Kate Remembered (43 page)

Now each time I saw her, I thought of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” in which a man was born old and progressively youthened, until he died an infant. As Hepburn's immobility increased, her physiognomy uncreased. Treatments for her skin left her visage taut and pink; her eyes seemed bigger and more expressive, lighting up at small things—positively childlike. She smiled a lot.

In the middle of May 1999—just days after her ninety-second birthday—I found myself in New York with a few free hours in which to drive to Fenwick for lunch. Kate's courtly friend David Eichler—himself in his late eighties, and looking a good decade younger—was up from Philadelphia; and Kate's sister Peg happened to visit that day as well, having driven down from Canton Center with a young Irishwoman, who brought a guitar. After a lunch of hot dogs with honey mustard and the standard macaroni and cheese, the girl pulled her chair right up to Kate's and began to play and sing. Kate gazed into her eyes through the entire song, as if in a daze. As soon as the tune was finished, her eyes widened, and she said, “Great. Another.” The young woman obliged. After another encore, she and Peg left, while David and I commented to Kate on the beauty of the girl's voice. She seemed not to know what we were talking about; and David said to me sotto voce, “Her short-term memory's completely gone.”

He left us alone for a while, during which time I carried on what passed in those days for conversation, a gentle soliloquy, which could occasionally draw a few syllables or sounds of response. When I at last announced that I had to leave, she said, “Is that wise?” I said I wasn't sure about that. And so she asked, “Is that necessary?” I said it was.

On my way out, I decided to drop in on Dick Hepburn, whose own declining health had kept him bedridden—sometimes asleep, I was told, as much as twenty-three hours a day. His nurse at the other end of the house told me that I was in luck, that he had just awakened.

I rapped on his door and found him in red pajamas, sitting upright on the side of his bed, motionless and staring into space. I entered, making polite conversation . . . until he said, “Present yourself.” I assumed that meant that I should stand before him. As I did, he held out his hand and said, “It is a pleasure to see you, Mr. Berg. Thank you for calling on me.” Then he lay down . . . and before I had left the room, he was sound asleep, snoring.

Ten days later I was able to steal away to Fenwick for another afternoon, where I had the pleasure again of seeing Peg, who had traveled this week with her granddaughter Fiona—a poetic soul who had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis for more than a decade and had already outlived all medical expectations by years. She was there—carrying a portable oxygen tank—with her husband and beautiful child and talking hopefully of getting a lung transplant. Peg's great friend Don Smith, a music teacher and choirmaster, was visiting as well, as was Dr. Bob Hepburn. Over hot dogs and macaroni, the conversation was largely about the recent shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Peg had plenty to say about guns (too many unenforced laws against) and child-rearing (not enough parents taking responsibility for). Somehow, this swirl of subjects triggered a nostalgic twist in the conversation, a rarity in any Hepburn house.

While Kate's mind seemed to wander, Bob and Peg told stories of their parents and their childhoods. Then Peg spoke of giving the government a sample of her blood, because the remains of some soldiers had recently been found in Southeast Asia, possibly including those of her son Tom, who had been missing in action for almost three decades. Finally the conversation turned to the other Tom—Peg, Bob, and Kate's oldest brother. For several minutes they mused in the most matter-of-fact tones about the circumstances of his death in the twenties. I looked over at Kate, who had turned away from us and stared instead toward the fire, her face wet with tears. I grabbed a tissue and blotted her eyes.

After the other guests left, I sat alone with Kate for a few minutes and commented on the stories that had surfaced that afternoon—the sickness, the shooting, the deaths. I wasn't expecting her to respond; I was just filling the silence. Then she spoke. “Life,” she said quietly and with some difficulty, as though it were hard to unclench her teeth, “. . . not easy.” One of Kate's caretakers entered the room and announced that it was time for some exercise. “We go out to play, don't we?” she said. Kate smiled broadly and said, “We do.”

Kate had said to me literally dozens of times over the years that she didn't fear death—“the big sleep,” she called it. It was dying she was afraid of. As I looked at her that day, I realized she no longer had anything to fear. She had survived the great race without much suffering; she had come through relatively unscathed. Of course, her life, like everybody else's, had had its share of disappointments and even tragedies. But she had approached the finish line free of most of the indignities of old age. Her days were blurring from one to another, but into her tenth decade, she was well-cared-for and comfortable—with few pains and with every need met. Loving people surrounded her.

After more than ninety years of challenges—personal, professional, emotional, and physical—Kate was surrendering, and seemed happy doing so. “Life's tough for everybody,” I heard her say more than once, “and that's why most people become its victims.” She lived most of her life as a contestant in that great struggle, always pushing herself hard, riding the wave and sometimes swimming ahead of it. “The natural law is to settle,” she once said. “I broke that law.”

Because Hepburn lived so long, for so many years ahead of her time, most of her fans forgot or failed to realize that she broke other “laws” in her lifetime as well. The biggest was that she refused to live as a “woman” in what was very much a man's world. She conducted her acting career as any freelance actor might, seldom seeking the protection of a studio or manager or agent. She conducted her personal relationships with that same independent spirit. Her initial response to any interdiction was always, “Says who? Just watch.” In so doing, she became a hero, someone men and women of all ages had to admire.

 

 

At the end of the
Esquire
interview I had conducted when we had first met in 1983, I asked Hepburn why she thought she had endured professionally, indeed flourished, for so long while all those around her lasted only a few years or decades at best. It was one of the few questions that ever made her pause before answering. After a few seconds, she said, “Horsepower.”

