She strode out in a black pantsuit and clogs, as the stunned crowd rose as one. Hepburn quieted the audience and thanked them for their moving welcome. “I’m also very happy that I didn’t hear anyone call out, ‘It’s about time,’ ” she said. Then she added, “I’m living proof that a person can wait forty-one years to be unselfish.” She was there to present the Irving Thalberg Award to her old friend Lawrence Weingarten, who had produced Adam’s Rib. After they walked offstage, Hepburn left the winner to face the press alone, as she disappeared into a waiting limousine, leaving as suddenly as she had arrived. Hepburn sightings in Los Angeles and New York—playing tennis with Alex Olmedo at the Beverly Hills Hotel, shoveling snow on East Forty-ninth Street, theater-going on and off Broadway—became less uncommon but no less thrilling.
By the 1980s most of the male movie stars of Hepburn’s generation had died, and the few remaining female stars of her vintage had fallen from sight. A tremor—mostly her head, sometimes her hands—had become increasingly pronounced; her voice quavered; and skin cancers periodically erupted on her face—“too much time in the sun. No good for redheads.” But her strength and energy had not noticeably diminished.
She and her friend Noel Willman, who had directed her in a few plays, drove down to Wilmington, Delaware, one day to catch a performance of a play called On Golden Pond, by Ernest Thompson. Hepburn found it a “true” depiction of an elderly married couple, coping with the difficulties of old age. Although she found the actors at least a generation too young for the parts they were playing, she thought it would make a good movie.
So did Jane Fonda. She was intrigued by the relationship between the incommunicative and undemonstrative father and his daughter, who had long sought his approval. It mirrored her relationship with her legendary father, Henry. Not until Jane’s production company put the film together and the director, Mark Rydell, introduced them, did the two mythic older stars meet.
“It was strange,” Kate said of being cast in the film. “It seemed as though I was the mother Jane had fantasized having . . . and if her father and I could make everything all right in the movie, somehow things would be all right in her life. There was certainly a whole layer of drama going on in the scenes between her and Hank, and I think she came by to watch every scene he and I had together. There was a feeling of longing about her.”
By the end of the shoot—during which Hepburn’s character, Ethel Thayer, tries to instill some Yankee virtues into her unforgiving daughter and unyielding husband—Hepburn was full of admiration for Jane Fonda. “We all had a good time making the picture,” Kate said. “It was fun.” And it allowed Kate to show how spunky she still was—diving fully clothed into Squam Lake, singing and dancing an old campfire song, perfusing her failing husband with love and wisdom. She walked away from the production thinking how hard it must have been for Jane, being the daughter of this famous figure who was so remote. “Hank Fonda was the hardest nut I ever tried to crack,” Kate said. “But I didn’t know any more about him after we had made the picture than I did at the beginning. Cold. Cold. Cold.”
At the start of production, Hepburn had given Fonda one of Spencer Tracy’s favorite hats; and at the end, the actor had reciprocated by presenting her with a painting he had done of three hats, Trary’s in the middle. Kate was touched by the gift—until she realized he had made a print of the picture and given dozens of them away, to publicists and friends of friends. “Strange man,” she said. “Angry at something. And sad.”
Hepburn had her hand in the script—more, I suspect, than she let on. She turned suddenly modest one evening talking about the speech in which Ethel tells her husband that he’s her “knight in shining armor,” and that he’s got to “go, go, go.” When I suggested that it sounded like “pure Hepburn,” she immediately spoke of all the hard work the writer had done, defining those characters. Ernest Thompson won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay that year. So did Henry Fonda, his first, which his daughter accepted while he watched on television from his bed, only a few months before he died. Breaking her own precedent, Katharine Hepburn won as well—for the fourth time.
By then, Hepburn was already appearing in a new work by Ernest Thompson, a play called The West Side Waltz. It was another gerontological study, a woman refusing to bow out of life gracefully. She had hoped somebody might buy the screen rights for her, to costar with either Elizabeth Taylor or Doris Day; but nobody did. Instead, she committed herself to a film originally titled The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley. Kate said the writer had literally thrown the script over her fence and she had fallen in love with it—a black comedy about an old woman who hires a hit man (played by Nick Nolte) to bump off her dying friends. Few beyond Hepburn saw the humor.
