Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  “You sculpted these?” I asked.

  “No, I posed for them.” Upon closer scrutiny, I could see that was the case and that she was pleased again.

  Over the next few minutes, we made small talk—about my hometown, Los Angeles, our mutual friend director George Cukor, who had died there just a few months prior, and our impending interview. She asked how much time I thought I would need, and I asked, “How much have you got?”

  “Oh, I’m endlessly fascinating,” she said, smiling again. “I’d say you’ll need at least two full days with me.”

  As my fire-tending had made the room warmer, I stood and removed my blue blazer, which I set on the couch. “I don’t think so,” said Hepburn gently but firmly. “Now look, I want you to be as comfortable as you like. But look where you’ve put that jacket. It’s right in my sight line, and it’s, well, somewhat offensive.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I can see that.” As I started to put it back on, she said that wasn’t necessary, that there was a chair on the landing and I should just “throw it there”—which I did. Upon re-entering the room, I instinctively adjusted a picture on the wall, a floral painting which was slightly askew.

  “Oh, I see,” said Miss Hepburn with great emphasis; “you’re one of those.” She smiled approvingly and added, “Me too. But nobody was as bad as Cole Porter. He used to come to this house, and he’d straighten pictures for five minutes before he’d even sit down. Listen, while you’re still up, I’m ready for another drink. How about you?”

  Again I made mine the weaker. It was not that I was afraid of falling on my face. It was more that I felt as though I were now walking through an RKO movie starring Katharine Hepburn, and I didn’t want to miss a single frame of it.

  As the clock on the mantelpiece bonged seven, Miss Hepburn said, “Look, I only invited you for drinks tonight because I wasn’t sure how we’d get on, but you’re more than welcome to stay for dinner; there’s plenty of food. But I can tell by the way you’re dressed, and I must say I like that tie, you’ve got another date. It’s probably better if you go anyway because we’re starting to talk too much already, and then we won’t be fresh for the performance tomorrow. Shall we say eleven?” I explained that I did, in fact, have a dinner date; but for her I would happily break it. “No,” she said, “we don’t want to run out of things to say to each other.” We shook hands goodbye, and I exited the room, grabbing my jacket from the chair.

  When I was halfway down the stairs, I heard her shout, “Use the bathroom before you leave!”

  II

  Making a Difference

  The first time I didn’t meet Katharine Hepburn was in April 1972.

  I had graduated from Princeton University the preceding year, having written my senior thesis on Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons who had “discovered” and developed F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and at least another score of the most significant writers in the United States between the World Wars. Even after submitting the thesis, I considered it a work in progress, a first draft of a full-scale biography of the man I considered the most important but least-known figure in American literature—a Harvard man whose ancestors went back to seventeenth-century New England, and a New York book editor whose vision ushered American literature farther into the future than any of his contemporaries. He was a Manhattan Yankee. While he chose to live most of his adult life as a Connecticut commuter, in the mid-1930s his highly theatrical wife, Louise, insisted they and their five daughters move to the city, into the house she had inherited from her father, a brownstone in the area called Turtle Bay, at 246 East Forty-ninth Street—next door to Katharine Hepburn.

  For several years the Perkinses called New York their home. Except for its allowing him to work extra hours with his most challenging author, Thomas Wolfe—who was then constructing Of Time and the River according to Perkins’s blueprint—Max Perkins dreaded urban dwelling. Louise, on the other hand, thrived. A talented actress and writer who lacked the drive and discipline to pursue an artistic career, she happily filled her days with city life. She found excitement in just living next door to her favorite star of the stage and screen. She was so stimulated, she even wrote a play about Napoleon’s sister Pauline as a vehicle for Miss Hepburn—a work she did not hesitate to bring to her neighbor’s attention. The two women became good acquaintances, though it privately ate at Louise being so close to the very model of everything to which she aspired and yet was so far from attaining.