When I showed her my finished, and ultimately unpublished, piece, with her interview bracketed by my commentary, I provided my own answer to the question, with which she took issue. I wrote that “Katharine Hepburn inspires because she speaks directly to the heart in a most intelligent manner. The reason for her staying power is that for the last half century, she—above all—has provided a treasury of images which represent timeless human values: courage, independence, truth, idealism, and love. She is romance.”

“Christ,” Kate argued. “I'm not romance. That's Marilyn.”

“No,” I said, “Monroe is sex and an object of lust . . . and a victim. You told me that the times you met her, she always reminded you of a ‘lonely leaf blowing in the wind.' ”

“Garbo, then,” she counteroffered.

“No,” I said, “I think she's mystery . . . and also a victim.”

“Well, then, I don't understand what you mean.”

“Eva Lovelace, Jo March, Terry Randall with their artistic yearnings,” I said; “Alice Adams with her social aspirations; Linda Seton, Tracy Lord, Tess Harding, Pat Pemberton, Bunny Watson getting whacked over the head by love; Rosie Sayer, Jane Hudson, Lizzie Curry, all desperate for love; Mary Tyrone, Christina Drayton, Ethel Thayer, even Eleanor of Aquitaine, all remembering the early glory of their love—don't you see, they're all dreamers, believers, adventurers, women of spirit who remain true to themselves but manage to change and grow and give to another person. That's what I mean by romance.”

“Okay,” she said. “I won't argue with you.”

“Well, that's a first.”

“You always have to have the last word, don't you?”

“Yep.”

 

 

When I first met Kate, she often kidded that she would not live long enough to see the year 2000. “Don't be ridiculous,” I'd say to her. “Lillian Gish is in her nineties, and you're tougher than she is.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Nobody's tougher than Lillian. She did all those stunts in the Griffith pictures—facing storms and running across the ice floes. She was there at the beginning. She blazed the trail. She was the tough one.” Miss Gish died in 1993 at the age of ninety-nine . . . and Katharine Hepburn lived to see what the world celebrated as the new millennium.

January 1, 2000, turned out to be just another day of another year for her. When she and I had talked about that future date, I'm sure she had never foreseen her life reduced to such inactivity. At first, it pained me to witness her body breaking down; but then I began to find joy in her longevity. I found solace just in seeing her living on with grace and dignity, delighting in even the smallest quotidian offerings of life—the sun rising over the lighthouse at Fenwick, a good meal, a warm fire, family and friends, a sound sleep under a lot of covers with a cool breeze and the sound of the waves blowing in—listening to the Song of Life.

T
hat first time I rang the doorbell at 244 East Forty-ninth Street and walked up the stairs for the second time—after I had been sent to the bathroom—I faced not only Katharine Hepburn but also several arrangements of flowers. They were all huge arrays of king-sized blossoms—anthuriums, birds-of-paradise, African daisies, star lilies, gladioli, and agapanthus—large enough for a hotel lobby; there were two cachepots, each containing a monstrous red amaryllis. “A big room like this wants big flowers,” she said during the course of our conversation. “They're really the only ones I care for.”

When I returned to Turtle Bay after my first visit to Fenwick, whole new shipments of flowers were arriving from friends and fans, and Kate fussed only over the arrangements of small blooms—precise arrangements of baby iris, sweet william, African violets, purple dendrobium, and Madagascar jasmine, known as wax flowers. “I really don't care for those big arrangements,” she declaimed. “The smaller flowers are so much more beautiful.”

One week she was passionate about white roses; the next week she couldn't stand them. “I really think the rose is the most overrated flower in the world,” she argued with complete sincerity one afternoon. “That seems a bit harsh, Kate,” I said. “I'm sure they're doing the best they can.”

Only one flower was above reproach, never debated nor denigrated:

Queen Anne's lace—
Daucus carota
—known in North America as the wild carrot and in Britain as cow parsley. “A popular name,”
The Oxford English Dictionary
says, “for various umbelliferous plants bearing clusters of small white flowers.” From afar, what distinguishes Queen Anne's lace is the large, flat white flower, sometimes the size of a butter plate, which is actually a cluster of smaller flowers formed by small stalks growing out of the central stem. A field of them does, indeed, look as though somebody has strewn a delicately woven mantilla across the ground.

“Have you ever looked at Queen Anne's lace,” Kate asked me during our first walk around Fenwick, “I mean really looked at it, up close, and studied it?”

I had not. Upon our uprooting a bunch of them, however, she provided me with an inspirational lesson. “Aren't they just thrilling?” Kate effused, pushing all the blossoms together so that they formed one large, flat-topped flower. “They're beautiful,” I concurred.

“But that's not the best part,” Kate said. “Turn one of them over.”

I did, and I saw a genuine marvel of nature, the underside of Queen Anne's lace, an extraordinarily intricate network of tiny stalks—“pedicels,” they're called, Kate told me—interwoven into a mesh that was at once strong and complex but also delicate and simple, perfectly symmetrical. This cross-hatching design of countless small spokes created a magnificent whole much greater than all its parts. “Now how can anybody look at that,” Kate asked, grabbing the flower from me and gently brushing her fingers across the fragile infrastructure, each tiny but tough filament connected to a smaller one, “—and not believe in God?”

I looked at Kate with some astonishment, only to realize—as I would repeatedly over the years—that Kate was being absolutely literal. “I mean,” she expounded, “how can anybody look at this and not believe there is some higher power, some divine force at work in the universe greater than Man, some god that created it, that created all this, that created us?”