Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  Before the dishes were cleared, Kate suggested we all move upstairs again. It was a little after eight. As we paraded up the narrow staircase, with Kate and Michael bringing up the rear, I heard him ask if he could speak to her privately. Cynthia, Kathy, and I returned to the rear living room, while Kate and Michael entered the front living room and stood by the windows overlooking Forty-ninth Street, their heads bowed down in serious conversation. Every now and then we could hear Kate say, in a low but firm voice, “Absolutely not. I’m terribly sorry, Michael, but absolutely not.” Within minutes, they had rejoined us, but Michael did not sit down. He said his goodbyes, and we all followed him to the front door, where a driver-bodyguard stood waiting. He ushered Michael from the door into a waiting vehicle, a television repair truck with no rear windows. They zoomed off into the night.

  Kate closed the door and looked at all of us assembled and cried, “Whiskey! Norah, get the whiskey!”

  Upstairs we poured our nightcaps, and Cynthia asked what had happened in the front living room. Kate explained that Michael had wanted a photograph of the two of them. Kate had said she would send him a picture of herself. No, Michael said, he wanted one of the two of them—and he had a photographer with him, who had been sitting all night in the television repair truck. “Absolutely not,” Kate had told him. This was meant to be a private dinner among friends, not a stop on his publicity junket. She thought Michael understood, until he had asked, “Do you know Greta Garbo?”

  Kate said that she did know Garbo, but they had not seen each other in years. “Oh,” he asked, “do you think you could introduce me to her?”

  “Absolutely not, Michael . . .”

  It was nine o’clock. Kate downed her drink and said, “I’m exhausted. I can’t recall a more peculiar night in my life, and I’m going to bed.” Which she did.

  I said, “I’m hungry. I’m going somewhere to eat some meat.” We all said our goodnights. I was staying that trip with a friend on the Upper West Side; and on my way to his apartment, I went to the nearest pay phone, where I called another writer-friend, whom I knew ate late. I asked if we could meet for a hamburger somewhere. He suggested a place within walking distance of each of us. On my way, I saw the strangest thing—

  During my walk of five or six blocks, I saw four different limousines cruising the avenues of New York, each with a back window open, enough to allow a glimpse of a young, light-skinned African-American wearing sunglasses, and a hand crooked out the window, wearing a sequined glove.

  Sworn to secrecy, having vowed never to reveal the details of my dinner during Hepburn’s lifetime, I said little during my second dinner that night. That didn’t matter. I could hardly shut my friend up. He was bursting with tales from his girlfriend, a journalist, who had covered Michael Jackson’s concert the preceding night at Giants Stadium in New Jersey . . . and she actually went backstage and saw him!

  I called Kate the following afternoon, and, without any prompting, she said, “If you show me the pages you wrote, I’ll show you mine.” They were pretty similar, except she had forgotten the butter in the soup.

  In fact, Kate had been writing fragments of her life for years—usually in the morning, in bed, over her pot of coffee—scribblings on a long yellow tablet that got typed by a secretary and filed away. In 1987 she published a short, lavishly illustrated book, The Making of The African Queen or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind. It became a bestseller, received glowing reviews, and encouraged her to keep writing. It also became a satisfying way to fill an hour or two of each day.

  Although she seldom indulged in nostalgia with most of her friends, Kate liked me to pepper her with questions about the past, as though I were interviewing her. A week or two after we had talked about a certain film or person, I would discover she had composed a vignette on the subject—usually written in short staccato phrases, much like the way she spoke—very often with dashes in lieu of standard punctuation. Publishers—especially Knopf, which had done so well with her first book—were eager for a second volume from her. But she was reluctant. She didn’t fancy herself as a writer; and to her, it seemed more than ever like throwing in the towel on her acting career, which was still going strong.

