Katharine Hepburn Tells Her Stories From the Stage

Oct 30, 05:00 AM

Current Headlines: By Jocelyn McClurg

NEW YORK -- The correspondence flies back and forth, all concerning a naughty word that has offended a handful of theatergoers. The lady making a plea to keep the banned word in the Los Angeles production of Coco: the star, Katharine Hepburn.

The year is 1971. Typing away in her inimitable style -- filled with dashes -- is the irrepressible Kate, making her case to the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera Association. "Dear Mr. Lawler," she begins.

"In an era of literature and cinema and theatre where every other expression is a four letter word -- it is -- let's face it -- curiously head in the sand -- to prohibit the use of the least offensive of these expressions -- because it might offend the audience."

She got her way -- no surprise -- and Hepburn, playing designer Coco Chanel, strolled on stage and uttered the four-letter word that begins with "s."

This amusing exchange of letters is part of Hepburn's personal theater archives, now in the hands of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and previewed to the media for the first time.

Hepburn, who died in 2003 at 96, left behind scrapbooks, photographs, costume sketches, scripts, fan letters, contracts and other stage memorabilia in boxes stretching "30 linear feet," in the library's words.

The decision to donate the material to the library was made by her executors, one of whom is longtime friend Cynthia McFadden of ABC's Nightline.

"We started when Miss Hepburn was alive, and she very much wanted all the materials preserved," McFadden says. The star kept her voluminous papers "squirreled away on the fourth floor of her house" in New York, McFadden says, and "it's remarkable to me that she kept all this stuff, especially because she was such a private person. But she had a real sense of history."

Hepburn's estate donated her film-related archives to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in California. And McFadden says Hepburn's most personal correspondence, including diaries, eventually will go to the academy as well and will be made public.

Though best known for her movie career, which earned her four Oscars, Hepburn returned to the stage throughout her life, with mixed results.

Dorothy Parker made one of her most famous, and most withering, quips about Hepburn's performance in the 1933 Broadway flop The Lake. "She ran the gamut of emotion from A to B," Parker wrote.

In her 1991 memoir, Me, Hepburn conceded that The Lake wasn't her finest hour. But she went on to have theatrical triumphs, from The Philadelphia Story to Coco, which, dirty word and all, earned her a Tony nomination.

"She would be sorry if people only saw her as a film actor," McFadden says. "She always loved the theater and loved going to the theater, and I spent many nights going with her." (c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.