Tell-All

and bloodshot from a prophylactic blast of Miss Kathie’s mace.
    Thus the reversal: as Miss Kathie becomes more vital and vibrant, the Webster specimen falls into increasing decrepitude. A stranger, meeting the pair for the first time, would be hard-pressed to name the younger and the older. With her haughty expression, it’s difficult to decide which Miss Kathie finds more disgusting: Webster’s apparent plots to murder her, or his declining physical virility.
    And with every scar and burn and scratch, this defacedWebster specimen looks more like the monster I warned Miss Kathie against.
    In a hard transition, we cut back to final dress rehearsal for the new Broadway show, at the moment the music is peaking with the voices of the entire cast singing, while Miss Kathie raises the American flag on Iwo Jima , assisted by Jack Webb and Akim Tamiroff . A Florenz Ziegfeld chorus line of Mack Sennett beauties gotten up as imperial Japanese airmen in low-cut, peekaboo costumes by Edith Head link arms and execute precision high kicks which expose their fascist buttocks. The spectacle fills a medium shot, busy with motion, color and music, until the shot pulls back to reveal the audience seats are—once more—almost all vacant.
    Luise Rainer sings slightly off-key during the Rape of Nanking , and Conrad Veidt flubbed a couple dance steps during the Corregidor Death March , but otherwise the first act seems to work. A constant plume, really a mushroom cloud of white cigarette smoke rises from Lilly Hellman’s seat in the center of the fifth row, flanked there by Michael Curtiz and Sinclair Lewis . On West Forty-seventh Street already the marquee carries the title
Unconditional Surrender
starring Katherine Kenton and George Zucco . Music and lyrics by Jerome Kern and Woody Guthrie . At the stage door, a truck from the printer unloads stacks of glossy programs. Backstage, Eli Wallach in the role of Howard Hughes practices some business, seated within the cockpit of a full-size balsa-wood mock-up of the Spruce Goose .
    The first act curtain falls as the chorus girls rush to change into their sequined shark costumes for the sinking of the USS Indianapolis at the opening of the second act. Ray Bolger prepares to die of congestive heart failure as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. John Mack Brown preps to assume office as Harry Truman opposite a small cameo appearance by Ann Southern as Margaret Truman .
    Amid the sea of empty seats, Terrence Terry and I sit in the twentieth row center, buttressed by our parcels and Bloomingdale’s bags and various thermos bottles.
    Alone in row twelve, stage right, sits Webster Carlton Westward III , his bright brown eyes never leaving the form of Miss Kathie. His broad shoulders leaning forward, both his elbows planted on his knees, he thrusts his American face toward her light.
    From any closer than row fifteen, Miss Kathie’s dyed hair looks stiff as wire. Her gestures, jittery and tense, her body whittled down by fear and anxiety to what Louella Parsons would call a “lipsticked stick figure.” Despite the constant threat of murder, she refuses to involve the police out of fear she’ll be humiliated by W. H. Mooring in
Film Weekly
or Hale Horton in
Photoplay
, depicted as a dotty has-been infatuated by a scheming gigolo. It’s a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea: whether to be killed and humiliated in book form by the Webb, or to remain alive and be humiliated by Donovan Pedelty or Miriam Gibson in
Screen Book
magazine.
    Even as the stagehands change the plaster rocks of Iwo Jima for the canvas hull of the doomed Indianapolis , I’m scribbling notes. My fountain pen scratching my handwriting along line after line, I scheme and conspire to save my Miss Kathie.
    Eyeing the Webster specimen, the matinee idol outline of Webb’s American profile, Terry asks if we’ve discovered any new murder plan.
    Midsentence, still writing, I retrieve the latest pages of Love Slave and toss them into Terry’s lap. I tell him that I found this newest revision in Webster’s suitcase this morning.
    Terry asks if I’ve arranged an escort for the show’s opening next week. If not, he can stop by the town house to collect me. His eyes skimming back and forth across the typed pages, Terry asks if Miss Kathie has seen this version of her demise.
    Flipping to a new page of my notebook, still writing, I tell him, Yes. That accounts for her vibrato.
    Peering over the top of the Love Slave pages,