A Year with Kate: Laura Lansing Slept Here (1988)
Wednesday, November 26, 2014 at 3:00PM
Episode 48 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn makes a truly awful houseguest.
Stars! They’re just like us! Except that they aren’t. An entire media industry has been built around bringing our cultural idols closer to us--Twitter alone delivers the illusion of intimacy 140 characters at a time--but at the end of the day, would you actually want to live with one? When George S. Kaufman had to host Radio Personality and Famous Critic Alexander Woollcott for a week, the experience was so aggravating that the playwright and his partner Moss Hart wrote a scathingly funny satire about Woollcott called The Man Who Came To Dinner. I bring this up for two reasons: 1) It’s a great Christmas comedy starring Bette Davis so go watch it right now if you haven’t and 2) This seems to have been more or less James Prideaux’s motivation when he wrote Laura Lansing Slept Here. If Prideaux is to be believed, Katharine Hepburn was witty, charming, and a gigantic pain in the ass.
Kate has played a lot of characters inspired by or based on her in some way, but Laura Lansing may be the most bluntly biographical since Tracy Lord. Laura is no actress, but a different kind of star: a celebrated author with a decades-long career. As Laura’s agent explains in a convenient bit of exposition:
“You were a sensation in your 20s, a household name in your 40s, an institution in your 60s, and now…"
Sound like anyone we know? Now Laura’s publisher is dropping her because she’s too out of touch, living in her NYC penthouse and only emerging for interviews. Laura’s agent begs her to retire, but she brushes off his suggestion with the typical Hepburn handwave. Instead, Laura makes a wager with him, the point of which can only be to move the plot forward: She will stay with an “average” family in Long Island for a week. If she flees back to the city, she must give up writing. Laura appears on the doorstep of an overworked accountant and his stay-at-home wife and immediately starts making demands. The results--to nobody’s surprise but Laura’s--are a disaster.
It’s fun to watch Kate have fun, and she’s definitely enjoying playing herself. Even more than Mrs. Delafield Wants To Marry, Laura Lansing Slept Here is designed to mine recognizable pieces of Kate’s image--be it her infamous stubbornness during interviews, her long and varied career, her independence, her pants, or her unshakeable air (and accent) of privilege--and then scatter them through the movie among 80s sitcom music stings and plot cliches. Unfortunately, the movie’s references to her career are on-the-nose and not particularly illuminating: a shout out to Jane Fonda, a rafting joke (the second in as many movies), a few quotes that may be Kate-isms (“I don’t have any regrets. I’ve been too lucky for that.”), many references to Kate’s career-long struggle to “relate” to the public, and a sweet remembrance of a past love affair. Since the plot is really just a makeshift coat rack on which to hang these increasingly heavy references, the entire movie ultimately collapses under its own weight.
While I have no doubt that Katharine Hepburn would probably have made a terrible houseguest for an average suburban household in the 1980s, the real takeaway of the film is that Kate stopped actively contributing to her iconic image through the films that she made. She’d still capitalize on it, as the rampant references in Laura Lansing Slept Here attest, but the roles Kate had taken for the past four years were increasingly reliant on an idea of Kate the Great that calcified somewhere around the time of her final Oscar win. This doesn’t mean Katharine Hepburn was washed up or finished. On the contrary, she was only a few years away from putting the final touches on the Katharine Hepburn legend through an autobiography. Me: Stories of My Life delivered concentrated Kate in a clipped, seemingly forthright tone that would have perfectly fit social media two decades later. And she did it all while still making movies. That was one energetic octogenarian.
Previous Week: Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986) - In which Katharine Hepburn stars in a geriatric version of The Way We Were.
Next Week: The Man Upstairs (1992) - In which Katharine Hepburn, octogenarian and Academy Award-winning legend, wrestles a convict and wins.
Reader Comments (4)
Never seen it, but I'm thinking this review is a lot more fun than the movie!
Marsha - my sentiments exactly! I have no recollection of this film - but I wasn't watching a lot of TV at the time. (Kudos Anne Marie for finding a copy)
The premise is promising but it sounds as if the script was somewhat banal. The fact that such a script was written with her in mind shows just how iconic and how much of an institution she had become. The equivalent these days would be a Nancy Meyers type of film with Diane Keaton.
This was pleasant enough but where her other TV vehicles to this point had a special event feel to them this one feels like a conventional TV movie mixed in with the average glut. It could just be the ghastly mid-80's color schemes of the sets, truly hideous, or the cheap flat photography. Where The Corn is Green felt open and vivid this is garish and boxy.
Kate's fine and Karen Austin is okay as the frazzled mom but this is run of the mill pablum.
This movie needs penguins