Hughes spent the first days of 1937 in Los Angeles, preparing to break his own cross-country speed record. The flight took place on January 19, and it was harrowing—at one point Hughes began to lose consciousness in the air and had to drop to an elevation of 1,500 feet—but he made it in 7 hours, 28 minutes. Two days later, Hughes met up with Hepburn in Chicago. “I stayed at the Ambassador Hotel,” Hepburn recalled. “Howard took a suite there too. Yes—same floor. Yes—you’re right of course—inevitable.”
What was inevitable—that they’d consummate their relationship? Or that the media would seize on it? Both. Reporters surrounded their hotel and followed Hepburn wherever she went. On January 21, national papers reported that the pair would marry before leaving Chicago. They didn’t, but at the end of the tour, the couple returned to Los Angeles and Hepburn moved into Hughes’s house on Muirfield Road. Howard gave her Ella’s old room. Katie, as Hughes had started calling her, brought three servants with her.
Chapter 10
Box-Office Poison
Katharine Hepburn wasn’t blind to the problems in her career. She knew that for every hit she had had over the last five years (A Bill of Divorcement, Little Women, Alice Adams), there was a flop so undistinguished that history all but forgets about them (Spitfire, Break of Hearts, Quality Street). But there would be no brushing Sylvia Scarlett under the rug. The film lost $200,000 and was believed by RKO execs to be an embarrassment. “It is just a bad picture,” wrote RKO’s Ned Depinet to the studio’s vice president, B. B. Kahane, “and it has undoubtedly hurt Hepburn.” The studio was desperate for their star to help them help her career by being friendlier to the press, but they didn’t have much luck there. “Any one but Hepburn would see readily that she has reached a point in her career when she needs all the help possible to stay up where she is,” wrote Kahane to Depinet, “but Katharine is just one of those peculiar girls who is not logical or normal in her viewpoints and attitude.”
Hepburn badly needed a hit, but Mary of Scotland didn’t catch fire the way all involved had hoped. Hepburn was then reduced to sharing billing with RKO’s other top female star, Ginger Rogers, in Stage Door—the movie adaptation of the play that had served as the staging ground for the Hayward-Sullavan affair. This was just one feature of the production conspiring to put Hepburn at a disadvantage. The RKO rumor mill was expecting friction between the two female stars, who were not only jockeying for top position at the studio, but also had a common history with Howard Hughes.* Not since A Bill of Divorcement had Hepburn played anything but an on-a-pedestal lead, and when she found herself on set of her first true ensemble film, she felt humiliated to be “listening in on scenes instead of dominating them.” She complained to RKO exec Pandro Berman, who told it to her straight: “Listen, Kate, you’d be lucky to be playing the sixth part in a successful picture.” Then she complained to director Gregory LaCava, who, Hepburn claimed, “got sorry for me . . . and handed me the whole last part of the movie.”
To hear Ginger Rogers tell it, this type of manipulation was typical of Hepburn, who in Ginger’s eyes was the unimpeachable mean-girl queen of the RKO lot.
“Kate always wanted her way and usually got it,” Ginger remembered. “I steered clear of her, not trusting what she might do if I in any way crossed her. I recognized she had little empathy for me.” Rogers claimed that Hepburn once poured a glass of water on her from a second-story window while Rogers was showing off a new mink coat. Hepburn—who had always had money, and thus never needed to draw attention to her ability to wear that money on her back—allegedly taunted Ginger, “If it’s a real mink, it won’t shrink!”
Rogers had been so keen to play Queen Elizabeth in Mary of Scotland that she had done an incognito screen test, arriving at the studio disguised as a fictional character, a London stage star calling herself Lady Ainsley. Producer Pan Berman and others on set were apparently duped, but Hepburn, who was to also appear in the test, was not. According to Rogers, Hepburn actually kicked her under the table at one point and whispered, “Who do you think you’re fooling?” Rogers didn’t get the part—it went to Florence Eldridge—leaving Ginger free to smugly note that Scotland wasn’t a hit, anyway. For her part, Hepburn spoke cattily about Rogers decades later, mocking the amount of time the other actress spent on her hair and concluding, “I thought about it later and decided maybe it wasn’t that Ginger was so vain as it was that she was insecure and felt dependent on her looks.”
