Kate Remembered (38 page)

Then there are movie stars, a breed unto themselves. The stakes are so high for those rare few who, decade after decade, captivate us, that we shower rewards upon them. Some are compensated with millions of dollars for a few days of work; their opinions on all subjects are held in higher regard. We create special rules for them, private entrances and exits for them to pass through.

The lives of the biggest movie stars—the “superstars”—are generally as “unreal” offstage as the characters they portray. There is a near-constant frenzy around them—the whirl of managers and agents and publicists and assistants tending to the constant demands for the star's time: interviews; photograph sessions; public appearances. The ringing telephone becomes an addiction, often sending a star into withdrawal when it stops.

For those who became famous under the old studio system, the lack of reality to their lives was even greater. Because the contract stars of the thirties, forties, and fifties had worked constantly, everything off the set was less important than what they did before the cameras. The studio heads paying the bills protected their own interests and took care of everything in their stars' lives. On the set, doubles were always available for the dangerous or unpleasant duties, whether it was performing a stunt or standing under the hot lights. Off-camera, everything was tended to. Not just clothing and grooming and personal chores but even indecent, occasionally illegal, activities were cleaned up, swept under the carpet, fixed.

Many stars begin to believe their own encomiastic press releases. After a year or a decade, and, in a few cases, a lifetime of fabulous salaries and fringe benefits, there naturally comes a sense of great expectations. With most movie stars, there also comes a sense of entitlement.

Perhaps the most attractive aspect of Katharine Hepburn's personality was that she held no such feelings. She made plenty of demands; indeed, she knew how to get what she wanted long before she was a star. In part, that's how she got to be a star. But she always remained grounded. In twenty years I never found a trail of bodies she trampled over in order to reach her goal. For all her impatience, there was always a sense of humility and humanity, even a sense of gratitude for her good fortune. She was never above making a bed, cooking a meal, chopping wood, or working her garden. Indeed, she found pleasure in those activities. Almost every time I saw her in the kitchen in Fenwick, she was wiping a sponge across the countertop, cleaning up after somebody.

In short, she never lost her work ethic. She believed the point of making money was to allow you to live comfortably enough to work some more, until you simply could work no longer.

“Retire?” she had exclaimed one night at dinner, when Irene Selznick had found a gentle way of broaching the topic. “What's the point? Actors shouldn't walk away from the audience as long as the audiences aren't walking away from them. As long as people are buying what I'm selling,” she added, “I'm still selling.” Kate never understood how people got stuck in jobs they didn't enjoy.

Stars who bemoaned the hardships of their profession—the impositions, the loss of privacy—rankled her, as though she were embarrassed to be one of them. “These actors who complain in interviews about twelve-hour days!” she said with incomprehension. “You sit there for eleven of them. It's not as if we're carrying sacks of feed all day!”

“What does he expect?” she said upon reading about Sean Penn punching out a photographer. “You can't go around saying, ‘I'm special. I make my living asking you to look at me, to pay to see me,' and then get upset at somebody for taking a picture. If you don't want to be a public figure, don't pick a public profession and don't appear in public. Because in public you're fair game.” She also didn't understand stars who sued newspapers over printing lies about them. “I never cared what anybody wrote about me,” Hepburn said, “as long as it wasn't the truth.”

While she sought the limelight all her life, Hepburn believed actors received too much attention and respect. “Let's face it,” she said once, “we're prostitutes. I've spent my life selling myself—my face, my body, the way I walk and talk. Actors say, ‘You can look at me, but you must pay me for it.' ” I said that may be true, but actors also offer a unique service—the best of them please by inspiring, by becoming the agents for our emotional catharses. “It's no small thing to move people,” I said, “and perhaps to get people to think differently, maybe even behave differently.” I pointed out to Hepburn that she had used her celebrity over the years for numerous causes—whether it was marching in parades for women's equality or campaigning for Roosevelt, speaking out against McCarthyism, or supporting Planned Parenthood. “Not much, really,” Kate said. “I could've done more. A lot more. . . . It really doesn't take all that much to show up for a dinner with the President or to accept an award from an organization so it can receive some publicity. Oh, the hardship! Oh, the inconvenience! Oh, honestly!”

