Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  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, an
d 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.”

  III

  Curtain Up

  I saw a play that night called K2. 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.

  At least, I think that’s what the drama was about, for my mind wandered throughout the performance. I kept reliving the comedy I had stepped into during the preceding three days, one that volleyed between “drawing-room” and absurdist. I kept wondering why this virtual stranger, whose reclusiveness among movie stars was second only to Garbo’s, had made herself so available to me. Katharine Hepburn and I had certainly gotten along and shared a few laughs, but that did not explain why somebody almost as famous for shutting people out as she was for her acting was suddenly opening her doors to me.

  The next morning I interviewed Blanche Sweet, one of the earliest stars of the silent screen (her career began in 1909) in her small apartment downtown. Just shy of eighty-eight, she was still a beauty with sharp insights and a sharp tongue. She was full of happy recollections of her days as one of Samuel Goldwyn’s leading ladies. But she was equally saddened by the way in which her career plummeted when pictures began to talk. Upon further reflection, she proudly asserted that her run of nearly twenty years was, in fact, as long as any actress could ask for in the medium, no matter what the era. “Even the great ones,” she said, “can’t stay a star longer than that. Some of the men get to go longer; but for women, it’s always about youth. Pickford and Garbo knew when to quit. Gish became a character actress; Crawford became a cartoon, playing axe-murderers. And Bette Davis was doing orange juice commercials. Orange juice for God’s sake!” she shrieked. “Bette Davis!”

  “Only one that I can think of,” said Miss Sweet, “got through the minefield, and that was—”

  “I know who you mean,” I said, not revealing my recent connection, “and she’s still going strong.”

  It was early afternoon when I left Blanche Sweet, picked up my rental car, and crossed the Triboro Bridge. One hundred miles out of the city, I exited the Connecticut Turnpike and drove through Old Saybrook—a charming small town, with one shop-lined main street. As instructed, I carried on until the road ended. (“Be sure to stop there, or you’ll end up in the Connecticut River,” Hepburn had warned.) I took a right onto a narrow causeway, over an inlet dotted with swans, and made the first left on the other side. “First right, past the flagpole, left at the tennis courts—just keep heading south and east; you can find east, can’t you? It’ll be afternoon, so the sun will be setting in the west, so you go where the sun isn’t setting. You can do that, can’t you? And it’s the house farthest south and east.”

  It was, in fact, hard to miss—a long, white brick house, three stories in the middle dropping to high-gabled two-story wings, rising from a long spit of land. A rush-filled pond ran the length of one side of the house, the Long Island Sound the other, so that it practically sat as an island on an island. At the approach of a dirt driveway was a hand-painted sign: PLEASE GO AWAY. As I drove under some trees, game birds flew out, into a cold, gray sky. It was a little after four when I rounded a bend and pulled into a large parking area.

  The front door was ajar, so I rapped on it as I entered a big foyer. Phyllis came to greet me and announced that Miss Hepburn was swimming. She directed me outside, where, between some stone jetties, I saw Katharine Hepburn’s head bobbing in the Sound. I walked across a patch of lawn, then a strip of sandy beach, buttoning my coat. “Now listen,” she shouted, “you are absolutely crazy if you don’t come in for a swim.” I put my hand in the water, which seemed to be in the fifties. “I’d be crazy if I did,” I said. “It’s a little cold, isn’t it?”

  “Only for the first few seconds,” she explained. “And then you’re numb.”

  She breaststroked in and grabbed her towel from the rocks. “And it feels so good when you get out.” She was wearing a one-piece black bathing suit, which she still filled nicely. Despite her lagging injured foot, she exuded enormous power—strong shoulders and arms and legs. “South,” I said, pointing across the water to Long Island. “East,” I said, pointing to one of two lighthouses alon
g the river. “Good boy,” she said with a smile. “Ask Phyllis to show you to Mother’s room, and I’ll meet you in the living room in a few minutes.”

  While I re-entered the house through its center porch, Hepburn went up some stairs at its west end, where there was an outdoor shower, which she used. By the time Phyllis and I had climbed the wide wooden stairs to the second floor, Kate had come down the long corridor of the bedroom floor and poked her head into the choicest guest suite—“Mother’s Room”—an ample sitting room (with windows on two sides) and bedroom, overlooking the water, with its own bath. There was nothing fancy anywhere, unfinished wood paneling, comfortable furniture, books on the desk and the nightstand, a fresh bar of Ivory soap on the sink. “Is this okay?” she asked.

  Smelling a fire burning downstairs in the living room, I was suddenly seized by the notion that if a seventy-five-year-old woman with a bad foot could find it within her to hobble out to the water and swim, surely an able-bodied thirty-three-year-old should be able to do the same. I quickly changed into a bathing suit and went down the corridor, which was lined with several other similar bedroom suites, though none seemed as large or well-situated as mine. I ran down the stairs toward the beach, and just kept running, headfirst into the water. Having got that far, I figured I owed it to myself to stay in as long as I could. After no more than forty-five seconds, I retreated, my body having turned blue. I took a hot shower outside on the upstairs deck, steam billowing into the cold air, before dressing. Then I meditated for twenty minutes, as I had for close to ten years, and joined my hostess in the living room.