America’s Princess
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters
A Darker take “Alchemy and Essence” by Laika

I was born on August 14th 1932 – that is to say that my body came into the world on that day. So my life now draws to a close. My second life.

There is something that I need to get off my chest. That is an English metaphor that is so true, because it has been a weight that has sometimes felt has been crushing me and preventing me from breathing. It is guilt. I took her life. She could have led that life, but I took it. I wanted so much to lead that life, so I took it.

I led that life, and I led it well. I told myself that every good thing I did, I did it for her. She made a mark on the world. She never would have done that without me – I told myself. But I never gave her that chance

My curse was to see her in the mirror every day – the little girl that I killed. Even now that my hair is white and my face wrinkled, I still see that child, so sweet and innocent, picking flowers there by the lake. I took her then. That was the person I was – the man I was. I was the monster that I portrayed in all those movies.

I wanted so much to be her, that I did something so outside my nature that it has appalled me in all the 79 years that have followed. People said that I was good and kind. I believed it. But it was not true. I took her life. I buried the man I was.

After the funeral I went there only once, and not because I wanted to. Only a few years ago I buried my husband at Forest Lawn Memorial Park and I walked right past the headstone: “Max Grosz, Actor and Gentleman, November 22 1879 - March 27 1941”. And murderer.

What drives a man to that? Desperation. We all understand it now – gender dysphoria. Back then it was simply a perversion. A huge lump of a man fit only to perform roles in horror movies, but inside longing to be a woman, and to live that life.

I drove her small unconscious body back down to California, back to Encino which in those days was just a rural village where my house could be isolated. I kept her sedated to the point of unconsciousness because I could not bear her tears and wails. I was a soft-hearted man, which makes it all the more unbelievable that I would have done this.

I needed to be her. I ached to be her. I had devoted a lifetime to achieving the impossible. A life spent in the study of neurology (so poorly understood then) and spirituality – to achieve transfer. I was the from, but I needed a to. It seems so cold to put it like that. She was a person in her own right, until I took her, without mercy or compunction.

This is what I have had to live with all these years.

I had to dispose of his body. I remember looking at it and thinking how big and ugly it was. Of course, I knew that this would be a task beyond an 8-year-old girl, but I had prepared a place to be buried. I left a trail by leaving my car and a note at Pismo Beach and digging my own grave beyond my property in a place where her little body could operate the lift and drive the tractor.

It would be suicide, plain and simple. A fading movie star – “Actor and Gentleman” taking his last curtain call – exit stage left. In Hollywood, even in the 1940s, such things were commonplace.

All that was needed then was for her to find her way through to Glendale, so I had booked a cab to pick her up and take her to the unit I had rented for her there. She would need to have some time to accept me, and for me to learn about her.

Until all of that was done, I had no time or thought to bask in my incredible achievement, but when I did, I found joy beyond all imagination. Such joy makes it easy to shelve your sins. But those sins remain, and shelves collapse.

Everything that I could do to prepare, I did, even though the chance of success seemed slight. I had all the papers fabricated. Tammy Kirby was not a complete fiction, but had died in childbirth years before, in Salt Lake City. I just needed a name and no parents – Tammy’s had followed her soon after her death – perhaps a succession of broken hearts.

Her real parents were alive. They were my other victims.

But there can be no such thing as an 8-year-old girl alone in Hollywood. What I wanted was to become the daughter of Saul “Zolly” Perleman, my agent and the man I respected most in life.

I went to the funeral in the outfit that Max had bought for the purpose, and I went right up to Zolly and Flora and said, “Mr. Perleman, I understand you were Max’s agent and that you are a good one”.

“I’ve had some success for my clients,” he said. “The ones with talent. I just wish Max had taken my advice more…”.

“Well I’m an actress,” I said. “And despite my tender years I’m quite good. And I’m in need of an agent. If you would see fit to let me read for you”

He just started yelling: “This is a funeral! Have you no decency?! I just lost my best friend. Listen Girlie, you might have the ruthlessness it takes to go places in this town, and you might even be talented---the next Shirley Temple---and will make some agent a rich man. But I’d sooner be a rag picker than speak another word to you!”

It was not what I wanted. It seemed to me that my plan was coming apart. I had everything I wanted, but without Zolly it would be hard. So, I followed him. The tears were real. They come so readily as a woman or a girl.

The under the monument to Tom Mix I confronted him again. This time I had to play the last card I had.

