It was 1962. My father’s cousin John del Valle and his wife, Ann, were visiting Northern California. John had been a founding member of the Publicists Guild of America and spent his career working for Paramount Pictures; Ann had been one of the first women to head a publicity unit for a film in the 1930s. Over the years, she had worked on Spellbound, The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and On the Waterfront, among many others. Ten years old, I was nervously waiting to tell them that more than anything in the world I wanted to be an actor.
They pulled up in front of our house in a blue Jaguar Mark X and emerged, he in a dark suit, she in a black dress that buttoned up the front, exposing a white fan-like jabot that burst inexplicably from between the lapels of the dress. With his fedora and horn-rimmed glasses and her red hair and elegant attire, they were the most dazzling people I’d ever seen, the embodiment of everything Hollywood.
My three brothers and I were dressed in slacks, white shirts, and skinny black ties—we did that in those days when family visited—and we were sitting in the living room of our house at Travis Air Force Base, halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. Our base housing was functional and nothing more—a simple, small four-bedroom box, furnished in “early BX style” as my father called it, and as far removed from Hollywood as one could get.
My brothers ran outside to play when they had the chance, and my parents and John went into the kitchen to freshen drinks. Finally alone with Ann in the living room, I was practically breathless with anticipation but couldn’t find the words to begin a conversation. As if sensing my conflict, she started.
“And what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I want to be an actor.”
She looked away from me, placed her cigarette between her lips and took a long drag, exhaling dramatically.
“It’s a very...difficult...profession.”
“I know.”
She shifted her gaze. Something about the way I’d said those two words
made her focus on me. She made a decision, snuffed out her cigarette, and started talking to me.
In kindergarten, because I was the tallest boy in class, I’d played the father in our Christmas play, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” by Clement Clarke Moore. My mother had sewn together a red-and-white striped nightshirt and matching nightcap as my costume. I held a lit candlestick and spoke my lines. At the end of the play, I stood on the little stage in the multipurpose room, looking out over the audience of proud parents applauding us, and thought, I like this.
For a boy growing up on an Air Force base surrounded by farmland near the Sacramento River Delta, far from anything that provided any opportunities for what I wanted—John and Ann and Hollywood might as well have been on another continent—becoming an actor, never mind meeting and working on great material with great actors, seemed impossible.
Forty-some years later, however, and now, indeed, a working actor, I found myself walking toward Katharine Hepburn’s house on the Connecticut shore to meet the incomparable star.
In the early 1970s, an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, I’d been very serious about my studies and majored in Romance Languages with the intention of becoming a college professor specializing in Romance Philology. Languages and words fascinated me. But something nagged at me when I was a senior, and I put off applying to graduate schools for a year. When finally I did halfheartedly apply to the University of Texas, Austin, I listened to that “something” that had been nagging at me and also applied to the American Conservatory Theatre’s summer training program for actors in San Francisco.
Auditions were required to get into the program—a terrifying thought— but I was determined to go through with it. I had to do two short pieces— one classical and one contemporary—and chose Petruchio’s speech (“Thus have I politically begun my reign . . . ”) from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, because I’d done the role, and Sammy’s speech from William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (“I always worry that maybe people aren’t going to like me, when I go to a party. Isn’t that crazy? . . . ”) because I thought it would be a good contrast. A few weeks later a letter from the conservatory arrived in the mail notifying me that I’d been accepted. Before stepping into my first class, indeed, before putting the letter down, I realized that this was what I had to do. I gave up the scholarship I’d been offered from the University of Texas, and my fate was sealed.
I finished the summer program, continued taking classes over the year, and then moved to New York where I took more classes, got an agent, and started to work. Later, I studied in England, did graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and with the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia. I lived and worked in Ireland. Theatre, TV, film–I’d been fortunate to work on some good material with good actors. I’d met and worked with celebrities.
