The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  She received five proposals of marriage. Two were from her tutors, Maurice Bowra, who persuaded her to switch from English to Greats, and Hugh Gaitskell, who had a considerable effect on her left-liberal convictions. After going down — without the expected first, perhaps because a friend of hers had just been killed in an accident — she spent six years lecturing in English, politics and economics for the Workers’ Educational Association.

  Gaitskell was instrumental in her social as well as her socialist development. In 1927 he took her to Magdalen College ball, at which she first glimpsed Frank Pakenham. The following evening, at the New College ball, she saw him again, and kissed him. Yet it was four years before they married, and she remembered that, in a year’s courtship while they were at Oxford, she never invited him to anything on his own.

  When they married he was a committed Conservative, working for the party. Nevertheless she stood unsuccessfully as Labour candidate for Cheltenham in 1935. She was subsequently Labour’s candidate for King’s Norton, Birmingham, until 1943, and stood for Oxford City in 1950. She was never elected, but she did make one convert, her husband joining the party in 1936.

  Conversely, she became a Roman Catholic in 1946, six years after her husband had converted without telling her. She was won over by reading Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Edmund Campion, not knowing that Waugh had opposed her marriage — as became apparent when his letters were published.

  Frank Pakenham’s political career began in earnest after he resigned his commission because of ill-health in 1940. He soon became personal assistant to William Beveridge, and from 1948 to 1951 he was Minister for Aviation. For six months he was First Lord of the Admiralty, and by 1964 he was Leader of the House of Lords. He went on to campaign against pornography and for penal reform and clemency in several high-profile cases; “hate the sin, love the sinner” was his maxim. For 60 years he was also a prolific, didactic author.

  Meanwhile, the Longfords had four sons and four daughters in quick succession, claiming to be able to determine their sex by attention to the body chemistry. It was a most extraordinarily energetic and driven family. “When there were eight of them at home with all their activities and high spirits and me being so ambitious,” she said, “we were all very competitive and quarrelsome. I transferred the intellectual snobbery on to the children and pushed the eldest ones too much.” On the other hand, she felt that too many parents nowadays abandon their responsibility towards their children when they reach their teens, out of misplaced regard for their independence when they are still too young to know how to exercise it.

  The Labour Party took exception to a potential MP having so many children, and when the choice came, she put family first without much regret. As it turned out, her métier was not politics but writing, which she began to do at the behest of newspapers wanting her to dispense advice on family life.

  She produced some excellent historical books and a fine volume of memoirs, although she turned out potboilers too. Yet it was not until she was in her fifties that she published her first book, Jameson’s Raid (1960). This was at the time the best account of that controversial episode of 1895-96, although later investigations and C. M. Woodhouse’s publication of the famous “missing telegrams” in his life of Cecil Rhodes suggested that Joseph Chamberlain was more deeply involved than she had believed.

  In 1964 Longford published the book that made her name, Victoria RI, a superbly sympathetic yet realistic portrait. There had not been a substantial life of the Queen for many years, and it is not too much to say that she was the first biographer to make Victoria into a living and understandable human being. It was deservedly a bestseller and she was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for non-fiction.

  Next, at the request of the late Duke of Wellington, she tackled the monumental task of writing a two-volume biography of the Iron Duke, whose unhappy wife, Kitty Pakenham, was a great-great aunt of her husband. The first volume, Wellington: Years of the Sword, appeared in 1969 and won the Yorkshire Post Prize. It was widely acclaimed and certainly disproved the suggestion then current that women could not write about war. The description of Waterloo is a wonderful set piece, and the whole book is one of the finest historical biographies in the English language. That year Longford was one of six authors in the family who were collective guests of honour at a unique Foyles lunch.

  Wellington: Pillar of State came out in 1972. Although both scholarly and highly readable, it was not quite on the level of the first volume — but then the duke’s career after 1815 was something of an anticlimax, so it may be that the problem was intractable.

