Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  On Monday shooting began. I had never seen Hepburn work on a set, and so I instinctively kept my distance during the days. To help her maintain her rhythm, I joined her almost every night for dinner, at which time I would find her in a robe with her hair in a towel. A few old friends occasionally appeared as well. Warren dropped by every night, and used me to compliment her indirectly, telling me in her presence how great her performance was. I had to leave at the end of the week for a writers’ conference, and two nights before my departure, Kate asked if I might visit her on the set. I said I would try. Warren seemed eager for me to drop by as well—to show, I felt, how regally she was being treated.

  I drove to Warner Brothers the next day at noon, arriving between camera setups. Kate was in her large soundstage dressing room, where her hair and makeup teams were tending to her. She looked great—more alert and alive than she had in months. Norah was on hand, assistants catered to the star’s every whim, and the crew was hurrying to set their lights and camera, so that Miss Hepburn would not be kept waiting. But that’s not what excited her so. It was the work. “As you can see,” she said, swiveling in her makeup chair to face me, “they’re treating me all right. So you don’t have to stay.” An assistant director came in to announce that they were ready to film again, and Kate said by way of dismissing me, “We’ve got to play now.”

  I saw Beatty and told him that I was leaving, that I felt my presence while she was working would make her uncomfortable. He suggested that I stand on the other side of the black curtain behind the set, where one could watch the proceedings on a television monitor. There I stood in the wings, alongside a slightly forlorn, sweet-faced, heavyset man who was also watching the screen intently, as Warren directed Hepburn in the scene. She did several takes, working off cue cards at first, then improvising a little on her own. By the third or fourth take, she seemed to be playing to the crew, and obviously winning their approval, as she brought more to the scene than was actually there.

  She had a way of reading the most banal lines as though they were fraught with some meaning—sometimes by pausing a little here, speeding up a little there; and the moments full of import, she simply tossed off. She provided a slightly different reading on each take, but she always made a point of understating, avoiding the obvious. When the scene was finished, the man by my side introduced himself and thanked me for my part in getting Hepburn to Los Angeles. Then I realized I was talking to the director, who, evidently, was not allowed on the set during Hepburn’s scenes.

  As I was leaving the soundstage, a posse of executives entered, wanting to get their first glimpses of Katharine Hepburn. From the sidelines, I watched Beatty escort them over and saw how she utterly charmed them—shaking each hand, laughing at their comments, thanking them for all their accommodations. She even posed for a team photograph, flinching only once, when one of the young executives put his arm around her.

  That night over dinner, Warren carried on about how she had snowed “the suits.” Hepburn explained that that had been part of her job since David Selznick had brought her to Hollywood sixty years ago. When Warren raved about her ability to improvise in the scene they had done later that afternoon, I reminded him that much of the final sequence of Woman of the Year, in which Tess Harding is alone in the kitchen trying to make breakfast with some culinary props, had been improvised as well. As he left that night, Warren kissed Kate on the cheek, looked deep into her eyes, and said, “If I had only met you thirty years ago.”

  After he left, Kate said to me, “Was that supposed to be a compliment?”

  By the time I returned from my trip, Hepburn had finished her work on Love Affair. Beatty and company had treated her magnificently, and she was obviously pleased to have completed the job. She returned home as soon as possible, which was fortunate . . . because less than forty-eight hours later, the Northridge earthquake seriously rocked the house in which Hepburn had been staying, sending lamps and vases to the floor. The Beattys’ house atop the city, where I had first dined with them five months earlier, was destroyed.

  The following September, Dominick Dunne wrote a profile of Warren Beatty for Vanity Fair, which detailed how Beatty had seduced Hepburn into appearing in his film. What struck me most in the article was a line toward the end of the piece, when Beatty was reflecting on stars and personalities and the subject turned to Howard Hughes. “What you must always remember about Howard,” Beatty said, “is that he was deaf.”

