Like Father, Katharine Kramer Takes Risks

“Spell it Katharine , with an a .” Petite and effervescent, with a wild mane of crimson tresses framing her animated face, Katharine Kramer was taking a break from rehearsals at the Hollywood Roosevelt Cinegrill, and explaining the significance of the vowel in the middle of her first name.

“After my father, Stanley Kramer, made ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ ” she explained, “he always said that if he had a boy he would name him after Spencer Tracy. But he had me, so he and my mother named me Katharine, after Katharine Hepburn. She’s my godmother, and her first gifts to me were a christening dress and the specific instructions to always spell my name with an a . And I’ve always been very careful about following her instructions. Wouldn’t you?”

The 20-year-old Kramer is at the Cinegrill through Saturday with a show--”The Colors of Myself,” crafted for her by old pros Earl Brown and Carl Jablonski, with the musical direction of the dependable Tom Shell. She is almost surely the youngest performer to work the well-known room and is well aware that she is taking a professional risk.

“Yes, it is a risk,” she said. “But I believe in the act, I believe in myself, I believe in the people I’m working with, and I’ve used my own money to make it happen. And it’s something I had to do. But my dad’s always been a risk-taker, too, so I guess he encouraged it in me.

“I didn’t go to college because I was too eager to do things, not just study them. Fortunately, my parents have always given me the opportunity to have free choice, and that’s what I do, I listen to my own instinct. Maybe that’s why my dad refers to me as the ‘Rebellious Redhead.’ He says I was born looking for a spotlight.”

Has her position as the daughter of one of Hollywood’s best-known directors had an effect on Kramer’s career?

“In one sense,” she replied, “it’s always been more difficult for me, because people tend to judge you twice as hard as they might otherwise do, and I’ve always wanted to make it on my own.

“But in another sense, I’ve learned a lot about the industry that I might not otherwise have known. My dad’s never been a Hollywood type, and he doesn’t socialize all that much. I mean, I didn’t exactly grow up with Frank Sinatra in my living room every night. But I did grow up with a fairly focused look at the industry from the inside. And that helped; it gave me the real scoop.”

The Kramer family left Los Angeles for Seattle when she was 10 but returned to Southern California two years ago.

Despite her youth, Kramer has had an extensive amount of professional experience. She appeared in several professional regional theater productions, studied with Herbert Berghof in New York and sang with several swing-style big bands.

She was so young when she began singing that liquor laws required that she wait in the kitchens of the large hotels in which she worked until it was time to do her numbers. “Other people tell their grandchildren about being born in a truck,” she explained. “I guess I’ll be able to tell stories about sitting around in some of the finest kitchens in America.”

Perhaps more importantly, the experience opened up the great treasury of American popular songs for Kramer, and she has been fascinated with it ever since. She worries, however, that her love of classic Gershwin and Rodgers & Hart might “make people think I’m just trying to hop on the nostalgia trend. But I’ve been singing these songs since I was 10, and well before Linda Ronstadt and Michael Feinstein started recording them.

“I’ve been told that I should be singing the music of my own generation, but this is the music that’s true to me, and it doesn’t feel out of date at all. In fact, I feel very linked with the future, in part because of my age, but also in part because, to me, the past is linked with the future.

“I love the heart and the innocence of the music of the past--of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s--and I like to think that retaining it will help revive the same feelings of heart and innocence in the music of the future. That’s one of my real goals. It’s something I really want to be a part of.”