Kate Remembered

Stanley Kramer, who had become Hollywood’s most socially conscious filmmaker and who had directed Spencer Tracy three times already, visited the Cukor guesthouse with a new idea for a movie he was hatching with the screenwriter of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, William Rose. A handsome—and alcoholic—American expatriate living on the Channel Island of Jersey, Rose was plotting the story of a wealthy British couple whose daughter brings home the man she intends to marry, “perfect in every way”—except for his being of another race. Sidney Poitier, then the most successful man of color ever to have appeared in motion pictures, had already expressed interest in playing the fiance, a cultivated professional man, the kind of role model that had not appeared in a mainstream film. With that piece in place, Kramer set about casting the costars.

A devoted friend and fan of Spencer Tracy, Kramer had suddenly thought this film might provide a glorious last hurrah for the ailing actor. By transplanting the story from its English locale to American soil, Tracy could easily play a retired, middle-class Irish-American, a former cop or fireman. Having broached the idea to Tracy without being brushed off, Kramer continued to spin his gears. If, indeed, this was likely to be Spencer Tracy’s last appearance in motion pictures—in a love story at that—he asked himself what would be more moving than casting him opposite his romantic partner of twenty-five years.

By the time Kramer had arrived at the cottage, the story had shifted even further. “Once I heard Stanley describe the setup, and he was suggesting that the fireman be in a more elevated position,” Kate recalled, “I knew that he was thinking of me to play the wife.” The three kicked around several possibilities that day. Tracy, who had for decades played the “conscience” in so many dramas—the all-American voice of truth and justice—would be wasted playing a priest in this romantic story; and he had already portrayed a judge for Kramer. They discussed his being a newspaper publisher, a man who had long been a liberal voice of reason, a man who stood for social justice—who suddenly balked when the ultimate test of his liberalism landed on his own doorstep. He would find himself coming up against his wife, who would be speaking from the heart, a sensible woman who would be the voice of romance.

Kate had mixed feelings about the project. She thought it sounded like a wonderful film—“with something important to say”; and she was eager to do it. For the first time, however, she worried that Tracy was not physically able to complete the job. Even in the world of studio doctors who routinely signed off on major health risks so that movies could get made, Spencer Tracy had become uninsurable. Knowing that, Kramer made two unusual promises to the actor. He said he would arrange the entire shooting schedule around Tracy, so that he would only have to shoot a few hours a day—and in the morning at that, when he was at his best. Furthermore, he said if Hepburn and Tracy would not make this movie, neither would he.

Columbia Studios agreed to finance the picture only if Hepburn would put her quarter-million-dollar salary in escrow along with the director’s half million until the completion of principal photography. That would provide enough insurance to reshoot with another actor, should that eventuality arise. Kramer put his money where his mouth was, an act of faith and friendship that Hepburn never forgot. “All of Stanley’s movies came straight from the heart,” she said. “There are damn few like him.”

He retreated to Jersey with writer Rose, who knocked out the script of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in a matter of weeks. In some ways, the material might have been better suited as a play. A handful of characters—the young lovers, their respective sets of parents, and a priest and maid for some comic relief—converge upon a single set, the San Francisco home of Matt and Christina Drayton, where they deliver speeches that argue all sides of the issue of the impending interracial marriage. But knowing they had Tracy and Hepburn—with at least one of them in a valedictory role—gave Rose and Kramer not only the voices to work with but also years of cinematic history.

Unlike Garbo and Gilbert, Myrna Loy and William Powell, Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan—even Abbott and Costello—Tracy and Hepburn had matured as a couple. Over a generation, the public had watched them encounter a number of different situations together, always a little ahead of their times. Paradoxically, this unmarried twosome had become the symbol of the all-American couple, exemplars of family values and, even more, of human values. Kate told me years later that while working on his script, “Willy Rose said he’d often ask himself, ‘Now what would Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn say here?’ Not the real Spence and the real me. But the images everybody knew. Queer, isn’t it?”

As a result, the entire film gave audiences the feeling that they were eavesdropping, listening in on relatives who had long been part of their collective consciences. The conceit was further enhanced by the actress who debuted in the film as their daughter, Katharine Houghton. The daughter of Kate’s sister Marion, and a stunning, literary graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Kathy burst onto the screen displaying a lot of her aunt’s zealous personality. Naturally, she looked enough like her to give rise to the rumor that she was, in truth, Tracy and Hepburn’s love child and that Kate’s sister had simply been their cover. “Now that’s one I haven’t heard,” Kate said of the canard when I mentioned it to her. “Too bad so many people are alive who remember when Marion was pregnant.”

Everybody’s anxiety over Tracy’s health only fostered greater efficiency on the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But it was a nervous-making shoot for Hepburn, who had to perform double duty—always looking after him and performing a considerably challenging role herself. While the two actors had always stuck around for each other in the past, feeding lines for the other’s close-ups, most shots of Hepburn alone were delivered to the script supervisor, thus allowing Tracy to go home early each day, as promised. “I shouldn’t say most movie sets, but certainly on a lot of movie sets, you develop a sense of family,” Kate recalled; and, she added, she couldn’t remember that feeling ever being so “strong” as it was on the set of this picture.

Tracy and Hepburn had long approached their work differently. He had a phenomenal memory, could read a script, absorb the lines, look over a scene the night before it was shot, and was usually word perfect on his first take. She liked to study a script, learning not only all her lines before production but most everybody else’s as well. She considered every possible reading she could give—and was known to pass along advice to other actors as to how they might deliver their lines as well. In the past, when she had suggested they rehearse together, Tracy generally dismissed the notion by saying, “I’m saving it for the set.”

On Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, however, Tracy asked Hepburn to run lines with him every night. He felt he owed as much to his director, for putting his salary on the line. He felt he owed Kate even more, for having put her career on ice for five years. He seemed eager to make this picture especially good, if only to help get her career back on track. So it was disconcerting for the actors to discover that, for the first time, he was having trouble remembering his lines.

The climax of the film was Spencer Tracy’s delivery of its message, a kind of verdict. After starting out as the leading opponent to his daughter’s marriage and listening to each character articulate his or her position, he takes exception to a comment made by the mother of Sidney Poitier’s character, played by Beah Richards. She avers that he has become an old man who has forgotten what it is to love. That spurs him to render his ultimate opinion that “in the final analysis it doesn’t matter what we think. The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt,” he says looking toward Hepburn, her eyes brimming with tears, “. . . that’s everything.” It was a flawless performance; and there was not a dry eye on the set. Everybody knew that Spencer Tracy was a great actor; but that day, they felt he wasn’t acting. On May 26, 1967, Tracy shot his final scene and went home. Kate thanked the cast and crew for all their cooperation.

Hepburn had been residing full-time in the Cukor guest cottage on St. Ives, though she continued to rent the Barrymore aviary a few minutes away on Tower Grove Drive. Phyllis spent her nights there. Kate generally sat up late with Tracy in the bedroom on St. Ives until he dozed off; then she repaired to the maid’s room off the kitchen. A buzzer sat on his bedstand and she carried the bell, attached to a long wire, wherever she went in the house. Day and night, she monitored his movements, as always, anticipating his needs. Before retiring, she’d put a big kettle of water on the stove, which she kept simmering all night, so that he could instantly prepare a cup of tea if he couldn’t sleep.

At three o’lock in the morning of June 10, 1967, Kate heard Tracy come out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. She was getting out of bed to join him when she heard a teacup smash against the floor and then a thud. By the time she reached him, Spencer Tracy was dead of a heart attack. While he had been slowly dying over the last few years, she found immediate comfort in the fact that the death itself had come so swiftly.

Hepburn immediately summoned Phyllis, George Cukor, the couple who lived on the grounds, and Howard Strickling, the MGM publicity chief, who had decades of experience dealing with the press at the death scenes of Hollywood stars. She was packing up her personal belongings and removing them from the premises when she suddenly came to her senses. “This was my house too,” she realized, “and I had lived with this man for most of my adult life.” She returned to the house and called Louise Tracy, their children, and Tracy’s brother.

“It seemed the least awkward thing to do,” Kate explained to me. “To have done otherwise would have required a series of lies and would have served nobody.” Over the next few hours, she did her best to stay out of the way, to let the Tracy family have their final moments of bereavement—thus depriving herself of that same moment of closure. “It was all like a bad dream,” Kate recalled more than twenty years later, “a real nightmare.” It reached its most surreal when the morticians asked how the body should be dressed. Kate had pulled out an old jacket and some trousers, but Louise Tracy took umbrage at not being able to select the clothes herself. In that moment, Kate snapped. “Oh Louise,” she said, “—what difference does it make?” By six o’clock, a doctor had examined the deceased and the undertaking firm of Cunningham & Walsh had taken him away. The press would arrive midday—when they were told that Mr. Tracy’s friends Miss Hepburn and Mr. Cukor had come down to the cottage at eleven that morning.

For three evenings the mortuary received mourners. Kate showed up each night after hours. One night she placed an oil painting she had done of some flowers into the casket. The next night she learned that the casket had been sealed at the family’s request. She presumed her painting remained with him.

Upon Tracy’s death, Hepburn behaved rather as she had during his lifetime, remaining unseen in public with the man she loved. Early on the morning of the funeral, Kate and Phyllis drove to the mortuary and helped place Spencer Tracy’s coffin into the hearse. Then from a respectable distance they followed the parade of black cars to the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Hollywood. When they got close enough to see that a crowd had formed, they turned around and headed for home. “Goodbye, friend,” said Kate.

After the funeral, a handful of Tracy’s closest friends—those intimate enough to have been part of his actual domestic life—stopped by the house on St. Ives. Hepburn greeted Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, writer Chester Erskine and his wife, Sally, director Jean Negulesco and his wife, Dusty. Hepburn seemed to be in complete control of her emotions. “I wasn’t really putting up a brave front,” she later said. “I was just in a complete daze.” It wasn’t until the Negulescos left, and Jean made a comment about how angry he was that Spencer had left them, that Kate collapsed into his arms and sobbed.

Kate never got over this story. “A rumor!” she said to me. “Can you imagine? Thirty years her husband isn’t there, and she thinks I’m a rumor.” For a minute or two Kate tried to imagine what could possibly have been in Louise Tracy’s mind—what hoops of denial she must have jumped through to believe that. I suggested to Kate that Louise Tracy knew the score all along and simply said what she had to get her goat. “But why would she want to do that?” Kate asked in a state of agitation. “Exactly,” I said.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner opened the following year and became the most successful picture at the box office that either Tracy or Hepburn had ever appeared in, together or apart. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards—including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress. William Rose won an Oscar for his screenplay. The late Spencer Tracy was up against Warren Beatty for Bonnie and Clyde, Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, and Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night; the latter won. Hepburn’s competition was not quite as stiff: Anne Bancroft for The Graduate, Faye Dunaway for Bonnie and Clyde, Dame Edith Evans for The Whisperers, and Audrey Hepburn for Wait Until Dark. With this, her tenth nomination, Hepburn won her second Oscar—thirty-four years after her first. “I felt that was the Hollywood community’s way of honoring Spence,” Kate said years later, with undue modesty. There’s no denying that sentiment played heavily into the voting that year. But if the Academy was honoring a life and not that particular performance, this was probably more the Academy’s way of applauding Hepburn’s return to the public arena. By the time her Oscar was presented—as before, in absentia—she had already completed work on another movie and was in the middle of filming yet another.

