Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  She was already seated on the couch at the end closest to the large fireplace, her foot up on a stool, in the big, wonderful room. Windows on the south looked onto the water, as did the bay window to the east, before which sat a wide bench filled with pots of plants and flowers. Big vases of cut flowers bloomed everywhere, amid several odd objects Hepburn had collected over the years—a small antique sled, two massive slabs of wood chained to the ceiling, and on the mantelpiece, spools of yarn in different colors, a cut-out wooden marksman taking aim, and two odd-shaped hunks of what looked like white stone, which—after making me guess—she revealed were elephant teeth. Decoys, stuffed birds, and other replicas of waterfowl were tucked here and there. “Now don’t you feel better?” she asked, referring to my swim.

  “I felt better the second I got out.”

  “Well, that’s really the point, isn’t it? And now you’ve earned your drink.” On a table at the entrance to the room sat a big tray with all the fixings for cocktails. Kate was already drinking what I learned was her usual starter, a goblet full of grapefruit juice on the rocks, which she had just finished. Then she liked that same glass refilled with ice, her shot of Scotch, topped with soda. I made the same for myself in a clean goblet and sat in one of the white wicker chairs opposite her on the other side of the fireplace. Several small, dim lamps were lighted all around the room. She clutched a pillow, on which was needlepointed a motto that had been carved into the fireplace of her first childhood home, the words of Charles Dudley Warner, a former editor of The Hartford Courant: LISTEN TO THE SONG OF LIFE.

  She asked what had taken me so long after my swim, and I said that I had been “listening to the song of life”—that I had been meditating. “Is that like contemplating your navel?” she asked. No, I said, it was more like settling down, and getting my mind and body, maybe even a little of my spirit, in tune. “Oh, I see,” she said in a tone she would later use whenever she heard anything that sounded a little otherworldly. “But don’t you find it a bothersome waste of time?” she inquired. That was my fear at first, I told her; but I quickly learned that meditating twice a day actually bought me more time, energizing me. She wasn’t buying much of what I was saying, certainly none of the metaphysical aspects. But when I described the physical effects, the nuts-and-bolts effects of meditation, she pressed for details. For the rest of her life, I discovered, she was insatiably curious, always fascinated by things she did not know about or understand. After hearing all the information she could absorb, she would assert her own position. “You’re not going to start meditating on me in the middle of dinner, are you?” she asked.

  The evening drill at Fenwick was similar to that in New York: Phyllis appeared with a few plates of hors d’oeuvres—usually small shrimp with a Louis sauce on one and small hot dogs with honey mustard on another. I offered to get her a drink, which she always considered, then requested a ginger ale. Because Norah did not make the weekly journey to Old Saybrook—having a family of her own in New Jersey—dinner was prepared by Phyllis or any number of people helping in the kitchen, including the driver and sometimes Kate herself. The meals would appear on trays—always served first, Kate placed hers on a plump pillow on her lap; mine and then Phyllis’s were set on television tables.

  There was always variety to the huge meals, but the tray at every dinner was essentially the same. We started with a large cup of soup—either beet with dill or zucchini with shallots, served hot or cold, depending on the weather—with thin Portuguese bread, which had been buttered then toasted. The main dish was either steak, curried lamb, or fish, sometimes a roast chicken, occasionally roast beef, for which Phyllis would prepare her specialty, York-shire pudding. The plate always contained some potato, usually au gratin or baked, and a vegetable alongside a few spoonfuls of boiled carrots and celery. By the time the third tray had been set down, Kate was usually halfway through her plate. Wine was always offered, but nobody ever accepted, as she and I happily sipped our Scotch-and-sodas. By the time the trays were cleared, we had usually moved on to a second Scotch. Dessert was always ice cream; and at my first dinner at Fenwick, Kate told me that her brother Dick had just cooked up an extraordinary batch of hot fudge, which we must have. Phyllis brought in the big scoops of coffee ice cream drowned in thick, bittersweet sauce, accompanied by a plate of Norah’s lace cookies with walnuts, practically paper thin. Kate always asked if I wanted “any coffee or tea or funny tea” (which meant something herbal), which neither of us ever had.

