Tell-All

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Another, she frowns down upon while her long, glossy fingernails pick at a mole or flaw on its smooth, pink forehead. “As the Spanish would say …” she says, “qué será será.”

  This “kinder kattle kall,” as Cholly Knickerbocker would call it, continues all afternoon. This audition. Prams and strollers form a line which runs halfway to the corner. This buffet of abandoned babies, the products of unplanned pregnancies, the progeny of heartbreak—these pink and chubby souvenirs of rape, promiscuity, incest. Impulse. Bottle-fed leftovers of divorce, spousal abuse and fatal disease. Even as the paintbrush, the pink bristles grow stiff in my hand, the babies arrive as proof of poor choices. The sleeping or giggling flotsam and jetsam, a residue of what seemed at one time to be true love.

  Each innocent, Miss Kathie holds, modeling it for the foyer mirror. Doing take after take of this same scene. Giving her right profile, her left. Smiling full-face, then fluttering her eyelashes, ducking her movie-star chin, emoting in reaction shots, telling the mirror, “Yes, she is lovely. I’d like you to meet my daughter: Katherine Jr.”

  Telling the mirror, “I’d like to introduce my son, Webster Carlton Westward the Fourth.” She repeats this same line of dialogue with each child before handing it back to the nurse, the nun, the waiting social worker. Comparing paint chips and fabric samples. Picking over each child for scars or defects. And for every infant Miss Kathie sends away, two more arrive to stand in line for a test.

  Into the late afternoon, she’s reciting: Bark, cluck, bray … Katherine Kenton, Jr.

  Oink, quack, moo … Webster Carlton Westward IV.

  She performs take after take, hours of that same screen test, until the streetlights flicker and blink, flare and shine bright. From the avenue, the sound of traffic fades. Across the street, in the windows of town houses, the curtains slide closed. Eventually Miss Kathie’s front steps descend to the sidewalk, empty of orphans.

  In the foyer, I stoop to retrieve the bandanna dropped on the floor. The fallen drops of pink paint, smeared and dry, form a fading pink path, a stream of pink spots tracked down the steps, down the street. A trail of the rejected.

  A taxicab pulls to a stop at the curb. The driver opens his door, steps out and unlocks the trunk. He removes two suitcases and places them on the sidewalk, then opens the back door of the cab. A foot emerges, a man’s shoe, the cuff of a trouser leg. A man’s hand grips the door of the cab, a signet ring glinting gold around the little finger. A head of hair emerges from the backseat of the cab, eyes bright brown as root beer. A smile flashes, bright as July Fourth fireworks.

  A specimen boasting the wide shoulders of Dan O’Herlihy, the narrow waist of Marlon Brando, the long legs of Stephen Boyd, the dashing smile of Joseph Schildkraut playing Robin Hood.

  In the reverse angle, my Miss Kathie rushes to the front door, calling, “Oh, my darling …” Her outstretched arms and thrusting bosom at once a suggestion of Julie Newmar playing Penelope greeting Odysseus. Jane Russell in the role of Guinevere reunited with Lancelot. Carole Lombard rushing to embrace Gordon MacRae.

  Webster Carlton Westward III calls up the steps, noble as William Frawley as Romeo Montague, “Kath, my dearest …” Calling, “Do you have three dollars to pay the cabdriver?”

  The driver, standing beside the suitcases, stoic as Lewis Stone, gristled as Fess Parker. The cab itself, yellow.

  Her auburn hair streaming behind her, Miss Kathie shouts, “Hazie!” She calls, “Hazie, take Mr. Westward’s luggage to my room!” The two brazen lovers embrace, their lips meeting, while the camera circles and circles them in an arch shot, dissolving to a funeral.

  ACT I, SCENE TWELVE

  Act one, scene twelve opens with another flashback. Once more, we dissolve to Katherine Kenton cradling a polished cremation urn in her arms. The setting: again, the dimly lit interior of the Kenton crypt, dressed with cobwebs, 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 bronze, copper, nickel. The urn in her arms, engraved, Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq., Miss Kathie’s fifth “was-band.”

  This took place the year when every other song on the radio was Frank Sinatra singing the Count Basie arrangement of “Bit’n the Dust.”

