Tell-All

by Chuck Palahniuk

  The Webster specimen opens a kitchen cabinet and collects the percolator. He pulls out a drawer and retrieves the power cord. He does each task on his first attempt, without hunting. He reaches into the icebox without looking and removes the metal can of coffee grounds. From another cabinet, he takes the morning tray—not the silver tea tray nor the dinner tray. It’s clear he knows what’s what in this household and where each item is hidden.

  This Webster C. Westward III appears to be a quick study. One of those clever, smiling young men Terrence Terry warned my Miss Kathie about. Those jackals. A magpie.

  Spooning coffee grounds into the percolator basket, the Webster specimen says, “If you’ll permit me to ask, Hazie, do you know whom you remind me of?”

  Without looking up from the page, Lilly suffocating in the freezing stratosphere, I say, Thelma Ritter.

  I was Thelma Ritter before Thelma Ritter was Thelma Ritter.

  To see how I walk, watch Ann Dvorak walk across the street in the film Housewife. You want to see me worried, watch how Miriam Hopkins puckers her brow in Old Acquaintance. Every hand gesture, every bit of physical business I ever perfected, some nobody came along and stole. Pier Angeli’s laugh started out as my laugh. The way Gilda Gray dances the rumba, she swiped it from me. How Marilyn Monroe sings she got by hearing me.

  The damned copycats. There’s worse that people can steal from you than money.

  Someone steals your pearls and you can simply buy another strand. But if they steal your hairstyle, or the signature manner in which you throw a kiss, it’s much more difficult to replace.

  Back a long time ago, I was in motion pictures. Back before I met up with my Miss Kathie.

  Nowadays, I don’t laugh. I don’t sing or dance. Or kiss. My hair styles itself.

  It’s like Terrence Terry tried to warn Miss Kathie: the whole world consists of nothing but vultures and hyenas wanting to take a bite out of you. Your heart or tongue or violet eyes. To eat up just your best part for their breakfast.

  You want to see Tallulah Bankhead, not just her playing Julie Marsden in Jezebel, or being Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes, but the real Tallulah, you only need to watch Bette Davis in All About Eve. It was Joseph L. Mankiewicz who wrote Margo Channing based on his poor mother, the actress Johanna Blumenau, but it was Davis who cozied up to Tallulah long enough to learn her mannerisms. Tallulah’s delivery and how she walked. How she’d enter a room. The way Tallulah’s voice got screechy after one bourbon. How, after four of them, her eyelids hung, half closed as steamed clams.

  Of course, not everybody was in on the joke. It could be some Andy Devine or Slim Pickens farmers in Sioux Falls couldn’t see Davis doing a minstrel-show version of Tallulah, but everybody else saw. Imagine a real performer watching you drink at a hundred parties, memorizing you while you’re upset and spitting in the face of William Dieterle, then making you into a stage routine and performing you for the whole world to laugh at. The same as how that big shit Orson Welles made fun of Willy Hearst and poor Marion Davies.

  The Webster specimen holds the percolator in the sink, filling it with water from the faucet. He assembles the basket, the spindle and the lid, plugs the female end of the electric cord into the percolator base and plugs the male end into the power socket.

  Folks in Little Rock and Boulder and Budapest, most folks don’t know what’s not true. That bunch of Chill Wills rubes. So the whole entire world gets thinking that cartoon version Miss Davis created is the real you.

  Bette Davis built her career playing that burlesque version of Tallulah Bankhead.

  Nowadays, if anybody mentions poor Willy Hearst, you picture Welles, fat and shouting at Mona Darkfeather, chasing Peel Trenton down some stairs. For anybody who never shook hands with Tallulah, she’s that bug-eyed harpy with that horrid fringe of pale, loose skin flapping along Davis’s jawline.

  It boils down to the fact that we’re all jackals feeding off each other.

  The percolator pops and snaps. A splash of brown coffee perks inside the glass bulb on top. A wisp of white steam leaks from the chrome spout.

  The Webster specimen’s got it backward, I tell him. Thelma Ritter is a copy of me. Her walk and her diction, her timing and delivery, all of it was coached. At first Joe Mankiewicz turned up everywhere. I might sit down to dinner next to Fay Bainter, across the table from Jessie Matthews, who only went anywhere with her husband, Sonnie Hale, next to him Alison Skipworth, on my other side Pierre Watkin, and Joe would be way up above the salt, not talking to anyone, never taking his eyes off me. He’d study me like I was a book or a blueprint, his diseased fingers bleeding through the tips of his white gloves.

