Kate Remembered (21 page)

In 1940, that was a widely held opinion. Spencer Tracy had, by then, appeared in more than forty pictures, playing everything from gangsters to priests and winning back-to-back Oscars for his performances as Manuel the Portuguese fisherman in
Captains Courageous
and Father Flanagan in
Boys Town.
He had become something more than an actor or even a successful movie star. With his unaffected delivery, Tracy had become a national icon, appearing over and over as a kind of truth-teller in movies, the solid American. He was, Kate suggested in an incautious moment, “completely male.”

And he was not afraid to turn that trait to sentimental use, maintaining a gruff exterior to disguise an obviously emotional inner life. She thought his performance in Fritz Lang's
Fury
—playing an Everyman who stands up to a mob—was “one of the greatest ever put on film. Absolutely thrilling in its simplicity.” And, she told me one night, “I've watched
Captains Courageous
at least seven times, and I've never seen the end of it, because I'm always in tears once Spence dies without letting the boy know he's lost his legs.”

When Hepburn thought Kanin and Lardner's extensive treatment was ready for the marketplace, she sent it to Joe Mankiewicz—without the writers' names on the pages. She gave him twenty-four hours to respond—not only to its quality but also to its ability to entice Tracy. “I want him or no dice with MGM,” she insisted. When Mankiewicz called to say it scored on both counts, she left for Los Angeles to meet with Mr. Mayer.

As with
The Philadelphia Story,
Hepburn controlled the material. Mayer asked how much she wanted for the story and who wrote it. She requested $125,000 for herself and as much again for the writers. She refused to name them, knowing novices could not demand that high a figure. When Mayer kept insisting on hearing their names, Hepburn sensed his vanity was about to get in the way of his negotiating a deal. Again she remembered her mother with the elders in Hartford and how she never let her own ego detract from her causes. “Just pour the tea, Kath,” Kate told herself. So before Mayer was forced into making a decision about buying the script, Hepburn quickly added that she had not come that day to close a deal, merely to see if MGM and Spencer Tracy were interested. Clearly Mayer was, enough for Hepburn to encourage her writers to polish the script. Tracy, unfortunately, was booked up, filming Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's classic tale
The Yearling
in Florida.

Hepburn didn't know at the time that
The Yearling
had been plagued from the start with bad weather and bugs, which were not only eating the actors alive but also swarming around the camera, rendering much of the footage unusable. Providentially, the film soon shut down (and would not recommence for another five years—then starring Gregory Peck); and Spencer Tracy was looking for a new picture. “The boys,” as Kate called young Kanin and Lardner, completed their script posthaste. Tracy liked it and committed to appear in it.

In early August of 1941, Hepburn was walking out of the Thalberg Building on the MGM lot when she saw Joe Mankiewicz walking with Spencer Tracy on their way to lunch. Although the two stars worked for the same studio, they had never met. They approached each other, and Mankiewicz made the unnecessary introductions. Kate held out her hand and sized up her new leading man from head to toe. Then she made a comment about her high heels and coquettishly remarked, “Mr. Tracy, you're not as tall as I expected.”

“Don't worry, Kate,” Mankiewicz interjected, “he'll cut you down to size.”

H
ow is your friend Irene?” Kate invariably asked at some point in every telephone conversation or visit. It was a loaded question, fraught with baggage—great interest tinged with melancholy.

Katharine Hepburn and Irene Mayer Selznick had, after all, been friends for more than fifty years. Kate had known Irene through most of her fifteen-year roller-coaster ride of a marriage to Benzedrine-fueled David Selznick; and they became closer in its aftermath, when the divorced Irene reinvented herself as a major force on Broadway. For her part, Irene had been ringside for Kate's arrival in Hollywood, her exile, and then her comeback, as well as the five successful decades that followed. She had also observed Kate's serial love affairs of the thirties yield to the one serious romance that consumed her for the next twenty-five years. With one Selznick son or the other almost always on the outs with his mother—sometimes Jeffrey and Danny were “in the doghouse” at the same time—“Sister Kate” became a favorite “aunt” to them. Despite all that shared history, by the end of the 1980s, the two women had all but stopped speaking to each other. But I can hardly remember a single telephone conversation or visit in which Irene did not ask, “How is your friend Kate?”

They had experienced less of a rift than a drift, two seemingly parallel lives that gradually arced in different directions. Born a month apart, each entered her eighties differently. Irene, a lifelong hypochondriac (the only way to get attention growing up alongside a sickly sister), was proud of her age. While often complaining of undiagnosable aches and pains, she bragged that she had “all her marbles,” and she worked steadily on a book of memoirs. Kate never said boo about her foot, which refused to heal properly; she stoically applied ice packs and stuck to her physical regimen as best she could; and she continued to entertain offers to work. She complained only that she couldn't remember things so well as she used to. For years, I had been suggesting that she commit episodes of her life to paper—something I learned she had already quietly been doing; but their actual publication struck her as a kind of death knell to her acting career. She didn't celebrate birthdays, though every year—usually on the wrong date that she had disseminated for publicity purposes back in 1932—the press ballyhooed the occasion. In May of 1989—her eighty-second birthday—one newspaper announced that she had just turned seventy-nine. “It's bad enough that I have to get older every year,” Irene dashed off in a note she mailed to Kate. “But do you have to keep getting younger?” Irene never received a reply. “The Kate I used to know would have called up and laughed,” Irene told me a few nights later at dinner.

