Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  Sunday after lunch brought the most dreaded moment in the week. That was when we packed the car for the drive back to the city—the hour in which all passengers and their baggage, as well as all perishable foodstuff and all living cut flowers, were packed into the white sedan. Even with her worsening foot, Kate would tear from room to room, gathering a shirt and pair of shoes from one bedroom, bouquets of huge lilies and tall stems of Queen Anne’s lace from the living room, jars of Peg’s stewed peaches and leftover zucchini soup, wheels of cheese, tins of cookies, loaves of bread, and coolers of meats and fruits and vegetables from the kitchen. Meantime, food was being prepared for the drive down—deviled eggs (heavy on the cayenne) and little sandwiches of ham and chicken with the crusts cut off.

  Once everything was gathered in the front hall, Kate oversaw the actual packing with military authority and surgical precision—“Coolers. Large suitcase. Small vase. Small suitcase . . .” After a good half hour of jostling and rearranging, the trunk was closed. Then came the last two commands, the same every week. “My leather bags,” would come the cry—which meant grabbing two pouches that looked as though the Pony Express had once carried them, filled with her latest writings, address books, wallet, and current mail. And then, just as we were ready to take off, “Where’s Phyllis?” Miss Wilbourn, who had taken to wandering, physically and mentally, would be herded into the front seat, where she was given a huge vase of flowers to hold all the way to New York. Kate and I would pile into the back, the leather pouches and food for the ride between us. Sometimes there’d be an additional passenger, which, of course, complicated the procedure by twenty percent. All hands still on deck—Dick, his lady friend, Virginia, any other Hepburn siblings or nephews—continued to come out front for the 1—2—1-2-3 salute, though over the next few years, the tradition would fade away for lack of enthusiasm.

  We usually stopped at a vegetable stand, then took the turnpike to New Haven, where I was delivered to my front door on St. Ronan Street. I’d go to bed early on Sunday nights—thoroughly refreshed by the weekend, too exhausted not to get a good night’s sleep, and too stuffed to want to eat for several days.

  Kate and I would speak on the phone once or twice during the week, to confirm our weekend plans. Every few weeks, however, she would say, “We’re in a rut. We’re like an old married couple. You better spend the weekend in the city.” She said there was nothing in the world better than having somebody else’s apartment in New York when the owner wasn’t around.

  During the late eighties, the friendship between Kate and Cynthia McFadden intensified. As Cynthia enjoyed a meteoric rise in her career—becoming enough of a star reporter on Court TV to be invited to join the powerful team at ABC News—she often lived upstairs on Forty-ninth Street. She and Kate also traveled a great deal together—to Los Angeles or Canada, when Kate was working on a television movie, to Boca Grande, Florida, for vacations. So it was with mixed emotions for Kate, when Cynthia fell in love and agreed to marry a man absolutely besotted with her, Michael Davies, the elegant publisher of The Hartford Courant.

  Cynthia told Kate that she dreamed one night of being married at Fenwick, and Kate made the dream come true. I can think of no greater sign of Kate’s love for her young friend and protégée than opening her private sanctuary to Cynthia and her family and friends. All the “Forty-ninth Street Irregulars” gathered for the event as well—Phyllis and Norah, of course, and also Tony Harvey, an old friend from Philadelphia named David Eichler, and me, along with Kate’s siblings and Kathy Houghton. There was a merry party the night before the wedding at the couple’s sprawling new house in Lyme, Connecticut, just across the river.

  Midday, September 9, 1989, we all gathered in the little church at Fenwick. A longtime friend and photographer of Kate, John Bryson, was there to take pictures. After the short, sweet ceremony, almost everybody walked over to the Hepburn house. Kate, in a cream-colored jacket worn over a white turtleneck shirt and white pants and white sneakers, rode. We enjoyed a beautiful late-summer garden party under a marquee at the rear of the house. Kate’s foot ached that day, but she circulated among all the guests before finding a chair. Even then, she hardly sat, as she made a point of standing for each person who approached to say hello or goodbye. When it came time to cut the five-tiered creamy cake, the bride called Kate over to share in the first piece—which she pushed into Kate’s face. Everybody laughed, mostly Kate.

  Kate was obviously happy seeing Cynthia so happy, but she was already starting to miss her company. In truth, they would continue to see almost as much of each other as before she married, but Kate knew that she could no longer be the central person in Cynthia’s life. Kate also felt that there was a great imbalance in the relationship, that the groom loved the bride more than she loved him. Kate wondered why it had been necessary to marry him.

  By five that afternoon, all the guests and the help had left. Kate and I were alone, under the tent, killing a bottle of club soda after the day’s champagne. She said she thought it was unfair for Cynthia to marry Michael, that Cynthia was more concerned just then with her career than with pleasing a husband and that that was no way to enter a marriage. The more she talked, the more I felt she was talking about her own marriage to Luddy. And the more she talked, the angrier she got. At last we just sat there, watching the sun pass over the Long Island Sound, in silence—until Kate said, “Pig.”

  “Let’s go in,” I said, putting my arm over her shoulder. She reached up and squeezed my hand tightly.