 

 

Los Angeles is, in many ways, a one-industry town. There is, obviously, a thriving financial sector; real estate, aerospace, and the music business have all played a large part in the economy and ethos of the city. But motion pictures dominate, pervading all walks of the city's life. Photographs of movie stars decorate the walls of liquor stores, restaurants, even car washes—with best wishes from the likes of Burt Reynolds, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Rock Hudson. Although most people in Los Angeles have never met a movie star, everybody there seems to “know” them all—through a common trainer or hair stylist or florist or dry cleaner or checker at the supermarket.

For close to seventy years, Katharine Hepburn sightings remained the most coveted of show-business personalities—even more than those of Garbo, who could be counted on to take her daily constitutional on the streets of New York. One rarely heard a firsthand Katharine Hepburn story. Although some of my friends knew of my relationship with her—mostly because her name appeared on the dedication page and in the acknowledgments of
Goldwyn
—few ever invaded
her
privacy by even asking me about her.

Although I had “known” Warren Beatty through several friends and my older brother, Jeff, the head of International Creative Management, a major talent agency, I had never met him until early 1993. Then I began receiving calls from his wife's agent. He said Annette Bening had long been fascinated with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and she was hoping I might be able to meet her sometime to talk about what I had gleaned from the Lindberghs' private archives. An insistent third call from the agent expressed the fact that Warren Beatty was eager to meet me as well and that somebody would be calling very soon to arrange a dinner. Five months passed in which I heard nothing.

In mid-July the agent called again to set our date. I said this no longer seemed like such a good idea, that after half a year there seemed something slightly forced in the situation. No, the agent explained, Warren Beatty was extremely interested in our meeting. I had not heard from anybody, he explained, because Warren had, in fact, been occupied producing, rewriting, and starring in a film called
Love Affair.
It was a remake of the 1957 movie
An Affair to Remember
, which starred Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, which was a remake of
Love Affair
, made in 1939 with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, all based on a story by Mildred Cram. He and Annette, I was told, very much wanted to get together as soon as possible.

On Wednesday, July twenty-first, Kevin McCormick, a film producer who had recently become an executive at Twentieth Century Fox, and I drove from our house in the hills above the Sunset Strip to Mulholland Drive, where we were buzzed through the Beattys' gate at exactly seven-thirty. In the living room, we found Warren playing with his eighteen-month-old daughter, entertaining two other guests, the agent and a female executive from another studio. Annette darted in, to say hello, and then went to put her daughter to bed. For several minutes, our host chatted with all of us; then we repaired to the dining room for dinner, where Annette joined us. Few movie stars look as good in person as they do on screen, where they benefit from makeup and lights. The Beattys, however, did. He was taller than I had expected, and his face was starting to show some attractive character lines I hadn't seen on film. She glowed.

The house was comfortable and unostentatious—though the dining-room ceiling could be retracted, letting guests feel as if they were outdoors. We ate “indoors” that night, a tasty but extremely dietetic meal of chicken and vegetables and a fruit dessert. A bottle of wine sat on the table, but neither of the hosts indulged, imbibing only water. Conversation quickly turned to my work on Lindbergh. Annette and the three other guests just sat and ate, as Warren peppered me with questions about the famous aviator. He was surprised (and pleased) to learn that the story included so much politics, starting with Lindbergh's grandfather (who had been elected to the Swedish Riksdag and had been forced to leave his homeland because of a political and sexual scandal), including Lindbergh's father, (who had been a controversial five-term Congressman), right up to Lindbergh himself, known for his role in the little-understood America First movement. I tried to include everybody at the table in the discussion, often lassoing Kevin in for his astute political commentary. But Warren was not much interested. That night I was the only person on whom he fixed his attention.

