"I'd rather not know" - Kate Hepburn and MJ (and the old Spencer Tracy cottage)

My feelings about Katharine Hepburn shifted a bit over the decades, from adolescent hero-worship to something more cautious (among other things, I feel her long professional and personal association with Spencer Tracy ended up limiting/diminishing her as an actress**), but she is still easily one of my favourite public personalities of the last century. Revisited this book a few days ago - the author, A Scott Berg, was more than 40 years younger than Hepburn but became a close friend of hers in the 1980s.

It’s a strange, rambling book in many ways, and I can see why it was controversial, being published just two weeks after Kate’s death in 2003, and employing a very personal tone while describing conversations and meetings during a time when she was living a reclusive life. But there are many amusing things in it, including a bizarre dinner party in 1984 with Michael Jackson (who wants Kate to introduce him to Greta Garbo). And a long-winded account of Warren Beatty ardently pursuing the 86-year-old Kate to play a small part in his remake of Love Affair/An Affair to Remember.

And many deeply moving passages too. There is one where Berg takes Hepburn around Los Angeles (after her many years being away from the place), down the streets that she once knew very well. Including the house that has replaced the cottage where she once lived with Spencer Tracy.
And then comes this bit: Berg tries to show her his own house for the first time (their previous meetings have only been during his trips to New York). And she is about to go up the stairs to see it, but then decides not to, and says “I’d rather not know that you live somewhere.”

(Some excerpts below.)

** During a recent discussion on my online film group, I expressed my view that if Kate had done more films with Cary Grant and fewer with Tracy, she may well have ended up as a better screen actress overall (and also a less awarded one!). I think David Thomson wrote something similar - that she was often subdued and restrained with Tracy, as if she was over-awed by him.

One reason this feels personal to me is that as an adolescent I had viewed Hepburn as a tremendous proto-feminist figure, the pants-wearing actress doing roles that were ahead of her time etc etc (and conducting herself unconventionally offscreen). Had watched some of the early films like Alice Adams, Little Women, Sylvia Scarlett etc. But then, over the years, as I watched some of her later work, especially the Tracy films, I felt a bit let down by how maudlin and smaller than life she allowed herself to be in his presence. (Naturally, some of this has to do with the nature of the roles they were playing, and the requirements of the films – but that wasn’t all there was to it.)
I’ll never let go of my Hepburn super-fandom, but eventually I came to find actresses like Barbara Stanwyck and Carole Lombard and Miriam Hopkins more interesting.  

P.S. a very old post here, mentioning Garson Kanin's book about Hepburn and Tracy.