Goddess of Love Incarnate. Leslie Zemeckis

and imprisoned her. A dim light shone through her worn curtains, shutting out prying eyes. She didn’t want people to see her. She didn’t want a camera to capture who she was now. It pained her worse than the ache in her joints. She had never wanted to be forgotten and insignificant. But she was.

      From the small table next to her bed incense burned, a constant, thin trail of smoke spiraling upward, mixing with the white cloud from her Salem cigarettes. From outside her apartment the smell was pungent. One of her fans joked, “Lili, people are going to think you burn incense to cover the smell of pot.” She thought that funny. “Good,” she said, “give them something to talk about.”¹¹ People had always thought the worst about her. With her help. She had loved the headlines.

      LILI ST. CYR IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST EXCITING WOMEN.

      ‘I CAN’T SING OR DANCE,’ ADMITS STRIPPER LILI ST. CYR. BUT HER SHAPELY FIGURE IS TALENT ENOUGH!

      “SHE EARNS $10,000 A WEEK FOR HER DARING WEDDING NIGHT ROUTINE AT THE SWANKIEST NIGHTCLUBS IN LAS VEGAS, HOLLYWOOD, AND NEW YORK.”

      She had toiled in dozens of heat-filled rooms. There were the clubs and the old burlesque houses with vermin crawling backstage—and not just the baggy pants comedians. Always the dust and the peeling paint and smell of beer and Limburger cheese, the comedians’ favorite.

      She missed traveling. Like she had told Mike Wallace almost forty years earlier, she believed in UFOs. It was really quite arrogant to think humans were alone in the universe. How she wished a spaceship would swoop down and carry her away, which is what the drugs did. Her own unidentified flying opiate.

      She was a dot. An infinitesimal insignificant blip in the universe. She could sense the junk moving through her. It made her heavy. Her breathing slowed. Floating. She was drowsy. She was coming down. The walls felt as if they were pushing in on her. Each breath an effort. She was pinned and had no escape.

      She dozed. No memories, the reason she embraced the drug. Thoughts washed away and relief danced through her. No more pain. No more regret or shame. No more fear. All magically washed away. The crash was coming and would hurt. Stabbing sensation, vomiting, diarrhea. Until she injected herself again.

      She woke with a parched throat. The skin loose and crepe-like around her neck. The once beautiful neck caressed by diamonds and pearls and expensive perfume and kisses from an endless variety of handsome suitors.

      A cat mewed in the kitchen playing with the leaky faucet that she didn’t want the landlord to fix. It would mean he would have to come in and there would be too many questions. He would see too much. Needles, though she tried to be careful. But most of all she feared he would see her. Ten years she had been here. Before that the previous apartment had been miserable. One room and Lorenzo had brought too many of his friends in. The middle-class neighborhood had swirled with rumors because of the traffic in and out of their dark apartment on the narrow path crammed beside other cottages. Squalid, admittedly. A comedown in the world. From her big house to that. Thank God she had the prescience to put her name on a waiting list for this apartment. Most assuredly her last residence. Besides the neighbors’ parking right next to her window that disturbed her sleep and the sounds of the laundry room banging around the corner, she managed. Not enough privacy, but she could always make the best of whatever life threw at her.

      She mustn’t let anyone see her.

      She remembered how they used to steal the most appalling pictures of Garbo, head down, thick glasses, a black turtleneck pulled up to her chin, baggy pants and flat shoes walking the streets of Manhattan. The old sex symbol gone four years now. It didn’t seem possible. The steel-haired, flat-footed Swede captured trying to outwalk her past.

      She had patterned herself after Garbo, seeking to emulate her allure, her mystery. She had been great friends with Garbo’s dear friend Virginia, yet she had never asked Virginia to introduce them. She, like Garbo, hid from the world. She had been so terribly insecure about her looks.

      There would be no more adventures for her. She had lived her life in pursuit of adventure, getting everything out of life she could; fame, money, romance, sex, fun. She knew there were those that pitied the life she lived now. But they didn’t understand the life she had led. She had done everything she had wanted to do. And more. There were no more adventures in store for her, but she could remember the past ones.

      She had been the stripper who had them lined up around the block in Chicago. Men had filled her hotels with flowers, showered her with jewels, furs; a few had punched her. She had lived her life in screaming headlines. And now this. A darkened room with thick red curtains, infused with dust. Old red curtains the color of the walls of her Canyon Drive bar. The curtains had come with her move; so little had.

      She was the woman who created beautiful, memorable acts such as “Carmen,” “Afternoon of a Fawn,” “Chinese Virgin,” not to mention a dozen others. A “Salome” act that had gotten her thrown out of Montreal was now a yellowing photograph accompanying an article in a long-defunct girlie magazine. But she had been in them all. All the Confidentials and Gazettes and Night and Days .

      That woman had filled her beautiful home with exquisite objets d’art. She had led a beautiful life. She had been a beauty. On the inside too. No one ever said a bad thing about her except to say she was “aloof.”

      Where was Lorenzo? She vaguely recalled something about a hospital but couldn’t remember if he was in one or if she had been.

      She heard Betty Rowland, the old bird, still bothered gluing false eyelashes on every day. She didn’t wear makeup any more. Hadn’t for years and years. She didn’t dress up, didn’t brush her hair that was as fragile as spun sugar from all the years of peroxide. Her vanity was long gone. Exhausted. She no longer spent hours in front of the mirror getting her “look” just right, oiling her hair and powdering her cheeks, inventing a fuller lip with red pencil, rubbing oil into her long legs, polishing her nails. Oh, the hours and years of attention she had lavished on herself. Now when she ventured out she threw on a worn long skirt, scarf, and hat. She had become like the women Colette wrote about in Chéri, “women past their prime, who abandon first their stays, then their hair-dye.”¹²

      She remembered being a teenager and reading how to bleach hair in one of her movie magazines. Peroxide, ammonia, and Lux soap flakes. First she tried it on herself and then her sisters. No, Dardy hadn’t let her, until later. But Barbara had. And suddenly she and Barbara were platinum blondes. That turned a lot of heads. The boys had tripped over themselves to get to the sisters.

      The silence in the apartment was eerie. Where were her “touches”?¹³ Her fans she corresponded with and whom she sent pictures of her younger self and they sent cash and kept her alive. If one of them would call, she would mention she could use a carton of cigarettes and some stationery. People had always done things for her.

      A gnarled hand rubbed her perspiring forehead. It was sweltering. The breath in her head scratched at her brain. Years and years of smoking. She wondered if she would get cancer, hell, if she had cancer, if she would die from that. She didn’t want to go to doctors. Her body wasn’t worth preserving any longer.

      She never had children. Her body was her temple. And a lot of others’.

      Leaning toward the television next to her bed she turned it on and dozed, the noise filling her head with memories of a time she could understand.

      Applause swelled. Always at the end of her act. No one had shouted, “Take it off! Take it off!” while she performed. Unlike the other strippers of her day, she commanded a certain amount of respect, just by the way she held herself as she stepped onstage. “You could hear a pin drop while I was on,” she said.¹⁴

      One magazine noted, “With the audience now fretful in anticipation, Lili breaks the hushed atmosphere.”¹⁵

      Another noted, “Lili is always the heroine in an exotic and sensual story. . . . Each guy can’t believe himself up there with her alone and so he’s silent, attentive, and respectful until the end of the story and the curtain brings him