Hepburn and Rogers were sometimes considered for the same roles at the studio, despite the fact that they were very different “types,” and this went beyond Rogers’s “dependen[ce] on her looks.” In the mid to late 1930s, Hepburn still represented a patrician privilege that was out of fashion and struck the majority of moviegoers, who were still struggling through the Depression, as out of touch. Rogers did a much better job of threading the needle of the 1930s: her persona was that of the working girl next door who occasionally (as in several scenes in each of her musical collaborations with Fred Astaire) found herself in glamorous environments in which she got to wear decadent confections of taffeta and silk—and she wore them extremely well. But the grass is always greener, and Rogers desperately wanted to be taken seriously as an actress, the way that Hepburn was. “We all wanted to be Katharine,” fellow RKO contract girl Lucille Ball once said. “Even Ginger. No, especially Ginger.”
Stage Door made a modest profit—just enough to solidify Rogers’s perceived value to RKO, but not enough to rescue Hepburn’s reputation as a drag on grosses. Though the film’s plot allowed Hepburn to play out on-screen a patrician-lady-redeems-herself-among-the-plebs narrative, audiences didn’t seem ready for the star to recharge her career along those same lines. Her next film, Bringing Up Baby, would decades later be reevaluated as the pinnacle of the screwball romantic comedy, but in the icy early months of 1938 it made no noise at the box office. Neither the studio nor the star knew that Bringing Up Baby would be the final film Hepburn would make under contract to RKO, but in the months after its disastrous release (Baby lost $365,000 in its first run), they could not agree on her next steps. The studio asked Hepburn to star in Mother Carey’s Chickens, a period family drama that they hoped could be another Little Women. Hepburn refused to make the movie, and the two parties were at an impasse. And then, on the morning of May 3, 1938, Hepburn, along with half a dozen other supposedly major stars, was drawn into a confrontation they couldn’t ignore.
“Wake Up! Hollywood Producers” blared the headline of the sponsored editorial, taking up half a page of The Hollywood Reporter. It was signed by Harry Brandt on behalf of the Independent Theatre Owners Association, a consortium of movie theaters that weren’t the property of the studios, but who were nonetheless pretty much at the mercy of the collected studios’ whims and self-serving policies. The ugly truth that the theater owners wanted the producers to wake up to? That some of the most major stars of the 1930s, including Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and, yes, Hepburn, had become “poison at the box office.”
The problem wasn’t with the stars themselves, exactly, except insofar as they couldn’t stop their own appeal from turning stale. The real problem was with the studios who kept paying these stars enormous amounts of money through long-term contracts, regardless of how their movies performed, leaving the theaters stuck releasing movies starring performers their audiences had grown tired of. Hepburn was singled out for more specific criticism than anyone else, even if some of the sniping was paired with praise: Hepburn, Brandt wrote, had “turned in excellent performances in Stage Door and Bringing Up Baby but both pictures died.” The message was that it was no longer feasible for studios to throw money at great artistry; not when their losses were essentially being passed down to the small business owners and operators who exhibited their movies, and not when MGM was breeding much cheaper, younger stars like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, whose movies had so far been guaranteed winners. RKO had treated Hepburn like an A-list star from A Bi
ll of Divorcement on, despite the fact that more of her movies were money losers than big hits. The “box office poison” ad, as it became known, is a work of hyperbolic propaganda, but in Hepburn’s case, it wasn’t totally inaccurate.
RKO didn’t need Brandt to tell them any of this; his arguments against Hepburn were the gist of what the execs had been saying among themselves for a long while. In fact, by May 1938, RKO and Hepburn had agreed that her future was not with the studio, and on the same day that Brandt’s editorial appeared, RKO’s Pandro Berman wired Hepburn his regret that her contract had been terminated.
