Kate Remembered Read Free Page A

drinks tonight because I wasn’t sure how we’d get on, but you’re more than welcome to stay for dinner; there’s plenty of food. But I can tell by the way you’re dressed, and I must say I like that tie, you’ve got another date. It’s probably better if you go anyway because we’re starting to talk too much already, and then we won’t be fresh for the performance tomorrow. Shall we say eleven?” I explained that I did, in fact, have a dinner date; but for her I would happily break it. “No,” she said, “we don’t want to run out of things to say to each other.” We shook hands goodbye, and I exited the room, grabbing my jacket from the chair.
    When I was halfway down the stairs, I heard her shout, “Use the bathroom before you leave!”

II
    Making a Difference
    T he first time I didn’t meet Katharine Hepburn was in April 1972.
    I had graduated from Princeton University the preceding year, having written my senior thesis on Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons who had “discovered” and developed F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and at least another score of the most significant writers in the United States between the World Wars. Even after submitting the thesis, I considered it a work in progress, a first draft of a full-scale biography of the man I considered the most important but least-known figure in American literature—a Harvard man whose ancestors went back to seventeenth-century New England, and a New York book editor whose vision ushered American literature farther into the future than any of his contemporaries. He was a Manhattan Yankee. While he chose to live most of his adult life as a Connecticut commuter, in the mid-1930s his highly theatrical wife, Louise, insisted they and their five daughters move to the city, into the house she had inherited from her father, a brownstone in the area called Turtle Bay, at 246 East Forty-ninth Street—next door to Katharine Hepburn.
    For several years the Perkinses called New York their home. Except for its allowing him to work extra hours with his most challenging author, Thomas Wolfe—who was then constructing Of Time and the River according to Perkins’s blueprint—Max Perkins dreaded urban dwelling. Louise, on the other hand, thrived. A talented actress and writer who lacked the drive and discipline to pursue an artistic career, she happily filled her days with city life. She found excitement in just living next door to her favorite star of the stage and screen. She was so stimulated, she even wrote a play about Napoleon’s sister Pauline as a vehicle for Miss Hepburn—a work she did not hesitate to bring to her neighbor’s attention. The two women became good acquaintances, though it privately ate at Louise being so close to the very model of everything to which she aspired and yet was so far from attaining.
    Katharine Hepburn and Max Perkins never met. Never comfortable in any kind of theater, he had no interest whatsoever in show people. Perkins’s stars performed on paper. But he enjoyed having a figure so glamorous living so close and privately delighted in the constant bustle at 244. His wife’s excitation over their famous neighbor amused him; and stories of the fabled actress brought out a touch of the voyeur in him. While he occasionally strained to get a peek at her, the closest he ever got to laying eyes on Katharine Hepburn was in espying a bust of her that sat by one of her drawing room windows.
    So in the spring of 1972, when I was diligently approaching everyone I could find who ever knew Max Perkins, I decided I had to interview Katharine Hepburn. To be honest, whatever testimony she might offer would be far from crucial. The fact is, I simply wanted to meet Katharine Hepburn, and I felt I had a good excuse.
    Growing up, I was always crazy about television and the movies, but I