In 1980 at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, I played Thidias in a production of Antony and Cleopatra with Jane Alexander as a powerfully intelligent Cleopatra. Later, I worked with Sheila MacRae in a raucous production of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage at Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse, and also worked with Barnard Hughes in New York on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Down-to-earth, real, hard workers who also enjoyed a good time, they all had something special onstage—star quality—that set them apart.
Now, however, as I approached this big house on the Connecticut shore, my heart raced. I was on my way to see Miss Hepburn with her niece Katharine Houghton, who I had come to know through work. Kath had written a two-character play, Best Kept Secret, which we’d just presented as a reading at a college in West Hartford, Connecticut. She read one role, and I had been recommended by a mutual friend to read the other.
“He has to play a Russian. Can he do a Russian accent?” Kath had asked when my name was mentioned. “Well,” our friend said, laughing. “He lived in Russia, studied at the Moscow Art Theatre, and speaks some Russian ...”
Kath had only finished writing the first act of the play, but the college was eager to hear it as a work-in-progress; we had rehearsed it several times in New York before heading up to Connecticut for the presentation. The reading went beautifully, and Kath invited me to her family’s summer house in Fenwick, down the Connecticut River on Long Island Sound. It was a warm and sunny weekend, unusual for February, and I accepted. After a simple lunch, Kath suggested we pay a visit to her aunt.
There was a slight breeze as we walked along the strand that connected Kath’s place to the big house. We passed large, brown-shingled summer homes with green and white trim that said Eastern Shore as much as anything. Little waves lapped the rocks below us. Some children screamed with delight as they played with their adoring Golden Retriever. As we neared the big house, the dark green pine trees that partially hid it grew bigger and bigger.
Arriving at Miss Hepburn’s house, we approached the front door from the side and not from the front drive. We walked past a hose splayed out on the lawn; a bicycle leaned against the house. Kath knocked on the front door, and we waited on the porch for someone to respond. Miss Hepburn’s nurse opened the door.
“Katharine, how good to see you!”
Over their greetings, I heard the unmistakable Hepburn voice sailing out of the living room in response to some unheard comment: “WELL, I’LL BE VERY HAPPY WHEN I’M DEAD...”
As we walked through the foyer toward the living room, I could see that the house was furnished simply, lovingly, with old things perhaps accumulated over the years, perhaps handed down from Miss Hepburn’s parents—a relaxed, comfortable, rambling home. Passing the dining room, I saw a long wooden table opposite a wall full of framed items and maritime knickknacks. Toward the bottom, a black-and-white photo in a silver frame caught my eye: Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.
There were several relatives and a few friends in the living room when I entered. Miss Hepburn, very much center stage, sat in her brown leather recliner.
“Aunt Katty, this is Tony Newfield. He’s an actor I’m working with.”
She looked up at me, not quite sure of this new person, but gave me her hand nevertheless. “How do you do, Miss Hepburn,” I said, taking it. “You’ve given me so much pleasure over the years.”
“WELL, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.”
She was still beautiful at ninety-one, with high cheekbones, radiant blue eyes, pouty, down-turned mouth, and gray hair piled onto her head in a neat bun. She wore her trademark turtleneck and slacks and a pair of immaculate white tennis shoes. I was immediately and irrevocably smitten.
We talked a bit about Kath’s play and the positive response it had received the night before in West Hartford. When Miss Hepburn’s nurse came in to give her some medicine, the rest of us strolled outside to a strip of lawn separating the house from the Sound. Miss Hepburn’s younger sister, Peg, whom I’d met at the reading the night before, stood nearby smoking a cigarette.
“YEAH, YOU’RE GOOD,” she told me, sounding just like her sister and punching me on the shoulder. “YOU TELL KATH TO KEEP WRITING THIS THING.”
“WELL, I WILL,” I replied, surprised to find myself sounding just like her.
“YEAH, WE’LL KEEP YOU,” she said, puffing a cloud of smoke in my direction.
“OKAY,” I said, “I’LL TAKE THAT ROOM THERE,” pointing to an upstairs window.