  By seven-thirty, dishes, trays, and tables had been cleared, and Phyllis had retired to the kitchen. I boldly approached the large country fireplace and placed a few more logs on, under the chatelaine’s watchful eye—“Not too close to each other,” she insisted. “Make them fight for the flame.” She asked me to throw a piece of driftwood on top, because it crackled and emitted colorful sparks. She asked about our interview in New York, if it had been satisfactory; and I said she had gone well beyond the call of duty. “Good, good,” she said, “because I didn’t want you to feel shortchanged in the Spencer department.”

  “I think we covered those films more than adequately,” I said.

  “Mmmmm,” she said in a way that would become familiar to me over the years, dropping several tones, suggesting that she could easily agree but that the issue at hand could be improved upon. I looked into the flames and, while jabbing the logs with a heavy wrought-iron poker, asked, “Was there something more you wanted to say?”

  In fact, there was. Raising her glass for me to refill, she began to walk me through her twenty-six-year relationship with Spencer Tracy, starting with their meeting on the MGM lot in 1941 and going up to his death in 1967. We had covered some of the same ground in New York. But this time she didn’t talk about the making of their movies, only about the nature of their relationship, what began as mutual admiration and quickly ripened into the most important experience in her life—“because for the first time,” she said, “I truly learned that it was more important to love than to be loved.”

  The fire died; and it was close to midnight. “Oh,” she said, looking at the clock, “I never stay up this late.” Kate directed me in the placing of the heavy screens in front of the fireplace and in locating the switches for each of the lamps in the living room.

  “Now, what do you like for breakfast?” she asked. I explained that I was very easy, a few pieces of fruit and some water. “No eggs, no cereal, no coffee?” No, honestly, just a few pieces of fruit and some water. “Fine,” she said, “you’ll find it all in the kitchen there, and whenever you’re ready, bring your tray into my room.” We walked up to my room, where she and I turned down the bed—which involved her folding and placing the comforter at the foot of the bed in such a way that one pull (should it become necessary in the middle of the night) would cover the entire bed. She plumped the pillows, checked on the towels, came over to peck me on the cheek, and said, “Nightie-night.” She closed the door and was gone.

  I was just unbuttoning my shirt when she walked right back in to drop a curious remark before leaving for the night. “You have a good memory,” she asked, “don’t you?”

  I always thought it was pretty good. But I stayed up until two scribbling page after page.

  Sleeping at Fenwick feels like drifting on a boat at sea. The wood of the house creaks gently, in harmony with the lapping tide and the distant foghorn. I awakened to the sound of gulls. After meditating in my sitting room (yes, twice a day), I padded down to the large kitchen—which held enough appliances for two households, as I would soon discover was the case. I found a tray waiting on the counter—with a grapefruit already sliced and separated, glasses and plates, and a fruitbowl—and a note saying, “See me. K.” I poured some juice from the nearest of the two refrigerators and selected some fruit and carried my tray upstairs, knocking on Hepburn’s open bedroom door.

  The master apartment was actually two rooms, with a picture-lined little hallway leading past a small bedroom suite into Kate’s h
uge room, practically as large as the living room directly beneath. The south- and east-facing windows allowed morning light to pour in. A fire crackled in the small fireplace. Unlike the other rooms I had seen, this one had red brick walls and was only trimmed in wood. It was a scene of orderly clutter, slithering books and scripts here, smooth stones and marble objects there. A rack held a dozen (mostly straw) hats; and cut flowers and her own paintings (by then, her representational though slightly fanciful style had become recognizable to me) were everywhere. Propped high in her bed on a mound of pillows, Kate—in white pajamas and a thin and faded red robe—sat reading the newspaper. Her hair was combed up and she was glowing; she wore spectacles low on her nose. A rattan chair and ottoman sat by the fire, which she instructed me to push closer to her bed, so that I could use the footrest as a table and face her while I ate. “Did you sleep all right and did you find everything you need?” she asked. I assured her I did and asked how late she had slept. “I’m usually up with the sun,” she said, “or just before.” At that hour, she explained, when the world was hers alone, she went down to the water—summer or winter, snow or shine—and swam.