  In his movie, Thelma Ritter wearing those cardigan sweaters half unbuttoned with the sleeves pushed back to the elbow, that was me. Thelma was playing me, only bigger. Hammy. My same way of parting my hair down the middle. Those eyes that follow every move at the same time. Not many folks knew, but the folks I knew, they knew. My given name is Hazie. The character’s called Birdie. Mankiewicz, that rat bastard, he wasn’t fooling anyone in our crowd.

  It’s like seeing Franklin Pangborn play his fairy hairdresser. Al Jolson in blackface. Or Everett Sloane doing his hook-nosed-Jew routine. Except this two-ton joke lands on only you, you don’t share the load with nobody else, and folks expect you to laugh along or you’re being a poor sport.

  If you need more convincing, tell me the name of the broad who sat for Leonardo da Vinci’s painting the Mona Lisa. People remember poor Marion Davies, and they picture Dorothy Comingore, drinking and hunched over those enormous Gregg Toland jigsaw puzzles on an RKO soundstage.

  You talk about art imitating life, well, the reverse is true.

  On the scripted page, John Glenn creeps down the outside of the space capsule hull, embracing Lilly Hellman and pulling her to safety. Inside the window of the orbiting capsule, we see them kissing passionately. We hear the buzz of a hundred zippers ripping open and see a flash of pink skin as they tear the clothes from each other. In zero gravity, Lilly’s bare breasts stand up, firm and perfect. Her purple nipples erect, hard as flint arrowheads.

  In the kitchen, the Webster specimen places the percolator on the morning tray. Two cups and saucers. The sugar bowl and creamer.

  When I met her, Kathie Kenton was nothing. A Hollywood hopeful. A hostess in a steakhouse, handing out menus and clearing dirty plates. My job is not that of a stylist or press agent, but I’ve groomed her to become a symbol for millions of women. Across time, billions. I may not be an actor, but I’ve created a model of strength to which women can aspire. A living example of their own incredible possible potential.

  Sitting at the table, I reach over and take a silver teaspoon from one saucer. With the spoon bowl cupped to my mouth, I exhale moist breath to fog the metal. I lower the spoon to the hem of my lacy maid’s apron and polish the silver between folds of the fabric.

  In the Hellman screenplay, through the window of the space capsule we see Lilly’s bare neck and shoulders arch with pleasure, the muscles rippling and shuddering as Glenn’s lips and tongue trail down between her floating, weightless breasts. The fantasy dissolves as their panting breath fogs the window glass.

  Buffing the spoon, I say, “Please don’t hurt her.…” Placing the spoon back on the tray, I say, “I’ll kill you before I’ll let you hurt Miss Kathie.”

  With two fingers I pluck the starched white maid’s cap from my head, the hairpins pulling stray hairs, plucking and tearing away a few long hairs. Rising to my feet, I reach up with the cap between my hands, saying, “You’re not as clever as you think, young man,” and I set the maid’s cap on the very tip-top of this Webster’s beautiful head.

  ACT I, SCENE FOURTEEN

  Cut to me, running, a trench coat worn over my maid’s uniform flapping open in front to reveal the black dress and white apron within. In a tracking shot, I hurry along a path in the park, somewhere between the dairy and the carousel, my open mouth gasping. In the reverse ang
le, we see that I’m rushing toward the rough boulders and outcroppings of the Kinderberg rocks. Matching my eye line, we see that I’m focused on a pavilion built of brick, in the shape of a stop sign, perched high atop the rocks.

  Intercut this with a close-up shot of the telephone which sits on the foyer table of Miss Kathie’s town house. The telephone rings.

  Cut to me running along, my hair fluttering out behind my bare head. My knees tossing the apron of my uniform into the air.

  Cut to the telephone, ringing and ringing.

  Cut to me veering around joggers. I’m dodging mothers pushing baby carriages and people walking dogs. I jump dog leashes like so many hurdles. In front of me, the brick pavilion atop Kinderberg looms larger, and we can hear the nightmarish calliope music of the nearby carousel.

  Cut to the foyer telephone as it continues to ring.

