Kate Remembered (4 page)

To make the Hepburn piece even more special, I suggested that instead of writing about her, I would interview her, allowing her to talk about the preceding five decades and
Esquire
to publish the most piquant bits of the transcript. After making my hard sell, I backpedaled, explaining that I felt funny making so strong an argument when I did not know Miss Hepburn and had no idea whether she would be remotely interested in cooperating. “But,” I said, “I think I can at least arrange a meeting.” Early that spring, Rust Hills asked if I would come to New York and present my case to Lee Eisenberg.

I did. During the meeting, he said they were already making room for a few women on their list . . . but that he was adamant about not including any other Hollywood personalities. I said that was important to me as well, because that would be part of my pitch to Hepburn, that she would be the sole representative of motion pictures in this gala issue.

I wrote to Hepburn, addressing my letter this time to her New York address, though I believed she was somewhere in Connecticut, where she had made headlines after becoming involved in a potentially fatal car crash near her weekend house in Old Saybrook the preceding December.

Less than a week later my phone rang, and the unmistakable voice said, “Mr. Scott Berg, this is Katharine Hepburn. Is this really a good idea?”

I was completely taken aback, not only to have Katharine Hepburn on my phone but to be plunging right into the discussion without any preamble. “Miss Hepburn, you're great to—”

“I mean, all these magazines are so slick,” she said, “and
Esquire
is the slickest of the slick. Is this really a good idea?”

I explained that I thought it was, that I shared many of her reservations, but this promised to be something out of the ordinary. I underscored the seriousness of
Esquire
's intentions by pointing out that she would be one of very few women presented at all, that ours would be the only piece in a question-and-answer format, and—my ultimate selling point—that she would be the only representative of Hollywood. That appealed to her the most. But she said she could not set a date right away, as she was still recuperating from her car accident and staying with her sister Marion and brother-in-law in Hartford. I asked what had happened—“Was it a snowy day? Were the streets icy?”—and inquired about her medical status, asking, “Are you on any dope?”

“Dope?” she asked. “I'm the dope. It was the most beautiful day I had ever seen, and I was driving my friend Phyllis from Fenwick back into the city; and there was a magnificent blue sky and I was so busy going on and on about how beautiful it was that I just drove right off the road and into a telegraph pole! No, it was the middle of the morning and no, I was cold sober, thank you very much.”

Both women, then in their seventies, got banged up badly. Phyllis Wilbourn, who had by then been in Hepburn's employ for more than twenty years, suffered a fractured wrist and elbow, two broken ribs, and neck injuries; Hepburn's right ankle fractured in so many places, she said, it had been “hanging on by a thread.” The ambulance driver was prepared to take her to the hospital in New Haven, the nearest major medical center; and there was already talk of amputating her foot. But Hepburn insisted on going to Hartford Hospital, where her father had been a surgeon and where her brother Bob practiced. “A brilliant orthopod,” she said, “glued my foot back on.” For the next few weeks, she said, she would be stuck where she was—playing a lot of Parcheesi with her family. “Look,” she said, “take this number down, and we'll talk again.”

“With pleasure,” I said.

“Call me tomorrow. Same time.” I looked at the clock and realized we had been on the phone for more than an hour.

Over the next few weeks we chatted almost every day—discovering we shared mutual friends, political persuasions, and a passion for chocolate. I sent her boxes of dark chocolate turtles and almond bark from Edelweiss, her favorite confectionary in Beverly Hills, and a copy of
The Man Who Came to Dinner,
the Kaufman and Hart classic about a curmudgeon who breaks his leg and moves into an unsuspecting household, wreaking havoc on everybody's lives.

By March 1983, Hepburn was ambulatory again—still in a cast and on sticks—charging back into her former routine. We arranged our interview session for the first Wednesday and Thursday in April, and she suggested I stop by for an introductory drink the preceding Tuesday at six sharp. “But only,” she said, “if you think this is really a good idea.” And so, there I was on Wednesday, April sixth—my second time at 244 East Forty-ninth Street—on what many consider one of the most desirable blocks in Manhattan.

Once an actual bay, roughly shaped like a turtle, the area had been filled in after the area's settlement in the seventeenth century; and except for a few stray businesses that use the name in this midtown East Side neighborhood, Turtle Bay has come to refer to the block of houses on Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth streets between Second and Third avenues, which back onto a private communal garden. These narrow four- and five-story houses have long been magnets for artists, home to a lot of literary and theatrical greats—including E. B. White and Robert Gottlieb (my editor at Alfred A. Knopf, the publishing company he headed), Harold Prince, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin at 242 East Forty-ninth, and, of course, Max Perkins at 246, a house then owned by Stephen Sondheim. Hepburn's house at 244 distinguished itself from the rest of the row with its decorative wrought-iron balustrade on the second floor, outside the three front windows, the center of which was crowned with a triangular arch.

I rang the terrifying bell for the second time in my life that morning at eleven on the dot. On this occasion, however, Hepburn herself opened the door. “Scott Berg,” she said, “you're late.”

“I'm not,” I protested. “I'm right on time, to the second.”

“You're ten years late.”

As if I hadn't been hers before I ever arrived, I was now utterly captivated, all but having become a Shaw character, the romantic poet hopelessly in love with the older Candida. “I feel like March-banks,” I said to her as I followed her up the stairs. After a few steps, however, I stopped. “If you will excuse me,” I said, “I would like to use the bathroom first.”

