A shot rings out, and Hellman staggers back, clutching her shoulder where blood spouts in pulsing jets between her fingers. In the distance, the pink Halston pillbox hat of Jacqueline Kennedy moves out of firing range as we hear a second rifle shot. A third rifle shot. A fourth …
More rifle shots ring out as we dissolve to reveal the kitchen of Katherine Kenton, where I sit at the table, reading a screenplay titled Twentieth Century Savior authored by Lilly. Sunlight slants in through the alley windows, at a steep angle suggesting late morning or noontime. In the background, we see the servants’ stairs, which descend from the second floor to the kitchen. The rifle shots continue, an audio bridge, now revealed to be the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs, the sound of the fantasy sequence bleeding into this reality.
As I sit reading, a pair of feet appear at the top of the servants’ stairs, wearing pink mules with thick, heavy heels, clop-clopping lower down the stair steps to reveal the hem of a filmy pink dressing gown trimmed in fluttering pink egret feathers. First one bare leg emerges from the split in front, pink and polished from the ankle to the thigh; then the second leg emerges from the dressing gown, as the figure descends each step. The robe flapping around thin ankles. The steps continue, loud as gunshots, until my Miss Kathie fully emerges and stops in the doorway, slumped against one side of the door frame, her violet eyes half closed, her lips swollen, the lipstick smeared around her mouth from cheek to cheek, the red smeared from nose to chin, her face swooning in a cloud of pink feathers. Posed there, Miss Kathie waits for me to look up from the Hellman script, and only then does she waft her gaze in my direction and say, “I’m so happy not to be alone any longer.”
Arrayed on the kitchen table are various trophies and awards, tarnished gold and silver, displaying different degrees of dust and neglect. An open can of silver polish and a soiled buffing rag sit among them.
Clasping something in both hands, concealed behind her back, my Miss Kathie says, “I bought you a present …” and she steps aside to reveal a box wrapped in silver-foil paper, bound with a wide, red-velvet ribbon knotted to create a bow as big as a cabbage. The bow as deep red as a huge rose.
Miss Kathie’s gaze wafts to the trophies, and she says, “Throw that junk out—please.” She says, “Just pack them up and put them away in storage. I no longer need the love of every stranger. I have found the love of one perfect man.…”
Holding the wrapped package before her, offering the red-velvet-and-foil-wrapped box to me, Miss Kathie steps into the room.
On the scripted page, Lilly Hellman holds Oswald in a full nelson, both his arms bent and twisted behind his head. With one fast, sweeping kick, Lilly knocks Oswald’s legs out from under him, and he crumbles to the floor, where the two grapple, scrabbling and clawing on the dusty concrete, both within reach of the loaded rifle.
Miss Kathie sets the package on the kitchen table, at my elbow, and says, “Happy birthday.” She pushes the box, sliding it to collide with my arm, and says, “Open it.”
In the Hellman script, Lilly brawls with superhuman effort. The silence of the warehouse broken only by grunts and gasps, the grim sound of struggle in ironic contrast to the applause and fanfare, the blare of marching bands and the blur of high-stepping majorettes throwing their chrome batons to flash and spin in the hard Texas sunshine.
Not looking up from the page, I say it isn’t my birthday.
Looking from trophy to trophy, my Miss Kathie says, “All of this ‘Lifetime Achievement …’ ” Her hand dips into an invisible pocket of her dressing gown and emerges with a comb. Drawing the comb through her dyed-auburn hair, a fraction, only a day or two of gray showing at the roots, drawing the comb away from her scalp, Miss Kathie lets the long strands fall, saying, “All this ‘Lifetime Contribution’ business makes me sound so—dead.”
Not waiting for me, Miss Kathie says, “Let me help.” And she yanks at the ribbon.
With a single pull, the lovely bow unravels, and my Miss Kathie wads up the silver paper, tearing the foil from the box. Inside the box, she uncovers folds of black fabric. A black dress with a knee-length skirt. Layered beneath that, a bib apron of starched white linen, and a small lacy cap or hat stuck through with hairpins.
The smell of her hair, on her skin, a hint of bay rum, the cologne of Webster Carlton Westward III. Paco wore Roman Brio. The senator wore Old Lyme. Before the senator, “was-band” number five, Terrence Terry, wore English Leather. The steel tycoon wore Knize cologne.
