Kate Remembered Read Online Free PDF Page A

It was the most beautiful day I had ever seen, and I was driving my friend Phyllis from Fenwick back into the city; and there was a magnificent blue sky and I was so busy going on and on about how beautiful it was that I just drove right off the road and into a telegraph pole! No, it was the middle of the morning and no, I was cold sober, thank you very much.”
    Both women, then in their seventies, got banged up badly. Phyllis Wilbourn, who had by then been in Hepburn’s employ for more than twenty years, suffered a fractured wrist and elbow, two broken ribs, and neck injuries; Hepburn’s right ankle fractured in so many places, she said, it had been “hanging on by a thread.” The ambulance driver was prepared to take her to the hospital in New Haven, the nearest major medical center; and there was already talk of amputating her foot. But Hepburn insisted on going to Hartford Hospital, where her father had been a surgeon and where her brother Bob practiced. “A brilliant orthopod,” she said, “glued my foot back on.” For the next few weeks, she said, she would be stuck where she was—playing a lot of Parcheesi with her family. “Look,” she said, “take this number down, and we’ll talk again.”
    â€œWith pleasure,” I said.
    â€œCall me tomorrow. Same time.” I looked at the clock and realized we had been on the phone for more than an hour.
    Over the next few weeks we chatted almost every day—discovering we shared mutual friends, political persuasions, and a passion for chocolate. I sent her boxes of dark chocolate turtles and almond bark from Edelweiss, her favorite confectionary in Beverly Hills, and a copy of The Man Who Came to Dinner, the Kaufman and Hart classic about a curmudgeon who breaks his leg and moves into an unsuspecting household, wreaking havoc on everybody’s lives.
    By March 1983, Hepburn was ambulatory again—still in a cast and on sticks—charging back into her former routine. We arranged our interview session for the first Wednesday and Thursday in April, and she suggested I stop by for an introductory drink the preceding Tuesday at six sharp. “But only,” she said, “if you think this is really a good idea.” And so, there I was on Wednesday, April sixth—my second time at 244 East Forty-ninth Street—on what many consider one of the most desirable blocks in Manhattan.
    Once an actual bay, roughly shaped like a turtle, the area had been filled in after the area’s settlement in the seventeenth century; and except for a few stray businesses that use the name in this midtown East Side neighborhood, Turtle Bay has come to refer to the block of houses on Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth streets between Second and Third avenues, which back onto a private communal garden. These narrow four- and five-story houses have long been magnets for artists, home to a lot of literary and theatrical greats—including E. B. White and Robert Gottlieb (my editor at Alfred A. Knopf, the publishing company he headed), Harold Prince, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin at 242 East Forty-ninth, and, of course, Max Perkins at 246, a house then owned by Stephen Sondheim. Hepburn’s house at 244 distinguished itself from the rest of the row with its decorative wrought-iron balustrade on the second floor, outside the three front windows, the center of which was crowned with a triangular arch.
    I rang the terrifying bell for the second time in my life that morning at eleven on the dot. On this occasion, however, Hepburn herself opened the door. “Scott Berg,” she said, “you’re late.”
    â€œI’m not,” I protested. “I’m right on time, to the second.”
    â€œYou’re ten years late.”
    As if I hadn’t been hers before I ever arrived, I was now utterly captivated, all but having become a Shaw character, the romantic poet hopelessly in love with the older