  The following month I was invited to a screening of Love Affair, at which Beatty and I never quite found each other. The movie played even cornier than I had expected, and for me its only moments of relief came when Hepburn appeared on the screen. (Her participation in the film was billed as a “Special Appearance by.”) While her dialogue still didn’t add up to much—and she did, somewhat haltingly, utter the pointless “Fuck a duck” line—she looked good and made a strong impression, especially at the moment when she waves goodbye. I found it most touching, because again, instead of the obvious, waving big, she sat alone and simply looked down at her aging hands.

  On my birthday that December, I received a dozen enormous crimson roses from “Warren and Annette.” Four years later, he showed up at a publication party for Lindbergh, which my brother Jeff threw. Except for the occasional chance encounter with Warren Beatty in the years between and since, I have never again seen or heard from “the movie star.”

  Katharine Hepburn’s phone still rang, and scripts continued to appear at her door. A producer I had never met called me one afternoon to ask if I might use my influence in getting her to consider playing the role of Aunt March in a remake of Little Women—a film that would feature Winona Ryder in Hepburn’s former role of Jo. I said it seemed dubious because I thought she had no intention of becoming a character actress—even as she approached ninety. (“Please tell them,” Kate said, “I would never even think of competing with Edna May Oliver”—who had played Aunt March in 1932.) Instead, Hepburn trekked to Canada to star in one or two more forgettable television movies, her powers of concentration diminishing as the tremors in her head and hands increased. She continued to talk of future projects, decrying the quality of what was being written for older actors.

  With each of my visits east, there came a moment of shock upon seeing her. Norah would usually try to prepare me for the changes I would find upon climbing the stairs to the living room. But Kate’s hair, still pulled back and piled high, looked whiter and wispier, her eyes grayer, and her body heavier, the result of her inability to exercise. Conversation became more difficult, what with her having less to report and her increasing difficulty remembering things. She seemed to be working hard to maintain her carriage, thrusting her jaw forward. “So noble,” I could hear Irene Selznick saying in her succinct way, “—heartbreaking.” Whenever I stood next to Kate, I was taken aback, seeing that she was several inches shorter than when I had met her. Her energy waned; she suffered from dizziness; she often seemed depressed.

  The next year I found her in the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, checked in under Phyllis Wilbourn’s name. Norah had suggested to me that nobody really knew what the problem was, but that she was receiving a few visitors. Upon entering the large room, I heard a doctor addressing her in a peculiarly hostile tone, while a grim nurse looked on. “Nobody’s allowed in here,” the doctor said as I entered. “He is,” Kate corrected, as I went over to the chair in which she was sitting, wearing her familiar pajamas and ratty red robe. “He’s my friend.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, hoping to clear some of the obviously unpleasant air.

  “They say I’m a drunk,” Kate whimpered, a tone I had never heard her emit.

  “Now, nobody said that,” the doctor quickly asserted.

  “Yes, you did,” Kate said. “You called me an alcoholic and said that I can’t drink again.” With that, she turned to me, her eyes watering. “You’ve known me a long time, Scott Berg,” she said. “Do you think I’m a drunk?” I said she
was not a drunk, and I asked the doctor and nurse if they might leave us alone for a moment. Then I went over to give Kate a hug, and she put her arm around my waist, pressed her head into my stomach, and cried. “I don’t know why I’m here,” she said.

  She wasn’t disoriented. In fact, she seemed sounder of mind than she had been in my last few visits. It was more that she didn’t know what was wrong with her, and nobody else seemed to know either. She just felt bad. I knew she was on a number of prescription drugs, and I couldn’t help thinking they were all somehow interacting, contributing to her general funk. “Look, Kate,” I said, “there’s no doubt in my mind—you don’t have a drinking problem . . . but as long as you’re taking all these pills, it seems to me you’ve got to stop drinking any alcohol. I mean, that’s what killed your friend Judy Garland . . . and Marilyn. That’s just common sense.” And common sense was still enough to trump any argument with Hepburn.

