In conversation with Katherine Piotroski

“No bank account?”

“Yeah, I know, it’s weird, right? But like, I guess she’s super old school, yannow? Like, I feel like she keeps all of her money in gold bars buried in her backyard yannow? If she has any left anyways, ha!”

My editor leaned back and thumbed through a thick wad of hundred dollar bills, her long red nail making a light tik-tik-tik as it parted the compact layers. She tipped the money into a large manilla envelope and slid it across the desk to me. The move struck me as something a TV character would do, and with her teased hair and massive gold hoop earrings, she would have fit right in as a mob wife on the Sopranos. I grabbed the envelope.

“You know where you’re going right?” she asked in a slightly condescending manner, “Don’t make me look stupid for trusting you with this, I want something we can really use, a real portrait of the lady, yannow?”

“You got it” I said with a saccharine smile and a thumbs up, As if you have anyone else dying to do the assignment anyways, I thought as I walked out of her dingy office, envelope tucked under my arm. I weaved my way through the maze of clunky laminate desks scattered seemingly at random around the dimly lit workspace of the LA Gossip, and emerged into the stifling heat of the parking lot, blinking against the assaulting sunlight. As always, I took a deep breath of the outside air, in, and out, trying to clear out the residual scent of stale cigarette smoke and coffee that always seemed to settle in the back of my throat during a day at the office, and got into my car. The tan leather interior had been drinking up the heat of the day since 8 am and I could feel myself start to sweat before I even settled into the seat. After a few guttural protestations from the engine, the car wheezed to life. I double checked the address, set up my phone’s GPS and, a few turns later, merged into highway traffic.

It’s strange, how real money feels when it’s yours, and how worthless it seems when it’s not. I glanced ruefully at the manilla envelope, filled with bills that represented nearly half of my pathetic yearly salary, and huffed out a breath.

“Focus,” I said out loud. Money doesn’t mean anything when it’s not yours. I used to feel the same way counting the till at my old waitressing job. Thousands of dollars, but they felt lifeless in my hands. The paltry tips I would receive at the end of the night, in contrast, hummed with life, with possibility. And at least at this job I get to write. Celebrity best dressed lists and breakups were not my subject of choice, but still.

And this assignment seemed different. Katherine Piotroski, or Kitty Peters, as she was better known, a reclusive Hollywood hasbeen currently gathering dust in some old mansion, had finally agreed to an interview. Why it was with a rag like the Gossip, I didn’t know, but I guess the magazine wasn’t always as seedy as it is now. Maybe she related to our descent into obscurity. Or maybe she just didn’t know. She didn’t even have a bank account, hence the cash, so I doubted she was very up to date with the goings ons of the city’s various tabloids.

After about two hours of highway crawling and a half an hour of meandering around the seen-better-days residential neighbourhood where she lived, I found the palace. Actually, I almost ended up blowing past the entrance to her driveway, which was obscured by thick clumps of overgrown weeds, pendulous under their own weight, arching towards each other over the gravel. A small nervous feeling fluttered to life at the base of my throat as I rounded curve after curve on my way to the house. Finally it came into view. Years of neglect couldn’t disguise what a gorgeous building it was, all victorian angles and delicate layers, a few balconies nestled gracefully in various alcoves. But, it seemed to be hunched in on itself somehow, as if braced for some terrible impact. I parked the car in the roundabout, and made my way to the door. The steps up to the porch creaked under my weight, and I kicked up a layer of dust as I dragged my feet across the welcome mat. The house seemed unused to company. “Go away”, it seemed to say. Instead, I rang the doorbell.

Katherine Piotroski. She was once an Elizabeth Taylor, a Marilyn Monroe. I had spent hours over the weekend watching her movies, watching her blink her doe eyes, her skin impossibly soft looking under the old Hollywood lighting, her voice softened by a mid atlantic drawl. She suffused her characters with a certain enigmatic quality, had garnered some awards, and no doubt had once graced the walls of many a teenaged boys’ bedroom, head thrown back in a laugh, pert bosom heaving. That was decades ago, so it shouldn’t have shocked me that instead of a glamorous young starlet, all pin curls and crinoline, the door was answered by a sagging, white haired woman in a pink velour tracksuit. But it did.

