Tell-All

Orchestra plays “Green-sleeves” as the shining satin and white lace of Miss Kathie drifts a step, drifts a step, drifts another step away, leaving me. Arm in arm with Lilly, she stalks closer to the altar, where Fanny Brice stands as the matron of honor. Louis B. Mayer waits to officiate. A bower arches above them, twining with countless pink Nancy Reagan roses and yellow lilies. Among the flowers loom a thicket of newsreel cameras and boom microphones.
    Miss Kathie walks what Walter Winchell calls “the bridalmile” wearing what Sheilah Graham calls “very off-white” posing what Hedda Hopper calls a “veiled threat.”
    “Something old, something new, something borrowed,” Louella Parsons would write in her column, “and something extremely fishy.”
    Miss Kathie seems too ready to be placed under what Elsa Maxwell calls “spouse arrest.”
    At the altar Lon McCallister cools his heels as best man, standing next to a brown pair of eyes. This year’s groom, the harried, haggard, battle-scarred Webster Carlton Westward III .
    Crowding the bride’s side of the church, the guests include Kay Francis and Donald O’Connor, Deanna Durbin and Mildred Coles, George Bancroft and Bonita Granville and Alfred Hitchcock, Franchot Tone and Greta Garbo , all the people who failed to attend the funeral for little Loverboy .
    As Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would say, “More stars than there are in heaven …”
    On her trip to the altar, my Miss Kathie throws looks and kisses to Cary Grant and Theda Bara . She waves a white-gloved hand at Arthur Miller and Deborah Kerr and Danny Kaye . From behind her veil she smiles at Johnny Walker, Laurence Olivier, Randolph Scott and Freddie Bartholomew, Buddy Pepper, Billy Halop, Jackie Cooper and a tiny Sandra Dee .
    Her gaze wafting to a familiar mustache, Miss Kathie sighs, “Groucho!”
    It’s through a veil that my darling Miss Kathie most looks like her true self. Like someone who throws you a look from the window of a train, or from the opposite side of a busy street, blurred behind speeding traffic, a face whom you could wed in that moment and imagine yourself happy tolive with forever. Her face, balanced and composed, so full of potential and possibility, she looks like the answer to everything wrong. Just to meet her violet eyes feels like a blessing.
    In the basement of this same building, within the crypt that holds her former “was-band” Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq. , alongside the ashes of Lothario and Romeo and Loverboy , amid the dead soldiers of empty champagne bottles, down there waits the mirror which contains her every secret. That defaced mirror of Dorian Gray , it forms a death mask even as the world kills her a little more each year. That scratched web of scars etched by myself wielding the same Harry Winston diamond that the Webster specimen now slips on her finger.
    But wrapped in the lace of a wedding veil my Miss Kathie always becomes a promising new future. The camera lights flare amidst the flowers, the heat wilting and scorching the roses and lilies. The smell of sweet smoke.
    This wedding scene reveals Webb as a brilliant actor, taking Miss Kathie in his arms he bends her backward, helpless, as his lips push her even further off balance. His bright brown eyes sparkle. His gleaming smile simply moons and beams.
    Miss Kathie hurtles her bouquet at a crowd that includes Lucille Ball, Janet Gaynor, Cora Witherspoon and Marjorie Main and Marie Dressler . A mad scramble ensues between June Allyson, Joan Fontaine and Margaret O’Brien . Out of the fray Ann Rutherford emerges clutching the flowers. We all throw rice supplied by Ciro’s .
    Zasu Pitts cuts the wedding cake. Mae Murray minds the guest book.
    In a quiet moment during which Miss Kathie has exitedto change out of her wedding gown, I sidle up beside the groom. As my wedding gift to Webb, I slip him a few sheets of printed paper.
    Those dulled brown eyes look at the pages, reading the words Love Slave typed across the top margin, and he says, “What’s this?”
    Brushing rice from the shoulders of his coat, I say, “Don’t play coy.…”
    Those pages already belong to him, stolen from his suitcase, I’m merely returning them to their rightful owner. Saying this, I straighten his boutonniere, smoothing his lapels.
    Lifting the first page, scanning it, the Webb reads, “ ‘No one will ever know why Katherine Kenton committed suicide on what seemed like such a joyous occasion.…’ ” His