| OCR Text |
Show KATHARINE HEPBURN W Katharine Hepburn was the first star I ever knew. One of her younger sisters, Peggy, was my first best girl. The other, Marion, married my college roommate. Since, in those days, I had no other stars to compare with Miss Hepburn, I thought summers all stars were like her. I have since learned how greatly I erred. Forty-fiv-e have passed since I lost out on Peggy to a Bennington professor, but Kate, at 75, is still my best star. Whether Miss Hepburn is Americas best actress may be debatable. Certainly, her range alone from Shakespeare to musical comedy on the stage and, on the screen, the only winner of four Academy Awards for acting would argue so. What seems not debatable is that she is Americas best at the best part she has ever played herself. To anyone who has ever known her, her entire life has been a class act. Indeed, in today's world of statistics and mass markets, she remains, for all of us, both a lovely link with a yesterday and a blazing affirmation that, whatever the computer life of tomorrow has in store for us. if it doesn't have a place in the sun for someone like her, we will all be the poorer. o Oh. you," she said when I first called her about this article. I can't talk to you now. I'm playing a game. What kind of game, I wanted to know. she said. And I'm winning! Come around teatime. But if youre going to do the Saint Katharine bit, youre going to have a hard time. Saint I aint. Goodbye." Miss Hepburn was right. She is no saint but that too is part of her appeal . Not once but three times on Broadway during Coco. A Matter of Gravity and West Side Waltz she literally stopped . the show. And started it over. In each case, someone had shot off a flashbulb during the first act. whereupon Miss Hepburn walked to the front of the stage and told the audience that she thought it was a performance they had come to see, but if it w as a photographic session , they could take pictures instead. Then she had the curtain rung down and began again from the beginning. Once, when a delivery truck w as block- - ing her car in a parking space and the driver refused to move, she pulled him from the truck and kicked him. I didnt really kick him, she says. "I just sort of pushed him with my foot." When she had a severe automobile accident in which she was, as she puts it, smashed to smithereens, one of the first letters she received was from a minister asking if she knew why God had humbled her. She wrote him back that she hadn't interpreted it that way she thought it was more like the work of the Devil. The lifelong battle Miss Hepburn has waged for her privacy has ranged from her being called, in Hollywood, Katherine of Arrogance" they spelled it with an e , she growls to a typically dash-fille- d article she wrote on the subject for the Virginia Law Weekly. Even when a close friend, Garson Kanin, wrote romance with a book about her Spencer Tracy and described it as a love letter to a fnend," she saw it as a betrayal they clearly had different standards about what was for sale. Miss Hepburn is probably the only star in the world who has never had a press agent; never, except under the most severe duress, given an autograph; never accepted speaking engagements or even honorary degrees; and never if she could possibly avoid it attended any kind of public affair or even gone to a restaurant. She answers all her o n letters, makes all her own telephone calls and all her own career decisions. The script of the movie she is now shooting. The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley, was tossed over the fence of the small house she still rents in Hollywood. She happened to be there when the package landed and thought it might be a bomb. But, typically, she went out to see what it was just the same. O wSkji . - V 27-ye- ar i Hepburn during , shooting of new The Ultimate Solution cfGnv'QuigUy- -- I .- . . 1 - :7' . T v i WXU 4 4 fa pmS BY CLEVELAND AMORY cost eHoroatATH tries mstes PACE 4 NOVEMBER 27, 193 PARADE IM6AZJKE |