  An agent without much experience had worked her way into Hepburn’s life and arranged for several publishers to court her at East Forty-ninth Street. When I asked Kate why she chose to do business with somebody so new to the game, she simply said, “I’ve always been attracted to mutts. And if I don’t help her, I don’t know how she’ll pay her rent.” I did my best to trumpet the merits of my new publishers, Putnam’s; and Phyllis Grann was thrilled to have a private audience with Hepburn. In the end, Bob Gottlieb, who lived across the private garden in Turtle Bay, eased her into signing a multimillion-dollar contract with Knopf, though he left the company to edit The New Yorker weeks later.

  In the autumn of 1990, I prepared to take up residence in New Haven so that I could work my way through the Lindbergh archives. Kate and I were both delighted by Yale’s proximity to Old Saybrook, not forty-five minutes up the coast. She suggested that I live at Fenwick and commute; but I said I could spend the travel time more constructively on campus each day, and that I would rather save Fenwick for the weekends, when the Manuscripts and Archives division of the library was closed.

  Then Kate had another brainstorm. The weekend before I intended to start work, her driver took us to New Haven, where we dropped in unannounced on a cousin of hers, Edie Hooker, who lived in a stately house on the choicest street in the city. “Edie lives alone in this big, beautiful house,” Kate explained on the way down. “And she has a guest apartment as well. It’s perfect for you.” It sounded as though it was, but I asked, “Shouldn’t we tell Edie Hooker we’re coming to visit her?” Kate told me not to worry and to leave all the talking to her. “You just stand there,” she instructed me, “and try not to look like a homicidal maniac.”

  We pulled into Edie Hooker’s driveway, and Kate stood there yelling, “Hey! Hey! Edie, come out here.” Out trotted a handsome elderly woman, who was surprised and delighted to see her famous cousin. “Now, Edie,” she explained, “this is Scott Berg, and he’s about to start writing an important book, and he has to live in New Haven a while, and you’re alone down here; and I thought—”

  Edie interrupted her to say that, in fact, she had a guest apartment, but that she had recently rented it out to a very nice young couple. “Well, I don’t suppose we can get rid of them then,” Kate mused.

  Hepburn suggested we tour the house. “Now look, Edie, this place is just too big for you to be rattling around alone—” Poor Edie tried to explain that she was very happy living alone and that her tenants were close by in an emergency. At last, she had no alternative but to offer me a room. I thanked her for her kindness but said that I would like to look for a place a little closer to the library, and that if I couldn’t find anything, I would be most grateful to accept her generous “offer.” Fortunately, the next day, I found exactly what I was looking for, a small apartment within a huge house on the same street as Edie Hooker, and an easier walk to the campus.

  Most Fridays for the next two years, I’d leave the library a little early and catch a commuter train—“The Shore Line East”—to Old Saybrook, where Kate and her driver would meet me at the station. Sometimes she’d even stand at the platform waiting for me to disembark. We’d make a stop or two in town—“Do you want an ice cream cone at James’s?”—before crossing the causeway to Fenwick. Then we’d sometimes take a swim and meet up by the fire at six for drinks and dinner. (Although I stopped entering the water from the end of September until May, Kate continued to take her sunrise swims in the dead of winter, trotting across even snow-covered sand.)

  The clocks at Fenwick seemed for the first time that year to be winding down. Phyllis, by then in her late eighties, had slowed considerably, physically and mentally. Not long after sunset, I would usually set up the dinner tables bef
ore the living room fire and help serve her and Kate. Eight-thirty became a late night.

  “Would you like to read something?” Kate would ask on her way upstairs practically every weekend of my first year in New Haven. Then she’d produce the latest batch of writing she was working over. I was instructed to make notations—“Be tough, but not too tough”—in pencil. I usually worked the pages over until eleven then left my marked-up copy outside her bedroom door. I rewrote none of her sentences. For the most part, I simply posed questions, urging her to fill in more details. “More milk, Bossy,” was a comment I jotted in many a margin. By the time we met again in her bedroom for breakfast in the morning, she had done most of her rewrites and we’d discuss those comments she had not understood. Within a year, there were enough finished pieces to fill a book—Me,which Knopf prepared to publish in the fall of 1991.

