The Books: “Kate Remembered” (A. Scott Berg)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Kate Remembered, by A. Scott Berg

The publication of this book was an event. It appeared only 13 days after Miss Hepburn’s death, so it seemed a bit iffy to me at first, like: Was this just thrown together and published to capitalize on her death? But no – it was by A. Scott Berg – one of the great biographers of our day (if you do nothing else, you must read his book about Lindbergh!) – and so that told me that something else was afoot here … something special. He had been friends with Katharine Hepburn for 20 years – she had come into his life peripherally when he was working on his biography of Maxwell Perkins, and then even more so when he was working on his biography of Samuel Goldwyn (excerpt here). Eventually, a friendship of sorts developed. One that grew and deepened with time. He met her in 1983 and was friends with her until the end. At some point, it seemed to Berg that he realized that she was using him as a sounding-board, she would reflect on things in her life that she never did before (at least not in public) … Maybe because she trusted him as a writer. Maybe because she knew she needed someone to get down her philosophy on life, her side of things … and he was the man to do it. Who knows. It was a mysterious relationship – even to Berg … but for whatever reason, she “let him in”. There’s a fascinating section where he reports a long conversation they had about Spencer Tracy’s alcoholism. Now Katharine Hepburn was quite a dogmatic opinionated person. She was one of those people who got uncomfortable with other people’s weaknesses and would say things like, “Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep going …” She had zero tolerance for complaining, and she had a dictum for everything. Berg reports how bossy she was. He’s a grown man but she’s telling him that – how he makes the tea is all wrong – you have to boil the water this long, and you have to dip the tea bag this long – or the whole thing is wrong … Like that kind of bossiness can be so insulting because it assumes that … the simplest of things have only ONE way to be done. My first boyfriend was like that. He hovered around me, telling me how to cut vegetables, how to pump gas, the correct way to towel off after going for a swim (I’m not even kidding) … If you’re a doormat in any sense of the word, you will be run over by such people. They will make you lose confidence in yourself. Berg had a lot of patience and also, as a writer, was fascinated by Hepburn … and by what it was in her that couldn’t leave other people alone. She had HER way of doing things, and all else was a deviation. It could be exasperating – but Berg writes about in such a funny and compassionate way. As a writer (especially a biographer) – he is trained to look at such small moments as indicative of larger psychological truths. He doesn’t presume to explain Katharine Hepburn. For the most part, he lets her explain herself. So back to Tracy’s alcoholism – there’s one night when Hepburn and Berg are sitting in her apartment in New York. It’s late. They have been talking for hours. Things are getting quiet and open … and they begin to talk about Spencer Tracy’s drinking. Berg hears all the stories – of how abusive Tracy was to her, how she put up with it, protecting him from himself and others – and sees a classic enabler situation. And suddenly, Kate, who never ever liked to seem unsure, asked Berg, “Why do you think Spence drank?” Berg takes a deep breath and talks for two pages – an in-depth analysis of his bystander’s opinion. What demons Tracy had, how it played out in his drinking and in his relationship to Hepburn … For once, Hepburn does not interrupt, or correct, or argue. She just sits there, listening. At the end, nobody speaks, and Hepburn finally realizes she must go to bed. She gets up to leave the room, without a word, and before she exits – she turns to him and says, “You need to write all that down.”

I think Berg had a sense that over the course of the friendship, she chose him to be the one to write about her. She knew he was writing it all down – and I can’t remember how the arrangement came about – but she asked him to hold back on publishing anything until after her death. He agreed. What a situation! I think, to the end, Hepburn was interested in how she was portrayed – and she knew that whatever was in Berg’s book would be okay by her. It would counter-act all of the more salacious books that she knew would be coming in the wake of her death (and they have). I am so curious as to how Berg worked with his publishing company – preparing the manuscript – and then holding it – for how long? … Had it gone to print, were books sitting in a warehouse somewhere, waiting for the news that Hepburn had passed away?