Leaving the dress on the table, Miss Kathie crosses stage right still combing her hair, to where she stands on her pink-mule toes to reach the television atop the icebox. The screen flares when she flips the switch and the face of Paco Esposito takes form, as gradual as a fish appearing beneath the surface of a murky pond. The male equivalent of a diamond necklace, a stethoscope, hangs around his neck. A surgical mask is bunched under his chin. Still gripping a bloody scalpel, Paco is snaking his tongue down the throat of an ingénue, Jeanne Eagels, dressed in a red-and-white-striped uniform.
“I don’t want the placement agency getting any idea that you’re more than a servant,” says my Miss Kathie. She cranks the dial switch one click to another television station, where Terrence Terry dances lead for the Lunenburg battalion against Napoleon at the Battle of Mont St. Jean. Still drawing the comb through her hair, Miss Kathie clicks to a third station, where she appears, Katherine Kenton herself, in black and white, playing the mother of Greer Garson in the role of Louisa May Alcott opposite Leslie Howard in a biopic about Clara Barton.
She says, bark, oink, cluck … Christina and Christopher Crawford.
“Nothing,” says Miss Kathie, “makes a woman look younger than holding her own precious newborn.”
Cluck, buzz, bray … Margot Merrill.
Another click of the television reveals Miss Kathie made up to be an ancient mummy, covered in latex wrinkles and rising from a papier-mâché sarcophagus covered with hieroglyphics to menace a screaming, dewy Olivia de Havilland.
I ask, Newborn what?
Hoot, tweet, moo … Josephine Baker and her entire Rainbow Tribe.
In a tight insert shot we see the reveal: the dress, there on the kitchen table, this gift, it’s strewn with long, auburn hairs, that heavy mahogany color that hair has only when it’s soaking wet. The discarded wrapping paper, the ribbon and comb, left for me to pick up. The black dress, it’s a housemaid’s uniform.
My position in this household is not that of a mere maid or cook or lady-in-waiting. I am not employed in any capacity as domestic help.
This is not a birthday present.
“If the agency asks, I think maybe you’ll be an au pair,” Miss Kathie says, standing on tiptoe, her nose near her own image on the television screen. “I love that word … au pair,” she says. “It sounds almost like … French.”
In the screenplay, Lilly Hellman looks on in horror as President John F. Kennedy and Governor John Connally explode in fountains of gore. Her arms straight at her sides, her hands balled into fists, Lilly throws back her head, emptying her mouth, her throat, emptying her lungs with one, long, howling, “Noooooooooooooo …!” The rigid silhouette of her pain outlined against the wide, flat-blue Dallas sky.
I sit staring at the wrinkled uniform, the torn wrapping paper. The stray hairs. The screenplay laid open in my lap.
“You can bring up the coffee in a moment,” says Miss Kathie, as she shuts off the television with a slap of her palm. Gripping the skirt of her gown and lifting it, she crosses stage right to the kitchen table. There, Miss Kathie plucks the lacy cap from the open box, saying, “In the future, Mr. Westward prefers cream in his coffee, not milk.”
Placing the white cap on the crown of my head, she says, “Voilà!” She says, “It’s a perfect fit.” Pressing the lacy cap snug, Miss Kathie says, “That’s Italian for prego.”
On my scalp, a sting, the faint prick of hairpins feel sharp and biting as a crown of thorns. Then a slow fade to black as, fr
om offscreen, we hear the front doorbell ring.
ACT I, SCENE ELEVEN
If you’ll permit me to break character and indulge in another aside, I’d like to comment on the nature of equilibrium. Of balance, if you’d prefer. Modern medical science recognizes that human beings appear to be subject to predetermined, balanced ratios of height and weight, masculinity and femininity, and to tinker with those formulas brings disaster. For example, when RKO Radio and Monogram and Republic Pictures began prescribing injections of male hormones in order to coarsen some of their more effete male contract players, the inadvertent result was to give those he-men breasts larger than those of Claudette Colbert and Nancy Kelly. It would seem the human body, when given additional testosterone, increases its own production of estrogen, always seeking to return to its original balance of male and female hormones.
Likewise, the actress who starves herself to far, far below her natural body weight will soon balloon to far above it.
