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presumably, had paid to have her teeth capped.
    “If you check the early fan magazines,” Barry noted, “they say she’d met Vando by that time. He was working on his experiments at the Bagratian Clinic outside Moscow, and it’s possible he’d already had something to do with the physical alterations.”
    “Did he operate on her eyes?”
    “Come off it—of course he didn’t. That’s the kind of show-business gossip that always attaches itself to people like Fedora.”
    The story of her next move, from Berlin to New York, was so at variance with reality that in talking about it Barry first reiterated the published “facts” and then told Marion the truth as he later had it from Fedora herself.
    “Actually, all the biographies agree in this, but none is correct. Here’s the way they tell it. After the Armistice, Derougemont arrives in Germany from France and goes to a party at Improstein’s house, where Zigeuner is being screened. He sees the lovely Maria Fedorovnya, offers on the spot to buy her contract from Improstein, who agrees to sell it to him. If you read his memoirs, Improstein says he later considered it the rashest and most ill-advised act of his career. Despite the fact that through his movie earnings at UFA he was later able to help finance the Weimar Republic, he was at the moment in financial trouble and he actually did sell her contract; but not to Derougemont, who had never been to Berlin at that time, and who, by the way, was not even the Frenchman he claimed to be.”
    “Maurice Derougemont wasn’t French? What was he?”
    “Hold your horses—that comes in a minute. Back to the fan mags. With the agreement in writing, Derougemont goes whooping off into the street, buys a fur coat and a dozen roses, presents himself at Maria’s door, flashes an engraved card and a dentist’s smile, and lays the coat at her feet, the roses in her arms, and the contract in her hand. He tells her to be ready and packed on the morrow, he books passage, first class, but with discretion, mind you—the staterooms are on different decks. There follows a merry transatlantic whirl. La Fedorovnya is a sensation on the dance floor and a celebrated guest at the captain’s table. She arrives in New York harbor gazing starrily up at the Statue of Liberty and doing cheesecake poses for a mob of press and photographers against the mahogany rail of the Hohenzollern— same coat, same contract, new roses.
    “She has a gay old time in Manhattan, including a trip to the zoo, where she wants to see ‘zee polar-r bear-r-rs—they remind me so uf home,’ then a nifty drawing room on the train and the trip to sunny Cal. Add more roses, more executives—the coat seems already to have been Hollanderized and gone to cold storage; no doubt the change in climate—and the script of Zizi is tucked into her little pink mitts. Buzz buzz buzz, and off to the studio for make-up and wardrobe tests and interviews, then into production, then to preview in Glendale, then to stardom, and there you have Fedora, born if not bred.”
    “None of that is true?”
    “A fiction from start to finish. Now I’ll tell you about Derougemont. Maurice Derougemont, you see, dear Marion, was not French at all, as he claimed to be, but American. He came from San Francisco and his name was Moe Roseman. When he met Fedora he was a two-bit shill in front of a burlesque theater in downtown Los Angeles. Sam Ueberroth, who later became Samuel L. Ueberroth, producer, was his sidekick, and with straw hats and snappy bow ties they hawked the charms of hula-skirted lovelies to be discovered inside. Moe was at that time seeing a good deal of Sam’s sister, Viola, who was a secretary at AyanBee, and it was through her that he first encountered Maria Fedorovnya. By the time Sam was making major films, Viola had attained a position of eminence as an important agent.”
    Barry had known Viola for years, and though she was occasionally faulted for her sharp tongue, he