She draws her legs in close to her body, her knees pressed to her chest. All of her wadded as tight as the ruined fistful of flowers.
Throwing back a swallow of gin, she says, “I’m such an old ninny.” She swirls the ice in the bottom of the glass, saying, “Why do I always feel so degraded?”
Her heart, devastated. My plan, working to perfection.
The rim of the glass, smeared red with her lipstick, the curved rim has printed her face with red, spreading the corners of her mouth upward to make a lurid clown’s smile. Her eyeliner dribbles in a black line down from the center of each eye. Miss Kathie lifts her hand, twisting the wrist to see her watch, the awful truth circled in diamonds and pink sapphires. Here’s bad news presented in an exquisite package. From somewhere in the bowels of the town house, a clock begins to strike midnight. Past the twelfth stroke, the bell continues to thirteen, fourteen. More late than any night could possibly get. At the stroke of fifteen, my Miss Kathie looks up, her cloudy eyes confused with alcohol.
It’s impossible. The bell tolling sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, it’s the doorbell. And standing on the stoop, when I open the front door, there waits a pair of bright brown eyes behind an armful of roses and lilies.
ACT I, SCENE EIGHT
We open with a panning shot of Miss Kathie’s boudoir mantel, the lineup of wedding photos and awards. Next, we dissolve to a similar panning shot, moving across the surface of a console table in her drawing room, crowded with more trophies. Then, we dissolve to yet another similar shot, moving across the shelves of her dining room vitrines. Each of these shots reveals a cluttered abundance of awards and trophies. Plaques and medals lie displayed in presentation boxes lined with white satin like tiny cradles, each medal hung on a wide ribbon, the box lying open. Like tiny caskets. Burdening the shelves are loving cups of tarnished silver, engraved, To Katherine Kenton, In Honor of Her Lifetime Achievements, Presented by the Baltimore Critics Circle. Statuettes plated with gold, from the Cleveland Theater Owners Association. Diminutive statues of gods and goddesses, tiny, the size of infants. For Her Outstanding Contribution. For Her Years of Dedication. We move through this clutter of engraved bric-a-brac, these honorary degrees from Midwestern colleges. Such nine-carat-gold praise from the Phoenix Stage Players Club. The Seattle Press Guild. The Memphis United Society of Thespis. The Greater Missoula Dramatics Community. Frozen, gleaming, silent as past applause. The final panning shot ends as a dirty rag falls around one golden statue; then the camera pulls back to reveal me wiping the award free of dust, polishing it, and placing it back on the shelf. I take another, polish it and put it back. I lift another.
This demonstrates the endless nature of my work. By the time I’ve done them all, the first awards will need dusting and polishing. Thus I move along with my soiled cotton diaper, really the most soft kind of dust cloth.
Every month another group entices Miss Kathie to grace them with her presence, rewarding her with yet another silver-plate urn or platter, engraved, Woman of the Year, to collect dust. Imagine every compliment you’ve ever received, made manifest, etched into metal or stone and filling your home. That terrible accumulating burden of your Dedication and Talent, your Contributions and Achievements, forgotten by everyone except yourself. Katherine Kenton, the Great Humanitarian.
Throughout this sequence, always from offscreen, we hear the laughter of a man and woman. Miss Kathie and some famous actor. Gregory Peck or Dan Duryea. Her ringing laugh followed by his bass guffaw. As I’m dusting awards in the library of the town house, the laughter filters downstairs from her boudoir. If I’m working in the dining room, the laughter echoes from the drawing room. Nevertheless, when I follow the sound, any new room is empty. The laughter always comes from around another corner or from behind the next door. What I find are only the awards, turning dark with tarnish. Such honors—solid, worthless lead or pig iron merely coated with a thin skin of gold. After every rubbing, more dull, worn and smutty.
In her boudoir, on the television, my Miss Kathie rides in an open horse-drawn carriage through Central Park, sitting beside Robert Stack. Behind them trails a huge looming mass of white balloons. At a crescendo of violin music, Stack rolls on top of Miss Kathie, and her fist opens, releasing the frenzied balloons to scatter and swim upward, whipping their long tails of white string.