I wasn’t trying to imitate the Hepburn way of speech, but it was as if some force—some Hepburn spirit—had invaded my body and was taking over.
“LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS HOUSE,” Peg said, and proceeded to give me a brief history and tour of the place. The Hepburn’s original wooden summer house had been destroyed in the hurricane of 1938. This one, constructed of brick and full of long hallways, rooms, hidden corners, nooks and crannies, had settled over the years and now listed slightly.
Back in the living room after the tour, Kath and I prepared to leave. Our plan was to walk along the beach to the Old Saybrook lighthouse on the point and back.
“Miss Hepburn, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much. You have a lovely house and a beautiful spot of land here.”
“WELL, NOW YOU KNOW WHY WE LIKE IT HERE...”
“I do, indeed. And now Kath is going to show me the lighthouse. Would you like to join us?”
“I’D RATHER BE DEAD!” Miss Hepburn replied, her blue eyes fierce with wit, focused intently into mine.
“All right,” I said, smiling. “’Til next time then.”
Several months later, Kath and I did a reading of Best Kept Secret at the Ivoryton Playhouse in Essex, Connecticut. While rehearsing in nearby Fenwick, Kath suggested that we pay another visit to the big house and, if they were up to it, do the first act of the play for her aunt Kate. Her uncle, the writer Dick Hepburn, who lived with his sister, and the staff could also watch. When we arrived, they told us that they would very much like to hear the play.
Outside there was a chill in the air, and a big fire burned in the fireplace when we entered the living room—a comfortable room that I was now more relaxed to take in: a hodge-podge of chairs and tables and rugs, and opposite the fireplace a wall of windows that faced the Sound. Imperious, Miss Hepburn sat in her recliner while I sat on a small stool at her side as the room was prepared for the reading. She looked as she did on my first visit—bun, turtleneck, slacks, tennis shoes—but as I sat chatting with her, she became The Lion in Winter’s Eleanor of Aquitaine. John Barry’s score for the film provided the musical accompaniment in my head as she sat beaming on her barge, her minions rowing her downriver to Chinon, with me, the player, preparing to perform for his queen.
Dick and the nurse came in and took seats next to Miss Hepburn. Kath and I stood in front of the fireplace and started reading. Dick, confused, interrupted several times.
“What?...What? I can’t hear!...I can’t understand!...”
“WELL, I UNDERSTAND!” Miss Hepburn barked at us, putting him in his place.
After a few false starts and pumping up the volume, we got through it. “Did you like it?” asked Kath when we finished.
“Well, I didn’t understand a word of it,” said Dick.
“Aunt Katty?”
“YES!” replied her aunt, glaring at her brother.
The following year, Kath and I again visited Fenwick on our way back to New York after performing Best Kept Secret at the Dorset Theatre Festival in Vermont.
“Tony, shall we go visit the dinosaurs?”
The occasion was Dick Hepburn’s eighty-eighth birthday.
Once again, we walked up the strand to the big house, but this time Kath carried her volume of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, having suggested earlier we might read something to her uncle.
“Uncle Dick...” Kath got the attention of her napping uncle. “Would you like to hear some sonnets by Shakespeare?”
“Oh...oh, yes...” he replied, sleepy.
“Tony’s going to read to you. You remember Tony...” “Oh...oh, yes...”
Kath watched as I read, and he perked up, listening to the words.
“Marvelous,” Dick said after I’d read several sonnets.
Leaving him with his son and daughter-in-law, who’d arrived to celebrate the day with him, we walked to the living room where Kath and I found her aunt. Sitting, as usual, in her recliner—same bun, turtleneck, slacks, and white tennis shoes—she looked more frail and older than she had on other visits.
My mother was in an assisted living facility fighting Alzheimer’s disease, and Miss Hepburn’s stare into the distance as we entered the room reminded me of her. She was doing nothing, had no reading material, her familial tremor causing her head to shake slightly.