A little after ten, the conversation changed, but the conversants did not. While the other guests grew restless, our host shifted the dialogue to
Goldwyn.
“Is it true I was the last person Sam Goldwyn talked to before he died?” Beatty asked me. Not quite, I explained. But Warren Beatty had, in fact, been the last name recorded on Goldwyn's telephone sheet before suffering the stroke that ended his career. Then, just as the other guests were getting up from the table—bored to tears, I feared—the conversation took another sudden shift.

“I guess you know Katharine Hepburn pretty well,” he said. “Because I see you dedicated your book to her.” While Annette started shepherding the others toward the door, Warren lingered behind with me, quickly measuring the depth of my friendship with Kate. “Do you think she'd like to work again?” he asked. Not right away, I said, as she had recently finished a rather uninspiring television movie. “Well,” he followed up, “do you think she's able to work again?” I said she was definitely capable, but her interest was waning along with her health. She had skin cancers on her face, she was not sleeping soundly, and was suffering from dizzy spells. Her shaking often became more pronounced, I said; and she had taken to working off cue cards. “Oh, that doesn't matter,” Warren said. “Jack uses them too”—meaning his friend Mr. Nicholson.

“Because there's a great part in our movie,” he continued.

“The old aunt?” I asked, slightly incredulously. “Is that really a great part?”

While the old aunt in
Love Affair
was but a supporting role, the character did serve as a kind of fulcrum, appearing in one extended scene in the middle of a sentimental story about a longtime bachelor about to marry. This man-about-town meets a singer, also about to marry, on a cruise; and their sudden love for each other becomes apparent during a brief layover at a European port, where they meet the man's elderly aunt, who is charmed by the young woman and wishes them Godspeed. (The ageless beauty Cathleen Nesbitt played the part in the Cary Grant version, the character actress Maria Ouspenskaya played opposite Boyer.) In this new version, the port-of-call had become Tahiti, the exteriors of which had already been shot. Beatty told me that Hepburn would have to travel no farther than the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, where her character's house was being built on a sound stage. Her dressing room would be constructed literally steps from the set.

“Even if she wanted to work again,” I told Warren, “you've got to remember that Hepburn has never played anything but the female lead. With the exception of her scene in
Stage Door Canteen
, she has always been the star. No supporting roles. No cameos. No commercials. And the only reason she did
Stage Door Canteen
was as part of the war effort.” This picture, I thought, isn't exactly in the national interest.

As he and I made our way out to the driveway, where the other guests were driving off and Kevin was talking with Annette, Warren explained that the film was virtually finished except for this one long scene—which required an actress of stature. Moreover, he said, he wanted an actress in her eighties who looked as though she was in her eighties—not an octogenarian who had been tucked and pulled nor a sexagenarian caked in makeup. Not only that, he said at last, “I've always been in love with Katharine Hepburn.”

Ever since he had been a young man, he said, she had bowled him over—with her brains, her beauty, and her attitude. “She's very sexy,” he said.

“That's what Howard Hughes thought,” I replied, knowing that Beatty had talked of producing a film about Hughes for more than a decade. “Yeah, what about that?” Warren said, as I was getting into the car, which Kevin had started up. “Did she ever talk to you about Hughes?” After I told him that she had, I could see he was prepared to pump me all night. I figured the only way we could leave was if I threw him a bone. So I said, “Kate often told me, ‘What you must always remember about Howard is that he was deaf. And from an early age that affected him.' ” As the car began to move, Warren followed along for a few paces, continuing the conversation—mostly about how chancy a sentimental love story was these days.

“Well,” said Kevin as we reached the end of the driveway, “—now I see what that dinner was all about.” I said he was being ridiculous, that the purpose of the evening was to learn about Lindbergh, and now that Warren had heard all I was willing to impart, that would be the last I would ever hear from him. We arrived home at eleven.