The calla lillies are in bloom again...

Okay, I don't know whether they really are or not. But even if not, they should be, just for today. Because this is Katharine Hepburn's 100th birthday. (And the old dame damn near made it to 100 herself.)

There is much about Miss H. to raise one's eyebrows over, her public persona being, as she herself admitted, a "thing" she invented. (See William Mann's new biography for more details.) She wasn't "Kate" to her family and close friends — she was "Kathy" or "Katie" — and the whole Tracy-Hepburn symbiosis is largely myth (again, see Mann) but when you're as gifted as she was, does it really matter? Could we imagine anyone else as Alice Adams? As Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, exhorting James Stewart with that irresistible phrase "Put me in your pocket, Mike" — which we all did, willingly? As Pat in Pat and Mike (occasioning Tracy's immotal observation "Not much meat on her, but what's there is cherce") or Amanda in Adam's Rib? Would we want to see any other woman coaxing and cajoling Bogie to take the African Queen down the river? Could anyone else have chilled us as much, or broken our hearts so thoroughly, as Mary Tyrone, smashing a plate while all but screaming "I — hate — DOCTORS!" in Long Day's Journey into Night? Who but The Great Kate could so incomparably have limned all of the slippery contours of that other great lady, Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter? Or have simultaneously twitted and buoyed up poor old Hank Fonda On Golden Pond? What a career! What glories!

The other Hepburn was, arguably, the most wonderful movie star, but this damn Yankee was the best of the lot. A prickly soul, not warm or cozy perhaps, but non pariel. As James Stewart so memorably observed in The Philadelphia Story, she — no less than Tracy Lord — had "hearth-fires and holocausts banked down inside" her.

So carry a single calla lily in your heart today for Katie, the greatest actress in American movie history.