That summer the arrival of a screenplay called The Lion in Winter spurred her into action. James Goldman had adapted his own successful play, the story of the marriage of Henry II of England and his imprisoned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who is sprung for the Christmas holidays in 1183. During the course of the play, they argue the question of succession, a decision that will affect nations on both sides of the Channel. Peter O’Toole, who had played Henry II in Becket, would wear the same crown once more.

“What was fascinating about the play,” Kate said, “was its modernness. This wasn’t about pomp and circumstance but about a family, a wife trying to protect her dignity and a mother protecting her children.” She grew even more excited about the project after seeing a film made by the director O’Toole was favoring—Dutchman, which presented a harsh look at urban life, with a woman stabbing a black man on a New York subway train. It hardly seemed an appropriate screen test for a film about twelfth-century European royalty, but Kate found director Anthony Harvey’s work “absolutely riveting. It grabbed you by the throat. Exactly the approach that our material needed. Not that glossy old MGM stuff, but cold people living in cold castles.” Furthermore, Harvey—an Englishman then in his mid-thirties—had been a film editor (for Stanley Kubrick, no less, on Lolita and Dr. Strangelove); and Hepburn had long been partial toward the profession. Similar to what she had said about David Lean, Kate reminded me that “nobody has the same love affair with film that cutters do. It’s a tactile medium for them.” She felt an instant rapport with the director, and they became great friends for the rest of Kate’s life. Nobody championed him more than she; and in her final years, nobody cared for her more than he.

The company—which included a young Anthony Hopkins as her son Richard (soon to be “the Lion-Hearted”) and an even younger Timothy Dalton as King Philip of France—rehearsed for two weeks in the Haymarket Theatre in London. Then they all moved to Dublin to shoot interior scenes and to Fontvieille, a small village in the south of France, where they filmed in an old abbey.

Hepburn admired everyone in the cast. O’Toole was wild and rambunctious, “sometimes utterly impossible, a real Irishman,” Kate said, “—too much charm and too much liquor. But I was used to that. And what an actor! Great voice. Great performance. Great fun.” His great vigor, she suggested, helped restore her vitality. Years later, she would take pride in the deserved success of Hopkins. And when Dalton was hired to play James Bond, she bragged that she “knew him when.”

The film was another triumph for Hepburn, with the public and within the industry. Again, her film was nominated in all the major categories—Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay. Again the screenwriter won . . . and so did Hepburn. This third victory was unprecedented. (So was the fact that there was a tie that year—with Hepburn sharing Best Actress honors with twenty-six-year-old Barbra Streisand, who had debuted in Funny Girl. After saying, “Hello, gorgeous” to her gleaming trophy, Streisand said what an honor it was to be in the same company as Hepburn, whose award was accepted by Tony Harvey.)

By then, Hepburn had left one locale in southern France for another, this time to appear in a production of The Madwoman of Chaillot. When she had signed on to appear in this film version of the Jean Giraudoux play, John Huston was meant to direct. By the time shooting began, however, Bryan Forbes had replaced him. “John was no fool,” Kate said of his abandoning this allegory, in which a quixotic noblewoman, the Countess Aurelia, takes on the greedy capitalists of the world. She holds a mock trial and lures all the villains into a bottomless pit by telling them of an oil reserve beneath her house. “The big problem,” Kate said, “is that material like this plays better on a stage than on screen, which requires something more literal. I mean, you have to photograph something. And I think it’s difficult for a movie audience to accept an entire film that is so abstract and stylized.”

Ely Landau, the producer of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, produced this picture as well, hiring a charm bracelet of international stars—including Charles Boyer, Claude Dauphin, Oscar Homolka, Yul Brynner, Donald Pleasence, and Danny Kaye; the Countess Aurelia’s conspirators were played by Edith Evans, Margaret Leighton, and Giulietta Masina. “I think the real problem with the picture,” Kate said, “is that none of us ever really figured out how to play our parts, how to speak that dialogue, which was terribly artificial. The old girls, we all started impersonating Edith Evans, who really was terribly amusing . . . but I don’t think she knew what she was doing any more than we did. It was really quite hopeless.” It was ultimately difficult for an audience—to say nothing of the star herself—to accept Katharine Hepburn as somebody who had truly lost her mind. She ultimately came across as more eccentric than mad.

Undaunted, Hepburn found that work begat more work, and her resurgence inspired her to new challenges. In 1969 she agreed to return to the stage after close to a decade’s absence . . . in a genre she had never attempted. Alan J. Lerner had been at work for a year on a musical based loosely on the life of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, the legendary clothes designer; and he wanted Hepburn—also a woman of style, stature, and staying power—to assume the title role. “Now, I’m sure I saw Ethel Merman in something, and I adored My Fair Lady,” Kate recalled, (though it turned out to be the Cukor-directed film version of the Lerner and Loewe classic that she recollected), “but I honestly don’t remember ever sitting through a Broadway musical. I certainly never thought I could sing my way through one.”

Hepburn herself admitted that after a lifetime in the theater she never learned to vocalize properly; and the only tunes she felt comfortable carrying were hymns. “But I can be loud,” she said, “and I figured if Rex Harrison could star in a musical, so could I.” She worked up a few songs with musical arranger and vocal coach Roger Edens, which she tried out one night at Irene Selznick’s before the guests of a small dinner party, which included Alan Lerner and Frederick Brisson, the play’s producer and husband of Rosalind Russell. After bellowing a captivating rendition of “Miss Otis Regrets,” everybody seemed convinced that she had enough equipment to carry a musical. What she lacked in euphony she made up for in guts. Ultimately she found both the challenge and Alan J. Lerner—a man of extraordinary wit and intelligence—irresistible.

