Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  Kate, Irene claimed, was “growing old disgracefully.” After years of privacy and discretion, she appeared to be ubiquitous—needlessly grabbing headlines. There had been the performance she attended of Candide at which the audience had to sit on benches so uncomfortable that she felt impelled to seat herself in a more comfortable chair—on the stage! While attending a play written by her niece Katharine Houghton, Kate fainted to the floor—through no fault of her own, really: the paint fumes from the still-wet scenery simply knocked her out cold. She attended a Michael Jackson concert at Madison Square Garden as the artist’s special guest; and she was appearing in a string of what Irene called “horrible little” television movies. “Dad always said Garbo had the right idea. Get off the screen while they still love you,” Irene would add to underscore her point.

  Perhaps hardest for Irene was that Hepburn seemed to be chugging along with a new train of friends, mostly younger. Anthony Harvey, who had directed her in The Lion in Winter, was proving himself as caring a friend as he had been her director—in many ways replacing George Cukor in her life. Laura Fratti, who had coached Kate in faking her piano-playing in movies and onstage, came around with her intellectual husband and their daughter. Sally Lapiduss, who had been a stage manager while Kate was performing The West Side Waltz on the road, accompanied her back to New York as a personal assistant and became a friend of Kate’s, prior to becoming a successful television writer-producer.

  “I remember when that phone number was a state secret and only a few of us had it,” Irene recalled one night, somewhat wistfully. “Now everybody does.” Mrs. Selznick, on the other hand, was in the phone book. (“If you really don’t want to be found,” she once told me, “list yourself in the Manhattan directory.”) Somehow, Irene kept current on everybody who came in and out of Kate’s life—through Norah, I always suspected, whom she liked a great deal and who was always up for a good gab.

  “And who’s Cindy?” Irene asked me over the telephone late one night in 1983. “I’ll be honest with you,” I replied, “I haven’t met her yet.”

  “I think you better,” said Irene, “because I think she’s taken over your room at Two forty-four.”

  Cindy was, in fact, a young woman from Maine named Cynthia McFadden, who had worked her way from Bowdoin College to Manhattan, where she apprenticed to the legendary newsman Fred Friendly. She became executive producer of his Media and Society Seminars on Public Broadcasting, a stimulating series on moral, legal, and ethical issues, in which a law professor would hit fungo-like questions to a team of experts, batting them back and forth Socratic-style. A highly ambitious graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, Cynthia moved on to produce a show about books for Lewis Lapham.

  Cynthia’s introduction to Kate came through Hepburn’s sister Marion, who arranged for her to meet Kathy Houghton and Kate herself. A deep friendship quickly developed. One night I called from Los Angeles and caught Kate in the middle of what sounded like a rousing dinner. “You should be here,” she said. “I even have a dinner companion for you, a brilliant young girl. She has big beautiful eyes, beautiful skin, and she wears her hair—why, she wears her hair piled high and tied in a knot like—”

  “Tell him,” I heard a young voice shout across the room, “I look like you.”

  “Well, yes,” said Kate, as though realizing it for the first time, “I suppose she does look like me.”

  On my next visit to New York, I met Cynthia at dinner and found her as attractive as Kate had said—though not quite the lookalike I had expected. Kate said she was sorry my room was currently occupied, would I mind using another? I had, in fact, already made arrangements to stay with another friend across town. Over the next few years, Cynthia’s friendship with Kate blossomed, as did her career. She was extremely attentive to Kate, treating her with respect and tenderness. This infusion of young blood—a woman starting out on her career in Manhattan and making Kate’s home her own—had an obviously tonic effect.

