From out of Miss Kathie’s evening bag spills her cigarette lighter, 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 pink onyx 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 and half-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 the white card, Webster Carlton Westward III, twisting him in the chimney draft, I watch a flame eat the name and telephone number. The scent of vanilla. The ash falls to the cold hearth.
On the television, Preston Sturges and Harpo Marx enter as Tycho Brahe and Copernicus. The first arguing that the earth goes around the sun, the latter insisting the world actually orbits Rita Hayworth. The picture is called Armada of Love, and David O. Selznick shot it on the Universal back lot the year when every other song on the radio was Helen O’Connell singing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” backed by the Jimmy Dorsey band.
The bathroom door swings open, Miss Kathie’s voice saying: bark, yip, cluck-cluck… Maxwell Anderson. Her Katherine Kenton hair turbaned in a white bath towel. Her face layered with a mask of pulped avocado and royal jelly. Pulling the belt of her robe tight around her waist, my Miss Kathie looks at the lipstick dumped on her bed. The scattered cigarette lighter and keys and charge cards. The empty evening bag. Her gaze wafts to me standing before the fireplace, the tongues of candle flame licking below her portrait, her lineup of “was-bands,” the invitations, all those future obligations to enjoy herself, and-of course-the flowers.
Perched on the mantel, that altar, always enough flowers for a honeymoon suite or a funeral. Tonight features a tall arrangement of white spider chrysanthemums, white lilies and sprays of yellow orchids, bright and frilly as a cloud of butterflies.
With one hand, Miss Kathie sweeps aside the lipstick and keys, the cigarette pack, and she settles herself on the satin bed, amid the candy wrappers, saying, “Did you burn something just now?”
Katherine Kenton remains among the generation of women who feel that the most sincere form of flattery is the male erection. Nowadays, I tell her that erections are less likely a compliment than they are the result of some medical breakthrough. Transplanted monkey glands, or one of those new miracle pills.
As if human beings-men in particular-need yet another way to lie.
I ask, Did she misplace something?
Her violet eyes waft to my hands. Petting her Pekingese, Loverboy, dragging one hand through the dog’s long fur, Miss Kathie says, “I do get so tired of buying my own flowers…”
My hands, smeared black and filthy from the handle of the fireplace damper. Smudged with soot from the burned place card. I wipe them in the folds of my tweed skirt. I tell her I was merely disposing of some trash. Only incinerating a random piece of worthless trash.
On television, Leo G. Carroll kneels while Betty Grable crowns him Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Pope Paul IV is Robert Young. Barbara Stanwyck plays a gum-chewing Joan of Arc.
My Miss Kathie watches herself, seven divorces ago-what Winchell would call “Reno-vations”-and three face-lifts ago, as she grinds her lips against Novarro’s lips. A specimen Winchell would call a “Wildeman.” Like Dorothy Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, a man Lillian Hellman would call a “fairy shit.” Petting her Pekingese with long licks of her hand, Miss Kathie says, “His saliva tasted like the wet dicks of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.”
Next to her bed, the night table built from a thousand hopeful dreams, those balanced screenplays, it supports two barbiturates and a double whiskey. Miss Kathie’s hand stops petting and scratching the dog’s muzzle; there the fur looks dark and matted. She pulls back her arm, and the towel slips from her head, her hair tumbling out, limp and gray, pink scalp showing between the roots. The green mask of her avocado face cracking with her surprise.
Miss Kathie looks at her hand, and the fingers and palm are smeared and dripping with dark red.