Kate Remembered
by A Scott Berg
Simon & Schuster £18.99, pp318
Over the years, starstruck young writers, most of them gay, have described how they were invited to the four-storey brownstone at 244 East 49th Street, Katharine Hepburn's Manhattan home for more than 60 years, to be given an imperious audience by the great lady and then dismissed. One of their number was Scott Berg, a Princeton graduate and author of a distinguished biography of the publisher Max Perkins (editor of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe).
In the opening pages of this engaging memoir, he recalls his first visit in 1983 to her odd ménage. The 76-year-old Hepburn, before even setting eyes on him, shouted down the stairwell telling him to use the 'bathroom'. 'You know my father was a urologist, and he said you should always go to the bathroom whenever you have to,' she explained. Hepburn gave Berg exactly an hour, but she'd agreed to talk to him further for an Esquire supplement on the '50 people who'd made a difference' during the previous 50 years. She was to be the only woman and the only Hollywood figure.
Esquire reneged on the deal by including other film stars and Berg and Hepburn withdrew the piece, thus confirming a bond that had grown up over several weeks of regular meetings in New York and Fenwick, her Connecticut retreat that had belonged to the Hepburn family since early in the century. For the next 20 years, Berg was a solicitous intimate and confidant, and she encouraged him to keep a record of their relationship with a view to publishing a book after her death.
And here it is, scarcely three weeks after lengthy obituaries and tributes have taken up many pages in the world's press. The book is an extraordinary feat of production, though some traditionalists might think the haste borders on the indecent.
Kate Remembered is a better book than John Malcolm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America or AE Hotchner's Papa Hemingway, both of which, in many respects, it recalls, especially in the chronicling of someone in decline and in extremis. The book interweaves the story of her upper-middle-class New England background and her 50 years of stardom with vivid, often very amusing accounts of this spirited, eccentric, proud, independent, dutiful, considerate woman in old age.
The general arc of the life will be familiar to anyone who's read the obituaries, but this book adds to what has been written about her and what she herself has chosen to write. Hepburn ostracised her friend, Garson Kanin, for 20 years after he'd invaded her privacy by writing the memoir, Tracy and Hepburn, but she speaks frankly to Berg of her 25-year love affair with the 'manly' Tracy, telling him of the one occasion when the drunken Spencer struck her in the face, and stating unequivocally that she never wanted to marry him. She pushes Berg into hypothesising about Tracy's alcoholism (partly attributable, he suggests, to a drunken, unappreciative father and low self-esteem), and then tells him that 'you should write all that down'.
The book is full of shrewd and fascinating asides on other actors. Olivier was a great actor but 'a second-rate person'; Richardson was 'as mad as a hatter until he got inside someone else's head'; Fonda was 'a strange man, angry at something and sad'; Bob Hope turned the comedy The Iron Petticoat into 'cheap vaudeville with me as his stooge'. Sinatra she loathed,and at the end of shooting on Suddenly Last Summer she spat in the face of both Joseph Mankiewicz and Sam Spiegel, though they claim she only spat at their feet.
Of younger actors, she revered Vanessa Redgrave (her performance in The Bostonians was, she thought, the one redeeming feature of Merchant-Ivory productions), tipped Julia Roberts for stardom, couldn't understand a word Schwarzenegger said, thought Meryl Streep too mechanical, didn't like Glenn Close's legs, was delighted by Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, held Sally Field in high regard and couldn't stand Woody Allen.
Running through the book is the difficult friendship between Hepburn and the theatrical impresario, Irene Mayer Selznick (the daughter of Louis B Mayer, former wife of David O Selznick, both major figures in Hepburn's career). The two women lived within a mile of each other, yet seldom met. They are the co-dedicatees of Berg's mammoth 1989 biography of Samuel Goldwyn and he acted as an emissary between them, trying to bring them together. Irene Selznick openly accuses Hepburn of bisexuality (a 'double-gater' is her term) and, reacting to Hepburn's public ubiquity, talks of her 'growing old disgracefully'. Hepburn was equally bitchy.
The book has two splendid set-pieces. The first is a dinner party that Hepburn gave for Michael Jackson at which it transpired that the singer was using the actress for a photo-opportunity. Jackson turned up in 'a satiny blue uniform trimmed with gold braid [that] looked flimsy and gaudy. Like something Harold Hill might have sold to some boys in Iowa along with some tin trombones'.
Under some questioning, Jackson revealed that the only Hepburn film he'd seen was 'the one where Spencer Tracy plays a fisherman, and he saves the little boy'. Half-way through an awkward meal, a message came from Stephen Sondheim's house next door. Sondheim's guest, Tom Stoppard, was requesting Jackson's autograph for his children. 'I can't recall a more peculiar night in my life. And I'm going to bed,' said Hepburn.
The second setpiece centres on Warren Beatty eliciting Berg's assistance to persuade the 86-year-old Katharine Hepburn to appear as his aunt in his film, Love Affair (a remake of An Affair to Remember), which deservedly went straight to video in Britain. It was a vanity trip for Beatty, and although Hepburn agreed to take the part (it was her final big-screen appearance and her only supporting role), his wheedling charm and self-regard cut little ice with her. When Berg commented that Beatty and his wife, Annette Bening, seemed very much in love, Hepburn replied: 'Hmmm. With the same man.'
Hepburn spoke in a personal, oddly fractured style, and one of the last memorable things she said to Berg was in 1999 at the point when she was losing her short-term memory and lapsing into amnesiac incoherence. Friends and relatives around her were talking about the Columbine High School massacre, her sister's son who was missing in action in South-East Asia, and her brother's suicide back in 1920.
' "Life," she said quietly and with some difficulty, as though it were hard to unclench her teeth, "...not easy".'