  Almost every Saturday for the two years I lived in Connecticut, we would drive to Kate’s sister Peg Perry, who lived upstate. We’d leave late in the morning, sometimes drop in on her brother Bob outside Hartford, leaving time to arrive at Peg’s cow farm for lunch. Phyllis would sit in the front seat of the car and invariably fall fast asleep within minutes. “She’s amazing,” Kate would say, incapable of understanding how anybody could sleep in the middle of a day. “She has absolutely nothing going on in that head of hers.”

  The youngest of Kate’s siblings, Peg was both the toughest and the tenderest—and perhaps the prettiest of the Hepburns as well. She wasn’t glamorous but had a natural strength of character reflected in her strong face, the weathered look of a woman who had worked outdoors much of her life, as she had. She graduated from Bennington College, married, and raised three sons and a daughter. One of her sons had long been missing in action in Southeast Asia. She is, if you can imagine, the most opinionated of all the Hepburns. And the minute you try to slot her into one category or another she’ll surprise you with an exception to her own rules. She thinks the world has become overly permissive—from parents mollycoddling their children to teachers losing authority; she believes in the right to bear arms. She can’t stand bleeding-heart liberals or dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. She truly believes in justice for all.

  Our lunches at Peg’s rectangular dining room table usually included a friend or two of Peg’s as well as a son or grandchild who might drop in. The meal was always a very hot macaroni and cheese pulled right out of the oven, usually some cold meat, some freshly baked bread, salad, and cold milk. Kate was always served first and had usually cleaned her plate by the time the last of us was getting started. Then we’d move on to dessert and hot coffee, and even hotter discourse from Peg, who would rail about the public library getting upset with her for shoveling the snow from the walk because the man hired to do the job didn’t do a good enough job or about the town elders who wouldn’t provide a tax incentive for somebody’s business, thus driving dozens of jobs to another town. Like Kate, Peg always saw the humor in the situation. Her bark is worse than her bite. “But you don’t want to cross her,” Kate told me after one heated discussion, “because there’s always the possibility she’ll shoot you!”

  After lunch we’d drive back to Fenwick, often stopping along the way at a general store or cheese shop or museum. One day Kate, Phyllis, and I drove through New Britain and made our way to the Museum of American Art, a lovely small collection, with some Marsden Hartleys, which Hepburn especially liked. Upon entering the small museum, we all signed the guestbook, even Kate. On our way out, I noticed that the page with our signatures had already been ripped out of the book by some souvenir collector. When I got into the car, I reported this fact. “Oh,” Kate said to me, “I had no idea you were so famous!”

  Phyllis began to sputter. “Oh, no, why you’re the famous one. They wanted your signature.”

  “Yes, dear. Thank you.”

  Every now and then we’d go to Fairfield, where the legendary agent Audrey Wood—who had nurtured the careers of playwrights from Tennessee Williams to Lanford Wilson—was in a nursing home, in a coma. She and Kate had not been great friends, but Kate always respected her. “This is a terrible irony,” Kate would say, “because this woman believed in euthanasia. I heard her talk about it many times. She was desperate not to be allowed to linger. But all that was before she had made all the proper arrangements for herself. And so she had a stroke and went into this coma.” For years Kate made a point of popping in to visit, unannounced—just to see that she was being cared for. She would check to see that the floors and bathroom were clean, that Audrey’s hair was washed and combed, and that her fingernails were clipped. Satisfied, she would depart with as little fuss as she had entered.

  I don’t remember a single day with Kate that she wasn’t reading. She was always in the middle of a big book—historical nonfiction and biographies her favorites; and there was always a pile of new novels within easy reach from her bed in New York and Fenwick. She became intrigued enough with Derek Humphry’s Final Exit, a detailed account of how to take one’s own life, to have two copies, one on each bedstand. “You’re too young for this,” she said upon giving me a copy, “but everybody should read it.” She loved to talk about books and pass her favorite current selections along to me. I could always tell how intensely she had liked each book by how much chocolate I found smeared on its pages.