  None of her later books was of the calibre of Victoria RI and Wellington, but all were sensible, stylishly written and gave pleasure to many. Having met Winston Churchill at Chartwell in 1938, she produced a pictorial biography of him in 1974, which was followed by one of Byron in 1976. She then spent three years in the archives of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, reading the papers of the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who married Byron’s granddaughter. Her biography did full justice to his lurid sexual life, though she was disgusted to find that he had once sent the same love poem to three women on the same day. Her anthology of verse by poets interred in Westminster Abbey, Poets’ Corner (1992), was an excellent idea but displayed evidence, in the editing at least, of too much haste.

  Meanwhile, she made something of a corner in books about royalty, beginning in 1974 with a splendidly illustrated and very enjoyable short survey of The Royal House of Windsor. This was followed by The Queen Mother (in a series published by Marks & Spencer, 1981), Elizabeth R (1983), The Oxford Book of Royal Anecdotes (1989) and Letters to Princess Louise (1991).

  Needless to say, an aristocrat writing about royalty was an irresistible recipe for publishers, readers and Americans, and she was a staunch monarchist, whatever others in the Labour Party might say.

  She abhorred the Andrew Morton school of graphically revealing biography, but could not entirely avoid becoming caught up in the controversies over the Prince of Wales’s marriage. While writing Royal Throne: The Future of the Monarchy, which appeared in 1993, she was granted an interview by Prince Charles, but as his separation from his wife became public, she found herself rewriting chapter after chapter. “I don’t like the philosophy of ‘doing your own thing’ which was injected into social life about 20 years ago,” she commented. “One can see why it’s caught on, but your own thing may not be other people’s thing. You’ve to try to do your best for those around you as well as yourself.”

  Having been granted permission by the Queen to investigate Queen Victoria’s correspondence with her eldest daughter, Longford published a final short life of Victoria in 1999.

  Her autobiography, The Pebbled Shore (1986), was a stylish account of the social and political scene before and after the Second World War. She was not, she confessed, an introspective person, and she was surprised at the effect that writing the book had on her: “It brought home that all these happy times really were past, the children being born, and Frank and I being young. I’d never quite acknowledged that these things were over and were never going to happen again. It was a melancholy discovery.”

  To the end she retained immense charm and great beauty and remained active, attending the funeral earlier this year of the Queen Mother, and appearing on Desert Island Discs. She read widely (War and Peace counted as holiday reading), and dabbled happily in watercolour. She was a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, 1968-78, and a member of the advisory committee of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1969-75. She received an honorary doctorate from Sussex University in 1970 and was appointed CBE in 1974.

  Her husband died last year. She is survived by four sons and three daughters. Among the children are the historians Antonia Fraser and Thomas Pakenham, the novelist Rachel Billington and the poet Judith Kazantzis. The journalist Catherine Pakenham was killed at 23 in a car accident in 1969, and a prize for women journalists was established in her name.

  Eliz
abeth, Countess of Longford, CBE, author, was born on August 30, 1906. She died on October 23, 2002, aged 96

  KATHARINE HEPBURN

  * * *

  THOROUGHLY ORIGINAL ACTRESS WHO THRIVED ON BEING AS HAUGHTY AND INDEPENDENT OFF SCREEN AS SHE WAS ON IT

  JULY 1, 2003

  Katharine Hepburn was not one of Hollywood’s more lovable stars, nor did she ever aim to be. She once observed of the young Maggie Smith: “She has the real star thing, the quality to irritate,” and that same quality was very important throughout Hepburn’s six decades of screen stardom. There were always those filmgoers who could not stand her at any price, to such an extent that when, in 1938, a leading distributor labelled about a dozen top box office stars “box office poison”, Hepburn was the only one on the list that anyone afterwards remembered.