Without ever saying a word directly on the subject, to each other or to me, their life-paths seemed bound never to recross. For one, Irene didn't get around much anymore. While she was still “full of piss and vinegar” (as she used to say) on almost any topic, from politics to Broadway to her children, her social life was shrinking to long telephone conversations with her intimates—Kitty Carlisle Hart, Leonora Hornblow, Jean Kerr, and Mr. Paley chief among them—and dinners for two in her apartment. Every now and then, she would say to me, “I've got to have that bean soup at the Post House” or “I've got to have some Chinese food tonight”; and without a moment's thought, we'd tear down to Chinatown and eat five or six courses, each in a different restaurant—one specializing in dim sum, another in Szechuan soup, another in Peking duck. Such nights became rarer, and with each visit to the Hotel Pierre, I found her a little less willing to venture out.

Kate, Irene claimed, was “growing old disgracefully.” After years of privacy and discretion, she appeared to be ubiquitous—needlessly grabbing headlines. There had been the performance she attended of
Candide
at which the audience had to sit on benches so uncomfortable that she felt impelled to seat herself in a more comfortable chair—on the stage! While attending a play written by her niece Katharine Houghton, Kate fainted to the floor—through no fault of her own, really: the paint fumes from the still-wet scenery simply knocked her out cold. She attended a Michael Jackson concert at Madison Square Garden as the artist's special guest; and she was appearing in a string of what Irene called “horrible little” television movies. “Dad always said Garbo had the right idea. Get off the screen while they still love you,” Irene would add to underscore her point.

Perhaps hardest for Irene was that Hepburn seemed to be chugging along with a new train of friends, mostly younger. Anthony Harvey, who had directed her in
The Lion in Winter,
was proving himself as caring a friend as he had been her director—in many ways replacing George Cukor in her life. Laura Fratti, who had coached Kate in faking her piano-playing in movies and onstage, came around with her intellectual husband and their daughter. Sally Lapiduss, who had been a stage manager while Kate was performing
The West Side Waltz
on the road, accompanied her back to New York as a personal assistant and became a friend of Kate's, prior to becoming a successful television writer-producer.

“I remember when that phone number was a state secret and only a few of us had it,” Irene recalled one night, somewhat wistfully. “Now everybody does.” Mrs. Selznick, on the other hand, was in the phone book. (“If you really don't want to be found,” she once told me, “list yourself in the Manhattan directory.”) Somehow, Irene kept current on everybody who came in and out of Kate's life—through Norah, I always suspected, whom she liked a great deal and who was always up for a good gab.

“And who's Cindy?” Irene asked me over the telephone late one night in 1983. “I'll be honest with you,” I replied, “I haven't met her yet.”

“I think you better,” said Irene, “because I think she's taken over your room at Two forty-four.”

Cindy was, in fact, a young woman from Maine named Cynthia McFadden, who had worked her way from Bowdoin College to Manhattan, where she apprenticed to the legendary newsman Fred Friendly. She became executive producer of his Media and Society Seminars on Public Broadcasting, a stimulating series on moral, legal, and ethical issues, in which a law professor would hit fungo-like questions to a team of experts, batting them back and forth Socratic-style. A highly ambitious graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, Cynthia moved on to produce a show about books for Lewis Lapham.

Cynthia's introduction to Kate came through Hepburn's sister Marion, who arranged for her to meet Kathy Houghton and Kate herself. A deep friendship quickly developed. One night I called from Los Angeles and caught Kate in the middle of what sounded like a rousing dinner. “You should be here,” she said. “I even have a dinner companion for you, a brilliant young girl. She has big beautiful eyes, beautiful skin, and she wears her hair—why, she wears her hair piled high and tied in a knot like—”

“Tell him,” I heard a young voice shout across the room, “I look like you.”

“Well, yes,” said Kate, as though realizing it for the first time, “I suppose she does look like me.”

On my next visit to New York, I met Cynthia at dinner and found her as attractive as Kate had said—though not quite the lookalike I had expected. Kate said she was sorry my room was currently occupied, would I mind using another? I had, in fact, already made arrangements to stay with another friend across town. Over the next few years, Cynthia's friendship with Kate blossomed, as did her career. She was extremely attentive to Kate, treating her with respect and tenderness. This infusion of young blood—a woman starting out on her career in Manhattan and making Kate's home her own—had an obviously tonic effect.

While Kate still preferred to arrange most of our dinners for just the two of us, we always had fun when Cynthia or Kathy Houghton or Tony Harvey came over. One night Kate and Cynthia and I went to the home of Nancy Hamilton, a longtime friend from the theater. We were celebrating Cynthia's having taken the New York bar exam that day. After dinner, Nancy—a songwriter, among many talents—wanted to play a record of Kirsten Flagstad singing Wagner. Kate could not have been less interested. She tried to get Nancy Hamilton to turn off the machine and return to conversation, but Nancy would not stop the music. Kate fired a desperate look my way, suggesting that I do something. At the close of an aria, I just sat down at the piano and started playing—making it impossible for our hostess to ignore me. The first song that came to mind was “Coco,” a number Kate had performed several hundred times. After playing it from start to finish, Kate looked puzzled and said, “Play that again,” which I did. Looking even more puzzled, she asked, “What is that song? I know I've heard it!”

I laughed until I realized she wasn't kidding. “Heard it!” I said. “You sang it four hundred times! It's ‘Coco.'”

“Oh, Christ!” she said. “I knew there was a reason I couldn't remember it. I couldn't stand that song.”

Cynthia was always interested in meeting new people; and she tended to make Kate more social, even less averse to appearing in public. Besides accepting the occasional dinner invitation, Hepburn increasingly found herself “on the town” during the day, occasionally performing unnecessary tasks. One day we had to find the perfect carrot peeler. Kate's driver took us to three different stores before we found an emporium selling kitchen utensils that had the exact size and model she wanted. I was fascinated to watch a dozen shoppers in that store near Union Square all suddenly develop an interest in carrot peelers and to see Kate's way of noticing them without being noticed.