  Sundays we usually ate an early lunch. Kate went through a succession of drivers in the years I knew her, all remarkably kind and slightly eccentric men (three of whom died young) who doubled as cooks at Fenwick on the weekends. We all pitched in around the house; and it irritated her if a visitor ever asked, “What can I do to help?” Nothing was always her reply. If you didn’t have the initiative and know-how simply to muck in, she would rather have you out of her way.

  When it came time to make lunch, I had become the official grape-slicer for the chicken salad—“Vertically! Vertically! They don’t taste the same cut across,” she continued to admonish. Phyllis made the toast, which had to be buttered before placed under the broiler; and Kate liked to make fried eggs for everybody, punching a hole out of a piece of bread with the top of a glass, then placing the bread in a frying pan and cracking the egg into the center. Dick would wander in and out, usually in some long underwear, preparing a roast, some confection, and a huge boiling pot full of anything else lying around the kitchen. Neither Kate nor Dick ever trespassed to the other’s side of the kitchen—except at night, when she’d check to see that he’d turned off all the burners on the stove. “One day he’s going to blow this house up,” she’d say on the one out of four times she’d find a flame still burning. The rest of us were always encouraged to hunt and gather from his sector—a turkey drumstick or a slice of cake as an appetizer to the meal being prepared on Kate’s side of the kitchen.

  The unspoken rivalry between Dick and Kate stretched as far back as childhood and increased as her fame grew. Any hope of restoring balance in their relationship was lost forever when, in the early forties, Dick wrote a play about a multimillionaire courting an actress. While it was clearly written as farce, it was plainly based on Howard Hughes and Kate. She resented the intrusion; and the entire family stood behind her. Dick claimed that it contained some of his best writing and that he intended to get the play produced. Only after all the Hepburns came down on him did he back off. In so doing, he had established a foundation of resentment toward his sister, one sound enough to make her feel responsible for his livelihood. That he was never too proud to accept her charity only furthered his resentment.

  One weekend Dick gave me one of his later plays to read, a work that periodically caught the eye of a producer. It was a witty account of an eccentric New England family that made me see he could have had a playwrighting career, had he actively pursued it. “The theater is tough,” Kate said, accepting only a small measure of responsibility for standing in his way; “but that play about Howard and me was cheap exploitation and would not have made his career. It would have been a stunt. If Dick really wan
ted the career thing badly enough, he should have written another play just as good, and another one after that.” He never did.

  While privacy among the Hepburns was, of course, held in high regard, one afternoon I came into my room and found Kate rifling through my overnight bag. I had clearly caught her red-handed. All she could do was smile sheepishly—for a moment. “Did you find anything interesting?” I asked. “No,” she said, stuffing my clothes and some papers back into the bag. “Not a goddamned thing!” Except for a box of chocolates—from which she took a piece of almond bark, which she ate as she walked out the door.

  There were lots of rules at Fenwick, but they were changed as often as they were broken. One day we were preparing a big fruit salad; and while peeling apples, I dropped a piece on the floor. I picked it up to throw in the garbage, and Kate yelled, “What are you doing? It’s perfectly fine.” Without even washing it, she threw it into the bowl. “Oh yes,” Phyllis added. “My father used to say a man eats a peck of dirt before he dies.” A few weeks later, I lost my grip on a carrot and—against my better judgment—I tossed it into the bowl. “Oh my God!” Kate shrieked. “Do you think we’re animals around here?” She fished it out of the bowl and chucked it into the garbage along with several leaves of lettuce she felt I had also contaminated. “What about the peck of dirt a man eats before he dies?” I asked. “Oh,” said Kate, “that’s one of those utterly ridiculous English expressions.” Every week there was a new policy regarding bed linens, as I prepared to change mine every Sunday morning. Sometimes she’d insist I leave the sheets on until my next visit, other times she’d declare, “We change all the sheets in this house every few days.” (She often expressed strong sentiments against anything but white sheets, but, periodically, light blue would appear on my bed.) In any case, Kate almost always took part in making the bed; and I never saw anybody derive as much pleasure from a good hospital corner as she did.