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The Stevedore Type. When the first draft of the book was finished in the fall of 1967. Lerner decided that no one would do but Katharine Hepburn. "One performance by Hepburn in something of mine and I'd die happy," Lerner told TIME Reporter Mary Cronin last week. He got Hepburn, although at 60 she had never sung a professional note in her life. Chanel was pleased with the selection. "She's very very expensive, you know." Coco confesses, however, that "I'd always thought of her as such a gendarme type—so sure of herself." (Hepburn characterizes herself as "the stevedore type.")
Actually. Coco would have to look far for a closer think-alike. "In essence, they're similar." Lerner says. "Both women are extraordinarily independent and vulnerable and feminine. Both lead lives according to their own standards." Although she never married, Coco Chanel's celebrated affairs kept the Continent buzzing during the 1920s and 1930s. When the Duke of Westminster proposed, her rejection was a classic: "There have been several Duchesses of Westminster—but there is only one Chanel." She seems to have had second thoughts, however. "There's nothing worse than solitude," she now says, "growing old without a shoulder on which to lean. Marry, marry—even if he's fat and boring."
Hepburn was married briefly in the 1920s and devoted herself to the late Spencer Tracy from the early 1940s on. "I don't think you can have too many friendships," she once said, "and I certainly don't think you can have too many amours. If you can wait around for someone who means something to you, it's the most rewarding experience." She has had a somewhat less flamboyant personal life than Coco's, but is consumed by a Coco-like work ethic. "Look at Chanel at 86," Lerner points out, "still pinning and ripping. I've never known anyone who is so totally immersed in her work as Kate."
Hepburn has been immersed in Coco for a year—primarily to have an answer ready for the can-she-sing question. Basically, she is a contralto with a range of an octave and three notes. For the past eight months she has been studying voice in various places—rattling the walls in Manhattan, London, Hollywood and Connecticut. So totally has Hepburn plunged into this production that when the first rehearsal was called on Sept. 29, she swept onstage knowing all her lines.
Following a pattern she began in Hollywood in the 1930s. Hepburn is always one of the first on stage, works the hardest and the longest without a break, and is among the last to leave. "She's Man Mountain Dean," says Jerry Adler, production stage manager. "She leaves us younger folks for dead at the end of the day." When she's not in a scene, she perches on a staircase munching things—packets of meat and cheese and fruit she has brought from home—listening and watching the onstage action over and over.