Katharine Hepburn doesn’t like the furniture arrangement on The Dick Cavett show so there’s only one thing to do and that is to rearrange it. This is in 1973 which would have made her about 66 years old. What spunk this woman had!

Of course the show’s producers and floor crew and Cavett himself just sit back and let this happen. They let her do whatever the heck she wanted because they knew this would be forever preserved on tape, and they knew it would be darn good TV and it was, and it still is.

I’ve been in television for nearly 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this and I could watch this again, and again. This is really funny. She’s got an all male studio crew rushing around like crazy and then she’s admonishing half of them at the same time, even ignoring Cavett.

I was over at Hepburn’s brother-in -law’s house the other day in Fenwick, and he told me she would walk into his house and do much the same thing.

Hepburn would rearrange the paintings in his house and furniture and Ellsworth Grant and his wife – Hepburn’s sister Marion – would let her do whatever she wanted. After Hepburn would leave their Fenwick home they would put the items back where they wanted them.

I just think this is a scream!

See you at “The Kate.”
Ann Nyberg, Trustee, KHCAC

In Katharine Hepburn’s 1973 interview with Dick Cavett, the subject turned to the Oscars and the fact that she had never appeared to accept any of her Best Actress awards (by that time, she had already won three and would win an unprecedented fourth by 1981). By way of explanation, Miss H laughed and said she was “too gutless,” continuing with, “afraid I wouldn’t win it. It must be that; couldn’t be anything else.” She elaborated by repeating her father’s words of wisdom about his children: “My children are very shy. When they go to a party—and this would include that—they’re afraid they’re going to be neither the bride nor the corpse.”

Then when asked what she thought about Brando and George C. Scott, who both refused to accept their Oscars, she said, “You’re either in a business or your not,” she told Cavett. “And you’re not that important. Nobody is.”

She continued to say that she probably should have gone to pick up hers, “but I really just didn’t. But I’m not proud of it . . . And the big moral stand about not being in the running for a prize . . . Oh . . .” The quote trailed off into laughter from Hepburn, Cavett and the few lucky souls who had drifted into the theatre to hear this historic interview, stopping just short of the divine Miss H possibly uttering an obscenity on television.

“What would you have said if we hadn’t been on television?” Cavett inquired. “I wouldn’t have said it,” she replied with a laugh.

Well maybe Katharine Hepburn wouldn’t have uttered a naughty word in public but that doesn’t mean Coco Chanel was averse to doing so—or should I say Katharine Hepburn as Coco Chanel.

Let me take you back to 1969. Katharine Hepburn is starring as Chanel in her first and only musical, Coco. Act One ends just as the great designer is about to present her comeback collection to the public. The curtain comes down with a flurry of anticipation. When it rises again for Act Two, the stage is a tumult of overturned chairs, and various accessories on the floor—in short, it looks like a war zone in the aftermath of the show. But the audience is still in the dark. How did it go? Was it a success? Hepburn as Coco rises from where she has been sitting watching the show and walks through the room, surveying the mess. When she reaches the front of the stage, she stops and with great feeling says: Sh – - t!

As I sat in the darkness of the mezzanine at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, eyes glued to the commanding figure onstage, my ears perked up at the sound of a voice that certainly sounded like hers emanating from below. I thought to myself, “Did she just say what I think she said?” For a moment, time seemed to stop and after an endless split second of silence, my answer arrived in the form of an explosion of laughter, like an enormous tidal wave, starting at the front of the house and crashing past me way up to the balcony.

In his book Tracy and Hepburn, Garson Kanin wrote that he asked Coco’s lyricist and book writer Alan Jay Lerner how he got Hepburn to agree to say the word. Lerner replied: “Easy. She wrote it.”

Kanin then questioned his friend Kate about it and she explained her reasoning. In previous versions of the scene, she said, there had been a lot of expository material explaining that Coco’s fashion how had been a failure. And in a true demonstration of the theory of less is more, Hepburn thought that one very well-placed cuss word would say it all. As she told Kanin, “I needed to start Act Two with a bang.” Mission accomplished.

A few months ago, when it was announced that Miss Hepburn’s theatrical papers had been donated to the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, one of the interesting letters that was quoted in the press coverage concerned this one little four-letter word. Apparently, when Coco was headed to Los Angeles, Hepburn was contractually forbidden to use the profanity. Believing that the loss would ruin the integrity of the scene, she fought for it via a letter to Edwin Lester of the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera Association, in which she wrote:

First, we have tried everything that anyone can think of to use instead. Nothing works—the sadness—the finality—the clarity and the brevity of this expression coming from the lips of a highly respectable old lady—who is alone—and who is in tears over the total failure of her show—strikes the audience as funny then as she runs up the stairway—curiously gallant.

Who could not be charmed after receiving such a thoughtful plea from the star? Certainly not Lester. He responded that her letter “was sufficient for us to acquiesce, particularly if acquiescence would make you happy.” And he added, “let me tell you how much we are looking forward to your visit with us, even though you bring that naughty word along with you.”

Till next time…
Judy Samelson
Editor/PLAYBILL®

“I was so tormented in the theatre. It frightened me so that I thought I must come back and overcome that. And it took me my whole life.”
—Katharine Hepburn

Over the course of her long and sublime career, Katharine Hepburn was often quoted on the subject of the movies. She loved them, she said—she loved being an audience and she loved making them. “What is better than a good movie?” she once inquired rhetorically of writer Lee Israel in a late 60s interview for Esquire. The process of making pictures was easy, she said. And it was fun. And, as she told Dick Cavett in their legendary 1973 sit down, it was well paid. And you got to travel.

In an interview with Geoffrey Guiliano for an audio tribute to Hepburn, writer and friend James Prideaux said, “Everything was interesting to her… she was always ready for an adventure.” Phyllis Wilbourn, Hepburn’s beloved right hand and majordomo, told Prideaux, “Whenever we get a script, Miss Hepburn and I, the first thing we see is where we get to go.” By that she meant, of course, to what new location was this project was going to take them, and what adventures awaited them there? When Prideaux presented Hepburn with a script he’d written expressly for her—the Emmy-nominated television movie Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986)—that’s precisely what she asked: “Where are we gonna shoot this? Where do we get to go?” And where did they go? The movie was shot in Vancouver, British Columbia. “That was Kate’s idea,” said Prideaux. (That’s them below, in a snapshot taken on the set.)

But the stage was trickier. Where moviemaking was fun, the theatre, as she revealed to Dick Cavett in that 1973 chat, was torment. Where moviemaking suited her internal clock, allowing her to rise in the pre-dawn hours, as was her wont, the theatre was all about late hours and stamina. Her plays always toured, so that satisfied the wanderlust. But because of the energy required (which she had in abundance but which she also told an interviewer was not as easy to maintain on stage as it looked) and the commitment to eight shows a week, presumably for an extended period of time, it was not unheard of for her to liken appearing in a play to a jail sentence.

Still, throughout her career, Hepburn would frequently leave behind the lush life of sunshine, oranges and moviemaking to voluntarily incarcerate herself on stage and excel in everything from Philip Barry to Shakespeare to Shaw.

Coming up: Beauty or the Beast?

Till next time..
Judy Samelson/Editor, PLAYBILL®