  She was soon home, with some changes in her various drugs; and Kate entered that phase in old age of “good days and bad days.” Sometimes, good hours and bad hours. More often than not, Norah answered the telephone, usually in a state of agitation over some minor emergency with Miss Hepburn.

  While never far from Kate’s thoughts, Phyllis Wilbourn gradually withdrew from the scene, as she required increasing amounts of bedrest and care from her team of attendants. During a visit to Fenwick in early 1995, I saw her sitting in a chair, staring out at the Sound, crying. I walked over to comfort her and asked what was wrong. “I’m just very worried,” she said. “Nothing will ever be the same.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked. “What are you worried about?”

  “The abdication,” she said. “That changes everything. And he was our most handsome king.”

  “Look on the bright side,” I said consolingly. “He evidently wasn’t very happy; and now he gets to spend the rest of his life with the woman he loves.” That cheered Phyllis up a little. As I held her hand, I added, “I’m sure he and Mrs. Simpson will have a long, happy life together.”

  “Do you really think so?” Phyllis asked.

  “I know so,” I said with enough authority to put her worries to rest.

  Another weekend, I flew to Connecticut to attend the wedding of Dick Hepburn’s son Mundy (an artist who worked with glass) and Joan Levy (an artist who worked on canvas). The bride was dressed as a Druid princess, and Kate was in relatively fine form. She was a little unsure on her feet but, with the support of a cane, completely ambulatory. She looked tired but was attentive, as she selected a comfortable chair from which to watch the ceremony. At one point, she noticed a man across the room snapping photographs of her and asked me to stand directly in front of her, with my back to the camera, so that I would obstruct his view. Driving back to Fenwick, I asked what had been the purpose of the bride’s costume. “To prove she’s insane enough to marry into this family,” she replied.

  In April 1995 Joan Levy called to tell me that Phyllis had died in New York City. I called Kate not only to offer my condolences but to find out how she was taking the loss. “What did she die of?” I asked.

  “What’s the difference?” Kate said. “She stopped breathing, and she’s dead. And that’s that.”

  Kate maintained her brave front until May eleventh. On what would have been Phyllis’s ninety-second birthday, a few Hepburns and some intimate friends celebrated her long life of loving companionship by burying her ashes in a cemetery in West Hartford, alongside other Hepburns. During the brief ceremony at the grave—as rain came down—Kate suddenly dropped to her knees and sobbed. I never heard her raise Phyllis’s name again.

  In late winter of 1996, Hepburn was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital with pneumonia. Reports on the radio and television were fatalistic. My phone calls to the house and to her brother Dr. Bob were more encouraging. Within a few days, in fact, Kate had asked for an ambulance to take her from the hospital to Fenwick, where oxygen tanks, a hospital bed, and round-the-clock nurses were waiting. Meantime, The National Enquirer splattered a ghoulish picture of her across its cover, quoting her as saying, “Don’t be sad—I’m going to join Spencer. . . .”

  Hepburn pulled through, as she would after a few other small bouts that year. But each attack compromised her vitality; and each siege brought out an army of tabloid reporters, who camped at the end of the Hepburn driveway—on “deathwatch.” The crafty ones got hold of the telephone number inside the house and tried to wrest any information from whoever answered the phone.

  My visits became increasingly quiet, as Kate’s ability to converse continued to diminish. She seemed to understand what was being said, but she seemed to lack the strength to respond. Direct questions seldom elicited more than a few words, which sometimes seemed to be in response to something that had been asked earlier . . . or unasked at all. Unless there was a third person present, these encounters became difficult, for they basically demanded that the guest engage in a monologue. During one of my trips that year, I found Tony Harvey. We sat on either side of Kate all afternoon and chatted, which she followed as though observing a tennis match. After a while, however, Tony and I noticed that her attention had shifted to a box of Edelweiss chocolate I had brought from California. One by one, she took every piece of chocolate out of the box, and then, one by one, put every piece back. Tony and I kept talking, though he raised an eyebrow and looked heavenward.

