by Anne Edwards
When Kate moved her possessions from Tracy’s bungalow, most of those fabled stars were either faded, retired or dead. With John Wayne’s death in 1979, only two remained of the old personalities who could command star billing—Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda. And not only had they never played together, they had not yet met. (Kate said at the time: “I’ve never met many people, but I’m sure I must have said, ‘How do you do?’ to Henry Fonda at one time or another. I felt as though I knew him.”)
On Golden Pond, the story that was to bring these two stars together, was written by Ernest Thompson, a playwright not yet thirty, and presented in the fall of 1978 off-Broadway at the Hudson Guild Theatre. Former screen star Greer Garson saw it and decided she would like to produce it for Broadway (just possibly she saw herself in the role of sixty-nine-year-old Ethel Thayer). Before it was brought to New York, the new production was tried out first in Wilmington, Delaware, and then at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theatre in Washington, D.C.
The play is about a couple who have been married fifty years and come once again to their summer cottage in Maine on Golden Pond. Norman Thayer, at seventy-nine, suffers from a heart condition. His wife, Ethel, ten years his junior, is fighting to keep him alive and happy—not an easy task given her husband’s disposition. But Ethel and Norman have an exceptional relationship, one that survives the unexpected arrival of their divorced daughter, their daughter’s objectionable suitor, and his difficult thirteen-year-old son. The daughter has come to Golden Pond to confront the depth of her father’s love for her before he dies. Kate had been sent the script by Greer Garson and her partner Arthur Cantor with a view to a film of the play and had been intrigued enough to go to Washington and sit through three performances.
No doubt had existed for Kate about the merits of the play. But Norman Thayer’s role was the key to the story and had to be played by someone old enough to be real, and of equal status to her. Only one man fit that description—Henry Fonda. The script was sent to him and he “read it and got fired up.” Fonda, who had been very ill, suffered from a heart condition and had worn a pacemaker for more than four years. A film that centered upon his character would not be easy to finance.
On Golden Pond opened on Broadway with Tom Aidredge and Frances Sternhagen in February, 1979, where it lasted a disappointing 128 performances, mainly because of the subject matter (old age) and the lack of star names. The producers transferred the show once again to a small off-Broadway theater for another 253 performances. Kate decided she would like to play Ethel Thayer in a film version. Fonda’s enthusiasm grew after he had seen the stage performance several times. Still, no film company was willing to risk a seven-million-dollar investment on a story about “old folks.” Then, Jane Fonda,* Henry’s film-star daughter, asked to read the script.
“It’s wonderful,” she told her father. “I want to play the daughter.” The part was small but her faith was strong enough to raise the money and co-produce the film, for which Thompson did his own screenplay—“the best I’ve ever read,” Fonda said.
Kate met with Jane Fonda in New York and then flew out to California to meet Henry Fonda and the director, Mark Rydell.† The meeting was held in a conference room at Twentieth Century-Fox. Kate arrived last, walked straight over to Fonda, held out her hand and said, “Well, it’s about time.”
Rydell and co-producer Bruce Gilbert were concerned about Kate’s health as well as about Fonda’s, Her palsy had progressed, and her head shook involuntarily at more frequent intervals. They finally decided that Kate’s palsy would give Ethel Thayer authenticity, and the starting date was set for June, 1980. Late in April, Kate and a friend were playing tennis on an indoor New York court. As Kate raised her arm to serve, a searing pain cut through her shoulder and arm. She froze, unable to move. After being rushed to the hospital she underwent a rotator cuff operation on her shoulder, which had become severely dislocated. The doctors claimed she would need a full three months to convalesce and that even then a film would be out of the question.
“I knew the film was dependent on the Fonda part being lazy, and not working, and not wanting [or able] to do a lot of physical things” Kate recalled. “The wife, my part, had to carry all the luggage, do everything, and here I am with an arm that’s really bad. Well, I tried to get out of the picture, but Fonda said, ‘No, you’ll be fine. You’ll do it. We won’t get anyone else.’ He stuck to his guns and in July, 1980 [two weeks late], we found ourselves on location in New Hampshire.”
