Kate Remembered Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  I - A Private Function

  II - Making a Difference

  III - Curtain Up

  IV - Morning Glory

  V - Katharine of Arrogance

  VI - In Bloom Again

  VII - Yare

  VIII - Guess Who Game to Dinner

  IX - Always Mademoiselle

  X - Travels with “My Aunt”

  XI - Queen Anne’s Lace

  Praise for A. Scott Berg’s

  Kate Remembered

  “Hepburn’s observations about everyone from Louis B. Mayer to Howard Hughes and Sean Penn are sharp, funny, and poignant.”

  —Maureen Dowd, The New York Times

  “Readers of Kate Remembered . . . will learn about Katharine Hepburn’s meteoric rise, her slumps, her many affairs, her offbeat family, and what she thinks of everyone from Bob Hope to Meryl Streep. Mostly, they will get a chance to experience what the star was like, with an intimacy far greater than any dirt-digging tell-all.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Touching . . . [an] unusual and unusually fitting account . . . of a life lived outside the usual in virtually all things.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Hepburn sounds off plenty in Berg’s fond recollection of their close twenty-year friendship. The actress comes across as smart, feisty, independent . . . A worthy look at a candid Kate.”

  —People

  “Kate Remembered is her last performance, and one of her most touching. That it comes to us from beyond the grave should not be a shock. That’s the sort of thing a goddess does.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Magnificent . . . A peach of a memoir. Berg and Hepburn have a similar chemistry on the page to Tracy and Hepburn on screen.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  “Intimate, thoughtful, and considerate. Kate Remembered is an intensely personal book, and that’s a good thing: This is Katharine Hepburn filtered through Scott Berg, and . . . part of the fun of the book is seeing how these two bright, confident personalities interact: The wisecracks fly like spitballs, but beneath it all, Berg and Hepburn are obviously simpatico.”

  —Salon.com

  “Berg’s writing is so intimate that readers may feel they are hiding behind a curtain as they listen to the stories he elicits from his subject.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “[Hepburn’s] legion of fans can spend some happy time with her in . . . Kate Remembered. It’s a work of love that . . . offers new insights into this kind, prickly, brilliant, brusque, beautiful, one-of-a-kind woman. [A] loving and generous memoir . . . The millions who loved Katharine Hepburn through her movies will love this book.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “A haunting insight into the twilight of fame, with shades of Sunset Boulevard, shades of The Aspern Papers. Berg is . . . an astute and subtle observer, always willing to take a back seat while greater egos strut their stuff The result is a memoir with never a dull page.”

  —The Daily Telegraph (London)

  “By virtue of Berg’s access and his powers of observation, you are brought inside the home of Hepburn from the time she is in her mid-seventies. Through the strength of her personality, which shines even in print, you hear her speak her own lines in her own voice, not lines written for her. If you are a Hepburn fan you have to read this book.”

  —The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY)

  “Fans will read Kate Remembered . . . and find within its pages a woman very much like the actress’s on-screen persona: cranky and charming, tough and thoughtful, independent and in love with those who can keep pace with stiff drinks and stronger conversations.”

  —Dallas Observer

  “The unorthodox friendship between actress and writer—one of a number of close friendships that sustained Hepburn through her last years—is wonderful to read about, simultaneously relaxing, entertaining, and touching. The book is irresistible, and I see no reason to try to resist it . . . uproarious . . . nostalgic . . . charming . . . gritty.”

  —The Buffalo News

  “Exhilarating . . . Kate Remembered reads like an extended conversation with this remarkable woman . . . An engrossing, three-dimensional account of a contradictory woman who was determined to be a star while keeping the world at bay. Because of Berg’s extraordinary access, a reader is bound to feel the thrill of being able to enter Hepburn’s private realm.”

  —The New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “Katharine Hepburn had definite ideas about just about everything, including how to arrange logs in a fire. So reveals memoirist A. Scott Berg, who received these instructions from her: ‘Not too close to each other. Make them fight for the flame.’ Revealing words. For, as Berg shows . . . Hepburn had plenty of fire and plenty of fight in her, and she was notoriously careful in not allowing others to get close to the flame. [A] pleasant memoir . . . and it serves as a useful manual for any actor looking to increase his or her odds of survival in the business.”

  —The Hollywood Reporter

  “A witty, gracefully written book about her life that is part biography, part memoir, and wholly a work of love. [Berg’s] familiarity with Hollywood and skill as a writer is evident in Kate Remembered, which seamlessly combines his personal reminiscences with fascinating detail about Hepburn’s childhood, remarkable career, and final years.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “A compulsively readable . . . look at an elusive legend.”