Based on decades of observation, I propose that sudden high levels of external praise always trigger an equal amount of inner self-loathing. Most moviegoers are familiar with the theatrically unbalanced mental health of a Frances Farmer, the libidinal excesses of a Charles Chaplin or an Errol Flynn, and the chemical indulgences of a Judy Garland. Such performances are always so ridiculously broad, played to the topmost balcony. My supposition is that, in each case, the celebrity in question was simply making adjustments—instinctually seeking a natural equilibrium—to counterbalance enormous positive public attention.
My vocation is not that of a nurse or jailer, nanny or au pair, but during her periods of highest public acclaim, my duties have always included protecting Miss Kathie from herself. Oh, the overdoses I’ve foiled … the bogus land investment schemes I’ve stopped her from financing … the highly inappropriate men I’ve turned away from her door … all because the moment the world declares a person to be immortal, at that moment the person will strive to prove the world wrong. In the face of glowing press releases and reviews the most heralded women starve themselves or cut themselves or poison themselves. Or they find a man who’s happy to do that for them.
For this next scene we open with a beat of complete darkness. A black screen. For the audio bridge, once more we hear the ring of the doorbell. As the lights come up, we see the inside of the front door, and from within the foyer, we see the shadow of a figure fall on the window beside the door, the shape of someone standing on the stoop. In the bright crack of sunlight under the door we see the twin shadows of two feet shifting. The bell rings again, and I enter the shot, wearing the black dress, the maid’s bib-front apron and lacy white cap. The bell rings a third time, and I open the door.
The foyer stinks of paint. The entire house stinks of paint.
A figure stands in the open doorway, backlit and overexposed in the glare of daylight. Shot from a low angle, the silhouette of this looming, luminous visitor suggests an angel with wings folded along its sides and a halo flaring around the top of its head. In the next beat, the figure steps forward into the key light. Framed in the open doorway stands a woman wearing a white dress, a short white cape wrapped around her shoulders, white orthopedic shoes. Balanced on her head sits a starched white cap printed with a large red cross. In her arms, the woman cradles an infant swaddled in a white blanket.
This beaming woman in white, holding a pink baby, appears the mirror opposite of me: a woman dressed in black holding a bronze trophy wrapped in a soiled dust rag. A beat of ironic parallelism.
A few steps down the porch stands a second woman, a nun shrouded in a black habit and wimple, her arms cradling a babe as blond as a miniature Ingrid Bergman. Its skin as clear as a tiny Dorothy McGuire. What Walter Winchell calls a “little bundle of goy.”
On the sidewalk stands a third woman, wearing a tweed suit, her gloved fingers gripping the handle of a perambulator. Sleeping inside the pram, two more infants.
The nurse asks, “Is Katherine Kenton at home?”
Behind her, the nun says, “I’m from St. Elizabeth’s.”
From the sidewalk, the woman wearing tweed says, “I’m from the placement agency.”
At the curb, a second uniformed nurse steps out of a taxicab carrying a baby. From the corner, another nurse approaches with a baby in her arms. In deep focus, we see a second nun advancing on the town house, bearing yet another pink bundle.
From offscreen we hear the voice of Miss Kathie say, “You’ve arrived.…” And in the reverse angle we see her descending the stairs from the second floor, a housepainter’s brush in one hand, dripping long, slow drops of pink paint from the bristles. Miss Kathie’s rolled back the cuffs of her shirt, a man’s white dress shirt, the breast pocket embroidered with O.D., the monogram for her fourth “was-band,” Oliver “Red” Drake, Esq., all of the shirt spotted with pink paint. A bandanna tied to cover her hair, and pink paint smudged on the peak of one movie-star cheekbone.
The town house stinks of lacquer, choking and acrid as a gigantic manicure compared to the smell of talcum powder and sunlight on the doorstep.
Miss Kathie’s feet descend the last steps, trailed by drops of pink. Her blue denim dungarees, rolled halfway up to her knees, reveal white bobby socks sagging into scuffed penny loafers. She faces the nurse, her violet eyes twitching between the gurgling, pink orphan and the paintbrush in her own hand. “Here,” she says, “would you mind …?” And my Miss Kathie thrusts the brush, slopping with pink paint, into the nurse’s face.