  Katharine Hepburn and Max Perkins never met. Never comfortable in any kind of theater, he had no interest whatsoever in show people. Perkins’s stars performed on paper. But he enjoyed having a figure so glamorous living so close and privately delighted in the constant bustle at 244. His wife’s excitation over their famous neighbor amused him; and stories of the fabled actress brought out a touch of the voyeur in him. While he occasionally strained to get a peek at her, the closest he ever got to laying eyes on Katharine Hepburn was in espying a bust of her that sat by one of her drawing room windows.

  So in the spring of 1972, when I was diligently approaching everyone I could find who ever knew Max Perkins, I decided I had to interview Katharine Hepburn. To be honest, whatever testimony she might offer would be far from crucial. The fact is, I simply wanted to meet Katharine Hepburn, and I felt I had a good excuse.

  Growing up, I was always crazy about television and the movies, but I never had any great interest in meeting movie stars. Disappointment seemed inevitable. But as has long been the case with many—from truck drivers to presidents—Katharine Hepburn was always the exception. From the first time I had watched her old movies on television and in revival houses and her new ones as they appeared in theaters, I wanted to meet her. By the time I had graduated from college, I had seen all of her signature films—not such an easy task in those pre-video days.

  Most fans suffer the problem of visiting their own best hopes upon their idols; but to her legions of fans around the world and across the century, Katharine Hepburn somehow seemed different from other movie stars, one whose natural beauty was probably just as striking even without Hollywood lights and makeup, one whose dialogue probably crackled with humor and intelligence even without others writing for her, one whose presence doubtless outshone any postures and gestures a director might have taught her. The greatest movie stars, the few genuine icons of the cinema, become so because we believe they are sharing actual pieces of themselves on the screen, a delusion fans nurse to heighten the fantasy. With Hepburn, however, such qualities were always assumed more than imagined.

  Working on my Perkins book at home in Los Angeles, I had heard that Katharine Hepburn lived perpetually in transit but that the best way to reach her was through her California address, where her life was at its most calm. I presumed Katharine Hepburn still received hundreds of letters a week with dozens of requests for interviews; but somehow I figured mine would appeal to her because the subject would be so unexpected. My father, a television and motion-picture writer and producer, obtained the Los Angeles address for me, and I sent a brief but earnest typed letter to 9191 St. Ives Drive, on the Beverly Hills border, just a few blocks above the Sunset Strip. Months passed, during which time I interviewed dozens of witnesses far more appropriate to my work—such writers as James Jones, Alan Paton, Taylor Caldwell, Marcia Davenport, Erskine Caldwell, and Martha Gellhorn. I mentally wrote off the letter I had written Hepburn.

  Then one day an envelope arrived, addressed in strong, jagged handwriting. Inside I found my letter to Katharine Hepburn, now filled on both sides of the page with the flamboyant script that had adorned the envelope. This handwritten response apologized for taking so long to get back to me but explained that her mail was in a constant state of flux; furthermore, she added, she really did not see any reason for us to meet as she had never met Max Perkins. She went on to write that she used to look out her windows and see the beautiful Perkins daughters, and that Louise Perkins was
“a lovely-looking creature—reaching for something on her own which she never could attain, I felt—living in the shadow of a remarkable man.” As for Perkins himself, she added, she used to spy on him walking “up and down Forty-ninth Street either conversing or in happy silence with my driver . . . who was known as the ‘Mayor of Forty-ninth Street.’ I always hoped that someday he would speak to me,” she noted, in conclusion. But he never did. The letter ended abruptly with neither complimentary close nor signature—merely “K.H.”

  I wrote back to thank her and to suggest that just those few outpourings indicated that a good interview might unlock more memories. She never responded. Frankly, she had already delivered more than I expected; and so I felt I had no business imposing any further. I finished my biography six years later and mailed a copy to her, again hearing nothing in reply.