Conveniently, Hepburn was now free to star in Cukor’s adaptation of Philip Barry’s play Holiday, filming at Columbia with Cary Grant as the male lead. Hepburn had personal ties to the project: at the beginning of her career, she had understudied Hope Williams in Holiday on Broadway. Her character Linda Seton was another difficult woman, the black sheep of a wealthy family who finds her soul mate in fellow societal rebel Grant. Holiday’s repudiation of wealth should have been in tune with the times, and Grant, in one of his most charming performances, should have been able to make audiences fall back in love with Hepburn by appearing to love her himself. But while Holiday seemed to have everything—including a very glamorously styled Hepburn—no one went to see it. It was like Hepburn could do nothing right.
That summer, Hepburn retreated to Fenwick. For the first time in her life, she was in no hurry to get back to work. For years her Hollywood career had been slipping, and everyone in the movie industry in a position of power who could have helped her make a comeback had lost faith in her—everyone, that is, but her boyfriend. Although Hughes’s career as a film producer was for all intents and purposes dormant in 1938, his growing status as an aviation pioneer conferred on him a glowing spotlight. The nephew whom Rupert Hughes had once written off as “grasping [and] dishonorable” had become, as Rupert himself put it in a 1937 profile of Howard he wrote for Liberty magazine, “the most picturesque young man in the country today.” (Unable to mask his still-boiling resentment, Rupert added that he was now put “in the two paradoxical positions of being the poor uncle of a rich nephew, and the biographer of one who, instead of being dead, is only half my age. But what of it?”)
Katharine Hepburn seems like the actress of the 1930s least likely to embrace a myth of herself as the damsel in distress rescued by a dashing aviator—the inverse of the tragedy she had played in Christopher Strong—but this was the narrative spin on the Hughes-Hepburn romance as it appeared in the papers and fan magazines. Decades later, Hepburn’s documented memories of her time spent with Hughes, as if taking a cue from the headlines, were highly romantic, if not romanticized. “Howard was more glamorous than Hollywood films,” she swooned long after the end of the affair, “because his life and adventures were real.”
They were kindred spirits. Both had obsessions with health and cleanliness. (“I believe at that time, I was more obsessed [with germs] than he,” Katharine later said. “We each spent a lot of time washing our hands.”) Both used their power and wealth to buy freedom from societal strictures, and neither was used to anyone telling them no. In Hepburn’s memory, much of the relationship was about private thrills. They skinny-dipped, diving off the wing of a seaplane in the middle of Long Island Sound. They devised secret codes and pseudonyms for one another; Hughes would address telegrams to Hepburn’s secretary Emily Perkins, and sign his name as “Dan” or “Boss.”
And then there was the sex. “Howard was the best lover I ever had,” Hepburn disclosed. Of the “many reasons” the couple was “sexually a good fit,” according to Hepburn? “We weren’t inhibited people. We certainly weren’t inhibited about our bodies. . . . Howard was not shy about sex. I think it was the only thing he wasn’t shy about. He wasn’t short of testosterone. He didn’t like a fragile woman. I was practically a professional athlete.”
Lust aside, the most important thing Hepburn and Hughes had in common, at least at this stage of their lives, was that both took pleasure in a tug-of-war with the press. Both Hughes and Hepburn, she wrote, “had a wild desire to be famous.” Yet while they craved even more fame than they had, they also hated crowds and strangers. Both wanted to be the most talked-about and celebrated person in their respective fields, without ever having to reveal themselves to anyone outside of their immediate circle. Together they thrilled to outrunning and deceiving reporters and photographers, and were delighted when their names and photos made it into the papers anyway. As Hepburn put it, “I don’t think either one of us would have liked it if no one noticed us.” Such desires fed their desire for one another; each considered the other an “appropriate companion” for a person of high profile such as themselves. “He was sort of the top of the available men,” Hepburn summed it up. “And I of the women.”