Coco proved to be the most arduous production of Hepburn’s career, a constant uphill battle. She continued her voice lessons six days a week. “I’m not sure I ever really learned to sing,” Kate admitted, “but I acted well enough to give the impression that I was singing!” The lyrics of Coco were among the cleverest Lerner ever wrote, but neither they nor the star were helped much by the music of André Previn, mostly forgettable tunes, some of which sounded like remnants from Gigi.

Then the show’s director, Michael Benthall, who had guided Hepburn in The Millionairess, began to stumble. When he proved unable to tackle all the elements of the musical—which included not only a complicated revolving set but also several characters out of Coco’s past appearing on large screens in filmed segments—he was sidelined. The choreographer, the young Michael Bennett, stepped in and assumed directorial duties as well. Bold and brash and full of his own ideas, he clashed constantly with Lerner and the star—both of whom, he felt, had somehow turned the show from the life of Chanel into that of Katharine Hepburn—an independent female artist, who gets through life by remaining “always mademoiselle.”

In fact, that was the title of the big finale; and several of its sentiments came straight from Hepburn’s mouth. One night while she was getting extremely frustrated with the entire production, Kate threw her hands up at dinner and said to Lerner, “Who the devil cares what a woman wears!” He said, “Kate, that’s a good lyric,” and used it. In the same number he also adopted one of Hepburn’s firmest beliefs about character, that actions define a person, that—as Lerner lyricized it—“One is as one does.”

During one number, Bennett staged a routine in which a dancer had to stand in front of Hepburn and perform a series of fan kicks, first swinging his right leg over her head, then the left. “I’m sure Michael kept hoping that man would miss one night and kick me right in the face,” Kate said. Everybody lived in constant fear that the set wouldn’t revolve properly, and on more than one occasion it didn’t. The audiences on those nights got perhaps the best show of all, as Hepburn would step center stage and regale the crowd with show-business anecdotes until the machinery was functioning again.

Once the show opened, the week before Christmas 1969, none of the problems seemed to matter. For eight months fans came steadily to see this sumptuous showcase for Katharine Hepburn, with its Cecil Beaton sets and costumes. While some critics quibbled over her warbling or quarreled over the writing, everybody succumbed to the power and energy the trim, Chanel-tailored sexagenarian exuded on the stage of the Mark Hellinger Theatre eight times a week. It remained a strained production, for which Hepburn shouldered much of the responsibility. “How couldn’t it be tense?” Kate asked. “I was nervous about every performance . . . wondering what the hell I was doing out there.” She left Coco in August 1970, and was replaced by Danielle Darrieux, who performed admirably. But the production closed shortly thereafter. (Hepburn recorded the cast album and resurrected the show on the road before soldout standing ovations.)

Through the 1970s, Katharine Hepburn remained in perpetual motion, tackling one project after another. Work remained the best antidote against grief. In fact, she refused far more offers than she accepted, agreeing only to those that provided the opportunity to work with unique talent or special material. Never having performed Greek tragedy, she went to Spain at the end of 1970 to appear in a film version of Euripides’ Trojan Women. Michael Cacoyannis, who had directed Zorba the Greek, had also enticed Vanessa Redgrave to costar. Kate considered her the most accomplished actress of her generation—“a thrill to look at and to listen to.” (Years later, in fact, there was talk of turning Hepburn’s memoir about the making of The African Queen into a film, which didn’t excite her until she learned that Redgrave might play her. “I don’t know who else could possibly do it,” she said.)

Kate worked next on two projects that she ultimately abandoned. She was meant to star in a film version of Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt, which George Cukor was directing. After receiving no satisfaction from several different versions of the script, Hepburn took to rewriting it herself. Shortly before shooting was to begin, the studio announced its displeasure with her version and that they were going back to earlier drafts of the script. “When I said I had no interest in any of the earlier drafts,” Kate recalled, “they said, ‘Thank you very much.’ ” She was replaced by Maggie Smith in what proved to be an unsatisfying production, released in 1972.

And, at the height of their friendship, Kate worked for years with Irene Selznick on a project called Martha, based on a series of books by Margery Sharp about a young artist. Irene intended to produce the film, with Kate directing. The project was subsequently aborted—“not because I didn’t think I could direct . . . and not because I didn’t think Irene could produce a movie. I think it’s simply because I was afraid we’d kill each other.”

Then producer Ely Landau approached her for the third time, on this occasion touting something called the American Film Theater. He was producing cinematic versions of important dramas, which would play on television and have theatrical film distribution. The play in question was Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, a family drama about a seemingly complacent older couple in suburban Connecticut whose lives are suddenly thrown off-kilter by the unexpected arrival of their best friends; this visit becomes a strange incursion, compelling the characters to examine the debts and deceptions in their lives. “I’ll be honest with you,” Kate divulged, “I knew that Albee was considered ‘the great white hope’ of the American theater, but I had absolutely no idea what that play was about.”

Surrounded by an elite corps of actors—which included Paul Scofield and Joseph Cotten—and directed by Tony Richardson, a highly intelligent and fussy British expatriate, Hepburn came to appreciate the point of the play. “I think it’s about self-protection,” she said, “—how our homes become our domains, and how we want to protect that from outsiders. And we even come to see that this marriage is really made up of two people trying to protect themselves, from each other. He’s a stuffed shirt, and she’s a bossy old thing, and that’s the only way they can save themselves. At least that’s what I think. But I must tell you, for the first time in my life, I had no idea what I was saying. Maybe that tells you how good the dialogue in that play is.” Several people had told her the play was funny; but Kate confessed, “I never really saw a grain of humor in it.”

