Taking the candy, I slip the forged love letter into the paper bag, where Miss Kathie will find it when she arrives home this afternoon, thoroughly shocked and shaved and ravenous.

ACT I, SCENE SEVEN

In the establishing shot, a taxicab stops in the street outside Miss Kathie’s town house. Sunshine filters through the leaves of trees. Birds sing. The shot moves in, closer and closer, to frame an upstairs window, Miss Kathie’s boudoir, where the drapes are drawn tight against the afternoon glare.

Inside the bedroom, we cut to a close-up shot of an alarm clock. Pull back to reveal the clock is balanced atop the stack of screenplays beside Miss Kathie’s bed. On the clock, the larger hand sits at twelve, the smaller at three. Miss Kathie’s eyes flutter open to the reflection of herself staring down, those same violet eyes, from the mirrors within her bed canopy. One languid movie star hand flaps and flops, stretching until her fingers find the water glass balanced beside the clock. Her fingers find the Nembutal and bring the capsule back to her lips. Miss Kathie’s eyelashes flutter closed. Once more, the hand hangs limp off the side of her bed.

The forged version of the love letter, the copy I traced, sits in the middle of her mantelpiece, featured center stage among the lesser invitations and wedding photos. Among the polished awards and trophies. The original date, Saturday, revised to Friday, tonight. Here’s the setup for a romantic evening that won’t happen. No, Webster Carlton Westward III will not arrive at eight this evening, and Katherine Kenton will sit alone and fully dressed, coiffed, as abandoned as Miss Havisham in the novel by Charles Dickens.

Cut to a shot of the same taxicab as it pulls to the curb in front of a dry cleaner’s. The back car door swings opens, and my foot steps out. I ask the cabdriver to double-park while I collect Miss Kathie’s white sable from the refrigerated storage vault. The white fur folded over my arm, it feels impossibly soft but heavy, the pelts slippery and shifting within the thin layer of dry cleaner plastic. The sable glows with cold, swollen with cold in contrast to the warm daylight and the blistering, cracked-vinyl seat of the cab.

At our next stop, the dressmaker’s, the cab stops for me to pick up the gown my Miss Kathie had altered. After that, we stop at the florist’s to buy the corsage of orchids that Miss Kathie’s nervous hands will fondle and finger tonight, as eight o’clock comes and goes and her brown-eyed young beau doesn’t ring the doorbell. Before the clock strikes eight-thirty, Miss Kathie will ask me to pour her a drink. By the stroke of nine, she’ll swallow a Valium. By ten o’clock, these orchids will be shredded. By then, my Miss Kathie will be drunken, despondent, but safe.

Our perspective cuts back and forth between the bedside alarm clock and the roving taxi meter. Dollars and minutes tick away. A countdown to tonight’s disaster. We stop by the hairdresser’s to collect the wig that’s been washed and set. We stop by the hosier’s for the waist cincher and a new girdle. The cobbler’s, for the high heels Miss Kathie wanted resoled. The bodice of the evening gown feels crusted with beads and embroidery, rough as sandpaper or brick inside its garment bag.

The camera follows me, dashing about, assembling all the ingredients-breathless as a mad scientist or a gourmet chef-to create my masterpiece. My life’s work.

If most American women imagine Mary, Queen of Scots or the Empress Eugenie or Florence Nightingale, they picture Miss Kathie in a period costume standing in a two-shot with John Garfield or Gabby Hayes on an MGM soundstage. In the public mind, Miss Kathie, her face and voice, is collapsed with the Virgin Mary, Dolley Madison and Eve, and I will not allow her to dissipate that legend. William Wyler, C. B. DeMille and Howard Hawks may have directed her in a picture or two, but I have directed Miss Kathie’s entire adult life. My efforts have made her the heroine, the human form of glory, for the past three generations of women. I coached her to her greatest roles as Mrs. Ivanhoe, Mrs. King Arthur and Mrs. Sheriff of Nottingham. Under my tutelage, Miss Kathie will forever be synonymous with the characters of Mrs. Apollo, Mrs. Zeus and Mrs. Thor.

Now more than ever the world needs my Miss Kathie to personify their core values and ideals.

According to Walter Winchell, “menoposture” refers to the ramrod straight backbone of a Joan Crawford or an Ethel Barrymore, a lady of a certain age whose spine never touches the back of any chair. A Helen Hayes, who stands straight as a military cadet, her shoulders back in defiance of gravity and osteoporosis. That crucial age when older picture stars become what Hedda Hopper calls “fossilidealized,” the living example of proper manners and discipline and self-restraint. Some Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis illustration of noble hard work and Yankee ambition.

Miss Kathie has become the paragon I’ve designed. She illustrates the choice we must make between giving the impression of a very youthful, well-preserved older person, or appearing to be a very degraded, corrupt young person.

My work will not be distracted by some panting, clutching, brown-eyed male. I have not labored my entire lifetime to build a monument for idiot little boys to urinate against and knock down with their dirty hands.

The cab makes a quick stop at the corner newsstand for cigarettes. Aspirin. Breath mints.

In the same moment, the bedside clock strikes four, and the alarm begins to buzz. One long movie-star hand reaches, the fingers searching, the wrist and forearm clashing with gold bracelets and charms.

At the curb outside the town house, I’m passing a twenty-dollar bill to the cabdriver.

Inside, the alarm continues, buzzing and buzzing, until my own hand enters the shot, pressing the button, which ceases the noise. In addition to the wig and white sable, I’ve brought the gown, the corsage, the shoes. I’ve filled an ice bucket and brought clean towels and a bottle of chilled rubbing alcohol, everything as clean and sterile as if I were kneeling bedside to deliver a baby.

My fingers hold an ice cube, rubbing it in a slow arc below one violet eye to shrink Miss Kathie’s loose skin. The ice skims over Miss Kathie’s forehead, smoothing the wrinkles. The melting water saturates the skin of her cheeks, bringing pink to the surface. The cold shrinks the folds in her neck, drawing the skin tight along her jawline.

Our preparation for tonight, all of her rest and my work, as much fuss and sweat as my Miss Kathie would invest in any screen test or audition.

With one hand I’m blotting the melted water. Dabbing her face with cotton balls dipped in the cold rubbing alcohol, reducing the pores. Her skin now feels as frigid as the sable coat preserved in cold storage. At one time, every fur-bearing animal in the world lived in terror of Katherine Kenton. Like Roz Russell or Betty Hutton, if Miss Kathie chose to wear a coat of red ermine or a hat trimmed in pelican feathers, no ermine or seabird was safe. One photo of her arriving at an awards dinner or premiere was enough to put most animals onto the endangered species list.

This woman is Pocahontas. She is Athena and Hera. Lying in this messy, unmade bed, eyes closed, this is Juliet Capulet. Blanche DuBois. Scarlett O’Hara. With ministrations of lipstick and eyeliner I give birth to Ophelia. To Marie Antoinette. Over the next trip of the larger hand around the face of the bedside clock, I give form to Lucrezia Borgia. Taking shape at my fingertips, my touches of foundation and blush, here is Jocasta. Lying here, Lady Windermere. Opening her eyes, Cleopatra. Given flesh, a smile, swinging her sculpted legs off one side of the bed, this is Helen of Troy. Yawning and stretching, here is every beautiful woman across history.