Kate Remembered (10 page)

“Now,” she said with a big smile, “you're ready to go. Dinner tomorrow? Drinks at six.” She leaned over for a hug and my hearty thanks for the weekend. While I was saying goodbye to Phyllis and Bob and Sue, she called out for Dick, who descended from upstairs, wearing a pair of long underwear and a red nightcap. His ethereal friend Virginia Harrington followed.

“The horn,” Kate said. “Don't forget to honk the horn on your car—after you've left the driveway and you can see the front of the house. Two times long, three short. One, two, one-two-three. Have you got that? One, two, one-two-three.”

“I've got it, but why?”

“Because that's what we do here,” she replied, as though I had asked the stupidest question in the world. Then she explained it was a ritual for coming and going, a code that she and Howard had devised years earlier. I said my farewells and drove off. And as I turned left out of the driveway, I beeped the old “one, two, one-two-three,” and looked to the front of the house. Through the rain I saw them all standing in the doorway, waving goodbye, Kate's hands reaching out wide, reminding me of the last shot of her in
Summertime
.

The drive into the city took longer than usual because of the weather, but I used the time to replay in my mind the many scenes from the weekend, moments that seemed to come right out of
You Can't Take It with You, Hay Fever
, and, on occasion,
Long Day's Journey into Night.
I returned my rental car, and went to the Upper West Side brownstone of my former editor Thomas Congdon, and his wife, Connie, friends who had become a second family to me. Tom handed me a batch of phone messages—Myrna Loy, Sylvia Sidney, Joan Bennett, all of whom were consenting to interviews about Goldwyn. “And a Mrs. Lieberson,” he said. “You're slipping,” he added. “I haven't heard of her.”

“No,” I said, “but she'd interest you the most, because you love ballet, and Mrs. Lieberson is none other than Vera Zorina,” the former star of the New York City Ballet and a former wife of George Balanchine. “And not only that,” I said, “Sam Goldwyn was madly in love with her.”

Connie was more interested in my pants. “Where did you get
those
?” she asked.

“Don't ask. I'll tell you later.” I showered and changed and ran off to dinner. “And don't wait up,” I suggested, “because I know I'll be late.” I took a cab to the Hotel Pierre on Fifth Avenue at Sixty-first Street. The elevator operator brought me to the tenth floor, and at exactly seven, I walked to the door at the end of the corridor on the left, apartment 1007-10, and rang the doorbell.

Although nobody embodied as much Hollywood history as she, Irene Mayer Selznick was not too grand to answer her own door. The daughter of legendary film mogul Louis B. Mayer—the former junk dealer who soon parlayed his New England distributorship of films into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the mightiest film studio in history—and the wife of David O. Seiznick—the son of one of Mayer's archrivals in the early movie business, a young studio mogul himself who quickly became the most celebrated producer of his day, forever remembered for
Gone With the Wind
—was a longtime resident of the hotel. Some years earlier, she had bought up several suites and combined them into one luxurious apartment overlooking Central Park. I don't think she was more than five feet tall—with short dark hair in bangs and the shrewdest pair of eyes I have ever seen; and I know she was one of the most powerful presences I have ever beheld.

As if her lineage were not impressive enough, upon divorcing Selznick, Irene moved to New York and hung out her shingle as a theatrical producer. Her first effort was the landmark production of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, for which she harnessed the talents of Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, and a young Marlon Brando. She subsequently produced such hits as
The Chalk Garden
and
Bell, Book and Candle.
It would be less than precise to call Mrs. Selznick an extremely difficult person, but she was easily the most challenging I have ever met. One never let down one's guard with Irene, unless looking to be knocked out or thrown out. Emotional, volatile, and analytical, she took nothing at face value, probing layers beneath layers in even the simplest matters.