Then producer David Susskind, who had been attempting for years to mount a television production of The Glass Menagerie, asked Kate to play the mother. She was loath to accept the offer. Having starred in motion pictures for forty years, she had a knee-jerk reaction against a work made directly for television. She also had Laurette Taylor’s performance as Amanda Wingfield ingrained in her memory. Agreeing to the project meant she would get to work with Anthony Harvey again, which pleased her enormously; but what ultimately convinced her to take the part was the opportunity for her niece Kathy Houghton to play her daughter once again, this time the crippled Laura. Hepburn signed on, only to learn that Kathy Houghton was not interested in playing the role. “She would have been perfect,” Kate said. “It’s a great part for her.” But Kathy had other acting plans at the time, as well as writing aspirations. Kate never really appreciated that it might be difficult for her niece to perform in her shadow.

While Hepburn was not ideally cast as the Southern mother, who endlessly recalls her days as an alluring belle, she brought all the requisite power to the role, which she delivered with grace and intelligence. Tony Harvey directed a strong supporting cast—Sam Waterston, Michael Moriarty, and Joanna Miles. The program became one of the great television events in 1973, commanding huge ratings. Its success opened Hepburn’s mind to the possibilities of future work in the medium.

Then Hepburn’s friend George Cukor, in his mid-seventies, was offered an elegant script by James Costigan—for television. Love Among the Ruins was an Edwardian story of an elderly actress who turns to a former beau to defend her against a younger man suing for breach of promise. Cukor thought it would be ideal for Hepburn and Laurence Olivier. Hepburn agreed and made a crucial suggestion to the director. “Look,” she said, “we both know Larry; and he will do this project only if you go to him first. Then suggest several other actresses, until he mentions my name. Then you can say, ‘Larry, if I knew you were doing this play, I’m sure I could get Kate.’ ” Olivier bought Cukor’s act.

Hepburn enjoyed working with Olivier—though she was still recuperating from a hip-replacement operation at the time. She thought he was “a first-rate actor.” But she felt compelled to add that she thought he was “a second-rate person.” More than finding him a posturing egomaniac, she based her judgment largely on his treatment of his former wife, Vivien Leigh, a talented though troubled woman, with whom Kate had been friendly. “Larry always wanted to be a big movie star,” Kate said, “and while he was considered the greatest actor on the stage, he was never in the first rank as a star in the movies. Then Vivien comes along and gets Scarlett O’Hara. Wins the Academy Award. Biggest picture ever made. Suddenly Larry says, ‘Oh darling, we really must get you out of Hollywood now. Let’s go off and do Shakespeare together.’ Now Vivien could do anything, but he was clearly trying to keep her in her place, which was billed beneath him. Then a few years pass and Vivien returns to make Streetcar. And she’s brilliant. Wins the Academy Award. Most talked-about movie of the year. And suddenly Larry says, ‘Oh darling, we really must get you out of Hollywood now. Let’s go off and do Shakespeare together.’ Small man. Giant actor. Very small man.” Love Among the Ruins was a great success, collecting rave notices, big ratings, and Emmy Awards for the director and his two stars.

Hepburn next teamed with John Wayne. She had not worked with him before, and she hadn’t played opposite an actor who seemed so different from her since she and Humphrey Bogart navigated the Congo River. In many ways, this picture, Rooster Cogburn, was a carbon copy of The African Queen—a Bible-toting minister’s daughter ends up on a journey with an aging marshal, who is after a gang of bad guys. The title hero was, in fact, the same character Wayne had played in True Grit.

There wasn’t much more to this movie than the two legends firing stereotypical dialogue at each other. But both stars had a good time making it. Coming from two different political camps, these rugged old-timers simply avoided controversial subjects and chose to enjoy each other’s company. Said Kate, “I can honestly say I never met a man who worked harder or played harder than Duke. He was a total straight-shooter, decent, and fun. Just a natural. We were up in the Cascades, and some days we got on our horses and rode all day. Great fun. Big man. Small backside.” The stunt casting alone was reason enough for some people to see the film, though not many.

In 1976 Hepburn agreed to a three-month run of a play called A Matter of Gravity by her friend Enid Bagnold. This was a lighter version of her hit play The Chalk Garden, a look at several generations in a big English country house. In London, Edith Evans had played the dotty matriarch in the decaying home. Bagnold was only too happy to alter the part to suit the grande dame of the American theater. In retrospect, one of the play’s greatest distinctions was its appearance of Christopher Reeve as her grandson in one of his first roles. Kate took a shine to the handsome young actor. So the day I heard that Reeve had been paralyzed in a near-fatal accident, I called Kate to give her the news. “Part of me thinks you’ll say, ‘He’d be better off dead.’ ”

Before taking A Matter of Gravity on a successful nationwide tour, Hepburn appeared in an odd, forgotten little movie called Olly Olly Oxen Free, in which she played the owner of a junkyard who helps two children repair a hot-air balloon. “All I really remember about it,” Kate said, only five years after making it, “is that I got to ride in the balloon. And one night we filmed a scene in which I brought the balloon down right in the middle of a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. I’d say that was probably worth the price of admission for all of us.”

After the Matter of Gravity tour, Hepburn worked again with George Cukor, then seventy-nine, remaking Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green. Bette Davis had appeared in the acclaimed 1940s film version, and Kate was pleased when the television production won more kudos for everybody involved.

So, in the fifteen years since Spencer Tracy’s death, Katharine Hepburn had been almost as active as she had during any previous period of her life. She cheerfully graced magazine covers and granted interviews, including one with Dick Cavett, the host of a popular late-night television program. In 1974 she startled a worldwide television audience—and a thousand people sitting in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion—when Academy Awards host David Niven unexpectedly announced the next presenter by saying, “To me, this is a star—Katharine Hepburn.”