On some shelves balance scissors big enough for the Jolly Green Giant, brass buffed until it could pass as something precious, the pointed blades as long as Miss Kathie’s legs. She brandished one pair to cut the ribbon at the opening ceremonies for the six-lane Ochoakee Inland Expressway. Another pair of scissors cut the ribbon to open the Spring Water Regional Shopping Mall. Another pair, as large as a golden child performing jumping jacks, these cut the ribbon at a supermarket. At the Lewis J. Redslope Memorial Bridge. At the Tennessee assembly plant for Skyline Microcellular, Inc.
On the television in the kitchen, Miss Kathie lies on a blanket next to Cornel Wilde. As Wilde rolls on top of her, the camera pans to a nearby spitting, crackling campfire.
Filling the shelves are skeleton keys so heavy they require both hands to lift. Tin treated to shine bright as platinum. Presented by the Omaha Business Fathers and the Topeka Chamber of Commerce. The key to Spokane, Washington, presented to Miss Kathie by his honor, the right esteemed Mayor Nelson Redding. The engraved keys to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Jacksonville, Florida. The keys to Iowa City and Sioux Falls.
On the dining room television, my Miss Kathie shares a train compartment with Nigel Bruce. As he throws himself on top of her the train slips into a tunnel.
In the drawing room, Burt Lancaster lowers himself onto Miss Kathie as ocean waves roll onto a sandy beach. On the television in the den, Richard Todd throws himself onto Miss Kathie as July Fourth fireworks explode in a night sky.
Throughout this montage, the actual Miss Kathie is absent. Here and there, the camera might linger on a discarded newspaper page, a half-tone photograph of Miss Kathie exiting a limousine assisted by Webster Carlton Westward III. Her name in boldface type linked to his in the gossip columns of Sheilah Graham or Elsa Maxwell. Another photograph, the two of them dancing at a nightclub. Otherwise, the town house is empty.
My hand lifts still another trophy, a heroic statuette, the muscle of each arm and leg as small and naked as a child Miss Kathie never had, and I massage its face, without pressing, to make such thin gold, that faint shine, last as long as possible.
ACT I, SCENE NINE
“The most cunning compliments,” playwright William Inge once wrote, “seem to flatter the person who bestows them even more than they do the person who receives them.”
Once more we dissolve into flashback. Begin with a swish pan, fast enough to blur everything, then gradually slow to a long crane shot, swooping above round tables, each dinner table circled with seated guests. The gleam of every eye turns toward a distant stage; the sparkle of diamond necklaces and beaming, boiled-white tuxedo shirts reflect that far-off spotlight. We move through this vast field of white tablecloths and silverware as the shot advances toward the stage. Every shoulder turns, twisted to watch a man standing at a podium. As the shot comes into deep focus, we see the speaker, Senator Phelps Russell Warner, standing behind the microphone.
A screen fills the upstage wall, flashing with gray images of a motion picture. For a few words, the figure of Katherine Kenton appears on-screen, wearing a corseted silk ball gown as Mrs. Ludwig van Beethoven. As her husband, Spencer Tracy, snores in the background, she hunches over a roll of parchment, quill pen squeezed between her blue fingers, finishing the score to his Moonlight Sonata. Her enormous face glowing, blindingly bright, from the silver-nitrate film stock. Her eyes flashing. Her teeth blazing white.
In the audience, every face is cast in chiaroscuro, half lost in the darkness, half lost in the glare of that distant light. Forgetting themselves outside of this moment, the audience sits aware only of the man onstage and his voice. Over all, we hear the rolling thunder of th
e senator’s voice boosted through microphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers; this booming voice says, “She serves as our brilliant light, forever guiding forward the rest of us mortals.…”
Across the surface of the screen, we see my Miss Kathie in the role of Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell, elbowing her husband, James Stewart, aside so she can listen covertly to Mickey Rooney on their party line, wasp-waisted in a high-collar dress. Her Gibson-girl hair crowned with a picture hat of drooping egret plumes.