He visited her up until her death. It’s weird: she kind of disappeared there, at the end … My copy of Philadelphia Story has a documentary in the special features, a long interview with Hepburn – following her around in her life – she’s in her 80s, I believe … Her life split between Fenwick (the family home in Connecticut) and her apartment in New York. She paints, she plays bridge with her remaining sibling, she has the same assistant she’s had for years … she is still quite vital. But the decline, when it came, was quick. We didn’t hear much more about her. Berg’s picture of her during those last years is heart-wrenching. Her mind began to go. Her memory lagged. She would sit in silence at dinner parties she would throw, and it seemed that she was retreating to someplace deep within her own past. She no longer participated. She began to get frazzled. Hepburn? Frazzled? It’s a strangely painful image. Katharine Hepburn has been a part of my life for … well … my whole life. She’s always been there. On Golden Pond came out when I was in junior high and she blew me away. She was not a cowering old lady appaering in small character parts. She still dominated. So to hear of her old and thin and pinched and frazzled is hard. At one point, she called Berg up and said, “I’d like to say goodbye.” Berg knew what she was doing, and a part of him resisted. He loved her. Yeah, she’s old, but you never are “over” something like that. “Oh well, it’s her time to go!” Like – who would act like that? Berg noticed that she had reverted to an almost completely childlike state, her skin stretching smoothly across her face, her eyes emerging, alive and sparkling, like a little kid. She lost the dogmatic edges she had always maintained. She was fading, and she knew it.

The book was frustrating to many. It seemed too quiet, too un-eventful – but I liked it for that reason. It is not strictly a biography. It leaps from present to past. It tells some stories from Hepburn’s life, but then it also tells the stories of Berg’s personal experiences with her. I was riveted by it all. Her character, her personality, is not an easy one. Berg does not spare her. Yet at the same time, he writes of her with love. We all have foibles and flaws and quirks, and we can only hope that we will find friends who will be kind with us. Forgiving.

I chose an excerpt today that has to do with the beginning of Hepburn’s movie career. She had giant success very early on – she was being “groomed” – and it paid off. She wasn’t like anyone else. Not just because she wore pants but just because … she was who she was. Hepburn always knew there would be a place for her in Hollywood, and sometimes she had to create it for herself … shoving herself back into the game, even when nobody seemed to want her … It was an act of faith and will, her career. Not to mention “horsepower” (which is the answer she gave to Scott Berg when he asked her why she survived so long in such a brutal career.)

Hepburn won an Oscar (Best Actress) for her role in Morning Glory – a relative newcomer to the scene. It set up her expectations. She was in for some rough times in the late 30s, but early on – she could do no wrong. Morning Glory, Little Women, Alice Adams

Here is the excerpt. Berg weaves in his current-day conversations with Hepburn – letting us know her own remembrances of that earlier time. The whole book is like that. It’s Hepburn commenting on her own life … so naturally, you can take it with a grain of salt … but there is time enough to be “objective” about Hepburn … In the moment following her death, Berg’s memoir appeared – and while it was definitely not the sycophancy of a fanboy – it was deeply loving and respectful, and it fulfilled a need at that time. You don’t come across movie stars like Kate Hepburn every day.

And man, I love the last anecdote.

EXCERPT FROM Kate Remembered, by A. Scott Berg

While Christopher Strong rather quickly crashed and burned, Hepburn garnered wonderful notices, securing her position as a headliner. That, the new star just as quickly realized, carried certain responsibilities. With even the smaller studios cranking out movies every month, some as many as two a week, Hepburn realized that if she wanted to remain at the head of the pack of actors, she would have to take charge of her career – to the extent of scouting and securing the best possible material for herself.

“I usually don’t look through people’s desks,” Hepburn told me one afternoon – somewhat disingenuously, I thought – “but one day I saw this thing on Pan Berman’s desk.” The thing was a script called Morning Glory, which was based on a play by a popular writer named Zoe Akins, and Pandro S. Berman was a twenty-seven-year-old assistant to David Selznick, then starting his own prestigious career as a motion-picture producer. Hepburn had taken an immediate shine to him and simply walked off with the script, telling Berman’s secretary that she would be back for her appointment with the producer.

“This must have been written for me,” she said to Berman when she returned to his office not two hours later. Few could deny her appropriateness for the part – that of a stagestruck girl from New England who comes to New York in quest of an acting career, stringing along a lover or two, then becoming an overnight sensation when she takes over for the star of a play who has walked out on opening night. No, Berman told her, it had been written, in fact, for Constance Bennett, a silent-screen actress who had just made a “comeback” at the age of twenty-seven in What Price Hollywood? (which George Cukor had directed just before A Bill of Divorcement). This film was to be directed by her costar, Lowell Sherman (who had successfully appeared as an actor in another work by Zoe Akins). “Hollywood was an even smaller town than Broadway,” Miss Hepburn realized. She spent the next several days meeting everybody connected to this production, talking up this “thrilling” screenplay … until she convinced them that she was “born to play this part”.

