There’s something rare and frightening about actors and actresses. It amounts to a kind of religious worship in which these figures are experienced, “known” by millions of strangers, “loved” by those who will never meet them, when they—the person inside, the person wearing the name and the legend—may sometimes realize, “Well, there’s not much left for me, is there?” You may remember that Katharine Hepburn called her own book (published in 1991, and emphatically not ghostwritten) Me, as if she had always had the fear of being left out. I can only add that if she’d lived to face Mr. Mann’s book, I think she would have put it down, dry-eyed but full of tears, and admitted, quietly: “me.”

There have been many books, some of them since her death in 2003 (Scott Berg’s memoir, Kate Remembered, self-serving and suspect, seemed to appear even as she died; it had evidently been kept back in anticipation of the event). I’ve read them all, and I don’t think there’s a dull book among them, though Barbara Leaming’s was a disappointment. The richness of those books is a tribute to Hepburn. She abhorred dullness and hated vanity—rather, let us say, she avoided dullness and hated to be caught in vanity.

That she was by turns self-centered and cold did not diminish the pleasure of her company, her wit or her warmth (this is not a contradiction). Those attributes, all professionally useful, merely confirmed what you gathered, and hoped for in advance: that she was a constant performance. She was being “Hepburn” and surely sometimes said, “The hell with Kate!” But here’s the point: Mr. Mann’s biography is not just the best on Hepburn—it’s a book that sets new standards in movie biography.

Sometimes it’s easy to think that some woman took up the theater and movies to escape a dreadful childhood—or circumstances that did not offer her enough “life.” That’s not the case with Kate. Her father a noted surgeon, her mother a suffragette, she was born in Connecticut and raised in a wise but idiosyncratic family and in houses she loved. She was educated at Bryn Mawr, and she was smart. Coming of age in the late 1920’s, in a context that believed in women, she could have excelled in so many other fields—medicine, law, politics, education. You can see her like that, in a worldly career. Yet there were flaws: A brother committed suicide, and her marriage to an amiable but rather vague broker—“Luddy”—ended after six years, though it never lost its friendship.

It’s in the matter of that brother, Tom, that you realize how serious and searching Mr. Mann is prepared to be. I call it a suicide, but the significance of the loss was that people—Kate included—were not sure. Tom had troubles: He was sexually uncertain, like his sister. He was strangled—but he might have been play-acting, or doing the real thing. Mr. Mann examines the shifts in opinion throughout the family, and he lets something very tricky emerge: that Tom for Kate was a mystery because they were close. It’s as if, with both brother and husband, she reckoned that terrain too close to her could hardly be inhabited.

She went out to Hollywood in 1932, in pants, with Laura Harding (an American Express heiress) as her pal. There was talk, and in her early films she gave every impression of being too smart and chilly for her own good—or to be a star. She did remarkable early work: Morning Glory in 1933 (winning an Oscar but not very likeable); Little Women (1933)—as Jo; Alice Adams (1935); Sylvia Scarlett (1935); Mary of Scotland (1936)—for a sweetheart, John Ford; Stage Door (1937); Bringing Up Baby (1938).

The latter, for Howard Hawks, with Cary Grant, is one of the greatest comedies ever made in America. She knew it was good, and she had to face the report—in Variety—that she was “box office poison.” America got the shivers when it watched her. This was the age of Crawford, Davis, Stanwyck, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy. You could be smart and classy, but a woman was expected to be sexy, and there Hepburn drew a blank.

But what about Kate? It’s the steady question of this book. Kate was romanced by Ford and Howard Hughes; she was one of the few MGM stars who got on with Louis B. Mayer (it may have helped that she was very close to Mayer’s daughter, Irene). Were these love affairs? Was there sex involved? Or was Hughes just another cerebral worrier who funded and helped manage her career? Hughes set her up with The Philadelphia Story (1940), and he was the secret lawyer in her very serious efforts to get the role of Scarlett in Gone With the Wind. The producer, David O. Selznick, refused her because he thought she wasn’t sexy enough, and Mr. Mann finally is not sure how much sex (heterosexual sex, anyway) really meant to her.

What’s fascinating in his account is the complete way in which Hepburn took charge of Kate around 1940, softening her looks, learning to be sexy, deliberately taking on roles where she was obedient to men—witness Woman of the Year (1942). The orthodox clincher in this buildup has always been “met Spencer Tracy,” and that did happen in Woman of the Year.

Tracy was, in some ways, the man’s man she favored. But he was also an alcoholic wreck—no book has made that more clear than this one, even to the point of exposing Tracy’s rather maudlin gay life. Kate was gay too, to be sure, but it was the strongest, most private part of her. Hepburn took advantage of Tracy because she realized how “perfect” they were onscreen together—indeed, that ease was a mercy to both of them as they grew older.

There’s a lot of new stuff in this book, plus a very shrewd account of how far Garson Kanin’s book, Tracy and Hepburn (1971) helped shape and deepen the legend. The truth was much more complex and not nearly as sentimental. Readers in the course of William Mann’s thorough and generous narrative can discover it for themselves. It’s no small point that the writing here has a subtlety and a forgiveness such as these untidy lives require.

Finally Kate died, and now Hepburn has to make her way alone. At this point, the only person left alive who was a big movie star in the 1930’s is Olivia de Havilland. The great ones of that generation changed our lives. But do kids respond to them now—kids who hardly knew them? No one can be sure, so we must keep our museums large and open, if that’s where Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962), Susan in Bringing Up Baby, Amanda in Adam’s Rib (1949) and Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story must live. Yet maybe that great myth is not enough. Maybe you have to have been alive with Kate as well as Hepburn to feel the game the two of them played.

In history, a “great actress” can turn as stuffy as Bernhardt, Rachel or Sarah Siddons. Of course, film helps the moment live. But if you want to remember the sudden mischief and the flaring face of Jeanne Moreau, Anna Karina or Katharine Hepburn, you had to be there and stand in line for their new movies when they were fresh.

David Thomson’s most recent book is Nicole Kidman (Knopf).

Janet Maslin (1/3): "Dog Days manages to be doubly conventional: it follows both an old-fashioned love-betrayal-redemption arc and the newer, bitchier nanny-Prada chick-lit motif...Any smart Web site would mock her [protagonist's] final gesture: turning on her laptop and writing the opening lines of this book."

Christopher Buckley (1/8): "...if this sparkly, witty - occasionally vicious - little novel is any indication of Wonkette's talent, then Cox ought to log out of cyberspace and start calling herself Novelette."

David Carr (1/5): "Dog Days is like a lot of first-time novels in that it takes the author's day-to-day existence and heats it up a few notches...the plot is on the hoary side." [He also calls Cox "a Katharine Hepburn with a severe case of potty mouth.")

If the Times continues apace, its writers may just exceed the book's own word count with alternate expressions of praise and political piñata-whacking.

Valentine's Day is still 10 long, wintry days away , but already we have a bunch of events crowding our in box, all of which begin, "Hey all you Single Ladies!" [ delete, block sender ]. Fashion Week, on the other hand, starts the day after tomorrow (that sound you hear is 10,000 Brazilian bikini waxes … ), and the invites aren't exactly overwhelming us-or even whelming us …. As for today, you can get your monthly requisite art event out of the way: Weimaraner wonk William Wegman and Cindy Sherman (favored artist of impressionable Barnard co-eds ) are among the 288 artistes who have kindly donated their wares to benefit the children of Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School . Mr. Wegman told us about his dog, which just gave birth (we like it when dogs are pregnant because, unlike all the smug Manhattan mommies, dogs don't act like being pregnant is equivalent to winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Twice.) "My children, who go to Little Red, slept through the entire thing. In fact, my son got up at 3 to go pee, and he saw my wife and I at our most hysterical-holding on to a puppy, trying to breathe life into it-and he said, 'My nose hurts.' He peed and then he went back to bed." Anything the Sex and the City foursome wear annoyingly flies off the shelves, so it was only a matter of time after Charlotte left shiksa-ville that people started trying on Judaism for size. Hence today's discussion, "It All Began With Ruth: A Panel Discussion on Conversion to Judaism." "I converted to Judaism a year and a half ago, after a very long spiritual journey that began in the mid-1990's. I was basically practicing Taoism," said panelist Joel Sanchez, a 40-year-old former actor. "I love gefilte fish. Before I converted, I had a Russian-Jewish girlfriend, and her mom used to make it." The gefilte fish gets 'em every time.

[Little Red School House and Elizabeth Irwin High School silent auction, I-20 Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, 10 a.m., 212-477-5316, ext. 232; "It All Began WithRuth: A Panel Discussion on Conversion to Judaism," J.C.C. in Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Avenue, 7 p.m., 646-505-5708.]

