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A. Scott Berg remembers Hepburn
BY GERALD PEARY
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A. Scott Berg’s Kate Remembered (Putnam, $25.95) is his secretly written record — chatty, chummy, definitely page-turning — of his 20-year friendship with Katharine Hepburn, who died on June 22 at age 96. Here is the most subjective, emotional of memoirs, from a writer known for his formal, distanced, elegant biographies of great male achievers of the 20th century: editor Maxwell Perkins, Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn, and aviator Charles Lindbergh. Hanging with Hepburn might be a more precise title. For two decades, Berg was the actress’s stay-over guest both at her New York townhouse and at Fenwick, her Connecticut estate. They ate together, drank Scotch together, swam together, gossiped together; finishing off an intimate evening of bonhomie, Hepburn would come into his bedroom and turn down the covers. "You are me!" she once whispered. No, nothing romantic went on. What one suspects is verified (discreetly) only on page 318. Berg resides in Hollywood with producer Kevin McCormick. The author is not just a masterly memoirist but (think David Wayne’s character in Adam’s Rib) Hepburn’s gay confidant. But who cares? I savored Kate Remembered. What’s nicest about the book is how Berg gets the quotidian flavor of Hepburn’s later years. He met her when she was a still-jaunty, amusing, opinionated 77 and endearingly batty, and he takes us through her days as a kind of recluse (she never ever ate in restaurants) but a fairly content one. She could get amazingly excited eating coffee ice cream over chocolate or playing Parcheesi with her servants or her brother. Her TV set usually sat unplugged; she was an inveterate reader, preferring non-fiction. The secret of her long life? Breeding had something to do with it. Spiritualism? She made jest of Berg’s twice-a-day meditation. Although a red-meat eater, she generally watched her pre-dessert diet. Exercise was everything: biking, golf, tennis, and twice-a-day plunges into the ocean all year ’round. What’s the purpose of existence? Berg once asked this of his actress pal. Hepburn came back with a pretty decent answer: "To work hard, and to love someone. And to have some fun. And if you’re lucky, you keep your health . . . and someone loves you back." The guy she loved most was her perennial co-star, Spencer Tracy, whom she also nursed through shaky decades of alcoholism. Much of what Berg writes of their relationship has been related before, most successfully in Garson Kanin’s memoir Tracy and Hepburn. We do learn here that Tracy swatted her once when soused, and that she never demanded that he divorce his wife because, simply, "I never wanted to marry Spencer." What about Hepburn’s lifetime of live-in female companions? Although she herself made Alice B. Toklas jokes, most of the women were decidedly not lesbian. But who really knows? A. Scott Berg, perhaps, but he’s too loyal to tell. I did learn here (is this new info?) that the actress had a liaison with filmmaker George Stevens when making Alice Adams in the 1930s. But it’s disappointing how little Berg has to say about Hepburn’s affair with director John Ford: he dismisses its importance in a few lines. Hepburn’s stormy unpublished letters to Ford in the archives at Indiana University tell a different story: they indicate that, pre-Tracy, she was desperately in love. One late evening, Hepburn pumped Berg about what he thought had prompted Spencer’s demons? Berg’s psychoanalytic answer, which starts out with Tracy’s heavy-drinking, bullying father, can be found on pages 213-215 of Kate Remembered. (There’s no index.) Pages 243-252 bring the eye-popping tale of the night Michael Jackson, totally crazy at 25, came to dinner at Hepburn’s Manhattan flat. When he finally left, an exhausted Hepburn declared, "I can’t recall a more peculiar night in my life, and I’m going to bed." Nighty-night, Kate. THERE WAS THE SHOLEM ALEICHEM SHTETL where G-d forgot to supply brains, and Errol Morris’s minus-IQ Vernon, Florida. Add to the mix Rod Murphy’s Greater Southbridge, an amusingly horrific home-movie documentary. It’s also an affectionate homage to the filmmaker’s dim-bulb Massachusetts home town. Among the peculiar individuals on camera is Jerry Sciesniewski, a lovable huge bruin of a man who gets on by selling back empty bottles. He’ll be there in person for Greater Southbridge’s first Boston showing this Tuesday, August 5, at 8 p.m. at the Paradise Lounge, 967 Commonwealth Avenue. Check it out! Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com
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