  As I arrive at the brick pavilion, we see an assortment of people, almost all of them elderly men seated in pairs at small tables, each pair of men hunched over the white and black pieces of a chess game. Some tables sit within the pavilion. Some tables outside, under the overhang of its roof. This, the chess pavilion built by Bernard Baruch.

  Cut back to the close-up of the foyer telephone, its ringing cut off as fingers enter the shot and lift the receiver. We follow the receiver to a face, my face. To make it easier, picture Thelma Ritter’s face answering the telephone. In this intercut flashback we watch me say, “Kenton residence.”

  Still watching me, my reaction as I answer the telephone, we hear the voice of my Miss Kathie say, “Please come quick.” Over the telephone, she says, “Hurry, he’s going to kill me!”

  In the park, I weave between the tables shared by chess players. On the table between most pairs sits a clock displaying two faces. As each player moves a piece, he slaps a button atop the clock, making the second hand on one clock face stop clicking and making the other second hand begin. At one table, an old-man version of Lex Barker tells another old Peter Ustinov, “Check.” He slaps the two-faced clock.

  Seated at the edge of the crowd, my Miss Kathie sits alone at a table, the top inlaid with the white and black squares of a chessboard. Instead of pawns, knights and rooks, the table holds only a thick ream of white paper. Both her hands clutch the stack of paper, as thick as the script for a Cecil B. DeMille epic. The lenses of dark sunglasses hide her violet eyes. A silk Hermès scarf, tied under her chin, hides her movie-star profile. Reflected in her glasses, we see two of me approach. Twin Thelma Ritters.

  Sitting opposite her at the table, I say, “Who’s trying to kill you?”

  Another ancient Slim Summerville moves a pawn and says, “Checkmate.”

  From the offscreen distance, we hear the filtered ambient noise of horse carriages clip-clopping along the Sixty-fifth Street Traverse. Taxicabs honk on Fifth Avenue.

  Miss Kathie shoves the ream of paper, sliding it across the chessboard toward me. She says, “You can’t tell anyone. It’s so humiliating.”

  Bark, oink, screech … Screen Star Stalked by Gigolo.

  Moo, meow, buzz … Lonely, Aging Film Legend Seduced by Killer.

  The stack of papers, she says she discovered them while unpacking one of Webb’s suitcases. He’s written a biography about their romantic time together. Miss Kathie pushes the stack at me, saying, “Just read what he says.…” Then immediately pulling the pages back, hunching her shoulders over them and glancing to both sides, she whispers, “Except the parts about me permitting Mr. Westward to engage me in anal intercourse are a complete and utter fabrication.”

  An aged version of Anthony Quinn slaps a clock, stopping one timer and starting another.

  Miss Kathie slides the pages within my reach, then pulls them back, whispering, “And just so you know, the scene where I perform oral sex on Mr. Westward’s person in the toilet of Sardi’s is also a total bold-faced lie.…”

  She looks around again, whispering, “Read it for yourself,” pushing the stack of pages across the chessboard in my direction. Then, yanking the pages back, she says, “But don’t you believe the part where he writes about me under the table at Twenty-one doing that unspeakable act with the umbrella.…”

  Terrence Terry predicted this: a handsome young man who would enter Miss Kathie’s life and linger long enough to rewrite her legend for his own gain. No matter how innocent their relationship, he’d merely wait until her death so he could publish his lurid, sordid tale. No doubt a publisher had already given him a contract, paid him a sizable advance of monies against the royalties of that future tell-all best seller. Most of this dreadful book was in all probability already typeset. Its cover already designed and printed. Once Miss Kathie was dead, someday, the tawdry lies of this charming parasite would replace anything valuable she’d accomplished with her life. The same way Christina Crawford has forever sullied the legend of Joan Crawford. The way B. D. Merrill has wrecked the reputation of her mother, Bette Davis, and Gary Crosby has dirtied the life story of his father, Bing Crosby—Miss Kathie would be ruined in the eyes of a billion fans.

  The type of tome Hedda Hopper always calls a “lie-ography.”

  Around the chess pavilion, a breeze moves through the maple trees, making a billion leaves applaud. A withered version of Will Rogers reaches his old Phil Silvers hand to nudge a white king forward one square. Near us, an aged Jack Willis touches a black knight and says, “J’adoube.”

