Kate Remembered (14 page)

After seeing the advance ticket sales in New York, however, Harris chose not to give the play another thought. He simply brought the company into town and opened it. “I felt as though I were sleepwalking through a nightmare,” Hepburn said of the experience, “and I kept hoping I would wake up.” She claimed never to read reviews, but after this play opened, she knew perfectly well that the critics had a field day with her. Very proudly, she recited to me Dorothy Parker's famous review of sixty years earlier, one of the legendary wit's most famous quips: “Go to the Martin Beck and see Katharine Hepburn run the gamut of emotion from A to B.” Kate pronounced the word “gam-MUTT,” saying, “That's what I was—a great big mutt.” After a few weeks, the crowds dwindled, but not quickly enough for the star, who was locked into a run-of-the-play contract. She just wanted out.

But Jed Harris was not done with her. Even though neither the play nor the star was very good, he realized Hepburn's name on a marquee was enough to draw people in for a few weeks in any city in which they opened. With Hepburn preparing to jump ship the moment the show closed in New York, where it had made its investment back, Harris announced they were moving to Chicago and then onward across the country. At last, she put her foot down, asking why he would continue with this play in which neither he nor the public had much interest. “My dear,” he said, “the only interest I have in you is the money I can make out of you.”

She respected the honesty of the answer and came right back to him, asking how much she would have to pay to see the show close. “How much have you got?” he replied. She grabbed her bankbook and read him the balance, some thirteen thousand dollars. He said, “I'll take it.” The check arrived in the morning, and the show closed in New York after a few more performances. Except for a chance meeting of no consequence in a theater years later, by which time Harris had become a broken man, Hepburn never saw him again.

Leland Hayward encountered Harris years later. “You know,” said the producer, by then completely washed-up, reflecting on
The Lake
, “I tried to destroy Katharine Hepburn.” Hayward was dumbfounded by the revelation. At last, he mustered wits enough to say, “You failed, didn't you?”

By the start of 1934, however, Jed Harris had come close to getting his wish. For one of the few times in her life, Katharine Hepburn's confidence in herself was terribly shaken.
Spitfire
opened and raised doubts about her future in Hollywood; and her marriage, at last, was no longer proving to be even one of convenience. For $100 a month, the “Ludlows” had moved into the Turtle Bay house on East Forty-ninth Street; and Luddy had relocated his business—a corporate payroll system for big companies, which Kate never completely understood—to New York. At the same time, she knew that she had better hurry back to Hollywood, to continue her climb up the career ladder, and that Luddy was excess baggage. He was willing to move to Hollywood, even to stay in New York and keep the home fires burning. But by then, Hepburn was feeling more romantic toward Leland Hayward than toward her own husband, and she couldn't bear the thought of “using” him more than she already had. Though Luddy moved out of the Turtle Bay house, he was content to remain in marital limbo. At last, however, Kate decided, “I should perform one act of generosity for my husband—divorce him.” In April 1934, she flew to Mérida, in the Yucatán, accompanied by Laura Harding, and filed for a Mexican divorce.

Some fifty years later, while she and I were tidying up the kitchen before going up to bed, I asked why she had bothered to marry Luddy—whom I never met—in the first place. After giving the counter a final swipe of the sponge, she looked me right in the eye and, without thinking twice, said, “Because I was a pig.”

 

 

After having practically every dinner with Hepburn that week after my first visit to Fenwick, I had to return to Los Angeles. The bulk of my Goldwyn research was there, and I had to pull together the interview with her that I was preparing for
Esquire
. As she walked down the stairs to send me off that Thursday night, she took me into the kitchen, where she pulled a key out of the table drawer. “Now, look,” she said, pressing it into my hand, “you're obviously coming back to New York, and you'll need a place to stay; and hotels are so damned expensive, and they're so cold and impersonal. And, well, you know the way here now. So, dinner is always at seven, drinks at six, and if you're eating with us, let us know by three. There's always a bed upstairs.”

She opened the door and followed me to the little black iron gate at the sidewalk, looking up and down Forty-ninth Street. I wondered if she wanted to be seen or not. “Let us know when you're coming back,” she yelled, when I was a few doors away; and I turned back to see that several passersby, recognizing the voice, had, in fact, stopped and stared at her.

She was smiling.

C
an you hear this?” the voice of Katharine Hepburn asked over my telephone a few days later, clinking a spoon against a glass dish. ”I am just finishing the most delicious hot-fudge sundae I have ever eaten. Dick has added exactly the right amount of coffee into the fudge and created the perfect sundae—over coffee ice cream. It's an absolutely perfect spring day, and the sunlight is absolutely brilliant. Did you send me that arrangement of flowers in New York—all sorts of lilies and irises?”

“Yes, they're from me.”

“You must forgive me for not thanking you sooner. The card was signed, ‘Your Parcheesi partner,' and so I called Marion, because we played Parcheesi every day when I was recovering up there, and she was always my partner. And she said she didn't send any flowers, and then I realized it must be you. And I thought you really are quite silly, because you are completely hopeless at Parcheesi, truly incompetent, and I will not play that game with you ever again.”

“May I hold you to that promise?”

We talked on the telephone for several minutes. I could tell that she didn't want to hang up—not that I wanted her to—that she was strangely content just to make small talk. She had told me early on that she felt her social life had been “very boxed” for most of her adult years—living in the same house and getting to know few people. And while Fenwick had long been her retreat to sanity, with few callers, I realized that her activity since her accident had slowed down radically. There was more forced quietude to her life than she liked. She suggested that I call her frequently—“Because who knows?” she said. “The next time you call, I may be dead!”