She strode out in a black pantsuit and clogs, as the stunned crowd rose as one. Hepburn quieted the audience and thanked them for their moving welcome. “I’m also very happy that I didn’t hear anyone call out, ‘It’s about time,’ ” she said. Then she added, “I’m living proof that a person can wait forty-one years to be unselfish.” She was there to present the Irving Thalberg Award to her old friend Lawrence Weingarten, who had produced Adam’s Rib. After they walked offstage, Hepburn left the winner to face the press alone, as she disappeared into a waiting limousine, leaving as suddenly as she had arrived. Hepburn sightings in Los Angeles and New York—playing tennis with Alex Olmedo at the Beverly Hills Hotel, shoveling snow on East Forty-ninth Street, theater-going on and off Broadway—became less uncommon but no less thrilling.

By the 1980s most of the male movie stars of Hepburn’s generation had died, and the few remaining female stars of her vintage had fallen from sight. A tremor—mostly her head, sometimes her hands—had become increasingly pronounced; her voice quavered; and skin cancers periodically erupted on her face—“too much time in the sun. No good for redheads.” But her strength and energy had not noticeably diminished.

She and her friend Noel Willman, who had directed her in a few plays, drove down to Wilmington, Delaware, one day to catch a performance of a play called On Golden Pond, by Ernest Thompson. Hepburn found it a “true” depiction of an elderly married couple, coping with the difficulties of old age. Although she found the actors at least a generation too young for the parts they were playing, she thought it would make a good movie.

So did Jane Fonda. She was intrigued by the relationship between the incommunicative and undemonstrative father and his daughter, who had long sought his approval. It mirrored her relationship with her legendary father, Henry. Not until Jane’s production company put the film together and the director, Mark Rydell, introduced them, did the two mythic older stars meet.

“It was strange,” Kate said of being cast in the film. “It seemed as though I was the mother Jane had fantasized having . . . and if her father and I could make everything all right in the movie, somehow things would be all right in her life. There was certainly a whole layer of drama going on in the scenes between her and Hank, and I think she came by to watch every scene he and I had together. There was a feeling of longing about her.”

By the end of the shoot—during which Hepburn’s character, Ethel Thayer, tries to instill some Yankee virtues into her unforgiving daughter and unyielding husband—Hepburn was full of admiration for Jane Fonda. “We all had a good time making the picture,” Kate said. “It was fun.” And it allowed Kate to show how spunky she still was—diving fully clothed into Squam Lake, singing and dancing an old campfire song, perfusing her failing husband with love and wisdom. She walked away from the production thinking how hard it must have been for Jane, being the daughter of this famous figure who was so remote. “Hank Fonda was the hardest nut I ever tried to crack,” Kate said. “But I didn’t know any more about him after we had made the picture than I did at the beginning. Cold. Cold. Cold.”

At the start of production, Hepburn had given Fonda one of Spencer Tracy’s favorite hats; and at the end, the actor had reciprocated by presenting her with a painting he had done of three hats, Trary’s in the middle. Kate was touched by the gift—until she realized he had made a print of the picture and given dozens of them away, to publicists and friends of friends. “Strange man,” she said. “Angry at something. And sad.”

Hepburn had her hand in the script—more, I suspect, than she let on. She turned suddenly modest one evening talking about the speech in which Ethel tells her husband that he’s her “knight in shining armor,” and that he’s got to “go, go, go.” When I suggested that it sounded like “pure Hepburn,” she immediately spoke of all the hard work the writer had done, defining those characters. Ernest Thompson won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay that year. So did Henry Fonda, his first, which his daughter accepted while he watched on television from his bed, only a few months before he died. Breaking her own precedent, Katharine Hepburn won as well—for the fourth time.

By then, Hepburn was already appearing in a new work by Ernest Thompson, a play called The West Side Waltz. It was another gerontological study, a woman refusing to bow out of life gracefully. She had hoped somebody might buy the screen rights for her, to costar with either Elizabeth Taylor or Doris Day; but nobody did. Instead, she committed herself to a film originally titled The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley. Kate said the writer had literally thrown the script over her fence and she had fallen in love with it—a black comedy about an old woman who hires a hit man (played by Nick Nolte) to bump off her dying friends. Few beyond Hepburn saw the humor.

Over the next few years, Kate continued to lose friends and acquaintances as well as longtime “rivals” from the thirties (most of whom she barely knew, if at all)—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur, Mae West, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck. Later Garbo, Dietrich, Greer Garson, Sylvia Sidney, and Claudette Colbert died. Kate’s first great friend from the theater, Laura Harding, lived an increasingly sedentary life on her estate in New Jersey, which irritated Kate as much as it bored her.

In what proved to be his final months, Kate restruck a warm relationship with Luddy, then a widower and suffering from inoperable cancer. For a while he accepted his first wife’s open invitation to Fenwick; but when the trips became too difficult, she visited him at his own bedside. “I tried to do everything for Luddy that I possibly could, knowing I could never repay him for all the support he had given me,” Kate told me two decades after his death. “Unimaginable—my life, had it not been for Luddy. He was heaven-sent.”

More than ever, Hepburn cultivated her newer friendships. Cynthia McFadden divorced her husband and, after joining the ABC News team, always made time for Kate; Tony Harvey moved , from the city to the Hamptons, but visited regularly at Turtle Bay and Fenwick and even got her to call on him on Long Island. David Eichler often made the trip north from Philadelphia for dinner and the night. She always got a charge out of seeing Martina Navratilova, one of whose tennis racquets she proudly displayed in the living room; and she always seemed buoyed by gossip columnist Liz Smith, despite her being engaged in what Kate called “a moronic profession.”