There was a young guy Jimmy, who used to live next door outside Encino. He claims that he knows that I am really Max Grosz. He was at the funeral. He claims that I told Zolly that I was Max. Well nobody believes him, so why would Zolly. No, what I di was to tell Zolly that Max whad sort of been my adopted uncle and mentor, and had given me “the Cassandra File” with instructions to give it to him – Zolly. Out of respect for Zolly and Flora I will not speak of the contents of the file, other than to say that Zolly wanted it and would destroy it. Zolly asked me if I had seen what was inside it.

“No,” I said. “I am only eight and on my own. Max said that you would look after me and help me get into the movies. You can have the silly file thing.”

That is why he hugged me.

I told Flora that my parents were dead and that my wider family in Utah were crazy Mormons and wanted to marry me off as a child bride when I turned 10.

We stopped off at the unit to pick up my things, and I moved into their place. Zolly got his file and Flora got the daughter she had always wanted.

I don’t know how they managed to adopt me, and given my tender age they did not burden me with the details. They seemed to get it squared away legally, but I suspect it had cost them.

Zolly may have been a bit suspicious at the start but he never showed it, and he grew to love me as I loved him. His love came from pride, because I proved to be everything that I promised to be. How could I not succeed? There was a lifetime of experience in an eight-year-old.

I became: Tammy Kirby, “America’s Princess” after my first credited role in “Happy Hearts”. Two other movies followed before my first Christmas special 1942: “Tammy In Toyland”. With that came to endorsements, all managed by Zolly. I never begrudged him making more money off of me than perhaps he should, because I had a life, and that was what I really wanted.

The life of Max was never that. He trudged and strained under the burden of having been born in that awful body. Tammy was truly alive – now a woman in a girl’s body, growing up into womanhood. I felt so blessed.

Yet in my solitude there was that steel vice of guilt that would squeeze me as if my bones would crack.

To make it worse, Zolly kept up contact with Jimmy and his parents, Max’s old neighbors. It was in the time before Jimmy started to voice his thoughts, but it seemed to me even then that he suspected something was not right. He was watching me for signs of Max. I knew things that Max would know and a young orphan girl would not.

How could speak out. With the beginnings of fame come the nutcases, and he could well be one of those. Perhaps I had the confidence to press him a little. But there would be a showdown much later.

In 1943 came my first big break – the title role in “The General’s Daughter” where I played the army base brat doing song and dance routines with the new recruits. “America’s Fighting Men”, the song I sang for those GI’s up on the table in the mess hall, became my signature tune. I would be invited to sing it for the troops who shipped off for Europe or the South Pacific, from where many would not return. But it was my bit for the war effort, and made me and all who watched me, proud.

Around this time, the parents of the child I had abducted sought me out. Zolly sheltered me but I asked to see them. Zolly always regarded me as having “wisdom beyond my years” (which was a fact) and left such calls to me.

“I am so sad to hear about your daughter, and I may look a lot like her, but I am not her,” I explained to them both. “I remember my own parents and my early life quite clearly. It was not happy. I wish I had been your daughter, but I am not. I hope that you find her.”

Only an actor could recite this stone faced in front of such emotion. Only somebody with 40 years of skill could hide the emotions boiling inside me. This couple were good and kind, and devastated by what had happened – what I had done.

If there was a time to surrender everything, it would have been then. But what could I do? I am your daughter, but only her body. Her mind has gone, and that was the thing that you loved and that loved you back. If I had said that, would they have believed me? Then what would I have done?

This was a burden that I was locked into. An iron maiden that I wear all my life – my second life.

And yet the iron shell I had worn in my first life had seemed just as bad. The iron shell in the form of Max – the Hollywood monster. A shell with immense hands and feet, body hair all over, and male sex organs. A true-life horror.

So after they left I set about the business of success. America’s Princess with that smiling face and those adorable curls, seemed so facile against Max’s body of work, but the smile was more genuine that the monster’s growl. As long as I was not alone with my problem, I was happy.

Movie offers kept coming, and Zolly was kept busy, because I refused a studio contract. I had learned from prior experience, although I could never claim that. A child has little experience if any.

I won special praise for the work I did with Tracy and Hepburn the screwball comedy “Junior Referee”. Everyone was amazed at how I could go toe to toe with them both, never missing a beat, just as a actor with years of experience would. That picture was when folks started to see that I really had something. After that I was going on the radio to sell war bonds and popping up everywhere.

