Kate’s confidant

New York

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of a new memoir about Katharine Hepburn is how it came to be written in the first place, how an accomplished biographer and a famously prickly megastar came together to unravel some of the most intimate details of her life.

Although there are no jaw-dropping revelations about the monumental actress, who died at age 96 last month, there are, in 370 pages, numerous insights into her groundbreaking career -- and plenty of fascinating analysis about her complicated life.

“Kate Remembered” is a glimpse of Hepburn in her last two decades as she tried to make sense of a life her public admired and marveled at. She wanted A. Scott Berg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and a late-in-life friend, to write about her, but not until after she died. That gave her the freedom to thrash out her thoughts with a skilled writer knowing that the world would not examine her life in the raw -- and not in her presence. Yet there was nothing specific she wanted withheld, he said.

“It was more a general attitude of Katharine Hepburn off duty who basically is as a soul much more tender than Katharine Hepburn the persona -- someone who is somewhat emotional, even a little sentimental,” Berg said in an interview Thursday.

Berg willingly went along with the arrangement because this was to be different from his other examinations of large personalities: editor Max Perkins, mogul Sam Goldwyn and aviator Charles Lindbergh. He tried to be objective about these subjects as he tackled them.

Hepburn he adored. So he kept her company and kept her confidences until she was ready for them to come out, after her death.

But yesterday, the 54-year-old writer, tall and fit in a blazer, dark T-shirt and jeans, was sitting in hotel lobby on a velvet couch clearly thrilled to be finally talking about “this unique and remarkable woman, who showed us how to live and how to get old.”

“So many people who knew we were friends had said to me: What was it like to be with Hepburn, what was it like to have to dinner with her, what was it like to go to [her Connecticut house]?” Berg said.

“I always knew it was a privilege I was being afforded. So I thought, once she is gone, why shouldn’t people know what it was like to be swept up into that cyclone of her world?”

This memoir follows Hepburn’s life chronologically while cutting in scenes and conversations between her and Berg.

It all began with an unexpected friendship. Berg had gone to Hepburn’s townhouse on the East Side of Manhattan in 1983 to do an interview for Esquire (which he ended up never writing). They hit it off; within a week, he was her partner in a competitive game of Parcheesi with her family and she had given him a key to her front door.

Over the next 20 years, they spent countless weekends at her waterfront home outside of Hartford, and hours checking up on each other by phone, he on the West Coast, she on the East Coast.

“She was never a reflective person,” Berg said. “She never stopped to think about, ‘Why did I do this ...’ until I came along. She was stopping to analyze her life for the first time.... I think it’s no coincidence one of the last people in her life, who she opens a door to, is a biographer.”

Their friendship was not all about him listening to her. Their conversations, Berg said, were a two-way street. Hepburn gave him advice on occasion and also would help him land interviews with reluctant subjects, including Lindbergh’s widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. He won his Pulitzer for that book, “Lindbergh,” published in 1998.

But the essence of their arrangement -- biographer to subject -- was unspoken. There was no handshake agreement that he would write a book. What they had was an understanding: she would tell her stories, all the while demanding that he pepper her with questions.

Occasionally, she would command, “Write that down.” And he did. But he never took a note in her presence and after a long conversation after dinner he’d run upstairs and start scribbling. He stuffed hundreds of scraps of paper into a drawer. Until 1999, he considered turning it all into a novel, something about Hepburn and her longtime friend Irene Mayer Selznick and with him caught in the middle. He even had a title: “Mortal Friends.” But his then-publisher at Putnam, Phyllis Grann, came up with the idea of a memoir.

Few knew that this postmortem account was all but finished in 2000. Only Berg’s partner, Kevin McCormick, a vice president at Warner Bros., and a few close colleagues -- a copy editor, his agent, a book jacket designer -- were in on it. The page proofs were kept in a safe at Putnam these last three years, and “Kate Remembered” became one of the best-kept secrets in the publishing world. Not even Berg’s parents knew of this project until the day Hepburn died.

Berg was vacationing in Nantucket with McCormick in late June when he received word that she was gone. He wasn’t surprised. He had seen Hepburn a month earlier and she couldn’t speak; he noticed that the bright light had gone out of her eyes. From Nantucket, he dictated one last sentence for the book: “On the afternoon of Sunday June 29, 2003, Cynthia McFadden [a TV reporter and a protege of Hepburn’s] thoughtfully placed the call I had been anxiously awaiting.”

The next day the presses rolled, and by last Friday 530,000 books were ready. They go on sale today.

Hepburn herself had told her story in 1991 in an autobiography for Knopf entitled “Me,” when she revealed for the first time her feelings about Tracy and her career. But that biography, not terribly penetrating, left many questions unanswered.

While she and Berg talked about virtually every corner of her long life, some subjects were never broached: sex and money.

“I never asked, she never told,” he said. “I felt that was a line I could not cross and should not cross and I wasn’t curious enough to want to know the answer.”

But others claimed they knew. Irene Mayer Selznick -- daughter of the movie mogul, onetime wife of the famous producer and a Hollywood fixture herself -- told Berg that she once saw an exchange of looks between Hepburn and a young female houseguest that suggested something more than friendship. Selznick was hurt that Hepburn had not confided in her.

But Berg dismisses this speculation of Hepburn’s bisexuality, invoking her own words: “Nobody really knows what goes on between two people when they’re really alone.”

In probably the most poignant scene in the book and one that typifies their collaboration, Hepburn asks Berg during one of their Connecticut talkathons why he thought Tracy, the love of her life, drank so heavily. Berg is reluctant to play amateur psychiatrist, but at her insistence he posits that Tracy, whose own father was a brutal drunk, was a tortured soul, a man with breathtakingly low self-esteem. This was not an occasional happy drunk, he told her.

“Kate, poker faced, just rose from the couch,” Berg writes. “We turned out the lights and walked upstairs without saying a word, her bad foot clomping on the bare wooden steps....” They said good night, but not before the stunned actress turned to her young friend and added, “You should write all that down.”

Berg said he’d like to think “Kate would sit down and read the book and have a good laugh. And at least two or three good cries.”