"How dare you keep me waiting? Are you that stupid?"
Not a 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.
"I'm sorry I'm late, really I am."
"You are not sorry. You are stupid."
Well, 10 minutes late is unfortunate, yes, but a deal breaker?
"I've been waiting a half hour for you," she says, rounding up by 20 minutes the delay. "You're an idiot."
As a lifelong fan, I keep waiting for the comic heroine of The Philadelphia Story to enter. Wouldn't 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 and she had not secured the rights to The Philadelphia Story, she would not be summoning reporters to her house today.
She is so 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 in a couple of corn husks, stokes the embers a bit here and there, and shoves the wood around.
Both of us are staring into the flames now and have yet to make eye contact. Regret at not having camped on her doorstep all night hangs heavy in the air. The silence gives us time to reflect: me on all the other times my lateness has been costly -- a part in the sixth-grade pageant, a starting place on the field-hockey team; her to conjure up fondly her own perfect record of punctuality. "I've never been late once in all my years in the theater," she says, scoffing at my having allowed only an extra hour to travel from Washington to New York City. Surely she could find a way to forgive the delay, what with the shuttle, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the stop at Random House to be cleared by the p.r. department, and the general rule of life that if anything can go wrong, it will. "Four hours. You should have allowed four hours. Anything less is dumb. I was 15 minutes early today."