The company rehearsed for a week, then shot the entire film in seventeen days. And, Hepburn recalled, director Lowell Sherman never appeared on the set before nine-fifteen or after five-thirty. Although he was alcoholic and dying of cancer of the throat, Sherman put everything he had into this picture, keeping the entire cast (which included such veterans as C. Aubrey Smith and Adolphe Menjou) constantly engaged and amused. Hepburn’s young romantic interest in the film was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., with whom she became close friends. Although it was ultimately cut from the picture, Hepburn and Fairbanks, Jr. performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, filming it before a small audience that included Doug’s father and stepmother, the Fairbankses. Kate confessed it was one of the few times in her life she had stage fright.

Hepburn gave a remarkable performance in Morning Glory, one praised for revealing new dimensions as an actress and for bringing originality to potentially trite material. In truth, Hepburn would confess, she had borrowed heavily from another actor in delineating her role. Ruth Gordon had appeared in a play called A Church Mouse, in which she spoke in a monotone at a fast clip, conveying both eagerness and nervousness. Hepburn “copied her totally” in playing this heroine, Eva Lovelace – who was determined to become “the finest actress in the world.” Stolen acting tricks or not, Hepburn proved completely winning and became one of the studio’s prime assets.

Meantime, David Selznick – who had a penchant for translating classic works of literature into motion pictures – had been developing a pet project, one featuring another Yankee with artistic yearnings, Little Women. He had been through several bad versions of the Louisa May Alcott novel about the four March sisters growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, before he assigned a husband-and-wife team to tackle it anew. In four weeks Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman wrote a shooting script, one with a role that seemed to be written for the new queen of the RKO lot.

“I would defy anyone to be as good as I was in Little Women,” Kate Hepburn would say of her portrayal of Jo March. “They just couldn’t be, they really couldn’t be, because I came from the same general atmosphere, enjoyed the same things. And I’m sure Louisa May Alcott was writing about herself and that kind of behavior that was encouraged in a New England girl; and I understood those things. I was enough of a tomboy myself; and my personality was like hers. I could say, ‘Christopher Columbus! What richness!’ and believe it totally. I have enough of that old-fashioned personality in myself. Coming from a big family, in which I had always been very dramatic, this part suited my exaggerated sense of things.” David Selznick agreed, and he recruited George Cukor to direct Hepburn a second time.

Based on the earlier scripts, Cukor had resisted the project, thinking the material was frilly and sentimental. Selznick insisted that he read the Alcott novel, with all its hardships of the Civil War era playing in the background of the lives of the March women. Cukor later told me, as I reported to Kate during one of our dinners, that reading the source material had completely turned him around. “Oh, that’s such bunk!” she said. “I’m telling you that man never read that book.” I replied that he told me she would say exactly that; and she said, “So, he didn’t deny it. I’m telling you George Cukor never read that book. But that didn’t matter. We had a wonderful script to work with, one that was really true to the spirit of the novel.”

Director and star bickered throughout the production – never about personal matters, only the material – in a collegial manner that brought them closer together. More often than not, Kate would get her way by either throwing her own New England background in his face or by reminding him, “You haven’t read the book.” The only time Cukor genuinely got mad at her on the set was the day she had to run up a flight of stairs carrying some ice cream while wearing a costume for which they had no duplicate. He repeatedly urged her to be careful not to spill on the dress, and finally said, “I’ll kill you if you do.” As though preordained, she did – and Kate burst into laughter. Cukor slapped her across the face and screamed, “You amateur!” running her off the set. She spent the rest of the day vomiting.

Hepburn enjoyed playing with her entire cast – which included Spring Byington as “Marmee” and the great character actress Edna May Oliver as Aunt March. Kate’s “sisters” included Frances Dee as Meg, Jean Parker as Beth, and Joan Bennett as Amy, her costumes having to be redesigned to conceal her pregnancy. But from that luminous cast, it was Hepburn’s portrayal as joe that shone in the public eye. In less than a year she had become more than a Hollywood leading lady. She was a star.

At a time when the Depression was hardening Hollywood’s edge – with movies about gangsters and tap-dancing gold-diggers – RKO suddenly had a big hit on its hands with this modest piece of counter-programming, a family drama full of family values. The film had its share of pain and reality, but its success sprang from the lives of characters the audience cared about. When the six-year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its best pictures of the year, Little Women was among the ten nominations. Katharine Hepburn was nominated as Best Actress – though not for the same picture. She got shortlisted for Morning Glory.

