Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/062992/0629510.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 9KB | 194 lines

                                                                                INTERVIEW, Page 76

A Bad Case of HEPBURN


By MARGARET CARLSON and Katharine Hepburn


    "How dare you keep me waiting? Are you that stupid?"

    Not a good beginning. Not good at all. An interview with
Katharine Hepburn is not easy under the best of circumstances,
even when her publisher has set it up to publicize the paperback
release of her best-selling autobiography, Me: Stories of My
Life. It is going to be awfully hard to ask what she was
thinking of carrying on a 27-year affair with the married
Spencer Tracy if she keeps her back turned to me the whole time.
Apologies are definitely in order.

    "I'm sorry I'm late, really I am."

    "You are not sorry. You are stupid."

    Well, 10 minutes late is unfortunate, yes, but a deal
breaker?

    "I've been waiting a half hour for you," she says,
rounding up by 20 minutes the delay. "You're an idiot."

    As a lifelong fan, I keep waiting for the comic heroine of
The Philadelphia Story to enter. Wouldn't Tracy Lord have
chastened Dexter with a blithe reprimand and moved on? If not
humor, what about understanding and empathy? But these, the
critics found, were the very qualities she had trouble
conveying, which limited her to light comedies and, in later
years, to playing starchy, irascible eccentrics. Hepburn was
dogged for years by Dorothy Parker's famous put-down of her
performance in the Broadway play The Lake: "Katharine Hepburn
runs the gamut of emotion from A to B." If her parents, heirs
to the Corning Glass fortune, had not bought her out of that
flop and she had not secured the rights to The Philadelphia
Story, she would not be summoning reporters to her house today.

    She is so determined to be sure this effrontery does not
go unpunished that she has forgotten the book altogether.
Instead, like the college professor who fiddles endlessly with
his pipe before explaining why you are flunking his course,
Hepburn decides to tend the fire in the second-floor drawing
room of her Manhattan town house, for which she says (later,
when she is speaking) she was offered $2 million. I look around
at her watercolors, the antique duck decoy, some African
artifacts, and memorize the pattern in the Oriental rug while
she slowly removes the screen from the fireplace, chucks in a
couple of corn husks, stokes the embers a bit here and there,
and shoves the wood around.

    Both of us are staring into the flames now and have yet to
make eye contact. Regret at not having camped on her doorstep
all night hangs heavy in the air. The silence gives us time to
reflect: me on all the other times my lateness has been costly
-- a part in the sixth-grade pageant, a starting place on the
field-hockey team; her to conjure up fondly her own perfect
record of punctuality. "I've never been late once in all my
years in the theater," she says, scoffing at my having allowed
only an extra hour to travel from Washington to New York City.
Surely she could find a way to forgive the delay, what with the
shuttle, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the stop at Random House to
be cleared by the p.r. department, and the general rule of life
that if anything can go wrong, it will. "Four hours. You should
have allowed four hours. Anything less is dumb. I was 15 minutes
early today."

    Fifteen minutes early to your own house? At one time, she
was known as arrogant and overbearing, with above-average
narcissism and self-regard even for a young actress. But over
time and with a few flops under her belt, she was supposed to
have mellowed. "Adorable," "charming" are the words she uses to
describe her gradual transformation.

    "So why did they send someone from Washington anyway?"

    We've now spent more time on this inquisition than was
eaten up by traffic at La Guardia. Short of couples therapy,
will nothing get us out of this trough? Maybe the Washington
comment is a way out, a four-lane expressway to freedom.

    "You're right. They should have sent a correspondent from
New York. Let's reschedule, and someone who can be 15 minutes
early will come."

    Hepburn turns around and heads toward the window to close
it. She has noticed how cold it is in here despite the roaring
fire. "Well, you're here now, aren't you? Might as well sit
down."

