The Lioness in Winter : GOING ONE ON ONE WITH KATHERINE HEPBURN

A list of do’s and don’ts precedes a visit to Katharine Hepburn, dowager empress of the American cinema.

“Whatever you do, don’t be late,” cautions a publicist, calling repeatedly to verify the appointment at the actress’s Turtle Bay brownstone on Manhattan’s Eastside. “And you’ll get a better interview if you arrive with a big bunch of flowers.”

Thus, at a little before the appointed hour, I show up at her house to discover the door open and the great lady herself barking orders to a staff of three women in the kitchen. She spies the flowers in my arms.

“‘Oh, how lovely! How lovely!” she says in those patrician Yankee tones which have enlivened madwomen and queens alike on the screen and stage. She winks conspiratorially. “I really didn’t expect you to find me in the kitchen but I did expect you to bring flowers. We’re running low.”

She tosses the flowers to an assistant and beckons me upstairs to a cozy sitting room, decorated with her own paintings of nature scenes and mementos such as the sterling silver box on the coffee table inscribed: “To Kate, the bane and blessing of my life, love, Alan.”

“Alan,” I surmise, must be Alan Jay Lerner, the composer of “Coco,” the 1969 Broadway musical in which she starred as the legendary fashion designer Coco Chanel. The “blessing” is Hepburn’s leonine talent which packed houses for this uninspired musical--a talent that is still roaring, the latest application being to “The Man Upstairs,” a CBS holiday movie airing Sunday. The “bane” is Hepburn’s feisty impatience with mediocrity and a peppery tongue for those who don’t measure up. “They think of me as the school principal,” she says of her public image. “People are a little scared of me,” she adds, not without satisfaction.

At 83, she is as chipper as ever, but the astringency now appears to be cut with a certain girlish flirtatiousness, Shakespeare’s seventh age returning her to a second childhood. Since the room is rather warm, I ask permission to remove my suit coat. “Take off all your clothes if you want,” she responds with a chuckle. “I won’t mind.”

Sitting on a floral-patterned easy chair, Hepburn--her face mottled with age, her wild mane of hair tamed into a bun--looks like a magnificent ruin. Though slightly built, she is imposing, looking less like the Statue of Liberty to which she compared herself, not immodestly, in “Me,” her Random House autobiography, and more like one of those ancient Gaelic heads found on a wind-blown Irish coast. (She follows up “Me” as subject and host of a televised “self-portrait,” “Katharine Hepburn: All About Me,” premiering Jan. 18 on TNT. It takes viewers inside Hepburn’s New York house and to Fenwick, Conn., her country home getaway.

In her book she catalogs the long list of physical ailments she has endured of late--a hip replacement, an ankle shattered in an automobile accident, arthritis, an eye infection from falling into a Venice canal shooting “Summertime.” But there is little or none of the psychological toll which we have come to expect from star autobiographies. Was her life, one wonders, just one of those rare charmed existences or did she simply not wish to write about her private emotional difficulties?

“I don’t think I’ve been punished by life, do you?” she says. “I’ve got this house, bought it for nothing in the ‘30s. If things got rough, I could always come in here and lock that door. Not everybody can do that. I’ve been lucky, really lucky.”

In “The Man Upstairs,” Hepburn plays Victoria Browne, one of those redoubtable old battle-axes who flips the world the bird while going about her business in a grand old house in the Pacific Northwest. When a fugitive convict (played by Ryan O’Neal) invades her home at gunpoint just before the holiday season, plot points are in place for some reassuring bromides planted in the sassy banter between two odd ducks. The main theme of the movie, like that of her book, is the Hepburn family motto: “Don’t moan, don’t whine, don’t blame. Just get on with it.”

“I’m not a whiner,” she says. “Never have been. Can’t stand people who are. I was brought up by two very strong people. Not only brought up but I am of them. I inherited those characteristics.”

Hepburn has long maintained, and she reiterates it now, that she was blessed in her parents, Thomas Norval Hepburn, a surgeon, and Katharine Houghton, a women’s-rights activist, both of whom associated with “radicals” of their day, such as birth-control crusader Margaret Sanger. The Hepburns’ Connecticut household encouraged the iconoclasm that has characterized Hepburn’s life and career. Her happy childhood also established what she calls “an optimistic and positive view” of life.

Contradictions nonetheless abound. For one, when she was 13, her brother committed suicide--a family trauma which she later explains with the recollection that, “When my brother disappeared, we were not encouraged to think about it more than we should. We were advised to get on with it.” For another, her well-integrated upbringing belies her own theory as to why many of the greatest actors choose acting, namely as a way to escape their unhappy and tortured selves.

“It mystifies me that I ever became an actress,” Hepburn says. “When I was 14, I thought I’d be a surgeon, but I knew that women really didn’t have a chance. My mother was horrified. She thought acting was silly. But I think Dad liked it. He’d take us to the movies every Saturday.”

In those years, Hepburn says unapologetically, “I craved money and fame. I was insanely ambitious.” She admits she married socialite Ludlow Ogden Smith in 1928 for his wealth. “Poor Luddy, he was the goat,” she says. “I married him, spent all his money, broke his heart and discarded him. He must’ve seen he was married to pig, don’t you think?”

If Hepburn had no unhappy memories with which to salt her craft, she learned acting by, as she puts it, “just doing it.”

She adds that she learned a lot by watching great actors perform. She cites two in particular: Spencer Tracy, her longtime lover whom she nursed in his dying days and stage legend Laurette Taylor (“The Glass Menagerie”) whom she idolized. But while Tracy and Taylor were both personally haunted and frequently sank into alcoholic despair, Hepburn was off being a “very healthy creature,” playing tennis, swimming and golfing.

