Tell-All

was merely disposing of some trash. Only incinerating a random piece of worthless trash.
    On television, Leo G. Carroll kneels while Betty Grable crowns him Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Pope Paul IV is Robert Young. Barbara Stanwyck plays a gum-chewing Joan of Arc .
    My Miss Kathie watches herself, seven divorces ago—what Winchell would call “Reno-vations”—and three face-lifts ago, as she grinds her lips against Novarro’s lips. A specimen Winchell would call a “Wildeman.” Like Dorothy Parker ’s husband, Alan Campbell , a man Lillian Hellman would call a “fairy shit.” Petting her Pekingese with long licks of her hand, Miss Kathie says, “His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.”
    Next to her bed, the night table built from a thousand hopeful dreams, those balanced screenplays, it supports two barbiturates and a double whiskey. Miss Kathie’s hand stops petting and scratching the dog’s muzzle; there the fur looks dark and matted. She pulls back her arm, and the towel slips from her head, her hair tumbling out, limp and gray, pink scalp showing between the roots. The green mask of her avocado face cracking with her surprise.
    Miss Kathie looks at her hand, and the fingers and palm are smeared and dripping with dark red.

ACT I, SCENE THREE
    Katherine Kenton lived as a Houdini . An escape artist. It didn’t matter … marriages, funny farms, airtight Pandro Berman studio contracts … My Miss Kathie trapped herself because it felt such a triumph to slip the noose at the eleventh hour. To foil the legal boilerplate binding her to bad touring projects with Red Skelton . The approach of Hurricane Hazel . Or the third trimester of a pregnancy by Huey Long . Always one clock tick before it was too late, my Miss Kathie would take flight.
    Here, let’s make a slow dissolve to flashback. To the year when every other song on the radio was Patti Page singing “(How Much Is) That Doggy in the Window?” The mise-en-scène shows the daytime interior of a basement kitchen in the elegant town house of Katherine Kenton; arranged along the upstage wall: an electric stove, an icebox, a door to the alleyway, a dusty window in said door.
    In the foreground, I sit on a white-painted kitchen chair with my feet propped on a similar table, my legs crossed at the ankle, my hands holding a ream of paper. A note flutters, held by paper clip to the title page. In slanted handwriting the note reads:
I demand you savor this while it still reeks of my sweat and loins
. Signed, Lillian Hellman .
    Nothing is ever so much signed by Lilly as it is autographed.
    On page one of the screenplay, Robert Oppenheimer puzzles over the best method for accelerating particle diffusion until Lillian stubs out a Lucky Strike cigarette, tosses back a shot of Dewar’s whiskey , and elbows Oppenheimer away from the rambling equation chalked the length of a vast blackboard. Using spit and her Max Factor eyebrow pencil, Lilly alters the speed of enriched uranium fission while Albert Einstein looks on. Slapping himself on the forehead with the palm of one hand, Einstein says, “Lilly,
meine liebchen, du bist eine genious!”
    At the window of the kitchen door, something outside taps. A bird in the alley, pecking. The sharp point of something tap, tap, taps at the glass. In the dawn sunlight, the shadow of something hovers just outside the dusty window, the shining point pecking, knocking tiny divots in the exterior surface of the glass. Some lost bird, starving in the cold. Digging, chipping tiny pits.
    On the page, Lillian twists a copy of the New Masses , rolling it to fashion a tight baton which she swats across the face of Christian Dior. Harry Truman has herded together the world’s top fashion mavens to brand the signature look of his ultimate weapon. Coco Chanel demands sequins. Sister Parish sketches the bomb screaming down from the Japanese sky trailing long bugle beads. Elsa Schiaparelli holdsout for a quilted sateen slipcover. Cristobal Balenciaga , shoulder pads. Mainbocher , tweed. Dior scatters the conference room with swatches of plaid.
    Brandishing her rolled billy club, Lilly says, “What happens if the zipper gets stuck?”
    “Lilly, darling,” says Dior , “it’s a fucking atom bomb!”
    At the kitchen window, the sharp beak drags itself against the outside of the glass, tracing a long curve, scratching the glass with an impossible, high-pitched shriek. An instant migraine headache,