“Hello, Miss Hepburn. This is Burt Reynolds.”
“Who?” asked The Great Kate, showing no flicker of recognition of the name. “Can’t talk now. Call me back later.” Bang.
Two hours later.
“Miss Hepburn, Burt Reynolds again.”
“Too soon . . . later, I said!” Bang.
And so it began, the dance any mere star must undertake when trying to woo Katharine Hepburn, the grande dame of American film into stepping before the cameras.
No easy sell, Hepburn, a four-time Oscar winner, fields offers herself on a black rotary-dial telephone, and despises scripts about old age, euthanasia and nursing homes.
“What would you send me?” the 85-year-old challenged when Reynolds finally gained her attention. “Use your imagination.”
He did. First Reynolds turned to longtime Hepburn scriptwriter James Prideaux, who had written Hepburn’s last two TV films: “Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry” (1986) and “Laura Lansing Slept Here” (1988).
Then, aided by George Schaefer, who had directed both, Reynolds prevailed with a Burt Reynolds Production of “The Man Upstairs,” a rollicking tale of an escaped convict (Ryan O’Neal) who invades the house of an irascible recluse (you know who). The show aired on CBS in December.
At the time Hepburn said it might be her swan song after 43 films. But then again, she added, “Not necessarily.
“I don’t believe in drawing lines,” Hepburn said in an interview-rakish, as always, in ripped tan pants, black Reeboks, a red turtleneck and a plaid shirt inherited from longtime lover Spencer Tracy.
“You don’t know when you’re going to pass out or get feeble-witted, so it’s just as well you keep going as long as you’re alive.”
In semi-retirement since 1988, Hepburn had turned from the screen to the typewriter, snaring a $4 million advance for her sassy autobiography, “Me,” now available in paperback (Ballantine, $5.99), “which I wrote myself, selling myself, which is about as low as you can get,” she said, pointing her chin into the air. The book sold 800,000 copies in hardcover and more than 1 million in paperback.
Although inactivity after the book was unthinkable, plucking Madame from her roost was not an easy task.
John Dayton, “The Man Upstairs” executive producer who accompanied the actress to Vancouver, B.C., for the eight-week shooting last July, said Hepburn nearly backed out at the last minute: “Neither Schaefer nor Prideaux originally believed Kate was up to it,” he said. She suffers pain from with an arthritic right shoulder, a hip replacement and a right ankle nearly severed in a 1982 car crash. She also has slight tremors.
A few weeks before the shoot began, Dayton, 44, received a note on Katharine Houghton Hepburn stationery: “Dear John, I hope you’re right. You better be. Kate.”
He was. And the twosome fell into a platonic affair. “We sat on the beach, ate ice cream, chartered a plane to Vancouver Island and talked about our families,” he said.
“Vancouver was gorgeous-the forest, the water, the setting, you name it!” Hepburn said of the location for “The Man Upstairs.” The filming inside a white clapboard mansion from 8:15 a.m. to 6 p.m. “was pure fun,” she said.
O’Neal grabbed at the chance to work with Hepburn, lost 20 pounds for the role and turned on the charm. “I have sort of a weakness for that,” Hepburn said with a smile. “Nobody reminds me of Spencer Tracy, but Ryan is a good actor, right there-interesting and alive. I thought: `This really works-good chemistry.’ “
Kindly photographed in soft focus with “bounced and diffused lighting,” Dayton said, the Hepburn face remained etched like Mt. Rushmore, the remarkable cheekbones a marvel, the patrician hauteur intact. Although her voice quavers and she walks with a cane and says she’s “crumbling slowly,” in one scene she raced up the stairs two at a time, rescuing O’Neal from falling out a window.
“That wasn’t a double. That was me,” she said proudly. “I’m not in bad shape, though that accident in 1982 really aged me.” A bad break. “Yes, and a stupid accident that didn’t need to happen. Running into that telephone pole was my fault.
In “The Man Upstairs” she played Victoria Browne, a spinster who meets an escaped convict, Moony Pulaski, who has snuck into her kitchen in search of safe harbor and a hot meal. Victoria discovered Moony staring into her refrigerator, whacked him with a cane, took the gun from him, then, feeling pity, summarily offered him a dinner of cold beet soup, leftover lamb, cookies and ice cream.
Would Hepburn offer dinner to an intruder in her own kitchen? “I might,” she said, laughing, “or I might shoot. It would depend on how he struck me, what mood I’m in mentally. If I thought he was just some poor slob with no brain, no. But would I shoot someone? Oh, yes. No problem”-this from an advocate of gun control.
