Many Failures At First

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31584, 23 January 1968, Page 6

Many Failures At First

KIMMIS HENDRICK)

(By

Hollywood shies away from talking about failures. But not Katherine Hepburn. She loves to talk about hers. She has learned so much, she says, from them. Hollywood says she can afford the approach. Obviously, she is one of the greatest actresses. “I failed so many times,” insists Miss Hepburn, harking back to her early theatre days, “but I went back and back.” When she played in “The Big Pond” on Broadway, she was fired. Her next role lasted one night The next fell through before the Broadway opening. So, too, with "The Warrior’s Husband.” But for this she was rehired. And she made a hit of it Now, as Columbia Pictures releases Stanley Kramer's “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” the feather in Columbia’s hat is really Miss Hepburn. She does not say so. She says it is the whole cast and Mr Kramer’s direction. She points out with very great pleasure that it is the ninth film in which she has played with Spencer Tracy. Miss Hepburn starts an interview by talking about speech. "People neglect it,” she says disapprovingly. And this reminds her of a Tracy anecdote.

“Spencer used to tell a marvellous story,” she recalls, “about a time when he was to play a Portuguese fisherman. The studio called in a real Portuguese fisherman to advise him. 1 “ ‘Do . you say feesh?' Spencer asked him. ‘Why no,‘ said the Portuguese. ‘I would say fish!’” It is clarity of speech in any case, Miss Hepburn says, that she sees as the mark of cultivation, in daily life or in theatre or film. She can make herself heard with a whisper. When she raises her voice, to quote her, she can be heard “half a mile away.” She smiles her spacious smile—“l’m better when I smile,” she declares; “my face is so hollow”—and then she says delightfully, “I have a theory that people with long necks can speak more clearly.” It fits. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” pleases her because it is what she calls good realism. She does not like the kind of realism that downgrades people—“l have an enormous objection to it,” she emphasises, “because you do not see the people whom you love that way.” She means, she says, that good realism sees through the surface, as with Shakespeare, as with Eugene O’Neill. She likes the new film because “it’s just the way we are.” And then she adds, "There’s some fantasy in it, as there is in all of us.” She likes it, too, because besides Mr Tracy the cast includes Sidney Poitier. And because it also includes a screen newcomer who is her own niece, Katherine Houghton (pronounced Hoe-ton). Miss Hepburn’s own mother was also a Katharine Houghton. LIKES DISCIPLINE Miss Hepburn, like her mother was graduated at Bryn Mawr. Her mother was a social worker and a fighter for civil rights. She married Dr Thomas Norval Hepburn, a crusader and vigorous individualist, and they raised Tom, Dick, Bob, Marion, Peggy, and Kate on tough intellectual and physical fare. They all had, for instance, to take ice cold showers each morning. Miss Hepburn still likes discipline.

She plays a fast game of tennis before breakfast or takes a two-mile hike. “I do not believe that two time two equals four in human relationships,” she comments, throwing in a word for reasonable elasticity. “But you can’t live anti-law and order. The old Quakers and the Puritans had something.” Some films today, she submits, mainly play to “a sqciety that doesn't want discipline.” She finds its indispensable. She also finds, she says, that she cannot let herself be selfconcerned when it comes to acting. “I learned a wonderful thing from John Huston when we were making ‘African Queen,” ” she says. “He wanted me once to kneel down in the dirt. I’m very practical—my dress was oatmeal colour and didn't show

dirt—but it didn’t satisfy John. “He asked, ‘Have you met Mrs Roosevelt’’ I said 1 had. He said, ‘She has enormous confidence in her integrity, so she doesn’t go embarrassed by how she looks. She can smile.' I got the point” Miss Hepburn remembers her father’s saying something when he was 82 that illustrates the no-nonsense approach she values for her work. He met her in Athens. He had flown tourist from New York, and she met his plane with plans all firm to go straight to the hotel so he could rest. “I didn't come to Greece to take a nap,” her father countered. “I came to see the Parthenon.” They did. “If I retired,” she says, “I wouldn’t use that word. It’s like waving a red flag before a bull.” She has two film roles lined up after the new one—- “ Eleanor of Acquitaine” first, and then, under John Huston, "The Mad-woman of Chaillot.’’ No retirement plan for her. Philip Barry wrote "The Philadelphia Story” for her and she quotes him, smiling her wonderful smile, to sum up her present situation. “I’m the privileged class,’ ” she says, “ ‘enjoying my privileges’—that’s Phil Barry.”— From the Christian Science Monitor.