Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.
Miss Kathie places the puppy on the Hellman screenplay, smack-dab on the scene where Lilly Hellman and John Wayne raise the American flag over Iwo Jima. Dipping one scabbed hand into the pocket of her silver fox coat, Miss Kathie extracts a tablet of bound papers, each page printed with the letterhead White Mountain Hospital and Residential Treatment Facility.
A purloined pad of prescription blanks.
Miss Kathie wets the point of an Estée Lauder eyebrow pencil, touching it against the pink tip of her tongue. Writing a few words under the letterhead, she stops, looks up and says, “How many Ss in Darvocet?”
The young man holding her baggage says, “How soon do we get to Hollywood?”
Los Angeles, the city Louella Parsons would call the approximately three hundred square miles and twelve million people centered around Irene Mayer Selznick.
In that same beat, we cut to a close-up of Loverboy, as the tiny Pekingese drops its own hot, stinking A-bomb all over General Douglas MacArthur.
ACT I, SCENE FOUR
The career of a movie star consists of helping everyone else forget their troubles. Using charm and beauty and good cheer to make life look easy. “The problem is,” Gloria Swanson once said, “if you never weep in public… well, the public assumes you never weep.”
Act one, scene four opens with Katherine Kenton cradling an urn in her arms. The setting: the dimly lit interior of the Kenton crypt, deep underground, below the stony pile of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, dressed with cobwebs. We see the ornate bronze door unlocked and swung open to welcome mourners. A stone shelf at the rear of the crypt, in deep shadow, holds various urns crafted from a variety of polished metals, bronze, copper, nickel, one engraved, Casanova, another engraved, Darling, another, Romeo.
My Miss Kathie hugs the urn she’s holding, lifting it to meet her lips. She plants a puckered lipstick kiss on the engraved name Loverboy, then places this new urn on the dusty shelf among the others.
Kay Francis hasn’t arrived. Humphrey Bogart didn’t send his regards. Neither did Deanna Durbin or Mildred Coles. Also missing are George Bancroft and Bonita Granville and Frank Morgan. None of them sent flowers.
The engraved names Sweetie Pie and Honey Bun and Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq., what Hedda Hopper would call “dust buddies.” Her beagle, her Chihuahua, her fourth husband-the majority stockholder and chairman of the board for International Steel Manufacturing. Scattered amongst the other urns, engraved: Pookie, and Fantasy Man, and Lothario, the ashen remains of her toy poodle and miniature pinscher, there also sits an orange plastic prescription bottle of Valium, tethered to the stone shelf by a net of spiderwebs. Mold and dust mottle the label on a bottle of Napoleon brandy. A pharmacy prescription bottle of Luminal.
What Louella Parsons would call “moping mechanisms.”
My Miss Kathie leans forward to blow the dust from a pill bottle. She lifts the bottle and wrestles the tricky child-guard cap, soiling her black gloves, pressing the cap as she twists, the pills inside rattling. Echoing loud as machine-gun fire in the cold stone room. My Miss Kathie shakes a few pills into one gloved palm. With the opposite hand, she lifts her black veil. She tosses the pills into her mouth and reaches for the crusted bottle of brandy.
Among the urns, a silver picture frame lies facedown on the shelf. Next to it, a tarnished tube of Helena Rubinstein lipstick. A slow panning shot reveals an atomizer of Mitsouko, the crystal bottle clouded and smudged with fingerprints. A dusty box spouts yellowed Kleenex tissues.
In the dim light, we see a bottle of vintage 1851 Château Lafite. A magnum of Huet calvados, circa 1865, and Croizet cognac bottled in 1906. Campbell Bowden & Taylor port, vintage 1825.
Stacked against the stone walls are cases of Dom Pérignon and Moët & Chandon and Bollinger champagne in bottles of every size… Jeroboam bottles, named for the biblical king, son of Nebat and Zeruah, which hold as much as four typical wine bottles. Here are Nebuchadnezzar bottles, twenty times the size of a typical bottle, named for a king of Babylon. Among those tower Melchior bottles, which hold the equivalent of twenty-four bottles of champagne, named for one of the Three Wise Men who greeted the birth of Jesus Christ. As many bottles stand empty as still corked. Empty wineglasses litter the cold shadows, long ago abandoned, smudged by the lips of Conrad Nagel, Alan Hale, Cheeta the chimp and Bill Demarest.
Miss Kathie’s mourning veil falls back, covering her face, and she drinks through the black netting, holding each bottle to her lips and swigging, leaving a new layer of lipstick caked around each new bottle’s glistening neck. Each bottle’s mouth as red as her own.
Sydney Greenstreet, another no-show at today’s funeral. Greta Garbo did not send her sympathies.
What Walter Winchell calls “stiff standing up.”
Here we are, just Miss Katherine and myself, yet again.
Brushing aside the black rice of mouse feces-in this strange negative image of a wedding-my Miss Kathie lifts the silver picture frame and props it to stand on the shelf, leaning the frame against the tomb’s wall. Instead of a picture, the frame surrounds a mirror. Within the mirror, within the reflection of the stone walls, the cobwebs, poses Miss Kathie wearing her black hat and veil. She pinches the fingertips of one glove, pulling the glove free of her left hand. Twisting the diamond solitaire off her ring finger, she hands the six-carat, marquise-cut Harry Winston to me. Miss Kathie says, “I guess we ought to record the moment.”
The mirror, old scratches scar and etch its surface. The glass marred by a wide array of old scores.
I tell her, Hit your mark, please.
“Are you absolutely certain you phoned Cary Grant?” says Miss Kathie as she steps backward and stands on a faded X, long ago marked in lipstick on the stone floor. At that precise point her movie-star face aligns perfectly with the scratches on the mirror. At that perfect angle and distance, those old scores become the wrinkles she had three, four, five dogs ago, the bags and sumps her face fell into before each was repaired with a new face-lift or an injection of sheep embryo serum. Some radical procedure administered in a secret Swiss clinic. The expensive creams and salves, the operations to pull and tighten. On the mirror linger the pits and liver spots she has erased every few months, etched there-the record of how she ought to look. Again, she lifts her veil, and her reflected cheeks and chin align with the ancient record of sags and moles and stray hairs my Miss Kathie has rightfully earned.
The war wounds left by Paco Esposito and Romeo, every stray dog and “was-band.”
Miss Kathie makes the face she makes when she’s not making a face, her features, her famous mouth and eyes becoming a Theda Bara negligee draped over a padded hanger in the back of the Monogram Pictures wardrobe department, wrapped in plastic in the dark. Her muscles slack and relaxed. The audience forgotten.
And wielding the diamond, I get to work, drawing. I trace any new wrinkles, adding any new liver spots to this long-term record. Creating something more cumulative than any photograph, I document Miss Kathie’s misery before the plastic surgeons can once more wipe the slate clean. Dragging the diamond, digging into the glass, I etch her gray hairs. Updating the topography of this, her secret face. Cutting the latest worry lines across her forehead. I gouge the new crow’s-feet around her eyes, eclipsing the false smile of her public image, the diamond defacing Miss Kathie. Me mutilating her.