My Life So Far (71 page)

At the appointed time Bruce and I drove to the parking lot of the restaurant where we had arranged to rendezvous with them. Within minutes their station wagon pulled up, and Ms. Hepburn got out and came over to me.

“Well, have you picked your house yet, Jane?” In that instant I knew that I had to throw out my assumptions about who would take which house.

“I have seen a number of houses, Ms. Hepburn, but you make your choice first and I’ll take what’s left.”

“Now you’re talking!” she said with a big grin, knowing I’d learned my lesson and wasn’t about to make the same mistake again. Whew! It had been a close call. Ms. Hepburn and Phyllis in a cozy little cabin? What
could
I have been thinking? She chose the eight-bedroom mansion.

L
et me provide a little backstory: For years I had wanted to do a movie in which all the Fondas—Henry, Peter, and I—could act together. When Bruce saw the play
On Golden Pond
in New York he wanted to buy it right away, as time was of the essence: Dad had been increasingly in and out of hospitals with heart disease and a variety of complications that resulted from it, and I knew there wasn’t a lot of time left for us to work together. Even though there was no role for Peter and mine was very much a supporting one, I believed that in the role of Norman Thayer, Dad would win the Oscar that had eluded him for so long. I wanted to make that happen for him.

Mark Rydell had agreed to direct the film, and Ernest Thompson, the young author of the play, would rework it for the screen.

The film tells of an elderly couple who have summered for decades on a lake in Maine called Golden Pond. Norman, a moody curmudgeon played by my father, is about to turn eighty, and his daughter, Chelsea, en route to Europe with her fiancé, has planned to stop by the lake for his birthday party. Along with them is the fiancé’s thirteen-year-old son, Billy, whom they hope to leave with Chelsea’s parents for a month while they travel. Chelsea, a real estate agent who lives in California, has had a troubled, distant relationship with her father all her life and has made a point of not visiting her parents because of it—something that has hurt her father, though she doesn’t even realize he cares.

Young Billy is angry, feeling as though he’s been dumped someplace boring with a couple of “old poops”; but in the course of the summer Norman and Billy bond as Norman never has with his own daughter. He teaches Billy to fish and to execute a fine backflip (the dive Chelsea was never able to accomplish), and Billy teaches Norman such expressions as “cruisin’ chicks,” “suck face,” and “San Fran–tastic.” We can feel Norman’s heart soften because of this relationship with Billy, and when Chelsea returns from Europe to fetch the boy, she sees this and gets jealous. With her mother’s encouragement Chelsea is finally able to muster the courage to confront her father, telling him she wants them to be friends, and he is able to show his love for her for the first time. The main fabric of the story is the touching fifty-year-long relationship between Norman and his wife, Ethel, played by Hepburn. It is deeply touching when he loses his way in the woods while trying to pick strawberries and comes running home to her. So is the scene when he suffers acute angina and she tells him how scared she is of losing him. The two of them bring a rare poignancy to these scenes, and I for one cannot watch them without sobbing uncontrollably.

T
ime was of the essence. Because of my father’s failing health, we all knew it was this summer or never.
On Golden Pond
is a summer story, and we had to get it done by early fall, when the deciduous hardwood tress so characteristic of that part of New England would begin to turn their fall colors.

Cinematographer Billy Williams had insisted on finding a lake that ran east to west, because it would give him a certain kind of light he felt was essential. Our location scout visited over one hundred lakes from the Carolinas to Maine, but Squam was apparently the only one on the East Coast that met this requirement. Then there was the unusual fact that while almost all other lakes were rimmed with summer homes, Squam seemed frozen in time. It was hard to believe that a place so beautiful was so undeveloped (until someone introduced me to the term
conservation by exclusion:
All the land bordering the lake is owned by wealthy families who intend to keep it undeveloped).

So we were working against time: the season changing, Ms. Hepburn’s injured rotator cuff, and my father’s health. Also, an actors strike was looming against the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and it threatened to shut down all productions. We hoped that if we had actually started shooting before the strike began, they wouldn’t ask us to stop. We were wrong. The actors struck, and we got the call to shut down. Bruce spent three desperate days arguing that because we were with ITC, a British independent company, not an MPAA studio, we didn’t fall under their jurisdiction. He was successful in getting a waiver that allowed us to continue. Had that not occurred,
On Golden Pond
would never have been made.

Once rehearsals had begun, Ms. Hepburn would invite me over to her house for tea. We’d sit in the comfortable white wicker chairs that were scattered about her glassed-in porch and she would tell me how I should play my role. I’m serious—and so was she. Ms. Hepburn would have me read her part and she’d read mine and give me line readings. Though I was stunned by this, I never let on that I found it . . . well, strange. I did not want to offend her.

I never tired of looking at her. Though in her mid-seventies, she was still magnificent. It was part attitude and part bone structure. I realized that if the architecture of a face is upward reaching (those cheekbones!) and properly proportioned, as hers was, it mattered not if the skin that was draped over the scaffolding was wrinkled and blotched . . . the essential beauty held. Aging takes more of a toll on less structured faces.

Though she told me once that she thought the two of us were very much alike—both strong, independent, liberal-minded women—she also let me know what she saw as our differences. For one thing, she thought I should be more involved on a day-to-day basis with the film production, which of course is how she was in her heyday—involved in all the details from casting to lighting. She has been quoted as saying, “Acting was all I ever wanted to do,” but I wasn’t like that. I loved acting, especially once I began producing my own pictures, but it was one important part of my life among others. I had my children, my ongoing political work with CED, the new Workout business to help fund it all . . . and a dog. (Ms. Hepburn wasn’t big on pets, either.) But I know Ms. Hepburn looked askance at all of this; she simply didn’t understand the concept of having a working partner like Bruce, of having a business unrelated to my profession, and of putting as much or more time into political work as I did into my career. Ms. Hepburn was livid that CED’s steering committee were all there, living at our camp (the smaller one, which I’d thought appropriate for Ms. Hepburn and Phyllis) in cabins and tents. She thought it was unpardonable for me not to be 100 percent concentrated on the film. We had to wait for a day when we were utterly certain Ms. Hepburn would not be coming to the set before we could invite the CED organizers to pay a visit and watch the shooting.

