Clasping something in both hands, concealed behind her back, my Miss Kathie says, “I bought you a present…” and she steps aside to reveal a box wrapped in silver-foil paper, bound with a wide, red-velvet ribbon knotted to create a bow as big as a cabbage. The bow as deep red as a huge rose.

Miss Kathie’s gaze wafts to the trophies, and she says, “Throw that junk out-please.” She says, “Just pack them up and put them away in storage. I no longer need the love of every stranger. I have found the love of one perfect man…”

Holding the wrapped package before her, offering the red-velvet-and-foil-wrapped box to me, Miss Kathie steps into the room.

On the scripted page, Lilly Hellman holds Oswald in a full nelson, both his arms bent and twisted behind his head. With one fast, sweeping kick, Lilly knocks Oswald’s legs out from under him, and he crumbles to the floor, where the two grapple, scrabbling and clawing on the dusty concrete, both within reach of the loaded rifle.

Miss Kathie sets the package on the kitchen table, at my elbow, and says, “Happy birthday.” She pushes the box, sliding it to collide with my arm, and says, “Open it.”

In the Hellman script, Lilly brawls with superhuman effort. The silence of the warehouse broken only by grunts and gasps, the grim sound of struggle in ironic contrast to the applause and fanfare, the blare of marching bands and the blur of high-stepping majorettes throwing their chrome batons to flash and spin in the hard Texas sunshine.

Not looking up from the page, I say it isn’t my birthday.

Looking from trophy to trophy, my Miss Kathie says, “All of this ‘Lifetime Achievement…’ ” Her hand dips into an invisible pocket of her dressing gown and emerges with a comb. Drawing the comb through her dyed-auburn hair, a fraction, only a day or two of gray showing at the roots, drawing the comb away from her scalp, Miss Kathie lets the long strands fall, saying, “All this ‘Lifetime Contribution’ business makes me sound so-dead.”

Not waiting for me, Miss Kathie says, “Let me help.” And she yanks at the ribbon.

With a single pull, the lovely bow unravels, and my Miss Kathie wads up the silver paper, tearing the foil from the box. Inside the box, she uncovers folds of black fabric. A black dress with a knee-length skirt. Layered beneath that, a bib apron of starched white linen, and a small lacy cap or hat stuck through with hairpins.

The smell of her hair, on her skin, a hint of bay rum, the cologne of Webster Carlton Westward III. Paco wore Roman Brio. The senator wore Old Lyme. Before the senator, “was-band” number five, Terrence Terry, wore English Leather. The steel tycoon wore Knize cologne.

Leaving the dress on the table, Miss Kathie crosses stage right still combing her hair, to where she stands on her pink-mule toes to reach the television atop the icebox. The screen flares when she flips the switch and the face of Paco Esposito takes form, as gradual as a fish appearing beneath the surface of a murky pond. The male equivalent of a diamond necklace, a stethoscope, hangs around his neck. A surgical mask is bunched under his chin. Still gripping a bloody scalpel, Paco is snaking his tongue down the throat of an ingénue, Jeanne Eagels, dressed in a red-and-white-striped uniform.

“I don’t want the placement agency getting any idea that you’re more than a servant,” says my Miss Kathie. She cranks the dial switch one click to another television station, where Terrence Terry dances lead for the Lunenburg battalion against Napoleon at the Battle of Mont St. Jean. Still drawing the comb through her hair, Miss Kathie clicks to a third station, where she appears, Katherine Kenton herself, in black and white, playing the mother of Greer Garson in the role of Louisa May Alcott opposite Leslie Howard in a biopic about Clara Barton.

She says, bark, oink, cluck… Christina and Christopher Crawford.

“Nothing,” says Miss Kathie, “makes a woman look younger than holding her own precious newborn.”

Cluck, buzz, bray… Margot Merrill.

Another click of the television reveals Miss Kathie made up to be an ancient mummy, covered in latex wrinkles and rising from a papier-mâché sarcophagus covered with hieroglyphics to menace a screaming, dewy Olivia de Havilland.

I ask, Newborn what?

Hoot, tweet, moo… Josephine Baker and her entire Rainbow Tribe.

In a tight insert shot we see the reveal: the dress, there on the kitchen table, this gift, it’s strewn with long, auburn hairs, that heavy mahogany color that hair has only when it’s soaking wet. The discarded wrapping paper, the ribbon and comb, left for me to pick up. The black dress, it’s a housemaid’s uniform.

My position in this household is not that of a mere maid or cook or lady-in-waiting. I am not employed in any capacity as domestic help.

This is not a birthday present.

“If the agency asks, I think maybe you’ll be an au pair,” Miss Kathie says, standing on tiptoe, her nose near her own image on the television screen. “I love that word… au pair,” she says. “It sounds almost like… French.”

In the screenplay, Lilly Hellman looks on in horror as President John F. Kennedy and Governor John Connally explode in fountains of gore. Her arms straight at her sides, her hands balled into fists, Lilly throws back her head, emptying her mouth, her throat, emptying her lungs with one, long, howling, “Noooooooooooooo…!” The rigid silhouette of her pain outlined against the wide, flat-blue Dallas sky.

I sit staring at the wrinkled uniform, the torn wrapping paper. The stray hairs. The screenplay laid open in my lap.

“You can bring up the coffee in a moment,” says Miss Kathie, as she shuts off the television with a slap of her palm. Gripping the skirt of her gown and lifting it, she crosses stage right to the kitchen table. There, Miss Kathie plucks the lacy cap from the open box, saying, “In the future, Mr. Westward prefers cream in his coffee, not milk.”

Placing the white cap on the crown of my head, she says, “Voilà!” She says, “It’s a perfect fit.” Pressing the lacy cap snug, Miss Kathie says, “That’s Italian for prego.”

On my scalp, a sting, the faint prick of hairpins feel sharp and biting as a crown of thorns. Then a slow fade to black as, from offscreen, we hear the front doorbell ring.

ACT I, SCENE ELEVEN

If you’ll permit me to break character and indulge in another aside, I’d like to comment on the nature of equilibrium. Of balance, if you’d prefer. Modern medical science recognizes that human beings appear to be subject to predetermined, balanced ratios of height and weight, masculinity and femininity, and to tinker with those formulas brings disaster. For example, when RKO Radio and Monogram and Republic Pictures began prescribing injections of male hormones in order to coarsen some of their more effete male contract players, the inadvertent result was to give those he-men breasts larger than those of Claudette Colbert and Nancy Kelly. It would seem the human body, when given additional testosterone, increases its own production of estrogen, always seeking to return to its original balance of male and female hormones.

Likewise, the actress who starves herself to far, far below her natural body weight will soon balloon to far above it.

Based on decades of observation, I propose that sudden high levels of external praise always trigger an equal amount of inner self-loathing. Most moviegoers are familiar with the theatrically unbalanced mental health of a Frances Farmer, the libidinal excesses of a Charles Chaplin or an Errol Flynn, and the chemical indulgences of a Judy Garland. Such performances are always so ridiculously broad, played to the topmost balcony. My supposition is that, in each case, the celebrity in question was simply making adjustments-instinctually seeking a natural equilibrium-to counterbalance enormous positive public attention.