Television Reviews : Hepburn Plays a Novelist in NBC’s ‘Laura Lansing’

In “Laura Lansing Slept Here” (tonight at 9, Channels 4, 36 and 39), a legendary best-selling novelist (Katharine Hepburn) is suddenly told that she has lost touch with the masses. To prove her agent and publisher wrong, she bets that she can survive for a week in the suburbs with a “normal” family.

The premise requires a gigantic suspension of disbelief--since when was, say, Jackie Collins required to stay in touch with just-plain-folks? But if you can swallow it, “Laura Lansing” provides a few moments of fun as La Hepburn moves in on an unassuming accountant’s family in Hicksville and social classes clash.

In the tradition of TV movies, the clash is quickly resolved. The family’s teen-ager (Schuyler Grant, Hepburn’s niece) hates Laura one day and confides in her the next. Although Laura ungraciously butts in on the couple’s love life, it’s all for the best--her interference resolves a simmering marital crisis.

In the last image of the movie, we’re even led to believe that Laura is responsible for the couple’s conception of their fourth child--and that this is something to cheer. This scene will send quite a few eyebrows up to the ceiling.

Still, writer James Prideaux hasn’t loaded the deck completely for Laura (as he did for Hepburn’s character in the recent “Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry”). The couple (Joel Higgins and Karen Austin) is allowed to register slack-jawed shock at Laura’s imperious indulgences. Higgins displays a touch of the proletarian charm that graced Hepburn’s former sparring partner, Jimmy Stewart.

George Schaefer directed.