Kate Remembered (41 page)

“Know what?” I asked.

“That you live somewhere,” she said in a slightly wistful tone.

She wanted to leave the house right away and carry on our tour of the canyons. Hepburn remembered every turn up every small street, stopping at one address or another, seldom getting more than a glimpse of a driveway. Later in the ride, she asked out of the blue, “How can you live in a house without a fireplace?”

That night Annette Bening accompanied Warren to Hepburn's house, and the four of us had dinner. The meals Norah prepared were the same she served in New York. Annette was charming and courtly with Hepburn. When she and Warren left, Kate asked, “Who's the girl?” That, I explained, was her costar in the movie—a very good actress and Warren Beatty's wife. “His wife!” she said. “He has a wife?” Yes, I explained; after years of his being Hollywood's most eligible bachelor, with countless celebrated romances, he married her. “Poor girl,” said Kate. I asked why she said that, that I thought they both seemed in love. “Hmmm,” observed Kate. Then, without missing a beat, she added, “With the same man.”

The second day our driving tour took us to the top of Tower Road. She wanted to see the wonderful house in which she had lived in the thirties, one later owned by Jules Stein, the founder of MCA, the entertainment empire. She asked who the current owner was, and I said, Rupert Murdoch. “Hmmmm,” she nodded knowingly, “this is a place for somebody who feels that he owns the world.” Big gates with the letter “M”—reminding me of the gates outside Xanadu in
Citizen Kane
—barred entry onto the property; but Kate asked me to try to get us in. I buzzed a half-dozen times from the gate, but there was no response. “This is New Year's Eve,” I said. “Everybody's probably away.” That was good, she said, instructing me to drive around to the back of the property. There was a chain-link gate ajar, through which we were both able to squeeze, thus setting foot on the grounds. After a few steps, however, we were met by a more formidable fence.

“We need some of those big wire-cutters,” she said. I apologized for not traveling with metal shears. “What about a bat, or something,” she said, suggesting that we could probably pry the locked gate open. After I struck out again, she scrounged around for a big stick. Not until we had rattled the chain-link fence for several minutes did she abort our mission. We tried the front gate one more time, then retreated down the hill.

Before going out to a New Year's Eve party that night, I returned to Kate's house to have dinner with her and the Beattys—at five-thirty. In honor of the occasion, Kate had me open a bottle of champagne. We all hoisted our glasses to good things in 1994, all except Annette . . . who at the last minute picked up her glass and, as though talking to herself, quietly said, “Well, the doctor said a small glass of wine would be all right.” It would not make the columns for a few months, but I drove off that night thinking the Beattys were expecting a second child.

That weekend, just before she was to begin shooting, Kate talked of going home. She said she was tired of Los Angeles; and the deal was that she could return whenever she wanted. Over breakfast the conversation veered to where it had been weeks ago, to the script. We read her scene aloud, and she kept saying, “It just doesn't make any sense.” I asked her what was unclear and suggested she improvise some dialogue of her own. She asked me to do the same. “Why don't you tell him,” she said, referring to Beatty, “that you and I discussed the script, and you've come up with a few suggestions that you thought would help the film.” I said that as the star, producer, and cowriter, he might not take kindly to “my” suggestions, but that I would speak to him.

After I had typed up the fresh pages, Beatty asked me to come to the house to discuss them. He said he liked them, then insisted on discussing even the most innocuous lines, word by word. I suddenly realized why so many years elapsed between each of his pictures. Then he asked what the possibilities were of her saying a line in his version of the script, “Fuck a duck.”

I asked him what the point was, as the line was neither necessary nor funny and was, frankly, a little tasteless. “But would she ever say it?” he asked. I said the sheer shock value of the line would probably hold some appeal for Hepburn. In
Coco
, I told him, her character had come down a staircase after a fiasco of a fashion show and said, “Shit!” I also said that, while that had been some twenty years earlier, she had disappointed a lot of fans. “But do you think she'd say it?” Warren repeated, clearly intent on working the line into the script. I said she probably would, but why upset some of the people who would be coming to the movie to see her?

“Nobody's coming to this movie to see her,” Beatty said.

“I'm sorry?” I said, having obviously misheard him.

“I said nobody's coming to this movie to see Hepburn.”

I stared at him, waiting for him to crack a smile but quickly realized he was dead serious. I replayed the past few months in my mind, wondering what the exigency of getting Katharine Hepburn into this movie had been about if it wasn't somehow to raise interest in the film. Suddenly I understood that this entire casting expedition had been little more than an exercise in vanity. “Well,” I said, “when the movie comes out in video and the distributor wants a third name on the box and the video stores shelve a copy in the ‘Katharine Hepburn' section, some of her fans might be disappointed to hear her say that line.”

“But,” Warren asked, ending the discussion, “you think she'd say, ‘Fuck a duck?' ”

Yes, Warren. Only one or two bits out of the pages I had brought over made their way onto the screen. And I did leave him with one further suggestion, which had to do with the moment when Warren's and Annette's characters say goodbye to his aunt for the last time. “Kate's got a very theatrical wave,” I said. “Look at the end of
Summertime
.” I suggested that this could be a touching moment for Hepburn's fans—“I mean, not that anybody's going to see this movie because of her.”

Beatty proceeded to tell me that he didn't understand why Hepburn didn't seem to be enjoying herself in Los Angeles, regarding the trip as more of an “opportunity.” He said that the weather was certainly better than New York's, the movie provided her with something to do, and “she'll be working with the greatest living director in the world.” While a successful television director named Glenn Gordon Caron was nominally the man calling the shots on this picture, I knew that Beatty himself intended to direct the Hepburn scenes. And so, once again, I looked for even a suggestion of irony. “I'm sorry?” I said.

