From offscreen a voice shouts, “Stop!” A female voice shouts, cutting through the violins and French horns, the rockets and machine-gun fire, shouting, “For fuck’s sake, stop!” A woman comes stomping down the center aisle of the theater, one arm lifted, wielding a script rolled as tight as a police officer’s billy club.
The orchestra grinds to silence. The singers stop, their voices trailing off. The dancers slow to a standstill, and the fighter jets hang, stalled, limp in midair, from invisible wires.
From the stage apron, in the reverse angle, we see this shouting woman is Lillian Hellman herself as she says, “You’re ruining history! For the love of Anna Q. Nilsson, I happen to be right-handed!”
In this same reverse angle, we see that the theater is almost empty. King Vidor and Victor Fleming sit in the fifth row with their heads huddled together, whispering. Farther back, I sit in the empty auditorium next to Terrence Terry, both of us balancing infants on our respective laps. Clustered on the floor around our chairs, other foundlings squirm and drool in wicker baskets. Chubby pink hands shake various rattles, these kinder occupying most of the surrounding seats.
“You’d better hope this show flops,” says Terrence Terry, bouncing a gurgling orphan on his knee. “By the way, where is our lethal Lothario?”
I tell him that Webb would have to truly hate Miss Kathie after what happened yesterday.
Onstage, Lilly Hellman shouts, “Everybody, listen! Let’s start over.” Hellman shouts, “Let’s take it from the part where the kamikaze fighters of the Japanese Imperial Army swoop low over Honolulu in order to rain their deadly fiery cargo of searing death on Constance Talmadge.”
The Webster specimen is currently undergoing treatment at Doctors Hospital. Just to escape the town house, Miss Kathie’s going into rehearsal, and Webster Carlton Westward III is recovering from minor lacerations to his arms and torso.
Terry says, “Fingernail scratches?”
At the house, I say, the nurses keep arriving. The nuns and social workers. The fresh castoff infants continue to be delivered, and Miss Kathie declines to choose. In the past few days, each baby seems less like a blessing and more like an adorable time bomb. No matter how much you love and cuddle one, it still might grow up to become Mercedes McCambridge. Regardless of all the affection you shower on a child, it still might break your heart by becoming Sidney Skolsky. All of your nurturing and worry and careful attention might turn out another Noel Coward. Or saddle humanity with a new Alain Resnais. You need only look at Webb and see how no amount of Miss Kathie’s love will redeem him.
Wrapped around one wrist, the foundling I hold wears a beaded bracelet reading, UNCLAIMED BOY INFANT NUMBER THIRTY-FOUR.
It’s ludicrous, the idea of me raising a child, not while I still have my Miss Kathie to parent. A baby is such a blank slate, like training the understudy for a role you’re planning to leave. You truly hope your replacement will do the play justice, but in secret you want future critics to say you played the character better.
“Don’t look at me,” Terry says, juggling an orphan. “I’m busy trying to raise myself.”
Despite repeatedly sidestepping possible death by bus accident and dinner at the Cub Room with Lilly Hellman, Miss Katie has invited Webb to share her town house-so that we might better monitor future drafts of his book-in-progress. She confessed, knowing now how Webster was actually a psychotic killer, a ruthless scheming slayer, now their sex life was more passionate than ever.
It was Webb who brought this stage project to Miss Kathie, gave her the script to read and told her she’d be ideal as the brash, ballsy Hellman seduced by Sammy Davis Jr. and parachuted onto Waikiki Beach with nothing but a bottle of sunblock and orders to stem the Imperial Army’s advance. Along the way she falls in love with Joi Lansing. According to Webb, this starring role had Tony Award written all over it.
According to Terrence Terry, the Webster specimen was merely grooming my Miss Kathie. These past few years, she’d fallen into obscurity. First, refusing stage and film projects. Second, neglecting her gray hair and weight. A generation of young people were growing up never hearing the name Katherine Kenton, oblivious to Miss Kathie’s body of work. No, it wouldn’t do for her to die at this point in time, not before she’d made a successful comeback. Therefore, Webster Carlton Westward III coaxed her to slim down; in all likelihood he’d bully her into a surgeon’s office, where she’d submit to having any new wrinkles or sags erased from her face.
If this new show was a hit, if it put my Miss Kathie back on top, introducing her to a new legion of fans, that would be the ideal time to complete his final chapter. His “lie-ography” would hit stores the same day her newspaper obituary hit the street. The same week her new Broadway show opened to rave reviews.
But not this week, I tell Terry.
Daubing with the hem of my starched maid’s apron, I wipe at the face of the infant I hold. I lean near the floor and pick out a thin sheaf of papers tucked beneath the diaper of a nearby baby. Offering the printed pages to Terry, I ask if he wants to read the second draft of Love Slave. Just the closing chapter; here’s the blueprint for Miss Kathie’s most recent brush with death.
“How is it our homicidal hunk has landed himself in the hospital?” Terry says.
And I toss the newest, revised final chapter at his feet.
Onstage, Lilly demonstrates to Miss Kathie the correct way to tour en l’air while slitting the throat of an enemy sentry.
Terry collects the pages. Still holding the orphan on his knee, he says, “Once upon a time…” He props the baby in the crook of one arm, leaning into its tiny face as if it were a radio microphone or a camera lens, any recording device in which to store his life. Speaking into this particular foundling, filling its hollow mind, filling its eyes and ears with the sound of his voice, Terry reads, “ ‘Perhaps it’s ironic, but no film critic, not Jack Grant nor Pauline Kael nor David Ogden Stewart, would ever tear Katherine to bloody shreds the way savage grizzly bears eventually would…’ ”
ACT II, SCENE FOUR
In voice-over, we hear Terrence Terry reading from the revised final chapter of Love Slave. As we dissolve from the theater of the previous scene, we continue to hear the ambient sounds of the rehearsal: carpenters hammering scenery together, tap dancing, machine-gun fire, the dying screams of sailors burned alive, and Lillian Hellman. However, these noises fade as once more we see the soft-focus interior of Miss Kathie’s boudoir. We see Webster Carlton Westward III, shot from the waist up, his naked torso shining with sweat, as he lifts one hand to his nose, the fingers dripping wet, and inhales deeply, closing his eyes. His hands drop down, out of the shot, then rise, each hand gripping a slender ankle. Lifting the two feet to shoulder height, he holds them wide apart. Webb’s hips buck forward, then pull back, drive forward and pull back, while the voice-over reads, “ ‘… On the final day of Katherine Kenton’s life, I oh-so-gently nudged the prow of my aching love stick against the knotted folds of her forbidden passageway…’ ”
Once again, the man and woman copulating are idealized versions of Webb and Miss Kathie, seen through heavy filters, their movements in slow motion, fluid, possibly even blurring.
Terry’s voice continues reading, “ ‘The pungent aroma of her most corporeal orifice drenched my senses. My ever-mounting admiration and professional respect boiling for release, I thrust deeper into the fragile, soiled petals of her fecund rose…’ ”
In the year preceding the French Revolution, according to Terrence Terry, the antiroyalists sought to undermine public respect for Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, by publishing drawings which depicted the monarchs engaged in degenerate sexual behavior. These cartoons, printed in Switzerland and Germany and smuggled into France, accused the queen of copulating with hordes of dogs, servants, clergymen. Before the storming of the Place de la Bastille, before the national razor and Jean-Paul Marat, these crude line drawings infiltrated citizens’ hearts as the vanguard for rebellion. Comic propaganda. Obscene little sketches and dirty stories marched as advance men, eroding respect, smoothing the path for the bloody massacre to come.