Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  I learned from Norah and the other caretakers around both houses that these days Kate was usually having two drinks before dinner and one or two postprandially. They never seemed to affect her physically, but they fogged her mind. She was forgetting things. This new condition worried Norah enough for her to take it upon herself to water down the whiskey. During my visits, she told me she was pouring half the Scotch out of the Famous Grouse bottles and diluting the rest with water. “It’s funny,” Kate said to me one night at dinner. “I’ve completely lost all sense of taste. I take a drink, and it has no flavor.”

  Unconsciously, Kate was using the liquor as an anodyne—not only to kill the mildly depressing bouts of loneliness but also her physical pain, which I had long suspected was worse than she ever let on. Emotional situations—a sad scene in a movie, a touching story, a death—could bring her to tears; but only once did I see her cry because something physically hurt. It was a late afternoon in 1992, when she was trying to step onto the bench in the living room to water some plants. She thought she was alone in the room, and I could see she was in agony. At last, she swung her bad foot up and it clearly ached. She let out a small cry, and I ran in to help her. There were tears in her eyes, and she said she had tripped.

  Another time in the summer of 1992, we drove to a park near Fenwick to take a walk. It had just started to sprinkle when Kate came upon a great bunch of Queen Anne’s lace. There was one absolutely magnificent blossom she insisted on having. She pulled and pulled on the huge flower but it would not uproot. Then she tried to snap the stalk, but it would only bend, not break. She asked me for the car key, which she used as a saw on the fibrous stem. For several minutes she stood hunched over the flower, hacking away, as the drizzle turned to rain. Mother Nature was clearly going to win this round; so I said, “Kate, let’s go. It’s really starting to come down.” As she gave up on the plant, I noticed how wet her eyes were, and not from the rain. We drove back to Fenwick in silence.

  That disturbed me far less than another drive some months later, in the spring of 1993. Kate’s chauffeur of the last few years, a man of great equanimity, had suddenly died, and a new man was at the wheel. On a Saturday morning we made the trip from Fenwick to Peg’s house for lunch, a trip she had made several thousand times. Approaching Hartford, US 91 offered exits to the east and west, and the driver called out for directions. “East,” Kate said firmly.

  “Aren’t we going to Peg’s?” I asked.

  “Of course we’re going to Peg’s,” she said. “Where do you think we’re going?”

  “Well, Peg lives to the west of Hartford.”

  “East. East,” she called out to the driver, then said to me, “You never had any sense of direction. She lives to the east.”

  “Kate,” I said, reaching for a map, “unless Peg has moved, she lives to the west of Hartford.” I spread Connecticut out on my lap and said, “Here’s where we are, and here to the left is Peg.”

  Kate looked thrown but tried to shrug it off. “All this time,” she said, “I always thought that was to the east.”

  Close to six months passed before I was again able to leave Los Angeles and visit Kate. By then, she was spending most of her time in Fenwick, using the trips to New York City for meetings with doctors, lawyers, and accountants—appointments that seemed merely a way of differentiating the weeks. In the early fall, I found a free weekend. Because I didn’t want her to anticipate my visit for too long with the possibility of my canceling at the last minute, I didn’t call her until Thursday afternoon. I said that I would arrive at Fenwick in time for dinner the next night. We had a nice long talk, and we joked that she would have to wait at least until five-thirty before eating dinner.

  Early the next morning I left for New Haven, where I picked up a car and drove on to Old Saybrook. The timing was perfect. I crossed the causeway to Fenwick a little after five and pulled into the driveway. A concerned woman looked out at me from the kitchen. This was Hong Luong, the new housekeeper at Fenwick, a strong but kind soul and an able cook. “I hope you’re expecting me?” I said, reading on her face that she was not.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “There’s plenty of food.”

  But I was worried. As I walked into the living room—which was darker than usual, and dead quiet—Kate and Phyllis were sitting in their places with television tables set before them, waiting to be served. “Remember me?” I asked.

  “What are you do—” she started to say, then stopped to amend her greeting. For the first time, I saw Kate embarrassed, even a little ashamed, as she said, “You are entering a house of the very old.”

  I poured a glass of Famous Grouse—a double, neat. And it tasted of nothing.

  X

  Travels with “My Aunt”

  Actors occupy a peculiar place in the social phylum—people who literally stand out from the rest of the species, wanting to be looked at as much as the rest of us want to look at them. They bring stories to life, tapping into our emotions, often becoming the vessels that allow us to experience a moment of realization, sometimes self-recognition. Many become reference points common to people around the world, elements in universally shared experiences. We tend to look upon the practitioners of the acting profession as special. We pamper and praise them; some people practically worship them.

  Then there are movie stars, a breed unto themselves. The stakes are so high for those rare few who, decade after decade, captivate us, that we shower rewards upon them. Some are compensated with millions of dollars for a few days of work; their opinions on all subjects are held in higher regard. We create special rules for them, private entrances and exits for them to pass through.

  The lives of the biggest movie stars—the “superstars”—are generally as “unreal” offstage as the characters they portray. There is a near-constant frenzy around them—the whirl of managers and agents and publicists and assistants tending to the constant demands for the star’s time: interviews; photograph sessions; public appearances. The ringing telephone becomes an addiction, often sending a star into withdrawal when it stops.

