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ACT I, SCENE THREE

Katherine Kentonlived as a Houdini. An escape artist. Itdidn’t matter … marriages, funny farms, airtight PandroBerman studio contracts … My Miss Kathie trapped herself becauseit felt such a triumph to slip the noose at the eleventh hour. To foilthe legal boilerplate binding her to bad touring projects with Red Skelton. The approach of HurricaneHazel. Or the third trimester of a pregnancy by Huey Long. Always one clock tick before it was toolate, my Miss Kathie would take flight.

Here, let’s make a slow dissolve toflashback. 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 daytimeinterior 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 insaid door.

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

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

On page one of the screenplay, Robert Oppenheimer puzzles over the best method foraccelerating particle diffusion until Lillian stubs out a Lucky Strike cigarette, tosses back a shot of Dewar’s whiskey, and elbows Oppenheimer away fromthe rambling equation chalked the length of a vast blackboard. Usingspit and her Max Factor eyebrow pencil, Lillyalters the speed of enriched uranium fission while AlbertEinstein looks on. Slapping himself on the forehead with thepalm of one hand, Einstein says, “Lilly, meineliebchen, du bist eine genious!”

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

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

Brandishing her rolled billy club, Lillysays, “What happens if the zipper gets stuck?” “Lilly, darling,” says Dior,“it’s a fucking atom bomb!”

At the kitchen window, the sharp beak dragsitself against the outside of the glass, tracing a long curve,scratching the glass with an impossible, high-pitched shriek. An instantmigraine headache, the point traces a second curve. The two curvescombine to form a heart, etched into the window, and the dragging pointplows an arrow through the heart.

On paper, Adriansees the entirety of the atom bomb encrusted with a thick layer ofrhinestones, flashing a dazzling Allied victory. EdithHead pounds her small fist on the conference table at the Waldorf=Astoria and proclaims that somethinghand-crocheted must rain fiery death on Hirohito,or she’ll pull out of the Manhattan Project. Hubertde Givenchy pounds on Pierre Balmain.

I stand and cross to the alley door. There wediscover 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 somuch better than sobriety.…” She waves the back of her left hand, thering finger flashing with a Harry Winstondiamond solitaire, and she says, “I found PacoEsposito!”

The diamond, the tool she used to cut herheart so deep into the glass. The heart and Cupid’sarrow etched in the alley window. Yet another engagement ring she’sbought herself.

Behind her stands a young man hung like aChristmas 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 tattooedarms. 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 sideacross my face, up and down, the way they’d vacuum up last-minuterewrites in dialogue.

The sole reason for KatherineKenton’s admitting herself to any hospital was because she soenjoyed the escape. Between making pictures, she craved the drama ofovercoming locked doors, barred windows, sedatives and straitjackets.Stepping indoors from the cold alley, her breath steaming, my MissKathie wears cardboard slippers. Not MadeleineVionnet. She wears a tissue- paper gown under her silver fox coat.Not Vera Maxwell. Miss Kathie’s cheeksscrubbed pink from the sun. The wind has tossed her auburn hair intoheavy waves. Her blue fingers grip the handles of a shopping bag shelifts to set atop the kitchen table.

In the screenplay’s third act, Hellman pilotsthe controls of the Enola Gayas 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 castratea screaming Jack Warner. She skins alive abellowing, bleeding Louis B. Mayer. Her griptightens around the lever which opens the bomb bay doors. Her deadlycargo shimmers pristine as a bride, covered with seed pearls andfluttering white lace.

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

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

Her barbed wire scars as gruesome as anywounds Lillian shows off from the Abraham Lincolnbrigade. Not as bad as Ava Gardner’s scarsfrom bullfighting with Ernest Hemingway. Or Gore Vidal’s scars from TrumanCapote.

“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’vechristened him Loverboy.”

The most recent of the “was-bands,” Pacoarrives after the senator who arrived after the faggot chorus boy whoarrived after the steel-smelting tycoon who arrived after the failedactor who arrived after the sleazy freelance photographer who arrivedafter the high school sweetheart. These, all of the stray dogs whosephotographs line the mantel in her lavish upstairs boudoir.

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

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

The men Miss Katherine marries, they’re lesshusbands than they are costars. Souvenirs. Each one merely a witness toattest to her latest daring adventure, so much like RaymondMassey or Fredric March, any leadingman she might fight beside in the Hundred Years War.Playing Amelia Earhart stowed away withchampagne and beluga caviar in the romanticcockpit of Charles Lindbergh during his longflight over the Atlantic. Cleopatra kidnappedduring the Crusades and wed to King Henry VIII.

Each wedding picture was less of a mementothan a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario KatherineKenton has survived.

Miss Kathie places the puppy on the Hellmanscreenplay, smack-dab on the scene where Lilly Hellman and John Wayne raise the American flag over Iwo Jima. Dipping one scabbed hand into the pocketof 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 thepink tip of her tongue. Writing a few words under the letterhead, shestops, looks up and says, “How many Ss in Darvocet?”

The young man holding her baggage says, “Howsoon do we get to Hollywood?”

Los Angeles, thecity Louella Parsons would call theapproximately three hundred square miles and twelve million peoplecentered 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.