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Kathie pinches the slack skin that hangs below her chin. Pinching and pulling the skin, she says, “No more whiskey. And no more of those damned chocolates.”
    Chocolate poisoning, it fits all the earmarks. Shame on Miss Kathie for neglecting an entire box on her bed, where Loverboy would be bound to sniff them out. The caffeine contained in even a single bonbon more than sufficient to bring about a heart attack in a dog of that size.
    The parchment card, signed,
Webb
. The Westward boy, what Cholly Knickerbocker would term an “opportunistic affection.” Next to the roses on the polished top of her dressing table rests the rubber bump of Miss Kathie’s diaphragm, pink rubber flocked with dust.
    Peeling off her false eyelashes, Miss Kathie looks at me standing behind her, both of us reflected in the mirror, multiplied into a mob, the whole world peopled by just us two, and she says, “Are you certain that no one else sent their condolences?”
    I shake my head, No. No one.
    Miss Kathie peels off her auburn wig, handing it to me. She says, “Not even the senator?”
    The “was-band” before Paco. Senator Phelps Russell Warner . Again, I shake my head, No. Not Terrence Terry , the faggot dancer. Not Paco Esposito , who currently plays a hot-tempered, flamenco-dancing Latin brain surgeon on some new radio program called
Guiding Light
. None of the was-bands have sent a word of condolence.
    Pawing the makeup from her face with cotton balls and cold cream, Miss Kathie snaps the elastic wig cap off the crown of her head. Her movie-star hands claw the long strands of gray hair loose. She twists her head side to side,fast, so the hair fans out, hanging to the pink, padded shoulders of her satin dressing gown. Fingering a few wispy gray strands, Miss Kathie says, “Do you think my hair will hold dye again?”
    The first symptom of what Walter Winchell calls “infant-uation” is when Miss Kathie colors her hair the bright orange of a tabby cat.
    “Optimism,” says H. L. Mencken, “is the first symptom that any disease is fatal.”
    Miss Kathie cups a hand beneath each of her breasts, lifting them until the cleavage swells at her throat. Watching herself in the angled mirrors, she says, “Why can’t that brilliant Dr. Josef Mengele in Munich do something about my old-lady
hands?”
    At best, this young Westward specimen is what Lolly Parsons calls a “boy-ographer.” One of those smiling, dancing young gadabouts who insinuate themselves in the private lives of lonely, fading motion-picture stars. Professional listeners, these meticulously well-groomed walking men, they listen to confidences, indulge strong egos and weakening minds, forever cherry-picking the best anecdotes and quotes, with a manuscript always ready for publication upon the instant of the movie star’s demise. So many cozy evenings beside the fire, sipping brandy, those nights will pay off with scandalous confessions and declarations. Mr. Bright Brown Eyes, without a doubt, he’s one of those seducers ready to betray every secret, every wart and flatulence of Miss Kathie’s private life.
    This Webster specimen is obviously a would-be author, looking to write the type of intimate tell-all that Winchell calls an unauthorized “bile-ography.” The literary equivalentof a magpie, stealing the brightest and darkest moments from every celebrity he’ll meet.
    My Miss Kathie scoops a finger through a jar of Vaseline , then rubs a fat lump of the slime, smearing it across her top and bottom teeth, pushing her finger deep to coat her molars. She smiles her greasy smile and says, “Do you have a spoon?”
    In the kitchen, I tell her. We haven’t kept a spoon in her bathroom since the year when every other song on the radio was Christine, Dorothy and Phyllis McGuire singing “Don’t Take Your Love from Me.”
    Miss Kathie’s goal: to reduce until she becomes what Lolly Parsons calls nothing but “tan and bones.” What Hedda Hopper calls a “lipstick