“You must be from the Gossip”, she said, waving me in with no preamble. “This way, this way.”

Her voice had the sound of having doubled back on itself, with a painfully husky quality that spoke of many years of chain smoking, and she was as bent and battered looking as the house she lived in. I followed behind her as she hobbled out to an outdated Lanai, where there was a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses sitting on a small wicker table, surrounded by several faded deck chairs.

“Siddown, siddown.” she grunted, as she lowered herself into a chair. I did the same, pulling out a tape recorder and a small black notebook from my bag. Recorder on, notebook open, the thrill of the yawning stretch of an empty page. I was ready. She took a sip of lemonade. I noticed a slight tremor in her hand as she brought the glass up to her lips, which had clearly been overlined with that same unsteadiness. I cleared my throat.

“Thank you for agreeing to do this Ms. Piotroski,” I said in my best warm-but-professional tone.

“Please, call me Kitty,” she replied, waving her hand. “Everyone else does. Did. Jesus. Been a while since I’ve had proper company, if you couldn’t tell.”

“Not at all.” A lie, but a harmless one. “Now, let’s begin.”

Over the next few hours she seemed to come alive right before me. Once an actress, always an actress, she delivered her lines with the impeccable timing and timbre of a trained star. She smoked cigarette after cigarette, and remembered what it felt like to have an audience. I didn’t need to pretend to be interested. My notebook was left untouched and open in my lap, but the winking red eye of the recorder bore witness to the evening. We were laughing to tears over some anecdote of her ripping the back of her dress at the golden globes, when a somber mood fell over us, the way it sometimes seems to do with people, unspoken but mutual. The sun was setting behind her then, lighting up her white puff of hair into a golden halo. She took a long drag, blowing the smoke up into the air.

“Sometimes I wish I had died up there, at the top. Like Marilyn, sweet girl. Always left them wanting more, right to the end. I’m not saying it was right, what happened to her, of course I’m not. But one of us has her face on a goddamn postage stamp, and it isn’t the one who’s still living and breathing.” She ashed her cigarette with a practiced flick. “You spend so damn long, climbing and climbing, working to get to the top. And then you get there. And the view is so sensational, you could look at it forever. So you stay. One more day, you say to yourself. One more, and one more. But if you don’t leave on your own, you’ll get pushed anyhow. Sometimes I think I would have rather died up there, looking at that view, than lived to see the bottom. Lived to see people forget. I was enjoying myself so much up there that I forgot to plant a flag, you understand? I forgot to do something that people would remember.”

I just looked at her.

“Sorry is that too bleak? Forget it, don’t write that, forget it. Is that what you want to do honey? Write?” All I can do is nod, staring down at my still blank page. The intimacy of this confession is choking me.

“Yes,” I manage to get out, “I want to write.”

“I’ll tell you what,” she says, cigarette between her lips, “What was my fee for this thing? Twenty thou, wasn’t it? You keep that, alright?” She held up her hands as I started to protest. “I mean it! I do, really. It’s cash, right? I’ll never say a word. It’s yours, honey. It’s yours. I don’t much need it, to be honest, I really just wanted to see if I could still fetch a price. That's not too pathetic is it? If you don’t take it I’ll fling it out into the ocean, I swear to god. Quit that job of yours and do some real writing for god's sake.” She throws her head back and laughs at that, really laughs. I find her so beautiful in that moment. Bedroom wall poster worthy. Sitting in my bag, the money starts to hum to life.

“If any book of yours gets turned into a movie, I guess I’ll take a part in it,” she says with a residual chuckle. “Just promise me something.”

“Anything.”

“Write something they won’t forget.”