  This was partly because her reaction was so characteristic: while all the rest shrugged and went on with their careers, she stormed out of Hollywood, vowing vengeance, and promptly achieved it by scoring her biggest success on Broadway in Philip Barry’s play The Philadelphia Story, to return to Hollywood in triumph in the film version of the play. By the end of her career she had won a record four Oscars for best leading actress — the first for Morning Glory and the last for On Golden Pond, almost 50 years later. In between she forged a famous alliance with Spencer Tracy, and their partnership in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? led her to an Oscar in 1968.

  Where so many other stars were pathetically dependent on feeling that the audience loved them, she was always an awkward customer, determined to do things her own way or not at all. When one of her later films, Olly, Olly, Oxen Free, was widely accounted by preview audiences a disaster that could be turned into a hit with some judicious re-editing, she firmly turned down the assistance, freely proffered, of such expert friends as George Cukor and Anthony Harvey, choosing rather to let the film go its own way to oblivion.

  On screen she never hesitated to play difficult, aggressive, unlovable characters, though the cynic might observe that she always (or nearly always) made audiences love her before the final fade-out. Certainly it is true, and probably significant, that the two roles of her maturity that she remained unhappy with and did not care to discuss were in Suddenly, Last Summer and Long Day’s Journey into Night, neither of which, in different ways, allowed this final access of audience sympathy.

  Many leading traits of her character, personal and professional, must have come from her early background, which was exceptional by Hollywood standards. Katharine Houghton Hepburn’s family was socially distinguished and guaranteed her financial independence from the outset. Her father, Thomas Norval Hepburn, was a famous urologist and supported her mother, Katharine Houghton, in her militant campaigns for women’s suffrage and birth control; she became the chairwoman in Washington of the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control. The young Katharine took part in suffrage marches and met prominent feminists such as Margaret Sanger and Emmeline Pankhurst. She was always encouraged to think for herself.

  After education at Bryn Mawr, the exclusive women’s college near Philadelphia that her mother had attended, she determined that she wanted to become a professional actress, and no one stood in her way. She had previously wanted to be a surgeon, but said that acting seemed to provide unlimited opportunities for both sexes and she was assisted by letters of introduction to leading figures in the theatrical world. Though she paid her dues with a succession of small parts and time in the sticks, she managed to get herself fired from, or walked out of, a number of promising situations before making it to Broadway, playing the Amazon heroine in The Warrior’s Husband in 1932. Her entrance was a spectacular 15ft leap on to the stage, which she performed each night without breaking a bone.

  From there it proved an unexpectedly quick passage to Hollywood stardom in her first film role, the daughter of a veteran who returns unexpectedly to haunt his family after years in a mental institution, in the film of Clemence Dane’s controversial play, A Bill of Divorcement (1932). Visibly unsure, and already very mannered, the 25-year-old Hepburn at once commanded the screen (which she had always affected to despise), particularly in an early scene in which she crossed the room and lay in front of the fireplace. The director, George Cukor, was to become a lifelong friend and counsellor, and had a house built specially for her lover, Spencer Tracy, on his estate. He went on to direct Hepburn in many of her most successful films, including Keeper of the Flame (1942), Adam’s Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952), in all of which Tracy co-starred.

  Hepburn was emerging as one of the most effective and individual new stars of the early sound cinema. Less successful was her return to the stage; when she appeared in The Lake in 1933, the play closed after only 55 performances and inspired Dorothy Parker’s famous line that Hepburn ran “the gamut of emotions from A to B”. But her position on the silver screen was confirmed that same year in Morning Glory, for which she won the first of her Oscars in the tailor-made role of a difficult but aspiring young actress.

  Until the “box office” slur in 1938 Hepburn’s career was an almost uninterrupted succession of triumphs in Hollywood. Her way of dealing with Hollywood was a perfect demonstration of “if you want them to run after you, just walk the other way”, though whether this was by design or because she was incapable of behaving differently has remained unclear. She certainly did not do any of the usual things a Hollywood aspirant would do, insisting on striding around in slacks, keeping her private life entirely private and retaining a distant hauteur in her relationships with tycoons unless, like Howard Hughes, they were as eccentric and unpredictable as herself. Her motto could have been “let them hate, provided they fear”, and undoubtedly many Hollywood high-ups did both.

