Kate Remembered Read Online Free PDF

Candida. “I feel like March-banks,” I said to her as I followed her up the stairs. After a few steps, however, I stopped. “If you will excuse me,” I said, “I would like to use the bathroom first.”
    Upon joining my hostess in the living room, I placed a small tape recorder on the table between us and made a few sound checks. I explained that I had never taped an interview before but that it was necessary in this instance because of the question-and-answer format. Then I removed my jacket and left the room to set it on the chair. “You’re learning,” she said, as I returned to the couch and pulled out my pages of questions.
    In the second before I pushed the “record” button, she anxiously blurted, “What’s the first question?”
    â€œDon’t worry,” I assured her. “You know all the answers.”
    â€œNo,” she insisted, “I have to know the first question.”
    â€œYou want the first question?” I asked. “Okay. What’s the capital of Kansas?”
    â€œWichita!” she said. “No, no. Topeka!”
    â€œRight. Let’s go. . . .”
    For the next two days, from eleven until five, we sat in the living room discussing not only Katharine Hepburn’s career but also the development of Hollywood as seen through her eyes—those of an insider who chose never to own a house there, so that she might always remain an outsider. I kept my questions on a fairly professional path, seldom trespassing into the personal. Her memories were vivid, and she was charming and funny; but I was constantly struck by how little thought she had given to her own actions and to those of people around her. Hepburn, I learned, always lived in the moment; and once an event had been completed, she was on to the next. There was no looking back.
    Lunches quietly appeared and disappeared during our taping sessions; and my subject asked each afternoon if I wanted to stay for dinner. I suggested that it might be best if I did not, to keep us fresh. “We don’t want to run out of things to say to each other,” I reminded her. After a day of calling her “Miss Hepburn,” she said, “Look, I think you should call me Kate.”
    â€œOkay, Kate,” I said. “And I think you should call me . . . Mr. Berg.”
    By the end of the second day we had covered her entire career, from the movies she saw as a child (with her father every Saturday night, at the Empire, Strand, or Majestic theater in Hartford, where she became infatuated with William S. Hart, the great stone-faced cowboy) to the script she was then trying to get produced, the story of an old woman who hires a hit man to put old people out of their misery. We had talked about fifty feature films in which she had starred, a dozen television movies, and twice as many stage productions. She answered everything with candor, I felt, trying to bring originality even to the basic questions she had heard hundreds of times. The only question she refused to answer concerned the years between 1962 and 1967, the one hiatus in her career, during which time I knew she had cared for the ailing Spencer Tracy. “I never talk about that,” she said when I reached that period. We quickly proceeded to discuss Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, their last picture together.
    Once we finished, Kate asked if I would like her to show me the rest of her house. For the first time, I entered the front living room, larger than where we had been sitting, and full of interesting artifacts and mementos, including the white bust of her that Maxwell Perkins used to see. There was also a television set, situated in such a way as to suggest nobody ever watched it. In fact, I noticed, it was not even plugged in.
    One flight up was Hepburn’s bedroom, a big bright room with a high ceiling and fireplace, overlooking the garden. The bed had a dozen pillows on it, of all shapes and