Thursday 5th

Henri Bendel, Part I- Dilemma for the ladies : Do you send your boyfriend to Bendels to nibble hors d'oeuvres and aptly named Playboy Playmate Nicole Wood ? Or do you endure yet another Valentine's Day composed of a card from Duane Reade and acrylic lingerie from H&M ? Henri Bendel is holding an exclusive Valentine's Day men's private shopping party -complimentary booze, complimentary gift wrap, free delivery of purchases over $500 and photos with the Bunny . ( You'd hope a fella would be happy enough just buying some naughty piece of lingerie for his ladyfriend without having to be enticed by some pneumatic nudie girl on stilt-like stilettos, but we digress …. ) We'll be downtown with our childhood crush Ralph Macchio, who's now 42 -yes, 42!-and who's in a new play, Magic Hands Freddy . "I co-star with Michael Rispoli, who plays a masseur named Freddy and is just great in the role," Mr. Macchio said. "He's perfectly cast . I play his brother Calvin. They're foster brothers who grew up in a rough neighborhood in Philadelphia, and my character winds up being a n art historian for the University of Pennsylvania …. The story explores the love of the brothers and the choices we make in life. It's got this great twist at the end that I'm tiptoeing around and trying not to give away. The first time I was onstage was in Cuba and His Teddy Bear with Robert De Niro ." Do people still recognize Daniel-San? " All the time ! They don't recognize as much anymore, because I'm beginning to age like the rest of the human race-and shamefully so! But it's always there; The Karate Kid is like my middle name in every press release. I realize that not many folks get that kind of an opportunity, so as much as it's been a double-edged sword, it was really a great thing." We're just happy he hasn't turned up on Star Dates on E!

[Men's shopping party, Henri Bendel, 712 Fifth Avenue, 6 to 8 p.m., 900-HBendel; Magic Hands Freddy, Soho Playhouse, 15 Vandam Street, 8 p.m., 212-239-6200.]

Friday 6th

Shivering, bare-kneed fashion editors take their pencil skirts to the Fashion Week mothership and pretend not to watch she of the sunglasses and bloodless lips …. To raise awareness for women's heart disease, the designers have whipped up some pretty red frocks that'll be parading down the runway on the bodies of mannequins Alek Wek and Erin Wasson, modelite Amanda Hearst, and celebs like Vanessa Williams and Jamie Lynn Discala. Later , Alek and Erin repair to Jean-Georges' new restaurant, Spice Market , for the 7th on Sixth party and wave away hors d'oeuvres with the likes of beauties Bridget Hall , Angela Lindvall , Carolyn Murphy , Anouk Lepore and Trish Goff. Hey, while we're almost on the subject, can we talk about how every woman on The Apprentice looks like a contestant from one of Mr. Trump's pageants? … Meanwhile , we recently inspected a press release, and when we saw the phrases "mockery of suburban living," "collapse of American value system" and "sexually repressed couple," we thought, "It's either a typical night on the Upper West Side or an Edward Albee play." The American Dream opens tonight.

[Red Dress Collection 2004, the Studio Noir, Bryant Park, noon, by invitation only; The American Dream , the Arthur Seelen Theatre, 250 West 40th Street, 8 p.m., e-mail impulsetheatre@hotmail.com for reservations.]

Saturday 7th

John Waters once said, "I pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value." A man after our own heart! We asked him about Edith Tells Off Katherine Hepburn , part of his photography retrospective, which opens tonight at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. "Hepburn took herself so seriously!" he said. "So this is Edith [Massey, whom you might remember from Pink Flamingos , sucking down eggs]-somebody that Katherine Hepburn I'm sure would have been snotty to -but, of course, Edith isn't really giving her the finger. That's the whole thing: using images from completely different things. I put them together to tellthenew narrativethat I want to tell that, of course , neverreallyhappened."What exactly is going on in that photo? "Well,I don'tknow whatthat's called.With balls, it's called 'tea-bagging.' With breasts, I'm not sure what it's called- foreplay ? Icon foreplay." … On the Left Coast, Clive Davis has his annual pre-Grammys bash and invites all his splashy friends.

[ John Waters: Change of Life opening reception, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 583 Broadway, 7:30 p.m., members only; Clive Davis' pre-Grammy bash, the Beverly Hills Hotel, 9641 Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Hills, Calif.]

Sunday 8th

Henri Bendel, Part II- British clothier Alice Temperley has hopped across the pond to move in with ol' Hank Bendel, and today she opens her new boutique with the help of model Helena Christensen (the one from Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" video). Meanwhile, at Bryant Park: Luca Luca (youthful, sensual), Alice Roi (princessy, rock 'n' roll) and Tracy Reese and Catherine Malandrino (is there a difference? We can't tell) …. And hey, rememberlast year's Grammys,when Erykah("I knew I should have gone to rehearsal") Badu read too far on the cue card and actually said "Applause" at the end of her speech? Moments like that are why you'll find us glued to our crappy Ikea sofa tonight, watching Beyoncé, Justin and OutKast win everything. And how exactly is Eminem's "Lose Yourself" still eligible for nomination? It came out so long ago, everyone's found themselves. (That last joke is an homage to Joey Adams . It wasn't his, but he woulda stolen it, and we woulda been glad he did.)

[Temperley store opening, Henri Bendel, 712 Fifth Avenue, 7 to 9 p.m., by invitation only; 46th Annual Grammy Awards, CBS,

8 p.m.; all Fashion Week shows by invitation only: Tracy Reese, the Studio, Bryant Park, 10 a.m.; Alice Roi, the Promenade, Bryant Park, 11 a.m.; Catherine Malandrino, 776 Sixth Avenue, 4 p.m.; Luca Luca, the Tent, Bryant Park, 8 p.m., more info at www.7thonsixth.com.]

Monday 9th

Oscar de la Renta takes his rich ruffles (and that later-in-life-acquired "de la" ) to Bryant de la Park and joins Carolina Herrera ( neatnik, big on the polka dots), Betsey Johnson (slightly goth, slightly slutty-the clothes, not her), Badgley Mischka (beading, elegant) and BCBG Max Azria (Banana Republic, but more fluttery). The Drama League honors smoldering actor Antonio Banderas and wife Melanie Griffith at the annual Musical Celebration of Broadway Gala. Jerry ("I put Baby in the corner") Orbach serves as honorary chair, while Chita Rivera and Christine Ebersole do the sing-and-kicky-kick thing …. At the uncivilized hour of 9 a.m., Bridal Guide magazine encapsulates daily life for women ages 25 and up with its annual "Race for the Rock," in which 50 entrants chase down a three-carat engagement ring. Winner gets the chance to propose to their sweetheart live on WB-11's Morning News .

[All shows by invitation only: Carolina Herrera, the Tent, Bryant Park, 11 a.m.; Oscar de la Renta, the Promenade, Bryant Park, 1 p.m.; Betsey Johnson, 17 Irving Place, 3 p.m.; Badgley Mischka, the Promenade, Bryant Park, 5 p.m.; BCBC Max Azria, the Tent, Bryant Park, 7 p.m., www.7thonsixth.com; Musical Celebration of Broadway Gala, Grand Ballroom, the Pierre Hotel, 2 East 61st Street, 7:30 p.m., 212-244-9494, ext. 5; Race for the Rock, start at Michael C. Fina, 545 Fifth Avenue, 9 a.m., 212-557-2500.]

Tuesday 10th

The luxury-gooding of Manhattan continues apace, as Louis Vuitton debuts its largest store in the world on East 57th Street. Speaking of which, on today's pussywalk : Chaiken (think Theory, but more expensive), Nanette Lepore (gypsy, feminine), Calvin Klein (so minimalist even he's not there anymore), Narciso Rodriguez (satin, clingy) …. Meanwhile, what does Bruce Wasserstein have in store for New York magazine? Ask him yourself when you crash the Bank Street College of Education soirée honoring him and playwright sister, Wendy Wasserstein. (We got a sneak peak at her next play: It's about a furrier and three Jewish women. One act.) If that doesn't do it for ya, fill your pipe with strawberry tobacco and head to the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at the Gah-den. "It's a benched-dog show, meaning the dogs have to be in a certain area when they're not being shown, and they'll be on benches-hence the name!" said Kennel Club spokesman David Frei. "That means you're able to circle amongst the contender, and maybe even pet them, shake some paws, meet the breeders and handlers of the dogs. You can ask questions like, 'Why does my dog do this, and how can I get them to stop? Why did my dog eat my modem?' That's a true story, you know! I came home last night, and it was just in pieces! I have the two greatest Brittanys, but they're kind of stir-crazy right now because of the weather."

[Louis Vuitton store preview party, 1 East 57th Street, 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., 150th Anniversary party, surprise location, 9:30 p.m. to 2 a.m., by invitation only; Bank Street College honors the Wassersteins; the Pierre Hotel, 2 East 61st Street, 6 p.m., 212-961-3332; Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, Madison Square Garden, 9 a.m., 212-307-7171, www.westminsterkennelclub.org.]

Wednesday 11th

The pitter-patter of model's big, bony feet continues today with Vera Wang (classic, tasteful), Michael Kors ( Ralph Lauren meets pre-Target Isaac Mizrahi ), Proenza Schouler (now out–Marc Jacobs–ing Marc Jacobs ), Anna Sui (quirky, boho), Matthew Williamson (we dunno, but the Vogue girls dig 'im) …. Once upon a time, Rolling Stones fans found out what it's like to be touched by an angel when it's packing a blade and weighs a deuce and a half. And you can, too, at the 92nd Street Y's screening of Gimme Shelter . "It'll be just like old times," cracked director Albert Maysles . "But I don't know what the rates of drug addiction are these days, or if anybody is taking LSD the way they used to." George Lucas pops up in the credits as one of the cinematographers. "The funny thing about Lucas was that none of his stuff was used," Mr. Maysles confessed. "His camera had something wrong with it and the stuff didn't come out. When we looked at it, all we saw was black with little spots, so we used to joke that that's how got the idea for … what was his film? That famous film?"

