Preface Catch Her If You

Preface Catch Her If You Can In the first light of dawn, wearing wrinkled khakis and a floppy hat, Katharine Hepburn charged up the hill from her bungalow. Without knocking, she rushed into the mansion of her friend and favored director George Cukor and began invading his kitchen cabinets. Alerted by pans crashing, Cukor’s assistant Charles Williamson hurried in to discover what he took at first to be a bag lady: a small, sixtyish woman, arms loaded with flour, unsweetened chocolate, and sugar. For a moment they regarded each other silently. “I’m baking brownies,” Hepburn finally said, staring him down—Tracy Lord, Tess Harding, Eleanor of Aquitaine, all defying him to scold. But Williamson expressed only surprise that she was there at all. No one, not even Cukor, had known she was in town. “Go ahead,” she said, shaking her finger, a smile crossing her face. “Try to figure me out. You’ll never get it right. No one ever does.” “She liked to keep people guessing,” said Williamson, remembering that day in the early 1970s as Hepburn scampered back down the hill, skirting Cukor’s famous pool and his elaborate terraced gardens. With its imposing ivy-covered walls, the Cukor estate, high in the Hollywood hills, offered the impregnability of a medieval castle. “Out in the world, Hepburn was one thing,” said Williamson, “but at George’s, she was quite another. And she liked people wondering which one was real.” Whether baking brownies at six in the morning or cooking up publicity for a movie, Katharine Hepburn always knew how to walk a fine line between reality and image. Though she’d insist hype and hoopla had no place in her world, she was an expert at the game she was playing. “Katharine Hepburn, public, private,” she mused, her eyes twinkling on cue in All About Me, the 1993 documentary based on her life. “Can you tell which is which? Sometimes I wonder myself.” She seemed to be daring us to find out, throwing down the gauntlet, wondering if anyone was ever really going to give her a chase. For all her vaunted aversion to the trappings of movie stardom, Hepburn reveled in the sport of celebrity. “I used to duck the press all the time, just for fun,” she said in 1992. “I think it was sort of a game.” Indeed, “the more insulting the press was,” she admitted elsewhere, “the more it stimulated me.” As early as 1933, one reporter observed that Hepburn’s “whole attitude expressed one thing: ‘Try to find out anything about me.’” For more than sixty years, that challenge never changed. “Catch me if you can,” she once called out to a gang of newshounds—just the sort of competition that fired her spirit. As I write these words in 2006, nearly four years after her death, the Hepburn legend remains largely as she left it, as sacrosanct as Lady Liberty and perhaps as durable. It has seemed enough to just stand back and admire, and certainly there is much that is admirable about Katharine Hepburn. She was an exemplar of achievement, an American cultural icon. Her very name conjures up indomitability, independence, Yankee common sense, Emersonian self-reliance. Of all Hollywood’s female legends, only Marilyn Monroe trumps her in terms of worldwide recognition. Yet Monroe’s name invokes Victim; Hepburn’s, by contrast, stands for Survivor. Maverick. Champion. Her passing on June 29, 2003, at the age of ninety-six, proved an unexpected media sensation. A year later, the auction of her personal effects at Sotheby’s generated a whole new cycle of publicity, with eleven thousand of the Hepburn faithful passing through in five days. As the myth was merchandised, however, the more interesting woman behind it risked being lost to history—without us even knowing it was happening. That’s because, for decades, we had taken the myth at face value. The depth of our admiration had convinced us that we knew the real Kate, that public and private were one and the same. “She starred in seven jillion movies,” the critic Mary McNamara wrote, “won all those Oscars, but in the end, Katharine Hepburn was loved for her self, for being who she was.” Who she was. The public really thought it knew. And therein lay her secret. The historian Daniel Boorstin has written that the “most important question of our lives” is “what we believe to be real.” Indeed, Hepburn’s herculean endurance depended upon our faith that she was 100 percent authentic. We understood that other great stars might live behind a manufactured public image. But Hepburn—Kate—was seen as thoroughly real. Her defiantly iconoclastic persona was predicated on the belief that there was no image, that she was beyond all that claptrap. But