The On Golden Pond company settled into the small town of Laconia, a summer place swarming in July with tourists who filled the cottages and lodges that bordered its four springfed lakes. One, Squam Lake, was the major location for the film.
“The first day,” Fonda reported, “I was sitting in one of those high director’s chairs with some of the company. We were between the cottage that was supposed to be our summer house and the lake. Shirlee [Mrs. Fonda] was there, the makeup people, the crew, a few members of the cast. And around the corner came Katharine Hepburn. Now, Hepburn is a presence wherever she is. In a room, she is the only one in it. In a big area, she doesn’t do anything to dominate, she just does and is. But as people saw her, she was gesturing for them to move away, and they sort of just melted in front of her, just disappeared. By the time she got to me, I was alone. I was aware this was happening, but I wasn’t quite sure why or how it happened. She came up to me holding her outstretched, cupped hands in front of her. Something crumpled was inside those hands but I didn’t know what it was. She came right up to me and stood there.”
“I want you to have this,” she said. “This was Spencer’s favorite hat.”
Fonda was moved to tears and wore it in their first scene and then throughout the film.
The styles of Kate and Jane Fonda were less polarized than expected. Jane Fonda was an activist who spoke at rallies and listened to loud rock music. (A few days into the shooting she brought rock star Michael Jackson onto the set, a young man Kate found somewhat jarring in the beginning but eventually liked.) But Jane Fonda is also a woman of grit, a tough lady who can take it and deal it out, an independent, intelligent woman willing to back her controversial opinions.
Rydell feared that hostility would develop between the two women. “After all,” he says, “Jane is the big star of the eighties and Katharine was the big star. You had the sense in the first few days of two lionesses prowling the same ground.”
“I couldn’t help fantasizing what would have happened if [Kate] and my dad had become lovers forty years ago, and Kate had been my mother,” Jane Fonda said. “To work with her, and to work with my father, was a terrifying, waking-up-in-the-morning-wanting-to-throw-up kind of experience. But what happened was, when we went to rehearsals, I realized that she was as nervous as I was.” Fonda paused and then added: “I had to get over the desperate need I once had for [Dad’s] approval. We’ve never been intimate. My dad simply is not an intimate person. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t love.”
During the filming Kate commented, “Henry Fonda’s not one to make new friends and neither am I, but we got along okay. He has his own world. He likes to sit and fish, I like to walk through the woods alone. We are quite similar. He doesn’t waste time. No small talk. And I hate to have idiotic conversations. We found we could work together just like that”—she snapped her fingers several times rapidly—“and we really did it.
“He had to do very, very, very uncomfortable things on cold evenings, in the wind, and sitting out in an open boat. He had to sit out in the bright sun, and he has skin like mine, can’t take the sun at all. He never uttered a complaint.”
“You want to hear about Katharine Hepburn?” Fonda replied. “She swam every morning and after work. She’d have her dinner, and go to sleep at eight o’clock, get up at three or four and study her lines. ... At the end of September, when it was bitter cold, they catapulted the fourteen-year-old boy* and me into the water. The company was more nervous than I. They
thought, ‘This old son-of-a-bitch is going to have a heart attack,’ but I fooled ’em. I had a wet suit on under my wardrobe. Katharine had to dive into the water, too, but she didn’t even wear a wet suit.”
The summer was magic for both of them. “Their affection was palpable,” recalls Mark Rydell. “One could feel it in the filming day to day. They approached this material bravely. Here you have Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn in their seventies, dealing with material that has to do with the final years of one’s life, and how do you face death and how do you support one another ... it was quite a resonant experience.”