Over the next few years, Kate continued to lose friends and acquaintances as well as longtime “rivals” from the thirties (most of whom she barely knew, if at all)—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, Mae West, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck. Later Garbo, Dietrich, Greer Garson, Sylvia Sidney, and Claudette Colbert died. Kate’s first great friend from the theater, Laura Harding, lived an increasingly sedentary life on her estate in New Jersey, which irritated Kate as much as it bored her.
In what proved to be his final months, Kate restruck a warm relationship with Luddy, then a widower and suffering from inoperable cancer. For a while he accepted his first wife’s open invitation to Fenwick; but when the trips became too difficult, she visited him at his own bedside. “I tried to do everything for Luddy that I possibly could, knowing I could never repay him for all the support he had given me,” Kate told me two decades after his death. “Unimaginable—my life, had it not been for Luddy. He was heaven-sent.”
More than ever, Hepburn cultivated her newer friendships. Cynthia McFadden divorced her husband and, after joining the ABC News team, always made time for Kate; Tony Harvey moved , from the city to the Hamptons, but visited regularly at Turtle Bay and Fenwick and even got her to call on him on Long Island. David Eichler often made the trip north from Philadelphia for dinner and the night. She always got a charge out of seeing Martina Navratilova, one of whose tennis racquets she proudly displayed in the living room; and she always seemed buoyed by gossip columnist Liz Smith, despite her being engaged in what Kate called “a moronic profession.”
Kate also found herself making time for people she normally would never have tolerated. She would invite Corliss Lamont, a highly intelligent but rather ponderous old author and philosopher, to dine anytime he called, even though he would sit there for fifteen minutes at a time without uttering a word. Kate had gone two decades without speaking to Garson Kanin because of his chatty book Tracy and Hepburn; but even he won his way back into her good graces, simply because he was available. “Oh,” she said wearily the day after their reunion, “I’m too old to be carrying grudges.” But her dance card was no longer filled every night. As often as not, Kate and Phyllis ate dinner alone, in increasing silence.
Into her eighties, Hepburn remained professionally active. She continued to make movies for television, which gradually deteriorated in quality, though not necessarily in popularity. She participated in documentary films—sometimes as the subject, just as often to contribute anecdotes about others, be it Spencer Tracy or George Stevens.
She tinkered for years on a screenplay titled Me and Phyllis, scenes of their lives together. It climaxed in the car crash in which Kate almost lost her foot and Phyllis her life. One night in the living room on Forty-ninth Street, Kate performed the entire script for me. She captured the dialogue between the two of them in funny detail; and she brought me close to tears a few times in revealing her gratitude for having had somebody so dear as Phyllis in her life. Beyond that, it was a strange piece of work that was meant to be a quasi-documentary, with Hepburn reenacting scenes from her own life. She asked me what I thought of it and how she might improve it. For a moment, I felt like William Holden stumbling into Norma Desmond’s parlor in Sunset Boulevard. “Now, remember,” she said, bef
ore I could speak, “don’t spoil an old woman’s delusions.”
“Well, it certainly played great tonight,” I said, “but do you think it would be as funny on the screen? I mean, wouldn’t it be strange?”
“Well, you laughed, and I’ll be playing me again.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but you were performing the whole thing as a kind of reading. It’ll be different if you’re staging it for film, which literalizes everything. Besides,” I said, “who could possibly play Phyllis?”
“Quite right,” Phyllis interjected. “Nobody could possibly play me.”
Kate asked for casting suggestions; and I proposed Mona Washbourne and Mildred Natwick, both of whom had some of Phyllis’s fey quality. “It’s a shame Nigel Bruce is gone,” Kate said.
“Nigel Bruce?” queried Phyllis indignantly. “To play me? That’s ridiculous.”
“You don’t have to worry, dearie. He’s dead.”