  For those who became famous under the old studio system, the lack of reality to their lives was even greater. Because the contract stars of the thirties, forties, and fifties had worked constantly, everything off the set was less important than what they did before the cameras. The studio heads paying the bills protected their own interests and took care of everything in their stars’ lives. On the set, doubles were always available for the dangerous or unpleasant duties, whether it was performing a stunt or standing under the hot lights. Off-camera, everything was tended to. Not just clothing and grooming and personal chores but even indecent, occasionally illegal, activities were cleaned up, swept under the carpet, fixed.

  Many stars begin to believe their own encomiastic press releases. After a year or a decade, and, in a few cases, a lifetime of fabulous salaries and fringe benefits, there naturally comes a sense of great expectations. With most movie stars, there also comes a sense of entitlement.

  Perhaps the most attractive aspect of Katharine Hepburn’s personality was that she held no such feelings. She made plenty of demands; indeed, she knew how to get what she wanted long before she was a star. In part, that’s how she got to be a star. But she always remained grounded. In twenty years I never found a trail of bodies she trampled over in order to reach her goal. For all her impatience, there was always a sense of humility and humanity, even a sense of gratitude for her good fortune. She was never above making a bed, cooking a meal, chopping wood, or working her garden. Indeed, she found pleasure in those activities. Almost every time I saw her in the kitchen in Fenwick, she was wiping a sponge across the countertop, cleaning up after somebody.

  In short, she never lost her work ethic. She believed the point of making money was to allow you to live comfortably enough to work some more, until you simply could work no longer.

  “Retire?” she had exclaimed one night at dinner, when Irene Selznick had found a gentl
e way of broaching the topic. “What’s the point? Actors shouldn’t walk away from the audience as long as the audiences aren’t walking away from them. As long as people are buying what I’m selling,” she added, “I’m still selling.” Kate never understood how people got stuck in jobs they didn’t enjoy.

  Stars who bemoaned the hardships of their profession—the impositions, the loss of privacy—rankled her, as though she were embarrassed to be one of them. “These actors who complain in interviews about twelve-hour days!” she said with incomprehension. “You sit there for eleven of them. It’s not as if we’re carrying sacks of feed all day!”

  “What does he expect?” she said upon reading about Sean Penn punching out a photographer. “You can’t go around saying, ‘I’m special. I make my living asking you to look at me, to pay to see me,’ and then get upset at somebody for taking a picture. If you don’t want to be a public figure, don’t pick a public profession and don’t appear in public. Because in public you’re fair game.” She also didn’t understand stars who sued newspapers over printing lies about them. “I never cared what anybody wrote about me,” Hepburn said, “as long as it wasn’t the truth.”

  While she sought the limelight all her life, Hepburn believed actors received too much attention and respect. “Let’s face it,” she said once, “we’re prostitutes. I’ve spent my life selling myself—my face, my body, the way I walk and talk. Actors say, ‘You can look at me, but you must pay me for it.’ ” I said that may be true, but actors also offer a unique service—the best of them please by inspiring, by becoming the agents for our emotional catharses. “It’s no small thing to move people,” I said, “and perhaps to get people to think differently, maybe even behave differently.” I pointed out to Hepburn that she had used her celebrity over the years for numerous causes—whether it was marching in parades for women’s equality or campaigning for Roosevelt, speaking out against McCarthyism, or supporting Planned Parenthood. “Not much, really,” Kate said. “I could’ve done more. A lot more. . . . It really doesn’t take all that much to show up for a dinner with the President or to accept an award from an organization so it can receive some publicity. Oh, the hardship! Oh, the inconvenience! Oh, honestly!”

  Los Angeles is, in many ways, a one-industry town. There is, obviously, a thriving financial sector; real estate, aerospace, and the music business have all played a large part in the economy and ethos of the city. But motion pictures dominate, pervading all walks of the city’s life. Photographs of movie stars decorate the walls of liquor stores, restaurants, even car washes—with best wishes from the likes of Burt Reynolds, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Rock Hudson. Although most people in Los Angeles have never met a movie star, everybody there seems to “know” them all—through a common trainer or hair stylist or florist or dry cleaner or checker at the supermarket.

  For close to seventy years, Katharine Hepburn sightings remained the most coveted of show-business personalities—even more than those of Garbo, who could be counted on to take her daily constitutional on the streets of New York. One rarely heard a firsthand Katharine Hepburn story. Although some of my friends knew of my relationship with her—mostly because her name appeared on the dedication page and in the acknowledgments of Goldwyn—few ever invaded her privacy by even asking me about her.

  Although I had “known” Warren Beatty through several friends and my older brother, Jeff, the head of International Creative Management, a major talent agency, I had never met him until early 1993. Then I began receiving calls from his wife’s agent. He said Annette Bening had long been fascinated with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and she was hoping I might be able to meet her sometime to talk about what I had gleaned from the Lindberghs’ private archives. An insistent third call from the agent expressed the fact that Warren Beatty was eager to meet me as well and that somebody would be calling very soon to arrange a dinner. Five months passed in which I heard nothing.

