Poignant look at a lioness in winter

One day in April 1983, a young man of 33, already the author of one acclaimed biography and hard at work on another, apprehensively rang the bell of Katharine Hepburn’s brownstone on New York’s East 49th Street. He had twice tried and failed to meet her, but now had established a telephone relationship with the actress, during which she had agreed to discuss the possibility of doing an interview with him for Esquire magazine’s 50th anniversary issue.

After Hepburn ordered Scott Berg to the bathroom so that nature’s needs would not interrupt their talk, they settled down to the first of what would be a series of conversations that were intense and frequent for the first decade of their friendship.

In time, it became apparent to both of them that Berg would write a book -- for publication after her death -- about their relationship, her career and her life in general. Often, after a particularly spirited exchange, she would urge him to take notes. “Kate Remembered,” rushed into print after her death on June 29, is the result of that largely unspoken conspiracy.

The book is a graceful and affectionate portrait of a cranky old lady whose legend is of more interest than the suffocating reality of slow geriatric decline that Berg recounts with a self-effacing patience and kindness that never acknowledges the most obvious fact about their friendship: His appearance on her doorstep was a godsend to the actress, then 76. In 1983, her best roles were behind her. Indeed, it had been well over a decade since she had acted in a movie. As Pauline Kael shrewdly remarked about Hepburn’s performance in 1968’s “A Lion in Winter,” she played to our affections for her in her later years -- the flinty proto-feminist who had gone her own way -- and won our indulgent acquiescence to her whirlwind presence.

Now, in the ‘80s, the offers were paltry and demeaning and her circle of intimates -- never large -- was shrinking. But Berg was handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, and had an admiring and extensive knowledge of her work. Maybe he was not quite the Parcheesi partner of her dreams, but he was in all other respects a perfect house guest. Berg, already the author of an acclaimed biography of Maxwell Perkins, was writing biographies of Sam Goldwyn and Charles Lindbergh that required his frequent presence on the East Coast. He often stayed with Hepburn, either in New York or Connecticut.

Over the years, he naturally learned much about her -- most notably about her famous relationship with Spencer Tracy, about whom he cannot entirely hide his disapproval. The man was an abusive and self-degrading drunk as well as an intermittent womanizer whose noisy strayings must have humiliated Hepburn. Yet she always returned to him. Indeed, for the last five years of his life, she abandoned her career to nurse him. What she learned from the experience, she tells Berg, is that the great thing in life is to give love, not to receive it.

Maybe so. But there are hints throughout “Kate Remembered” that the story is more complicated. With Berg, as she was with everyone, Hepburn was voluble in her affection for her parents. But suicide was rife in the family -- Kate herself discovered the body of her brother, a shattering occurrence, the details of which she could never fully recall -- and she hinted to Berg that her father was a remote and bumptious man -- a type to whom she was drawn throughout her life.

Before she met Tracy, there were affairs with such macho and distant men as her directors, John Ford and George Stevens, and, most sexily, Berg thinks, Howard Hughes, whose deafness assured his unavailability for intimate communication. There are gingerly suggestions that perhaps Hepburn sought solace from these ultimately unsatisfactory affairs with other women. Berg’s other great friend, Irene Mayer Selznick -- the book at times becomes virtually a double portrait of these two tough old nuts (of whom Selznick, Louis B. Mayer’s daughter and a lifelong friend of Hepburn, is the smarter and more entertaining) -- is blunt about it. “A double-gaiter,” she eventually snorts about Hepburn.

Whether that was true, Berg very sensibly refuses to say. But there are other refusals in this book that are less justifiable. Besides her anguished speculations about Tracy’s demons and her amusing portrayal of Hughes, she is sometimes tartly interesting about co-stars like Henry Fonda (“Strange man. Angry at something. And sad.”) or Laurence Olivier (“Giant actor. Very small man.”), but sometimes she’s just out to lunch, as when she complains that modern leading men, like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, can’t sit on a horse or wear white tie and tails the way her contemporaries could, not quite realizing that the demand for those skills has slackened of late. And a lot of the time, we’re just having dinner with Kate or riding in the car with her. These are, very often, occasions for a rather tiring solipsism on her part.

Yes, there is a hilarious account of Kate throwing a dinner party for terminally weird Michael Jackson and a pretty ugly one in which Berg, trying to keep Kate interested in life, finds himself, to his eventual shame, conspiring with a snaky Warren Beatty to lure her into her final screen appearance, in “Love Affair,” the disastrous 1994 remake of “An Affair to Remember.”

But to be honest, Berg’s record of Hepburn’s opinions don’t quite add up to a book. So as he expands his material from what would have been a terrific magazine article, Berg violates the two limits he set in its first pages, where he vows not to write either a formal biography or a critical study of Hepburn. But there is, frankly, more than enough swotted up biographical -- as opposed to memoiristic -- writing here to satisfy all but the most besotted fan. And in the same paragraph he passes this whopping critical judgment: “I believe -- unabashedly and without qualification -- that Katharine Hepburn established the greatest acting career of the twentieth century, perhaps ever.”

In support of this dubious thesis, Berg offers a certain amount of critical exegesis, characterizing, accurately enough, her major movies and the public’s response. But he misses the autobiographical connections between the woman and her roles. In the early (and best) days of her stardom, she was most often the haughty, self-assured, occasionally androgynous aristocrat, in dire need of being brought to earth by the likes of Cary Grant or, after “Woman of the Year” in 1941, Spencer Tracy. At that time in our history, this taming of the swell was a most agreeable fantasy and if it required Hepburn to abandon her fancy feminist ways in order to embrace domesticity, so be it. In real life, that’s pretty much what she did for Tracy, until they finally, ironically, became -- and this is one of Berg’s smartest notions -- role models of long-term bourgeois affection, despite their well-hidden torments and lack of a marriage license.

In later years, Hepburn took to playing a variant on this theme -- the spinster warmed out of frigidity at the last minute by men either rough-hewn (Bogart, John Wayne) or slippery (Rossano Brazzi, Burt Lancaster). Again, this was an agreeable fantasy and Hepburn gratefully abandoned her feminist integrity with a good nature that appealed to the giggly-smirky spirit of the ‘50s.

This is star acting of a very respectable kind -- but also of the kind that sooner or later turns into an unexamined and basically inarguable celebrity premise. I’m not going to dispute its “greatness” with Berg, except to say that at least three Hepburn contemporaries -- Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Irene Dunne -- consistently demonstrated a richer range and a subtler vulnerability than she did. The world wants, perhaps needs, to believe that Katharine Hepburn is a defining “legend” of independence, cutting bravely, prematurely, intentionally against the grain of her times. I suspect that like most “legends,” hers was a compound of genetic luck, fortuitous casting and shrewd publicity that suited not just the spirit of her long moment, but the requirements of movie history, always more interested in bold imagery than nuance. That said, Berg has poignantly captured her dying fall, when the image -- which of course sustains its possessor as much as those possessed by it -- begins to fade and, in pain, confusion and loneliness, Katharine Hepburn was obliged, at last, to endure the fate that awaits us all. And renders all questions of greatness, fame and their social utility both moot and absurd, but in this case, bestselling.

Richard Schickel’s latest book is “Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip.” His latest film is “Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin.”

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Kate Remembered

A. Scott Berg

G.P. Putnam’s Sons; 370 pp., $25.95