ACT I, SCENE THREE

Katherine Kenton lived as a Houdini. An escape artist. It didn’t matter… marriages, funny farms, airtight Pandro Berman studio contracts… My Miss Kathie trapped herself because it felt such a triumph to slip the noose at the eleventh hour. To foil the legal boilerplate binding her to bad touring projects with Red Skelton. The approach of Hurricane Hazel. Or the third trimester of a pregnancy by Huey Long. Always one clock tick before it was too late, my Miss Kathie would take flight.

Here, let’s make a slow dissolve to flashback. To the year when every other song on the radio was Patti Page singing “(How Much Is) That Doggy in the Window?” The mise-en-scène shows the daytime interior of a basement kitchen in the elegant town house of Katherine Kenton; arranged along the upstage wall: an electric stove, an icebox, a door to the alleyway, a dusty window in said door.

In the foreground, I sit on a white-painted kitchen chair with my feet propped on a similar table, my legs crossed at the ankle, my hands holding a ream of paper. A note flutters, held by paper clip to the title page. In slanted handwriting the note reads: I demand you savor this while it still reeks of my sweat and loins. Signed, Lillian Hellman.

Nothing is ever so much signed by Lilly as it is autographed.

On page one of the screenplay, Robert Oppenheimer puzzles over the best method for accelerating particle diffusion until Lillian stubs out a Lucky Strike cigarette, tosses back a shot of Dewar’s whiskey, and elbows Oppenheimer away from the rambling equation chalked the length of a vast blackboard. Using spit and her Max Factor eyebrow pencil, Lilly alters the speed of enriched uranium fission while Albert Einstein looks on. Slapping himself on the forehead with the palm of one hand, Einstein says, “Lilly, meine liebchen, du bist eine genious!”

At the window of the kitchen door, something outside taps. A bird in the alley, pecking. The sharp point of something tap, tap, taps at the glass. In the dawn sunlight, the shadow of something hovers just outside the dusty window, the shining point pecking, knocking tiny divots in the exterior surface of the glass. Some lost bird, starving in the cold. Digging, chipping tiny pits.

On the page, Lillian twists a copy of the New Masses, rolling it to fashion a tight baton which she swats across the face of Christian Dior. Harry Truman has herded together the world’s top fashion mavens to brand the signature look of his ultimate weapon. Coco Chanel demands sequins. Sister Parish sketches the bomb screaming down from the Japanese sky trailing long bugle beads. Elsa Schiaparelli holds out for a quilted sateen slipcover. Cristobal Balenciaga, shoulder pads. Mainbocher, tweed. Dior scatters the conference room with swatches of plaid.

Brandishing her rolled billy club, Lilly says, “What happens if the zipper gets stuck?”

“Lilly, darling,” says Dior, “it’s a fucking atom bomb!”

At the kitchen window, the sharp beak drags itself against the outside of the glass, tracing a long curve, scratching the glass with an impossible, high-pitched shriek. An instant migraine headache, the point traces a second curve. The two curves combine to form a heart, etched into the window, and the dragging point plows an arrow through the heart.

On paper, Adrian sees the entirety of the atom bomb encrusted with a thick layer of rhinestones, flashing a dazzling Allied victory. Edith Head pounds her small fist on the conference table at the Waldorf=Astoria and proclaims that something hand-crocheted must rain fiery death on Hirohito, or she’ll pull out of the Manhattan Project. Hubert de Givenchy pounds on Pierre Balmain.

I stand and cross to the alley door. There we discover my Miss Kathie standing in the alley, bundled in a fur coat, both arms folded across her chest, hugging herself in the cold dawn.

I ask, Isn’t she home a few months early?

And Miss Kathie says, “I found something so much better than sobriety…” She waves the back of her left hand, the ring finger flashing with a Harry Winston diamond solitaire, and she says, “I found Paco Esposito!”

The diamond, the tool she used to cut her heart so deep into the glass. The heart and Cupid’s arrow etched in the alley window. Yet another engagement ring she’s bought herself.

Behind her stands a young man hung like a Christmas tree with various pieces of luggage: purses, garment bags, suitcases and satchels. All of it Louis Vuitton. He wears blue denim trousers, the knees stained black with motor oil. The sleeves of his blue chambray shirt rolled high to reveal tattooed arms. His name, Paco, embroidered on one side of his chest. His cologne, the stench of high-test gasoline.

Miss Kathie’s violet eyes twitch side to side across my face, up and down, the way they’d vacuum up last-minute rewrites in dialogue.

The sole reason for Katherine Kenton’s admitting herself to any hospital was because she so enjoyed the escape. Between making pictures, she craved the drama of overcoming locked doors, barred windows, sedatives and straitjackets. Stepping indoors from the cold alley, her breath steaming, my Miss Kathie wears cardboard slippers. Not Madeleine Vionnet. She wears a tissue-paper gown under her silver fox coat. Not Vera Maxwell. Miss Kathie’s cheeks scrubbed pink from the sun. The wind has tossed her auburn hair into heavy waves. Her blue fingers grip the handles of a shopping bag she lifts to set atop the kitchen table.

In the screenplay’s third act, Hellman pilots the controls of the Enola Gay as it skims the tops of Japanese pine trees and giant pandas and Mount Fuji, en route to Hiroshima. In a fantasy sequence, we cut to Hellman wielding a machete to castrate a screaming Jack Warner. She skins alive a bellowing, bleeding Louis B. Mayer. Her grip tightens around the lever which opens the bomb bay doors. Her deadly cargo shimmers pristine as a bride, covered with seed pearls and fluttering white lace.

In her own kitchen, my Miss Kathie sinks both hands into the shopping bag and lifts out a hairy chunk of her fur coat. The ragged pile of hair seems to tremble as she places it atop the Hellman screenplay. Two black button eyes blink open. On the table, the damp, hairy wad shrinks, then explodes in a hah-choo sneeze. Between the two button eyes, the fur parts to reveal a double row of needle teeth. A panting sliver of pink tongue. A puppy.

Around the new diamond ring, her movie star hands appear nicked and scabbed with dried red, smudged with old blood. Spreading her fingers to show me the backs of both hands, Miss Kathie says, “This hospital had barbed wire.”

Her barbed wire scars as gruesome as any wounds Lillian shows off from the Abraham Lincoln brigade. Not as bad as Ava Gardner’s scars from bullfighting with Ernest Hemingway. Or Gore Vidal’s scars from Truman Capote.

“I picked up a stray,” says Miss Kathie.

I ask, Which one? The dog or the man?

“It’s a Pekingese,” says Miss Kathie. “I’ve christened him Loverboy.”

The most recent of the “was-bands,” Paco arrives after the senator who arrived after the faggot chorus boy who arrived after the steel-smelting tycoon who arrived after the failed actor who arrived after the sleazy freelance photographer who arrived after the high school sweetheart. These, all of the stray dogs whose photographs line the mantel in her lavish upstairs boudoir.

A rogues’ gallery of what Walter Winchell would call “happily-never-afters.”

Each romance, the type of self-destructive gesture Hedda Hopper would call “marry-kiri.” Instead of plunging a sword into one’s stomach, you repeatedly throw yourself on the most inappropriate erect penis.

The men Miss Katherine marries, they’re less husbands than they are costars. Souvenirs. Each one merely a witness to attest to her latest daring adventure, so much like Raymond Massey or Fredric March, any leading man she might fight beside in the Hundred Years War. Playing Amelia Earhart stowed away with champagne and beluga caviar in the romantic cockpit of Charles Lindbergh during his long flight over the Atlantic. Cleopatra kidnapped during the Crusades and wed to King Henry VIII.