Heroic Hepburn

Press, 29 March 1982, Page 12

Heroic Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn has just won her fourth Oscar for “On Golden Pond.” Penelope Gilliatt interviews the 74-year-old star for the “Observer.”

Katharine Hepburn sat herself in a high-slung leather chair with a foot rest.

“Isn't that a barber’s chair?” I asked.

“Men’s chairs are always more comfortable." she said. "So are men’s clothes. That’s why I wear pants. And for quite a while, from 10 to 13,1 shaved my head so that boys couldn’t pull my hair." Miss Hepburn lives in New York, in Turtle Bay. Her drawing room, on the ground floor, has comfortable vicarage-looking chairs and a lot of books. None of the usual clutter of film scripts. She was wearing one of her khaki drill suits. They look steely but they remind you that steel has a melting point. One of the most recent times I saw her we talked about Bryn Mawr, her college of old. She wanted to make a film about it, with the proceeds to go to the college, and she wanted me to write the script. We had cucumber sandwiches. I was catechised about what the hell I knew about Bryn Mawr. Scared, as intended, I managed to dredge up a few facts and also mentioned some alumnae who are friends of mine. “I graduated in 1928," she said. “They’re much younger than I am,” firmly. An accusation. She got up from her barber’s chair and threw the tea-leaves on the fire, saying: “That fire won’t be lit till tomorrow evening anyway.” The unique bone structure, the freckles, the lack of make-up, the energy at 70plus and who cares how much plus: she is watchable whatever she is doing. 1 Her grin alone would identify her. She has worked all her post-college life. When I saw her she. had just finished shooting “On Golden Pond,” directed by Mark Rydell, and

had been on a long tour of Ernest Thompson's “West Side Waltz," in which she played an ageing, radiant pianist gifted with so much attack that any grand piano of proportionate manners would have backed away. She had also been playing a lot of her usual tennis, at which she is very good, and thus damaged a shoulder. She didn't want any intruder to know which hospital she was in. In and out fast. She was furious as hell about the impending and endless costume fittings, which hurt, but she did them. Her professionalism is as obdurate as her friendships and her opinions. This is not to say that she doesn’t call any of her decisions into question. Though her emotional instinct is to be staunch, her intellectual instinct is to be truant. When she is acting, particularly on stage, her character is a trumpet-call to dissidence. “My father, Thomas H. Hepburn, was a surgeon from Hartford, Connecticut, who led the field in education about venereal disease 20 years before public health officials would talk about it. My mother was a Boston Houghton, also called Katharine. She went to Bryn Mawr, too. She was a champion of women’s suffrage and 'birth control. Why are you laughing?” .. J "Because you were one of six children.” She turned away her head and I remembered that one of the six' particularly dear to her had died in youth, in circumstances not to be gone into.

She turned her head back to look at me straight, more characteristically, spoke a couple of sentences about the death, and shook her head in

impatience as if she had a piece of grit in her eye. Bryn Mawr is a remarkable college. It has close links with Queen’s College. Harley Street, where I went: the reasons for the link being, among others, that Bryn Mawr is firmly a women's college, founded by the efforts of a few men with regard for the kind of women still dismissively called "brainy." “At Bryn Mawr I was a very good golfer and a very poor student ... I came by the skin of my teeth. I got in. and by the skin of my teeth I stayed. "Everything that you start becomes discouraging almost immediately. But if you start something you finish it.” About “dropping out," the American undergraduate disease that sounds like one of the huge number of American plays and films at the moment that have participial titles — “Making It,” “Starting Over,” "Touching Bottom,” “Being There” - Miss Hepburn said that, when she was at Bryn Mawr, “dropping stuff wasn’t quite so .funny. And dropping stuff because you think you are superior to it — dumb, just dumb." "You've described yourself as painfully shy.” “Whether that was because I was painfully egotistical The bom actress’s pause. “But my father said, ‘My children are all very shy — they go to a party and they’re afraid they’ll be neither the bride nor the corpse.’ He had something there. “I was a very good athlete, but I didn't dare, try out for anything so I just pretended I was awful and finally I had an appendix attack and I

thought, ’Thank God, I hope I’ll die.’ "The College wrote my family and said that they thought maybe it would be a good idea if I didn’t try to finish college. Because at the end of that year my standing was bad. “And my father, being a surgeon, wrote back and said that, if he had a patient in the hospital who was sick he wouldn’t send him home . . . The secret of life is that if you work you can do anything." She Shifted on her barber’s chair, spoke of Hollywood colleagues, especially of George Cukor, of the antiFascist movement in Hollywood that caused our common friend Donald Ogden Stewart (who adapted Philip Barry’s stage play "The Philadelphia Story” and filmed it with Katharine Hepburn) to settle in England, where he has lately died, as blithely mischievous to the very end as any ally could be. When she first went to Hollywood the producers were all very short, she said, and Louis B. Mayer was very, very short. We looked together at her clog-soled and clog-heeled shoes on the barber’s chair. Hepburn is a tall woman anyway, but the way she builds up her' hair adds to her height, and so do the clog shoes. Struggling as an actress in the Hollywood power-factory of the Thirties, she found it helpful to tower over mini-’ built megalomaniacs. No magnate could have come on this poised and razor-brained beauty on the lot without hearing the clarion power of her voice as it would sound to the box office, nor without hearing a union bell peal in his own ears that he had better agree, finish, cut and run. She has now won four Academy Awards and nine Academy nominations, but the prizes are an insufficient

salute to the body of her best work. She doesn't care, except that there is no commemoration of the TracyHepburn films. When Spencer Tracy and Miss Hepburn play together they create a particular comic weather. It is without storms, sometimes selfmockingly despairing, inbued with generosity, blue-skied. I asked about the particular way she chose to pick up a milk-jug in "Adam s Rib," one of her nine films with Tracy. Not by the handle; by her long fingers placed firmly over the jug. George Cukor, the director, confirms that it was her own piece of acting business. Tracy and she are alone together in the scene. Her gesture has the tone of all their films: together, they convey a quality of sexuality between true siblings, brother-and-sister love and alliance as it exists in so many of the Thirties and Forties films we most cher-

ish — womanliness liberated from Women’s Liberation. Miss. Hepburn’s elemental blend of resilience, frailty and courage is not definable as ordinarily feminine, but it is certainly' not mannish. We know that she is telling us the truth, in her own fashion; as Tracj' did. in his own fashion. Miss Hepburn tries ambitiously to be ordinary, and unlamentably fails. On stage, she will either face out an audience and shoot the lines at us as if our minds were the bull's-eye and she the surest shot in the world, or play them as though they were banners of the English language that she commands and serves. She can often make you wonder for a moment if she wrote her lines herself. I can’t think of any other woman with the rage of pity to play Lear if she had the chance, or the swift sad wit to play Hamlet. People often talk about heroic actors. She is a heroic actress.