[All Fashion Week shows by invitation only: Vera Wang, the Atelier, Bryant Park, 11 a.m.; Michael Kors, the Tent, Bryant Park, 11 a.m.; Provenza Schouler, the Studio, Bryant Park, 2 p.m.; Anna Sui, the Tent, Bryant Park, 7 p.m.; Matthew Williamson, the Studio, Bryant Park, 8 p.m.; Gimme Shelter , Steinhardt Building, 35 West 67th Street, 7 p.m., 9 p.m., 212-601-1000.]

You weren't around, you say? Well, here's Ms. Smith in the Aug. 28 edition of her column: "YOU CAN read 'Kate Remembered,' the boring and self-referential Scott Berg memoir on Miss Hepburn, but why not instead read Town & Country this month, carrying its vintage Kate conversation with her pal, the late director George Cukor. (You may have gathered I don't approve of the vain and narcissistic Berg, and I don't believe for one minute Kate 'collaborated' with him on his self-indulgent little book)."

And in a quote that was picked up by a number of newspapers, Ms. Smith pronounced Mr. Berg's book, "Self-promoting fakery …. Hepburn would have despised it and his betrayal of her friendship."

Well, as you might have guessed, Mr. Berg noticed Ms. Smith's dispatches. When The Transom attempted to contact the author to ask him why he thought the columnist had her knickers in a twist over his book, he issued a written statement via his publisher, G.P. Putnam's Sons.

"Over the last two months, I have been truly shocked at Liz Smith's professional behavior-or, more accurately, her lack thereof," Mr. Berg wrote. "My family and friends have reacted with utter disbelief at the level of personal disdain conveyed by Ms. Smith toward someone she barely knows; (indeed, beyond my appearing at one of her Literacy Volunteer events, I've met her but a few times.) And I've heard that people I don't even know are shocked by her personal assault on my reputation, one that stops just short of character assassination.

"I truly-evidently, naively-expected a higher standard from someone who allegedly shares my deep respect for my subject, especially as I wrote about Katharine Hepburn with nothing but the utmost love and admiration," Mr. Berg continued, adding: "I am unaware of any personal ax Liz Smith has to grind; but her columns certainly make one highly suspicious of her motives in this matter. Whatever the explanation, she seems to have given me more ink this summer than she's given Liza Minnelli and David Gest! And she's spelled my name right."

Mr. Berg may offer no motive, but speculation among followers of this brouhaha is that Ms. Smith's anger toward Mr. Berg has something to do with Ms. Smith's close personal friendship with Primetime Monday anchor Cynthia McFadden who, like Mr. Berg, and Ms. Smith, for that matter, was close to Hepburn. Some contend that Ms. McFadden wanted to write a remembrance of Hepburn herself. Others suggest that the contretemps stems from Mr. Berg's portrayal of Ms. McFadden in the book.

There is one point in Kate Remembered where Irene Selznick, the widow of David Selznick, informs Mr. Berg that Ms. McFadden has "taken over" the room he stayed in when he stayed at Hepburn's East 49th Street townhouse. And, indeed, there are moments in Kate Remembered when Mr. Berg seems to be bending over backward to show there was no rivalry between him and Ms. McFadden. He also chronicles Ms. McFadden's 1989 wedding to Hartford Courant publisher Michael Davies at Hepburn's childhood home, Fenwick. After the wedding, during which Ms. McFadden smeared the first-cut piece of wedding cake all over Hepburn's face, Hepburn told Mr. Berg that "she thought it was unfair for Cynthia to marry Michael, that Cynthia was more concerned just then with her career than with pleasing a husband and that that was no way to enter a marriage." Mr. Berg writes that the more Hepburn talked, "the more I felt she was talking about her own marriage to Luddy"-Ludlow Smith, her first husband-"And the more she talked, the angrier she got." Finally, Ms. Hepburn utters a single word, "Pig."

Earlier in the book, when Mr. Berg asks Hepburn why she married Smith, whom she largely ignored, she says: "Because I was a pig." (Mr. Davies and Ms. McFadden have since divorced.)

When we reached Ms. Smith, she told us she didn't want to hear Mr. Berg's statement. "I'll read it in your column," she said. But she denied that her salvos at Kate Remembered had anything to do with Ms. McFadden. "My reaction to Scott Berg's book has to do with my love for Ms. Hepburn, not my regard for Cynthia or her family or anyone else," she said. "This is my supreme personal reaction. I think all of Ms. Hepburn's close friends and intimates are dismayed by the book" in part, she said, because "no one in Ms. Hepburn's group of friends even knew he was doing this." She added: "I did what I think was the very last interview Ms. Hepburn ever gave, at the time of her book, Me. So I'm certainly entitled to be disappointed in a Pulitzer Prize winner whom I have admired in the past, writing such a boring stupid book of betrayal."

Ms. McFadden, who has since been named the co-executor of Hepburn's estate, could not be reached for comment, but a friend of the TV journalist told The Transom that though Ms. McFadden has "been approached numerous times through the years about writing a book about Katharine Hepburn, she's made it clear that she has neither the time nor the inclination." The friend also said: "Cynthia could care less about how she was portrayed in the book and like many of Hepburn's close friends was only upset by the deceit that Scott engaged in with Hepburn about his intentions to write a book or biography."

In his statement, Mr. Berg wrote that over the two decades that he kept in close contact with Hepburn: "Despite our deepening friendship-maybe because of it-she never lost sight of the fact that I was a professional writer, a biographer. Countless times she spoke of my writing a book about her, insisting only that it never be published during her lifetime. On several occasions she suggested that I publish my account of her life as close to her death as possible. I always thought that was because she wanted to set the record straight about her life right away, before other books put other versions out there."

And though he could not be reached to respond to Ms. Smith's comments, the final paragraph of his statement states: "I will long take comfort in my surety that Katharine Hepburn would have thanked me for my memoir-all the laughs and even the sad parts-because it is loving and honest … and because it preserves the stories of her life for generations to come."

-Frank DiGiacomo

The League of Extraordinary Nerds

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's … a group of crime-fighting Oxford dons!

November will see the debut of a new comic book from G.I. Joe publishers Image Comics. Heaven's War focuses on the Inklings, the scholarly cabal that was centered around Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis, Lord of the Rings scribe J.R.R. Tolkien and poet and War in Heaven novelist Charles Williams. The group, which used to meet at the Oxford pub Eagle and Child, shared an interest in theology, philosophy and fantasy.

Heaven's War imagines that the writers were up to something much more than Guinness-fueled navel-gazing. According to an advertisement in the Previews catalog published by Diamond Comic Distributors Inc., the book will be set in 1938, with the world hovering on the brink of World War II when "a secret angelic battle is waged in the heavenly realms to determine mankind's fate." The Inklings are pitted against the infamous occultist author Aleister Crowley, who "plans to manipulate those angelic struggles and thus shape the world according to his will."

In order to stop him, the Inklings "must decipher a landscape of sacred geometry to intercept Crowley at the threshold of heaven."

We're not making this up.

What prompted the desire to turn a group of dead fountain-pen-wielding scholars into superheros? It could well be Image Comics' attempt to cash in on the success of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore's D.C./A.B.C. comic about Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll, the Invisible Man and Mina Murray (née Harker) from Bram Stoker's Dracula, who band together in 1898 to save the British Empire from evil. Extremely successful as a comic, League was adapted into an eponymous movie starring Sean Connery that was released this summer to mostly negative reviews and bad box office.

Eric, a marketing manager at Image Comics whose voice-mail messages promised to return calls "as soon as superhumanly possible," did not, in fact, return calls.

-Rebecca Traister

Annoyed With Lloyd

New York party-planners, don't invite Susan Sarandon and new Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove to the same shindig just yet. The Transom caught up with Ms. Sarandon at the opening of fashion house Akris' flagship store on Madison Avenue on Sept. 17 and asked what she made of former Washington Post columnist Mr. Grove's move to her hometown. "It's unfortunate that you have to start attacking people's children in order to make a name for yourself," Ms. Sarandon fumed, referring to a March 18, 2003, Post item Mr. Groves had written that quoted Ms. Sarandon's mother, Lenora Tomalin. Ms. Tomalin mentioned a breakfast-table imbroglio in 2000 in which Sarandon's 13-year-old son asked if she had voted for Bush. Ms. Tomalin told the reporter that she wouldn't discuss politics with a 13-year-old that has been "brainwashed" by his parents.

The item prompted Ms. Sarandon's other half, Tim Robbins, to approach Mr. Grove at Vanity Fair's 2003 post-Oscars party and threaten, "If you ever write about my family again, I will fucking find you and I will fucking hurt you."

"It's a pathetic legacy to leave-that this would be your job," Ms. Sarandon continued at the Akris party. "They must be such unhappy people. I feel bad for them. I don't hold a grudge."

Mr. Grove called Ms. Sarandon's comments "nonsense." "[Ms. Tomalin] had some things on her mind. Unprompted by me, she said them. Even though she's not a celebrity she thought what she had to say was important and I agree," he said. "She should take the issue up with her mother, not me." After 19 years at The Post, where he wrote his column "The Reliable Source" from 1999 until almost two months ago, Mr. Grove's News column will begin on Sept. 29. "At some point there will be peace, which is Susan's hope, I think," he said.

