Tell All

ACT I, SCENE ONE

Act one, scene one opens with Lillian Hellman clawing her way, stumbling andscrambling, through the thorny nighttime underbrush of some German schwarzwald, a Jewish baby clamped to each of hertits, another brood of infants clinging to her back. Lilly clambers herway, struggling against the brambles that snag the gold embroidery ofher Balenciaga lounging pajamas, the blackvelvet clutched by hordes of doomed cherubs she’s racing to deliver fromthe ovens of some Nazi death camp. More innocent toddlers, lashed toeach of Lillian’s muscular thighs. Helpless Jewish, Gypsy and homosexualbabies. Nazi gestapo bullets spit past her in the darkness, shreddingthe forest foliage, the smell of gunpowder and pine needles. The headyaroma of her Chanel No. 5. Bullets and handgrenades just whiz past Miss Hellman’s perfectly coiffed Hattie Carnegie chignon, so close the ammunitionshatters her Cartier chandelier earrings intorainbow explosions of priceless diamonds. Ruby and emerald shrapnelblasts into the flawless skin of her perfect, pale cheeks.… From thisaction sequence, we dissolve to:

Reveal: the interior of a stately Sutton Place mansion. It’s some BillieBurke place decorated by Billy Haines,where formally dressed guests line a long table within a candlelit,wood- paneled dining room. Liveried footmen stand along the walls. MissHellman is seated near the head of this very large dinner party,actually describing the frantic escape scene we’ve just witnessed. In aslow panning shot, the engraved place cards denoting each guest readlike a veritable Who’s Who. Easily half oftwentieth-century history sits at this table: PrinceNicholas of Romania, Pablo Picasso, Cordell Hull and Josef von Sternberg. The attendant celebrities seemto stretch from Samuel Beckett to Gene Autry to Marjorie Mainto the faraway horizon.

Lillian stops speaking long enough to drawone long drag on her cigarette. Then to blow the smoke over Pola Negri and Adolph Zukor before she says, “It’s at that heart-stopping moment I wished I’d justtold Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ‘No, thankyou.’ ” Lilly taps cigarette ash onto her bread plate, shaking her head,saying, “No secret missions for this girl.”

While the footmen pour wine and clear thesorbet dishes, Lillian’s hands swim through the air, her cigarettetrailing smoke, her fingernails clawing at invisible forest vines,climbing sheer rock cliff faces, her high heels blazing a muddy trailtoward freedom, her strength never yielding under the burden of thosetiny Jewish and homosexual urchins.

Every eye, fixed, from the head of the tableto the foot, stares at Lilly. Every hand crosses two fingers beneath thedamask napkin laid in every lap, while every guest mouths a silentprayer that Miss Hellman will swallow her ChickenPrince Anatole Demidoff without chewing, then suffocate, writhingand choking on the dining room carpet.

Almost every eye. The exceptions being onepair of violet eyes … one pair of brown eyes … and of course my ownweary eyes.

The possibility of dying before Lillian Hellman has become the tangible fear of thisentire generation. Dying and becoming merely fodder for Lilly’s mouth. Aperson’s entire life and reputation reduced to some golem,a Frankenstein’s monster Miss Hellman canreanimate and manipulate to do her bidding.

Beyond her first few words, Lillian’s talkbecomes one of those jungle sound tracks one hears looping in thebackground of every Tarzan film, just tropicalbirds and Johnny Weissmuller and howlermonkeys repeating. Bark, bark, screech … Emerald Cunard. Bark, growl,screech … Cecil Beaton.

Lilly’s drivel possibly constitutes somebizarre form of name-dropping Tourette’s syndrome.Or perhaps the outcome of an orphaned press agent raised by wolves andtaught to read aloud from Walter Winchell’scolumn.

Her compulsive prattle, a true pathology.

Cluck, oink, bark… Jean Negulesco.

Thus, Lilly spins the twenty-four-carat goldof people’s actual lives into her own brassy straw.

Please promise you did NOThear this from me.

Seated within range of those flying heroicelbows, my Miss Kathie stares out from the bank of cigarette smoke. Anactress of Katherine Kenton’s stature. Herviolet eyes, trained throughout her adult life to never make contactwith anything except the lens of a motion picture camera. To never meetthe eyes of a stranger, instead to always focus on someone’s earlobe orlips. Despite such training, my Miss Kathie peers down the length of thetable, her lashes fluttering. The slender fingers of one famous whitehand toy with the auburn tresses of her wig. The jeweled fingers of MissKathie’s opposite hand touch the six strands of pearls which containthe loose folds of her sagging neck skin.

In the next instant, while the footmen passthe finger bowls, Lillian twists in her chair, shouldering an invisiblesniper’s rifle and squeezing off rounds until the clip is empty. Stilljust dripping with Hebrew and Communist babies. Lugging her cargo ofSemitic orphans. When the rifle is too searing hot to hold, Miss Hellmanhowls a wild war whoop and hurtles the steaming weapon at the pursuingstorm troopers.

Snarl, bark, screech… Peter Lorre. Oink,bark, squeal … Averill Harriman.

It’s a fate worse than death to spendeternity in harness, serving as Lilly Hellman’s zombie, brought back tolife at dinner parties. On radio talk programs. At this point, MissHellman is heaving yet another batch of invisible babies, rescued Gypsybabes, high, toward the chandelier, as if catapulting them over thesnowcapped peak of the Matterhorn to thesafety of Switzerland.

Grunt, howl, squeal… Sarah Bernhardt.

By now, Lillian Hellmanwraps two fists around the invisible throat of AdolfHitler, reenacting how she sneaked into his subterranean Berlin bunker, dressed as LeniRiefenstahl, her arms laden with black-market cartons of Lucky Strike and Parliamentcigarettes, and then throttled the sleeping dictator in his bed.

Bray, bark, whinny… Basil Rathbone.

Lilly throws the terrified, make-believeHitler into the center of tonight’s dinner table, her teeth biting, hermanicured fingernails scratching at his Nazi eyes. Lillian’s fistsclamped around the invisible windpipe, she begins pounding the invisibleFührer’s skull against the tablecloth, making the silverware andwineglasses jump and rattle.

Screech, meow, tweet… Wallis Simpson. Howl, bray, squeak… Diana Vreeland.

A moment before Hitler’s assassination, George Cukor looks up, his fingertips stilldripping chilled water into his finger bowl, that smell of fresh-slicedlemons, and George says, “Please, Lillian.” Poor George says, “Would youplease stuff it.”

Seated well below the salt, below the variousprofessional hangers-on, the walking men, the drug dealers, themesmerists, the exiled White Russians and poor LorenzHart, really at the very horizon of tonight’s dinner table, ayoung man looks back. Seated on the farthest frontier of placement. Hiseyes the bright brown of July Fourth sunlight through a tall mug of rootbeer. Quite the American specimen. A classic face of such symmetricalproportions, the exactly balanced type of face one dreams of lookingdown to find smiling and eager between one’s inner thighs.

Still, that’s the trouble with only a singleglance at any star on the horizon. As Elsa Maxwellwould say, “One can never tell for certain if that dazzling, shinyobject is rising or setting.”

Lillian inhales the silence through herburning cigarette. Taps the gray ash onto her bread plate. In a blast ofsmoke, she says, “Did you hear?” She says, “It’s a fact, but Eleanor Roosevelt chewed every hair off my bush.…”

Through all of this—the cigarette smoke andlies and the Second World War—the specimen’sbright brown eyes, they’re looking straight down the table, up thesocial ladder, gazing back, deep, into the famous, fluttering violeteyes of my employer.