how much of it was really true? “She was very shrewd, very aware of everything when it came to her career and her image,” said her friend the screenwriter James Prideaux. “There wasn’t much that Kate wasn’t aware of. But then she was apt to turn around and declare she didn’t care what her public image was.” Only “half of the time,” Prideaux said, would he take her at her word. “So I’ve had control,” Hepburn admitted late in life, sitting in an old black leather swivel chair in her New York house, her tennis-shoed feet up on a hassock. “And anyone who has control is a fool if they don’t make the best of it.” Most accounts of Hepburn’s life—books and articles—have been written by friends, fans, or journalists who took the trip up the steep, narrow stairs of her town house in New York’s Turtle Bay or drove out to her summer home in Fenwick, Connecticut. All her biographers, accurately or not, have implied some kind of “cooperation” from the star. After she died, it was the impression of some that A. Scott Berg, her most recent chronicler, was putting the final polish on the legend as Hepburn wanted it told. Yet Berg, admitting his lack of objectivity upfront, acknowledged in the introduction to Kate Remembered (published immediately upon her death and offering a warm, witty, loving account of their friendship) that the four-time Oscar winner merited a more thorough, full-scale biography. As a reporter and cultural historian, I have attempted to supply the book Berg describes. I am a great admirer of Hepburn’s, but I was not a friend nor would I consider myself a fan. Unlike other biographers, I do not begin my account with an in-person meeting with the star. Instead of the living legend, I start with the relics she left behind. On the day of her estate sale at Sotheby’s, I watched and listened as the bidding grew frenzied. Auctioneers’ voices ratcheted higher; phones rang nonstop; Internet bidding nearly shut down the servers. Some of the items being sold were exquisite. The diamond and sapphire jardiniere brooch from Howard Hughes was estimated at $15,000, while the true value of other artifacts was priceless: the purchase agreement for The Philadelphia Story, telegrams between Hepburn and Hughes, the star’s first contract with RKO. But many of the other lots on the block bordered on the absurd: rolled-up newspaper that she used as hair curlers; a no trespassing sign; her (unsigned) Bloomingdale’s credit card. “Look at Lot 647,” Scott Berg groaned to the press. “Her tennis shorts! That is crossing the line.” The faithful didn’t agree. “I’d love to bid on her wedding dress,” a New Yorker gushed. “Can you imagine owning Katharine Hepburn’s wedding dress?” It was, to look at it, nothing special: crushed velvet, cream colored, with gold embroidery around the neck and a diamond pattern on the chest. Hepburn had worn it in 1928, when she married Ludlow Ogden Smith, always a shadowy figure in previous accounts of her life. Looking at the wedding dress, I couldn’t help but wonder about this young man named Smith and his bride. The starting bid was $2,500, but the gown ended up selling for more than ten times that amount. Overall, $5.9 million was taken in. Sotheby’s would register more new clients with this auction than any other. What was most surprising was the degree of devotion to someone so long out of the limelight. “You would think,” observed one of Hepburn’s friends as we passed the faithful clutching photographs from Bringing Up Baby and Adam’s Rib, “she had been Princess Diana.” Give or take Liz Taylor, Katharine Hepburn was the only great star of Hollywood’s golden age to live into the twenty-first century. While she survived, no truly authentic biography could be written. Few intimates would consent to interviews; those who did were guided by the outlines of the myth she helped create. For as long as she lived, her legend, with its wonderful tales of grit and ambition and luck and love—as well as its omissions, obfuscations, and outright inventions—was scrupulously maintained. But it’s time to take a second look at the legend. Katharine Hepburn was a critical figure of the twentieth century, significant enough to truly understand and fully appreciate. Many of her friends, family, and associates, previously committed to silence, have come around to believing that a deeper portrait of Hepburn is both valuable and fitting. Here, in these pages, for the first time, they tell their stories. In addition, previously unavailable letters and private papers have been uncovered, allowing me to consider the private Hepburn in a new light.

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