I’ve done a lot of interviews with celebrities. Though many of the celebrity interviews I published in the magazines I edited were written by other writers. I did the interview myself when one needed some extra heft to make the piece seem more important.

What you’re always looking for when talking with a celebrity is a quote — something –– anything they say that’s different or interesting or even sincere. What they want to talk about is their new project, of course, which is the only reason they’re being interviewed in the first place. And they’re acting during the interview, sometimes still playing the part they played in the project they want to promote, sometimes playing the star persona they have built up over the years.

Want to know what a movie star is really like? Peter Bart, a former editor of Variety and a Hollywood producer, once told me: “Don’t interview them. Negotiate points with them.” I’m sure he was right.

I interviewed Katharine Hepburn several times. She remained a surprisingly popular cover girl for Ladies’ Home Journal during the 1980’s. Hepburn, born in 1907, needed and deserved special attention. She was on the cover of the Ladies’ Home Journal’s 100th anniversary issue in January 1984. I presented that issue to President Reagan in the Oval Office. “Great,” he said, “something older than me in the Oval Office.” I’m not sure if he meant the magazine or Katharine.

She always acted Katharine Hepburn. The nasal upper-class enunciation. The gestures. The tremor. You wondered if she had Parkinson’s and hoped she didn’t. But no, she claimed, it was Familial Tremor inherited from Grandfather Hepburn. She wore high necks and loose shirts, flat shoes, her Connecticut country look. Though we met several times in her townhouse on East 49th Street, which she had bought in 1931. It was dark, cluttered, and rather shabby. In the kitchen there was a cartoon hung above the old refrigerator. It showed horses in a field. One, with its head tilted high, was running past two others. The caption read: “She hasn’t been herself since they told her she looks like Katharine Hepburn.”

She always insisted on feeding me lunch — copious lunches: lamb chops, potatoes, salad, and pudding with heavy cream for dessert. Hard to manage and chew while balancing a notebook and a tape recorder. “Why aren’t you eating?” she would ask across the dining room table. “Eat up!” she would insist. I didn’t dare leave that second tough little chop unchewed on my plate.

She always said the same things in interviews. She knew her script: that she had lived her life like a man, that you should not blame your parents but blame yourself, that she would have been a terrible mother, that when you fail, you have to get up, go on and try again. She also said she worried that she was really “a terrible bore.” And that the audience never really liked her. Only after she played “Coco” on Broadway and received eight standing ovations a week did she begin to believe she had fans. Even though through the years she won four Oscars more than any other performer. She never attended the award ceremony to receive them.

She talked about Spencer Tracy, who was married and whom she loved for many years, only after he had passed away. She was with him when he died but, out of respect for his widow and his son, did not go to his funeral. After his death, she finally called his wife Louise and suggested they might be friends. Mrs. Tracy replied, “I thought you were a rumor.” A rumor? Tracy and Hepburn had made nine movies together and been in love for 30 years. In their last movie “Look Who’s Coming to Dinner” he seems, both in and out of character, to acknowledge his great love for her. In that scene her eyes brim with tears. She had been his full-time caregiver during the last seven years of his life even while making that movie.

Hepburn was around my mother’s age. I told her my mother had once complained that the worst thing about aging was nobody ever calls you and says something nice about you. They only call to say something nice about your children and think that is enough. My mother was complaining about the way you’re inevitably ignored when you’re old while your need to be noticed never ends. Hepburn thought that was interesting. But while we were talking about aging her phone rang and rang, and her loyal secretary kept relaying messages of invitations. After all, she was Katharine Hepburn.

I once spoke about Hepburn to the television journalist Cynthia McFadden, her great friend and the co-executor of her will. We sat together at a lunch I gave for Helen Mirren, an AARP cover girl, who was a Hepburn admirer. Mirren is pleasantly normal — far less like a star than most, perhaps because she became very famous and popular later in her career.

At the lunch I remember Cynthia said that once she and Hepburn were going to an event together and the guard at the entrance had thought Cynthia, far younger, must have been the celebrity. Hepburn was enraged. So, no matter how famous you are, being ignored when you are old — because you are old — hurts. Even when you’re the Great Katherine Hepburn.

When Hepburn was in her 40s, she had already started playing old maid roles, most famously in “The African Queen” with Bogart and in “Summertime” a lovely movie directed by David Lean, who she greatly admired. Set in Venice, Hepburn, as part of the plot, falls into the canal. She insisted on doing the stunt herself. It gave her an eye infection that made her eyes red and teary and was never cured even by the top ophthalmologists in London and New York.

Yet Mirren now 80 can still rock a curvy evening gown and promote L’Oreal make up. She’s still aways a little sexy in all her roles. Does that reflect the way we now are beginning to see women after 70? And accept that older women can have appeal? Maybe so.

In the 1990s LHJ did a series of one-shots, each focused on different icons: Jackie, Elizabeth Taylor, and, of course, Hepburn. After the issue about her was published in 1993. she was the one who sent me a thank you note in her spindly handwriting. And in 1994 her last television appearance was in a movie based on Truman Capote’s One Christmas; the story he had written for me for a Christmas issue of the Journal more than a decade before.

In truth, I didn’t remember that until I was fact checking this piece. It made me discover a coincidence I didn’t even know existed.

The film can still be found on Apple. I’m going to download it tonight.