-John Gallagher

Bring the Pane

"I've lived in two different places in New York," Drew Barrymore said at the premiere of Duplex, a comedy about living in New York City, on Sept. 18 at Clearview Beekman Theatre. "I tended to weirdly get places with no windows and I didn't realize it in the beginning, and wondered why I was severely depressed by the lack of light in my apartment." Ms. Barrymore is reportedly shacking up at the Mercer Hotel with Strokes beau Fabrizio Moretti while she awaits renovations-more windows?-to a new Union Square pad. But she wasn't letting on to any of it. Wearing an off-white Chloé car coat with black trim to match her dyed-blond hair, she told The Transom: "The next place I get, hopefully, will be full of light."

-Jake Brooks

There's a scene in David Lean's Summertime that has always seemed to me to capture the essence of its star.

Katharine Hepburn plays an executive secretary from Ohio who has come to Venice for the first time. Dazed by sensory overload, she's sitting happily on the patio of her hotel overlooking a canal, meeting the other guests. But then everybody else drifts away, to their friends, to their pre-arranged dinners. She's alone. She gets up, surrounded by the colorful explosions of begonias, caladiums and geraniums. Quizzically, she tilts her head and then walks in the direction of the tilt-a charming acting trick favored by Hepburn-with Lean's camera tracking slowly with her from left to right. He cuts to a close-up of her reacting to the sensuality of Venice-the pale silver light on the water, the echoing cries of the gondoliers-then dissolves to her sitting, still alone, on the patio. We know everything she's feeling-she's as lonely in Italy as she was in Ohio, but she's trying not to tip over into self-pity. (As Chaplin knew so well, the combination of loneliness and gallantry is immensely poignant.) She rises, calls down to a cat. The cat ignores her. She turns around, her eyes welling up, then makes a decision. She briskly decides to get moving-to move out toward life.

Conventional wisdom has it that Katharine Hepburn's acting stock-in-trade was a haughty upper-crust intelligence, but her greatest dramatic gift was for pain and social awkwardness, as she showed in Summertime , or in Alice Adams , 20 years before.

Hepburn was more than a movie star, of course; she carefully sculpted her career and the public perception of it so that she became a living metaphor for women in the 20th century. She was an actress who would willingly attempt anything except a character who was stupid. In her early films, she personified the shock of the new-there was no actress of her generation with a comparable clarity or intelligence except, perhaps, Carole Lombard, and Lombard's talent didn't come into focus until later in the 30's. And just as Hepburn was the heroine for a lot of people's lives, so she was certainly the heroine of her own.

Several memoirs, an autobiography, documentary films and hundreds of interviews apparently being insufficient, Hepburn gave her friend A. Scott Berg leave to write Kate Remembered , so long as it was published posthumously. Kate Remembered is partly biography at a trot, partly memoir, and considerably more interesting as the latter than the former-not always for reasons that were intended.

Any book on Katharine Hepburn inevitably circles around the quarter-century she spent with Spencer Tracy. On-screen, Tracy was a stolid, know-it-all Oberon who learned a few overdue lessons from her dancing Ariel. He stared and fumed; she smiled and moved languidly away. He kept her from getting too flighty, made her girlish, and she could calm the grumpy bear.

Off-screen, the situation was rather different. More treacle has been spilled about Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn than any couple since Abelard and Heloise, and Mr. Berg doesn't help much. This is possibly because all the treacle was either spilled or stage-managed by Hepburn-and she's still doing it, even though she's dead.

Mr. Berg sees her clearly, but only up to about arm's length. He says, correctly I think, that "[Tracy] and Katharine Hepburn experienced the ups and downs of any married couple; but in never sealing their arrangement legally, they were able to retain an element of unreality in the relationship, a false quality based on neither of them being locked in."

So far, so good. But when he asks Hepburn why nobody ever tried to get Tracy into Alcoholics Anonymous, she responds with a stuttering explanation that encompasses several different rationales, all blatantly phony: She points to Tracy's own psychological cover-up that told him that as long as his drinking didn't interfere with his work, it wasn't really a problem. She also says, "Spencer Tracy was the biggest star in the world, and I don't think he would have been anonymous there for very long. And news of this sort would have killed his career."

So she and, apparently, Mr. Berg would have us believe that Howard Strickling, the vice president in charge of publicity (or lack of it) at M.G.M.-the man who could cover up news of Tracy's room-shattering destruction, brawls, liaisons of various degrees of seriousness, not to mention boorish behavior that was by no means limited to the times when he was drunk-would have been powerless to suppress the news of Tracy's going to A.A. Mr. Berg's acceptance of this manifestly lame rationale proves only that he was utterly besotted by Hepburn.

The truth is that nearly every quasi-romantic relationship that Hepburn had-Leland Hayward, Howard Hughes and John Ford as well as Tracy-was with a man who was completely unsuitable for any conventional relationship. Hepburn wanted men who were as gifted and cantankerous as she was-especially if they were tortured Irish alcoholics-but she only wanted them up to a point. Co-existing with her caretaker streak was a strong sense of self-preservation: Tracy could never push her too hard about anything because he was basically dependent on her, at first because of his guilt over his drinking, later because of the interior and exterior corrosion wrought by the drinking. Hepburn would only have left Tracy if he'd gotten divorced-and sobered up.

Likewise, Mr. Berg seems unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, her capacity for duplicity-one that rivaled Eve Harrington's. At the same time she was touring with Jane Eyre and sleeping with Howard Hughes, she was writing love letters to John Ford back in Hollywood that expressed abject devotion.

Hepburn was a hard-core liberal-she once wore a red dress to a Henry Wallace rally-but one of her favorite people was the extremely conservative Louis B. Mayer. Tracy said that she thought him "big time," and Mr. Berg quotes Hepburn saying, "He was the most honest man I ever met in Hollywood. A straight shooter. We closed our deals with a handshake in his office."

What was at work between Hepburn and Mayer was a mutual recognition that politics was superficial compared to what really mattered: show business. Mayer may have been a reactionary, but when it came to movies-a dangerous affair of the heart requiring a duelist's steady hand and a gambler's belief in instinct-he was profoundly romantic. For Mayer, Hepburn was a blessed relief from the bawling, overgrown children that surrounded him, proof that one could have talent without undue temperament. Between two honorable people who understood and respected each other, a handshake was more than enough.

There's something key about this. Personally as well as professionally, Hepburn was provocative but never actively dangerous; quite beautiful, but lacking in anything approaching an erotic quality.

She never walked out on a contract à la Davis or Cagney because she believed in the artist's paramount responsibility: to her own talent. To risk damaging that talent, or to create an environment in which that talent could not be exercised, was anathema. Correspondingly, she believed in herself in a way that is usually forbidden to people, if only out of manners or modesty. She admits to selfishness, but what we're really talking about here is something approaching megalomania. "I would defy anyone to be as good as I was in Little Women ," she tells Mr. Berg. That she happens to be right doesn't make her any less insufferable.

On the upside, this self-confidence drove her to play Shakespeare and Shaw on the stage, and O'Neill in the movies; on the downside, it impelled her to give terrible performances in terrible movies like Spitfire and Dragon Seed . She didn't know what she couldn't do.

Most actresses' careers flicker and recede in their 40's and 50's; the public's interest fades with beauty and desirability. But her lack of conventional sensuality meant that Hepburn could age on-screen with complete conviction and still compel our interest. Indeed, Hepburn's middle age was the time of her deepest work. Besides Summertime , there was a turn into villainy with Suddenly, Last Summer , and a harrowing Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night . Eventually, somewhere after Lion in Winter , she entered that phase of a career where every appearance was essentially a vehicle for the display of her mannerisms, and she became America's favorite old aunt. The films and TV movies were second-rate or worse, the performances mostly bossy and one-note.

A. Scott Berg's memoir/biography is unlike his other books, which are usually focused, painfully fair-minded and a trifle chilly, perhaps because he's drawn to subjects (Max Perkins, Lindbergh, a forthcoming book about Woodrow Wilson) who often seem clinically repressed. The exception is Sam Goldwyn, but then Mr. Berg wanted to write about a primary figure of the movie industry, which is a halfway house for exhibitionists. Most biographers write out of restrained passion, pro or con, but Mr. Berg has always seemed to work from restrained dispassion.

But here he's in an unaccustomed emotional mode, and sometimes it washes over the sides. He seems to have seen Hepburn as part pal, part surrogate mother, and the relationship was clearly a validation for him. Of course, the parents we choose rarely disappoint us like the parents who have been chosen for us.

Putnam rush-released Kate Remembered , a book whose composition had been kept a secret. The implication was that at last the full truth would be known: Hepburn had unloaded extraordinary and intimate revelations on Mr. Berg. Actually, there's nothing here we haven't already read or intuited about Hepburn. She adored Tracy and found her greatest satisfaction in selflessly taking care of him; she didn't care about having a family; and so forth. The book is far more revelatory about the author, who displays a perceptible passive-aggression toward practically anybody else accepted into the gravitational pull of the star, and also offers a curiously contemptuous portrait of an unnamed female editor at Knopf.

Putnam's release strategy was, of course, all about commerce, and quite unnecessary. Even awash as we are in the constant, maddening heroin rush of the media, are we likely to forget the maddening, valiant, indefatigable Katharine Hepburn? Not bloody likely.

Scott Eyman's Lion of Hollywood: The Life of Louis B. Mayer will be published next year by Simon & Schuster.

