Katharine Hepburn: A Bad Case of 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.