Tell-All

by Chuck Palahniuk

Miss Kathie’s movie-star voice continues, “ ‘… living and playing together, cavorting amidst the adoring legions of our public …’ ”

  In contrast, we see the girl with beady eyes and a beaky nose, watching as she tweezes the eyebrows above the violet eyes. The ugly girl kneels to scrape the dead skin off the pretty girl’s heels using a pumice stone. Like a charwoman, the ugly girl rocks forward and back with the effort to scrub the pretty girl’s bare back using sea salt and elbow grease.

  My Miss Kathie’s voice-over continues, “ ‘… living and playing together, working seemingly endless hours, Hazie and I always supported and urged each other forward in this festive endeavor we so blithely refer to as life …’ ” She reads, “ ‘We lived so much like sisters that we even shared our wardrobes, wearing one another’s shoes, exchanging even our undergarments with complete freedom.…’ ”

  As the montage continues, the ugly girl sweats over an ironing board, pressing the lace and frills on a blouse, then giving it to the pretty girl. The ugly girl bends to lather and shave one of the pretty girl’s long legs as it extends from a bathtub overflowing with luminous bubbles.

  “ ‘I scratched her back,’ ” the voice of Miss Kathie reads, “ ‘and Hazie scratched mine.…’ ”

  On-screen, the ugly girl delivers a breakfast tray to the pretty girl, who waits in bed.

  “ ‘We made a special point to pamper each other,’ ” says the voice-over.

  In the continuing ironic montage, the pretty girl puts a cigarette between her own lips, and the ugly girl leans forward to light it. The pretty girl drops a dirty towel on the floor, and the ugly girl picks it up for the laundry. The pretty girl sprawls in a chair, reading a screenplay, while the ugly girl vacuums the rug around her.

  The voice of Miss Kathie reads, “ ‘And as our careers began to bear fruit, we both savored the rewards of success and fame.…’ ”

  As the montage progresses, we see the ugly girl become a woman, still plain-looking, but aging, gaining weight, turning gray, while the pretty girl stays much the same, slender, her skin smooth, her hair a constant, rich auburn. In quick cuts, the pretty girl weds a man, then weds a new man, then weds a third man, then a fourth and fifth, while the ugly woman stands by, always burdened with luggage, shoulder bags, shopping bags.

  In voice-over Miss Kathie says, “ ‘I owe everything I’ve become, really everything I’ve attained and achieved, to no one except Hazie Coogan. …’ ”

  As the ugly woman ages, we see her pretty counterpart laughing within a circle of reporters as they thrust radio microphones and photographers flash their cameras. The ugly woman always stands outside the spotlight, offstage in the wings, off-camera in the shadows, holding the pretty woman’s fur coat.

  Still reading from the manuscript of Paragon, Miss Kathie’s voice says, “ ‘We shared the trials and the tears. We shared the fears and the greatest joys. Living together, shouldering the same burdens, we kept each other young.…’ ”

  In the montage, an adoring crowd, including Calvin Coolidge, Joseph Pulitzer, Joan Blondell, Kurt Kreuger, Rudolph Valentino and F. Scott Fitzgerald, looks on as the ugly woman places a birthday cake before the beauty. At that beat, we cut to the ugly one presenting another cake, obviously a year later. With a third quick cut, yet another cake is presented as Lillian Gish, John Ford and Clark Gable applaud and sing. With each successive cake, the ugly woman looks a bit older. The beauty does not. Every cake holds twenty-five blazing candles.

  The reading continues, “ ‘Her job title was not that of secretary or acting coach, but Hazie Coogan deserves credit for all of my finest performances. She was not a spiritual guide or swami, but the best, truest adviser any person could ever treasure.’ ” Her voice rising, my Miss Kathie says, “ ‘If posterity finds continuing value in my films, humanity must also recognize the obligation of respect and gratitude owed to Hazie Coogan, the greatest, most talented friend for whom a simple player could ever ask.’ ”

  With this statement, the beauty inhales deeply, surrounded by the beaming countenances of celebrities, everyone bathed in the flickering light from the birthday cake. Leaning forward, she blows out the birthday candles, and the festive scene drops to total and complete black. A silent, blank void.

  Against this darkness, Miss Kathie’s voice says, “ ‘The end.’ ”

  ACT III, SCENE SEVEN

  My life’s work is complete.

  For one final time we open in the crypt below the cathedral, where the veiled figure of a lone woman enters carrying yet another metal urn. She sets the urn alongside the urns of Terrence Terry, Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq., and Loverboy, then lifts her black veil to reveal her face.

  This woman dressed in widow’s weeds is myself, Hazie Coogan. Unescorted.

  Miss Kathie was mine. I invented her, time and time again. I rescued her.

