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found Paco Esposito!”
    The diamond, the tool she used to cut her heart so deep into the glass. The heart and Cupid ’s arrow etched in the alley window. Yet another engagement ring she’s bought herself.
    Behind her stands a young man hung like a Christmas tree with various pieces of luggage: purses, garment bags, suitcases and satchels. All of it Louis Vuitton . He wears blue denim trousers, the knees stained black with motor oil. The sleeves of his blue chambray shirt rolled high to reveal tattooed arms. His name, Paco, embroidered on one side of his chest. His cologne, the stench of high-test gasoline.
    Miss Kathie’s violet eyes twitch side to side across my face, up and down, the way they’d vacuum up last-minute rewrites in dialogue.
    The sole reason for Katherine Kenton ’s admitting herself to any hospital was because she so enjoyed the escape. Between making pictures, she craved the drama of overcoming locked doors, barred windows, sedatives and straitjackets. Stepping indoors from the cold alley, her breath steaming, my Miss Kathie wears cardboard slippers. Not Madeleine Vionnet . She wears a tissue-paper gown under her silver fox coat. Not Vera Maxwell . Miss Kathie’s cheeks scrubbed pink from the sun. The wind has tossed her auburn hair into heavy waves. Her blue fingers grip the handles of a shopping bag she lifts to set atop the kitchen table.
    In the screenplay’s third act, Hellman pilots the controls of the Enola Gay as it skims the tops of Japanese pine trees and giant pandas and Mount Fuji , en route to Hiroshima . In a fantasy sequence, we cut to Hellman wielding a machete to castrate a screaming Jack Warner . She skins alive a bellowing, bleeding Louis B. Mayer . Her grip tightens around the lever which opens the bomb bay doors. Her deadly cargo shimmers pristine as a bride, covered with seed pearls and fluttering white lace.
    In her own kitchen, my Miss Kathie sinks both hands into the shopping bag and lifts out a hairy chunk of her furcoat. The ragged pile of hair seems to tremble as she places it atop the Hellman screenplay. Two black button eyes blink open. On the table, the damp, hairy wad shrinks, then explodes in a
hah-choo
sneeze. Between the two button eyes, the fur parts to reveal a double row of needle teeth. A panting sliver of pink tongue. A puppy.
    Around the new diamond ring, her movie star hands appear nicked and scabbed with dried red, smudged with old blood. Spreading her fingers to show me the backs of both hands, Miss Kathie says, “This hospital had barbed wire.”
    Her barbed wire scars as gruesome as any wounds Lillian shows off from the Abraham Lincoln brigade. Not as bad as Ava Gardner ’s scars from bullfighting with Ernest Hemingway . Or Gore Vidal ’s scars from Truman Capote .
    “I picked up a stray,” says Miss Kathie.
    I ask, Which one? The dog or the man?
    “It’s a Pekingese,” says Miss Kathie. “I’ve christened him Loverboy.”
    The most recent of the “was-bands,” Paco arrives after the senator who arrived after the faggot chorus boy who arrived after the steel-smelting tycoon who arrived after the failed actor who arrived after the sleazy freelance photographer who arrived after the high school sweetheart. These, all of the stray dogs whose photographs line the mantel in her lavish upstairs boudoir.
    A rogues’ gallery of what Walter Winchell would call “happily-never-afters.”
    Each romance, the type of self-destructive gesture Hedda Hopper would call “marry-kiri.” Instead of plunging a sword into one’s stomach, you repeatedly throw yourself on the most inappropriate erect penis.
    The men Miss Katherine marries, they’re less husbandsthan they are costars. Souvenirs. Each one merely a witness to attest to her latest daring adventure, so much like Raymond Massey or Fredric March , any leading man she might fight beside in the Hundred Years War . Playing Amelia Earhart stowed away with champagne and beluga caviar in the romantic cockpit