  The next year, in the spring of 1979, I embarked on my second book, a biography of Samuel Goldwyn. He was the “Great Independent” of the Hollywood producers, a man who helped establish four motion-picture companies that had withstood fifty years of economic earthquakes—Paramount, MGM, United Artists, and the Samuel Goldwyn Company. His second wife, a former starlet named Frances Howard, had broken into show business in summer stock in Rochester, New York. There she fell in with (and in love with) a pudgy up-and-coming director of enormous talent, George Cukor. Strangely, his homosexuality only intensified their friendship, allowing them to become intimate in all ways but one. When the divorced Sam Goldwyn—with his fabled temper, twenty-one years her senior, and no matinee idol—proposed marriage, Frances ran straight to George, who quickly assessed her career opportunities. “Marry him, Frances,” he said. “You’ll never get a better part!”

  George Cukor and Frances Goldwyn remained close all their lives—and beyond, as you will see; and the Goldwyns’ son—Sam, Jr. (“Sammy” to those who knew him as a boy)—immediately arranged for me to meet with this crucial primary source. Beyond his remarkable career, Cukor was also famous for having one other “best friend”—Katharine Hepburn, whom he had directed ten times, including several pictures that were among the very best work either of them ever did. The talents and temperaments of actors and directors—be it D. W. Griffith with Lillian Gish, John Ford with John Wayne, William Wyler with Bette Davis—often click that way, providing outstanding results. For my money, no actor-director team in motion-picture history ever topped Hepburn and Cukor—especially when it came to romantic comedy. In fact, Hepburn’s small house on St. Ives was actually the guest cottage on the Cukor estate that Spencer Tracy had rented as the home away from his legal residence with his wife, the home Hepburn had shared with Tracy.

  I went to 9166 Cordell Drive (around the corner from St. Ives) for the first time at eleven in the morning on September 11, 1979, a blazingly hot day, into the 100s. The Cukor house was walled off from the road. At a door in the middle of the wall was a small wooden box, containing a telephone. I picked up the receiver, announced myself, and was admitted into the yard. A lawn swept down to the right toward a Romanesque pool area, where Cukor was standing with what appeared to be a team of houseboys, gardeners, and pool attendants. He suggested that one of the downstairs guestrooms in his big white house would be the coolest place for us to sit and talk. En route we toured much of the house, passing portrait-filled walls, with Hepburn represented everywhere—in paintings, photographs, even a pair of puppets of her and Spencer Tracy.

  Cukor was a most animated talker—at a fast clip, with a lot of hand gestures; and we talked for several hours. I scribbled notes in a pad as “television tables” were set before us with large chef’s salads and tall glasses of iced tea. A little before three, a handsome young assistant checked in on Cukor, whose energy was flagging, and I stood to introduce myself. “Oh, I know who you are,” he said. “Miss Hepburn talks about nothing but your book whenever she’s here.”

  Suddenly reminded, Cukor said that Kate was eager to meet me, that he would arrange it when she was next in California. Before I left, Cukor insisted on showing me the rest of his house—a beautiful living room with a large-paned picture window and Chippendale and Regency furniture that was fancy without being fussy; an oval room with a copper fireplace and a parquet floor and Georges Braque and Juan Gris represented on the walls; and, finally, his secretary’s office, every square inch of which seemed to be covered with signed photographs of the greatest actors of the century. “Funny how they always call me a ‘woman’s director,’” he said with some irritation, pointing out pictures of many of his leading men—John Barrymore, W C. Fields, Leslie Howard, Jack Lemmon in his first film, Ronald Colman in his Oscar-winning performance in A Double Life, and Rex Harrison in his, My Fair Lady. We met many more times over the next few years and became friends.

  The second time I didn’t meet Katharine Hepburn was in 1981, when she came to Los Angeles while appearing in Ernest Thompson’s The West Side Waltz. I saw the play, and Cukor arranged for us to meet at dinner after the run; but the invitation arrived at a time when I had to be in New York. So there I was getting to know many of Hepburn’s coevals—most of the remaining stars from the “golden age of Hollywood”—actresses whose careers had wound down while hers was humming. And I was still missing the one I was longing to meet.

