Word: hepburn
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...good beginning. Not good at all. An interview with Katharine Hepburn is not easy under the best of circumstances, even when her publisher has set it up to publicize the paperback release of her best-selling autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life. It is going to be awfully hard to ask what she was thinking of carrying on a 27-year affair with the married Spencer Tracy if she keeps her back turned to me the whole time. Apologies are definitely in order...
...Tracy Lord have chastened Dexter with a blithe reprimand and moved on? If not humor, what about understanding and empathy? But these, the critics found, were the very qualities she had trouble conveying, which limited her to light comedies and, in later years, to playing starchy, irascible eccentrics. Hepburn was dogged for years by Dorothy Parker's famous put-down of her performance in the Broadway play The Lake: "Katharine Hepburn runs the gamut of emotion from A to B." If her parents, heirs to the Corning Glass fortune, had not bought her out of that flop...
...determined to be sure this effrontery does not go unpunished that she has forgotten the book altogether. Instead, like the college professor who fiddles endlessly with his pipe before explaining why you are flunking his course, Hepburn decides to tend the fire in the second-floor drawing room of her Manhattan town house, for which she says (later, when she is speaking) she was offered $2 million. I look around at her watercolors, the antique duck decoy, some African artifacts, and memorize the pattern in the Oriental rug while she slowly removes the screen from the fireplace, chucks...
...Hepburn turns around and heads toward the window to close it. She has noticed how cold it is in here despite the roaring fire. "Well, you're here now, aren't you? Might as well sit down...
...this time, and a simple threat to leave was all that was needed to break the logjam. A bully respects a bully. In her book, Hepburn speaks candidly of being "totally selfish," "a me, me, me person." To Ludlow Ogden Smith, her husband of six years whose only mistake was that he loved her, she admits to being an "absolute pig." He tried everything to please her, went so far as to change his name so that she wouldn't be known as Kate Smith. "Isn't that the way it is?" She shrugs. "Luddy loved me and would...