By Cynthia Citron
BURBANK–Stephanie Zimbalist met Katharine Hepburn only once, when the legendary actress came backstage to tell Zimbalist and the other members of the cast of Baby Dance, “You are all so good!! And I thought I was the only one!”
Despite the left-handed compliment, Hepburn has continued to have a major impact on Zimbalist’s acting career. This month she brings her one-woman show about Hepburn, Tea at Five, to the stage of the Falcon Theatre after having performed it in various venues across the country, including the living rooms of her closest friends. She will perform it for the 100th time on November 7th.
Tea at Five was written by Matthew Lombardo, based on Hepburn’s autobiography, Me. And Zimbalist relishes the role, even though her idol was “the other Hepburn—Audrey.”
Launching into Hepburn’s familiar vocal tones and accent, Zimbalist reveals that Hepburn’s was a “made-up” voice. “It doesn’t come from the diaphragm, it comes from back in the throat and is hard to project,” she says. She likens it to the way that actor Jack Klugman “used his instrument” after he lost a vocal chord to cancer. He has a hushed, raspy voice, she says, “and he uses it like a great violinist playing with only two strings.” But, she continues, “If you’re not Hepburn, you’re not Hepburn, and impersonations are not what I do. Instead, when I’m portraying someone, I feel as if I’m turning a prism, and if I can bring a character into focus for even a moment, then I’ve done what I set out to do.”
Recently, to her great surprise, Zimbalist discovered an unexpected connection to Hepburn. It seems there was a man named Edward Spaulding who died in Chelmsford, Massachusetts in 1629, but not before begetting a line of descendants that includes Katharine Hepburn in the ninth generation and Stephanie Zimbalist in the eleventh. (Stephanie’s mother was Lorinda Spalding before she married actor Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and they gave Stephanie the middle name of Spalding.)
“So Kate is kin,” Stephanie exults.
On the Zimbalist side of the family there are also impressive ancestors. Her grandfather, Efrem Zimbalist, Sr., was a prominent violinist who died in 1985 at the age of 95, and her grandmother was opera star Alma Gluck (nee Reba Feinsohn). Her grandfather was born in Rostov-on-Don in Russia and her grandmother was born in Romania, neither place hospitable to Jews, so when they left their homelands, “Judaism wasn’t what you wanted to take with you,” Zimbalist explains. And so her father, Efrem Jr., was raised as an Episcopalian. (As an aside, Efrem, Jr. apparently inherited his father’s longevity: he turns 92 this November.)
As for Hepburn’s family, Zimbalist describes Hepburn’s father Tom, a urologist, as a typical “East Coast Connecticut Yankee” (even though he was born in Virginia) who kept a “stiff upper lip” and was stern and judgmental with his six children. Hepburn’s mother, Katharine Houghton, was a suffragette, heiress to the Corning Glass fortune, and co-founder of Planned Parenthood.
More connections between the two families: Efrem Zimbalist Jr. once dated Katharine Hepburn’s sister Peggy. And after Hepburn’s husband Ludlow Smith died, Hepburn moved into his apartment on 49th Street in New York, just across the street from the senior Zimbalists.
Hepburn didn’t want to take her husband’s name because she didn’t want to be known as Kate Smith, Zimbalist says, “but when he was dying she came back to New York to nurse him, and she was at his side when he died.”
In addition to this role in Tea at Five, Zimbalist cites as one of her favorite roles the part of Sylvia in A.R. Gurney’s play of the same name. “I played a dog,” she says. “I’m a dog-hearted person.” To emphasize the point, she hugs her longhaired dachshund Scampi as she talks. When asked about her favorite actor, she says, “I suppose I must say Jimmy Stewart, since he said I was his favorite actress in an interview in Video Review.” But then she adds Daniel Day-Lewis, “so daring, bold, and imaginative,” Geoffrey Rush in Shine and Vanessa Redgrave, “nobody can touch her on film.” And finally, “Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long. I saw that one seven times!”
Zimbalist has made close friends of the people she has worked with, including Jenny Sullivan, who directs Tea at Five, and with whom she has collaborated a dozen times. And Linda Purl, with whom she starred in Baby Dance. “She is the best friend anybody could ever have,” Purl says. “The fact that she is talented and smart is just a bonus.” Purl continues, “Tea at Five is the best thing I’ve ever seen her do. She really captures the essence of Katharine Hepburn.”
But not always. Zimbalist, with her self-deprecating sense of humor, tells about doing Tea at Five in Santa Barbara, where she inadvertently left out five pages of script in the first act. “You left out the phone call,” the director told her when she came offstage. Undaunted, Zimbalist jimmied the second act to include the information from the phone call, but at the end, in the talkback with the audience, she confessed that she had left out a part of the first act. And then, to the delight of the audience, she performed the left-out scene. “They loved it,” she says. “They thought they were in on something special.” To this day, Santa Barbara thinks Stephanie Zimbalist can do no wrong.
Tea at Five will run Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 4 through November 14th at The Falcon Theatre, 4252 Riverside Drive in Burbank. Call (818) 955-8101 for tickets.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World