  But there was no arguing with the success of films such as Little Women (1933), Alice Adams (1935), Quality Street (1937), Stage Door (1937) and Bringing Up Baby (1938), the archetypal screwball comedy of the 1930s; it could even excuse the occasional misfire like Sylvia Scarlett (1935), which teamed her with Cary Grant and the director George Cukor in an uneasy version of Compton Mackenzie’s transvestite comedy, insisted on despite all advice to the contrary.

  In all of these films she played variations, pushed towards farce, comedy or occasionally pathos, of her own perceived character: headstrong, independent and at times arrogant, the sort of person people wanted to shake even while they loved her to distraction. This was fair enough as a Hollywood style — what else, after all, did any important star do at the time? — though, remarkably, Hepburn continued to be taken seriously as an actress rather than dismissed as a mere movie star.

  She departed from Hollywood after the succès d’estime of Holiday (1938), also co-starring Cary Grant and directed by Cukor, only to return on her own terms in triumph with the film version of The Philadelphia Story (1940), written by the same playwright as Holiday, Philip Barry. Howard Hughes offered to finance it even before he had read it and, with a loan from Hughes, she put up a quarter of the costs and bought the screen rights from Barry for $25,000. It was a hit and within a few days of opening, MGM offered her $175,000 for the rights.

  This meant that she could dictate that her salary was $75,000, the director was Cukor and that her co-stars would be James Stewart and Cary Grant. Tracy Lord was the definitive Hepburn role and the film version was a hit. It could hardly have done more to confirm everything that everyone had ever thought about her.

  For her next film, Woman of the Year (1942), her chosen director was George Stevens — with whom she had had a fling when he directed her in Alice Adams and Quality Street. This film would also change the course of her life since it brought her together for the first time with Spencer Tracy. They starred together in nine films and remained deeply involved for the remaining 27 years of his life.

  When they first met she was 33 and he was 42. The story went that she had just come from a meeting with MGM executives, for which she had worn heels which added four inches to her 5ft 7in; Tracy was two in
ches taller. “I’m afraid I’m a little tall for you, Mr Tracy,” she said. “Don’t worry, Miss Hepburn,” he replied. “I’ll cut you down to my size.” And he did. Years later, she said: “I struggled to change all the qualities I felt he didn’t like. I was his.”

  Tracy and Hepburn were together for years, but neither lived together nor went out together; it was said that Tracy and his wife, Louise, could not get divorced on account of being Catholics, but in fact Louise was Episcopalian. Hepburn’s relationship with him was an open secret, handled with great dignity by all parties — even, surprisingly, the Hollywood press. She was his secretary, companion and chauffeur — and frequently his nurse.

  On screen they were chalk and cheese: he was the roughneck made good, she the society lady able to keep her end up in any amatory and professional tussles through class and gender. But as she grew older — and she did nothing to disguise or hinder the ageing process — her standard characterisation of the difficult but magnetic young woman, relations with whom tended to be a minefield worth traversing, gradually shifted into that of the prickly, cranky old maid whose life might yet be transfigured by affection and romance. A key film in this transition was John Huston’s The African Queen (1951), in which she was a missionary navigating dangerous waters with Humphrey Bogart as a hard-drinking captain of a disreputable motor launch. The film was shot in the Belgian Congo, from where she wrote long letters to Tracy every day.

  The transition was complete when she made Summertime (1955), in which she enjoyed a romantic interlude with the deceptively seductive Rossano Brazzi in Venice. In one scene she had to fall backwards into a canal, from which she caught a form of conjunctivitis that led to the teary look that remained with her for the rest of her career. In 1959 and 1962 came the two effective but aberrant, unsympathetic characterisations: as Tennessee Williams’s implacable Southern matron in Suddenly, Last Summer and Eugene O’Neill’s drug-addicted mother in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, both of which, despite her dislike of the roles, won her Oscar nominations.