Can you remember the dress I wore when we met? It no longer fits me, I’m so thin. The Kinegraph people think I’m ill or dying. They even say it to my face. I still wake up calling your name over and over. You’ve never left me. Some weeks I hardly eat anything. I’m wasting away, they tell me, and you know an actress can’t afford to lose her profile.
Sickness plagues her imagination. She falls mortally ill when life goes awry, when fortune balks, when love loses its luminescence; for if you are ill, God cannot refuse you sustenance. It was because I genuinely believed her inability to either sleep without night sweats, or draw breath without pain, that I was with her when death came at us out of Giles’s pistol. She and I were finished, but I had been unable to reject that face: not beautiful, but so robustly young, and illusory. Believe that face and lose your way. Study the transformation as she applies the powders, rouges, and charcoal stripings. Discover in that colored mouth, in those magnified eyes, the lure of the virgin-into-vixen: kill my innocence and I’ll reward you with my fur.
I’ve made thirty-five films this year and until two months ago nobody knew my name. And I thought I’d be anonymous forever. Of course I’d love to see you. Always. I was supposed to make two films last week and I missed both because of my weakness, but now that we’re leaving the city I’m wonderfully well, for we’re going to a marvelous lake with wild woodland. Do you know where I’m talking about? I can’t believe it. I’m so excited. I told them everything I knew about the place, and my director couldn’t wait. We’ll be at our hotel four weeks, so come, love, please come, and everything will be just as it was.
Her success as my Thisbe had been supreme, she famous overnight, her photo in all the magazines. The play ran five months and when it closed Flo Ziegfeld was ready to put her in his Miss Innocence to replace Anna Held, but along came Giles’s Wild West performance and Ziegfeld said nobody tainted by scandal would ever be in a show of his. For a time no one in theater would hire her, but the scandal faded into gossip and instead of being branded as the vixen she emerged as destiny’s waif, the innocent darling corrupted by the “eater of broken meats,” as the Police Gazette labeled me.
She sought work in the pictures, brought her photographs to Kinegraph, and was hired at fifteen dollars a week. Her salary rose to six hundred a week and is still climbing. She’s become Kinegraph’s chief asset: The Kinegraph Girl, nameless, chameleonic face of sorrow and rapture and fury and terror and wickedness and determination and invitation.
During one of her illnesses rumors spread that she’d been killed by a burglar, or run down by a drunken motorist. The public wondered: Where has our girl gone? Kinegraph publicists advertised in the newspapers to disprove the lies about her death, and announced she was coming to New York for a new picture. Squadrons of police had to hold back fans waiting for her train at Grand Central — a greater crowd than greeted the President the previous week. Kinegraph promptly abandoned its policy of anonymity for actors and agreed the public should know the Kinegraph Girl by name: Melissa Spencer. . Melisssssssssa Ssssssssspenccccccccer, how sweet the sibilance!
My sickness flared up when the police came to talk about Cully Watson. All lies. How can such a man be believed? If they put it in the papers again my career is ruined. Why would he slander me? I never said a word to him, and I swear this on my breasts, which you know how much we both value. Please meet me at Cooperstown and we will erase the horror and relive our loving days there and I’ll be well again just from the sight of you.
Her film-in-progress was The Deerslayer, Cooper’s five-hundred-page Natty Bumppo novel condensed to a twenty-minute movie. Her role was Hetty, the simpleminded daughter of scalp hunter Thomas Hutter. When I found my way to the village and then to the set, there she was, Melissa-into-Herty, lying on her bed beneath a quilt, her face powdered into a death pallor; for Hetty had been shot by a stray bullet as the British troops rescued Deerslayer and Hetty’s sister, Judith, from torture at the hands of the Huron Indians. Hetty was dying, and her secret love, Hurry Harry, another scalp hunter, was by her deathbed, along with Judith, heroic Deerslayer in his fringed buckskins, and his bare-chested Indian friend Chingachgook, noble Delaware chief. The actors mouthed Cooper’s cumbersome dialogue as if it meant something to the film.
“How come they to shoot a poor girl like me and let so many men go unharmed?” Hetty wondered.
“ ’Twas an accident, poor Hetty,” said Judith.
“I’m glad of that — I thought it strange: I am feeble minded, and the red men have never harmed me before. . there’s something the matter with my eyes — you look dim and distant — and so does Hurry, now I look at him. . my mind was feeble — what people call half-witted. . How dark it’s becoming!. . I feel, Deerslayer, though I couldn’t tell you why. . that you and I are not going to part forever. .”
“. . Yes, we shall meet ag’in, though it may be a long time first and in a far-distant land.”
“Sister, where are you? I can’t see now anything but darkness. .”
“Speak, dearest,” said Judith. “Is there anything you wish to say. . in this awful moment?”
Cooper has Hetty blush, which to Judith means Hetty is undergoing “a sort of secret yielding to the instincts of nature,” and, on cue from Judith, Hurry Harry, nature’s lusty pawn, takes Hetty in his arms. She utters her love for him, then dies.
Melissa, no stranger at death’s door, rose up from Hetty’s bed twice, fell back twice to die twice, one of the film’s notable scenes. When it ended and the camera ceased its clatter, she rose up again to embrace me, kiss me lightly but with promise. The director eyed our kiss with disapproval, and I sensed he was Melissa’s new conquest. He was early thirtyish, boyish, and rumpled.
“Our next film’s in California, where we’ll never have to worry about the weather,” he said. “And it gets us away from the patent wars — movie companies suing each other over who owns the camera technology. You know about that, I guess.”
“Of course,” I said, knowing nothing of such wars.
“Melissa has no interest in these things,” said the rumpled boy, “but she’ll thrive in California. Inspiration under the sun. You’ll have that every day, Mel.”
“A life of sunshine,” Melissa said. “What luxury.”
When Rumples ended the day’s filming, Melissa changed clothes, leaving Hetty’s shroud and heavy eye makeup behind, converting that face that launched a thousand nickels (ten thousand thousand nickels) back into its faux pristinity. We went to the hotel and found our way to the rear piazza with its same rockers, same hammock, same view of the lovely lake that Cooper called Glimmerglass, and its vast, lush forests. Here we had spent ten idyllic days in the summer of 1908, convinced life was a dream of sensual indolence.
Melissa took up her familiar position in the hammock, and we ordered the same drinks (gin and quinine water), set them on the same wicker table, and we studied each other as if the 1908 dream had not dissolved in cordite reek and blood spew. Two years gone and the residual bone pain from the bullet (which had entered my left chest where the burning stick pierced Katrina: God’s own symmetry) continued to plague my sleepless nights. Yet it was the forgotten wound, spoken of by neither Katrina nor Melissa; for I’d behaved badly, had not summoned the penitential grace to die from my bullet.