  “That’s French,” Miss Kathie says, “for tout de suite.”

  Shaking her head over the manuscript, she says, “I wasn’t snooping. I was only looking for some cigarettes.” My Miss Kathie shrugs and says, “What can we do?”

  It’s not libel until the book is published, and Webb has no intention of doing that until she’s dead. After that, it will be his word against hers—but by then, my Miss Kathie will be packed away, burned to ash and interred with Loverboy and Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq., and all the empty champagne bottles, the dead soldiers, within her crypt.

  The solution is simple, I tell her. All Miss Kathie needs to do is live a long, long life. The answer is … to simply not die.

  And pushing the manuscript pages across the chessboard, shoving them at me, Miss Kathie says, “Oh, Hazie, I wish it were that simple.”

  Printed, centered across the title page, it says:

  Love Slave: A Very Intimate Memoir of

  My Life with Kate Kenton

  Copyright and author,

  Webster Carlton Westward III

  This is no partial story, says Miss Kathie. This draft already includes a final chapter. Pulling the ream of paper back to her side of the table, she flips over the stack of pages and turns the last few faceup. Near the ending, her voice lowered to a faint whisper, only then does she begin to read aloud, saying, “ ‘On the final day of Katherine Kenton’s life, she dressed with particular care.…’ ”

  As old men slap clocks to make them stop.

  My Miss Kathie whispers to me the details about how, soon, she would die.

  ACT II, SCENE ONE

  Katherine Kenton continues reading as voice-over. At first we continue to hear the sounds of the park, the clip-clopping of horse-drawn carriages and the calliope music of the carousel, but these sounds gradually fade. At the same time we dissolve to show Miss Kathie and Webster Carlton Westward III lounging in her bed. In voice-over we still hear Miss Kathie’s voice reading, an audio bridge from the preceding scene: “ ‘… On the final day of Katherine Kenton’s life, she dressed with particular care.’ ”

  Reading from the “lie-ography” written by Webb, the voice-over continues, “ ‘Our lovemaking felt more poignant. Seemingly for no special reason the muscles of her lovely, seasoned vagina clung to the meaty shaft of my love, milking the last passionate juices. A vacuum, like some haunting metaphor, had already formed between our wet, exhausted surfaces, our mouths, our skin and privates, requiring an extra force of effort for us to tear ourselves asunder.’ ”

  Continuing to read from the f
inal chapter of Love Slave, Miss Kathie’s voice-over says, “ ‘Even our arms and legs were reluctant to unknot themselves, to untangle from the snarl of moistened bedclothes. We lay glued together by the adhesive qualities of our spent fluids. Our shared being pasted into becoming a single living organism. The copious secretions held us as a second skin while we embraced in the lingering ebb of our sensuous copulations.’ ”

  Through heavy star filters, the boudoir scene appears hazy. Almost as if dense fog or mist fills the bedroom. Both lovers move in dreamy slow motion. After a beat, we see that the bedroom is Miss Kathie’s but the man and woman are younger, idealized versions of Webster and Katherine. Like dancers, they rise and groom—the woman brushing her hair and rolling stockings up her legs, the man popping his cuffs, inserting cuff links, and brushing lint from his shoulders—with the exaggerated, stylized gestures of Agnes de Mille or Martha Graham.

  Miss Kathie’s voice, reading, says, “ ‘Only the beckoning prospect of dinner reservations at the Cub Room, a shared repast of lobster thermidor and steak Diane in the scintillating company of Omar Sharif, Alla Nazimova, Paul Robeson, Lillian Hellman and Noah Beery coaxed us to rise and dress for the exciting evening ahead.’ ”

  As the voice-over continues, the lovers dress. They seem to orbit each other, continuing to fall into each other’s embrace, then straying apart.

  “ ‘Donning a Brooks Brothers double-breasted tuxedo,’ ” the voice-over reads, “ ‘I could envision an infinite number of such evenings stretching into our shared future of love. Leaning close to tie my white bow tie, Katherine said, “You have the largest, most gifted penis of any man alive.” I recall the moment distinctly.’ ”

  The voice-over continues, “ ‘Inserting a white orchid in my buttonhole, Katherine said, “I would die without you plumbing my salty depths.”

  “ ‘In retrospect, I think,’ ” Miss Kathie’s voice-over says, “ ‘ “If only that were true.” ’ ”