(Host) Commentator David Moats reflects on Katharine Hepburn, Gregory Peck and childhood memories.
(Moats) The other night I rented the Katherine Hepburn movie “Lion in Winter” to remind myself of who she had been as a movie star. Katherine Hepburn’s death, combined with the recent death of Gregory Peck, signaled the passing of a generation.
They were not a generation, of course. They were just actors. Their business was make-believe. And yet for years and years they were a presence in our lives.
My generation encountered both Hepburn and Peck after they had become stars. Hepburn had made “Philadelphia Story” when my parents were in college, and the era of her movies with Spencer Tracy was the era in which I was born. By the time I came along, Hepburn and Peck were a part of the grown-up world, the world of my parents. Discovering the meaning of Katherine Hepburn was a way of discovering part of that world – the aristocratic Yankees of New England who gave Hepburn her bearing, her diction, the set of her mouth, and eyes that could be both dazzling or forlorn.
“Lion in Winter” was one of her later movies. It gave my generation a good dose of what it meant to be Katherine Hepburn. The role of Eleanor of Aquitaine seemed to be a perfect embodiment of the Hepburn persona – regal, witty, spirited, imprisoned by her place in society.
Gregory Peck’s greatest role came a few years earlier when he played Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He put out on the screen for all to see qualities of decency and courage at a time when there was premium on both.
Their deaths put me in mind of a dream I have from time to time. In this dream, I have somehow found my way back to the house in California where I grew up. In the dream I am well into my adult life, far removed from that childhood home, but I have the chance to go back to live there, to move right in, to resume the life that ended when I was no longer a child.
It is an appealing idea. In the dream there is comfort in saying to myself, “I could live here,” “I know how to live here.” The dream suggests it would be possible somehow to reconstitute the life of my childhood.
In that life sometimes, when Bob Hope came on television, my mother would join us in the TV room. We all understood who Gregory Peck was, and Katherine Hepburn. For them to die reminds me I can’t really go back to that old house, with its views of San Francisco Bay and my mother and father still in charge of the world.
Of course, in real life, it’s not a house or a place where I would choose to live, even if I could afford it. But I can rent old Hepburn movies or have another look at “To Kill a Mockingbord.”
Katherine Hepburn and Gregory Peck – they were only actors. But they caught our attention. In their great movies, they showed us defeat and grace in defeat. Their deaths show us something, too, about memory and time.
This is David Moats from Middlebury.
David Moats is the Editorial Page Editor for the Rutland Herald and winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. He spoke from our studio in Norwich.