  After lighting a candle, I pop the cork on a bottle of champagne, one magnum still frothing, overflowing and alive in the company of so many dead soldiers. Into a dusty glass, milky with cobwebs, I pour a bubbling toast.

  This is love. This is what love is. I’ve rescued her, who she was in the past and who she will be to the future. Katherine Kenton will never be a demented old woman, consigned to the charity ward in some teaching hospital. No tabloid newspaper or movie magazine will ever snap the kind of ludicrous, decrepit photographs that humiliated Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. She will never sink into the raving insanity of Vivien Leigh or Gene Tierney or Rita Hayworth or Frances Farmer. Here would be a sympathetic ending, not a slow fade into drugs, a chaotic Judy Garland spiral into the arms of younger men, finally to be found dead sitting astride a rented toilet.

  Hers would not be a slow, grinding death or a sad fading away. No, the legend of Katherine Kenton required an epic, romantic grand finale. Something drenched in glory and pathos. Now she would never be forgotten. I’ve given her that.

  A dramatic exit—after a suitable third act.

  I raise my glass and say, “Gesundheit.” I drink a toast and pour another.

  Please let me remove all doubt that Webster Carlton Westward III adored her. It was obvious the first time their eyes met down the length of that long-ago dinner party. He never wrote a word of Love Slave, despite how each draft was found in his luggage. No, all of those chapters were my doing, typed and tucked beneath his shirts, where I felt certain Miss Kathie would discover them. A woman torn between love and fear, it would be only a matter of time before she delivered a sealed copy to her lawyer or agent, where it would later implicate the Webster.

  Forgive me for boasting, but mine was a perfect frame-up.

  We intercut here with a tableau which the police discovered: Miss Kathie shot to death by a gun still gripped in the Webster’s hand. It would appear that the pair slaughtered each other amid the candles and flowers of her boudoir. The result of a failed robbery attempt. Near her lies the corpse of Mr. Bright Brown Eyes wearing a black ski mask and shot by Miss Kathie’s old gun, the rusted gun she’d retrieved from the crypt. Clutched in his hand, a pillowcase spills out pilfered praise, gold-plated, silver-plated trophies and awards. The symbolic keys to Midwestern cities. Honorary college degrees awarded to her for learning nothing.

  If it is the case that love does survive death, then you may consider this to be a happy ending. Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Happily ever after or not.

  In a Samuel Goldwyn touch, ham-handed as that final shot in his Wuthering Heights, we might include a quick flashback here. Just a quick reveal to show me shooting both the lovebirds in their bedroom, then staging the scene to suggest the burglary described in Love Slave. The surprise ending: that my role is not so much best friend or maid as villain. Hazie Coogan played the role of murderess. Perhaps in that last instant, Miss Kathie’s violet eyes will register the full realization that she’s been duped all along.

  Slowly, we dissolve back to the Kenton crypt.… With the mirror propped in its customary place, positioned just so, I step to the lipstick X marke
d on the stone floor and superimpose my own face over the true face of my Miss Kathie. The lifetime of her scars and wrinkles, every distortion and defect she ever suffered, it’s my own burden for the moment. The mirror itself sags with its collection of so many scratched insults. Every single one of Miss Kathie’s faults and secrets.

  The fur coat I’m wearing, it’s her fur coat. My black veil, her veil. I reach into the slit of one pocket and retrieve the Harry Winston diamond ring. Kissing the ring, where it sits in the palm of my hand, I blow on it the way you would a kiss, and tumbling, thrown and flashing a low arc across the crypt, the diamond shatters the flawed reflection. What was an actual life story collapses into countless sparkling, glittering fragments. That single perfect image exploded into so many contradicting perspectives. The priceless diamond itself lost in this heap of so many worthless, dazzling glass shards.

  Katherine Kenton will live for all time, preserved in the public mind, as permanent and lasting as silver-screen legends Earl Oxford and House Peters. Immortal as Trixie Friganza. Her face will be as familiar to future generations as the luminous, landmark face of Tully Marshall. Miss Kathie will continue to be worshiped, the way applauding audiences will forever worship Roy D’Arcy, Brooks Benedict and Eulalie Jensen.

  From the shattered mirror, any true record of my Miss Kathie reduced to glittering slivers, from this the camera swings to focus on the newest urn. Coming closer and closer, we read the name engraved into the metal: Katherine Ellen Kenton.

  To this I raise my glass.

  ACT III, SCENE EIGHT

  Act three, scene eight opens with Lillian Hellman throwing herself across the plush boudoir of Katherine Kenton, rocketing through the room and landing with her full weight upon the gun hand of a masked Webster Carlton Westward III. Lilly and the Webb struggle, throwing themselves about the bedroom, smashing chairs, lamps and bibelots in their raucous fight for survival. The muscles of Lilly’s slim elegant arms strain to subdue the attacker. Her Lili St. Cyr lounging pajamas flapping and torn. Her Valentino hosiery devastated. Her elegant white teeth bite deep into the Webb’s devious, scheming neck. The combatants tread on Lilly’s fallen Elsa Schiaparelli hat while Katherine can only watch in abject horror, shrieking with doomed panic.