    All this time, and a simple threat to leave was all that
was needed to break the logjam. A bully respects a bully. In
her book, Hepburn speaks candidly of being "totally selfish,"
"a me, me, me person." To Ludlow Ogden Smith, her husband of
six years whose only mistake was that he loved her, she admits
to being an "absolute pig." He tried everything to please her,
went so far as to change his name so that she wouldn't be known
as Kate Smith. "Isn't that the way it is?" She shrugs. "Luddy
loved me and would do anything for me. I loved Spencer and
would do anything for him. So often these things are unequal."

    When asked how someone so full of rectitude could fall in
love with a married man, she says, "You don't pick who you fall
in love with. There are so few people to love. It's hard for
one adult to even like another. Almost impossible." No argument
there. But what about Spencer Tracy's wife Louise, home with
their deaf child. "We never lived together. He stayed in one
house on George Cukor's estate, and I stayed in another
nearby." Does that nicety of real estate explain why many
members of the press came to romanticize her 27-year affair with
Tracy? "I never talked to them. Never. They could write what
they wanted but without any quotes from me, though. So they lost
interest."

    She offers lunch and I gratefully decline, in the interest
of not being late for my next appointment. But she insists.
"You kept me waiting so long, it's now lunchtime. I'm starving."

    No one wants that. Better to be force-fed toasted ham and
cheese than to give her cause to start up on the late thing
again. She is in her trademark khakis ("look at this hole, from
gardening at Fenwick"), black turtleneck, sweater tied over her
shoulders. The Gap should pay her royalties. "It was the only
sensible way to dress. Anything else was silly. Fussing over
clothes. Idiotic."

    Hepburn calls Norah, her housekeeper who got the job
because she did not sit until Hepburn did, with a loud grunt of
the sort not heard outside a barnyard or a soccer match.
"Eeuuuuuunhhhh!" A deep breath and another grunt. "Why," Hepburn
turns to confide in me, "do they only hear you the second time?"

    Finally, we are on the same side. I'm upstairs, Norah's
downstairs. Hepburn has someone new in her sights. When dessert
is slow in coming because Norah is waiting for the homemade
Irish lace cookies to bake, Hepburn muses, "What do you think
she is doing down there to that ice cream, making it?"

    Hepburn still swims, "to be irritating," all year off Long
Island Sound but points to a bum ankle that forces her to crawl
over the rocks to get out of the water. "Imagine the obituary,
actress drowns in six inches of water." Only for a second do I
imagine this and ask, generally, about dying. "No fear. I love
to sleep. I picture it as just a good long sleep." She likes
being alone. "I have such a great family that I haven't had much
need for friends. Guests come for dinner at 6 and have to leave
by 8."

    After her divorce, she was involved with the agent Leland
Hayward and Howard Hughes, but it was Tracy "who was on to her,"
who gave up nothing for her and who consequently won her
devotion. She stopped doing everything that irked him, even
altered "qualities which I personally valued. It did not matter.
I changed them." Despite making it safe for women to wear pants,
she is not a have-it-all feminist on the subject of children and
career. "You can't do both. It's a choice. If you want a career,
which I did, why bring a child into the world who won't get the
benefit of your total attention? You can't concentrate on more
than one thing at a time."

    Hepburn is no more introspective in person than she was in
her off-the-top-of-her-head, sentence-fragment memoir. Hepburn
does not like people who "make a fuss." When she found her
16-year-old brother dead, hanging from the rafters by bed
sheets, she cried later because it was expected of her. The
apparent suicide was never discussed. She waits until the last
chapter to talk about Tracy, who she says initially believed the
rumor that she was a lesbian. She says she never knew how he
really felt about her and wonders now if she "should have
straightened things out." He would have felt less guilt, and the
divorce would have been "ennobling to ((Louise))." Regrets? Only
that she did not become a writer because it is so easy. "No
makeup. No costumes. I wrote in bed every morning. Whatever came
into my head. Someone types it up, and you have a book. I have
no idea what it says. I've never read it." This, like wearing
an old green raincoat fastened with a big safety pin to
auditions to show that she didn't care whether they liked her
or not, is something of a pose. There is an audiotape of her
reciting Me, so she has read parts of it at least once.

    She suddenly stands. "You have enough, I'm sure." As is
her custom, she leaves without saying goodbye.