Tell-All

of plunging a sword into one’s stomach, you repeatedly throw yourself on the most inappropriate erect penis.
    The men Miss Katherine marries, they’re less husbandsthan they are costars. Souvenirs. Each one merely a witness to attest to her latest daring adventure, so much like Raymond Massey or Fredric March , any leading man she might fight beside in the Hundred Years War . Playing Amelia Earhart stowed away with champagne and beluga caviar in the romantic cockpit of Charles Lindbergh during his long flight over the Atlantic. Cleopatra kidnapped during the Crusades and wed to King Henry VIII .
    Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.
    Miss Kathie places the puppy on the Hellman screenplay, smack-dab on the scene where Lilly Hellman and John Wayne raise the American flag over Iwo Jima . Dipping one scabbed hand into the pocket of her silver fox coat, Miss Kathie extracts a tablet of bound papers, each page printed with the letterhead White Mountain Hospital and Residential Treatment Facility .
    A purloined pad of prescription blanks.
    Miss Kathie wets the point of an Estée Lauder eyebrow pencil, touching it against the pink tip of her tongue. Writing a few words under the letterhead, she stops, looks up and says, “How many Ss in Darvocet?”
    The young man holding her baggage says, “How soon do we get to Hollywood?”
    Los Angeles , the city Louella Parsons would call the approximately three hundred square miles and twelve million people centered around Irene Mayer Selznick .
    In that same beat, we cut to a close-up of Loverboy , as the tiny Pekingese drops its own hot, stinking A-bomb all over General Douglas MacArthur .

ACT I, SCENE FOUR
    The career of a movie star consists of helping everyone else forget their troubles. Using charm and beauty and good cheer to make life look easy. “The problem is,” Gloria Swanson once said, “if you never weep in public … well, the public assumes you never weep.”
    Act one, scene four opens with Katherine Kenton cradling an urn in her arms. The setting: the dimly lit interior of the Kenton crypt, deep underground, below the stony pile of St. Patrick’s Cathedral , dressed with cobwebs. We see the ornate bronze door unlocked and swung open to welcome mourners. A stone shelf at the rear of the crypt, in deep shadow, holds various urns crafted from a variety of polished metals, bronze, copper, nickel, one engraved, Casanova , another engraved, Darling , another, Romeo .
    My Miss Kathie hugs the urn she’s holding, lifting it tomeet her lips. She plants a puckered lipstick kiss on the engraved name Loverboy , then places this new urn on the dusty shelf among the others.
    Kay Francis hasn’t arrived. Humphrey Bogart didn’t send his regards. Neither did Deanna Durbin or Mildred Coles . Also missing are George Bancroft and Bonita Granville and Frank Morgan . None of them sent flowers.
    The engraved names Sweetie Pie and Honey Bun and Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq. , what Hedda Hopper would call “dust buddies.” Her beagle, her Chihuahua, her fourth husband—the majority stockholder and chairman of the board for International Steel Manufacturing . Scattered amongst the other urns, engraved: Pookie , and Fantasy Man , and Lothario , the ashen remains of her toy poodle and miniature pinscher, there also sits an orange plastic prescription bottle of Valium , tethered to the stone shelf by a net of spiderwebs. Mold and dust mottle the label on a bottle of Napoleon brandy . A pharmacy prescription bottle of Luminal .
    What Louella Parsons would call “moping mechanisms.”
    My Miss Kathie leans forward to blow the dust from a pill bottle. She lifts the bottle and wrestles the tricky child-guard cap, soiling her black gloves, pressing the cap as she twists, the pills inside rattling. Echoing loud as machine-gun fire in the cold stone room. My Miss Kathie shakes a few pills into one gloved palm. With the opposite hand, she lifts her black veil. She tosses the pills into her mouth and reaches for the crusted bottle of brandy.
    Among the urns, a silver picture frame lies facedown on the shelf. Next to it, a tarnished tube of Helena Rubinstein lipstick. A slow panning shot reveals an atomizer of Mitsouko ,the crystal bottle clouded and smudged with fingerprints. A dusty box spouts yellowed Kleenex tissues.
    In the dim light, we see a bottle of vintage 1851 Château Lafite . A magnum of Huet