In fact, several producers showed an interest in Kate’s script, though I think a few of them were just interested in spending time with her and shopping her name around town. Joseph E. Levine—a producer with a long and spotty track record—actively pursued the project and claimed for months to have the financing in place. Talks progressed far enough that Kate was once willing to have lunch with him in public. She told me it would be the first time she had eaten in a restaurant in at least twenty years. As that made it an occasion in itself, she selected The Four Seasons. She ate caviar and drank champagne and thoroughly enjoyed herself; but the deal soon fell apart.
No matter. Hepburn finished her second autobiographical book, Me, the compilation of pieces she had been pulling together over the years. Sonny Mehta and everyone else at Knopf backed the book in a tremendous way. When the American Booksellers Association held its large annual tradeshow in New York late in the spring of 1991, just months before publication, Kate opened her house to the owners of the major bookstores and chains for a cocktail party.
For the first time I saw her panic about the book. While dozens of people milled around the house, some spilling out into the garden on the warm spring evening, Kate pulled me upstairs and said, “Why am I doing this?” I assured her that this party was great public relations, that meeting her was one of the biggest thrills for everybody in that room. “No,” she said in frustration. “Why am I publishing this book? I mean, I’ve gone this long. Why bother—”
“Maybe because the public has given you a lot over the years. And you should think of this as giving them something back. A small piece of you for those who care.”
Kate returned to the party all smiles; and when the books were produced, she autographed copies for everybody who had a hand in its publication. She even agreed to selective publicity. While the book never got penetratingly personal, it illustrated a life of hard work, adventures, and fun.
On my next visit to Fenwick, I found a copy of the book just sitting on my bed, autographed with the author’s love and thanks. Flipping through the finished work, I also found my name listed with a dozen others in the acknowledgments—calling me her “chief critic.” I went downstairs and said, “I assume this copy of your book is for me.”
“Mmm,” she said, not wishing to make much of it. “Is it all right?”
“Yeah, it’s great. Thank you for your kind words. But honestly, Kate. I’m not a critic.”
“What are you talking about? Of course, you are. You’re always correcting and criticizing, and having the last word.”
“That’s not true,” I protested. “I may make the occasional suggestion—”
“It’s quite true. You’re doing it right now. My God, you’re completely hopeless!”
One day later that week, when we were back in New York and Me was number one on the bestseller lists, I asked Kate what her most satisfying role had been. “I’d have to say,” she replied, pausing, then looking up at the wooden goose hanging from the ceiling as it had years earlier back in the Cukor guest cottage, “—those years I wasn’t working.”
I knew she meant those five years just before Spencer Tracy’s death. And then she surprised me by remembering exactly the first time that topic had come up. “But,” she added with a smile, now that we had covered a lot of ground in the years since then, “I never talk about that time.”
“Who’s Donovan?” Kate asked over the phone one day in the summer of 1990.
“Donovan?” I asked back. “Why do you want to know about Donovan?”
“Who is he?”
“Well, he’s a singer, kind of a folk-rock singer from the sixties. Why do you want to know about Donovan?”
“Because I’m going to do his program.”
“His program? What kind of program?”
“His television program.”
“Kate, this guy was a hippie singer and songwriter from the sixties. I don’t think he has a television program. What sort of show do you think he has?”
“It’s one of those talk shows. Like Cavett. Only it’s during the day, and he’s apparently very popular with all the housewives.”
“Got it. Kate—his name is Donahue. Phil Donahue. Yes, he’s got a very popular show. It’ll be great for your book. But you had me worried for a minute. I thought you were going on some show wearing a headband and love beads.”
It didn’t take much to promote Kate’s book; and she did what she was asked. Cynthia McFadden made her promise not to appear on Sally Jessy Raphael or any of the other down-market shows. There was no need to worry. Nobody knew how to sell Katharine Hepburn better than Katharine Hepburn. In fact, she often talked about herself in the third person—as “the creature.” She said “the creature” had become an institution, much like the Flatiron Building or the Statue of Liberty, a bastion that had withstood the tests of time. Me became a phenomenal success, cresting the bestseller list for over a year.
