Kate Remembered

That 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.”

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.

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.

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?”

As we toured Fenwick that day, and a few times after that over the next two decades, I was able to lead Kate to the subject of religion. In truth, it was not one with which she was especially comfortable. She was always more at home with the physical than the metaphysical, with the earthly rather than the cosmic. “I believe,” she told me—though she was always vague about what, exactly, she believed in. “I would have to say that I don’t believe Man is the Supreme Being,” she said; but she seldom revealed herself to be more spiritual than that.

“I believe he lived,” she said without hesitation. “And I believe he was an exemplary human being who walked the earth . . . and if more people practiced what he preached, this world would be a better place. And I’d say a lot of people have done terrible things in his name. But was he the son of God? Well, I don’t think I could honestly say. . . .”

“I don’t really believe in Heaven and Hell,” she said, “—but in the here and now, and that we are meant to live in such a way that we can hope there is always something better than what we currently have. I believe how I act today will affect the way I am tomorrow.

“And one day I’ll die,” she said, “and that doesn’t frighten me. I think it will be fine, perfectly fine . . . because I’ll just be taking a long, wonderful nap. But until I do . . . I intend to tire myself out.”

Kate was never one to speak in abstractions. For all her wisdom, she was seldom one to philosophize. But in my last long conversation with her, the evening of her nephew Mundy’s marriage—when we were alone and she seemed strangely pensive—I could not resist asking, “So what do you think it’s all about? Life, I mean. What’s the purpose? What are we doing here?”

I would have felt embarrassed asking such trite questions had Kate not spared me by answering without hesitation. “To work hard,” she said, “and to love someone.” Then she paused.

She was proud of her answer. And as I just stared at this woman in front of me, then in her late eighties, her head shaking terribly that night, and her moist eyes looking right into mine, she said, “Now, don’t tell me you’re going to argue with that, Scott Berg! Just once, for God’s sake, you might think I’m right about something . . . and you won’t insist on having the last word!”

I got up from my chair, walked over to the couch, kissed her on the forehead, and threw another log on the fire along with a piece of driftwood, which crackled and sparked into a small pyrotechnic display of reds and yellows and blues. I returned to my chair, and then we both just sat there in complete silence until the fire burned out.

Dick Hepburn died in October 2000. Kathy Houghton informed me of a small memorial service that was to be held in the little church at Fenwick. I wanted to attend—to salute Dick and to check on Kate. A few weeks later, I found her looking none the worse for his death, but she barely spoke. During that afternoon’s ceremony, she remained in the reclining chair recently installed in the living room, with Peg at her side.

After a series of warm eulogies in the very plain, unheated chapel, most of the several dozen congregants walked back to the Hepburn house, where food had been set out. Kate was still sitting quietly with Peg, whom I relieved for the next hour, serving as an usher to the steady procession of people who came in, one or two at a time, to pay their respects. When we were alone, Kate asked why all those people were there; and I said because Dick had died. With unexpected vehemence, she said, “You have misinformation.” I marveled at her powers of denial.

And, in that moment, I realized that until then most of us around Kate had been exercising those same powers in relating to her. Norah stifled her tears as she admitted that Miss Hepburn had failed to recognize her on this particular visit. I counted the months, no years, since I had had an actual conversation with Kate, a genuine volley of more than two sentences; and I had blithely accepted the fact that her daily physical activity had declined to little more than moving from her bedroom to the stair lift to the living-room recliner and back. Peg told me that in my absence that afternoon, she had asked Kate how I had met her in the first place. “At a dance,” she had replied, “in Philadelphia.” Peg and I laughed, wondering what decade she was imagining. Sadly, the fireplaces at Fenwick had sat cold for years, ever since oxygen tanks had been parked at Kate’s side.

I made efforts (not always successful) to see Kate whenever I traveled east, and my visits invariably followed a medical scare or rumor of her demise. She watched some of the television coverage of September 11, 2001, and seemed to understand the violent attack on Manhattan that day. “But we’re not in New York,” she comfortably observed.

Over the next twenty months, I saw her condition remain stable, relatively still and stressless. But when I called her on her ninety-sixth birthday, she could not speak into the phone; and those around her all asked in somewhat ominous tones when I was visiting next.

I arrived in Fenwick eighteen days later, on May 30, 2003, and Kate’s appearance alarmed me. Her eyes widened as I entered the living room and sat beside her; but they appeared sunken, their bright light extinguished. She managed a weak smile of recognition, but she looked weary and miserable. A tube carrying oxygen was fixed to her nostrils. A dramatic weight loss suggested that she had not been eating.

Hong, who had been filling Norah’s shoes in Connecticut for years, and Norah herself, who was spending as much time in Fenwick as possible, said that in the past few weeks Miss Hepburn had ingested little more than liquefied yogurt and nutritional drinks. Every now and then, she showed interest in a small piece of toast with jam, which she would hold up to her mouth for two minutes at a time—sometimes putting it down, sometimes swallowing it whole. I kept thinking of my conversation with her a few years prior, about her own ability to hasten her departure from life by not eating, and wondered if she had taken to questioning every mouthful. Or had eating simply become a burden, maybe even painful? When I asked about her new diet, Hong and Norah hastily urged me to talk to the circumspect Erik Hanson.

I called him from the kitchen and learned the recently diagnosed truth, that a very aggressive tumor—large and hard—had been discovered in Kate’s neck. Various medical options had been considered; and, after factoring in her age and diminished quality of life, it was decided to let nature take its course. When I pressed Erik for further details from the doctors, he simply said, “Any time. Maybe tomorrow . . . but, with Kate, who knows? But we’re not talking years.” Nurses were administering over-the-counter drugs to quell any pain.

In saying goodbye to Kate that afternoon, I held her hand for several minutes as I told her, hardly for the first time, how much she meant to me. And I whispered into her ear that it was all right for her to “let go” whenever she wanted, that if she were tired, she could simply go to sleep—during the day, when there was always a friend or family member by the side of her chair, or at night, when a nurse kept bedside vigil. I didn’t fool myself, thinking my words would make much difference; they were just my way of saying that she would not be alone, and that everyone around her felt she had long since displayed more than a lifetime of strength and courage.

Within two weeks, getting beyond the chair in her bedroom became too much of a challenge; and Kate’s intake of liquids decreased. I monitored her condition daily by telephone. On the afternoon of Sunday, June 29, 2003, Cynthia McFadden thoughtfully placed the call I had been anxiously awaiting. After showing us for almost a century how to live, Katharine Hepburn showed us, at last, how to die.

I think about Kate often, as I will for the rest of my life. Lately, I’ll admit, I’ve been having a little fun steering myself time and again into the same daydream, one of my own deliberate invention: It’s a balmy night in June, and I’m in a white dinner jacket at the Merion Cricket Club in Haverford, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, for the first promenade of the summer. A lively band breaks into a bouncy new Cole Porter tune. Suddenly, a striking young woman appears—fresh from Bryn Mawr—with big, luminous eyes and high cheekbones. A gentle breeze blows through her auburn hair. We notice each other; and, with her long legs, she is striding right toward me . . .