Kate Remembered (5 page)

At least, I think that's what the drama was about, for my mind wandered throughout the performance. I kept reliving the comedy I had stepped into during the preceding three days, one that volleyed between “drawing-room” and absurdist. I kept wondering why this virtual stranger, whose reclusiveness among movie stars was second only to Garbo's, had made herself so available to me. Katharine Hepburn and I had certainly gotten along and shared a few laughs, but that did not explain why somebody almost as famous for shutting people out as she was for her acting was suddenly opening her doors to me.

The next morning I interviewed Blanche Sweet, one of the earliest stars of the silent screen (her career began in 1909) in her small apartment downtown. Just shy of eighty-eight, she was still a beauty with sharp insights and a sharp tongue. She was full of happy recollections of her days as one of Samuel Goldwyn's leading ladies. But she was equally saddened by the way in which her career plummeted when pictures began to talk. Upon further reflection, she proudly asserted that her run of nearly twenty years was, in fact, as long as any actress could ask for in the medium, no matter what the era. “Even the great ones,” she said, “can't stay a star longer than that. Some of the men get to go longer; but for women, it's always about youth. Pickford and Garbo knew when to quit. Gish became a character actress; Crawford became a cartoon, playing axe-murderers. And Bette Davis was doing orange juice commercials. Orange juice for God's sake!” she shrieked. “Bette Davis!”

“Only one that I can think of,” said Miss Sweet, “got through the minefield, and that was—”

“I know who you mean,” I said, not revealing my recent connection, “and she's still going strong.”

It was early afternoon when I left Blanche Sweet, picked up my rental car, and crossed the Triboro Bridge. One hundred miles out of the city, I exited the Connecticut Turnpike and drove through Old Saybrook—a charming small town, with one shop-lined main street. As instructed, I carried on until the road ended. (“Be sure to stop there, or you'll end up in the Connecticut River,” Hepburn had warned.) I took a right onto a narrow causeway, over an inlet dotted with swans, and made the first left on the other side. “First right, past the flagpole, left at the tennis courts—just keep heading south and east; you can find east, can't you? It'll be afternoon, so the sun will be setting in the west, so you go where the sun isn't setting. You can do that, can't you? And it's the house farthest south and east.”

It was, in fact, hard to miss—a long, white brick house, three stories in the middle dropping to high-gabled two-story wings, rising from a long spit of land. A rush-filled pond ran the length of one side of the house, the Long Island Sound the other, so that it practically sat as an island on an island. At the approach of a dirt driveway was a hand-painted sign: PLEASE GO AWAY. As I drove under some trees, game birds flew out, into a cold, gray sky. It was a little after four when I rounded a bend and pulled into a large parking area.

The front door was ajar, so I rapped on it as I entered a big foyer. Phyllis came to greet me and announced that Miss Hepburn was swimming. She directed me outside, where, between some stone jetties, I saw Katharine Hepburn's head bobbing in the Sound. I walked across a patch of lawn, then a strip of sandy beach, buttoning my coat. “Now listen,” she shouted, “you are absolutely crazy if you don't come in for a swim.” I put my hand in the water, which seemed to be in the fifties. “I'd be crazy if I did,” I said. “It's a little cold, isn't it?”

“Only for the first few seconds,” she explained. “And then you're numb.”

She breaststroked in and grabbed her towel from the rocks. “And it feels so good when you get out.” She was wearing a one-piece black bathing suit, which she still filled nicely. Despite her lagging injured foot, she exuded enormous power—strong shoulders and arms and legs. “South,” I said, pointing across the water to Long Island. “East,” I said, pointing to one of two lighthouses along the river. “Good boy,” she said with a smile. “Ask Phyllis to show you to Mother's room, and I'll meet you in the living room in a few minutes.”

