Knowing Hepburn and Other Curious Experiences

Prideaux's memoir might better have been called Knowing Everybody, as it is a shamelessly name-dropping show-biz tell-all of the old school, in which every performer is brilliant, every moment is unforgettable and everybody is a dear friend. The tone is set early, when Prideaux, a screenwriter and playwright (The Last of Mrs. Lincoln, etc.) announces that ""One's first view of the Hotel Bel-Air must be one of the pleasantest moments life has to offer."" With its one-sentence paragraphs and astonishingly detailed accounts of nothing much, Prideaux's narrative is breathless; there's too much here about brief encounters with the famous (Milton Berle at an airport) and about the merely indirectly famous (David Selznick's widow). But when the book focuses on the author's 30-year friendship with Katharine Hepburn, the detail and the breathlessness are nearly justified. Having written several TV movies for Hepburn (Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry, etc.), Prideaux has seen her at her best and her worst, and he tells it all. Some of it is hilarious, as when Hepburn gives directions to a truck driver by stopping traffic and demanding of a passing driver: ""Do you happen to have a map of Beverly Hills?"" Much of it, though, is unflattering, the usual bad behavior by a movie star--petulance, insecurity, imperviousness. The character most revealed by the book, however, is the author's, as his fawning alternates with a barely controlled rage. ""I believe that all stars should be drowned at birth,"" he writes near the end, after an 85-year-old Hepburn has blown up at him on the set of a film. But, he hastens to add: ""I don't really believe that."" Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)