  As in the opening scene, we dissolve to a long dinner table where Lilly sits, now regaling her fellow guests with the story of this struggle. The candlelight, the wood-paneled walls, the footmen. Lillian stops regaling long enough to draw one long drag on her cigarette, then blow the smoke over half the diners before she says, “If only I hadn’t chosen to diet that week …” She taps cigarette ash onto her bread plate, shaking her head, saying, “My glorious, brilliant Katherine might still be alive.…”

  Beyond her first few words, Lillian’s talk becomes one of those jungle sound tracks one hears looping in the background of every Tarzan film, just tropical birds and howler monkeys repeating. Bark, squeak, meow … Katherine Kenton.

  Oink, moo, tweet … Webster Carlton Westward III. A man who did nothing except fall deeply in love—passionately in love—he must now play the villain for the rest of this silly motion picture we call human history.

  Miss Kathie’s movie-star flesh has barely cooled, and already she’s been absorbed into the Hellman mythos. Miss Lilly’s own name-dropping form of Tourette’s syndrome.

  While the footmen pour wine and clear the sorbet dishes, Lillian’s hands swim through the air, her cigarette trailing smoke, her fingernails clawing at an invisible burglar. In her dinner party story, Lilly continues to spar and struggle with the masked gunman. In their grappling, they fire a shot, which Hellman dramatizes by slapping her open palm on the table, making the silverware jump and the stemware ring together.

  From my place, seated well below the salt, I merely listen to Lilly spin more gold into her own self-promoting dross. On my knee I bounce a jolly plump infant, one of the many orphans sent for Miss Kathie to review. Under my breath, I say a silent prayer that I might die after Lilly. To my left and right, from the head to the foot of the table, Eva Le Gallienne, Napier Alington, Blanche Bates, Jeanne Eagels, we all say the same prayer. George Jean Nathan of Smart Set magazine draws a fountain pen from his chest pocket and scribbles notes on a napkin. Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times spies him, taking notes about Nathan’s notes. Bertram Block jots notes about Schallert’s notes about Nathan’s notes.

  The possibility of dying before Lillian Hellman … dying and becoming merely fodder for Lilly’s mouth. A person’s entire life and reputation reduced to some golem, a Frankenstein’s monster Miss Hellman can reanimate and manipulate to do her bidding. That would be a fate worse than death, to spend eternity in harness, serving as Lilly Hellman’s zombie, brought back to life at dinner parties. On radio shows and in Hellman’s autobiographies.

  It was Walter Winchell who once said, “After any dinner with Lilly Hellman, you don’t crave dessert and coffee—what you really need is the antidote.”

  Even the most illustrious names, once they’re dead long enough, are reduced to silly animal sounds. Grunt, bark, bray … Ford Madox Ford … Miriam Hopkins … Randle Ayrton.

  Seated to my right, Charlie McCarthy congratulates me on the success of my book. As of this week, Paragon has been at number one on the New York Times best-seller list for twenty-eight weeks.

  Seated across the table, Madeleine Carroll inquires in that rich British accent of hers, asking the name of the child in my lap.

  In response, I explain how this tiny foundling had been adopted by Miss Kathie, and now I have become its legal guardian. I’ve inherited the town house, the rights to Paragon, all of the investments and this child, who sputters and smiles, a perfect blond angel. Its name, I explain, is Norma Jean Baker.

  No, none of us seem so very real.

  We’re only supporting characters in the lives of each other.

  Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.

  I signal, and a footman pours more wine. In my mind, I’m already crafting a story wherein Lillian Hellman thrashes and fusses and plays the boring, egomaniacal fool. Lillian Hellman plays the villain the way Webster plays the villain. In my own story of tonight, this dinner party, I’ll be cool and collected and right. I shall say the perfect rejoinder. I will play the hero.

  Please promise you did NOT hear this from me.

  Cut. Print it. Roll credits.

  (end)

  Chuck Palahniuk’s ten previous novels are the best-selling Pygmy, Snuff, Rant, Haunted, Lullaby, Diary, Choke—which has been made into a film by director Clark Gregg, starring Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston—Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher. He is also the author of the nonfiction profile of Portland, Oregon, Fugitives and Refugees, published as part of the Crown Journeys series, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Chuck Palahniuk

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Palahniuk, Chuck.

  Tell-all / Chuck Palahniuk. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.A4554T45 2010

  813′.54—dc22

  2009032846

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53317-1

  v3.0

  eries: # )