Even as she entered her 90's, Ms. Hepburn never lost her youthful sweet tooth. The paper documents Ms. Hepburn's standing order, which looks as if it were hastily torn from a notepad however many years ago:

Dark

Pecan Turtles

Molasses Chips

Butter Crunch

Dark Orange Peel

Champagne Truffles

Dark Almond Bark

Every month, beginning in 1981, Ms. Hepburn would be brought to the store by her driver, and she would order a two-pound assortment of her now-documented favorites.

"She preferred dark chocolate rather than milk," said an employee who asked to be identified by his first name, Jack. A Polish immigrant in his early 50's with a smile that revealed a web of wrinkles around his eyes, Jack has been at Mondel's for 12 years and helped Ms. Hepburn with her monthly candy order until she stopped visiting the store in 1995. He is an advocate of Ms. Hepburn's chocolate preferences.

"I assume that's why she lived that long," he said.

One time, Jack had to help Ms. Hepburn with the door; she couldn't figure out "whether to pull or push," he said. "She was a very nice old lady.

"I thought she would be much taller. Maybe with age she shrunk a little," he said.

Although Ms. Hepburn stopped coming herself in 1995, she didn't stop satisfying her monthly longing for pecan turtles. Until three months ago, Ms. Hepburn's niece, Katharine Houghton, was ordering the chocolate and having it delivered to her house in Connecticut.

Jack has no intention of taking down Ms. Hepburn's list of favorites.

"I'm very saddened," Jack said. "Not because she was a customer, but because she was a great, great star that just passed away. It's sad."

Ms. Hepburn's preference for Mondel's was well known among her tight coterie of friends, including Lauren Bacall-who, three years ago, showed up at the shop and "bought a little present for Ms. Hepburn," Jack said.

The shop contains one other nugget of Hepburn memorabilia, Scotch-taped to the glass next to the shop's register. Written on the stationery of "Katharine Houghton Hepburn," it arrived six years ago, when the store sent a special package of turtles, truffles and bark to her Connecticut home to commemorate her 90th birthday. The note reads:

"Dear Mondel Chocolates,

Thank-you for the delicious chocolates-how very thoughtful-Ms. Hepburn was pleased."

-Jake Brooks

Buddy Hackett, 1924-2003

Here's one of the last jokes Buddy Hackett told:

"I met this beautiful young girl, and my doctor said to me, 'You better be careful. If you have sex with her for 30 days in a row, it could be fatal.' I said, 'Well, I've been going with her for almost 30 days. Little does she know, she dies tomorrow.'"

Mr. Hackett left it on the answering machine of comedian Jeffrey Ross on June 29, the day before his death.

"He just told me this fucking dirty joke and the punchline is 'She dies tomorrow,' and then he died the next day," Mr. Ross said from Los Angeles. "It was pretty weird. That was not his usual type of message. His messages usually sound like this .... "

Mr. Ross played The Transom a message from his answering machine, in Mr. Hackett's distinctive voice.

"It's the Big Kahuna! Are you in town or did you go away or whaa-aat? See, tonight I'm sitting here, I'm thinking I would take you some place nice to eat. Boy, I'm getting kind of hungry. All right, bye-bye."

Beep.

"That was my wake-up call every day," Mr. Ross said. "He'd read me eye-doctor jokes two days in a row, and then he'd switch over to a hooker joke. Then one day he wouldn't say anything funny-he'd just say, 'I'm at the beach house, call me there.'"

The two comedians met at the New York Friars Club in 1995.

"I'll never forget it," Mr. Ross said. "I was in an elevator going up to play poker, and there he was! 'How ya doin'?' I said, 'Mr. Hackett, it's an honor to meet you-I'm a really big fan'. He shook my hand and he said, 'You know who hates farts the most? Midgets. They live at ass height.' And he walked off the elevator. I mean, you knew he was a little crazy."

How smart was Buddy Hackett?

"The smartest guy I knew. If I was ever gonna get him to sit down and write a book, it wouldn't have been about comedy. Because that was about the fourth or fifth thing he was an expert on."

What else?

"Being a man. He knew what it was. He had stage fright, but he had no life fright. He'd get a flat tire or somebody would pull a gun on him or somebody would break his heart-he could survive all that, and he could teach other people how to do it. He was a real tough guy. He knew everything about women ... girls loved him. He's been married 40-some-odd years, but he still sort of had that mojo."

Mr. Ross had a good, raunchy Buddy Hackett joke: "One of the ones that I'll always love is, he said: 'I've been with blondes, brunettes, redheads, short, fat, skinny, young, old-except it's all been the same cunt.' He's been married 48 years. It's just his delivery and the fact that you knew he loved her and that he didn't mean it as a mean thing. He was just trying to get a rise out of me."

Recently, Mr. Hackett was appearing on the Craig Kilborn show.

"He'd call me all week: 'I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna say that.' He'd try out 20 jokes, he'd really get them honed, and then he'd go on the show and he wouldn't say one word of any of it. He would just completely improvise. It was this sort of planned chaos that was his life and his act. He always knew what he could do, but he never knew what he would do, if that makes any sense. I learned that from him."

On June 28, Mr. Ross spoke with his friend for the last time. He ran some jokes by Mr. Hackett that he planned to use for the following day's roast of MTV personality Carson Daly.

"You know I can't do a roast without trying them out on Hack. And he doesn't know who the fuck I'm talking about ... you're trying out Nelly jokes!

"I just loved that. Even though he cared more than anybody I ever met about the audience, the illusion was that he just didn't give a shit," Mr. Ross said. "And that incredible aloofness, that cool that he had: He taught me about dignity in comedy, which you don't hear a lot about. Even if he being blue, or even if he was being silly, he did it with dignity. He didn't like pranks and things that embarrassed people. He was really not into all these pranks and reality shows and stuff that sort of exposed people in a way that they didn't want to be. He would never do anything like that. He taught me that concept of being dignified and still being funny."

-George Gurley

Moondoggle

"How many blond role models are there?" asked novelist Amanda Brown. The author of the book that inspired the film Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde was at the June 30 premiere at Christie's.

"Thank God there's Hillary!" she exclaimed.

Ms. Brown, herself a strawberry-blonde who attended Stanford Law School and now lives in San Francisco, feels greatly inspired by her two dogs-one a Wheaten terrier named Gomez, the other a Bijon named Underdog. "Underdog was really my only friend in law school," she said.

In Legally Blonde 2, the dog character gets more screen time than Ms. Witherspoon's co-star, Luke Wilson. The movie follows the further adventures of ebullient Bel Air native Elle Woods, now a young lawyer who goes to Washington to lobby against cosmetics testing on animals.

In addition to her fight on Capitol Hill, her makeover of several Congresswomen and her struggle to plan a wedding while away from home, the movie traces-perhaps most poignantly -her acceptance that her Chihuahua, Bruiser (played by film veteran Moondoggie), is gay.

"I didn't know it was going to be all about dogs, but that was the main thing that kept me so interested, because I have a little dog," said Tommy Tune at the Christie's after-party. Other attendees included LeAnn Rimes, David Copperfield and Frédéric Fekkai.

The display windows lining the outside of the auction house featured Reese look-alikes wildly waving at passers-by. The usually pristine white auction house had been revamped in all things pink, from the seating to the petit fours. Lounging on a white sofa, Mr. Tune sat next to Animal Fair founder Wendy Diamond, who nuzzled her Maltese, Lucky. Lucky wore a boa produced by a pet-products company called High Maintenance Bitch to the screening.

"She was barkless," said Ms. Diamond, a believer in gay-animal rights. "Lucky is a lesbian! She has a girlfriend named Minuta."

"Ophie, my former dog, was homosexual, and he had a lover named Tiger," offered Mr. Tune. "They're both in heaven now. Maybe they're making mad, passionate love there! Tiger was a Maltese and Ophie was a Yorkie, and Ophie would force Tiger to give him head, and I'd watch and say, 'O.K., whatever.' But little Shubert [Mr. Tune's current dog] isn't gay, so that shows that being gay doesn't necessarily mean your dog will be gay, too."

A lesson to us all. Nearby, Yana Syrkin of the canine label Fifi and Romeo stroked her Chihuahua, Yoda. Ms. Syrkin, formerly in charge of wardrobe for Ally McBeal, designed all the dog clothing in the film, and developed a special bond with Ms. Witherspoon's four-legged sidekick.

"I think Moondoggie really played himself," she said. "Except I'm not sure if he's gay or not. I think he's neutered."

To The Transom's disappointment, Moondoggie was not present at the fête, although Ms. Witherspoon-wearing a black shawl-was there with her entourage, which included pal Breckin Meyer and hubby Ryan Phillippe.

"I don't have to say anything to anybody anytime!" Mr. Phillippe barked when asked whether he was supposed to say he liked the film. Next to him, his wife signed autographs for her adoring teeny-bopper fans (many of whom were dressed as her character in the movie, and had been manicured and blow-dried in a candy-filled, pink-curtained room at Christie's).

Also present was Jennifer Coolidge, who played Paulette Bonafonté, Elle's large-lipped, busty best friend. She wore all black and had her yellow hair blow-dried straight.

"I seem to be in every dog movie ever made," she sighed. (Ms. Coolidge also appeared as a lesbian poodle owner in Best in Show, although she's probably best-known for her performance as Stifler's Mom in American Pie.)

Standing near a table of cherries, strawberries and mousse was another blonde, one whom Amanda Brown might also cite as a role model of sorts -Tina Brown. She attended the screening and party with her 17-year-old son, George Evans, and a nephew.