Of course, the idea of an actor having children was anathema to her. She told me that she had never wanted children because she thought she was too selfish. “If I’d had a child,” she said, “and the child got sick and was crying just as I had to leave for the theater, where hundreds of people were waiting for me to perform, and I had to make a choice—the play or the child—well, I’d smother the child to death and go on with the show. You just can’t have both,” she said with frightening certainty, “a career
and
children.”

I don’t think she was right, at least not for me. Maybe for her she was: To have had the career she wanted perhaps required 100 percent attention. I do know that I felt terrible after these conversations. They played to my tendency to feel that I should be handling my life differently, more like . . . I don’t know. There was always a roster of women whose lives seemed more sensible than mine, just as there was always a list of actresses who could do my part better than I. I stayed awake many a night fretting about this, feeling sure that she was right, that my kids would be totally screwed up because of me.

But guess what. They aren’t. In fact, my kids have grown up to be amazing, talented, well-balanced, lovable people. Not that I can take credit for it all, but still. Anyway, I am what I am. In a 1978 interview in
Rolling Stone,
Donald Katz wrote about me, “No one else has ever stepped out to such a band of new drummers in the movie world and maintained a career.”

On more than one occasion during those teatime conversations, Ms. Hepburn talked of her relationship with actresses Constance Collier and Ethel Barrymore, both elders with whom she seemed to have assigned herself the role of acolyte. She described how when Barrymore was hospitalized toward the end of her life, Hepburn would visit her regularly. She told me about this so often that I began to wonder if she was hoping for a younger actress who would befriend her—and whether perhaps the actress she had in mind was me. I was never sure. But she was more comfortable with people who had no other attachments, not even pets.

She talked a lot about the importance of her parents in her life, always speaking of them as the most wonderful, fascinating parents anyone could have and crediting them with making her what she was. Apparently her habit of swimming every morning when she was at her country house in Connecticut, even in winter, had been developed at an early age. She told me that her father had insisted all his children take baths in a tub filled with ice every morning before school. When I suggested that this might be considered child abuse, she said, “Oh no, that is what builds character; and that is why I have such a strong constitution and never get sick.” I wasn’t convinced but kept my mouth shut.

She told me that every morning in the city she would get up at 5:00
A.M.,
have breakfast in bed, and write about her life’s experiences. One chapter, she said, was called “Failure” and described her monumental failure in a Broadway play called
The Lake.

“One reviewer said, ‘Go see Katharine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B,’ ” she said with a snort. “I’m writing about how you learn more from failure than you ever do from success.” On that one I agree with her.

Having learned my lesson, I was not about to miss a second historic event, so I was present on the first day of shooting, even though I was not in the scene. Ms. Hepburn was all made up and waiting for my father on the front steps of the house in which we were filming. She had a twinkle in her eye and we could tell she was hiding something behind her back. As soon as Dad arrived, she walked up to him and said, “Here, Hank. This was Spence’s favorite hat. I want you to have it for this film.” Dad was clearly moved by this gesture from his leading lady, as were we all. In the course of the film he wore three different hats and Spencer Tracy’s was one of them. When the film ended, he made a painting of the three hats, so real that you could feel their texture; he had lithograph copies made and presented one to every member of the cast and crew.

My first day of filming was the scene of my arrival at my parents’ summer home with my fiancé and his son. Ms. Hepburn had not seen me in costume and makeup. She took one look at my high-heeled shoes and disappeared, returning a few minutes later in a pair of her old platform shoes from the thirties, which increased her height by at least two inches. That’s when I remembered that height was important to her. (I’d read that she’d brought it up in her first encounter with Spencer Tracy, telling him, “You’re not as tall as I expected.” This prompted producer Joseph Mankiewicz’s famous comment, “Don’t worry, Kate, he’ll soon cut you down to size.”) I suppose that for her, height established dominance. She’d be damned if she’d let me tower over her.

That same day, between takes, I was standing in front of the mirror that hung near the front door where Norman’s hats were hung when Ms. Hepburn surprised me by coming up behind me. She reached around and took a chunk of my cheek between her fingers.

“What does this mean to you?” she asked, pulling on my cheek.

“What do you mean?”

“Your image. What do you want your image to be?” She gave my cheek another little tug. “This is your package. We all have our package, what presents us to the world. What do you want your package to say about you?”

“I have no idea,” I answered.

But I thought a lot about this for days afterward and still do today. (That’s the thing about Ms. Hepburn: She got under my skin and stirred things up.) I think I now know why she asked me the question. She thought I needed to be more self-conscious about my image. That’s what she felt movie stars needed to do—God knows she did. She had a persona, a style particular to her that will live on in the minds of her public, and she never wavered from it. I, on the other hand, was a hodgepodge, still searching for who I was, lacking self-consciousness about my persona, and this bothered her. She didn’t want me to be this way; it was one more thing about me that she didn’t approve of. We tend to think of the term
self-consciousness
as meaning something bad, as being awkward or uncomfortable with oneself. But the way I am using it it means something rather different—a
consciousness of self,
the impact our presence has on other people. The only other person I have known as self-conscious is Ted Turner. And, as it was with Hepburn, it’s part of his charm.