  —Fort Worth Star Telegram

  “An affectionate, often affecting memoir.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Rebel, feminist, free thinker, recluse, survivor, great actress. A. Scott Berg attempts to capture all these descriptions of Katharine Hepburn in his mesmerizing account of an extraordinary life. In the end, she comes across as a fascinating figure with standards that guided her all her life . . . As for Berg, he is always in control, resulting in an ultimately satisfying style imbued with sincerity and complete honesty.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “A loving memoir of someone who became a friend, a rare thing between biography writers and stars in this age of kiss and tell. It is also remarkably candid.”

  —Birmingham Post (UK)

  “Even those who’ve read many Hepburn biographies will find Berg’s immersion in the actor’s world engrossing, full of crisply voiced takes on old Hollywood and intimate looks at her everyday life.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  BERKLEY BOOKS NEW YORK

  A Berkley Book

  Published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  A division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2003 by A. Scott Berg

  The ten-line excerpt of Phelps Putnam’s “The Daughters of the Sun” (as published in The Collected Poems of H. Phelps Putnam, edited by Charles R. Walker, 1971) is reprinted with the kind permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  The following photographs are used with the kind permission of the

  owners indicated below:

  Archive Photos: frontispiece and pages 136 and 168: The Academy of Motion Picture

  Arts and Sciences: pages 8, 216, and 312; Corbis/Bettmann-UPI: pages 26, 68, and 274;

  Getty Images: page 108; G. P. Putnam’s Sons: page 362; Nick Vaccaro: page xiv.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or

  electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of

  copyri
ghted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Berg, A. Scott (Andrew Scott)

  Kate remembered / A. Scott Berg.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-49734-0

  1. Hepburn, Katharine, 1907—2003. 2. Berg, A. Scott (Andrew Scott) 3. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title

  PN 2287. H.45 B45

  2003 791.43’028’092—dc21

  2003545232 [B]

  CIP

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  to

  KEVIN McCORMICK

  Author’s Note

  Over the past thirty years, I have written three biographies. Each of these books is part of a larger plan I have long been devising, a collection of objectively told life stories of great American cultural figures of the twentieth century, each representing a different wedge of the Apple Pie. (Thus far, I have written about a book editor from New England, a motion-picture mogul from Poland, and an aviator from the Midwest.) This book falls outside that plan.

  The subject at hand has certainly led a fascinating life and impacted the times in which she lived. She more than merits a full-scale biography. Alas, I am not the one to write such a book because I am, quite frankly, incapable of writing about her objectively. For one thing, I believe—unabashedly and without qualification—that Katharine Hepburn established the greatest acting career of the twentieth century, perhaps ever. And for another, Katharine Hepburn was a close friend of mine for two decades. Quite frankly, I walked into her life adoring her; and over the next twenty years, my admiration for her only swelled.

  This book is, thus, not a critical study of either Katharine Hepburn’s life or her career. It is, rather, as true an account of her life as I can present, based on countless hours of private conversations during which she reminisced. Even more than recalling events, Miss Hepburn often used our time together to reflect, an exercise in which I don’t think she indulged with anybody else. And so, more than my remembrances, this book intends to convey hers.

  As our conversations would invariably turn to her past, I soon felt that she was using me less as a sounding board than as an anvil against which she could hammer some of her emotions and beliefs. Consequently, this book reveals an unusual relationship in a unique life, one lived large—and largely according to her own rules. More important, it sets down many of the stories of that life as she saw them, full of sentiments she felt should not be made public until her death. Ultimately, then, it is not just a story of the poignant final years in which I knew her; it is a tale of a great theatrical personality and the better part of the century that was the stage for her distinguished life.

  I

  A Private Function

  I’ve never felt so intimidated ringing a doorbell.

  Even though she and I had become friendly in the past few months over the telephone and I was standing at her front door in New York City at her invitation, I was genuinely nervous about our first meeting. And I’ve never been especially starstruck.

  But this was different. Katharine Hepburn was the first movie star I had ever noticed, and she had been my favorite ever since—the only actor whose plays and movies I attended just because she was in them.

  On that Tuesday—April 5, 1983—I arrived at Third Avenue and Forty-ninth Street with fifteen minutes to spare. So I walked around a few neighboring blocks until 5:55 p.m. Then I slowly walked east on Forty-ninth Street until I was a few doors from Second Avenue—number 244. I stood on the sidewalk for another minute and a half, until the second hand on my watch ticked toward twelve. I opened the little black iron gate, stepped down into the well at the curtained front door, and pressed the button. The bell let out a ring so shrill, I could practically feel all four floors of the brownstone shake.

  Nobody answered. After a long pause, a short woman with black hair poked her cherubic face out of an adjacent door, the service entrance, and said, “Yes?”

  I said I had a six o’clock appointment with Miss Hepburn. Was I at the wrong door? “No, no,” she said. “I’ll let you in.” She came to the front door, and I heard two heavy locks tumble. This was Norah Considine, who cooked and cleaned. She said Miss Hepburn was expecting me.