  In mid-July the agent called again to set our date. I said this no longer seemed like such a good idea, that after half a year there seemed something slightly forced in the situation. No, the agent explained, Warren Beatty was extremely interested in our meeting. I had not heard from anybody, he explained, because Warren had, in fact, been occupied producing, rewriting, and starring in a film called Love Affair. It was a remake of the 1957 movie An Affair to Remember, which starred Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, which was a remake of Love Affair, made in 1939 with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, all based on a story by Mildred Cram. He and Annette, I was told, very much wanted to get together as soon as possible.

  On Wednesday, July twenty-first, Kevin McCormick, a film producer who had recently become an executive at Twentieth Century Fox, and I drove from our house in the hills above the Sunset Strip to Mulholland Drive, where we were buzzed through the Beattys’ gate at exactly seven-thirty. In the living room, we found Warren playing with his eighteen-month-old daughter, entertaining two other guests, the agent and a female executive from another studio. Annette darted in, to say hello, and then went to put her daughter to bed. For several minutes, our host chatted with all of us; then we repaired to the dining room for dinner, where Annette joined us. Few movie stars look as good in person as they do on screen, where they benefit from makeup and lights. The Beattys, however, did. He was taller than I had expected, and his face was starting to show some attractive character lines I hadn’t seen on film. She glowed.

  The house was comfortable and unostentatious—though the dining-room ceiling could be retracted, letting guests feel as if they were outdoors. We ate “indoors” that night, a tasty but extremely dietetic meal of chicken and vegetables and a fruit dessert. A bottle of wine sat on the table, but neither of the hosts indulged, imbibing only water. Conversation quickly turned to my work on Lindbergh. Annette and the three other guests just sat and ate, as Warren peppered me with questions about the famous aviator. He was surprised (and pleased) to learn that the story included so much politics, starting with Lindbergh’s grandfather (who had been elected to the Swedish Riksdag and had been forced to leave his homeland because of a political and sexual scandal), including Lindbergh’s father, (who had been a controversial five-term Congressman), right up to Lindbergh himself, known for his role in the little-understood America First movement. I tried to include everybody at the table in the discussion, often lassoing Kevin in for his astute political commentary. But Warren was not much interested. That night I was the only person on whom he fixed his attention.

  A little after ten, the conversation changed, but the conversants did not. While the other guests grew restless, our host shifted the dialogue to Goldwyn. “Is it true I was the last person Sam Goldwyn talked to before he died?” Beatty asked me. Not quite, I explained. But Warren Beatty had, in fact, been the last name recorded on Goldwyn’s telephone sheet before suffering the stroke that ended his career. Then, just as the other guests were getting up from the table—bored to tears, I feared—the conversation took another sudden shift.

  “I guess you know Katharine Hepburn pretty well,” he said. “Because I see you dedicated your book to her.” While Annette started shepherding the others toward the door, Warren lingered behind with me, quickly measuring the depth of my friendship with Kate. “Do you think she’d like to work again?” he asked. Not right away, I said, as she had recently finished a rather uninspiring television movie. “Well,” he followed up, “do you think she’s able to work again?” I said she was definitely capable, but her interest was waning along with her health. She had skin cancers on her face, she was not sleeping soundly, and was suffering from dizzy spells. Her shaking often became more pronounced, I said; and she had taken to working off cue cards. “Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Warren said. “Jack uses them too”—meaning his friend Mr. Nicholson.

  “Because there’s a great part in our movie,” he continued.

  “The old aunt?” I asked, slightly incredulously. “Is that really a great part?”

  While the old aunt in Love Affair was
but a supporting role, the character did serve as a kind of fulcrum, appearing in one extended scene in the middle of a sentimental story about a longtime bachelor about to marry. This man-about-town meets a singer, also about to marry, on a cruise; and their sudden love for each other becomes apparent during a brief layover at a European port, where they meet the man’s elderly aunt, who is charmed by the young woman and wishes them Godspeed. (The ageless beauty Cathleen Nesbitt played the part in the Cary Grant version, the character actress Maria Ouspenskaya played opposite Boyer.) In this new version, the port-of-call had become Tahiti, the exteriors of which had already been shot. Beatty told me that Hepburn would have to travel no farther than the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, where her character’s house was being built on a sound stage. Her dressing room would be constructed literally steps from the set.

  “Even if she wanted to work again,” I told Warren, “you’ve got to remember that Hepburn has never played anything but the female lead. With the exception of her scene in Stage Door Canteen, she has always been the star. No supporting roles. No cameos. No commercials. And the only reason she did Stage Door Canteen was as part of the war effort.” This picture, I thought, isn’t exactly in the national interest.

  As he and I made our way out to the driveway, where the other guests were driving off and Kevin was talking with Annette, Warren explained that the film was virtually finished except for this one long scene—which required an actress of stature. Moreover, he said, he wanted an actress in her eighties who looked as though she was in her eighties—not an octogenarian who had been tucked and pulled nor a sexagenarian caked in makeup. Not only that, he said at last, “I’ve always been in love with Katharine Hepburn.”