Kate Remembered (36 page)

In 1976 Hepburn agreed to a three-month run of a play called
A Matter of Gravity
by her friend Enid Bagnold. This was a lighter version of her hit play
The Chalk Garden
, a look at several generations in a big English country house. In London, Edith Evans had played the dotty matriarch in the decaying home. Bagnold was only too happy to alter the part to suit the grande dame of the American theater. In retrospect, one of the play's greatest distinctions was its appearance of Christopher Reeve as her grandson in one of his first roles. Kate took a shine to the handsome young actor. So the day I heard that Reeve had been paralyzed in a near-fatal accident, I called Kate to give her the news. “Part of me thinks you'll say, ‘He'd be better off dead.' ”

“Mmmm,” Kate said, passively agreeing. Then she added, “But I don't think so. He's strong. Strong body, strong spirit. He's got a family he loves. He's got guts . . . and unlike a lot of actors . . . he's got a brain.”

Before taking
A Matter of Gravity
on a successful nationwide tour, Hepburn appeared in an odd, forgotten little movie called
Olly Olly Oxen Free,
in which she played the owner of a junkyard who helps two children repair a hot-air balloon. “All I really remember about it,” Kate said, only five years after making it, “is that I got to ride in the balloon. And one night we filmed a scene in which I brought the balloon down right in the middle of a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. I'd say that was probably worth the price of admission for all of us.”

After the
Matter of Gravity
tour, Hepburn worked again with George Cukor, then seventy-nine, remaking Emlyn Williams's
The Corn Is Green.
Bette Davis had appeared in the acclaimed 1940s film version, and Kate was pleased when the television production won more kudos for everybody involved.

So, in the fifteen years since Spencer Tracy's death, Katharine Hepburn had been almost as active as she had during any previous period of her life. She cheerfully graced magazine covers and granted interviews, including one with Dick Cavett, the host of a popular late-night television program. In 1974 she startled a worldwide television audience—and a thousand people sitting in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion—when Academy Awards host David Niven unexpectedly announced the next presenter by saying, “To me, this is a star—Katharine Hepburn.”

She strode out in a black pantsuit and clogs, as the stunned crowd rose as one. Hepburn quieted the audience and thanked them for their moving welcome. “I'm also very happy that I didn't hear anyone call out, ‘It's about time,' ” she said. Then she added, “I'm living proof that a person can wait forty-one years to be unselfish.” She was there to present the Irving Thalberg Award to her old friend Lawrence Weingarten, who had produced
Adam's Rib
. After they walked offstage, Hepburn left the winner to face the press alone, as she disappeared into a waiting limousine, leaving as suddenly as she had arrived. Hepburn sightings in Los Angeles and New York—playing tennis with Alex Olmedo at the Beverly Hills Hotel, shoveling snow on East Forty-ninth Street, theater-going on and off Broadway—became less uncommon but no less thrilling.

By the 1980s most of the male movie stars of Hepburn's generation had died, and the few remaining female stars of her vintage had fallen from sight. A tremor—mostly her head, sometimes her hands—had become increasingly pronounced; her voice quavered; and skin cancers periodically erupted on her face—“too much time in the sun. No good for redheads.” But her strength and energy had not noticeably diminished.

She and her friend Noel Willman, who had directed her in a few plays, drove down to Wilmington, Delaware, one day to catch a performance of a play called
On Golden Pond,
by Ernest Thompson. Hepburn found it a “true” depiction of an elderly married couple, coping with the difficulties of old age. Although she found the actors at least a generation too young for the parts they were playing, she thought it would make a good movie.

So did Jane Fonda. She was intrigued by the relationship between the incommunicative and undemonstrative father and his daughter, who had long sought his approval. It mirrored her relationship with her legendary father, Henry. Not until Jane's production company put the film together and the director, Mark Rydell, introduced them, did the two mythic older stars meet.