Kath stood in front of her. “Aunt Katty, would you like to hear some Shakespeare?”
Miss Hepburn looked at Kath.
“YES!”
Looking and sounding like a younger version of her aunt, Kath turned to me and commanded: “Tony, read.”
I drew up a chair and placed it inches away from Miss Hepburn, to the left of her chair. If I was to read to her, I wanted to make sure she could hear and see me. As on the first visit, she locked her blue eyes into mine.
I took a deep breath and began to recite Shakespeare cold for the woman who had done it all and worked with the best. Miss Hepburn had acted in As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, among other plays. Would I make the text live for her as I read? Would she grow bored and dismiss me? Or worse, fall asleep?
Kath sat in front of us and watched. I opened the book and read Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Miss Hepburn listened, her head shaking, her eyes focused on me. She said nothing but continued to look at me. So far so good. I picked another sonnet and read again. Then another. Five or six sonnets in all. Kath then asked me to read from the plays: Hamlet, Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet, Jaques’s Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It, beginning with the line, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.” I felt myself split into two parts—the one reading and the one observing. The ninety-something- year-old Miss Hepburn listened as I read about man’s mortality and how we grow from infancy to maturity and finally dwindle into old age.
But as I read, Miss Hepburn watched me closely, and her blue eyes boring into me told me it was all right to continue.
It was now time to do a scene from The Taming of the Shrew, a play all three of us had done in different productions, at different times of our lives. Miss Hepburn had played Katherina the shrew with the actor Robert Helpmann in a production that toured Australia in the mid-1950s, well after she had established herself as a major star. My experience playing Petruchio had been at Redlands High School in Southern California in the fall of 1969. A great deal of attention was being given to the production because it marked the reopening of the high school’s beautiful, historic, Spanish-style 1,100-seat theatre that had been closed for several years to be retrofitted for earthquake safety. It was a huge production to pull together, and I quickly realized what a daunting challenge I’d taken on. Seventeen years old, I had not only to keep on top of my classes but had to learn my lines, learn how to swagger and hold the stage, how to tame the shrew. “Actors Answer Question: Is Shakespeare for RHS?” was the headline of the positive review in the newspaper the day after we opened. The critic went on to say that “Tony Newfield was a boisterous, lusty, and thoroughly masculine Petruchio...” Maybe I could do this, I thought.
I turned to Kath, took a deep breath, and started.
“Good morrow, Kate; for that’s your name, I hear.”
“Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing,” she answered. “They call me Katherine that do talk of me.”
I turned to Miss Hepburn, staring at me inches away, and, looking directly into her eyes, continued with the next ten lines from memory, relishing each use of Shakespeare’s repetition of the name “Kate.”
Miss Hepburn beamed and played the scene with me, reacting silently to the words. When I spoke of her beauty, she batted her eyelids, looked down, and blushed. It was the first—and only—time I called her Kate, and she responded to it. Her eyes blazed, she jutted her jaw out at me, her head shook.
When I came to the end of the speech and finished with Petruchio’s declaration of intention to marry, she paused for a moment, then took a deep breath and pronounced, “WELL...THAT WAS THRILLING...!”
I smiled and nodded.
Kath stood and said it was time to go. “We’ll leave you to rest, Aunt Katty, but will be back soon.”
I stood up, took her hand and held it between mine. “Men coveted this talon once,” she’d said of it in The Lion in Winter. Now it was old, dry and small, and I held it with care.
“Thank you,” I said. “Until the next time.” Hoping there would indeed be a next time, not knowing there would not.
Leaving the house and walking along the strand back to Kath’s house, images from 1969—Redlands, our production of Shrew, my youth—fought for dominance in my mind’s eye with images of Miss Hepburn smiling, her playing the scene with me. Kath and I walked in silence, and soft light bounced off the eastern shore while seagulls called to one another as they flew across the Sound.
Click file to read full article as featured in Memoir, Issue 11, 2012
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