This, the year when every other song on the radio was Doris Day singing “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe” backed by the Bunny Berigan Orchestra. In the audience, no single face draws our focus. Despite their pearls and bow ties, everyone looks plain as old character players, dress extras, happy to shoot a scene sitting down.
At the microphone, the senator continues, “Her sense of noble purpose and steadfast course of action sets the pattern for our highest aspirations.…” His voice sounds deep and steady as a Harry Houdini or a Franz Anton Mesmer.
This prattle, further example of what Walter Winchell means by the term “toast-masturbating.” Or “laud mouthing,” according to Hedda Hopper. According to Louella Parsons, “implying gilt.”
Turning his head to one side, the senator looks off stage right, saying, “She visits our drab world like an angel from some future age, where fear and stupidity have been vanquished.…”
The camera follows his eye line to reveal Miss Kathie and myself standing in the wings, her violet eyes fixed on the senator’s spotlighted figure. Him in his black tuxedo. Her in a white gown, one elbow bent to crush a pale hand to her heart. Cue the lighting change, bring down the key light, boost the fill light to isolate Miss Kathie in the wings. Block the scene with the senator as a groom, standing before a congregation, taking his vows prior to giving her some tin trophy painted gold in lieu of a wedding ring.
It’s no wonder such bright lights seem invariably surrounded by the dried husks of so many suicidal insects.
“As a woman, she radiates charm and compassion,” says the senator, his voice echoing about the hall. “As a person, she proves an eternal marvel.” With each word, he climbs to her status, fusing himself to her name recognition and laying claim to the enormous dowry of her fame in his upcoming bid for reelection.
Upstage, the vast luminous face of my Miss Kathie hovers on-screen in the role of Mrs. Claude Monet, painting his famous water lilies. Her perfect complexion care of Lilly Daché. Her lips, Pierre Phillipe.
“She is the mother we wish we’d had. The wife we dream of finding. The woman whom all others measure themselves against,” the senator says, shining and polishing Miss Kathie’s image before the moment of her appearance. Before he presents her to this audience of the faithful. This stranger she’s never met, coaxing her fans to a low-key frenzy of anticipation before she joins him in the spotlight.
More “projectile praise” and “force fawning” or “compliment vomit,” in the eyes of Cholly Knickerbocker.
Everything sounds so much better when it comes out of a man’s mouth.
Clasped in my hands, a screenplay rolled tight, here is the only prospect for work my Miss Kathie has been offered in months. A horror flick about an aged voodoo priestess creating an army of zombies to take over the world. At the finale, the female lead is dismembered, screaming, and eaten by wild monkeys. Lynn Fontanne and Irene Dunne have already passed on this project.
That trophy held by the senator, it will never shine as bright as it shines at this moment before it’s received, while this object is still beyond Miss Kathie’s grasp. From this distance apart, the senator and she both look so perfect, as if each offers the other some complete bliss. Senator Phelps Russell Warner, he’s the stranger who would become her sixth “was-band.” Himself a prize that seems worth the effort to dust and polish over the remainder of her lifetime.
Every coronation contains elements of farce. You must be a toothless, aged lion, indeed, before this many people will risk petting you. All of these tin-plate copies of Kenneth Tynan, trying to insist their opinions count for anything. Ridiculous clockwork copies of George Bernard Shaw and Alexander Woollcott. These failed actors and writers, a mob that’s never created worthwhile art, they’re now offering to carry the train of Miss Kathie’s gown, hoping to hitch a ride with her to immortality.
Using a strong eye light, go to a medium close-up shot of Miss Kathie’s face, her reaction, as the senator’s off-camera voice says, “This woman offered the best of an era. She blazed paths where none had braved to venture. To her alone belong such memorable roles as Mrs. Count Dracula and Mrs. President Andrew Jackson.…”
Behind him play scenes from The Gene Krupa Story and The Legend of Genghis Khan. Miss Katie, filmed in black and white, kisses Bing Crosby on a penthouse terrace overlooking a beautiful panoramic matte painting of the Manhattan skyline.
