Weightless and floating in the black void of outer space, Lilly swims, holding her breath. Her arms stroke, and her legs kick in an Australian crawl, inching her way along the side of the orbiting space capsule until she arrives beside a small tin-colored box affixed to the outer hull. The box is stenciled, SOLAR MODULE, and it flashes with an occasional burst of bright sparks. Still holding her breath, her cheeks inflated and her brow furrowed in concentration, Lilly drags a ball-peen hammer from the hip pocket of her slacks ensemble accessorized with Orry-Kelly high heels. Her chandelier earrings and turquoise squash-blossom pendant are still tethered to Lilly, but float and drift in the absence of gravity. Gripping the hammer in her blue fingers, the veins swelling under the skin at her temples, Lilly swings the steel head to collide with the module box. In the vacuum of space, we hear nothing, only silence and the steady thump-thump of Lilly’s enormous heart beating faster and faster. The hammer strikes the module a second time. Sparks fly. The tin-colored metal dents, and flakes of gray paint float away from the point of impact.
More hammer blows fall; with each the sound rings louder, then louder as we dissolve to reveal the kitchen of Katherine Kenton, where I sit at the kitchen table, reading a screenplay titled Space Race Rescue penned by Lilly. I wear the black maid’s uniform, over it the bib apron. On my head the starched, lacy maid’s cap. The hammer blows continue, an audio bridge, now revealed to be an actual pounding sound coming from within the town house.
The blows ring more loud, more fast as we cut to a shot of the bed headboard in Miss Kathie’s boudoir, revealing the sounds as the headboard pounding the wall. The sexual coupling takes place below the bottom of the frame, barely outside the shot, but we can hear the heavy breathing of a man and a woman as the tempo and volume of the pounding increase. Each impact makes the framed paintings jump on the walls. The curtain tassels dangle and dance. The bedside pile of screenplays slumps to the floor.
On the page, as Lilly’s astronaut heart beats faster and her hammer batters the box again and again, we hear the headboard of Miss Kathie’s bed slamming the wall, faster, until with one final, heroic pounding, the lights of the space module flicker back to life. The pounding ceases as all the various gauges and dials flare back to full power and, framed in the module’s little window, John Glenn gives Lilly the thumbs-up. Tears of horror and relief stream down the face inside his astronaut helmet.
In the background of the kitchen, two hairy feet appear at the top of the servants’ staircase, two hairy ankles descend from the second floor, two hairy knees, then the hem of a white terry-cloth bathrobe. Another step down, and the cloth belt appears, tied around a narrow waist; two hairy hands hang on either side. A chest appears, the terry cloth embroidered with a monogram: O.D. The robe of the long-deceased fourth “was-band.” Another step reveals the face of Webster Carlton Westward III. Those bright brown root-beer eyes. A smile parts his face, pulling at the corners of his mouth, spreading them like a stage curtain, and this American specimen says, “Good morning, Hazie.”
On the page, Lilly Hellman struggles in the cold, black void of space, dragging herself along the hull of the Friendship 7, fighting her way back to the air lock.
The Webster specimen opens a kitchen cabinet and collects the percolator. He pulls out a drawer and retrieves the power cord. He does each task on his first attempt, without hunting. He reaches into the icebox without looking and removes the metal can of coffee grounds. From another cabinet, he takes the morning tray-not the silver tea tray nor the dinner tray. It’s clear he knows what’s what in this household and where each item is hidden.
This Webster C. Westward III appears to be a quick study. One of those clever, smiling young men Terrence Terry warned my Miss Kathie about. Those jackals. A magpie.
Spooning coffee grounds into the percolator basket, the Webster specimen says, “If you’ll permit me to ask, Hazie, do you know whom you remind me of?”
Without looking up from the page, Lilly suffocating in the freezing stratosphere, I say, Thelma Ritter.
I was Thelma Ritter before Thelma Ritter was Thelma Ritter.
To see how I walk, watch Ann Dvorak walk across the street in the film Housewife. You want to see me worried, watch how Miriam Hopkins puckers her brow in Old Acquaintance. Every hand gesture, every bit of physical business I ever perfected, some nobody came along and stole. Pier Angeli’s laugh started out as my laugh. The way Gilda Gray dances the rumba, she swiped it from me. How Marilyn Monroe sings she got by hearing me.
The damned copycats. There’s worse that people can steal from you than money.
Someone steals your pearls and you can simply buy another strand. But if they steal your hairstyle, or the signature manner in which you throw a kiss, it’s much more difficult to replace.
Back a long time ago, I was in motion pictures. Back before I met up with my Miss Kathie.
Nowadays, I don’t laugh. I don’t sing or dance. Or kiss. My hair styles itself.
It’s like Terrence Terry tried to warn Miss Kathie: the whole world consists of nothing but vultures and hyenas wanting to take a bite out of you. Your heart or tongue or violet eyes. To eat up just your best part for their breakfast.
You want to see Tallulah Bankhead, not just her playing Julie Marsden in Jezebel, or being Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes, but the real Tallulah, you only need to watch Bette Davis in All About Eve. It was Joseph L. Mankiewicz who wrote Margo Channing based on his poor mother, the actress Johanna Blumenau, but it was Davis who cozied up to Tallulah long enough to learn her mannerisms. Tallulah’s delivery and how she walked. How she’d enter a room. The way Tallulah’s voice got screechy after one bourbon. How, after four of them, her eyelids hung, half closed as steamed clams.
Of course, not everybody was in on the joke. It could be some Andy Devine or Slim Pickens farmers in Sioux Falls couldn’t see Davis doing a minstrel-show version of Tallulah, but everybody else saw. Imagine a real performer watching you drink at a hundred parties, memorizing you while you’re upset and spitting in the face of William Dieterle, then making you into a stage routine and performing you for the whole world to laugh at. The same as how that big shit Orson Welles made fun of Willy Hearst and poor Marion Davies.
The Webster specimen holds the percolator in the sink, filling it with water from the faucet. He assembles the basket, the spindle and the lid, plugs the female end of the electric cord into the percolator base and plugs the male end into the power socket.
Folks in Little Rock and Boulder and Budapest, most folks don’t know what’s not true. That bunch of Chill Wills rubes. So the whole entire world gets thinking that cartoon version Miss Davis created is the real you.
Bette Davis built her career playing that burlesque version of Tallulah Bankhead.
Nowadays, if anybody mentions poor Willy Hearst, you picture Welles, fat and shouting at Mona Darkfeather, chasing Peel Trenton down some stairs. For anybody who never shook hands with Tallulah, she’s that bug-eyed harpy with that horrid fringe of pale, loose skin flapping along Davis ’s jawline.
It boils down to the fact that we’re all jackals feeding off each other.
The percolator pops and snaps. A splash of brown coffee perks inside the glass bulb on top. A wisp of white steam leaks from the chrome spout.
The Webster specimen’s got it backward, I tell him. Thelma Ritter is a copy of me. Her walk and her diction, her timing and delivery, all of it was coached. At first Joe Mankiewicz turned up everywhere. I might sit down to dinner next to Fay Bainter, across the table from Jessie Matthews, who only went anywhere with her husband, Sonnie Hale, next to him Alison Skipworth, on my other side Pierre Watkin, and Joe would be way up above the salt, not talking to anyone, never taking his eyes off me. He’d study me like I was a book or a blueprint, his diseased fingers bleeding through the tips of his white gloves.