Jane Fonda recently sat down for a lengthy interview with The Hollywood Reporter which covered a variety of topics, including Katharine Hepburn. The publication quotes her as follows:
"I saw the play On Golden Pond and I thought, you know, my part is the smaller part, but oh boy this is a great part for [my father]. It could win him an Oscar before he died. He died five months after he won his Oscar. And so I produced it, and we didn’t know right away who we were going to get for the woman. And one day, me and my producing partner Bruce Gilbert, the office phone rang: 'Hello. Guess who? It’s Katharine Hepburn.' And you know, she pretty much said, 'I want to do this.' ...Her first words to me in person were, 'I don’t like you,' which, you know, is kind of like having God say that you’re worthless. [LAUGHTER] And the reason that she was so angry I realized, I found out, she told me, is because she and my father had never met. I mean that’s one of the interesting things about Hollywood. You can be a big star but never meet each other, and they had never met. And so it was in the context of: they were going to be working together on On Golden Pond when they met, and I wasn’t there.
Which to her was a huge sign of disrespect. I had chosen instead — because I was about to do a movie I’d spent 12 years developing called The Dollmaker — I was on a road trip with Dolly Parton, trying to discover what it meant to be a hillbilly. I mean, you know, right? But she was so angry with me. And then she said, 'I’ve torn my rotator cuff, and I think you should hire Geraldine Page.' And the minute she said that I knew what the deal was. She was going to offer to quit before I or my partner would have a chance to say, 'We can’t really, you know, you’re not going to be well enough in a month,' and so she took the offensive. And then when I said to her — totally, by now, I was a shriveling piece of humility — 'Oh, Miss Hepburn' (which I always called her: Miss Hepburn, always) 'We will wait for you. There is no one else that can do this part. We will make the canoe you have to carry out of balsa wood if necessary, but you must…'
So once she realized, then she said, 'Who’s going to get top billing?' [LAUGHTER] Because she thought, you know, it’s interesting ’cause right at that moment in cinema history she was a much older woman who was no longer a box office draw, and I was more of a box office draw. So she assumed, because it’s what she would have done, that I would request top billing.
Let me just tell you the last thing she said to me. When I was nominated as best supporting actress, she was nominated as best actress. My father was nominated as best (actor), they both won and I didn’t. Neither of them were there, they were too sick. I called her the next day to congratulate her. You know what she said to me? 'You’ll never catch me now.' [LAUGHTER] And it took me a second to realize what she was talking about. She’s so competitive. I had two, she had three. If she hadn’t won and I had we’d be tied. [LAUGHTER] Now she had four, there’s no way I’m going to catch up to her. Such a character. [LAUGHTER]
Oh, well she was on the one hand very prickly. I mean she was a snob, she was very moody, she was very judgmental. Michael Jackson came and stayed for ten days on the set. And when I first asked her permission, there’s this young singer, a black young singer that I would like to invite, she was not happy. Black kid is going to? But then the crew said you don’t understand. It’s Michael Jackson. We lived together. I went skinny dipping with him. Also, by the way, with Greta Garbo."
Read the full interview at The Hollywood Reporter.
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