When I saw once again that this was no laughing matter, I said, “Well, it's true, Cukor and Huston and Ford are all dead,” naming just a few of the giants with whom she had worked. “But what about Billy Wilder and Kurosawa and David Lean?”

“I mean guys who are still working,” Beatty contended.

“How about Stanley Kubrick?”

“Yeah,” he conceded, “but he hasn't made a picture in years.” I refrained from even introducing such names as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Mike Nichols . . .

Beatty and I saw each other again on Sunday night, for dinner at Hepburn's. Kate's mood seemed lighter than it had all week. She had been applying a salve one of Beatty's doctors had prescribed, and her skin had noticeably improved. Everybody was aglow with anticipation. As Warren and I left her, she called out to me, “I hope he's paying you a lot of money.” Warren only laughed . . . all the way out the door.

On Monday shooting began. I had never seen Hepburn work on a set, and so I instinctively kept my distance during the days. To help her maintain her rhythm, I joined her almost every night for dinner, at which time I would find her in a robe with her hair in a towel. A few old friends occasionally appeared as well. Warren dropped by every night, and used me to compliment her indirectly, telling me in her presence how great her performance was. I had to leave at the end of the week for a writers' conference, and two nights before my departure, Kate asked if I might visit her on the set. I said I would try. Warren seemed eager for me to drop by as well—to show, I felt, how regally she was being treated.

I drove to Warner Brothers the next day at noon, arriving between camera setups. Kate was in her large soundstage dressing room, where her hair and makeup teams were tending to her. She looked great—more alert and alive than she had in months. Norah was on hand, assistants catered to the star's every whim, and the crew was hurrying to set their lights and camera, so that Miss Hepburn would not be kept waiting. But that's not what excited her so. It was the work. “As you can see,” she said, swiveling in her makeup chair to face me, “they're treating me all right. So you don't have to stay.” An assistant director came in to announce that they were ready to film again, and Kate said by way of dismissing me, “We've got to play now.”

I saw Beatty and told him that I was leaving, that I felt my presence while she was working would make her uncomfortable. He suggested that I stand on the other side of the black curtain behind the set, where one could watch the proceedings on a television monitor. There I stood in the wings, alongside a slightly forlorn, sweet-faced, heavyset man who was also watching the screen intently, as Warren directed Hepburn in the scene. She did several takes, working off cue cards at first, then improvising a little on her own. By the third or fourth take, she seemed to be playing to the crew, and obviously winning their approval, as she brought more to the scene than was actually there.

She had a way of reading the most banal lines as though they were fraught with some meaning—sometimes by pausing a little here, speeding up a little there; and the moments full of import, she simply tossed off. She provided a slightly different reading on each take, but she always made a point of understating, avoiding the obvious. When the scene was finished, the man by my side introduced himself and thanked me for my part in getting Hepburn to Los Angeles. Then I realized I was talking to the director, who, evidently, was not allowed on the set during Hepburn's scenes.

As I was leaving the soundstage, a posse of executives entered, wanting to get their first glimpses of Katharine Hepburn. From the sidelines, I watched Beatty escort them over and saw how she utterly charmed them—shaking each hand, laughing at their comments, thanking them for all their accommodations. She even posed for a team photograph, flinching only once, when one of the young executives put his arm around her.

That night over dinner, Warren carried on about how she had snowed “the suits.” Hepburn explained that that had been part of her job since David Selznick had brought her to Hollywood sixty years ago. When Warren raved about her ability to improvise in the scene they had done later that afternoon, I reminded him that much of the final sequence of
Woman of the Year,
in which Tess Harding is alone in the kitchen trying to make breakfast with some culinary props, had been improvised as well. As he left that night, Warren kissed Kate on the cheek, looked deep into her eyes, and said, “If I had only met you thirty years ago.”

After he left, Kate said to me, “Was that supposed to be a compliment?”

By the time I returned from my trip, Hepburn had finished her work on
Love Affair.
Beatty and company had treated her magnificently, and she was obviously pleased to have completed the job. She returned home as soon as possible, which was fortunate . . . because less than forty-eight hours later, the Northridge earthquake seriously rocked the house in which Hepburn had been staying, sending lamps and vases to the floor. The Beattys' house atop the city, where I had first dined with them five months earlier, was destroyed.

The following September, Dominick Dunne wrote a profile of Warren Beatty for
Vanity Fair,
which detailed how Beatty had seduced Hepburn into appearing in his film. What struck me most in the article was a line toward the end of the piece, when Beatty was reflecting on stars and personalities and the subject turned to Howard Hughes. “What you must always remember about Howard,” Beatty said, “is that he was deaf.”

The following month I was invited to a screening of
Love Affair
, at which Beatty and I never quite found each other. The movie played even cornier than I had expected, and for me its only moments of relief came when Hepburn appeared on the screen. (Her participation in the film was billed as a “Special Appearance by.”) While her dialogue still didn't add up to much—and she did, somewhat haltingly, utter the pointless “Fuck a duck” line—she looked good and made a strong impression, especially at the moment when she waves goodbye. I found it most touching, because again, instead of the obvious, waving big, she sat alone and simply looked down at her aging hands.

On my birthday that December, I received a dozen enormous crimson roses from “Warren and Annette.” Four years later, he showed up at a publication party for
Lindbergh
, which my brother Jeff threw. Except for the occasional chance encounter with Warren Beatty in the years between and since, I have never again seen or heard from “the movie star.”