I had by this evening known Irene Mayer Selznick for about five years. At the start of my research on
Goldwyn
, Sam Goldwyn, Jr., had said the most perceptive person I could possibly speak to about his father would be Irene Selznick; and, he added, she probably wouldn't speak to me. So warned, I didn't approach her until I had been researching for more than a year and could ask questions in an informed manner. Then I sent her a letter outlining my goals and included a copy of
Max Perkins.
A second letter announced that I would be coming to New York in the near future and if she could spare a few minutes it would be helpful to meet her. Several weeks passed before she called me in Los Angeles one night, after ten.

She was working on her memoirs, she said, and she had a few technical questions about “the merger” in 1924 of the Metro and Goldwyn companies. Could I possibly straighten out some of the dates for her and direct her to any documentation? We talked for more than an hour; and the next day I sent by overnight mail Xeroxes of a few relevant documents—providing answers I believed she already knew. The following night, at eleven, she telephoned again, inviting me to call upon her the next time I was in New York. Many long calls over the next few months ensued, during which time she had been diagnosed with cancer of the nose.

Before I arrived in New York, I heard from a mutual acquaintance that Mrs. Selznick was seeing nobody, having just undergone an operation in which half her nose was removed, as was some skin from her forehead to fashion a new one. I called her anyway, to wish her well, and she apologized for her inability to receive visitors. Five minutes later, she called back to say she had not seen anybody in ages, and as I didn't know what she had looked like previously, I would not be shocked by any disfigurement. She clearly wanted company; and I seemed the perfect visitor—a friendly stranger. Could I see her after dinner that night? I packed a notepad in my jacket breast pocket.

Upon arriving at her apartment, she ushered me into a small library, where the lights had been turned down. I could still see fine, raw red marks between her eyebrows and down the bridge of her nose. She asked how I was getting along with the Goldwyn family, then slowly—and in a voice so low I had to strain to hear—she spewed details of the feud between her father and Sam Goldwyn. I sat there spellbound, too mesmerized to take notes. Once or twice I instinctively reached for my pen, but I hesitated before drawing it. A little after one in the morning, I said, “Mrs. Selznick, I feel you should be getting some rest.” She showed me to the door and said, “It's a good thing you didn't write anything down. If you come back for dinner tomorrow, I'll let you take that pad out of your pocket.”

Over the next decade, we spent countless hours together—in person, when I was in New York, and on the telephone, when I was in Los Angeles, usually after her city had gone to sleep. Her insights about Goldwyn and Hollywood and even the world were invaluable; but she came to exert an even greater influence on me, leading me to dig constantly for deeper meanings. Her years undergoing professional analysis—to say nothing of her own insightful mind—and living with two of the most compulsive men in a community of severe personality disorders had taught her to look for the truths that lay beneath all the falsities of Hollywood. Everything had a subtext, Irene believed, an inner truth more interesting than anything the naked eye could see. She was always more interested in that which was unspoken, in all that was not said. For her, little was ever stated directly; every sentence was fraught with cryptic messages.

As a result, conversations were like chess matches—in which Irene was always thinking two moves ahead. During one of our midnight phone conversations, for example, her second phone rang. She said she had to take the call and would call me back. When she did call—a little after three in the morning in New York—she started by saying, “No, your name didn't come up.” I was immediately meant to deduce that she had only one friend who called her at that hour—William S. Paley, whom I had recently interviewed. Another time, when I was in the midst of writing, she asked how the book was going. As I prepared to describe the “delicate stage” I was at, she simply asked, “Fenestration?” I didn't quite grasp what she was saying, so I proceeded to explain how I had finished laying down the entire story, and had gone through it a second time, stuffing in as many facts as possible, and that I was about to go through it again, this time taking things out, letting in air, opening up windows. “Ah,” she said after my two-minute description, “fenestration.”

In the middle of one extremely intense late-night conversation in apartment 1007, a siren outside sounded, and she saw my eyes move toward the window and hold there one beat too long. “Well,” she said, “I just lost you. You were gone. We'll pick up this story next time.”

It took me two days to figure out what she meant when she described a beautiful chorus girl her father had been attracted to as a “double-gater”—someone who swings both ways.

