Hepburn Steals the Show at Kennedy Center : Awards: Actress and four others are honored for lifetime achievement in the arts.

It dazzles everyone, even those who have seen it all.

“Of all the events I’ve attended,” a White House Marine guard said, nervously adjusting the cuffs of his military tuxedo as he gazed at the celebrity-studded crowd in the East Room--”this is really it.”

This last weekend, as it has for the last 13 years, Washington dressed up and turned out to honor five Americans whose cultural achievements have earned them a place in the nation’s heart.

The artists’ committee of the Kennedy Center Honors this weekend bestowed its rainbow-striped ribbons on jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, actress Katharine Hepburn, opera singer Rise Stevens, composer Jule Styne and director Billy Wilder in a whirlwind of black-tie events lauding their contributions not only to the arts, but to the nation’s sense of self.

“Their genius and sheer vitality have amazed and challenged us and most of all, helped us to understand what it is to be an American,” President Bush said at the White House reception Sunday.

Throughout the annual rite to anoint beloved artists as cultural icons, the five honorees graciously endured a bombardment of accolades from Washington’s austere powerful and Hollywood’s glamorocracy.

“You have graced our lives, you have graced our nation and you have graced our history,” Walter Cronkite told them.

The weekend proceeded from an elegant dinner at the State Department Saturday to a lavish reception at the White House Sunday, with brunch at the Ritz-Carlton thrown in between. It culminated, as it has in years past, in a gala celebration in the flag-draped halls of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The Sunday performance, produced for the 13th year by George Stevens Jr. and Nick Vanoff, will be televised on CBS at 9 p.m. Dec. 28.

There were fewer surprises in this year’s program. Notable performances included Tommy Tune and Ann Reinking dancing to peppy Styne show tunes, a stand-up routine from humorist Art Buchwald and a litany of praise to Hepburn intoned in trio by Glenn Close, Lauren Bacall and Angela Lansbury.

But in the end, it was not the performers, but the indomitable Hepburn who stole the show.

The actress had been a reluctant honoree. For years the artists’ committee that grants the awards cajoled her, but Hepburn stubbornly refused their entreaties. Committee members speculated that her age and illness combined with her stubborn dislike of awards (she never showed up to claim any of her four Oscars) led her to rebuff the committee until this year.

It wasn’t surprising then, that the 83-year-old actress was elusive all weekend, showing up only when absolutely necessary to receive her medal or sit in the honorees’ box.

At the gala on Sunday she was dressed in her trademark black turtleneck, her hair swept into the familiar topknot. A white scarf was her only concession to the formality of the occasion.

But after watching clips of her performances with Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant and Henry Fonda, she seemed overcome with emotion.

As the house lights came up, Hepburn leaned forward out of the artists’ box, waited for the audience to hush and then said: “They were all remarkable actors . . . I was very lucky.”

She humbly endured three standing ovations from the crowd.

Superlatives swirled all evening around the honorees. Marilyn Horne called mezzo-soprano Stevens “the epitome of all that is wonderful about opera and about America.”

Jack Lemmon said director Wilder, who directed him with Marilyn Monroe in the 1959 comedy “Some Like It Hot,” once told him that “you are as good as the best thing you’ve ever done.”

“Well, if that is true,” Lemmon said, “then Billy is as good as some of the best films in the world.”

And Jerome Robbins tipped his hat to composer Styne, saying “Open the song book of America, and it reads ‘Music by Jule Styne.’ ”

Gillespie watched the proceedings with his famous quizzical gaze. In fact, Bill Cosby teased him from stage, saying: “When I look up there and see my friend Dizzy in the box with everyone looking so straight, I know there is one person who is not straight. . . . Dizzy looks exactly that way.”

The previous evening, under the marble gaze of Thomas Jefferson in the State Department’s formal reception rooms, a reporter asked Gillespie what it felt like to be honored this way.

Gillespie merely pursed his famous lips, leaned back, and whistled.

When they weren’t overwhelmed by the attention, the honorees seemed to bask in the adulation of the political and entertainment elite.

“For me, this is a culmination of a career,” Stevens said with a sigh during the State Department reception Saturday. “It’s the epitome.”

Wilder’s response was somewhat more measured. “This is the greatest thing next to winning the Heisman trophy,” he said, downing salmon in the East Room.

Washington may be a little too dowdy for this event, said CBS CEO Laurence Tisch, but “it is still the capital of our country.”

“The artists we honor tonight have given us their best and by so doing they really have shown us the best that is within ourselves as a nation,” said Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

The Marine guard agreed, but said he wanted to concentrate on something else: “The faces.”