Kate also found herself making time for people she normally would never have tolerated. She would invite Corliss Lamont, a highly intelligent but rather ponderous old author and philosopher, to dine anytime he called, even though he would sit there for fifteen minutes at a time without uttering a word. Kate had gone two decades without speaking to Garson Kanin because of his chatty book Tracy and Hepburn; but even he won his way back into her good graces, simply because he was available. “Oh,” she said wearily the day after their reunion, “I’m too old to be carrying grudges.” But her dance card was no longer filled every night. As often as not, Kate and Phyllis ate dinner alone, in increasing silence.

Into her eighties, Hepburn remained professionally active. She continued to make movies for television, which gradually deteriorated in quality, though not necessarily in popularity. She participated in documentary films—sometimes as the subject, just as often to contribute anecdotes about others, be it Spencer Tracy or George Stevens.

She tinkered for years on a screenplay titled Me and Phyllis, scenes of their lives together. It climaxed in the car crash in which Kate almost lost her foot and Phyllis her life. One night in the living room on Forty-ninth Street, Kate performed the entire script for me. She captured the dialogue between the two of them in funny detail; and she brought me close to tears a few times in revealing her gratitude for having had somebody so dear as Phyllis in her life. Beyond that, it was a strange piece of work that was meant to be a quasi-documentary, with Hepburn reenacting scenes from her own life. She asked me what I thought of it and how she might improve it. For a moment, I felt like William Holden stumbling into Norma Desmond’s parlor in Sunset Boulevard. “Now, remember,” she said, before I could speak, “don’t spoil an old woman’s delusions.”

In fact, several producers showed an interest in Kate’s script, though I think a few of them were just interested in spending time with her and shopping her name around town. Joseph E. Levine—a producer with a long and spotty track record—actively pursued the project and claimed for months to have the financing in place. Talks progressed far enough that Kate was once willing to have lunch with him in public. She told me it would be the first time she had eaten in a restaurant in at least twenty years. As that made it an occasion in itself, she selected The Four Seasons. She ate caviar and drank champagne and thoroughly enjoyed herself; but the deal soon fell apart.

No matter. Hepburn finished her second autobiographical book, Me, the compilation of pieces she had been pulling together over the years. Sonny Mehta and everyone else at Knopf backed the book in a tremendous way. When the American Booksellers Association held its large annual tradeshow in New York late in the spring of 1991, just months before publication, Kate opened her house to the owners of the major bookstores and chains for a cocktail party.

For the first time I saw her panic about the book. While dozens of people milled around the house, some spilling out into the garden on the warm spring evening, Kate pulled me upstairs and said, “Why am I doing this?” I assured her that this party was great public relations, that meeting her was one of the biggest thrills for everybody in that room. “No,” she said in frustration. “Why am I publishing this book? I mean, I’ve gone this long. Why bother—”

Kate returned to the party all smiles; and when the books were produced, she autographed copies for everybody who had a hand in its publication. She even agreed to selective publicity. While the book never got penetratingly personal, it illustrated a life of hard work, adventures, and fun.

On my next visit to Fenwick, I found a copy of the book just sitting on my bed, autographed with the author’s love and thanks. Flipping through the finished work, I also found my name listed with a dozen others in the acknowledgments—calling me her “chief critic.” I went downstairs and said, “I assume this copy of your book is for me.”

One day later that week, when we were back in New York and Me was number one on the bestseller lists, I asked Kate what her most satisfying role had been. “I’d have to say,” she replied, pausing, then looking up at the wooden goose hanging from the ceiling as it had years earlier back in the Cukor guest cottage, “—those years I wasn’t working.”

I knew she meant those five years just before Spencer Tracy’s death. And then she surprised me by remembering exactly the first time that topic had come up. “But,” she added with a smile, now that we had covered a lot of ground in the years since then, “I never talk about that time.”

It didn’t take much to promote Kate’s book; and she did what she was asked. Cynthia McFadden made her promise not to appear on Sally Jessy Raphael or any of the other down-market shows. There was no need to worry. Nobody knew how to sell Katharine Hepburn better than Katharine Hepburn. In fact, she often talked about herself in the third person—as “the creature.” She said “the creature” had become an institution, much like the Flatiron Building or the Statue of Liberty, a bastion that had withstood the tests of time. Me became a phenomenal success, cresting the bestseller list for over a year.

After the rush of the book, however, as the sales, interviews, and publicity died down, there was little on Hepburn’s plate. For the first time in a long time—at age eighty-five—she didn’t know what she even might do next. Scripts still arrived regularly, but most of them were terrible—patronizing screenplays about “cute little old ladies—what a goddamned bore,” she said. She received umpteen renditions of The Aspern Papers, one of which, she hooted with incredulity, was pornographic.

Her primary occupation became her mail. A secretary sorted through most of it, then presented her with those letters that required a response. A few warranted handwritten replies—usually written with a black Flair pen on KATHARINE HOUGHTON HEPBURN notepaper. Others received dictated responses later in the day. The important missives were alphabetized and filed in fat accordion folders and stored away.

Most of the mail came from rapturous fans. Little peeved Kate more than an extravagant letter from an admirer who rhapsodized about her talent and beauty and influence on his or her life, then addressed the envelope to “Katherine Hepburn.” “God,” Kate would splutter, “you’d think the first thing they’d learn is how to spell my name.” It pleased her that people enjoyed her work, but she found the letters from those who wrote of spending countless hours watching her movies, night after night, deeply disturbing. “If they’re really inspired by what I’ve done with my life,” she asked, “—why don’t they do something with theirs? Not just watch old movies.”

More disturbing were the occasional crank letters, sometimes hate mail, usually about her position on abortion. Occasionally there were threats. Whenever she received such a letter—or read about an abortion clinic being bombed by some religious fanatic—Kate would declare, “So much for ‘God is Love!’ ” The hate mail was separated from the rest; but Kate held on to it, tucking it away in a closet off the living room.