“It was strange,” Kate said of being cast in the film. “It seemed as though I was the mother Jane had fantasized having . . . and if her father and I could make everything all right in the movie, somehow things would be all right in her life. There was certainly a whole layer of drama going on in the scenes between her and Hank, and I think she came by to watch every scene he and I had together. There was a feeling of longing about her.”

By the end of the shoot—during which Hepburn's character, Ethel Thayer, tries to instill some Yankee virtues into her unforgiving daughter and unyielding husband—Hepburn was full of admiration for Jane Fonda. “We all had a good time making the picture,” Kate said. “It was fun.” And it allowed Kate to show how spunky she still was—diving fully clothed into Squam Lake, singing and dancing an old campfire song, perfusing her failing husband with love and wisdom. She walked away from the production thinking how hard it must have been for Jane, being the daughter of this famous figure who was so remote. “Hank Fonda was the hardest nut I ever tried to crack,” Kate said. “But I didn't know any more about him after we had made the picture than I did at the beginning. Cold. Cold. Cold.”

At the start of production, Hepburn had given Fonda one of Spencer Tracy's favorite hats; and at the end, the actor had reciprocated by presenting her with a painting he had done of three hats, Trary's in the middle. Kate was touched by the gift—until she realized he had made a print of the picture and given dozens of them away, to publicists and friends of friends. “Strange man,” she said. “Angry at something. And sad.”

Hepburn had her hand in the script—more, I suspect, than she let on. She turned suddenly modest one evening talking about the speech in which Ethel tells her husband that he's her “knight in shining armor,” and that he's got to “go, go, go.” When I suggested that it sounded like “pure Hepburn,” she immediately spoke of all the hard work the writer had done, defining those characters. Ernest Thompson won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay that year. So did Henry Fonda, his first, which his daughter accepted while he watched on television from his bed, only a few months before he died. Breaking her own precedent, Katharine Hepburn won as well—for the fourth time.

By then, Hepburn was already appearing in a new work by Ernest Thompson, a play called
The West Side Waltz
. It was another gerontological study, a woman refusing to bow out of life gracefully. She had hoped somebody might buy the screen rights for her, to costar with either Elizabeth Taylor or Doris Day; but nobody did. Instead, she committed herself to a film originally titled
The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley
. Kate said the writer had literally thrown the script over her fence and she had fallen in love with it—a black comedy about an old woman who hires a hit man (played by Nick Nolte) to bump off her dying friends. Few beyond Hepburn saw the humor.

Over the next few years, Kate continued to lose friends and acquaintances as well as longtime “rivals” from the thirties (most of whom she barely knew, if at all)—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, Mae West, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck. Later Garbo, Dietrich, Greer Garson, Sylvia Sidney, and Claudette Colbert died. Kate's first great friend from the theater, Laura Harding, lived an increasingly sedentary life on her estate in New Jersey, which irritated Kate as much as it bored her.

In what proved to be his final months, Kate restruck a warm relationship with Luddy, then a widower and suffering from inoperable cancer. For a while he accepted his first wife's open invitation to Fenwick; but when the trips became too difficult, she visited him at his own bedside. “I tried to do everything for Luddy that I possibly could, knowing I could never repay him for all the support he had given me,” Kate told me two decades after his death. “Unimaginable—my life, had it not been for Luddy. He was heaven-sent.”

More than ever, Hepburn cultivated her newer friendships. Cynthia McFadden divorced her husband and, after joining the
ABC News
team, always made time for Kate; Tony Harvey moved , from the city to the Hamptons, but visited regularly at Turtle Bay and Fenwick and even got her to call on him on Long Island. David Eichler often made the trip north from Philadelphia for dinner and the night. She always got a charge out of seeing Martina Navratilova, one of whose tennis racquets she proudly displayed in the living room; and she always seemed buoyed by gossip columnist Liz Smith, despite her being engaged in what Kate called “a moronic profession.”

