Each of the various champagne glasses, set and scattered within the crypt, cloudy with dust and past wine, the rim of each glass is a museum of different lipstick shades Miss Kathie has left behind. The floor, littered with the butts of ancient cigarettes, some filters wrapped with these same ancient colors of lipstick. All these abandoned drinks and smokes set on ledges, on the floor, tucked into stony corners, this setting like an invisible cocktail party of the deceased.
Watching this, our ritual, Terry dips a hand into the inside pocket of his suit coat. He plucks out a chrome cigarette case and snaps it open, removing two cigarettes, which he places, together, between his lips. Terry flicks a flame to jump from one corner of the chrome case, and lifts it to light both cigarettes. With a snap of his wrist, the flame is gone, and Terry replaces the thin case, returned to inside his coat. He plucks one cigarette from his mouth, trailing a spiral of smoke, and reaches to place it between the red lips of Miss Kathie.
This flashback takes place before the crow’s-feet caused by Paco Esposito. Before I scratched the frown lines related to the senator into this mirror of Dorian Gray.
Wielding the diamond, I get to work drawing. I trace any new wrinkles, adding any new liver spots to this long-term record. Sketching the network of tiny spider veins puckered around the filter of Miss Kathie’s burning cigarette.
Terry says, “A word of warning, Lady Kath.” Sipping his filthy champagne, he says, “If you’ll take my advice. You need to be careful…”
As Terry explains, too many lady stars in her situation have opened their doors to a young man or a young woman, someone who’d sit and listen and laugh. The rapt attention might last for a year or a month, but eventually the young admirer would disappear, returning to another life among people his own age. The young woman would marry and vanish with her own first child, leaving the actress, once more, abandoned. On occasion a letter might arrive, or a telephone call. Keeping tabs.
In the same manner Truman Capote kept in touch with Perry Smith and Dick Hickock while they sat on death row. Biding his time. Capote needed a finale for In Cold Blood.
Every major publisher in America harbors a book, the advance money already paid to some pleasant young person, a handsome, affable listener, who’d spun a few evenings of dinner into a movie-star tell-all biography and needed only a cause of death to complete the final chapter. Already, that pack of stage-door hyenas waited on Mae West to die. They phoned Lelia Goldoni, hoping for bad news. Scanned the obituary pages for Hugh Marlowe, Emlyn Williams, Peggie Castle and Buster Keaton. Vultures circling. Most were already finagling introductions to Ruth Donnelly and Geraldine Fitzgerald. At this moment, they sit in front of a fireplace in the parlor of Lillian Gish or Carole Landis, vacuuming up the thorny anecdotes they’d need to flesh out two hundred pages, their vulture eyes committing to memory every gesture of Butterfly McQueen, every tic or mannerism of Tex Avery that could be sold to the ravenous reading public.
All of those future best-selling books, they were already typeset, merely waiting for someone to die.
“I know you, Kath,” says Terry, turning his head to blow smoke. The stale air of the crypt heavy with the smell of smoke and mold. He takes the wedding ring from the dusty stone shelf, saying, “I know you’re a sucker for an audience, even an audience of one.”
Some grocery delivery boy or a girl conducting a door-to-door survey… these ambitious stray dogs, they each sit clack-clacking on a rusty typewriter at home. A pretty, wide-eyed, starstruck youngster will steal Miss Kathie’s life story. Her reputation. Her dignity. Then pray for her to die.
With the diamond, I cut the furrows of sadness across her forehead. Updating Miss Kathie’s life story. The map of her. The mirror already scratched with years of worry and grief and scars documenting Miss Kathie’s secret face.
Judy Garland, Terry says, and Ethel Merman never again walked out, not in public, not with as much of their previous pride and glamour, after Jacqueline Susann cast them as the fat, drunken, foulmouthed characters Neely O’Hara and Helen Lawson in The Valley of the Dolls.
In response, the diamond shrieks against the glass. The high-pitched, wailing sound of funeral keening.
Dropping to one knee on the cold stone floor, Terry looks up at Miss Kathie and says, “Will you marry me? Just to keep you safe?” He reaches out to take her hand. He says, “At least until something better comes along?”
This, a sodomite and a faded movie star, is what Walter Winchell calls a “match made in resignation.” Terry proposes becoming her emotional bodyguard, a live-in placeholder between real men.
“Just like your portrait here,” says Terry, nodding at the mirror in its silver frame, “any friendly young biographer is only going to showcase your flaws and faults in order to build his own career.”
As always, I drag the diamond in straight lines to mimic the tears running down Miss Katie’s face.
I shake my head, Don’t. Don’t let’s repeat this torture. Don’t trust another one.
As always, another duty of my job is to never press too hard lest the mirror shatter.
My Miss Kathie slips a hand into the slit of one fur coat pocket, fishing out something pink she sets on the dusty shelf. Exhaling cigarette smoke, she says, “I guess I won’t be needing this…” So many years ago, this something Miss Kathie meant to leave behind forever.
It was her diaphragm.
Terry slips the wedding band onto her finger.
Miss Kathie smiles, saying, “It still feels warm.” She adds, “The ring, not the diaphragm.”
And I pour everyone another round of champagne.
ACT I, SCENE THIRTEEN
The scene opens with a tight shot of John Glenn strapped into the astronaut seat within the capsule of the Friendship 7 spacecraft, the first American to orbit Earth. Beyond the capsule’s small window we see our glorious blue planet swirled with white clouds, suspended among the pinprick stars in the deep blackness of space. As Glenn’s gloved hands fiddle with the wide assortment of controls on the panel before him, flipping a switch, turning a knob, he leans into a microphone, saying, “ Mission control, I think we might have a problem…”
Glenn says, “ Mission control, do you read me?” He says, “I seem to be losing power…”
In unison, every light on the control panel blinks out. The lights blink on for a moment, then off. Flickering, the lights go out altogether, leaving Glenn in only the faint glow of the stars. Seated in absolute silence, Glenn wraps both gloved hands around the microphone, bringing his mouth almost to touch the wire mesh of it and shouting, “Please, Houston!” Screaming, “Alan Shepard, you bastard, don’t let me die up here!”
The shot pulls back to reveal an interior panel in the wall behind Glenn’s astronaut chair. A handle in the center of the panel begins to slowly turn. Drawing focus because it’s the only movement in the shot, highlighted by a key light in the otherwise murky compartment.
Glenn quietly sobs in the darkness.
Insert a close-up of the handle turning, intercutting with extreme close-ups of Glenn’s face, his sobs and tears fogging the inside surface of his helmet face shield.
From offscreen, we hear a familiar voice say, “Pipe down.”
In a medium shot, we see the panel behind Glenn swing open, revealing a stowaway Lillian Hellman as she steps free from what appears to be a storage locker. In one continuous shot, she steps through a doorway, under a stenciled sign reading, WARNING: AIR LOCK. Hellman says, “Wish me luck, you big baby.” She draws a deep breath, and her hand slaps a large, red button labeled, JETTISON. An inner door slides shut, sealing the air lock, and a burst of mist belches Lilly from the side of the orbiting capsule. She wears no helmet, no pressurized suit, only an elegant sports ensemble of slacks and sweater designed by Adrian.