Upon joining my hostess in the living room, I placed a small tape recorder on the table between us and made a few sound checks. I explained that I had never taped an interview before but that it was necessary in this instance because of the question-and-answer format. Then I removed my jacket and left the room to set it on the chair. “You're learning,” she said, as I returned to the couch and pulled out my pages of questions.

In the second before I pushed the “record” button, she anxiously blurted, “What's the first question?”

“Don't worry,” I assured her. “You know all the answers.”

“No,” she insisted, “I have to know the first question.”

“You want the first question?” I asked. “Okay. What's the capital of Kansas?”

“Wichita!” she said. “No, no. Topeka!”

“Right. Let's go. . . .”

For the next two days, from eleven until five, we sat in the living room discussing not only Katharine Hepburn's career but also the development of Hollywood as seen through her eyes—those of an insider who chose never to own a house there, so that she might always remain an outsider. I kept my questions on a fairly professional path, seldom trespassing into the personal. Her memories were vivid, and she was charming and funny; but I was constantly struck by how little thought she had given to her own actions and to those of people around her. Hepburn, I learned, always lived in the moment; and once an event had been completed, she was on to the next. There was no looking back.

Lunches quietly appeared and disappeared during our taping sessions; and my subject asked each afternoon if I wanted to stay for dinner. I suggested that it might be best if I did not, to keep us fresh. “We don't want to run out of things to say to each other,” I reminded her. After a day of calling her “Miss Hepburn,” she said, “Look, I think you should call me Kate.”

“Okay, Kate,” I said. “And I think you should call me . . . Mr. Berg.”

By the end of the second day we had covered her entire career, from the movies she saw as a child (with her father every Saturday night, at the Empire, Strand, or Majestic theater in Hartford, where she became infatuated with William S. Hart, the great stone-faced cowboy) to the script she was then trying to get produced, the story of an old woman who hires a hit man to put old people out of their misery. We had talked about fifty feature films in which she had starred, a dozen television movies, and twice as many stage productions. She answered everything with candor, I felt, trying to bring originality even to the basic questions she had heard hundreds of times. The only question she refused to answer concerned the years between 1962 and 1967, the one hiatus in her career, during which time I knew she had cared for the ailing Spencer Tracy. “I never talk about that,” she said when I reached that period. We quickly proceeded to discuss
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,
their last picture together.

Once we finished, Kate asked if I would like her to show me the rest of her house. For the first time, I entered the front living room, larger than where we had been sitting, and full of interesting artifacts and mementos, including the white bust of her that Maxwell Perkins used to see. There was also a television set, situated in such a way as to suggest nobody ever watched it. In fact, I noticed, it was not even plugged in.

One flight up was Hepburn's bedroom, a big bright room with a high ceiling and fireplace, overlooking the garden. The bed had a dozen pillows on it, of all shapes and sizes. A small painting of a man reading a newspaper, his back to the artist, sat on the nightstand; the close-cropped white hair was enough to reveal that this was Spencer Tracy. “I never could get his face just right,” she explained, “. . . except when I sculpted him.” She produced a small, accurate bust she had made.

She led me into the bathroom, one unimaginably crude for a movie star. An old freestanding sink with two taps; a small tub with a big, plain showerhead hanging directly overhead, not protruding on an angle from the wall; some drawers and shelves with pictures of family and Spencer Tracy; threadbare towels; Colgate Tooth Powder; Albolene face cream. A second bedroom, at the front of the house, had become an extension of her closets, with athletic shoes, shirts, and a lot of red sweaters everywhere. She said there was a comfortable guest room upstairs.

As we headed down, Kate asked if I had plans for the weekend. She was going “up country,” she said, to Fenwick, her country house in Connecticut; and she felt our interview was just getting started. “Look,” I said, “we've got much more material than
Esquire
could ever possibly use. But I would love to see Fenwick.” She suggested I appear at Forty-ninth Street the next day at noon, at which time her driver planned to collect her and Phyllis. In fact, I had an appointment the next day—an interview for my Goldwyn book, which I could not break; and so I suggested that I would get up there on my own steam, by dinnertime. She said the trains to Old Saybrook were few and asked if I really wanted to bother renting a car.

We went down to the kitchen together, where we found Phyllis lying on a small daybed in the corner, reminding me that she had been the more seriously injured in the December car accident. “Do you have a good sense of direction?” Hepburn asked me, in the same tone that she had used two days earlier when asking about fireplaces. I told her I did, and she began to reel off the route to Fenwick, a sock-shaped peninsula off the Connecticut coast at Old Saybrook, where the Connecticut River empties into the Long Island Sound. She ran through the directions again, making them more complicated the second time. I assured her I could find the way. Not convinced, she threw a pop quiz at me. “Okay,” she said, while we stood in the kitchen, “which way is south?” As I looked around to get my bearings, she muttered to Phyllis, “It's hopeless. We'll never see him again.”

“I'll be there, Kate,” I said, as I leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. She gave me a hug and a big pat on the back and said, “I used to be taller. I've already shrunk an inch or two.” With that, she slammed the heavy door behind me, sending me out onto Forty-ninth Street, yelling, “Don't be late.”

I
saw a play that night called
K
2
. On a spectacular set that recreated the second-highest peak in the world, an interesting drama unraveled: In quest of the summit, one of a pair of climbers becomes injured, forcing the other to choose between returning to base camp or remaining with his teammate; this incited a dialogue about survival. In the end, he chooses to remain with his climbing partner, leaving the two to perish together.