  Kate’s driver took me to Hartford, where I caught a plane to New York, in order to make a connection late that night to London, where I was going to promote my Goldwyn book. I had a few minutes at JFK, during which I called Irene Selznick. As soon as she heard my voice, she said, “Revolting.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to catch up with her mind.

  “The cake in the face. I know all about it. Absolutely revolting. Do you think she’s lost her mind?” Irene pressed me for every detail of the wedding, though she seemed to know most of them already. I flipped through the guest list in my mind to ascertain who had filled her in. To this day, I don’t know the identity of her mole. (I suspect Norah.) But I did know that after almost sixty years of friendship, everything Kate did of late irritated her. And Irene never dealt well with pain.

  Although I always found her extremely democratic in her thinking, Irene had been raised a princess. She liked—expected, even—everything in her life to be special, exclusive. (She titled her discreet memoirs, in which she kept her most revealing stories between the lines, A Private View; and she prided herself on a life full of people and experiences few could match.) For her, it wasn’t fame or wealth that conferred prestige so much as uniqueness. Accordingly, it pained her to see Kate become increasingly public.

  One day Kate got into an argument with a traffic warden on Forty-ninth Street over her momentarily double-parked car. When the altercation made the newspapers, complete with pictures, Irene was mortified. Not long after that, Irene was sick in bed, and Kate decided to bring some of Norah’s soup to her apartment at the Hotel Pierre. Irene was moved by the gesture; but, she reported to me, “She got into the elevator here looking like Raggedy Ann, and the elevator operator wouldn’t take her up. She had no idea who this ‘bag lady’ was. And Kate had to go to the manager to get permission to come up. Kate! I’m talking about Kate! Katharine Hepburn!”

  Irene was devastated. It was hard enough for her to feel she had lost her friend to a gang of younger people she didn’t know, or that Kate forged valiantly on with her career, despite her own physical maladies. Irene had come to feel excluded from Kate’s life, and she was unwilling to try to be included any longer. She decided Kate was becoming a commoner. More than once that year, Irene talked about her “noble” friend—and suddenly burst into tears.

  There was one more thing. During her last visit to East Forty-ninth Street, Irene discovered a young woman she did not know who had been staying there. At o
ne moment her eagle-eyes witnessed an exchange between the two of them that suggested a level of intimacy she had never allowed herself to believe. “Now everything makes sense,” Irene said to me. “Dorothy Arzner, Nancy Hamilton—all those women. Laura Harding. Now it all makes sense. A double-gater. I never believed that relationship with Spence was about sex.”

  “Irene, I think you might be getting carried away,” I said. “I sure get the feeling that Spencer Tracy was a pretty sexual animal, and they wouldn’t have lasted that long if sex wasn’t involved.”

  “In the beginning,” she said. “But you can’t drink as much as Spence did and maintain a relationship built on sex.”

  “But like most great relationships,” I suggested, “shouldn’t it become about something more?”

  Irene granted that was the case with Hepburn and Tracy; but she was disturbed by her new understanding of Kate’s sexual nature. “Irene,” I said, “you don’t know what goes on with all these women. I mean, Kate herself says, ‘Nobody really knows what goes on between two people when they’re alone.’”

  “That’s my point,” Irene replied. “You’re too young to have known all those other women, those single women. I knew them. I knew who they were.”

  I said that I felt that Kate was simply more comfortable with single people of either sexual persuasion, that she felt she could get closer to individuals with no other attachments, and that while I had told her of a relationship in my life that began about the time she and I met, she almost never wanted to hear about it. “I don’t like to think of you living anywhere,” Kate had said to me shortly after giving me the key to her house. “I like to think that this is your home.”

  Again, sexuality was not really the issue between Kate and Irene. It was the exclusion that troubled Mrs. Selznick—that there had been a dimension of Kate’s life that had never been revealed to her, one that Kate could now be sharing with people she had never even heard of. This realization became a turning point in their lives, the moment at which Irene, feeling hurt, began to lose interest in her friend of some sixty years.

  In 1990 Irene seemed to be suffering physically, but so far as I knew, no doctor could put his finger on a specific problem. Her body ached (“Of course it aches,” Kate would say, “she never moves in or out of that goddamned apartment!”); and her appetite was diminishing. In some ways she was happier than I had seen in more than ten years, largely because, for the first time since I had known her, she was feeling good about the lives of both her sons at the same time. Jeffrey had married a beautiful woman named Barbara who “loves him and looks after him better than he deserves”; and not only had Danny married into the Sulzberger family but, Irene observed, “They think he’s Cary Grant.” Her will, which she emended regularly as long as I knew her, was in order.

  So it came as a shock to me that summer when I received one of the most unforgettable phone calls of my life—one in which, after a few minutes of pleasantries, Irene said, “I’m calling to say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye? Where are you going?”

  “I said, ‘I’m calling to say goodbye’ . . . goodbye . . . the big trip.” It dawned on me what she was saying, but I couldn’t believe it.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked. Irene said, “Don’t I sound all right?” I replied that she sounded better than she had in ages. “That’s right,” she said, “That’s why I’m calling to say goodbye.”

