The Kate I Knew

When I was 13 years old, my father informed me that I’d be spending Christmas with his new girlfriend and her elderly pal, a Katharine something-or-other, at her estate in some fancy annex of Old Saybrook, Conn., and that I would likely be pressed into service as a cookie-making sous-chef or a helper elf assisting in the manufacture of holiday knickknackery, all of which sounded about as appealing as attending a lecture on the history of the thimble. I should have known something was up, however, because my father was fairly agog at the prospect of the visit, and I had never known his pulse to register much above a flatline. So it was with a sense of foreboding that, on that December day nearly 30 years ago, I arrived at a magnificently ramshackle mansion looking panoramically over Long Island Sound and was introduced to the luminary in question.

“Adam,” my father said, “this is Katharine Hepburn.”

Don’t laugh, but I didn’t get it. It simply didn’t compute. I was a kid and my interest in the history of Hollywood didn’t extend much beyond Daryl Hannah in a prosthetic fishtail. So despite a flickering semi-recognition and a burgeoning sense of shame—I felt as if I were the punch line to a joke that only I failed to comprehend—I couldn’t place her. I still didn’t get it when my father repeated the name, at double volume and half speed, as if to an imbecile or foreign tourist (“Kath-a-rine Hep-burn”) nor when I was stationed atop an apparently historically significant artifact (“That stool is from the set of The African Queen,” I was told, “The A-fri-can Queen”) during the insufferable wreath-making with which I had been charged.

It wasn’t until she went to the closet for some festive ribbon that I realized the demoralizing depth of my ignorance:

In the closet she ferreted busily through a mound of clutter so deep that it had nearly archaeological significance, tossing over her shoulder antique wooden tennis racquets still straitjacketed in their wingnutty frames, eroded croquet wickets, retired garden implements, shuttlecocks that had been stripped of their rubber noses, forlorn winter woolens distended with age, and one last item—something whose ker-chunk of impact with the floor indicated some serious mass—until she finally found some ribbon and happily installed it in the wreaths.

That last kerchunky item? It was shiny; it was golden; it was literally and metaphorically weighty.

It was—as you have no doubt surmised—an Oscar.

I was an awkward kid back then. My face was a moonscape of acne and fretted with self-doubt and I spent most of my spare time nurturing a finely honed terror of being publicly wrong about anything. I would do scads of extra-credit reading, but when class rolled around I was about as talkative as one of those Easter Island heads. Once I tried, in front of all the cool kids, to bluff a bartender into serving me a drink by asking, with my best sunglasses-on-nosepoint suavity, for a Scotch “straight up, neat, without any ice.” Another time, in Bio 2, I inspired explosive public ridicule when I told the teacher that “myoblast” was the clinical term for “orgasm achieved by masturbation.” 

These things still haunt me.

And I had hitherto considered them senior deities in my personal pantheon of gaffes, but this—failing to recognize in whose redoubtable presence I now stood—was big. This was mondo. I might as well have said, “So you are the most Academy-Award-winning performer of all time and one of this century’s most important cultural figures? Ah. Nifty. I’m Adam Davies. I like Pudding Pops and Duran Duran.”