Still Me (27 page)

From September 1975 through June 1976 I had to manage both. After a month of rehearsals we opened in Philadelphia, then went on to Washington, New Haven, Boston, and Toronto before coming to New York. Most days I would catch a train to New York at 6:00
A.M.
, learn my lines on the way, tape scenes from several episodes, then travel back in time for the evening performance out of town. Occasionally we would tape
Love of Life
on Sundays as well, which was my only day off from the play. I rarely had time for meals and lived mostly on candy bars and coffee. But I had just turned twenty-two and thought I could handle it all because I had unlimited reserves of energy.

One highly melodramatic moment in New Haven proved me wrong. I'd finished a day of taping in New York. I'd been up since five, filmed all my scenes by three-thirty, caught the train back to New Haven, and arrived at the theater by seven-fifteen, ready to go on at eight o'clock.

My first entrance in the play had been generously set up by Hepburn: she was downstage left as I entered through the French doors center stage. In the first act my character, Nicky, a student at Oxford, occasionally comes home to visit his grandmother for the weekend, and they're always delighted to see each other. The direction called for me to burst through the French doors calling out, “Grandma!” then cross down left to embrace her. On this particular evening I burst through the French doors, managed to call out “Grandma!” and passed out cold. I bounced off a nearby table as I went down on the floor.

Hepburn turned to the audience and said, “This boy's a goddamn fool. He doesn't eat enough red meat.” She had the curtain brought down, and after a moment I came to. I was then helped to my dressing room and the understudy went on. I had to lie there listening to him go through the entire performance. I was checked out by a doctor, who told me I was suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition. I promised him that I would take better care of myself and assured everybody that I could still do the show. On the way to her dressing room, Hepburn stuck her head in the door and said, “You're just goddamn lucky you're a little bit better than he is.”

I think that she cared about me, and for that I'll always be grateful. She invested so much time in me, always pushing me to do more. Hepburn never expressed affection in a direct, loving manner, but she always brought us things from her summer home on the Connecticut shore. She'd pass around strawberries, tomatoes, and corn and say to me, “You're going to be a big star, Christopher, and support me in my old age.” And I'd say, “I can't wait
that
long.” She even forgave me for collapsing onstage.

I adored her, but she scared the pants off me most of the time. On a good day, though, I could stand up to her, which I think she respected. I believe I was fairly close to what a child or grandchild might have been to her. A gossip column in the Boston papers even suggested that we were having an affair. She was sixty seven and I was twenty-two, but I thought that was quite an honor.

She was always a fantasy figure to me. When we were rehearsing in New York, I would go to see her old films, like
Alice Adams, Bringing Up Baby
, or
Holiday
, at art houses around the city. As I watched her on the screen, I knew that if I'd been an eligible bachelor back in the thirties, I would have done anything to meet her. Then at work the next morning she was sixty-seven again, sometimes crotchety, and always unpredictable.

For many years after the play closed, she would invite me for tea, and I would send her my latest news along with pictures of my kids. Once I ran into her at Lincoln Center, where Robin Williams and Steve Martin were doing
Waiting for Godot.
At this point I hadn't seen her for quite a while. I came down and stood in the row below her during intermission. I was about to say. “Hi, Kate, nice to see you,” but she preempted me with “Oh, Christopher, you've gotten fat.” She had a knack of throwing people off balance; she was a master of the unexpected.

In the fall of 1984, when I was in Hungary on
Anna Karenina
, my friend Steve Lawson was staying in my apartment. He, too, experienced the unexpected when the phone rang and it was Kate calling. At first he wondered what friend was doing such a good impersonation. Finally she convinced him she
was
Katharine Hepburn and asked, “Where's Christopher?” Steve replied, “Oh, he's overseas.” Then she said, “Tell him I'm calling to say he was absolutely marvelous in
The Bostonians
. He was absolutely captivating.” Steve quickly wrote down this extravagant praise. Then she asked, “What's he doing now?” Steve told her that I was in Budapest shooting
Anna Karenina
with Jackie Bisset. To which Hepburn responded, “Oh, that's a terrible mistake. He shouldn't be doing that. Goodbye.” You're up one minute and down the next.

As Vronsky in
Anna Karenina
with Jackie Bisset.

When we were doing
A Matter of Gravity
, my father took a huge shine to Kate. And she thought he was just the most charming, the most intelligent, the most attractive man she'd met in a long time. He was teaching at Yale and lived nearby in Higganum, so it was easy for him to come to the performances. When I think about it, they're quite similar, Kate and my father. Two perfectionists: loving, charismatic, charming, and able to undercut you in a second.

