Kate Remembered (32 page)

The unspoken rivalry between Dick and Kate stretched as far back as childhood and increased as her fame grew. Any hope of restoring balance in their relationship was lost forever when, in the early forties, Dick wrote a play about a multimillionaire courting an actress. While it was clearly written as farce, it was plainly based on Howard Hughes and Kate. She resented the intrusion; and the entire family stood behind her. Dick claimed that it contained some of his best writing and that he intended to get the play produced. Only after all the Hepburns came down on him did he back off. In so doing, he had established a foundation of resentment toward his sister, one sound enough to make her feel responsible for his livelihood. That he was never too proud to accept her charity only furthered his resentment.

One weekend Dick gave me one of his later plays to read, a work that periodically caught the eye of a producer. It was a witty account of an eccentric New England family that made me see he could have had a playwrighting career, had he actively pursued it. “The theater is tough,” Kate said, accepting only a small measure of responsibility for standing in his way; “but that play about Howard and me was cheap exploitation and would not have made his career. It would have been a stunt. If Dick really wanted the career thing badly enough, he should have written another play just as good, and another one after that.” He never did.

While privacy among the Hepburns was, of course, held in high regard, one afternoon I came into my room and found Kate rifling through my overnight bag. I had clearly caught her red-handed. All she could do was smile sheepishly—for a moment. “Did you find anything interesting?” I asked. “No,” she said, stuffing my clothes and some papers back into the bag. “Not a goddamned thing!” Except for a box of chocolates—from which she took a piece of almond bark, which she ate as she walked out the door.

There were lots of rules at Fenwick, but they were changed as often as they were broken. One day we were preparing a big fruit salad; and while peeling apples, I dropped a piece on the floor. I picked it up to throw in the garbage, and Kate yelled, “What are you doing? It's perfectly fine.” Without even washing it, she threw it into the bowl. “Oh yes,” Phyllis added. “My father used to say a man eats a peck of dirt before he dies.” A few weeks later, I lost my grip on a carrot and—against my better judgment—I tossed it into the bowl. “Oh my God!” Kate shrieked. “Do you think we're animals around here?” She fished it out of the bowl and chucked it into the garbage along with several leaves of lettuce she felt I had also contaminated. “What about the peck of dirt a man eats before he dies?” I asked. “Oh,” said Kate, “that's one of those utterly ridiculous English expressions.” Every week there was a new policy regarding bed linens, as I prepared to change mine every Sunday morning. Sometimes she'd insist I leave the sheets on until my next visit, other times she'd declare, “We change all the sheets in this house every few days.” (She often expressed strong sentiments against anything but white sheets, but, periodically, light blue would appear on my bed.) In any case, Kate almost always took part in making the bed; and I never saw anybody derive as much pleasure from a good hospital corner as she did.

Sunday after lunch brought the most dreaded moment in the week. That was when we packed the car for the drive back to the city—the hour in which all passengers and their baggage, as well as all perishable foodstuff and all living cut flowers, were packed into the white sedan. Even with her worsening foot, Kate would tear from room to room, gathering a shirt and pair of shoes from one bedroom, bouquets of huge lilies and tall stems of Queen Anne's lace from the living room, jars of Peg's stewed peaches and leftover zucchini soup, wheels of cheese, tins of cookies, loaves of bread, and coolers of meats and fruits and vegetables from the kitchen. Meantime, food was being prepared for the drive down—deviled eggs (heavy on the cayenne) and little sandwiches of ham and chicken with the crusts cut off.

Once everything was gathered in the front hall, Kate oversaw the actual packing with military authority and surgical precision—“Coolers. Large suitcase. Small vase. Small suitcase . . .” After a good half hour of jostling and rearranging, the trunk was closed. Then came the last two commands, the same every week. “My leather bags,” would come the cry—which meant grabbing two pouches that looked as though the Pony Express had once carried them, filled with her latest writings, address books, wallet, and current mail. And then, just as we were ready to take off, “Where's Phyllis?” Miss Wilbourn, who had taken to wandering, physically and mentally, would be herded into the front seat, where she was given a huge vase of flowers to hold all the way to New York. Kate and I would pile into the back, the leather pouches and food for the ride between us. Sometimes there'd be an additional passenger, which, of course, complicated the procedure by twenty percent. All hands still on deck—Dick, his lady friend, Virginia, any other Hepburn siblings or nephews—continued to come out front for the 1—2—1-2-3 salute, though over the next few years, the tradition would fade away for lack of enthusiasm.