“I think they looked into a world that must’ve been terrifying,” says Hepburn. “I didn’t. But that’s why they were great and I’m just OK. They were both wildly vulnerable, but I think I’m tough, don’t you?”

In fact, Hepburn was criticized for being too steely when she played the fluttery Amanda Wingfield in the television production of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.” But if awards are any measure of success, the actress is being unduly modest in rating herself as “just OK.” She’s won four best actress Oscars--the record.

There are numerous other accolades as well, including Tony nominations (for “Coco” and “The West Side Waltz”), a best actress Emmy (for 1975’s “Love Among the Ruins”) and several lifetime achievement tributes.

There was a brief period in the ‘30s during which Hepburn was labeled “box-office’ poison. But since her own self-engineered comeback in Philip Barry’s “The Philadelphia Story,” she has been at the top of her profession.

She rarely bothers, however, to show up for the encomiums. Her only recent Oscar show appearance was in 1974 to present an honorary award to her producer Lawrence Weingarten. Still, one wonders, has she ever tuned in on Oscar night, even just out of curiosity?

“No,” she says. “I think it’s stupid. I’m not interested in prizes. I think you do your best and, if you do your best, then you deserve an award for every performance. I’m the one who gives myself the prizes.” She pauses for a moment and then adds, “That makes me sound like a remarkable egomaniac, doesn’t it?”

Though she insists she doesn’t read books written about her, Hepburn is unambiguous about her love of fame (“If you’ve been famous, you want to keep being famous”). Over the years, she’s been widely admired for the dignity and grace with which she has maintained her privacy. Early on, she discovered that the press could make people look utterly ridiculous. “Unless you’re very cagey,” says Hepburn, “you have to look out. I’m very cagey.”

Yet, that hasn’t stopped people from jumping to their own conclusions about her from time to time. In her book, she says that, when they met, Spencer Tracy had an image of her as a lesbian with dirty fingernails. When asked if those rumors bothered her at the time, she jokes, “Well I cleaned my fingernails this morning so you wouldn’t think that.”

“I had many women friends who were very close to me,” she adds, “and if you had that, then people thought you were a lesbian. It didn’t bother me at all because it wasn’t true. If it were they’d have found about it somehow. It’s nobody’s goddamn business. Nowadays, I’m forced to be interested in a lot of people’s sex lives, which I find exhausting.”

Hepburn claims never to have heard of Madonna even though there is a wry reference to the press-horny star in “The Man Upstairs.” But she listens avidly while I fill her in on the details of the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow scandal of which she’d been totally ignorant. She says, “Oh, oh, oh! How complicated all that is. This is all too much. I feel sorry for both of them, but it’s really just a bore.”

Not that Hepburn believes that a star should abrogate his or her responsibility to speak out on social issues if the political situation calls for it. In 1947, against the wishes of her boss, Louis B. Mayer, she spoke out publicly against censorship. She expresses admiration for actresses such as Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave who have taken controversial stands.

Asked how the public perception of her differs from the way she really thinks of herself, she responds, “I’m not that nice. I think they think I’m better than I am. I’m not that sweet.”

“Are you a mean person?” she’s asked. “No,” she answers.

“Are you a bully?” There’s a pause. “Well ... no,” she says. “I don’t think so. But I’m not one to say to people, just do whatever you want. I do like to get my way as often as possible, don’t you?”

*

After an hour, Hepburn invites me to accompany her while she’s being driven to the doctor for an eye check-up. “It shouldn’t take long and if you wait for me, I’ll take you home,” she offers graciously. On the way out the door with Jimmy, her driver, and Phyllis Wilbourn, her secretary of nearly 40 years, she spies a young man on the sidewalk carrying a big bouquet of flowers. “Who are those for?” she booms, yanking out of his hand a delivery slip that says “Katharine Hepburn.” She starts to take the flowers, but the delivery boy balks. “I have to deliver these to...”

“I am,” she intones imperiously, whisking the flowers out of his hands and into the arms of an assistant, leaving the boy dumbfounded.

In between bursts of Hepburn telling Jimmy what route to take--”I don’t know why you’re so in love with this street, Jimmy, it’s hopeless. Go over to Park”--the conversation turns to the future, which in view of her age, might seem rather limited. Not to her. When the actress is reminded that she has reportedly said “The Man Upstairs” will be her last movie, she says, “I think I was misquoted.” As long as she is alive and well, she adds, she expects to continue doing those things which will keep her “out of the nuthouse.”

“I don’t fear death,” she says. “I hope I don’t get some disease. Then I’d do my best to tumble off the roof or something. But I don’t think about it any more than I think about why it is we’re here. We’re here after all, aren’t we?”

Asked if she’s had regrets, Hepburn says, “I think lots of them, but I’m not prepared to say what they are.”

Not having children?

“Certainly not. I wasn’t about to deny myself anything.”

Not having been recognized as a great beauty?

“Oh god, no. I was fascinated by Garbo. But I was never concerned about my looks. Never worried about getting old. Such a waste of time, really. I’m much too logical for that.”

Then, looking out the window, she says softly, “I wish I had been easier with people. I don’t have many close friends. I think I’ve been too...”

Returning to her accomplishments, she says, “I think acting can do some good in the world after all, don’t you? I’ll just go on doing it until I finally disappear. I just hope I don’t overstay my welcome. I hope no one says good riddance.”

“The Man Upstairs” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.

“Katharine Hepburn: All About Me” airs Jan. 18 on TNT.