  Irene explained that for the first time in years, she was happy with her life. “Everything’s in order,” she said. And because she was relatively free of pain, she didn’t want to endure “the real thing” when it came along. “Well, maybe it won’t come along,” I suggested, and she could go on in her present state for many more years. “I don’t want to go on for many more years,” she replied.

  “But don’t you want to see your children’s lives play out, and your grandson. You adore him. And what about your friends? I’ve just started this book, and I want to be able to share it with you.”

  “Darling,” she said, “I do care about your book. So we’ll keep talking to each other every few days . . . and you’ll come to see me every few months. And I’ll ask about your book, and you’ll tell me, and I know how this whole chapter of your life will end. I’m tired of watching things when I know how they’ll end.”

  I suggested that she was probably going through a kind of depression, and maybe a little time and perhaps some medication would change her attitude. “Do I sound depressed?” she asked. “I can’t remember the last time I felt this good.”

  “So why are you calling then? What can I do?” I asked. She told me that I could just carry on being her friend as though this call had never happened. She explained that she was calling five or six people, whom she named. Kate was not among them. She said we had become “special friends”; and she didn’t want me to pick up the paper one morning and suddenly read her obituary.

  “Well, you’re smart enough to know that this is a cry for help, then,” I said. “And I’m going to call somebody—a mutual friend, a doctor, your boys, Kate.”

  “No!” she shouted into the phone. “If you discuss this call with anybody, I will never speak to you again.”

  We talked for another two hours, and I reluctantly agreed to her terms. But I begged her to discuss the matter with her sons. If she didn’t, I argued, she was putting an unfair burden on her friends. She agreed.

  “So is this really goodbye then?” I asked before hanging up. “No,” she said, “—probably late September, but certainly by the first week of October.”

  I was stunned. I thought, perhaps, a doctor had given her a death sentence of some kind. A recurrence of her cancer, maybe? But Irene had said that was not the case; or, I tried to recall, had she merely issued a non-denial denial? So I played by the rules and said nothing to anybody. Our conversations with each other continued without further reference to the phone call, though I did send her missives with small comments that revealed that I had listened to everything she had told me over the years. She replied with grateful notes.

  On October 11, 1990, during a break at the Yale library, I picked up my phone messages from Los Angeles, which included an urgent call from John Goldwyn, Samuel Goldwyn’s grandson and Irene Selznick’s godson. He told me the news that Irene had been found dead that morning, wasn’t it shocking?

  Over the next few weeks, I learned of a few others who had received Irene’s farewell phone calls. She had discussed the matter with her children, I learned, though they were obviously unable to thwart her plans. She had not called Kate, who probably would have been more supportive of her exit plan than she imagined. Then I learned that Irene died under circumstances even more mysterious than I had imagined.

  There was apparently no evidence that Irene had committed suicide. I was told she had stayed up late that night, fussing with papers and making a few calls. She was found dead in her bed in the morning, with her hands folded over her chest, holding her eyeglasses, and wearing a beatific look. I have since pursued the story of exactly how Irene Selznick died, and the best answer seems to be that she, as only she could do, simply willed it.

  The memorial service was arranged for November ninth at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Kate had no intention of attending. I called her the week before and the night before and argued that I thought she would feel better if she went, that Irene had played an important role in her life. “What’s the point?” Kate asked. “She’s dead. She won’t know the difference.”

  “What about Danny and Jeffrey?” I asked. “It would mean a lot to them.” There was no arguing about that.

  I swung by the next day and her driver took us to the Ethel Barrymore before the doors inside had even opened. Kate barged in and I followed, and several ushers called out that she couldn’t enter yet, as they were still setting up. Hearing the commotion, Danny, who was producing the event, came up the aisle, told the ushers it was all right, and embraced Kate. Her eyes welled up seeing him. He asked us where we want
ed to sit, and we selected center orchestra seats. Minutes later the few hundred others were admitted. All the speakers that afternoon were concise, eloquent, funny, and on the mark, just as Irene would have insisted. She came across as a no-nonsense woman whom everybody found challenging.

  After quickly escaping to Kate’s waiting car, she said, “Don’t ever have one of those for me.” I said I was sure some tribute was inevitable. “Well, luckily I won’t have to be there for it,” she added, “and neither should you.” I suggested that Irene’s service had provided some comfort for everybody there. “Not me,” she said. “She’s dead, and nothing’s going to bring her back. Better if everybody had stayed home and thought about her for a moment, then gone on with their lives. And that’s all they should do when I die. And if anybody wants to do more than that, they can rent one of my movies.”

  A few dozen of us, Kate included, went back to Irene’s apartment. The rooms were filled with several recognizable faces from an earlier era of show business. They all focused on the foyer when Katharine Hepburn entered. While she spoke to Danny Selznick, I fixed two plates of food. After a few minutes, Kate was making motions to leave, when a short, old man made a beeline toward her, calling out, “Will you speak to me?” I could see she didn’t recognize him, and I was able to whisper “Elia Kazan” before he was standing in front of her.