While I re-entered the house through its center porch, Hepburn went up some stairs at its west end, where there was an outdoor shower, which she used. By the time Phyllis and I had climbed the wide wooden stairs to the second floor, Kate had come down the long corridor of the bedroom floor and poked her head into the choicest guest suite—“Mother's Room”—an ample sitting room (with windows on two sides) and bedroom, overlooking the water, with its own bath. There was nothing fancy anywhere, unfinished wood paneling, comfortable furniture, books on the desk and the nightstand, a fresh bar of Ivory soap on the sink. “Is this okay?” she asked.

Smelling a fire burning downstairs in the living room, I was suddenly seized by the notion that if a seventy-five-year-old woman with a bad foot could find it within her to hobble out to the water and swim, surely an able-bodied thirty-three-year-old should be able to do the same. I quickly changed into a bathing suit and went down the corridor, which was lined with several other similar bedroom suites, though none seemed as large or well-situated as mine. I ran down the stairs toward the beach, and just kept running, headfirst into the water. Having got that far, I figured I owed it to myself to stay in as long as I could. After no more than forty-five seconds, I retreated, my body having turned blue. I took a hot shower outside on the upstairs deck, steam billowing into the cold air, before dressing. Then I meditated for twenty minutes, as I had for close to ten years, and joined my hostess in the living room.

She was already seated on the couch at the end closest to the large fireplace, her foot up on a stool, in the big, wonderful room. Windows on the south looked onto the water, as did the bay window to the east, before which sat a wide bench filled with pots of plants and flowers. Big vases of cut flowers bloomed everywhere, amid several odd objects Hepburn had collected over the years—a small antique sled, two massive slabs of wood chained to the ceiling, and on the mantelpiece, spools of yarn in different colors, a cut-out wooden marksman taking aim, and two odd-shaped hunks of what looked like white stone, which—after making me guess—she revealed were elephant teeth. Decoys, stuffed birds, and other replicas of waterfowl were tucked here and there. “Now don't you feel better?” she asked, referring to my swim.

“I felt better the second I got out.”

“Well, that's really the point, isn't it? And now you've earned your drink.” On a table at the entrance to the room sat a big tray with all the fixings for cocktails. Kate was already drinking what I learned was her usual starter, a goblet full of grapefruit juice on the rocks, which she had just finished. Then she liked that same glass refilled with ice, her shot of Scotch, topped with soda. I made the same for myself in a clean goblet and sat in one of the white wicker chairs opposite her on the other side of the fireplace. Several small, dim lamps were lighted all around the room. She clutched a pillow, on which was needlepointed a motto that had been carved into the fireplace of her first childhood home, the words of Charles Dudley Warner, a former editor of
The Hartford Courant:
LISTEN TO THE SONG OF LIFE.

She asked what had taken me so long after my swim, and I said that I had been “listening to the song of life”—that I had been meditating. “Is that like contemplating your navel?” she asked. No, I said, it was more like settling down, and getting my mind and body, maybe even a little of my spirit, in tune. “Oh, I
see
,” she said in a tone she would later use whenever she heard anything that sounded a little otherworldly. “But don't you find it a bothersome waste of time?” she inquired. That was my fear at first, I told her; but I quickly learned that meditating twice a day actually bought me more time, energizing me. She wasn't buying much of what I was saying, certainly none of the metaphysical aspects. But when I described the physical effects, the nuts-and-bolts effects of meditation, she pressed for details. For the rest of her life, I discovered, she was insatiably curious, always fascinated by things she did not know about or understand. After hearing all the information she could absorb, she would assert her own position. “You're not going to start meditating on me in the middle of dinner, are you?” she asked.

The evening drill at Fenwick was similar to that in New York: Phyllis appeared with a few plates of hors d'oeuvres—usually small shrimp with a Louis sauce on one and small hot dogs with honey mustard on another. I offered to get her a drink, which she always considered, then requested a ginger ale. Because Norah did not make the weekly journey to Old Saybrook—having a family of her own in New Jersey—dinner was prepared by Phyllis or any number of people helping in the kitchen, including the driver and sometimes Kate herself. The meals would appear on trays—always served first, Kate placed hers on a plump pillow on her lap; mine and then Phyllis's were set on television tables.