  She looked at my tray and said, “That looks pretty meager. Don’t you even take coffee?” No, I said, just water and juice, which I mix with psyllium husk.

  “Psyllium husk?” she asked, in a shocked tone. “You take psyllium husk?” As I prepared to discuss this fiber’s gastric benefits, she added, “I thought I was the only one who knew about that. You know, Howard turned me on to psyllium husk forty-five years ago. I’ve taken it every day since.” I was surprised—not that she too was a regular user but that she had dropped so casually the name of Howard Hughes, her most reclusive alleged paramour.

  She had worked through her own breakfast of grapefruit and toast and dry cereal—having recently given up shredded wheat, which she would crumble, she told me, for granola with dried fruit—and was pouring the last cup of what had been an entire pot of coffee. “Are you sure you don’t drink coffee in the morning? What do you use to turn on the motor?” Actually, I explained, I meditate each morning as well as at the end of each day, and that charged me up. “Christ,” she said, rolling her eyes, “how much is there to think about?!!”

  Over the next half hour we discussed the news—she kept current in all sections of the paper, except the business pages—and talked about our options for spending the day. The agenda was so full, I kept forgetting that she was still recovering from a car accident.

  I removed the breakfast trays to the kitchen, showered, and we met in the foyer, where Kate was suiting up for a chilly morning. She was wearing some old khaki pants, a black turtleneck, and an overshirt, and was putting on a ratty, torn jacket. “What is that made of?” I asked. “Dog hair?”

  She was only partially amused. “You don’t approve of my jacket?” she asked. I said it was not a question of approving; I just wondered what it was. It turned out to be a removable lining from an old coat, one that had not belonged to her in the first place, which she somehow had walked off with twenty-five years earlier. From a barrel in the front hall, which was filled with old golf clubs and walking sticks, she grabbed a proper cane and handed me a long, narrow piece of driftwood that she thought became me.

  We went out the front drive and headed over the lawn toward the beach to the east of the house. Once we hit this rocky part of the shore, I suggested that perhaps this was not the best place to walk on an ankle that had recently been shattered. But she insisted this was the best way to strengthen it. I asked if that was a medical opinion, and she said no, “a sensible one.” We walked at a good clip, toward a far jetty of huge granite blocks which, she said, had once served as ballast on America-bound ships. We climbed atop this rugged walkway of unevenly cut boulders and began to walk out to the far lighthouse in the Sound—one built in the 1860s, she said, as a companion to the lighthouse of one century earlier several hundred yards up the river. We were about a quarter of the way out when we reached a point that was going to require a good leap from one boulder to the next. Noticing her sizing up the challenge, I said, “Why don’t we head back?” No, she insisted. She could not press on, but it was important that I get all the way out to the lighthouse, that I must go to the far side of the tower so that I could get the view looking out to the sea and then looking back to the house. She waited for me, sitting on one of the rocks, while I ran all the way out and took in the spectacular view, a strong wind slapping my face on the run back.

  Returning to the house, Kate gave me some of the history of Fenwick. It had once been a great farm but, by the early 1900s, had been subdivided, becoming a private summer enclave principally for Hartford insurance executives. Kate’s father, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, who practiced in Hartford, bought a big, Victorian-style house at the end of a cluster of summer homes, and sent his family down there for the season, joining them as often as possible. The houses surrounded what was then a private golf course and tennis courts. Everybody there knew everybody there. It was an ideal place for boating and fishing and swimming and diving, all of which Kate mastered early on. “Paradise!” Kate said, whenever she talked about Fenwick. She told me then how, as a child, she developed not only into a superb all-around athlete but also a tomboy—calling herself “Jimmy.” She pointed out the pier from which she learned to dive—swandives, backflips, halfgainers, you name it.

