Meeting the Stars - 04 July 2003

One of the comical pains of living on and on is something I hope most listeners will not feel for some time to come.

It's the pleasurable moment of remembering an anecdote about some famous person you'd once run into and then suddenly discovering that the famous person is totally unknown to the friend, possibly even the grey-haired friend, that you're about to amuse.

One time, staying with some friends who lived on a hacienda up in the hills behind Santa Barbara, California, my host remarked: "Oh, by the way, we're having drinks with the Colmans."

"The Colmans?"

"Yeah, Ronnie and his wife."

"Ronnie and his wife?"

To me it was as if a young beginner with the violin had been told by an uncle: "Oh, by the way, we're dining with Luddy" - "Luddy?" - "Ludwig, Beethoven."

Ronald Colman, although then in the twilight of his career, had been for three decades just about the most world famous English movie actor alive.

We went to his house and who should open the door but the man himself.

He offered his hand first to me and said in his famous velvety voice: "My dear fellow, do come in. My mother is your greatest fan."

I was moved to say, "Never mind your mother, how about you?" But I was too overwhelmed to say anything. But the mere thought of Ronald Colman's mother listening to my talks... This was some time in the early 1950s.

Well, a year or two ago I thought this was the sort of anecdote that would appeal to a friend who'd stopped by, a pretty cultivated, on-the-ball woman in her early 50s, who had a professional interest - as a television producer - in actors and acting.

I'd long ago learned my lesson of never assuming - especially in anybody under 60 - a familiarity with my heroes and heroines, writers, politicians, movie stars and so forth.

After all, watching an enormous crowd cheering a liner sailing into Southampton, no less a grandee than Mahatma Gandhi had asked: "Who is this Mr Chaplin?"

So to my woman friend in her early 50s I said: "Does the name Ronald Colman mean anything to you?"

She paused and looked thoughtful.

"He was, was he not, a United States senator?"

End of Colman story.

So I begin guardedly this time to introduce the character I'm going to talk about by having you meet her the way I met her.

Last Monday morning her picture, accompanying a huge obituary, took up a page and a half of the New York Times.

When I saw the photograph, I realised from the calendar that it was exactly 70 years ago that - visiting Hollywood for the first time as a student and tourist - I had the august sensation of being picked up at my humble hotel by a studio limousine, a limousine sent expressly for me, a totally anonymous graduate student driving round the country in a $45 secondhand Ford.

It came about this way. During the previous winter and spring I had sent to one of the two distinguished English Sunday papers a few theatre reviews of a new play by Eugene O'Neill, Nobel Prize playwright and one by Noel Coward, then the chic-est of English playwrights.

Out of what in New York is called chutzpah I'd had the audacity to write to the editor of this Sunday paper - an awesomely famous man - suggesting that on my summer trip west, since I should be stopping by Hollywood, I might write a series of six pieces on the movies, beginning with an interview with Charlie Chaplin, then with the celebrated German director Lubitsch, with an English star - how about the monumental C Aubrey Smith? - then an Oscar-winning cameraman and so forth.

Of course I knew none of these magnificos but to my astonishment the awesome editor wrote back and said it so happened that his film critic, Miss Lejeune, was taking off for just six weeks and I might submit the pieces.

When I got out there I started my grand tour by deciding to write first about a famous director at work. And the man I chose, who was then in the first flush of a great success, was one George Cukor.

He'd just started shooting the immortal work of Louisa May Alcott - an immortal woman writer - Little Women.

Why not come out and spend the day with the cast on a stretch of what they'd turned into a New England landscape, about 20 miles out from Beverly Hills?

And so I was driven off and greeted in the warmest fashion. After all I represented the Observer owned by the Astors, no less. I was greeted by Mr Cukor and the cast.

I'll call off their names without further definition. You may take my word for it, it was a very starry cast, palpitating in the wake of the veteran actors Paul Lukas and Henry Stephenson and Edna May Oliver, Joan Bennett, Jean Parker, Frances Dee and Katherine Hepburn.

Katherine Hepburn was indeed the subject of the Times obituary and it was not a lament.

She was 96 and long a martyr to an embarrassing trembling of the head and hands which she swore to the end was not Parkinson's Disease.

Back there - 70 years ago, in that California valley - what struck me in watching the shooting of this famous story of four young sisters growing up in New England before the Civil War, was nothing about the play or the shooting but - how shall I put it? - it was the social oddity of this girl Hepburn.

She stood out, it seemed to me at the time, as a kind of attractive freak, all because of her accent which was that of a well-schooled, upper-middle-class New England girl just out - she was four years out - of Bryn Mawr, a college of high academic standing, but also notable for breeding well-bred, upper-class young women.

It had its own distinct variation of an upper-crust New England accent - which is not, by the way, anything like British English of the same class.

Miss Hepburn had it and in that place and time it was quite strange.

I don't believe it would be news to older listeners to hear that the majority, maybe a large majority, of American screen actors and actresses in those days - whatever parts they became trained to play - came from humble immigrant Southern and Eastern European backgrounds.

Since the top producers who founded Hollywood had also that background - most of them peddlers who had fled from Jewish pogroms in Europe - one of the notable signs of their feelings of social inferiority throughout the 20s into the 50s was the alacrity with which they rushed to change the given names of rising stars to English names.

Way back then those cunning but simple Russian and Lithuanian and German producers thought wrongly that the absolutely top social class in the United States was English.

Hence Emanuel Goldenberg became Edward G Robinson, Bernard Schwarz - Tony Curtis, Allan Konisberg - Woody Allen, Frances Gumm - Judy Garland, Marion Levy - Paulette Goddard, Issur Danielovitch Demsky - Kirk Douglas, and on and on.

Katherine Hepburn was born and stayed Katherine Hepburn. Daughter of a distinguished surgeon in Connecticut and a mother who was a fervent socialite suffragette.

This rationalisation of mine of course came to me much later, during a period of Hepburn's life, in her late 20s/early 30s, when she made some indifferent movies and was famously dubbed "box office poison" - because I now think the movies she was making then were not good enough to overcome the general popular dislike of what was called her fancy accent.

In that summertime long ago all I noticed was that the rest of the cast treated her with particular respect, not usually due a young actress. She had, however, won an Oscar the year before. But the three other sisters somehow gave off the feeling that she was not your normal Hollywood product.

But she was totally unaffected. she was who she was, an upper class Yankee of character - and what character. She refused to be bought and sold by a studio, no matter how tyrannical and fearsome a Zukor or a Goldwyn might be.

She had a play written for her by a famous Philadelphia playwright, bought the play, acted in it and then sold it to a Hollywood studio to be made her way on her terms.

The producers hated her. But the actors, slaves to anything the studio picked for them, cheered her.

And for the rest of her screen life she ran things her way and made tyrants say "Yes, Miss Hepburn". "Well, Kate, okay".

Late in life she said flatly that she had been born of a well-to-do family and felt an obligation to live up to its responsibilities.

"I was not," she wrote, "a poor little thing. I don't know what I'd have done if I'd come to New York and had to get a job as a waiter or something."

She added she was a success not because of any great individual talent.

"I have advantages," she said. "I had better be a success."

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