We usually stopped at a vegetable stand, then took the turnpike to New Haven, where I was delivered to my front door on St. Ronan Street. I'd go to bed early on Sunday nights—thoroughly refreshed by the weekend, too exhausted not to get a good night's sleep, and too stuffed to want to eat for several days.

Kate and I would speak on the phone once or twice during the week, to confirm our weekend plans. Every few weeks, however, she would say, “We're in a rut. We're like an old married couple. You better spend the weekend in the city.” She said there was nothing in the world better than having somebody else's apartment in New York when the owner wasn't around.

During the late eighties, the friendship between Kate and Cynthia McFadden intensified. As Cynthia enjoyed a meteoric rise in her career—becoming enough of a star reporter on
Court TV
to be invited to join the powerful team at
ABC News
—she often lived upstairs on Forty-ninth Street. She and Kate also traveled a great deal together—to Los Angeles or Canada, when Kate was working on a television movie, to Boca Grande, Florida, for vacations. So it was with mixed emotions for Kate, when Cynthia fell in love and agreed to marry a man absolutely besotted with her, Michael Davies, the elegant publisher of
The Hartford Courant.

Cynthia told Kate that she dreamed one night of being married at Fenwick, and Kate made the dream come true. I can think of no greater sign of Kate's love for her young friend and protégée than opening her private sanctuary to Cynthia and her family and friends. All the “Forty-ninth Street Irregulars” gathered for the event as well—Phyllis and Norah, of course, and also Tony Harvey, an old friend from Philadelphia named David Eichler, and me, along with Kate's siblings and Kathy Houghton. There was a merry party the night before the wedding at the couple's sprawling new house in Lyme, Connecticut, just across the river.

Midday, September 9, 1989, we all gathered in the little church at Fenwick. A longtime friend and photographer of Kate, John Bryson, was there to take pictures. After the short, sweet ceremony, almost everybody walked over to the Hepburn house. Kate, in a cream-colored jacket worn over a white turtleneck shirt and white pants and white sneakers, rode. We enjoyed a beautiful late-summer garden party under a marquee at the rear of the house. Kate's foot ached that day, but she circulated among all the guests before finding a chair. Even then, she hardly sat, as she made a point of standing for each person who approached to say hello or goodbye. When it came time to cut the five-tiered creamy cake, the bride called Kate over to share in the first piece—which she pushed into Kate's face. Everybody laughed, mostly Kate.

Kate was obviously happy seeing Cynthia so happy, but she was already starting to miss her company. In truth, they would continue to see almost as much of each other as before she married, but Kate knew that she could no longer be the central person in Cynthia's life. Kate also felt that there was a great imbalance in the relationship, that the groom loved the bride more than she loved him. Kate wondered why it had been necessary to marry him.

By five that afternoon, all the guests and the help had left. Kate and I were alone, under the tent, killing a bottle of club soda after the day's champagne. She said she thought it was unfair for Cynthia to marry Michael, that Cynthia was more concerned just then with her career than with pleasing a husband and that that was no way to enter a marriage. The more she talked, the more I felt she was talking about her own marriage to Luddy. And the more she talked, the angrier she got. At last we just sat there, watching the sun pass over the Long Island Sound, in silence—until Kate said, “Pig.”

“Let's go in,” I said, putting my arm over her shoulder. She reached up and squeezed my hand tightly.

Kate's driver took me to Hartford, where I caught a plane to New York, in order to make a connection late that night to London, where I was going to promote my Goldwyn book. I had a few minutes at JFK, during which I called Irene Selznick. As soon as she heard my voice, she said, “Revolting.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, trying to catch up with her mind.

