Pauline Kael nor David Ogden Stewart , would ever tear Katherine to bloody shreds the way savage grizzly bears eventually would.…’ ”

ACT II, SCENE FOUR
    In voice-over, we hear Terrence Terry reading from the revised final chapter of Love Slave . As we dissolve from the theater of the previous scene, we continue to hear the ambient sounds of the rehearsal: carpenters hammering scenery together, tap dancing, machine-gun fire, the dying screams of sailors burned alive, and Lillian Hellman . However, these noises fade as once more we see the soft-focus interior of Miss Kathie’s boudoir. We see Webster Carlton Westward III , shot from the waist up, his naked torso shining with sweat, as he lifts one hand to his nose, the fingers dripping wet, and inhales deeply, closing his eyes. His hands drop down, out of the shot, then rise, each hand gripping a slender ankle. Lifting the two feet to shoulder height, he holds them wide apart. Webb’s hips buck forward, then pull back, drive forward and pull back, while the voice-over reads, “ ‘… On the final day of Katherine Kenton ’s life, I oh-so-gently nudgedthe prow of my aching love stick against the knotted folds of her forbidden passageway.…’ ”
    Once again, the man and woman copulating are idealized versions of Webb and Miss Kathie, seen through heavy filters, their movements in slow motion, fluid, possibly even blurring.
    Terry’s voice continues reading, “ ‘The pungent aroma of her most corporeal orifice drenched my senses. My ever-mounting admiration and professional respect boiling for release, I thrust deeper into the fragile, soiled petals of her fecund rose.…’ ”
    In the year preceding the French Revolution , according to Terrence Terry , the antiroyalists sought to undermine public respect for Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette , by publishing drawings which depicted the monarchs engaged in degenerate sexual behavior. These cartoons, printed in Switzerland and Germany and smuggled into France , accused the queen of copulating with hordes of dogs,