  My Miss Katie hugs the urn, lifting it to meet the black lace of her veiled face. Behind the veil, her lips. She plants a puckered lipstick kiss on the engraved name, then places this new urn on the dusty shelf among the others. Amidst the bottles of brandy and Luminal. The unlit prayer candles. The only other cast members in this three-shot, myself and Terrence Terry, each of us prop Miss Kathie by one elbow. What Louella Parsons would call “pal bearers.”

  The collection of crematory urns stand among dusty bottles and magnums of champagne. Vessels of the living and the dead, stacked here in the chilled, dry dark. Miss Kathie’s entire cellar, stored together. The urns stand. The bottles lie on their sides, all of them netted and veiled with cobwebs.

  Bark, oink, squeal … Dom Pérignon 1925.

  Bark, meow, bray … Bollinger 1917.

  Terrence Terry peels the gilded lead from the cork of one bottle. He twists the loop, loosening the wire harness which holds the mushroom cork in the mouth of the bottle. Holding the bottle high, pointed toward an empty corner of the crypt, Terry pries at the cork with both his thumbs until the pop echoes, loud inside the stone room, and a froth of foam gushes from the bottle, spattering on the floor.

  Roar, cluck, whinny … Perrier-Jouët.

  Tweet, quack, growl … Veuve Clicquot.

  That Tourette’s syndrome of brand names.

  Terry lifts a champagne glass from the stone shelf, holding the bowl of the glass near his face and pursing his lips to blow dust from it. He hands the glass to Miss Kathie and pours it full of champagne. A ghost of cold vapor rises from and hovers around the open bottle.

  With each of us holding a dusty glassful of champagne, Terry lifts his arm in a toast. “To Oliver,” he says.

  Miss Kathie and myself, we lift our glasses, saying, “To Oliver.”

  And we all drink the sweet, dirty, sparkling wine.

  Buried in the dust and cobwebs, the mirror lies facedown in its silver frame. Following a moment of silence, I lift the mirror and lean it to stand against the wall. Even in the dim light of the crypt, the scratches sparkle on the glass surface, each etched line the record of a wrinkle my Miss Kathie has had stretched or lifted or burned away with acid.

  Miss Kathie lifts her veil and steps to her mark, the lipstick X on the stone floor. Her face in perfect alignment with the history of her skin. The gray hairs gouged into the mirror align with her hair. She pinches the fingertips of one black glove, using her opposite hand, tugging until the glove slides free. Miss Kathie twists the diamond engagement ring and the wedding band, handing the diamond to me, and placing the gold band on the dusty shelf beside the urns. Beside the urns of past dogs. Beside past shades of lipstick and fingernail varnish too bright, deemed too young for her to wear any longer.

  Each of the various champagne glasses, set and scattered within the crypt, cloudy with dust and past wine, the rim of each glass is a museum of different lipstick shades Miss Kathie has left behind. The floor, littered with the butts of ancient cigarettes, some filters wrapped with these same ancient colors of lipstick. All these abandoned drinks and smokes set on ledges, on the floor, tucked into stony corners, this setting like an invisible cocktail party of the deceased.

  Watching this, our ritual, Terry dips a hand into the inside pocket of his suit coat. He plucks out a chrome cigarette case and snaps it open, removing two cigarettes, which he places, together, between his lips. Terry flicks a flame to jump from one corner of the chrome case, and lifts it to light both cigarettes. With a snap of his wrist, the flame is gone, and Terry replaces the thin case, returned to inside his coat. He plucks one cigarette from his mouth, trailing a spiral of smoke, and reaches to place it between the red lips of Miss Kathie.
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  This flashback takes place before the crow’s-feet caused by Paco Esposito. Before I scratched the frown lines related to the senator into this mirror of Dorian Gray.

  Wielding the diamond, I get to work drawing. I trace any new wrinkles, adding any new liver spots to this long-term record. Sketching the network of tiny spider veins puckered around the filter of Miss Kathie’s burning cigarette.

  Terry says, “A word of warning, Lady Kath.” Sipping his filthy champagne, he says, “If you’ll take my advice. You need to be careful.…”

  As Terry explains, too many lady stars in her situation have opened their doors to a young man or a young woman, someone who’d sit and listen and laugh. The rapt attention might last for a year or a month, but eventually the young admirer would disappear, returning to another life among people his own age. The young woman would marry and vanish with her own first child, leaving the actress, once more, abandoned. On occasion a letter might arrive, or a telephone call. Keeping tabs.