  “I was fearless,” she said, “. . . and lawless.” Time and again, Kate told me over the next twenty years that she and her siblings were raised with “no rules—except the golden one.” The Hepburns lived largely by their own code, which often meant pushing limits and beyond, forcing them to develop their own moral compasses. She told me how she and a friend also used to break into houses, for example, just to create mischief. When damage had been done, her father would generally take care of it, letting Kate’s own shame stand as her punishment. Her conscience was enough to inform her that she would have to make any necessary financial adjustments. For major infractions, he believed in spankings. In fact, Kate often spoke of how most “modern parents” had become afraid of their children. “Children need boundaries,” she said, in one of her few psychological observations, “so they can know how far they have to go to get beyond them.”

  Freedom fostered creativity. When the Bishop of New Mexico preached in Connecticut one Sunday about the plight of the Navajos and their need for a new Victrola, young Kate and some friends produced a stage version of Beauty and the Beast. Kate grabbed the choicest role for herself—the Beast; and the children raised seventy-five dollars for the Native Americans.

  Kate wanted to show me the rest of Fenwick on that cool but clear day. Normally, she explained, we would go on bicycle; but her foot was clearly hurting. In the large garage sat a golf cart, which I backed out and which she “backseat drove” as I tooled along some curvy roads through some high grass to the northeast corner of Fenwick, right along the river. We passed a few old houses, which she adored, and a number of large “monstrosities” that were being built in what was fast becoming an all-too-fashionable locale. Kate was not averse to the newcomers—for people pretty much stuck to themselves there, treating her like any other neighbor—nor even the building of new houses. It was the lack of good taste and common sense, building houses beyond the proportions their land dictated. She introduced me to an elderly man coming out to his mailbox, one Charlie Brainard, whom Kate had known from Hartford and Fenwick for close to seventy years. “Charlie and I remember when all this was our playground,” Kate said affectionately.

  “We’re still pretty lucky to be living here,” he said. “It’s still fun.”

  “Charlie,” she said with a toss of the head, “we’re pretty lucky to be living anywhere.” Knowing a good exit line when she heard one, she rapped her cane on the steering wheel of the golf cart, and we were off again, to see the inner lighthouse—which required our walking across other people’s property. Whether the owners were home or not did not matter. Fenwick was st
ill her playground, and she always seemed to draw strength just watching the flow of the Connecticut River. She told me that her family’s original house in Fenwick was completely destroyed by the hurricane of 1938, and that she had built the present house—larger and stronger.

  Heading back toward the Hepburn house, and then beyond, she reminded me that the river connected Fenwick to Hartford in the north. (I told her I was no stranger to the Connecticut River, as I had spent a great deal of time along its banks even farther north, in Windsor, Vermont, which had been Max Perkins’s summer and ancestral home. She seemed a little surprised—not that I knew her river, but that it extended beyond her territory.) “Republican,” she said as we drove around, “all very Republican.” She was speaking of the Hartford insurance families, her neighbors and summer friends.

  “We were always left of center,” Kate said of her family, thinking how the Hepburn brood must have appeared to the rest of the upper—middle class in Hartford. “I’m sure they considered us extremely eccentric, a tribe of wild Indians.” And with good reason:

  Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn and his wife, Katharine Houghton Hepburn, were unlike any of their peers, and they prided themselves on the differences. While both were active members of their community, they—and their six children—had always stood slightly apart.

  Tom Hepburn came from two Virginia families—the Hepburns and the Powells—both of which had suffered economically during the Civil War. His father was a poor Episcopalian minister, his mother a proper lady who believed women did not get a fair deal in life and that they should obtain proper educations. “He was very good-looking,” Kate said of her father, “and he adored women.” He had been a great athlete at Randolph-Macon College and studied medicine at Johns Hopkins.

  Katharine “Kit” Hepburn was almost two years his senior, the daughter of Caroline Garlinghouse and Alfred Augustus Houghton (pronounced HO-ten, not HOW-ten). She was, in many ways, the woman Tom’s mother might have become, had she been born a generation later. Alfred Houghton grew up in the shadow of his dynamic brother Amory (pronounced AM-ree, with a short “a”), who built the Corning Glass Company. Alfred suffered from depression; and one day, after visiting his brother, without explanation, he put a bullet through his brain—leaving a young wife and three daughters.