  At the end of 1982 I received a telephone call from Rust Hills, the fiction editor of Esquire. He explained that the magazine wanted to mark its impending fiftieth anniversary by producing its “greatest issue ever.” Toward that end, Esquire was asking fifty authors to write about one of the fifty people in the last half-century who had “made a difference” in the way we had lived. Knowing I was deep into my Goldwyn research, Hills figured that I would think of motion pictures as the most popular art form of the 1900s and that I might select a mogul—probably Goldwyn—whose career might illustrate the “difference” he had made. I hesitated, largely because I was still in the midst of my research and was not ready to write up my findings, not even in a magazine piece. “But this would be a great opportunity for you,” Rust Hills kept insisting, reminding me that I would be in the company of Mailer and Cheever and Updike.

  “I definitely want to contribute a piece,” I assured him, “but I’m not prepared to write about one of the moguls.” After a moment’s thought, I said I had a better idea. “What about Katharine Hepburn?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “We’ve already decided that we don’t want any movie stars. And we only want to write about men.”

  “Now look,” I said, “I’d like to give this some serious thought . . . but I could make a very good argument right now that Katharine Hepburn is a lot more than a movie star. And one other thing . . .” (I was suddenly recalling Cary Grant’s response to Jack Warner’s offer to play Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady—that not only did he not want the part but that if Rex Harrison didn’t play it, he didn’t even want to see the movie.) “If there are not going to be any women represented in the issue,” I said, “not only do I not want to write for it, I don’t even want to read it. I think you guys are going to be in big trouble if Eleanor Roosevelt isn’t one of the fifty people who have ‘made a difference.’ ” I suggested we both think about it.

  By the time Rust Hills called back a week later, I was perfectly clear about my choice of subject and why. I explained the singularity of Katharine Hepburn’s career, the “greatest in Hollywood history,” I said. I dramatized my point with the fact that she won her first Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role the very year Esquire was founded and her unprecedented fourth Best Actress Oscar just that March. Thus, I explained, her career spanned Esquire’s years precisely. She was the only leading lady in the history of the medium to sustain a major career over five decades, I said, and she was still in demand. As if that was not enough, I added, she was one of the few movie stars who had performed regularly on the stage. Even more important, I argued, was the role Hepburn had played off the screen, as a model, even a hero, for at least three generations of women.


  Hills reiterated that his editor in chief, Lee Eisenberg, simply did not want to include any women in the issue, and certainly not an actress. “Then how about this,” I argued, “—why not do forty-nine men and one woman, Hepburn, as the person who made the biggest difference in the way men have changed their act over the last fifty years, that Hepburn best illustrates how the role of women had metamorphosed since the 1930s and how men had been forced to play at the top of their games just to keep up? The modern woman that Hepburn symbolizes,” I said, “has kept men on their toes for years.”

  Thinking of a handful of actors I thought the men at Esquire would consider their gods, I built my case: I suggested that Cary Grant was never so jaunty and appealing as when he was playing off Katharine Hepburn in Holiday, Bringing Up Baby, and The Philadelphia Story; Spencer Tracy, I said, was never so spunky and attractive as he was when keeping up with Hepburn in Woman of the Year and Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike; Jimmy Stewart was never so lusty and swaggering as he was in The Philadelphia Story, the only role for which he won an Oscar; Henry Fonda was never so prickly as he was on Golden Pond, in the role for which he won his only Oscar. And Humphrey Bogart never proved himself so doughty as when his Charlie Allnut shaped up for Hepburn’s Rosie Sayer in the role for which he won his only Oscar.

  To make the Hepburn piece even more special, I suggested that instead of writing about her, I would interview her, allowing her to talk about the preceding five decades and Esquire to publish the most piquant bits of the transcript. After making my hard sell, I backpedaled, explaining that I felt funny making so strong an argument when I did not know Miss Hepburn and had no idea whether she would be remotely interested in cooperating. “But,” I said, “I think I can at least arrange a meeting.” Early that spring, Rust Hills asked if I would come to New York and present my case to Lee Eisenberg.