After the rush of the book, however, as the sales, interviews, and publicity died down, there was little on Hepburn’s plate. For the first time in a long time—at age eighty-five—she didn’t know what she even might do next. Scripts still arrived regularly, but most of them were terrible—patronizing screenplays about “cute little old ladies—what a goddamned bore,” she said. She received umpteen renditions of The Aspern Papers, one of which, she hooted with incredulity, was pornographic.
Her primary occupation became her mail. A secretary sorted through most of it, then presented her with those letters that required a response. A few warranted handwritten replies—usually written with a black Flair pen on KATHARINE HOUGHTON HEPBURN notepaper. Others received dictated responses later in the day. The important missives were alphabetized and filed in fat accordion folders and stored away.
Most of the mail came from rapturous fans. Little peeved Kate more than an extravagant letter from an admirer who rhapsodized about her talent and beauty and influence on his or her life, then addressed the envelope to “Katherine Hepburn.” “God,” Kate would splutter, “you’d think the first thing they’d learn is how to spell my name.” It pleased her that people enjoyed her work, but she found the letters from those who wrote of spending countless hours watching her movies, night after night, deeply disturbing. “If they’re really inspired by what I’ve done with my life,” she asked, “—why don’t they do something with theirs? Not just watch old movies.”
More disturbing were the occasional crank letters, sometimes hate mail, usually about her position on abortion. Occasionally there were threats. Whenever she received such a letter—or read about an abortion clinic being bombed by some religious fanatic—Kate would declare, “So much for ‘God is Love!’ ” The hate mail was separated from the rest; but Kate held on to it, tucking it away in a closet off the living room.
For Kate, the most distressing aspect of the 1990s was Phyllis’s behavior. Her age had long been a mystery, but everybody presumed she was at least a few years older than Kate. As such, she was something of a medical miracle, still going through the motions of her rigorous job ev
ery day, seven days a week. In truth, Kate had really looked after Phyllis more than the other way around for years. Everything about her had slowed; she often needed to lie down; she was frequently confused. “Phyllis needs a Phyllis,” Kate said; and she hired people to look after her, mostly to see that she didn’t wander into harm’s way. One Sunday afternoon I came upon Phyllis in the foyer at Fenwick, just standing there in a daze with one arm in the sleeve of her coat. I asked her if everything was all right. “Oh, fine. Just fine,” she insisted. “I just can’t remember whether we’re coming or going.”
Kate was becoming lonely. Although Cynthia McFadden saw Hepburn as much as possible, her fast-paced career, new romances, and a baby consumed more and more of her time. Tony Harvey in the Hamptons and David Eichler in Philadelphia found themselves in Manhattan with less frequency, while Kate’s pianist friend Laura Fratti suffered from ill health and didn’t get around much. And I finished my research on Lindbergh and had to go home to Los Angeles to write. For the next few years, I had little reason to travel to the East Coast except to visit Kate.
At first I tried to steal away every month or two. Gradually, my visits decreased to four times a year, then two. I tried to stay in touch by telephone, but Kate always acted slightly hostile toward the instrument or those at the other end. Whenever I called, she would ask where I was, then say, “Well, you’re of no use to me there.” Then she’d usually add, “You should come back soon . . . before I’m dead.”
Our visits remained pleasant, but they were changing. With less stimulation, her life had become stagnant. She moved more slowly; her energy ebbed. Gone were the conversations until midnight, or ten, or even eight. Sometimes she’d want dinner as early as five o’clock; and she’d clamber up the stairs to bed—literally using her hands and feet—by six, before the sun had set.
The only thing that kept her downstairs a little longer was to have a drink or two after dinner. In the late eighties she had changed brands of Scotch, from her King William IV to Famous Grouse. She had been introduced to it by her wealthy relatives in Boca Grande, Florida. “Now, Kate,” I said, in mock irritation, “I’ve been telling you about this Scotch for years, that all the right people in England drink it. And you ignored me. Now because some Houghtons drink it, it’s okay.” She recalled my having discoursed on the subject of Famous Grouse more than once. “You’ve caught me, and now you know the truth,” she said. “I’m a hopeless snob.”
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