But I have such wonderful memories of what she could do onstage. In Act 2 of
A Matter of Gravity
, Nicky has decided to marry a young girl who's half black and half white. They plan to move to Jamaica; the grandmother thinks he's throwing his life away. The two of them are alone, just before he leaves. Then she says, “You are my last piece of magic. I have so loved my portrait in your heart.” Nine actresses out of ten would say that directly to the grandson, with tenderness and poignancy. Hepburn played it straight out front, never looking at me, to underscore her disappointment and to indicate that she no longer respects him. There was nothing left for me to do; I had to walk off in silence. At that point, at most performances, she broke down, suddenly realizing that wasn't how she had wanted it to end. Sometimes she would move upstage toward the door wanting to call Nicky back, to embrace him one last time. But it was too late. It was a completely original and surprising way to play the scene.

The farewell scene.

Hepburn often used to say to me, “Be fascinating, Christopher, be fascinating.” I used to think: That's easy for you to do; the rest of us have to work at it. But over the course of rehearsals, the out-of-town tryout, and the Broadway run, I learned that she was talking about unpredictability, about revealing the contradictions. She told me that if you're playing a character who's usually drunk, you have to find moments of complete sobriety in order to add dimension to the role. Not even a chronic alcoholic is drunk all the time. And she talked about how important it is to bring your own life experience to the work. She once said, “You are already real; the character is fiction. The audience must see your reality through the fiction.”

As I studied her acting it seemed that she was always Katharine Hepburn
and
the character at the same time. Over the years I had the good fortune to perform with other brilliant actors who work the same way, like Paul Scofield, Vanessa Redgrave, Gene Hackman, and Morgan Freeman. Gene Hackman, for example, never goes to great lengths to change his outward appearance for a role; instead he transforms himself
inside.
In spite of your initial awareness of seeing the familiar Gene Hackman appear on the screen, you quickly accept him as whatever character he is playing because his work is so truthful. In
Gravity
I had the privilege of spending nine months working with one of the masters of the craft.

When we opened in New York, Kate got the bulk of the reviews, and I was favorably mentioned. The
Times
said that our scenes were the best, although the play itself didn't make much sense. The reviewer wrote that when Enid Bagnold tired of a character she sent him offstage for no good reason, but that it was great to see Hepburn in person and that I showed promise.

I wish I'd made more of an effort to stay close to her over the years, instead of just sending notes back and forth and often declining her invitations to tea. But from the moment we started working together, the uncertainty of our relationship was difficult for me. I guess it was too much like the roller coaster rides within my own family. The play had been a tremendous learning experience, but now I felt a need to break away. In the summer of 1976, when the production moved to Los Angeles, I dropped out.

Kate was very disappointed in me for doing that. When I went to see the new production, I got a chilly reception backstage. I felt as if I'd betrayed her. We'd created something, a special relationship, and then I hadn't stayed the course.

I had another reason for leaving: I was enticed by movies at this point. If the play had been truly wonderful, I would have stayed with it. But it was really her vehicle, a chance for the audience to see Katharine Hepburn live. While the rest of us were not exactly set dressing, we were not absolutely essential to the proceedings. I felt I needed to move on.

Stark convinced me to go to Los Angeles after the New York run, in June 1976. He arranged for me to be represented by Bresler, Wolf, Cota & Livingston, a small but prestigious agency that represented a select number of film and television actors. Jack Nicholson was their star client. All of the partners in the agency were very enthusiastic about working with me, but as they sent me out on auditions I realized we were not in sync about the kind of work I wanted to do.

Mike Livingston, who became my “responsible” agent, was ecstatic when I was offered the starring role in a television series called
The Man from Atlantis.
The character was part man and part fish. The $14,000 a week certainly appealed to me, but when Mike told me I had to go to an optometrist to be fitted for green contact lenses and then go over to the studio to be measured for webbed feet, my heart sank. I had wanted to get my feet wet in Hollywood, but this was definitely not what I had in mind. I told Mike that I needed to think it over. Then I drove out to my favorite little airport in Rosamond, near Edwards Air Force Base, hopped in their Pilatus B4 sailplane, and spent the afternoon playing in the clouds over the Tehachapi Mountains. I passed on the fish-man (Patrick Duffy, later a star of
Dallas
, took the part). When my agents called with other unappealing ideas, I would always head back out to the desert to find relief in soaring.