“No contradiction,” she said. “As long as somebody else has a gun to hold me up, I should have a gun to shoot-him-first. Notice I say him. And if he’s willing to end my life, he has to be willing to accept a morality that ends his. Tough, but true.”
Of the friendship that Victoria, her character in the TV film, developed with the Moony character, Hepburn said, “She’s hungry for adventure and she likes his sensitivity and humor.”
Yet, like Victoria, she’s not crazy about being touched or grand displays of physical affection: “No, I’m not all emotional like some women, not that way at all. But I’m very dependable . . . I don’t show it, but a fact is a fact is a fact.”
In “The Man Upstairs,” the bittersweet ending left Hepburn standing at the door of her house with tears in her eyes, the audience well aware of her sudden but deep affection for O’Neal’s Pulasky.
In real life, since her 27-year affair with the married Spencer Tracy ended with his death in June 1967, has she ever fallen in love again? “The answer is no, I didn’t,” she said with a shrug. “I’m not the easy-to-fall-in-love-with type. I’m rather fussy. Heavens, I didn’t want: `Well, she’s lucky to get him.’ “
A confirmed loner, Hepburn lives in a Manhattan townhouse and considers her privacy the greatest luxury imaginable (“nobody telling you to get out of the bathroom-it’s yours.”) She said she inherited her assertive nature from her maverick parents, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, a urologist who campaigned for the prevention of venereal disease and legalized abortion, and her mother, Katharine Houghton, a birth-control supporter.
Would she have gotten an abortion had she ever become pregnant?
“Of course! I’m not going to have a child I don’t want,” she said. “Poor Kate Jr., she might have had reason to kill me! I was a terrible pig. My aim was me, me, me.”
Does she worry about death?
“What a relief . . . ahhhhh, great, no more interviews!”
Is she scared of anything?
“Yeah, if the house was burning down and I was on the roof and I had to jump and there was no net-that would frighten me.”
Any thoughts on the recent presidential election?
“Bush and Quayle are feeble-witted, so pathetic, incredible,” she said. “I voted for Perot-liked his spunk.”
How does she view face lifts, dying hair and fancy clothes?
“I never fell into those traps. No makeup, no perfume-I don’t like smells. No nylons, I don’t have any. No skirts-just one to wear to a funeral if the customer is fussy.”
Stoic to the core despite her physical infirmities and armed with her mother’s motto-“Don’t Give In”-Hepburn still rises at 6 a.m., ready for action. What does she do all day?
“I do whatever everybody else does: I swim in the freezing water, I fix the garden and I play tennis even with this foot-they can hit the balls to me and that works my arms.”
The tennis games occur each weekend at the family homestead in Fenwick, Conn., where she visits brothers Dick and Bob and sister Peg. Her older brother Tom committed suicide at age 16, and her sister Marion died a few years ago. Recently, her beloved driver-cook, Jimmy, died, one week after complaining about flu symptoms.
How does she get through such losses?
“Loss is certainly part of life and you have to get over it or else just blow your brains out,” she said. “I never thought of knocking myself off-not with the benefits and advantages I’ve had in life. I’ve been lucky-fate, fate, fate, smiled at me.”
And unlike many of her Hollywood colleagues who have fallen into the ditch of addiction, Hepburn has remained stalwart. No addictions of any kind? “None except chocolate,” she said. “No compulsive behavior. I haven’t been desperate. If you have the habit of escaping into something, that’s dangerous.
“I enjoy life,” she said. “I like to garden, I like to clean the floor, polish the furniture, sleep, make movies and eat.” Her favorite meal is roast beef, grilled tomato, vegetables and ice cream.
“That’s right,” she said. “You’re either born happy like that or you’re not. I like things.”
The actress, who turns 86 in May, also likes to write, so what about another book?
“My God!” she said, gasping with laughter, “give me a suggestion. The publisher would be happy to take another book because of sales, but I have no pancakes in the oven.”
In the meantime, she rules her roost-the cook, Norah Moore; two secretaries, Phyllis Wilbourne and Sharon Powers; all hover around. Why is she bossy?
“I’m bossy because I own this house and I live in it alone,” she said, “and I got a good price for it. Paid $27,500 in the ’30s; my former neighbor, Garson Kanin (a director, screenwriter and playwright who also wrote the memoir `Tracy and Hepburn’ in 1971), got about $2 million when he sold his house next door, but I’ve got nowhere to go-so I’ll keep it until I can’t get up and down the stairs anymore.”
Then what? “Then I can crawl, I can crawl,” she bellowed. But would she? “Oh yes!” she said, then laughed uproariously, seeing me to the door. “I’d rather crawl than sell.”