Over the next fifteen years, I called regularly. If more than a week ever went by, she usually greeted me with, “I thought you died.” She always asked when I was visiting New York next and how my work was progressing.

In fact, our work together—the interview for
Esquire's
fiftieth-anniversary issue—took an odd turn. In the fortnight after my return to Los Angeles from our initial meeting, I learned, by chance, that
Esquire
had, in fact, commissioned a number of pieces on other Hollywood personalities, designating such stars as Gary Cooper and John Wayne as among the “Fifty People Who Have Made a Difference.” I didn't necessarily disagree with their choices, but—as I promptly reminded the magazine editors—my chief argument in coaxing Miss Hepburn into our interview had been
Esquire'
s assurance that she would be the only Hollywood figure represented. “Don't tell her,” suggested the editor in chief.

I told him that was unacceptable. What was more, I reminded him, I had not yet received either a contract or any money for the piece—so, legally speaking, I could just walk away from the assignment. “That's terribly unprofessional,” the editor insisted. “I think it's more unprofessional for you to break a promise you made to a writer and one of your honorees,” I replied.

On my next visit to New York a few weeks later, I explained the situation to Miss Hepburn. “But if you don't turn it in,” she worried, “you won't get paid.” I assured her that the money they were offering was not enough even to factor into the decision. “Well,” she said, “it's not as if I need it for my career.” That settled that.

When I reported the verdict to the editors at
Esquire
, they were furious. They quickly turned their indignation into invention. As the forty-nine other authors were turning in their assignments, they evidently received an unpublishable piece from Truman Capote. Desperate to have his name on their cover, and now just as eager to have a piece on Hepburn, they asked him to write about her. He didn't know her but said he had an anecdote in which he stepped on her foot at the theater one night. “I told you they were slick,” Hepburn said to me when I brought her a copy of the final product. “Who knew they were morons?” As a result of the incident, my stock with Kate soared.

I returned to my Goldwyn book more dedicated than ever. I was visiting New York to interview supporting players in his life five or six times a year, thus allowing me to see Hepburn often. She always wanted to hear about my latest interview or conversations with anyone from “the old days.”

With the number of her own projects decreasing, Hepburn delighted in dabbling in mine. Over the next several years, she consistently asked how she might help. In retrospect, it occurs to me that all her largesse—the time we shared, the meals, lodging, intimate conversation, and lots of dark chocolate (“the best in the world,” she insisted, came from a small shop on upper Broadway called Mondel's—turtles, almond bark, and breakup)—had always been given freely, before I even had to ask. I never made a single request of her . . . with one exception. After conducting literally scores of interviews for my book, only one important source kept evading me; and I thought Kate—who prided herself on pulling rabbits out of hats—might be able to help.

Irving Berlin had been one of Samuel Goldwyn's closest friends. Well into his nineties when I began my project, I had written America's composer laureate several times in hopes of arranging an interview. His eldest daughter had put in a good word for me, as had Goldwyn's son. Irene Selznick suggested I use her name in one of my entreaties; and even Berlin's private secretary of many years, with whom I had spoken several times, said she would take up my cause. I had heard stories that Berlin had become senile and was living in his pajamas on the top floor of his town house on Beekman Place, watching television all day and talking to nobody. Then one day he telephoned—to say (with the television blaring in the background) that he could not see me, that it was too exhausting even to think about all those games of gin rummy at which he caught Sam Goldwyn cheating. Before I could even try to engage him in a conversation, he hung up. I figured it was time to play my trump card.

“You're always asking if you can help me,” I said to Kate during one of my weeks in New York. “Well, maybe there is. Can you think of any way I might get to Irving Berlin?” For a moment, Kate warmed up to the challenge, then a cold, worried expression came across her face. “I hear he's become Garbo,” she said, “and that he sees nobody. And I haven't seen him since RKO”—which meant the mid-thirties. “I understand,” I said. “But if you have any suggestions . . .”

The next night I returned for dinner from my rounds in New York and found Kate sitting in her chair with a big smile pasted across her face. Her clothes were less casual than usual. She was even wearing a little makeup and some perfume. “Well, I had a most interesting day,” she said, all Cheshire-catlike.

“Really?”

Yes, she said. After lunch she had walked to 17 Beekman Place, a five-story Georgian brick house, which is practically around the corner, and rang the bell. A maid answered, and Kate said she didn't wish to disturb Mr. Berlin, but she wanted to leave a note for him. The maid asked if she cared to come in, and she said no. She just wanted to know that Mr. Berlin was all right. Then, as Hepburn related the story, a clear voice from several floors above sang out, “Kate, is that you?” And she replied, “Yes, Irving, is that you?” He told her to wait a moment, that he would be right down.

“He looked quite wonderful,” she said. “Especially for a man close to a hundred.”

“At one hundred,” I responded, “whatever you look like looks wonderful.”

No, she continued, he looked healthy and was well-groomed and nicely dressed. They sat in the living room, and she explained her mission, that she was calling on my behalf, hoping he might see me. He replied that his stomach got so churned up just thinking about Sam Goldwyn (a common malady, even among Goldwyn's friends), he couldn't think of sitting down with a biographer and dredging it all up. But surely, he told Kate, she could stay for tea. Stay she did . . . for more than three hours! “And,” Kate recounted to me that night, “he was wonderful—full of stories and full of life and full of memories. We talked about RKO and remembered things I hadn't thought of since the thirties. And it was one of the most wonderful afternoons I've ever had. And he absolutely refuses to see you.”