When the film was released in November, 1981, Henry Fonda received the lion’s share of accolades. Fonda breathed such life into his character that he was Norman Thayer. Audiences were greatly moved by his performance of a dying man when they knew that his own health was deteriorating quickly and that On Golden Pond would be his last film. Speculators already had Fonda winning the Academy Award that next spring. Kate was cited as having made Ethel Thayer “an authentic human spirit,” but she was faulted by what reviewers thought was an oversentimentalized performance. The condition of her eyes had grown steadily worse, and they teared throughout most of the film. So cleverly did she minimize the shake of her head that it looked as if her palsy could have been adopted for the role. Kate did not concern herself about the Awards or her chances of winning or losing. Ernest Thompson had given her another of his plays to read, West Side Waltz, and she had decided to accept still a new challenge. West Side Waltz was the story of an aging concert pianist, and Kate would have to give a realistic impression that she was playing the music being taped over the sound system in the theater.
Her shoulder had healed during the filming of On Golden Pond, but in the last few weeks of production she had walked into a glass door, miraculously without shattering it. The pain returned and Rydell had to shoot around her for several days. No serious damage to the shoulder had been incurred but two fingers on that hand had become numb. Playing the piano was marvelous therapy, but at the same time it was difficult, uncomfortable and frustrating. Kate liked Thompson’s story, and though West Side Waltz dealt with the same theme—aging—as had On Golden Pond, it presented another, much different problem—that of aging alone.
Margaret Mary Elderdice, the widowed, seventyish former concert pianist, lives in a residential hotel on the West Side of Manhattan. She struggles fiercely to hold on to her independence, but as the play progresses she goes from a cane to a walker to a wheelchair and is finally forced to accept the offer of a somewhat vulgar middle-aged violinist to share the apartment. The two women are oddly matched, but their music bridges the wide gap that divides them and both find renewed spirit in the duets they begin to play together.
The role of Cara Varnum, the violinist, was almost of equal importance to Mrs. Elderdice; and the actress who played the part had to have a certain chemistry with Kate for the play to work. Kate had been to see the musical comedy star Dorothy Loudon* in Ballroom, in which she played a widow who meets a man her age at a public dance hall. Loudon was most moving in the role,† and Kate asked her to co-star with her in West Side Waltz. By now, Kate had brought in Noel Willman, the director, and Roger Stevens and Robert Whitehead, her producers on A Matter of Gravity.
Loudon and Kate rehearsed daily at Kate’s house, practicing the piano and violin together as well. (“I don’t think Vladimir Horowitz and Isaac Stern have anything to worry about,” Loudon said at the time. “Actually, Kate is very good but I’m developing two chins from trying to balance the violin.”) Onstage they were only to finger their instruments, synchronizing their movements to recordings of professional musicians. Kate had achieved a similar feat years before when she made A Song of Love. Film, however, could be cut and intercut and the recorded music made to match the hand movements on screen. On the stage there would be no mechanical help. The women had to have their movements timed perfectly to the music and be careful not to touch their instruments.
Determinedly, Kate practiced three to four hours a day, regaining the mobility in her fingers, memorizing the intricacies of each piece, striving to achieve the appearance of a professional pianist at work. And Loudon matched her in her concentration.
The plan was to tour West Side Waltz in eight cities for almost a year before bringing it into New York. The play premiered in Los Angeles at the Ahmanson, in January, 1981, to praise for Kate and Loudon but less than enthusiastic reviews for the play. Thompson never stopped rewriting during the course of the tour, which ended in Philadelphia. The show opened in New York on November 18, 1981, coincidentally the same day On Golden Pond was placed in general release.
Walter Kerr in The New York Times wrote: “I’m not sure that author Ernest Thompson realizes . . . what multiple small miracles Katharine Hepburn is bestowing upon his play. . . . One mysterious thing she has learned to do is breathe unchallengeable life into lifeless lines. She does it, or seems to do it, by giving the most serious consideration to every syllable she utters. There may have been a time when she coasted on mannerisms, turned on her rhythms into a form of rapid transit. That time is long gone.”
