Act I: The Greatest Star Of All

MAX:

Once, you won't remember

If you said Hollywood,

hers was the face you'd think of

Her face on every billboard

In just a single week,

she's get ten thousand letters

Men would offer

Fortunes for a bloom from her corsage

Or a few strands of her hair

Today, she's half-forgotten

But it's the pictures that got small

She is the greatest star of all

Then, you can't imagine

How fans would sacrifice themselves to touch her shadow

There was a maharajah

Who hanged himself with one of her discarded stockings

She's immortal

Caught inside that flickering light beam

Is a youth which cannot fade

Madame's a living legend;

I've seen so many idols fall

She is the greatest star of all

JOE:

When he'd gone,

I stook looking out the window for a while.

There was the ghost of a tennis court with faded markings and a sagging net.

There was an empty pool where Clara Bows

and Fatty Arbuckle must have swum 10,000 midnights ago.

And then there was something else:

the chimp's last rites, as if she were laying

a child to rest.

Was her life really as empty as that?