  While Kate still preferred to arrange most of our dinners for just the two of us, we always had fun when Cynthia or Kathy Houghton or Tony Harvey came over. One night Kate and Cynthia and I went to the home of Nancy Hamilton, a longtime friend from the theater. We were celebrating Cynthia’s having taken the New York bar exam that day. After dinner, Nancy—a songwriter, among many talents—wanted to play a record of Kirsten Flagstad singing Wagner. Kate could not have been less interested. She tried to get Nancy Hamilton to turn off the machine and return to conversation, but Nancy would not stop the music. Kate fired a desperate look my way, suggesting that I do something. At the close of an aria, I just sat down at the piano and started playing—making it impossible for our hostess to ignore me. The first song that came to mind was “Coco,” a number Kate had performed several hundred times. After playing it from start to finish, Kate looked puzzled and said, “Play that again,” which I did. Looking even more puzzled, she asked, “What is that song? I know I’ve heard it!”

  I laughed until I realized she wasn’t kidding. “Heard it!” I said. “You sang it four hundred times! It’s ‘Coco.’”

  “Oh, Christ!” she said. “I knew there was a reason I couldn’t remember it. I couldn’t stand that song.”

  Cynthia was always interested in meeting new people; and she tended to make Kate more social, even less averse to appearing in public. Besides accepting the occasional dinner invitation, Hepburn increasingly found herself “on the town” during the day, occasionally performing unnecessary tasks. One day we had to find the perfect carrot peeler. Kate’s driver took us to three different stores before we found an emporium selling kitchen utensils that had the exact size and model she wanted. I was fascinated to watch a dozen shoppers in that store near Union Square all suddenly develop an interest in carrot peelers and to see Kate’s way of noticing them without being noticed.

  While Kate and Phyllis went to the cash register to pay for the item—Kate never carried cash, just a checkbook; Phyllis was there to pull out a roll of bills from a change purse of household money—I lingered with the crowd. Eleven out of twelve shoppers bonded in excitement—“Is it really her? She still looks great. She’s my grandmother’s favorite; she’s my mother’s favorite. She’s my favorite.” One severely tailored, middle-aged matron said, “I always thought she overacted.” I reported the results of my straw poll to Kate, who said I should always tell people she was my aunt, so they would be polite enough not to criticize her, at least in our presence.

  Kate was back to seeing every show on Broadway; and she often asked if we might duck out to the movies, though little interested her there. She avoided action pictures and couldn’t believe that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were international stars. “I don’t understand him,” she said of the latter after we had seen a preview of one of his movies. As I tried to explain the worldwide appeal of the Austrian-born bodybuilder, she said, “No, I mean when he speaks—I don’t understand him!” She found most of the Merchant-Ivory pictures “a bore,” though she delighted in Vanessa Redgrave’s performance in their production of The Bostonians—or any role she ever saw her in. She had flipped for John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and she greatly admired Sally Field in Norma Rae and Places in the Heart. She liked Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast and again in Working Girl. She said the new star of that picture, Melanie Griffith, reminded her of Judy Holliday but feared her career would fade fast. “There’s something lethargic about her,” she explained, “where Judy was full of energy.” She had zero tolerance for Woody Allen movies, though she thought The Purple Rose of Cairo captured the flavor of the RKO movies of her vintage. After seeing Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza, she predicted her becoming “the next big movie star,” the first she had “seen in years.” Meryl Streep was her least favorite modern actress on screen—“Click, click, click,” she said, referring to the wheels turning inside her head.

  Glenn Close was her least favorite actress on stage. “She’s got these big, fat, ugly
feet,” Hepburn told me upon returning from a matinee of Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing, in which Close had opened on Broadway opposite Jeremy Irons. “And she goes around barefoot in the play and almost ruins the whole thing.” She thought Irons gave a spectacular performance, though she didn’t think he was a well-trained actor. “It’s a personality performance,” she said, “all tricked up with mannerisms and charm—like me.” On the other hand, she admired Irons’s wife, Sinead Cusack, who was in New York around that time performing with Derek Jacobi and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Much Ado About Nothing and Cyrano de Bergerac. Hepburn thought she was “the real McCoy—one of the most exciting actors I’ve ever seen.”

