Tell-All

said, “All biographies are an assemblage of untruths.” A beat later, adding, “So are all
autobiographies.”
    The critics were willing to forgive Lillian Hellman a few factual inaccuracies concerning the Second World War . As presented here, this was history—but better. It might not be the actual war, but this was the war we wished we’d fought. For that, it was brilliant, dense and meaty, with Maria Montez slitting the throat of Lou Costello . After that, Bob Hope tap-dancing his signature shim-sham step through a field of live land mines.
    Compared to the opening night of
Unconditional Surrender
, no doughboy crouched in the trenches nor GI in a tank turret ever shook with as much fear as my Miss Kathie felt stepping out on that stage. She made a ready target from every seat in the house. Dancing and singing, she was asitting duck. Each note or kick step could easily be her last, and who would notice amidst the barrage of fake bullets and mortar shells that rocked the theater that night? Any wily assassin could squeeze off a fatal shot and make his escape while the theatergoers applauded Miss Kathie’s bursting skull or chest, thinking the death blow was merely a very effective special effect. Mistaking her spectacular public murder for simply a plot point in Lilly Hellman’s epic saga.
    So Miss Kathie danced. She occupied every inch of the set as if her life depended on it, constantly dodging and evading any single location on the stage, climbing to the forecastle of a battleship, then diving into the warm waves of the Pacific Ocean , the lyric of an Arthur Freed song bubbling up through the water, and Miss Kathie breaking the azure surface a moment later, still holding the same Harold Arlen note.
    It was terror that invested her performance with such energy, such verve, spurring the best Miss Kathie had given her audience in decades. Creating an evening which people would recall for the remainder of their lives. Imbuing Miss Kathie with a kinetic vitality which had been too long absent. Peppered throughout the audience we see Senator Phelps Russell Warner seated beside his latest wife. We see Paco Esposito in the company of industry sexpot Anita Page . Myself, I sit with Terrence Terry . In fact, the only empty seat in the house is beside the haggard Webster Carlton Westward III , where he’s lovingly placed the massive armload of red roses he, no doubt, intends to present during the curtain calls. A bouquet large enough to conceal a tommy gun or rifle. The barrel perhaps equipped with a silencer, although such a precaution would be wholly unnecessary as deafening Japanese Zeros dive-bomb the American forces at Pearl Harbor .
    Tonight’s performance amounted to nothing less than a battle for her identity. This, the constant creation of herself. This strutting and bellowing, a struggle to keep herself in the world, to not be replaced by another’s version, the way food is digested, the way a tree’s dead carcass becomes fuel or furniture. In her high stepping, Miss Kathie endlessly blared proof of her human existence. In her blurred Bombershay steps here was a fragile organism doing its most to effect the environment surrounding it and postponing decomposition as long as possible.
    Framed in that spotlight, we watched an infant shrieking for a breast to suckle. There was a zebra or rabbit screaming as wolves tore it to pieces.
    This wasn’t any mere song and dance; here was a bold, blaring declaration howling itself into the empty face of death.
    Before us strutted something more than Miss Kathie’s past characters: Mrs. Gunga Din or Mrs. Hunchback of Notre Dame or Mrs. Last of the Mohicans .
    No one except myself and Terrence Terry would take note of the sweat drenching my Miss Kathie. Or notice the twitching, nervous way her eyes rattled in their attempt to watch every seat in the orchestra and balcony. For once, the critics weren’t her worst fear, not Frank S. Nugent of the
New York Times
nor Howard Barnes of the
New York Herald Tribune
nor Robert Garland of the
New York American
.
    Jack Grant of
Screen Book
, Gladys Hall and Katherine Albert of
Modern Screen
magazine, Harrison Carroll of the
Los Angeles Herald Express
, a legion of critics take rapturous notes, racking their brains for additional superlatives. Also, columnists Sheilah Graham and Earl Wilson , a group that any other show, any other night would constitute what Dorothy Kilgallen calls “a jury of her sneers,” this night