"My daughter is at camp, and she's a Reese Witherspoon fanatic. I feel like a traitor having come to see it without her. I'm going home to e-mail her all about it," said Ms. Brown.

The Transom asked her about her blondeness.

"I think it's easier for blondes to be winning, you know?" she said. "I think they can play the blonde whenever they want to, and it works better than for a brunette."

The young Mr. Evans, devastatingly handsome with his reddish-brown hair, suddenly lit up.

"I love blondes, and that's why I think I'd like to be a blonde!" he said. "I think I'd have more fun."

Would Ms. Brown be taking her son to her colorist, The Transom asked?

"He's out of control," she said.

-Anna Jane Grossman & Alexandra Wolfe

The Man From V.E.R.S.A.C.E.

Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde also has its fair share of product placement. For example, Elle Woods carries a "Pan Am" Hogan bag and does her work on a custom pink Gateway computer. (Even Frédéric Fekkai makes a cameo.)

But the strangest bit comes from Versace, the House of Donatella currently outfitting Christina Aguilera, which gets a rib-tickling every so often from Saturday Night Live.

At an early point in the movie, Elle discovers that her Chihuahua Bruiser's family is being used for animal testing at Viable Entropy Retraction Systems and Corporate Enterprises Inc., which can be abbreviated as V.E.R.S.A.C.E. Elle wants the dogs to come to her wedding, so she vows to get them out. But when she arrives at the animal-testing headquarters, she mistakenly identifies it-and who wouldn't?-as the clothing company, and shows the security guard her customer-appreciation card, which only those who have shopped at more than six Versace boutiques can get. When that doesn't do any good, Elle suggests that the security guard call Billy Daley, the Versace "customer-service representative."

For fashion insiders, this is the biggest joke in the movie. Mr. Daley is, in fact, the senior publicist on the Versace account at KCD, a public-relations firm with offices in New York and Paris that is known as the gatekeeper for the most glamorous fashion shows in New York, with clients like Marc Jacobs, Anna Sui, Zac Posen and Helmut Lang.

Reached in Paris, Mr. Daley said that he had indeed heard that his name was featured in the movie. "I just thought no one would catch it," he told The Transom.

"The whole thing happened really innocently." KCD and Versace worked closely with the Legally Blonde 2 production, sending products and clothing to MGM and to the set. Several scenes involving the brand-including a few with Elle shopping at a Versace store, and another where she finds Bruiser in front of a Versace boutique-didn't make it into the movie.

Just the animal-testing scene.

"We know that corporation is not Versace," Mr. Daley said, speaking for every American moviegoer out there. "There's no issue with our cosmetics and skin care. It's a stylistic fashion film, and it's almost better than her wearing the clothes, because they say 'Versace' two times in the first 10 or 15 minutes."

But back to how he got in the movie: "Someone said to the writer [Kate Kondell], 'This guy Billy Daley's been great,'" Mr. Daley said. "And the writer said, 'That's a great name-why don't we use it?' People always say my name is very American. They shot the scene, and they asked me to sign a release. I thought it would be reshot and the name would be changed to Vladimir Something.

"I'm sure my mom's all abuzz about it up in Boston. Regular people never think they're going to make it into a movie."

-Marshall Heyman

Lapps of Luxury

As summer heat finally begins to grip the city, many New Yorkers' daydreams turn to waves lapping against the southern shore of their Long Island getaways. But on Wednesday, June 18, chef Alain Ducasse and his girlfriend, Gwenaelle Gueguen, were dreaming of a different vacation destination: scenic Lapland.

Dressed in a pink suit, Ms. Gueguen emerged with the quiet Mr. Ducasse to speak to guests, including publicist Susan Magrino and Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten. Mr. Steingarten had just cheerfully stowed a special menu, designed in honor of the third anniversary of Mr. Ducasse's first New York restaurant, Alain Ducasse at the Essex House.

The six-course meal included a breast of squab with foie gras and glazed turnips; pasta with lobster and rock octopus; and some deceptively thin French fries that popped with tomato pesto when you bit into them.

But Ms. Gueguen was thinking of climates where the victuals weren't quite so tasty.

"The food was awful!" she said of their stay, now eight years past, in Lapland. "And it was so cold! You could not walk more than 40 steps before your face .... " Here she stopped and pulled her skin back across her cheekbones, miming cold, frostbite or possibly a high wind. "It was the most wonderful vacation: We stayed in bed the whole time and slept. I actually want go back."

But the couple won't be returning to deepest, darkest Lapland for some time. Rather, they will split their summer between Mr. Ducasse's other restaurants, which are everywhere from Paris and London to St. Tropez and Mauritius, before returning to New York in mid-September to open Mix, a 90-seat eatery on West 58th Street.

-Rebecca Traister

Wife-Beaters?

On Wednesday, June 25, supermodel Tyra Banks, the Victoria's Secret angel and current producer-cum-host of UPN's America's Next Top Model, was out on 71st and Madison with her mother and another woman, bearing up under the heat in heavy blue jeans and a newsie cap.

Among the fans gazing after her was Baruch. The 17-year-old Ramaz student, dressed in a blue pinstripe suit, asked for her autograph and snapped a photo.

"You're very articulate. I like the way you speak," she said to him, according to Baruch.

Baruch slipped the paper into his briefcase and proudly told The Transom that this was his second autograph on his walk home from 85th Street: Jack Nicholson was filming the as-yet-untitled Nancy Meyers project just a few blocks away and had given him one as well.

The Transom waved goodbye to the young gentleman and continued along behind Ms. Banks into the teen-trendy boutique Intermix, between 77th and 78th streets on Madison Avenue, where she tried on a short, fitted leopard-print skirt by Moschino.

Her companion ooh'd and ahh'd while her mother sat outside the fitting rooms, chatting on the cell phone and resting on a bench in the shoe section. But the store was missing a crucial wardrobe element:

"Do you have wife-beaters?" Ms. Banks' companion asked a salesgirl.

Indeed they did, and once she tried it on she was pleased, saying that it made the outfit look a bit more casual and was "good because it's not too sexy."

She joked that her hair was fried (it looked it) and complained about her extensions.

"I'll probably have to wear a hat with this," Ms. Banks said, referring to her television show. "I'm so sick of these frickin' wigs."

-Lucy Teitler & Alexandra Atiya

Rich or Richie?

Denise Rich may be trying to become the next Lionel Richie. Ms. Rich has co-written-along with Cedric Samson, the South African answer to Michael Jackson-two new songs to be released on July 22 on the compilation album Songs for Life, a charity effort whose proceeds will go to fight H.I.V./AIDS in Southern Africa.

The album, spearheaded by well-known entertainment lawyer Paul Marshall and King Mswati III of Swaziland-the founder of the Royal Initiative to Combat AIDS-was launched last Wednesday night in the Delegates Dining Room at the United Nations Building.

Swaziland, described to The Transom by a couple who had recently traveled there as "a land-locked nugget" between South Africa and Mozambique, has been decimated by H.I.V. and AIDS in recent years, thus prompting King Mswati III to take action and begin RICA.

His Majesty, who arrived around 6:30 p.m. flanked by a large, intimidating entourage, provided the element of intrigue as he was joined at brief intervals by Mr. Marshall, producer Phil Ramone, R&B singers Gerald Levert and Freddie Jackson, singer Becky Bealing, as well as Whoopi Goldberg and Miss Universe Amelia Vega.

When The Transom first spotted Ms. Rich (clad in a tight Dolce & Gabbana floral-patterned dress), she was undulating on a pair of glossy white Manolo Blahnik stilettos and clapping her hands to the soulful stylings of Mr. Levert as he sang his contribution to the album, "It's Gonna Be O.K."

After taking advantage of photo-ops with the prepubescent country-singing sensation Billy Gilman-"He is going to be huge," she later prophesied-Ms. Rich found a moment to speak with The Transom.

"I think it was a few years ago that Paul Marshall called me up and he said: 'Listen, do you want to write for this project, for Africa, for AIDS?' And I'm like, 'Sure,'" Ms. Rich explained, purring the "sure."

She later joined up with Mr. Samson in Los Angeles, and they quickly wrote "Children of All Nations," a little ditty reminiscent of the '85 anthem "We Are the World."

The Transom asked where the inspiration for the song came from.

"Just, you know, from life," Ms. Rich said. "I have a song coming out on Jessica Simpson. I have a Spanish song on Marc Anthony. I have a song coming out on Geri Halliwell's new album. I'm very excited."

She's also excited to be working with Mr. Ramone, who was brought onto the project by Mr. Marshall.

"The king got with Marshall and they started [Songs for Life]," Mr. Ramone said. A native of Fort Worth, Tex., Mr. Ramone-shod in a pair of aged cowboy boots and wearing a leather jacket of presumably the same vintage-spoke in a lyrical drawl that emerged from behind an orange-and-gray beard. "And I thought that's a great way to spend your life-part of it."

Songs for Life will include tracks from Britney Spears, Patti LaBelle, Judy Collins (who sings Ms. Rich's anthem "Children of All Nations") and the ever-popular Joan Osborne and Simply Red.

A Live Aid-esque concert is in the preliminary stages, and although Ken Kragen has been replaced, in this case, by a king from Swaziland, some things will never change.

"I mean, you know, really-the world needs so much hope and light and love at this time," said Ms. Rich.