  Glenn Close’s feet notwithstanding, Kate insisted I see The Real Thing. She thought Stoppard was a cold playwright but that this was the most emotional work he had written. She wangled two house seats for a Wednesday matinee, one for me and one for “your friend Irene.” (Irene would later assert that Irons’s performance was one of the three greatest performances she had ever seen, ranking alongside Brando’s in Streetcar. The third great performance she would later cite was John Lithgow’s in Requiem for a Heavyweight, which had been adapted from a Rod Serling teleplay for a short-lived Broadway run.)

  In addition to the tickets, Kate invited us back to her house for dinner that night. The invitation thrilled Irene and led to an amusing evening. I sat back and listened as these two old friends hop-scotched across a half century of show-business acquaintances, all the obvious Hollywood names plus some mutual Broadway friends—producer Hugh “Binky” Beaumont, agent Audrey Wood, Lillian Hellman, Tallulah Bankhead . . . “and do you remember how Myron was always betting on that goddamned horse named Malicious?” Irene asked. “Always a long shot and it paid off every time.”

  The next morning, Kate said it had been nice to see Irene, but “all she talks about are aches and pains and dead people.” Irene said it had been nice to see Kate, but “you’re the only one of her friends that I can stand.” Although she hadn’t met Cynthia McFadden, she didn’t like the sound of her. She bristled at Kate’s extreme interest in the young woman’s career. She occasionally asked longingly about my visits to Fenwick, wondering, “Who makes the beds?” I said everyone seemed to make his or her own . . . and if I was ever slow about it, Kate would just march in and make it. “That’s what I was afraid of,” said Irene. She returned only once more in her life to 244 East Forty-ninth Street.

  I finished my Goldwyn biography in the late spring of 1988, a rocky moment in the history of my publishers, Alfred A. Knopf. The firm’s longtime standard-bearer, and my editor, Robert Gottlieb, had recently decided to leave the publishing house upon being offered the editorship of The New Yorker. A brilliant gentleman from London, Sonny Mehta, replaced him, and my book was assigned to one of Gottlieb’s protégées to edit. I handed over the twelve hundred—page manuscript on which I had worked for some eight years and made a plea few editors ever hear: “Please,” I begged, “cut anything you can out of this manuscript. I feel it’s about four hundred pages too long, so if anything even makes you pause for a moment, please mark it as material I might cut.”

  Four months later the editor returned the manuscript to me—shorter by twelve pages. As she put the book into production, I sent this “edited” version to Irene. A day later she called to say, “You’ve sent me the wrong pages. I’ve got one of your rough drafts.” After I explained that this was the edited version, Irene said that was unacceptable. She strongly felt that the material was all there but that much of it was out of proportion. If that was the best Knopf was going to do with my book, she said, she would just have to edit the book herself. For the next ten days, she did just that, working it over word by word. Twice a day she would call outraged by something. “Zsa Zsa Gabor’s in your book, but no Pearl White!” she screamed one day, reminding me that I had left out the silent screen’s most famous cliff-hanging heroine. Her edited version had marginalia everywhere—all perfectly precise. When she had reached a paragraph I had written about Jon Hall, the star of Goldwyn’s production of The Hurricane, for example, she simply wrote in the margin: “Sonny Tufts,” a reference to a second-string leading man who also didn’t warrant much attention.

  The Pierre was featuring a special chef that week she was playing editor, and Irene recommended that we sample his food one night in her apartment while discussing the manuscript. Over turbot with an intense lobster sauce, she pointed out stories that ran on for pages that should be condensed to paragraphs, paragraphs that should become sentences, and sentences that should be two-word mentions. When we reached the pages I had written about a terrible Goldwyn picture called A Song Is Born, I spoke of simply cutting most of it. Upon hearing that, Irene grabbed a piece of bread out of my hand and mopped her plate clean of the remaining sauce. “What made that sauce so good?” she asked rhetorically. Before I could speak, she provided her own answer: “Reduction.”

  The next morning Irene called to say that she had just called “his nibs”—Bob Gottlieb, whom she looked upon as a third son—and “gave him hell.” She suggested I rework the draft as quickly as possible and send the revised pages to him, even though he had already assumed his duties at The New Yorker.