  In the same manner Truman Capote kept in touch with Perry Smith and Dick Hickock while they sat on death row. Biding his time. Capote needed a finale for In Cold Blood.

  Every major publisher in America harbors a book, the advance money already paid to some pleasant young person, a handsome, affable listener, who’d spun a few evenings of dinner into a movie-star tell-all biography and needed only a cause of death to complete the final chapter. Already, that pack of stage-door hyenas waited on Mae West to die. They phoned Lelia Goldoni, hoping for bad news. Scanned the obituary pages for Hugh Marlowe, Emlyn Williams, Peggie Castle and Buster Keaton. Vultures circling. Most were already finagling introductions to Ruth Donnelly and Geraldine Fitzgerald. At this moment, they sit in front of a fireplace in the parlor of Lillian Gish or Carole Landis, vacuuming up the thorny anecdotes they’d need to flesh out two hundred pages, their vulture eyes committing to memory every gesture of Butterfly McQueen, every tic or mannerism of Tex Avery that could be sold to the ravenous reading public.

  All of those future best-selling books, they were already typeset, merely waiting for someone to die.

  “I know you, Kath,” says Terry, turning his head to blow smoke. The stale air of the crypt heavy with the smell of smoke and mold. He takes the wedding ring from the dusty stone shelf, saying, “I know you’re a sucker for an audience, even an audience of one.”

  Some grocery delivery boy or a girl conducting a door-to-door survey … these ambitious stray dogs, they each sit clack-clacking on a rusty typewriter at home. A pretty, wide-eyed, starstruck youngster will steal Miss Kathie’s life story. Her reputation. Her dignity. Then pray for her to die.

  With the diamond, I cut the furrows of sadness across her forehead. Updating Miss Kathie’s life story. The map of her. The mirror already scratched with years of worry and grief and scars documenting Miss Kathie’s secret face.

  Judy Garland, Terry says, and Ethel Merman never again walked out, not in public, not with as much of their previous pride and glamour, after Jacqueline Susann cast them as the fat, drunken, foulmouthed characters Neely O’Hara and Helen Lawson in The Valley of the Dolls.

  In response, the diamond shrieks against the glass. The high-pitched, wailing sound of funeral keening.

  Dropping to one knee on the cold stone floor, Terry looks up at Miss Kathie and says, “Will you marry me? Just to keep you safe?” He reaches out to take her hand. He says, “At least until something better comes along?”

  This, a sodomite and a faded movie star, is what Walter Winchell calls a “match made in resignation.” Terry proposes becoming her emotional bodyguard, a live-in placeholder between real men.

  “Just like your portrait here,” says Terry, nodding at the mirror in its silver frame, “any friendly young biographer is only going to showcase your flaws and faults in order to build his own career.”

  As always, I drag the diamond in straight lines to mimic the tears running down Miss Katie’s face.

  I shake my head, Don’t. Don’t let’s repeat this torture. Don’t trust another one.

  As always, another duty of my job is to never press too hard lest the mirror shatter.

  My Miss Kathie slips a hand into the slit of one fur coat pocket, fishing out something pink she sets on the dusty shelf. Exhaling cigarette smoke, she says, “I guess I won’t be needing this.…” So many years ago, this something Miss Kathie meant to leave behind forever.

  It was her diaphragm.

  Terry slips the wedding band onto her finger.

  Miss Kathie smiles, saying, “It still feels warm.” She adds, “The ring, not the diaphragm.”

  And I pour everyone another round of champagne.

  ACT I, SCENE THIRTEEN

  The scene opens with a tight shot of John Glenn strapped into the astronaut seat within the capsule of the Friendship 7 spacecraft, the first American to orbit Earth. Beyond the capsule’s small window we see our glorious blue planet swirled with white clouds, suspended among the pinprick stars in the deep blackness of space. As Glenn’s gloved hands fiddle with the wide assortment of controls on the panel before him, flipping a switch, turning a knob, he leans into a microphone, saying, “Mission control, I think we might have a problem.…”

  Glenn says, “Mission control, do you read me?” He says, “I seem to be losing power.…”

  In unison, every light on the control panel blinks out. The lights blink on for a moment, then off. Flickering, the lights go out altogether, leaving Glenn in only the faint glow of the stars. Seated in absolute silence, Glenn wraps both gloved hands around the microphone, bringing his mouth almost to touch the wire mesh of it and shouting, “Please, Houston!” Screaming, “Alan Shepard, you bastard, don’t let me die up here!”