Kate also found herself making time for people she normally would never have tolerated. She would invite Corliss Lamont, a highly intelligent but rather ponderous old author and philosopher, to dine anytime he called, even though he would sit there for fifteen minutes at a time without uttering a word. Kate had gone two decades without speaking to Garson Kanin because of his chatty book
Tracy and Hepburn;
but even he won his way back into her good graces, simply because he was available. “Oh,” she said wearily the day after their reunion, “I'm too old to be carrying grudges.” But her dance card was no longer filled every night. As often as not, Kate and Phyllis ate dinner alone, in increasing silence.

Into her eighties, Hepburn remained professionally active. She continued to make movies for television, which gradually deteriorated in quality, though not necessarily in popularity. She participated in documentary films—sometimes as the subject, just as often to contribute anecdotes about others, be it Spencer Tracy or George Stevens.

She tinkered for years on a screenplay titled
Me and Phyllis,
scenes of their lives together. It climaxed in the car crash in which Kate almost lost her foot and Phyllis her life. One night in the living room on Forty-ninth Street, Kate performed the entire script for me. She captured the dialogue between the two of them in funny detail; and she brought me close to tears a few times in revealing her gratitude for having had somebody so dear as Phyllis in her life. Beyond that, it was a strange piece of work that was meant to be a quasi-documentary, with Hepburn reenacting scenes from her own life. She asked me what I thought of it and how she might improve it. For a moment, I felt like William Holden stumbling into Norma Desmond's parlor in
Sunset Boulevard.
“Now, remember,” she said, before I could speak, “don't spoil an old woman's delusions.”

“Well, it certainly played great tonight,” I said, “but do you think it would be as funny on the screen? I mean, wouldn't it be strange?”

“Well, you laughed, and I'll be playing me again.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but you were performing the whole thing as a kind of reading. It'll be different if you're staging it for film, which literalizes everything. Besides,” I said, “who could possibly play Phyllis?”

“Quite right,” Phyllis interjected. “Nobody could possibly play me.”

Kate asked for casting suggestions; and I proposed Mona Washbourne and Mildred Natwick, both of whom had some of Phyllis's fey quality. “It's a shame Nigel Bruce is gone,” Kate said.

“Nigel Bruce?” queried Phyllis indignantly. “To play me? That's ridiculous.”

“You don't have to worry, dearie. He's dead.”

In fact, several producers showed an interest in Kate's script, though I think a few of them were just interested in spending time with her and shopping her name around town. Joseph E. Levine—a producer with a long and spotty track record—actively pursued the project and claimed for months to have the financing in place. Talks progressed far enough that Kate was once willing to have lunch with him in public. She told me it would be the first time she had eaten in a restaurant in at least twenty years. As that made it an occasion in itself, she selected The Four Seasons. She ate caviar and drank champagne and thoroughly enjoyed herself; but the deal soon fell apart.

No matter. Hepburn finished her second autobiographical book,
Me,
the compilation of pieces she had been pulling together over the years. Sonny Mehta and everyone else at Knopf backed the book in a tremendous way. When the American Booksellers Association held its large annual tradeshow in New York late in the spring of 1991, just months before publication, Kate opened her house to the owners of the major bookstores and chains for a cocktail party.

For the first time I saw her panic about the book. While dozens of people milled around the house, some spilling out into the garden on the warm spring evening, Kate pulled me upstairs and said, “Why am I doing this?” I assured her that this party was great public relations, that meeting her was one of the biggest thrills for everybody in that room. “No,” she said in frustration. “Why am I publishing this book? I mean, I've gone this long. Why bother—”

“Maybe because the public has given you a lot over the years. And you should think of this as giving them something back. A small piece of you for those who care.”

Kate returned to the party all smiles; and when the books were produced, she autographed copies for everybody who had a hand in its publication. She even agreed to selective publicity. While the book never got penetratingly personal, it illustrated a life of hard work, adventures, and fun.

On my next visit to Fenwick, I found a copy of the book just sitting on my bed, autographed with the author's love and thanks. Flipping through the finished work, I also found my name listed with a dozen others in the acknowledgments—calling me her “chief critic.” I went downstairs and said, “I assume this copy of your book is for me.”