  Irene’s comments helped me reduce the manuscript by three hundred pages. Then Bob Gottlieb moonlighted for a few days, living up to his legendary reputation and finding another hundred pages on top of that. With the book at last on the production schedule, I began searching for my next topic.

  An editor at Knopf introduced me to the executrix of the Tennessee Williams estate—Maria Grenfell, Lady St. Just—who was then actively searching for a Williams biographer. This was a brass ring in nonfiction circles. Arguably America’s greatest playwright, (the debate still rages between pro-Williams and pro-O’Neill camps), Williams left a massive collection of unpublished material; and a well-researched, well-written life story of the man had not yet appeared. The Lady St. Just was a colorful character—reputedly Williams’s model for Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and a former actress who had married a Morgan Bank heir. Upon her longtime friend Tennessee’s death, she was left to oversee his literary matters. “I remember when she was working the streets,” Irene told me when I discussed my having dinner with her.

  Our meeting was such a triumph that the next day the Lady St. Just literally pulled me by the hand to two different law offices to meet her co-executors and to arrange for my securing the necessary rights and permissions to the Williams archives. A lovely man and friend of mine named Lyle Leverich had been researching a Williams biography for years, working from authorization by Williams himself. But the Estate was trying to block him at every turn, including their ultimate threat that they would prohibit his quoting any Williams material. I figured I might be influential with the Estate in allowing Leverich to publish his work, knowing that I would have access to material he did not have and that my book would be published at least a decade later. After everything seemed to be arranged for me to write the official biography—all too quickly, I thought, especially after one of the attorneys showed me Leverich’s authorization and commented, “it’s not exactly the wine-soaked cocktail napkin Maria says it is”—I went to the Hotel Pierre bursting with my good news. “Congratulations!” Irene said upon learning of the offer. “Now run like hell.”

  I didn’t have to sell the producer of A Streetcar Named Desire on the importance of my subject. But she felt compelled to tell me that my writing such a book would be like “entering a snake pit.” She suggested that I would never survive working with “that woman”—Maria St. Just—and that Tennessee Williams’s affairs were as big a “cesspool” after his death as they had been during his lifetime. I was happy to have somebody with whom I could discuss all aspects of the story before I signed a decade of my life away; and I made all the compelling counterarguments about the drama of Williams’s life. Irene listened to my earnest oral argument, staring at me through her glasses. At last, she closed the
debate by saying, “Lousy third act.”

  Before I left her that night, she urged me to discuss the subject with “your friend Kate.” Hepburn had, after all, played two of Tennessee Williams’s juiciest parts—Violet Venable and Amanda Wingfield; and he had written another, Hannah Jelkes in Night of the Iguana, for her. I stopped by 244 the next day. “I am afraid,” Kate said, “Irene’s right. Tennessee’s life was a nightmare, a total nightmare; and I don’t think you’ll ever wake up. You really don’t want to spend years with those people, his people.” Kate had just read the finished manuscript of Goldwyn—for which she unsolicitedly called my publishers and gave them an advertising blurb—and said, “That man was a pirate, but there was lift to his life. I didn’t much care when he died in real life, but I did when he died at the end of the book. I don’t think you’ll feel the same about Tennessee. His life was one long suicide. He dragged people down in the gutter with him, and I’m afraid he’ll drag you too.”

  I rethought. But even before I could express my doubts to anyone, the Lady St. Just—of whom many joked she was “none of the three”—suddenly announced that she was rescinding her offer because she had heard that I was “incompetent.” Case closed. Once again, I was casting my net in the biographical waters.

  At dinner one night Kate asked if I had any new prospects. I told her that three different publishers, who had heard of our friendship, said I should write about her. “Yes, you should,” she said. “But not while I’m alive.”

  I continued to put feelers out, and told the editor I had been assigned at Knopf that I was actively looking for a subject, another great American cultural figure but—because I had written about Perkins and Goldwyn—not somebody from the worlds of publishing or film. When she suggested Italian film director Luchino Visconti, I felt free to roam.