In the spotlight, the senator’s florid, naked forehead shines as bright as the award. He stands tall, with wide shoulders tapering to his patent-leather shoes. A pink-flesh facsimile of the Academy Award. Above and behind his ears, the remainder of his hair retreats as if hiding from the crowd’s attention. It’s pathetic how easily a strong spotlight can wipe away any trace of a person’s age or character.
It’s this pink mannequin saying, “Hers is a beauty which will linger in the collective mind until the end of humanity; hers is a courage and intelligence which showcase the best of what human beings can accomplish.…”
By praising the frailty of this woman, the senator looks stronger, more noble, generous, loving, even taller and more grateful. This oversize man achieves a humility, fawning over this tiny woman. Such beautiful, false compliments—the male equivalent of a woman’s screaming fake orgasm. The first designed to get a woman into bed. The second to more quickly complete sexual intercourse and get a man out of bed. As the senator says these words which every woman craves to hear, he evolves. His broad shoulders and thick neck of a caveman become those of a loving father, an ideal husband. A humble servant. This savage Neanderthal shape shifts. His teeth becoming a smile more than a snarl. His hairy hands tools instead of weapons.
“Tonight, we humbly beseech her to accept our admiration,” says the senator, cradling the trophy in the crook of one arm. “But she is the prize which all men wish to win. She is the crowning jewel of our American theatrical tradition. So that we might give her our appreciation, ladies and gentlemen, may I give you … Katherine Kenton.”
Earning applause, not for any performance, but for simply not dying. This occasion, both her introduction to the senator and her wedding night.
I suppose it’s a comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse damage to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.
Tonight, yet another foray into the great wasteland which is middle age.
Upon that cue, my Miss Kathie takes the spotlight, entering stage right to thunderous applause. More starved for applause than for any chicken dinner the occasion might offer. The scene shattered by the flash of hundreds of cameras. Smiling with her arms flung wide, she enters the senator’s embrace and accepts that gaudy piece of gilded trash.
Coming out of the flashback, we slowly dissolve to a tight shot which reveals this same trophy, engraved, From the Greater Inland Drama Maniacs of Western Schuyler County. Over a decade later it sits on a shelf, the gold clouded with tarnish, the whole of it netted with cobwebs. A beat later a scrap of white cloth wraps the trophy; a hand lifts it from the shelf. With further pullback, the shot reveals me, dusting in the drawing room of the town house. Polishing. Stray spiderwebs cling to my face, and a halo of dust motes swirl around my head. Outside the windows, darkness. My gaze fixed on nothing one can actually see.
From offscreen, we hear a key turn in the lock of the front door. A draft of air stirs my hair as we hear the heavy door open and shut. The sound of footsteps ascending the main staircase from the foyer to the second floor. We hear a second door open and shut.
&nbs
p; Abandoning the trophy, the dust cloth still in one hand, I follow the sound of footsteps up the stairs to where Miss Kathie’s boudoir door is closed. A clock strikes two in some faraway part of the house as I knock at the door, asking if Miss Kathie needs help with her zipper. If she needs me to set out her pills. To draw her bath and light the candles on her fireplace mantel. The altar.
Through the boudoir door, no answer. When I grip the knob, it refuses to turn in either direction. Fixed. This door Miss Kathie has never locked. Pressing one dusty cheek to the wood, I knock again, listening. Instead of an answer, a faint sigh issues from inside. The sigh repeats, louder, then more loud, becoming the squeak of bedsprings. The only answer is that squeak of bedsprings, repeating, a squeak as high-pitched and regular as laughter.
ACT I, SCENE TEN
The scene opens with Lillian Hellman grappling in barehanded combat with Lee Harvey Oswald, the two of them wrestling and punching each other near an open window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, surrounded by prominent stacks of Hellman’s The Little Foxes and The Children’s Hour and The Autumn Garden. Outside the window, a motorcade glides past, moving through Dealey Plaza, hands waving and flags fluttering. Hellman and Oswald gripping a rifle between them, they yank the weapon back and forth, neither gaining complete control. With a violent head butt, slamming her blond forehead into Oswald’s, leaving his eyes glazed and stunned for a beat, Hellman shouts, “Think, you commie bastard!” She screams, “Do you really want LBJ as your president?”