There was always variety to the huge meals, but the tray at every dinner was essentially the same. We started with a large cup of soup—either beet with dill or zucchini with shallots, served hot or cold, depending on the weather—with thin Portuguese bread, which had been buttered then toasted. The main dish was either steak, curried lamb, or fish, sometimes a roast chicken, occasionally roast beef, for which Phyllis would prepare her specialty, York-shire pudding. The plate always contained some potato, usually au gratin or baked, and a vegetable alongside a few spoonfuls of boiled carrots and celery. By the time the third tray had been set down, Kate was usually halfway through her plate. Wine was always offered, but nobody ever accepted, as she and I happily sipped our Scotch-and-sodas. By the time the trays were cleared, we had usually moved on to a second Scotch. Dessert was always ice cream; and at my first dinner at Fenwick, Kate told me that her brother Dick had just cooked up an extraordinary batch of hot fudge, which we must have. Phyllis brought in the big scoops of coffee ice cream drowned in thick, bittersweet sauce, accompanied by a plate of Norah's lace cookies with walnuts, practically paper thin. Kate always asked if I wanted “any coffee or tea or funny tea” (which meant something herbal), which neither of us ever had.

By seven-thirty, dishes, trays, and tables had been cleared, and Phyllis had retired to the kitchen. I boldly approached the large country fireplace and placed a few more logs on, under the chatelaine's watchful eye—“Not too close to each other,” she insisted. “Make them fight for the flame.” She asked me to throw a piece of driftwood on top, because it crackled and emitted colorful sparks. She asked about our interview in New York, if it had been satisfactory; and I said she had gone well beyond the call of duty. “Good, good,” she said, “because I didn't want you to feel shortchanged in the Spencer department.”

“I think we covered those films more than adequately,” I said.

“Mmmmm,” she said in a way that would become familiar to me over the years, dropping several tones, suggesting that she could easily agree but that the issue at hand could be improved upon. I looked into the flames and, while jabbing the logs with a heavy wrought-iron poker, asked, “Was there something more you wanted to say?”

In fact, there was. Raising her glass for me to refill, she began to walk me through her twenty-six-year relationship with Spencer Tracy, starting with their meeting on the MGM lot in 1941 and going up to his death in 1967. We had covered some of the same ground in New York. But this time she didn't talk about the making of their movies, only about the nature of their relationship, what began as mutual admiration and quickly ripened into the most important experience in her life—“because for the first time,” she said, “I truly learned that it was more important to love than to be loved.”

The fire died; and it was close to midnight. “Oh,” she said, looking at the clock, “I never stay up this late.” Kate directed me in the placing of the heavy screens in front of the fireplace and in locating the switches for each of the lamps in the living room.

“Now, what do you like for breakfast?” she asked. I explained that I was very easy, a few pieces of fruit and some water. “No eggs, no cereal, no coffee?” No, honestly, just a few pieces of fruit and some water. “Fine,” she said, “you'll find it all in the kitchen there, and whenever you're ready, bring your tray into my room.” We walked up to my room, where she and I turned down the bed—which involved her folding and placing the comforter at the foot of the bed in such a way that one pull (should it become necessary in the middle of the night) would cover the entire bed. She plumped the pillows, checked on the towels, came over to peck me on the cheek, and said, “Nightie-night.” She closed the door and was gone.

I was just unbuttoning my shirt when she walked right back in to drop a curious remark before leaving for the night. “You have a good memory,” she asked, “don't you?”

I always thought it was pretty good. But I stayed up until two scribbling page after page.

 

 

Sleeping at Fenwick feels like drifting on a boat at sea. The wood of the house creaks gently, in harmony with the lapping tide and the distant foghorn. I awakened to the sound of gulls. After meditating in my sitting room (yes, twice a day), I padded down to the large kitchen—which held enough appliances for two households, as I would soon discover was the case. I found a tray waiting on the counter—with a grapefruit already sliced and separated, glasses and plates, and a fruitbowl—and a note saying, “See me. K.” I poured some juice from the nearest of the two refrigerators and selected some fruit and carried my tray upstairs, knocking on Hepburn's open bedroom door.