-J.B.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find myself on a rainy January afternoon in 1979 sitting on the floor of her old townhouse in Turtle Bay, after years of explaining how I was not the kind of old-fashioned journalist who asked movie stars for their brownie recipes, while she dished brownies out of a battered old pan and shared the secrets of her kitchen. She was 71 then, an elegant old trout of boundless energy and surging spirit who made the young film stars of the day look like a pile of dead sea moss. The occasion was a TV special of The Corn is Green , and the interview was her idea. She was at an age when work was scarce and one appearance took on the status of a major event. Right up to her death last week at 96, millions of people still cared very much what she said and did because she represented precision, order, character, taste, standards, integrity and determination-qualities as rare as Christmas bluejays.

I am not presumptuous (or lucky) enough to pretend we were close friends, but we met several times through the years, once at George Cukor's house. Again one night after the curtain fell on Coco , when Angela Lansbury and I drove her home and sat in front of the fire while she poured tea. On weekends, she chopped her own wood in Connecticut on the same land where she was born and raised, lugging it back to Manhattan in the trunk of her car, and kept the fireplaces blazing all winter. When the sparks flew out on the rug, she shoved them back into the hearth with her bare hands between mouthfuls of tiny toasted sandwiches filled with oozy butter and orange marmalade. Once in Spain where she was filming The Trojan Women in a godforsaken dump called Atienza, I drove three hours north from Madrid past hydroelectric plants and empty gas stations until the road hit the parched and open plains, arid and dead as the Dakota badlands. Following a lonely telephone cable in the Castillian mountains, the car began to climb. Up past the castle walls of ancient Roman ruins, through dwarfed Hieronymus Bosch villages where crones draped in black raised sunburned arms to chase the ravens from their granaries. When the exhausting trip ended, I was on the top of a mountain surrounded by a herd of bearded goats, a band of gypsies from the nearby caves leaning against a rock and eating a stolen melon, and Katharine Hepburn, bent over a washtub, shampooing Vanessa Redgrave's hair. She charged the film company $5.00 for doing it. Nearly blinded by the rubber tire smoke from the burning of Troy, she hobbled up and down hills between scenes like a rabbit collecting fossils, and learned Spanish, which she flunked at Bryn Mawr. Everyone in the cast suffered from sunstroke, diarrhea, nausea and every kind of local disease imaginable, except for Kate, who nursed them all. "I'm working as hard as any human being can," she said, wiping bloodshot eyes. "The climate hates me, and there is no money, but I am hired to deliver the goods no matter what the circumstances, so I'll do the best I can. I owe it to the people who have supported me through the good years and bad. Spencer taught me to play the material, come hell or high water, never jazz it up. He never even seemed aware of whether the role was good or not. Life was difficult but acting was his relaxation. For me, life is a thrill, but acting is difficult. I come to it with a driving anxiety and I am very hard on myself, so who needs critics? Spencer never read the reviews, he'd just hear about them from friends, the way I do. Also, I am mad about the business but I refuse to assume the responsibility of selling the damn thing. When I started out, the press knew nothing about me, where I came from, who I slept with, why I wore trousers. I made up a lot of stories that were absolutely loony. Now they know a little more, but I still don't do interviews. The questions are idiotic. I know what makes a good story or a funny photograph, I am not a fool. But I cannot divide my concentration, and I hate talking about myself. It's a bore."

A few years later, in Turtle Bay, she was an easier, softer porcupine, but just as prickly. This is what I remember: "It's a wonderful thing to have a high aim in life, a real ambition. Today all you see is self-pity and 'I'm so misunderstood, poor little me, I'm such a failure.' No humor in anything. And everyone getting kicked around by society with an excuse. I will not accept excuses and I will never give one. You're either on time or you're late. You either remember your lines or you don't. You either pay your bills or you go to jail. I'm sick and tired of a whole generation of kids who say 'I'm tired' or 'I'm nervous' or this and that. If you're tired, give yourself some gas and climb that hill. Why you can't do something is of practically no interest at all to me, unless you say you've got a size-eight foot in a size-five shoe and can't take another step. To this I say take off your shoes and hop on my back and I'll carry you the rest of the way. But it's a poor habit in life to blame anyone but yourself for anything.

"I was brought up by two freedom-loving parents, the eldest of six children, and we were taught to express ourselves as long as we were interesting and could hold the floor. But if we were bores and there were other fascinating people in the room, we damned well learned to keep our big mouths shut. My parents were funny, vigorous and right on top of all the new thinking, but I was mightily snubbed as a kid by many, many people, which put a good chip on my shoulder to get ahead and show that I was worth something."

George Cukor said she swept through Hollywood in 1932 like a typhoon, insulting everyone in sight-a freckled snotty eccentric who wore men's clothes and fought senselessly with everyone in sight. She was an immediate star. "I had to or they would have had me playing whores or discontented wives married to weasels and bores. I have now lived long enough to watch women go out of style and all that's left is moron sex. Maybe they'll get tired of men committing violent, brutal acts and have the women commit them too, but that's not much of an ambition. I wouldn't play hatchet murderesses or alcoholic mothers or loonies when I was young, and I won't play them now. So the parts aren't there for a woman my age. What happened to Bette Davis' career is heartbreaking. If you've been on the screen for 100 years you shouldn't show your face too often."

On Golden Pond was still to come along and win her a fourth Oscar in 1981, but for the last 30 years, she mostly retired to Turtle Bay and stoked the fire. "Either you're a fireplace person or you're not and I've never trusted anyone who wasn't. Stephen Sondheim, who lives next door to me, complains because the smoke gets into his living room. A most disagreeable man. I don't think he's a fireplace person."

She was not a vitamin or health-food nut. She ate a lot of sugar and "anything else I damn well please. I deny myself nothing. I think what you should eat is perfectly obvious. I just don't care to eat those things, so I don't. We live in an era of making a great deal out of very little. They make a big deal out of diets. I've never been on a diet in my life. They make a big deal out of acting, and I've never found it that complicated. Spencer used to say, when they get too high and mighty about actors, remember who killed Lincoln."

She didn't smoke. She was a strong believer in ice baths, played tennis, walked a lot, never watched any of her old movies on TV because she ate dinner at 5 p.m., went to bed at 7, and got up at 4 a.m. A starchy, no-nonsense New Englander who loved snowstorms, she dove into a Connecticut lake every day that was eight degrees above zero. "I used to do it just to irritate people. Now it's become sort of a lunatic ritual." Money? "I didn't come from money, but I've made enough to be independent. I can tell you honestly it means absolutely nothing to me. I give most of it away. I only keep enough to live comfortably and keep myself from having to borrow. I mean, a year from now I won't have to come up to you and say 'Look, I was nice to you and gave you a good interview once-can you spare a thousand dollars?' I'm protected from that in my dotage. But what I've done with my life has never had anything to do with money. You are defined by who you are inside, not by what you're worth at market value. Spencer Tracy and Laurette Taylor, my favorite actors, were like baked potatoes. One look at them and you just knew they'd taste as good as they looked. Me, I'm more like the Flatiron Building. All I can say is I could never be anyone else, I don't want to be anyone else, and I've never regretted what I've done in my life even though I've had my nose broken a few times doing it." The last time I saw her was at Radio City Music Hall in 1988, when we both appeared on the last of those Night of 100 Stars TV specials produced by Alexander Cohen. I had just finished an awkward dress rehearsal that required me to descend a staircase and goose-step my way off the stage in a chorus line of Rockettes. The crowded stage parted like the Red Sea as Kate the Great, wearing tennis shoes and supported by a cane, made a beeline straight for me! "I knew if I lived long enough," she said in the voice of Alice Adams, "I'd see it all. You dancing with the Rockettes! Now I've seen everything!" That was the day she pulled me aside and gave me the best advice I've ever had: "Watch your back, kid. You're opinionated and truthful and they're not always gonna like it. I repeat what my father told me. 'Kate, you're stubborn as a horse with blinders on, ignoring trends, true to your own beliefs no matter what anybody says, and you'll probably end up alone. Pause. And thank god for that. Because in the end, when all is said and done, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that in this life, you at least made one person happy'!"

Audrey was the Hepburn women wanted to look like. Kate was the Hepburn they wanted to be like. Nobody really knows why, although whole books have tried to analyze her strange and powerful influence on her own time. "Lies, all lies. I never read them because they would just make me mad. All I have to do is make seven phone calls and there's nobody left for these writers to talk to who knows anything at all about me. So they write terrible books about me anyway, and make the whole thing up." I think the thing that made her special was her daring, giddy, fearless mix of humor and horse sense. By remaining intensely guarded about her privacy, she got standing ovations when she entered a theater. The press hounded her in the street with cameras ready, as though she were Garbo. After Joan Crawford's death, a fan who obviously had not read the papers approached her and asked, "Aren't you Joan Crawford?" Hepburn snorted. "Not any more, I'm not!" and stalked away.

Katharine Hepburn, a first edition in an age of Xerox. Gone at 96, but still stalking.

For me, one unequivocal truth emerged after Election Day, namely that it's a lot harder to be a First Lady than a would-be Senator. With an intelligent, nose-to-the-grindstone campaign and "six black pantsuits later," Hillary Clinton emerged her own person. As the wife of the President and a woman with ambitions of her own, she has finally emerged from an impossible position, her life a constant tug of war between observance of the wifely niceties of makeup, dress and deference in support of her man, and trying to wrest some semblance of individuality from the duties of official coupledom. With each step in one direction, she lost credibility with the opposing camp. A change of hairdo, a recipe for cookies, an obvious determination to stand by her man and feminists jumped all over her. Yet by offering assistance as a shadow cabinet member, she was accused of coattails-riding nepotism.

