Tell-All Read Free

cigarettelighter, a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, her tiny pill box paved with rubies and tourmalines and rattling with Tuinal and Dexamyl .
Bark, cluck, squeak
… Nembutal .
    Roar, whinny, oink
… Seconal .
    Meow, tweet, moo
… Demerol .
    Then, fluttering down, falls a white card. Settling on the bed, an engraved place card from this evening’s dinner. Against the white card stock, in bold, black letters, the name Webster Carlton Westward III .
    What Hedda Hopper would call this moment—a “Hollywood lifetime”—expires.
    A freeze-frame. An insert-shot of the small, white card lying on the satin bed beside the inert dog.
    On television, my Miss Kathie acts the part of Spain’s Queen Isabella I , escaped from her royal duties in the Alhambra for a quickie vacation in Miami Beach , pretending to be a simple circus dancer in order to win the heart of Christopher Columbus , played by Ramon Novarro . The picture cuts to a cameo by Lucille Ball , on loan out from Warner Bros . and cast as Miss Kathie’s rival, Queen Elizabeth I .
    Here is all of Western history, rendered the bitch of William Wyler .
    Behind the bathroom door, in the gush of hot water, my Miss Kathie says:
bark, bray, oink …
J. Edgar Hoover . My ears straining to hear her prattle.
    Fringe dangles off the edge of the red satin coverlet, the bed canopy, the window valance. Everything upholstered in red velvet, cut velvet. Flocked wallpaper. The scarlet walls, padded and button tufted, crowded with Louis XIV mirrors. The lamps, dripping with faceted crystals, busy with sparkling thingamabobs. The fireplace, carved from pinkonyx and rose quartz. The entire effect, insular and silent as sleeping tucked deep inside Mae West ’s vagina.
    The four-poster bed, its trim and moldings lacquered red, polished until the wood looks wet. Lying there, the candy wrappers, the dog, the place card.
    Webster Carlton Westward III , the American specimen with bright brown eyes. Root-beer eyes. The young man seated so far down the table at tonight’s dinner. A telephone number, handwritten, a prefix in Murray Hill .
    On the television, Joan Crawford enters the gates of Madrid , wearing some gauzy harem getup, both her hands carrying a wicker basket in front of her, the basket spilling over with potatoes and Cuban cigars, her bare limbs and face painted black to suggest she’s a captured Mayan slave. The subtext being either Crawford’s carrying syphilis or she’s supposed to be a secret cannibal. Tainted spoils of the New World. A concubine. Perhaps she’s an Aztec.
    That slight lift of one naked shoulder, Crawford’s shrug of disdain, here is another signature gesture stolen from me.
    Above the mantel hangs a portrait of Miss Katherine painted by Salvador Dalí; it rises from a thicket of engraved invitations and the silver-framed photographs of men whom Walter Winchell would call “was-bands.” Former husbands. The painting of my Miss Kathie, her eyebrows arch in surprise, but her heavy eyelashes droop, the eyelids almost closed with boredom. Her hands spread on either side of her face, her fingers fanning from her famous cheekbones to disappear into her movie star updo of auburn hair. Her mouth something between a laugh and a yawn. Valium and Dexedrine . Between Lillian Gish and Tallulah Bankhead . The portrait rises from the invitations and photographs, future parties and past marriages, the flickering candles andhalf-dead cigarettes stubbed out in crystal ashtrays threading white smoke upward in looping incense trails. This altar to my Katherine Kenton .
    Me, forever guarding this shrine. Not so much a servant as a high priestess.
    In what Winchell would call a “New York minute” I carry the place card to the fireplace. Dangle it within a candle flame until it catches fire. With one hand, I reach into the fireplace, deep into the open cavity of carved pink onyx and rose quartz, grasping in the dark until my fingers find the damper and wrench it open. Holding