She had a wicked laugh, over which she would occasionally lose control; and nothing ever got past her. Her response to anything new, shocking, or hard to believe was, “You go to hell, go right to hell!”

“So, how did you get on with that brother?” Irene asked that wet Sunday night, not four hours after I had left Fenwick. We went into the cozy library, where we ritually sat for drinks. I went to the rear closet, next to an exquisite picture of a little girl by Mary Cassatt, and fetched a canister of thin wheat crackers, while she pulled from the refrigerator a crockery jar of herring and a chilled bottle. “Cary's aquavit,” she always called it, a rare brand her longtime friend Mr. Grant had introduced to Irene years earlier. Because it apparently could not be obtained outside Sweden, he always kept her stocked with a case of it. “Oh, the chemistry,” she never failed to say in response to the initial reaction in our mouths of the herring with the wheat and the aquavit. After a few gentle moans of ecstasy, and a toast to Cary, she said, “You never told me you knew my friend Kate.”

I explained that until a week prior I had not known Katharine Hepburn but that over the last few days a friendship had instantly unfolded. I also told Irene that I knew that people in her position were often approached by writers in their efforts to get to more famous people; and though I knew of the close relationship between the two women, I never wanted Irene to think for a minute that that was why I had been spending so much time with her. (She had, for example, recently befriended a man whom she unmasked as someone who really wanted to meet Kitty Carlisle, the widow of Moss Hart.) Similarly, it had not been until my second day at Fenwick that I had told Kate of my friendship with Irene. This information had clearly prompted a call upon my departure, one that came after fifty years of ups and downs between them, a complex relationship in which each clearly admired the other despite diametrically opposed approaches to life.

After talking about Kate all through dinner and into the early morning, I realized I was about to become a Ping-Pong ball in a game of two experts who played hard and fast. Toward two, Irene got up from her chair, clasped my shoulder (rather melodramatically, I thought at first), and said, “You must go to her.”

I realized she was dead serious and, as always with Irene, obviously meant more than the literal. I'm sure I looked puzzled at her remark.

“Kate has nobody,” Irene said, with a touch of pity in her voice, “nobody she can really talk to. She has spent so many years keeping people away, now nobody really comes around.” I said that sounded a little extreme, that she seemed to have an active social life, with people calling and knocking on her door all the time. “But nobody she can talk to,” said Irene, “certainly not that insane brother. Who's still alive who knew George Cukor? Who knows who Grady Sutton is? Lowell Sherman? Dorothy Arzner? Everyone's either dead or doesn't know who they were when they were alive.”

In a low voice, she said that she loved Kate—“Sister Kate,” she signed her letters to Irene, referring to more than a popular song from their youths—and that the greatest favor she could now do for her friend was to present me to her. I said that I did not see the need for taking sides, that we were all friends here. But Irene said that Kate was quickly going to become even more insistent about her friendship with me, and that I must not fail her, that on those occasions when both would be calling, and I could respond to but one of them, I must “always be there for Kate.” Boy, I thought, sitting in her vast living room—with a stunning Matisse (looking all too much, I thought, like Jennifer Jones, David Selznick's second wife)—there's a lot written between these lines. As Irene showed me to the front door, she repeated, “Go to her.”

I did—the next night, for dinner . . . and the next few nights after that. The drill was generally the same, with Phyllis sitting with us through the meal, occasionally chiming in with some funny observation, then discreetly disappearing so that Kate and I could talk alone. The only part of the dinner routine at Hepburn's that I didn't enjoy was that she ate so fast. Sometimes I'd just be finishing my soup while she was impatiently waiting to move on to dessert. In an aside, I once quietly commented to Phyllis that I had heard that many people didn't like dining at Schönbrunn Palace with the Emperor Franz Josef because he ate so fast, and the half-eaten servings of the guests were cleared as soon as the emperor had finished each course. “What are you two muttering over there?” Kate asked, never wanting to be excluded from any conversation. “Oh,” Phyllis explained, “Mr. Berg was just saying that he thinks of us as royalty.” To this day, I'm not sure how clever Phyllis was.