So Judy how was Dick Cavett?
Couldn't make it.. again
Sorry you couldn't make it, Alyssa.
It was another pretty wonderful evening. I felt like I was witnessing the birth of a new comedy team: Seldes & Cavett could take their act on the road. He pretended to belittle himself in her presence and she pretended to respond to his wisecracks as though he were a fly that needed swatting. It was all an act, cause they know each other. But it was also very funny.
So, Sherry and I put our notes together (mostly hers) and here's a bit of what went on:
Seldes and Cavett entered and sat at a table center stage - just like Tony Harvey and Katharine Houghton and Charlotte Moore did before them. The Zoe Caldwell/Sam Waterston evening that you attended was the only one where the participants stood at lecturns. I guess that after that first night, they figured that they'd be more comfortable sitting down than standing for an hour or hour and a half.
Marian Seldes began by stating that the Theatre Guild was begun in 1929 by Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner. She read from Theresa Helburn’s autobiography A Wayward Quest in which she said this about her first meeting with Katharine Hepburn. The excerpt was too long to take notes on, but as luck would have it we have Helburn's book and Sherry transcribed the excerpt that Seldes read:
The first time, Katharine Hepburn came to my office to discuss an acting career she was carelessly groomed and she had taken no pains at all with her appearance. Still an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, she was an odd-looking child. But when she opened the office door it was as though someone had turned on a dynamo. The air vibrated with the electric force of her personality.
Certainly she lacked any vestige of humility. When the young people who later founded the Group Theatre first began to hold meetings, Katie attended. She listened to their plans and then she stalked out.
“That’s all right for you,” she told them, “but I intend to be a star.”
Seldes then spoke about The Philadelphia Story. She said that Philip Barry was having a bad time as a playwright, Kate had endured an earlier Broadway disaster (The Lake) and was currently coming off a succession of poor performing pictures, and the Guild was tottering financially. So they all came together to do The Philadelphia Story. These are Helburn’s words that she quoted:
Kate was in Hollywood doing the film version of Philip Barry’s Holiday. Philip began to discuss a play with Kate and before long he had started to write The Philadelphia Story as a starring vehicle for her. He talked to me about it. He wanted the Guild to do it.
Working with Kate was a delight; she is a wonderful person to do a play with, honest and forthright, and unusually generous. Fred Stone, who had co-operated with her in the movie version of Alice Adams, remembered how, when the film had to be cut, Kate went to the director to say, “Fred has done a marvelous job with his big scene. If you have to cut, cut out some of my stuff.” I don’t know of any other incident quite like that in Hollywood.
Kate has a rock-bound sort of character. Her loyalties are unswerving. Her friends last. She lives simply, never flamboyantly. Her family, made up of distinguished scientists, never took her career seriously until she made her smash in The Philadelphia Story. I still grin to myself when I think of the party Kate gave after a performance. As long as her family was there she served beer; when they had gone she brought out the champagne.Helburn’s comments continued, “We opened The Philadelphia Story in Philadelphia where it made a great hit. There was no doubt about it, Phil and Kate and the Guild had struck a bonanza.”
She continued that there was then the question of whether or not to bring the play to New York. She described the back and forth of the participants. Finally “Kate threw up her hands. ‘Do anything you want, dear,’ she said in a tone of foreboding. ‘Throw your money away.’ Well, we brought it in and we had a smash hit. It re-established Philip Barry’s reputation as a playwright; it made Katharine Hepburn famous; and it paid off the Guild debts. That’s the theatre for you in a nutshell.”
Dick Cavett then said that over the years, Kate received numerous offers from many different producers to do plays as well as musicals.
He read a letter dated March 3, 1958 from Kate’s agent, Abe Lastfogel, the thrust was that Roger Stevens was inquiring if Kate and Spencer Tracy would consider doing Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock as a musical. The production people who were proposed were all top shelf including Agnes de Mille doing the choreography. Kate and Spencer’s response was not read.
They also read a letter from Josh Logan, pleading with her to do Miss Moffat, which she turned down. Bette Davis starred in the ill-fated production in 1974.
He continued by reading from a January, 1966 letter from City Center’s Jean Dalrymple, stating that they were planning to mount four American plays and they wanted Kate to play Queen Elizabeth in Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen. Unfortunately, it never happened.
They moved on to reading the letters of Enid Bagnold in regard to the production of her play A Matter of Gravity.
It wasn’t until 1974 that Bagnold had seen Kate in a film. She saw her in Pat and Mike and was impressed with Kate’s athletic ability. She told Kate that it was important to get the “fun” in a character and expressed to Kate “you are the fun that I write. You are me.” She continued, “I don’t know who could do Mrs. Basil as you could do it.”
Bagnold was thrilled that the play was a financial success and in her letters said to Kate, “you’ve made me a lot of money, you’ve made me rich.”
Kate’s response in a letter to Bagnold in regard to performing Mrs. Basil was “I couldn’t put a foot wrong, me being you.”
Marian Seldes read from Clive Barnes’ review that appeared in the New York Times on February 4, 1976.
I have rarely seen Miss Hepburn better even in the movies. As we might have guessed from her recent TV film Love Among the Ruins, her acting is now in the lambent heat of its Indian summer. Even her stylizations have become style in the certainty of their execution – so her startled and amused gentility, her crisp ineffably unanswerable way with a cliché, all are unforgettable. Admirers of acting in that grand mannerism, nowadays so easily lost, should see this performance and etch it on their memories.They read other letters from friends and colleagues, including one from James Cagney that praised her to the skies for both Gravity and Love Among the Ruins - he called her and Olivier "magical."
They each spent time at the end talking about their memories of Kate. Cavett told stories about Stratford, one being this:
He recalled that Kate lived in what had been a bait house that sat on the bank and hung a bit over the edge of the Housatonic River which runs past the grounds of the theatre at Stratford. Each day Kate would swim in the river which has a swift current. One day someone worried aloud that she really shouldn’t swim there for fear the current would be too strong and carry her out to sea, and John Houseman, the director, interjected, “It wouldn’t dare!”
One of Seldes' comments:
After she married Garson Kanin, she stated that she and Garson had dinner with Kate each Monday night at Kate’s home at 244 E. 49th St. She related that as she got to know Kate, she realized how much Kate had influenced her – not only as an actress but as a woman. Seldes was born in 1928, and she stated, “you can’t have been a girl growing up in the Thirties and Forties and not been influenced by her.”
This seems like a good place to stop because this last comment by Seldes seems to describe quite a few of us, doesn't it? Seldes COULD have said "you can't have been a girl growing up in the Thirties, Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and Nineties" - and even into the new millennium, where her movies have taken over for her live presence and have continued to draw young women (and men, don't want to leave you guys out, but really, the role model is a powerful thing to young women) to influence so many more in how to live a long life of loyalty to friends, character, integrity, humor - and, just for good measure, artistry.
C'est tout!
Judy