  I entered the vestibule and left my raincoat on a bench at the foot of the steep, narrow staircase, with its metal pole for a handrail. Another woman appeared from the kitchen—gray-haired, bony, with a neckbrace; and we introduced ourselves. She was, as I presumed, Phyllis Wilbourn, Hepburn’s companion and majordomo. “Oh, yes. Go right up,” she said in a sandy-throated English accent. “Miss Hepburn’s expecting you.” At the top of the landing, I could look into the rear living room, where the last of that day’s light was coming in from the garden.

  Before I had even entered the room, I heard the unmistakable voice from inside. “Did you use the bathroom?”

  “I’m sorry?” I said, now standing in the doorway and seeing Katharine Hepburn for the first time.

  She sat to the right in a comfortable-looking chair, her feet in white athletic shoes propped up on a footrest. She appeared to be amazingly fit for a seventy-five-year-old then recovering from a serious car accident. She looked restored and relaxed, her skin tight against the legendary cheekbones, her eyes clear, a soothing pale blue, her hair a ruddy gray, all pulled off her face and pinned up into her trademark knot. She wore no makeup and flashed a big movie-star grin, exuding charm and energy. She was wearing khaki pants, a white turtleneck under a blue chambray shirt, and she had a red sweater tied loosely around her neck. As I approached her, I tried to take in as much of the room as I could—the high ceiling, pictures on the walls, a fire blazing in the fireplace, nothing ostentatious except for huge bouquets of flowers everywhere.

  “Did you use the bathroom?” she asked again, before I had reached her.

  “No.”

  “Well, don’t you think you should?”

  “No, thank you. I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  “Well, I think you should probably go back downstairs and use the bathroom first.” I repeated that I didn’t think it was necessary but that I would do my best.

  Two minutes later I returned; and as I reached the top of the stairs, she asked, “Did you use the bathroom?”

  “Well, actually,” I said, “I did, thank you.”

  “Good. You know my father was a urologist, and he said you should always go to the bathroom whenever you have to . . . and you see, you had to. So how do you do? I’m Katharine Hepburn.”

  “Yes, I know you are.” We shook hands, and from her chair she looked me up and down and smiled. “You’re tall.” A little over six feet, I told her. “Tennis?” No, I said, but I swim regularly and work out with weights at a gym. “Boah.” A little boring, I concurred, adding that it was the most time-efficient form of exercise for me.

  “Do you smoke?” she asked.

  I started to laugh—reeling as though I had walked into a production of The Importance of Being Earnest—and said, “No, Lady Bracknell, I don’t.” She laughed and said, “I used to. Gave it up. Disgusting habit. Well, I hope you drink.”

  “Fortunately,” I said, “I do.” With that, she sent me to the table behind her, on which sat a wooden African mask of a woman with unusually large, wild eyes and prominent cheekbones. “Somebody sent me that,” she said. “It looks just like me, don’t you think?” Except for the tribal paint, it did. Next to it sat a large wooden tray with several bottles of liquor and three thick glass goblets. “Do you see anything there you like?” I did—a bottle of King William IV Scotch. She asked me to make two of them, according to her specifications—which meant filling the glass beyond the brim with ice, pouring a shot of the whiskey slowly over the cubes, then topping it with soda. She directed me to sit on the couch to her right, white canvas covered with a red knit throw. She took a sip, then a gul
p of her drink and said, “Too weak.” I doctored it. “Yours looks too weak,” she said. Fearing a replay of the bathroom episode, I stood my ground, saying, “I feel the need to stay one ounce more sober than you.”

  While we discussed the interview I had come to conduct with her, Phyllis Wilbourn climbed the stairs. I started to get up, as the neck-braced septugenarian appeared a little wobbly; but my hostess assured me she was just fine. “You’ve met Phyllis Wilbourn?” Miss Hepburn inquired, as the older woman passed a tray of hot cheese puffs. “My Alice B. Toklas.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that,” Phyllis insisted. “It makes me sound like an old lesbian, and I’m not.”

  “You’re not what, dearie, old or a lesbian?” she said, laughing.

  “Neither.” With that, Phyllis fixed her own drink, a ginger ale, and sat in a chair opposite us; and I continued to soak up the room. Hepburn watched me as I gazed at a carved wooden goose hanging on a chain from the ceiling. “Spencer’s,” she said. Then I noticed a painting of two seagulls on some rocks.

  “Do you think that’s an exceptional picture or not?” she asked.

  “It’s amusing,” I said. “Fun.”

  “Me,” she said, referring to the artist.

  The fire was dying, and Hepburn asked if I knew anything about fireplaces. I told her I was no Boy Scout but that I could probably kick a little life into it. “Let’s see,” she said, preparing to grade me in what was clearly an important test. I used the pair of wrought-iron tongs to turn a few logs over, and they went up in a blaze. She was visibly pleased. “How about those on the mantel?” she asked, referring me to a pair of small figurines, nude studies of a young woman. “Me,” she said.