Going Down on the Titanic

You must have seen the headlines last week:

LAST SURVIVOR OF THE TITANIC DIES.

REVISED TITANIC DEATH TOLL: 100%

ICE BERG INTERVIEWED: "MY WORK IS DONE. I CAN MELT NOW. GO GLOBAL WARMING."

JAMES CAMERON: "TIME TO SINK ANOTHER ONE. SEQUEL!"

RUSH LIMBAUGH: "I'M GLAD THE TITANIC FAILED."

Well Gloria Stuart has a message for all of you:



Come the Fourth of July, Little Gloria turns 99, but she's not actually dead; just her career. I mean honestly, a mere 12 years ago she was nominated for an Oscar in the most phenomenally successful movie to that date, Titanic, and yet here she isn't. The woman hasn't made a movie in five years. My guess? She's just plain lazy. Being 99 is no excuse. Last Friday I turned 112 (and I'm still waiting for your presents, darlings. Snap it up. Vodka is always nice), and while I'm not acting anymore except in bed ("You're the best, Eduardo. You're the world's greatest stud." Talk about acting!), here I am dictating my brains out, while Little Dougie types up my thoughts.

Don't get me wrong; I adore Little Gloria. But she was always insecure about her drab looks. After all, the only reason to date an invisible man is because with him, you know you're the one everyone is looking at.

Poor little Claude Rains. Gloria broke his heart, and left him and his velvet voice so wounded emotionally, he couldn't even read without getting frightened.

Naturally, Gloria and I have known each other for ages. We met back in 1932, when she appeared with my fourth husband, Boris Karloff, in The Old Dark House. Unfortunately, once we got the lights turned back on and she could see Boris and I clearly, she let out one of her patented shrieks! "Save me Boris! She's so hideous!" Talk about rude! Her married name may have been Sheekman, but it should have been "Shriekwoman." If her husband hadn't been Arthur Sheekman, a divine comedy writer, and one of Groucho Marx's closest friends, I wouldn't have let the weird woman in my house. (Why do you think I kept my old house so dark in the first place?)

And for God's sake, never let her anywhere near your jewelry! She stayed overnight here at Morehead Heights once (Boris was sometimes a little too hospitable), and the next day all my diamonds were at the bottom of the swimming pool. Do you know how hard diamonds are to find under water? But what I really objected to was that I was still wearing some of them at the time. (I must remember to replace all that water in my pool with vodka. It would make drowning so much more fun.)

Why does the strange woman like to throw jewelry into bodies of water anyway? It's not a normal pastime, like drinking heavily, or shagging my gardener's son Eduardo. You know, normal behavior. On one of Little Gloria's trips to New York her whereabouts were unknown for one night, and the next morning, Tiffany's found their entire inventory at the bottom of the Central Park Lake. Gloria had struck again!

Maybe it was the iceberg that sank her ship that gave her the idea. After all, an ice berg looks like a huge diamond in he rough, and it was floating in the sea. And that diamond she tossed overboard looked big enough to sink another ship.

The movie got it all wrong anyway. Who do you think Gloria was playing in that movie? Little Kate? Hardly. She was playing me of course! Yes, I went down on the Titanic. You may find that hard to swallow, but I didn't.


I remember setting sail from London, with Queen Elizabeth herself bidding us Bon Voyage as we sailed over Buckingham Palace. Even then, 97 years ago, that woman was a frump. Charles has been waiting a long time to become queen.

You want proof? Well here's the lovely portrait Leonardo DiCaprio drew of me, as I lay there, wishing Hugh Jackman had gotten his role. I mean Leo is okay looking, but he's 34 and he still looks like he's 12. And skinny! During sex, I don't like to fear being impaled on one of his other bones! Get some pecs boy. You can buy them, you know. And Leo, maybe some hair plugs - on your pecs! If only Hugh had played Jack, that movie might have been a success!


Incidentally, the reason my pecs aren't dangling down and falling off the side of the bed in that rather permissive sketch is that, well, this was 97 years ago. They were still "Perky" and "Insolent." (Perky is the right one. Insolent is the left one. What are yours named?)

I didn't actually realize at first that the ship was sinking. Darlings, I get that sinking feeling all the time. And when your walk is as wobbly as mine, a little thing like a catastrophic collision between a ship and an ice berg is hard to even notice. I had just been doing butthole shots with Bruce Ismay (Ismay was such a huge butthole, that it took an entire fifth to fill the shot.), and I just thought it was the vodka hitting. I had ordered mine "neat," so the ice was just an intrusion.

And when the Titanic bar began flooding, how was I supposed to know it wasn't just me getting - ah - moist? My body has always had a strong involuntary glandular erotic response, although God knows I will usually volunteer. The first time I saw Hugh Jackman shirtless onscreen, 32 people seated in the rows below me drowned.

If Leo hadn't come along and lured me onto a lifeboat with a vodka stinger, I might be at the bottom of the ocean, still skin diving through the Titanic bar. Everything is on the house now. By the way, seconds after this next picture was taken, I got hit in the head by a large diamond drifting down from a ship overhead. Damn you Gloria!

They called me "The Unbearable Tallulah Morehead" in the lifeboat, but it gave me experiences to fall back on when I shot the sea-going thriller Life Preserver for Alfred Hitchcock, and believe you me, I do a lot of falling back.



Meanwhile, in the next life boat, Kathy Bates and Debbie Reynolds got in a fist fight over which of them was really Molly Brown. (Molly herself wisely kept out of it. Kathy had her trusty sledgehammer with her, and Debbie is a trained dancer who can kick your teeth in while singing "Good Morning.")

It was a night to remember, and how I wish I could. So as long as Gloria Stuart, Kathy Bates, Debbie Reynolds, and I are still alive, there are still survivors of the Titanic, although Robert Wagner is the only still-living survivor of the 1953 20th Century Fox movie Titanic, the one where we're supposed to believe that Clifton Webb is married to Barbara Stanwyck and that they have two children. Puh-leaze. They hadn't perfected artificial insemination in 1912. And I saw Clifton Webb in my sauna once (He was - ah - "inhaling" Rock Hudson), and he had no stretch marks, so I knew he'd never been pregnant. Clearly that movie is a bigger fantasy than Star Trek.


(Speaking of Star Trek, is it just me, or did JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof put into Star Trek so much of the time-travel/time-paradox stuff they've been using on LOST this past season that they turned it into Lost in Space? Hmmm. Catchy title.)


Well darlings, I'm off. The delivery boy from The Liquor Barn is here with my vodka, and I need to strap myself into this Okinawan twirl-basket so he can have his tip, or better yet, his whole shaft. (Thank Heavens I'm not allergic to wicker. My affair with The Wicker Man was blazing hot!)

One last note: come next Monday, look for my review of The Tony Awards Show over on The Huffington Post. Be sure to check it out.

Cheers darlings.