The limited three-month engagement was financially successful. Kate played to capacity houses as she had on the tour. When the show closed in February, 1982, it again took to the road, Kate with it, this time for a brief tour to begin in Washington, D.C. She had received her twelfth Academy nomination for On Golden Pond, but she was appearing at the Kennedy Center at the same time as the ceremonies. When asked by the film’s publicist what she would like her representative to say, she replied, “A simple thank you will suffice,” which is what Bruce Gilbert, On Golden Pond’s co-producer, repeated when he accepted her fourth Academy Award for Best Actress on her behalf. Fonda was awarded his first for Best Actor.* Jane Fonda, tears in her eyes (“A Fonda can cry at a good steak,” Henry Fonda had once said) accepted for him. Fonda was now confined to his bed. “My father would say typically that this is just luck,” she said as she grasped the golden statuette and held it in front of her. “But I will try to assure him that there’s no luck to it.” Three weeks later Henry Fonda died.
Kate was now the last of the great film legends still able to claim star billing. Although she was seventy-five, a good story with something important to say still commanded her attention and dedication. One film script, The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley, a black comedy about an elderly woman who hires a professional “hit man” to help her put an end to the lives of her aging compatriots who no longer care to live, had consumed her interest for eleven years. Written by Martin Zweiback, a relatively unknown scriptwriter, the screenplay had literally been dumped on her back doorstep when she had occupied the California bungalow. She had tried to get it produced, but euthanasia was considered too controversial a subject. Nonetheless, Kate pressed on, engaging Zweiback to further develop the story.
When the tour of West Side Waltz ended in the summer of 1982, her interest in The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley was reactivated, and she convinced Tony Harvey that he should direct it and enlisted Nick Nolte* as her co-star. A deal was being set for production.
Her plan was to spend the month of December with her brother Dick and his family at Fenwick, where Phyllis joined her. A record snowfall and freezing temperatures hit Fenwick shortly after her arrival. Despite difficult road conditions Kate would drive into town on errands, cautious but certain she knew the roads well enough to navigate safely. On December 13, with Phyllis beside her, Kate headed into town. As they took a fairly sharp curve, the car skidded, spun and crashed headlong into a utility pole. The impact crumpled the front end of the car and a piece of steel nearly severed Kate’s right foot. Phyllis had injured her hand and arm, but not seriously. When help came and Kate was extricated from the car and transferred to the ambulance, her foot “was hanging just from a tendon.”
Kate insisted she be taken to Hartford Hospital, an hour’s ride over icy roads, where the surgeon who had saved her finger
was on the staff. He was alerted and immediately upon her arrival performed the intricate surgery to reattach the foot. The press was told only that she had an injury to her ankle. For several days after the surgery, it looked as though the operation might not have been successful. Nineteen days later, the day after New Year’s, she left the hospital in a cast up to her hip and moved into her sister Marion’s Hartford residence. The fear that she might lose the foot was past, but for the next eight months she spent equal time in and out of the hospital. After six more months of therapy (and the news that Luddy had just died), she decided to go back to work. By then, two Israeli producers, Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus, had agreed to finance The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley through their Gannon Films. The movie began shooting in New York in October, 1983. Golan and Globus were masters at bringing in small films under budget. The fact that they had Katharine Hepburn as their star did not affect their tightfisted attitude. The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley was strictly a no-frills production. And Golan and Globus were not informed of the seriousness of Kate’s recent injury.
Her indomitability during the making of this film was awesome. She asked for no favors and received none. Nolte called her “a cranky old broad but a lot of fun.” She did not have to do anything strenuous or physical (although she did tackle a scene without a double that called for her to ride a motorcycle with Nolte); but she had to, and did, appear spry, and she did brave the harsh conditions of shooting many exteriors in New York during an unseasonably cold fall. As always, she arrived on a set or location before her co-workers and had her hand into everything being done.
The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley was a great departure for Kate. Sophisticated comedy had always been her special forte, no one could deliver an acid one-liner better. Grace Quigley was a character in a black comedy that, if played wrong, since the topic was euthanasia, could easily have become distasteful. Kate never believed the story was offensive. “If people are offended by it, then I think they are wrong. If people can just learn to laugh instead of being terrified at what the future holds for them, they will be better off,” she commented, adding that she personally had no fear of death. “What release! to sleep is the greatest joy there is. . . . If I were a burden to myself and I could leave my money to younger people who could really use it, I would feel it was my privilege to do what I could do. . . . There are no rules, except to know yourself.”