“The cake in the face. I know all about it. Absolutely revolting. Do you think she's lost her mind?” Irene pressed me for every detail of the wedding, though she seemed to know most of them already. I flipped through the guest list in my mind to ascertain who had filled her in. To this day, I don't know the identity of her mole. (I suspect Norah.) But I did know that after almost sixty years of friendship, everything Kate did of late irritated her. And Irene never dealt well with pain.

Although I always found her extremely democratic in her thinking, Irene had been raised a princess. She liked—expected, even—everything in her life to be special, exclusive. (She titled her discreet memoirs, in which she kept her most revealing stories between the lines,
A Private View;
and she prided herself on a life full of people and experiences few could match.) For her, it wasn't fame or wealth that conferred prestige so much as uniqueness. Accordingly, it pained her to see Kate become increasingly public.

One day Kate got into an argument with a traffic warden on Forty-ninth Street over her momentarily double-parked car. When the altercation made the newspapers, complete with pictures, Irene was mortified. Not long after that, Irene was sick in bed, and Kate decided to bring some of Norah's soup to her apartment at the Hotel Pierre. Irene was moved by the gesture; but, she reported to me, “She got into the elevator here looking like Raggedy Ann, and the elevator operator wouldn't take her up. She had no idea who this ‘bag lady' was. And Kate had to go to the manager to get permission to come up. Kate! I'm talking about Kate! Katharine Hepburn!”

Irene was devastated. It was hard enough for her to feel she had lost her friend to a gang of younger people she didn't know, or that Kate forged valiantly on with her career, despite her own physical maladies. Irene had come to feel excluded from Kate's life, and she was unwilling to try to be included any longer. She decided Kate was becoming a commoner. More than once that year, Irene talked about her “noble” friend—and suddenly burst into tears.

There was one more thing. During her last visit to East Forty-ninth Street, Irene discovered a young woman she did not know who had been staying there. At one moment her eagle-eyes witnessed an exchange between the two of them that suggested a level of intimacy she had never allowed herself to believe. “Now everything makes sense,” Irene said to me. “Dorothy Arzner, Nancy Hamilton—all those women. Laura Harding. Now it all makes sense. A double-gater. I never believed that relationship with Spence was about sex.”

“Irene, I think you might be getting carried away,” I said. “I sure get the feeling that Spencer Tracy was a pretty sexual animal, and they wouldn't have lasted that long if sex wasn't involved.”

“In the beginning,” she said. “But you can't drink as much as Spence did and maintain a relationship built on sex.”

“But like most great relationships,” I suggested, “shouldn't it become about something more?”

Irene granted that was the case with Hepburn and Tracy; but she was disturbed by her new understanding of Kate's sexual nature. “Irene,” I said, “you don't know what goes on with all these women. I mean, Kate herself says, ‘Nobody really knows what goes on between two people when they're alone.'”

“That's my point,” Irene replied. “You're too young to have known all those other women, those single women. I knew them. I knew who they were.”

I said that I felt that Kate was simply more comfortable with single people of either sexual persuasion, that she felt she could get closer to individuals with no other attachments, and that while I had told her of a relationship in my life that began about the time she and I met, she almost never wanted to hear about it. “I don't like to think of you living anywhere,” Kate had said to me shortly after giving me the key to her house. “I like to think that this is your home.”

Again, sexuality was not really the issue between Kate and Irene. It was the exclusion that troubled Mrs. Selznick—that there had been a dimension of Kate's life that had never been revealed to her, one that Kate could now be sharing with people she had never even heard of. This realization became a turning point in their lives, the moment at which Irene, feeling hurt, began to lose interest in her friend of some sixty years.

In 1990 Irene seemed to be suffering physically, but so far as I knew, no doctor could put his finger on a specific problem. Her body ached (“Of course it aches,” Kate would say, “she never moves in or out of that goddamned apartment!”); and her appetite was diminishing. In some ways she was happier than I had seen in more than ten years, largely because, for the first time since I had known her, she was feeling good about the lives of both her sons at the same time. Jeffrey had married a beautiful woman named Barbara who “loves him and looks after him better than he deserves”; and not only had Danny married into the Sulzberger family but, Irene observed, “They think he's Cary Grant.” Her will, which she emended regularly as long as I knew her, was in order.