Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,70

What are you—sore about a little slap?

Hepburn: You meant that, didn’t you?

Tracy: Why, no . . .

Hepburn: Yes you did, yes, I can tell a . . . a slap from a slug!

Tracy: Well, OK . . . OK . . .

Hepburn: No, I’m not so sure it is, I’m not so sure I care to . . . expose myself to typical, instinctive, masculine aggression!

Tracy: Oh, calm down . . .

Hepburn: And it felt not only as if you meant it but as if you felt you had a right to! I can tell!

Tracy: What’ve you got back there? Radar equipment?

Oh, just go out and rent it.

Although I am particularly susceptible to Kate in the 1940s, every decade of her career throws up humbling performances. She held the record for Oscar nominations until Meryl beat her, and any Hepburn devotee finds a place in his or her heart for the grand guignol of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), despite the fact that she despised both the film and her treatment on the set—she spat in the director’s face on the last day of filming. Also, the dynamite partnership with Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen (1951) is the equal of anything she did with Tracy. In Bogart, she found the action-man dimension of her father that she loved, and he found a woman with similar chutzpah to his own wife, Bacall, who followed them to the difficult, insect-ridden location, reportedly a little nervous of how good a match her husband and his costar looked on paper. She needn’t have worried: Hepburn’s romantic dedication to Tracy is now legendary, and I remember, again, as a child, hoping for the sort of relationship that seemed symbolized in the fact that even as he lay dying, Hepburn spent every day with him, lying on the floor beside his bed. They never married because he was already married, and as a Catholic and family man, he never divorced. One can only feel horror and pity for the kind of wife forced before the whole world to recognize the shimmering immortality of that adulterous relationship. Tracy claimed, “My wife and Kate like things just the way they are,” and the truth or otherwise of this remained between the three of them, never publicly discussed. Tracy and Hepburn’s last film together, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), was the first Hepburn movie I ever saw, aged about five, with a running commentary from my mother on the physical perfection of Sidney Poitier. The movie is sentimental, but the sentiment, both political and personal, is at least genuine; I struggle to think of another film of which this is so true. Tracy, a long-term alcoholic, was basically dying during filming, and when he delivers the last line, “If what they feel for each other is even half what we felt, then that is everything,” Hepburn cries real tears. Six months later he was dead. They were both nominated for Oscars, and when she heard she had won again (Hepburn was not at the ceremony; she never picked up any of her four Oscars), her first and only question was “Did Spence get one too?” He did not, but she considered it a shared award.

So physical in her youth, always determined to perform her own stunts, old age struck Hepburn as one hell of a bore. She never hid like a starlet or felt destroyed by lost looks (she never really lost her looks), but she was frequently frustrated by not being able to do what had once come so easily. She once cried with frustration at having to employ a twenty-four-year-old stunt double to ride a bike for her in a film. At the time, Hepburn herself was seventy-two. Two days ago she died, aged ninety-six. I don’t know why I should be surprised, but I was, and when I found out, I wept, and felt ridiculous for weeping. How can someone you have never met make you cry? Two years ago I went to see The Philadelphia Story play on a big screen in Bryant Park. It was July and so hot my brother and I had been spending the day in the penguin exhibit at the zoo (we had no air-conditioning), but then we heard about the film—my favorite film—playing outdoors and rushed downtown.

We were too late to get a seat. It was packed like I have never seen any New York open space since the Dalai Lama came to Central Park. We were disconsolately