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in 1939 stank to high heaven! Stupid Western. Actually my career was finished three years before that. You know when?"
    "Turn over, please. When?"
    "When I was five feet four. When I was only five feet three I was still Prince Charming, America's Little Sunshine Boy. Even another half-inch. After that, finished. All over."
    "Hold out your hands, please."
    "Do you understand? I was too tall for a child star. The studio canceled the contract." Natasha placed a sheet of paper on my stretched-out hands. It wobbled and fell off. She wound the blood-pressure cuff around my arm and inflated it. "I remember even now the studio doctor adjusting the little piece of wood on the height scale and shaking his head. Five feet four inches. That was that. That was the twentieth of December, 1935. My poor mother had a nervous breakdown. I was not even fourteen years old. I had various businesses and oil wells and stocks and bonds. But I was five feet four and finished. Isn't that comical? Now I have to be quiet, right?"
    "Yes. Breathe deeply, please." She hooked the stethoscope into her ears and listened to my heart. "Don't breathe. Breathe." The flat disc of the instrument slid across my naked chest. T heard the rain outside. "Sit up, please." She examined my back. "How tanned you are!"
    "Two weeks ago I was still lying in the sun in California. Tell me that you would never have thought I was drinking!"
    "Breathe deeply."
    After a little while I started again. "T am reallv in eood condition. There is not an ounce of fat on my bodv. You can't imagine how I prepared myself for my work! Riding. Boxing. Tennis. Could I have another drink?"
    This time she only poured a little into the elass.
    "I hope you'll forgive me for behaving the way I did. I

    simply lost my head. There is so much at stake. My first film in twenty years! Isn't that crazy? Isn*t that alone sufficient to drive a man to drink? At six years old. still a baby, I made my first film, then fourteen more films, one after the other, and then no more. Ouch!" She had dug her fingers into my right side below my ribs and piercing pain went through me.
    "Did that hurt very much?"
    "Well, yes."
    "Your liver." Now she took a little patella hammer and tapped my knee for reflex action.
    "Are your parents still alive?"
    "No."
    "What did they die of?"
    "My father of uremia. My mother of cancer of the larynx." I became sentimental. "She had a hard life. . . . My father left us when I was two years old. He just went off with someone on the chorus line."
    Natasha tapped my right knee; my leg jerked up. "Good reflexes, right? T tell you, organically I'm perfectly healthy . . . Yes, he just left us . . . without a penny. . . . Mother then developed a facial paralysis. It was too much for her, you understand. And she could not act any more. . . . Now I was.her only hope. We moved to Los Angeles. . . . Mother worked as a cleaning woman, as an usherette in movie theaters, and deliverine newspapers. For a time she washed corpses for a funeral parlor."
    "You loved your mother very much, didn't you?"
    "Yes. She did everything for me. I learned to dance and sing, tap dance and ride. Many times there was nothing to eat—but she always scraped the money together for instructions. She took in washing, sewed at night and even begged."
    "Begged?"
    "Outside of nightclubs. I caueht her twice doine it. When I was four years old there was not a studio in Hollywood where I was not known. Three years she dragged

    me from studio to studio. ... If there were three hundred children waiting for one to be chosen for a two-day part ... I was among them. . . . My compulsive talking is pathological, isn't it? Do you know that I have not talked about all this in years?"
    "I am very interested, Mr. Jordan. After I saw your film The Little Lord I ran a temperature of 104°. And I wanted to marry you. Does that hurt?" I was sitting up now and with the edge of her hand she had examined the area around my kidneys. "No . . . not at