While still not a teenager until well after the end of the war, I was already setting the style for that whole Bobby-Soxer generation to come.

As fame grew there were more questions about my past. Where was I really from? Releases spoke of my being an orphan with my birth records being lost in a fire, or some such. It seemed that no two biographies on her quite matched when it came to my early years.

But nobody cared because I did. As I said, I had stolen a life and my duty was to be the best person that I could be. I had the example of Max, who, up until his malevolent deed was such a wonderful person. He was “a gentleman” and “about the nicest man you ever meet”. I was even nicer.

I studied too, because I wanted a future beyond Hollywood, but also because I wanted to experience a girl’s youth, with slumber parties, teenage crushes, prom dances, everything that had been denied me as a man. As a famous child star in Hollywood you can only achieve an imitation of such a life, but it was real enough for me.

With other girls I shared the stresses of adolescence, the first period, the first sexual encounters, the first scare of possibly pregnancy, the first love and the first loss of love. These were all the things that I craved and which had haunted me for sixty two years before I became Tammy Kirby. I lived them all with joy.

But then I returned to acting and at just twenty years old, I received my first Oscar nomination in 1953. When I finally won the award in 1961 as Best Supporting Actress in “The Stepchild”, with Betty Davis and Anne Bancroft playing the abusive daughter. I dedicated the award to Zolly who died only a week before the Awards Ceremony. I felt that I had achieved everything I could in acting.

The review for that movie in “Variety” said: “Who would have thought that the girl once known as America’s Princess could convey an evil screen presence not seen since the days of Max Grosz?” I felt that I had not only proven myself but proven my whole prior existence as well.

I was ready to find something else – something that made a real difference. That was when Jimmy contacted me again, after all those years. He asked to see me, and I agreed, because I try not to refuse.

He came to my house. He was sort of a family friend, after all. After minimal nervous small talk he just blurted out: ‘How much do you know about Max Grosz?” It was like an accusation.

I told him that we had met. That was a lie. You cannot meet yourself. The child met him, when he took her from beside the lake that spring afternoon, but I was not her – I was just in her. It brought it all back.

“I only met him briefly, but he gave me a letter to give to Zolly that kicked off my career, so I am grateful for that…”.

“You are him!” The words sounded like madness, even though I knew them to be true.

I jumped up a shouted: “Get out. Get out of my house!” It was loud enough to bring Al my security guy into the room to eject the man. He backed away, towards the door.

“I just wanted to know, that I wasn’t imagining something or crazy for thinking this,” he said. There was the look of sadness and frustration on his face that spoke of a lifetime being disbelieved. “I am not threatening you. If you ever want to call, I am someone you can talk to about this. I will keep the secret.”

That word sounded like blackmail. I shouted that I would call the police. So he left. He said that I would never hear from him again, and I haven’t. But there were times when I wanted to call him. He died a few years ago. There will never be peace for me there either.

I felt that the time had come for me to leave Hollywood in the hope that by leaving I could somehow leave my guilt behind. I married a wealthy movie backer from Madison Wisconsin, and I followed him home. I became a wife and mother. I experienced the joy of love and childbirth and of seeing children grow. I became involved in charities, cause and then politics. I became Mayor of Madison and then a Senator for Wisconsin. In that role I proudly championed the people of my adopted state and did good wherever I could.

But it seems that, despite the halls of power being full of the opposite, for some no amount of good deeds can satisfy a conscience.

Family is a source of happiness, and mine has grown. But somehow with the loss of my husband even a life longer than any person could ever have, becomes meaningless while there is pain. Not physical pain, but something much worse. The pain of guilt. The pain of regret.

My family could never understand it, and with the loss of my husband it became more acute. Thy offered me drugs. Now I am in care I have heard them as N&Ns – numb and neutral. I deny myself that. My wrong deserves pain.

I have lived the life I have always wanted, and now I must pay the price for that.

© Maryanne Peters 2020

Author's Note: There is a story behind this. A few days ago Veronica sent me her story “Alchemy and Essence” which was essentially a mind transfer tale within an homage to old Hollywood. I asked whether she would allow me to write my conclusion. Her Max was a very nice man, but what struck me was the loss of the little girl's future, so this became a tale of guilt. Veronica will re-post her story so everybody can have another chance to enjoy it.
Maryanne