She may joke about her six black pantsuits, but that sartorial choice might just as easily have been political suicide. The nervousness about women as boss ladies can often be allayed, the various gods appeased, by the donning of ladylike attire-i.e., skirts rather than pants, that red flag of cross-dressing symbolically announcing a woman's desire to be both woman and man.

I'm reminded of a scene in Woman of the Year in which Katharine Hepburn's internationally famous political columnist is sitting on a sofa, her slack-clad legs sprawled apart while, beside her, her fey male assistant (Dan Tobin) is crossing his legs in prim ladylike counterpoint. This visual duet of antagonistic body language captures the way some men feel about Hillary. Ms. Hepburn, a controversial figure in her time who thumbed her nose at convention, was famous in Hollywood then for preferring slacks to skirts. Dawn Powell, in her novel A Time To Be Born , refers to Ms. Hepburn's "arrogant lack of make-up." Hepburn's movies play on the tension between the masculine and feminine sides of her personality, and nowhere more comically, charmingly and excruciatingly than in Woman of the Year , her first film with Spencer Tracy. Hepburn's Tess Harding-based on the famous war correspondent Dorothy Thompson-speaks several languages, is on a first-name basis with world leaders and swaggers through New York drawing rooms with a sense of entitlement, but she hasn't a clue about the simpler things of life, like baseball, love and the scrambling of eggs, all of which she learns at the hands of Tracy's meat-and-potatoes sports reporter.

In real life, Dorothy Thompson was the left's answer to conservative femme fatale Clare Boothe Luce. But where Luce was seen as a woman who used her femininity to get ahead (a phenomenon her play, The Women, dissects with insider knowledge), Thompson was a more straightforward type. She quaked at the thought of marriage and, according to her biographer Peter Kurth in American Cassandra , was terrified of losing her independence.

"Sometimes I want love … and a home," Thompson wrote to a friend (in a letter quoted in the book), but "I want so to be free. I know if I marry I'll never take risks again the same way.

Who can fail to sympathize with this lament, the smart woman terrified of being engulfed by emotion? Yet such weakness is often turned against her. Woman of the Year is almost apoplectically ambivalent towards its brainy but vulnerable heroine. Before degenerating into a mean-spirited attack on the maternally challenged Tess Harding (who, like Hepburn and Thompson at the time, had no children), the movie alternates between awe and amusement at this powerhouse woman. Her femininity is emphasized at one point, denied at another. One of director George Stevens' most exquisite shots is the camera movement up Hepburn's sleek, silk-stockinged legs that is Tracy's first glimpse of her … and one of the few times we've ever seen Hepburn's shapely gams.

It's no wonder that, at this particular moment in history, we're seeing a lot of variations of the take-charge woman in guises that, typically of movies, rouse and allay fears simultaneously. In Robert Altman's Dr. T & The Women (screenplay by Anne Rapp), the dialectic between femme and butch plays out in the sexually segregated world of Dallas. Men carry guns and hunt furry animals; women wear furry animals, skirts and jewels. It's a world into which Bree, Helen Hunt's sleek and sporty golf pro, arrives like a visitor from another planet. In the waiting room of Dr. T, the gynecologist played by Richard Gere, you could almost overdose on the clashing perfumes of a clientele that (unlike the women of The Women , who defer to offstage men) really do rule the world of Dallas-but in the old-fashioned way. When Dr. T proposes to love and take care of the happily independent Bree and set her up in the manner to which Dallas dames are accustomed, she cries: "Why would you think I'd want that?"

The other sort of movie dominatrix is the ball-buster babe-the woman who kicks butt but is reassuringly female. In Erin Brockovich , Julia Roberts may play a woman who holds a multibillion-dollar power company hostage, but she's all delectable cleavage and girlie smile. Charlie's three Angels may be martial-arts champions, but at the end of the day they giggle and look gorgeous for their Uncle Bosley and invisible puppeteer, Charlie. In the upcoming Miss Congeniality , Sandra Bullock-who, like Ms. Roberts and Cameron Diaz, is old-fashioned ditzy adorable-plays an F.B.I. agent who must pose as a Miss Universe contestant to thwart a terrorist attack.

Clearly, plenty of high-glucose frosting is required to make girl power palatable, and we're still not comfortable with women who wear pants, even if they're form-fitting black-leather numbers. Still, we who voted Democrat in the Senatorial election-whoever we are-somehow overcame all those inner and outer obstacles and voted for Hillary. Now let's see if she can pull it off.

I arrived for dinner on a recent night with friends from Amsterdam, where I had just spend a week and where, thanks to the city's years as part of the Napoleonic empire, there seemed to be almost as many patisseries as in Paris (and plenty of bicycles to ward off the effects of all that butter and sugar). Payard, on the Upper East Side (personal trainer rather than bicycle territory), is owned by François Payard, the former pastry chef of Daniel, along with that restaurant's chef-owner, Daniel Boulud. Mr. Payard's hand is evident the minute you start on your first course-asparagus-which comes with a citrus tart that is almost like dessert. And only a genius of a patissier could have devised the feathery light torte that consists of goat cheese brie layered with potatoes and toasted walnuts in puff pastry.

Payard, which opened last fall, was designed by David Rockwell and combines a Belle Époque French pastry shop and cafe with a bistro. The cafe is charming, with little tables, wrought-iron chairs and wood-and-glass display cases stuffed with pastries and cakes. The bistro, which is in the back, has a molded ceiling two stories high, and mahogany walls decorated with large mirrors and amber handblown lamps. The first time I was there, I sat downstairs, which was fun but incredibly noisy. Upstairs there is a balcony, which is quieter, but it's Siberia.

I was expecting to find good food at Payard, but I was surprised by the poor service. It is disconcerting to lose your waitress in the middle of dinner, without so much as a by-your-leave, as happened the first time I was there (she seemed to be having an off night, and was abrupt and forgetful, so I was actually quite relieved when she was replaced by a young man who was at least efficient). But with my Amsterdam friends we sat upstairs. And we sat and sat. The wait between our first and second course seemed endless.

"The service here reminds me of that restaurant we went to in Amsterdam, the Five Flies," said my husband, a trifle hyperbolically as, waiting in vain for a waiter, he refilled our glasses with wine. He told our Dutch friends, who were just a little testy at the criticism of their native restaurants, how at this expensive tourist place the waitress slopped soup all over the wide rim of the bowl, mopped it up with a napkin, sending bits flying all over the place, and knocked over a glass of red wine, which I caught in the air like a football. (When I had asked if there was anything on the impenetrable menu suitable for children, the waiter suggested sweetbreads. Maybe he thought they were sweet.) "You should invent a new category when you review restaurants," my husband added. "So far I give this place three flies for service."

"You're being unfair," I protested. A while later our waiter reappeared, took the bottle of wine from the table and emptied it with a backhand into our glasses.

"Well, maybe two flies," I said.

But the food at Payard was certainly spectacular. Enormous care has been taken to get everything right, and the dishes are beautifully presented. I began with a warm salad of skate on green lentils tossed in a ginger-scallion vinaigrette. It was extraordinary, as was the squid, stuffed with brandade and served with arugula in a lemony dressing. The crab salad was also good, very fresh, with greens in a blood orange dressing.

Two other seafood dishes were wonderful: juicy sautéed scallops paired with savoy cabbage and trumpet mushrooms, the whole dish brought together with a delicate curry-chive jus; and roast monkfish with artichokes barigoule.

Since Payard is a bistro, it serves steak, a good sirloin with peppercorns and french fries. The fries were square-cut, crisp on the outside, light and soft within. They were great, and we got a side order for the table. (The haricots verts tossed in butter and garlic are also terrific.) I loved the venison, too, roasted rare and served with quince chutney and dauphine potatoes.

For $15, you get a grand tasting of the cakes you see when you come through the front door, and grand they are. We wiped the plate clean. You don't want to miss the carrot cake on the menu, either. Carrot cake at the health food store was never like this, light as air and topped with orange blossom meringue and two windowpanes of spun sugar. I'm sure Katherine Hepburn would have put away several helpings of the warm bittersweet chocolate soufflé with pistachio ice cream, and the creamy cappuccino of chocolate and mascarpone sorbet.

I wondered what the personal trainers of the women in the restaurant, who looked like the chicken-without-the-skin and salad-without-dressing brigade, were going to have to say when they saw their customers the next morning. Then I thought of Sophia Loren, who did for pasta what Katharine Hepburn did for chocolate. When she was asked her secret, she replied, "Everything you see I owe to spaghetti."

Payard Patisserie and Bistro

* *

1032 Lexington Avenue, at East 73rd Street

717-5252

Dress: Chic

Noise level: High

Wine list: Good and reasonably priced

Credit cards: All major

Price range: Main courses lunch $19 to $22, dinner $19 to $25

Lunch: Monday to Saturday 11:30 A.M. to 2 P.M.

Dinner: Sunday to Friday 6 P.M. to 10:30 P.M., Saturday to 11 P.M.

Tea: Monday to Saturday 3:30 P.M. to 5 P.M.

* - Good

* * - Very good

* * * - Excellent

* * * * - Outstanding

No star - Poor