  The shot pulls back to reveal an interior panel in the wall behind Glenn’s astronaut chair. A handle in the center of the panel begins to slowly turn. Drawing focus because it’s the only movement in the shot, highlighted by a key light in the otherwise murky compartment.

  Glenn quietly sobs in the darkness.

  Insert a close-up of the handle turning, intercutting with extreme close-ups of Glenn’s face, his sobs and tears fogging the inside surface of his helmet face shield.

  From offscreen, we hear a familiar voice say, “Pipe down.”

  In a medium shot, we see the panel behind Glenn swing open, revealing a stowaway Lillian Hellman as she steps free from what appears to be a storage locker. In one continuous shot, she steps through a doorway, under a stenciled sign reading, WARNING: AIR LOCK. Hellman says, “Wish me luck, you big baby.” She draws a deep breath, and her hand slaps a large, red button labeled, JETTISON. An inner door slides shut, sealing the air lock, and a burst of mist belches Lilly from the side of the orbiting capsule. She wears no helmet, no pressurized suit, only an elegant sports ensemble of slacks and sweater designed by Adrian.

  Weightless and floating in the black void of outer space, Lilly swims, holding her breath. Her arms stroke, and her legs kick in an Australian crawl, inching her way along the side of the orbiting space capsule until she arrives beside a small tin-colored box affixed to the outer hull. The box is stenciled, SOLAR MODULE, and it flashes with an occasional burst of bright sparks. Still holding her breath, her cheeks inflated and her brow furrowed in concentration, Lilly drags a ball-peen hammer from the hip pocket of her slacks ensemble accessorized with Orry-Kelly high heels. Her chandelier earrings and turquoise squash-blossom pendant are still tethered to Lilly, but float and drift in the absence of gravity. Gripping the hammer in her blue fingers, the veins swelling under the skin at her temples, Lilly swings the steel head to collide with the module box. In the vacuum of space, we hear nothing, only silence and the steady thump-thump of Lilly’s enormous heart beating faster and faster. The hammer strikes the module a second time. Sparks fly. The tin-colored metal dents, and flakes of gray paint float away from the point of impact.

  More hammer blows fall; with each the sound rings louder, then louder as we dissolve to reveal the ki
tchen of Katherine Kenton, where I sit at the kitchen table, reading a screenplay titled Space Race Rescue penned by Lilly. I wear the black maid’s uniform, over it the bib apron. On my head the starched, lacy maid’s cap. The hammer blows continue, an audio bridge, now revealed to be an actual pounding sound coming from within the town house.

  The blows ring more loud, more fast as we cut to a shot of the bed headboard in Miss Kathie’s boudoir, revealing the sounds as the headboard pounding the wall. The sexual coupling takes place below the bottom of the frame, barely outside the shot, but we can hear the heavy breathing of a man and a woman as the tempo and volume of the pounding increase. Each impact makes the framed paintings jump on the walls. The curtain tassels dangle and dance. The bedside pile of screenplays slumps to the floor.

  On the page, as Lilly’s astronaut heart beats faster and her hammer batters the box again and again, we hear the headboard of Miss Kathie’s bed slamming the wall, faster, until with one final, heroic pounding, the lights of the space module flicker back to life. The pounding ceases as all the various gauges and dials flare back to full power and, framed in the module’s little window, John Glenn gives Lilly the thumbs-up. Tears of horror and relief stream down the face inside his astronaut helmet.

  In the background of the kitchen, two hairy feet appear at the top of the servants’ staircase, two hairy ankles descend from the second floor, two hairy knees, then the hem of a white terry-cloth bathrobe. Another step down, and the cloth belt appears, tied around a narrow waist; two hairy hands hang on either side. A chest appears, the terry cloth embroidered with a monogram: O.D. The robe of the long-deceased fourth “was-band.” Another step reveals the face of Webster Carlton Westward III. Those bright brown root-beer eyes. A smile parts his face, pulling at the corners of his mouth, spreading them like a stage curtain, and this American specimen says, “Good morning, Hazie.”

  On the page, Lilly Hellman struggles in the cold, black void of space, dragging herself along the hull of the Friendship 7, fighting her way back to the air lock.