Hepburn forever believed she was nominated for the wrong movie, that her work in Morning Glory was “very good” but that it was “tricked up, charming, mugging.” In Little Women, however, she said, “I gave what I call the main-course performance, not a dessert.” After much consideration, Hepburn chose not to attend the award ceremony, in the Fiesta Room of the Ambassador Hotel on the night of March 16, 1934. That night Will Rogers presented all the golden statuettes, whose new nickname of Oscar was starting to spread beyond the industry. After announcing that Cavalcade was the Best Picture and Charles Laughton was Best Actor, Rogers pronounced Katharine Hepburn that year’s Best Actress.

The Academy Awards conflicted Hepburn from the very outset of her career, beginning with her believing that somebody so young and new to the game couldn’t possibly win. There was more to it than that. Indeed, even after she was told she was won, Hepburn said she wanted to release a statement saying she did not believe in awards – “or some asinine answer like that.” In truth, she later admitted, “mine was really bogus humility, because I was genuinely thrilled to win.”

From that first nomination, Hepburn vowed never to attend the Academy Awards ceremony, a vow she was not proud of. “I think it is very noble for the people who go and lose, and I think it is very ignoble of me to be unwilling to go and lose,” she confessed. “My father said that his children were so shy because they were afraid they were going to a party and they were not going to be either the bride or the corpse. And he may be right. I can’t think of a single, logical defense of someone who occupies a position in the industry that they refuse to go to the biggest celebration that that industry has to offer. I think it’s unpardonable, but I do it … I have no defense.”

At the same time, Hepburn added, she believed the industry and the public at large exaggerated the importance of the prize. A lot of it, she insisted, is luck and timing. “If you have a very good part,” she said, “you have a very good opportunity … and sometimes you can shine in a dull year. But honestly,” she added, “if you give an award-worthy performance, you know it. And I do think I’m terribly self-indulgent in refusing to appear.” When I asked Kate in 1982 where her Oscars were, she could not say, other than that she had given them to a museum in the Empire State Building. “I mean, if I don’t go to the ceremony,” she explained, “I can’t very well put them on my mantelpiece, can I? I simply have no right to.”

Having risen to the top of her new profession in little more than a year, Hepburn still felt she had plenty to prove. Triumphant on the West Coast, she told her studio bosses that she wanted to return to New York, to the theater. She thought she could take Manhattan by storm by appearing in a new play called The Lake. RKO would not release her, unless she agreed to make one more picture before leaving. Star and studio found themselves stale-mated, until Kate had the nerve to say she would appear in a movie called Spitfire. Feeling capable of anything, she said she would star as the heroine – an uneducated, barefooted tomboy, an Ozarks faith healer named Trigger Hicks. She demanded $50,000 for four weeks of work plus $10,000 for each day beyond that. Hepburn gave it her all (and collected $60,000 for her efforts) and had banked enough good will with the critics to escape virtually unscathed.

The few who ever saw Spitfire rank it among the worst movies Katharine Hepburn ever made. The star felt the same, later chastising herself by saying, “The few times I did something for the money, it was mediocre material, and I did mediocre work.” While Kate kept few photographs of herself on display around any of her homes, a picture of her as Trigger Hicks remained for years in a place of prominence just outside her bedroom at Fenwick. “A reminder,” she told me with an arch of an eyebrow. “Trigger keeps me humble.”

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5 Responses to The Books: “Kate Remembered” (A. Scott Berg)

  1. Kate says:

    This was my favorite–i liked it much better than “Me.”

  2. red says:

    Kate – yeah, I loved it too.

  3. karen says:

    “I am so curious as to how Berg worked with his publishing company – preparing the manuscript – and then holding it – for how long? … Had it gone to print, were books sitting in a warehouse somewhere, waiting for the news that Hepburn had passed away?”

    This is just my guess. Since it only took 13 days, the manuscript must have been finished, edited, and probably typeset into page proofs. They may have held the proofs in case Berg wanted to make any last-minute changes after Hepburn’s death. Once they got The Word, every department involved would drop everything to expedite the printing, binding, shipping, and marketing.

    It’s possible the books were already printed, as you suggested, though. But assuming the book had very high priority, it think it would be possible to get it printed and shipped in 13 days.

  4. Alex says:

    Oh God. HOW have I never read this??? How??? I’m off to the bookstore today.

    I’m so not kidding. Today. Period.

  5. iconista says:

    I’m dying to read your review but I just got this book out the library yesterday and I want to read Berg’s homage first. I’m on page 38 and A. Scott is really starting to get on my nerves. Tell me he stops being soooo swoony in love with Kate AND himself soon!

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