While Katie was holed up at Fenwick, Hughes was also on the East Coast, where he was preparing for the biggest aviation feat of his life. The plan was to take off from Newark and circumnavigate the globe faster than Wiley Post, then the record holder, had managed it in 1933. A big difference was that Post had done it alone—a feat Hughes, with uncharacteristic deference, compared to “pulling a rabbit out of a hat or sawing a woman in half.” Hughes would bring with him a mechanic, two navigators (one celestial and one aerial), and a radio engineer. In preparation for the round-the-world flight, Katie and Howard shacked up in Laura Harding’s apartment in Manhattan, hidden from the reporters constantly congregating outside Hepburn’s place. Katie accompanied Howard to the airfield and then went to Fenwick, where she’d listen to the adventure on the radio—like much of the rest of the world. The spectators had cause to hold their breath: Post, holder of the previous record, had died preparing to circumnavigate the world a second time, and just a year earlier, daring aviatrix Amelia Earhart had vanished attempting the same feat.
This time there was no crash landing; the plan went off virtually without a hitch. Hughes landed at Floyd Bennett Field at 2:34 local time on July 14, 1938. He had completed his flight around the world in three days, nineteen hours, fourteen minutes, and ten seconds—shaving almost two full days off Post’s record. The next day, Hughes’s feat was on the front page, top of the fold, of most newspapers. Hepburn’s boyfriend was suddenly the most famous man in the world.
This seems to be the moment when the kinds of games Hughes and Hepburn had played with the press—alternately ducking publicity and courting and indulging in it—lost a bit of their appeal. Alone in a spotlight brighter than most men would experience in their lives, Hughes fiercely intensified his efforts to protect his own image. In August 1938, Dell rushed out a biographical magazine called The Life Story of Howard Hughes. Hughes contended the volume contained unspecified inaccuracies and made a deal to have the publisher recall all unsold copies, at Hughes’s expense. This process ended up totaling $8,550.32—almost $150,000 in 2016 dollars. Hughes aide Lee Murrin reported that he personally accompanied two and a half tons’ worth of magazines to the city incinerator, and “figured we burned approximately 175,000 magazines.”
But for Hepburn, certain types of publicity were better than anything money could buy. The November issue of Modern Screen magazine would carry on its cover an inaccurate implication that Hughes apparently did nothing to try to remove from circulation. The soft-focus cover painting featured, on the left, Hepburn, smiling and staring off into the distance, her head slightly tilted upward as if she were watching the sky. On the right was Hughes, his aviator goggles on his head, a knowing smirk under his lidded eyes. The caption: “Will America’s hero, Howard Hughes, marry Katharine Hepburn?”
Oddly, there was no accompanying article in that issue about Hepburn and Hughes, but in the previous issue of Modern Screen, under the headline “What’s the Matter With Hepburn?” writer Ben Maddox had posited Hughes as Hepburn’s last, best hope at proving her heterosexuality. “Before this summer is over Katharine Hepburn must decide which road she will take,” Maddox declared. “Shall she remember,
before it is too late, that first of all she is a woman?” If she was indeed a woman first, she would be “concerned only with one man’s wishes.” With Hughes, Maddox wrote, “[Hepburn] remembered she could be just a woman after all. Now—should she be? He is fascinating, and being with him is so stimulating. But he’d never play second fiddle to any woman’s career. He’s used to having his own way with women, too. Kate doesn’t mind giving in to his whims now. But could she—for always?” Maddox concluded that Hepburn “is on the verge of her wonderful discovery. Conquest of self, conquest of divided impulses, that must be her answer! It will be brutal if she pulls a boner.”*
Maddox and Modern Screen would have been chagrined to know which way Hepburn was leaning. Before he took off for his life-changing flight, Hughes had proposed to Hepburn, more than once. And more than once, she had turned him down.
If Hughes had harbored any fantasies of putting a ring on it when his celebrity was soaring and Hepburn’s career was slumping, assuming her defenses would be down, he had badly read the situation. “I did not want to marry Howard,” Hepburn wrote later. With her career underwater, feeling “obsessed by my own failure,” the last thing she felt she needed was the anchor of another husband. “Certainly I felt that I was madly in love with him. And I think he felt the same way about me,” she recalled. But when the relationship reached the point where one would have to follow the other at the expense of serving their own careers, they chose separate paths. Hepburn stayed on the East Coast, where she had the support of her family and the chance of rebuilding her career on the stage. Hughes went back to Hollywood. “Ambition beat love,” Hepburn mused.
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood Page 18