The two women lean together, close, as if they were kissing each other’s cheeks, trading the swaddled bundle for the brush. The white uniform of the nurse, spotted with pink from touching Miss Kathie. The nurse left holding the gummy pink brush.
Her arms folded to hold the foundling, Miss Kathie steps back and turns to face the full-length mirror in the foyer. Her reflection that of Susan Hayward or Jennifer Jones in Saint Joan or The Song of Bernadette, a beaming Madonna and child as painted by Caravaggio or Rubens. With one hand, my Miss Kathie reaches to the nape of her own neck, looping a finger through the knot of the bandanna and pulling it free from her head. As the bandanna falls to the foyer floor, Miss Kathie shakes her hair, twisting her head from side to side until her auburn hair spreads, soft and wide as a veil, framing her shoulders, the white shirt stretched over her breasts, framing the tiny newborn.
“Such a pièce de résistance,” Miss Kathie says, rubbing noses with the little orphan. She says, “That’s the Italian word for … gemütlichkeit.”
Miss Kathie’s violet eyes spread, wide-open, bug-eyed as Ruby Keeler playing a virgin opposite Dick Powell under the direction of Busby Berkeley. Her long movie-star hands, her cheeks marred only by the pastel stigmata of pink paint. Her eyes clutching at the image in the foyer mirror, Miss Kathie turns three-quarters to the left, then the right, each time closing her eyelids halfway and nodding her head in a bow. She bows once more, facing the mirror full-on, her smile stretching her face free of wrinkles, her eyes glowing with tears. This, the exact same performance Miss Kathie gave last month when she accepted the lifetime tribute award from the Denver Independent Film Circle. These identical gestures and expressions.
A beat later, she unloads the infant, returning the bundle to the nurse, Miss Kathie shaking her head, wrinkling her movie-star nose and saying, “Let me think about it.…”
As the nun mounts the porch steps, Miss Kathie thrusts two fingers into her own dungarees pocket and fishes out a card of white paper.… She holds the sample shade of Honeyed Sunset to the cherub’s pink cheek, studying the card and the infant together. Shaking her head with a flat smile, she says, “Clashes.” Sighing, Miss Kathie says, “We’ve already painted the trim. Three coats.” She shrugs her movie-star shoulders and tells the nun, “You understand.…”
The next newborn, Miss Kathie leans close to its drowsing face and sniffs. Using an atomizer, she spritzes the tender lips and skin with L’air du Temps and the tiny innocent begins to squall. Recoiling, Mis
s Kathie shakes her head, No.
Another gurgling newborn, Miss Kathie leans too close and the dangling hot ash drops off the tip of her cigarette, resulting in a flurry of tiny screams and flailing. The smell of urine and scorched cotton. As if a pressing iron had been left too long on a pillowcase soaked in ammonia.
Another foundling arrives barely a shade too pale for the new nursery drapes. Holding a fabric swatch beside the squirming bundle, Miss Kathie says, “It’s almost Perfect Persimmon but not quite Cherry Bomb. …”
The doorbell rings all afternoon. All the day exhausted with “offspring shopping,” as Hedda Hopper calls it. “Bébé browsing,” in the semantics of Louella Parsons. A steady parade of secondhand urchins and unwanted kinder. A constant stream of arriving baby nurses, nuns and adoption agents, each one blushing and pop-eyed upon shaking the pink, paint-sticky hand of Miss Kathie. Each one babbling: Tweet, cluck, hoot … Raymond Massey. A quick-cut montage.
Bray, bark, buzz … James Mason.
Another nurse retreats, escaping down the street when Miss Kathie asks how difficult it might be to dye the hair and diet some pounds off of a particularly rotund cherub.
Another social worker flags a taxicab after Miss Kathie smears a tiny foundling with Max Factor base pigment, ladies’ foundation number six.
Pursing her lips, she hovers over the face of one wee infant, saying, “Wunderbar …” Exhaling cigarette smoke to add, “That’s the Latin equivalent for que bueno.”
Miss Kathie brandishes each child in the foyer mirror, hefting it and cuddling its pinched little face, studying the effect as if each orphan were a new purse or a stage prop.
Meow, squawk, squeak … Janis Paige.
Another tiny urchin, she leaves smudged with lipstick.
Another, Miss Kathie leans too close, too quickly, splashing a newborn with the icy-cold Boodles gin of her martini.