  In 1997, Joan Levy called me in Los Angeles to say that Kate had suddenly taken a turn for the worse and that she was sinking fast. Again I called Kate’s brother Bob, who said that this, in fact, looked like the end and that there seemed little for anybody to do. Kate had become very weak, wasn’t eating, and her “systems were shutting down.” I said I could catch a plane out later that day to come say goodbye, but Bob advised against it. “At this point, I’m not sure you’ll make it in time,” he said. “And even if you do, I’m not sure what you’ll find.”

  I found Kate the next morning, in her bedroom—sitting in a chair, in a fresh pair of pajamas, a shawl around her shoulders—looking old but fine. “Do you know who I am?” I asked, as I entered the room, sunshine pouring through every window. “No,” she said, the light in her eyes. As I stepped out of the shadow of the entry and closer to where she sat, she looked up and into my face, and a big tear rolled down her left cheek. One of the nurses leaned toward me and whispered, “When she heard you were coming today, she asked me to put some lipstick on her.”

  “What’s all this business about you dying?” I asked.

  “I’m not,” she said, in what was clearly an effort. Then she looked a little ashamed that she was evidently incapacitated, a state belied by the animation in her eyes.

  I spent the day in Fenwick, mostly in the company of the household staff, the nurses, and, later, Cynthia McFadden, who had been visiting regularly. After our morning meeting, Kate napped. Like the doctors, everyone was puzzled by Hepburn’s condition—what ailed her and how she kept springing back. They worried because she had not eaten much in days.

  When she awoke, Cynthia and the others, knowing that I had to return to Los Angeles, suggested that I go upstairs and spend some time alone with her. The general consensus in the house was that she had pulled through this bout, but the end was surely close. Again, I found her sitting upright in her chair, with a tray of untouched food.

  I sat by her side and asked if she wanted to eat. Like a child, she turned her head away and said nothing. I told her that I was so happy to see her but that I hated to find her this way. She sat stock-still and seemed to look through me. Winding into what I thought might very well be my last goodbye, I told her how much her friendship had meant to me over the years but how I hoped it would continue. She still looked away, now into the blazing fire. “Look, Kate,” I said leaning in very close to her and talking in a low voice, “you and I have talked about death a lot . . . and I know you’ve always been interested in the Hemlock Society and all those books on how to kill yourself. And maybe that’s
where you are now. And if there’s anything I can do to help you . . . well, actually, if you’re ready to go now, the best thing you can do is just keep up what you’re doing. Don’t eat. Starve yourself. Just don’t eat.”

  Suddenly her head snapped in my direction, and her eyes burned into mine. With her right hand she grabbed mine and put it on her left forearm. “I’m not weak,” she said, shaking her flexed arm for me to feel. It was unbelievably firm. “I’m not dying,” she said. “I’m strong.”

  “Well,” I said, “you really do feel strong. But you don’t seem to be able to pick up a fork. And people are worried that you’re not eating, even when they try to feed you. And you can’t stay strong unless you eat. And I’m saying if you’re not eating because you’re ready to go, well then, don’t eat—”

  Without having to search for words, she continued to look me in the eyes . . . and then, without making any other move, she simply opened her mouth. For the next few minutes, I fed her soup, macaroni and cheese, and coffee ice cream, which had melted, until she emptied the plate and two bowls. As she ate, I talked about how she had to start building herself up. I discussed yoga with her, and told her how Alice Roosevelt Longworth practiced postures and stood on her head into her nineties. “Can’t,” she said. I explained that anybody could, that there was always a movement of some part of the body, to say nothing of the breathing, that one could practice. I demonstrated a few basic exercises.

  By the time she had finished eating, I realized I had to leave, in order to catch my plane home. I hugged her goodbye, and she held her cheek pressed against mine, then looked into my eyes until hers began to tear again. I said I would try to get back soon, but it might not be for a few months. As I started for the door, she spoke the longest sentence I had heard from her that day. “Are you still loved?” she asked.