For Kate, the most distressing aspect of the 1990s was Phyllis’s behavior. Her age had long been a mystery, but everybody presumed she was at least a few years older than Kate. As such, she was something of a medical miracle, still going through the motions of her rigorous job every day, seven days a week. In truth, Kate had really looked after Phyllis more than the other way around for years. Everything about her had slowed; she often needed to lie down; she was frequently confused. “Phyllis needs a Phyllis,” Kate said; and she hired people to look after her, mostly to see that she didn’t wander into harm’s way. One Sunday afternoon I came upon Phyllis in the foyer at Fenwick, just standing there in a daze with one arm in the sleeve of her coat. I asked her if everything was all right. “Oh, fine. Just fine,” she insisted. “I just can’t remember whether we’re coming or going.”

Kate was becoming lonely. Although Cynthia McFadden saw Hepburn as much as possible, her fast-paced career, new romances, and a baby consumed more and more of her time. Tony Harvey in the Hamptons and David Eichler in Philadelphia found themselves in Manhattan with less frequency, while Kate’s pianist friend Laura Fratti suffered from ill health and didn’t get around much. And I finished my research on Lindbergh and had to go home to Los Angeles to write. For the next few years, I had little reason to travel to the East Coast except to visit Kate.

At first I tried to steal away every month or two. Gradually, my visits decreased to four times a year, then two. I tried to stay in touch by telephone, but Kate always acted slightly hostile toward the instrument or those at the other end. Whenever I called, she would ask where I was, then say, “Well, you’re of no use to me there.” Then she’d usually add, “You should come back soon . . . before I’m dead.”

Our visits remained pleasant, but they were changing. With less stimulation, her life had become stagnant. She moved more slowly; her energy ebbed. Gone were the conversations until midnight, or ten, or even eight. Sometimes she’d want dinner as early as five o’clock; and she’d clamber up the stairs to bed—literally using her hands and feet—by six, before the sun had set.

The only thing that kept her downstairs a little longer was to have a drink or two after dinner. In the late eighties she had changed brands of Scotch, from her King William IV to Famous Grouse. She had been introduced to it by her wealthy relatives in Boca Grande, Florida. “Now, Kate,” I said, in mock irritation, “I’ve been telling you about this Scotch for years, that all the right people in England drink it. And you ignored me. Now because some Houghtons drink it, it’s okay.” She recalled my having discoursed on the subject of Famous Grouse more than once. “You’ve caught me, and now you know the truth,” she said. “I’m a hopeless snob.”

I learned from Norah and the other caretakers around both houses that these days Kate was usually having two drinks before dinner and one or two postprandially. They never seemed to affect her physically, but they fogged her mind. She was forgetting things. This new condition worried Norah enough for her to take it upon herself to water down the whiskey. During my visits, she told me she was pouring half the Scotch out of the Famous Grouse bottles and diluting the rest with water. “It’s funny,” Kate said to me one night at dinner. “I’ve completely lost all sense of taste. I take a drink, and it has no flavor.”

Unconsciously, Kate was using the liquor as an anodyne—not only to kill the mildly depressing bouts of loneliness but also her physical pain, which I had long suspected was worse than she ever let on. Emotional situations—a sad scene in a movie, a touching story, a death—could bring her to tears; but only once did I see her cry because something physically hurt. It was a late afternoon in 1992, when she was trying to step onto the bench in the living room to water some plants. She thought she was alone in the room, and I could see she was in agony. At last, she swung her bad foot up and it clearly ached. She let out a small cry, and I ran in to help her. There were tears in her eyes, and she said she had tripped.

Another time in the summer of 1992, we drove to a park near Fenwick to take a walk. It had just started to sprinkle when Kate came upon a great bunch of Queen Anne’s lace. There was one absolutely magnificent blossom she insisted on having. She pulled and pulled on the huge flower but it would not uproot. Then she tried to snap the stalk, but it would only bend, not break. She asked me for the car key, which she used as a saw on the fibrous stem. For several minutes she stood hunched over the flower, hacking away, as the drizzle turned to rain. Mother Nature was clearly going to win this round; so I said, “Kate, let’s go. It’s really starting to come down.” As she gave up on the plant, I noticed how wet her eyes were, and not from the rain. We drove back to Fenwick in silence.

That disturbed me far less than another drive some months later, in the spring of 1993. Kate’s chauffeur of the last few years, a man of great equanimity, had suddenly died, and a new man was at the wheel. On a Saturday morning we made the trip from Fenwick to Peg’s house for lunch, a trip she had made several thousand times. Approaching Hartford, US 91 offered exits to the east and west, and the driver called out for directions. “East,” Kate said firmly.

Close to six months passed before I was again able to leave Los Angeles and visit Kate. By then, she was spending most of her time in Fenwick, using the trips to New York City for meetings with doctors, lawyers, and accountants—appointments that seemed merely a way of differentiating the weeks. In the early fall, I found a free weekend. Because I didn’t want her to anticipate my visit for too long with the possibility of my canceling at the last minute, I didn’t call her until Thursday afternoon. I said that I would arrive at Fenwick in time for dinner the next night. We had a nice long talk, and we joked that she would have to wait at least until five-thirty before eating dinner.

Early the next morning I left for New Haven, where I picked up a car and drove on to Old Saybrook. The timing was perfect. I crossed the causeway to Fenwick a little after five and pulled into the driveway. A concerned woman looked out at me from the kitchen. This was Hong Luong, the new housekeeper at Fenwick, a strong but kind soul and an able cook. “I hope you’re expecting me?” I said, reading on her face that she was not.