Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  Her virtue remained safe with Putnam, Kate later reported, as it seemed good enough for him just to be known to be living with a beautiful young actress. After a while, in fact, it was she who became miffed that Putnam did not even make a pass at her. Only later did she learn that her father had permitted this highly progressive living arrangement only after having privately confronted the poet. “Now listen, Put,” he had said to this sophisticated “older man,” “my daughter is like a young bull about to charge and she will do everything she can to seduce you, but if you lay a hand on her, I’ll shoot you.” Putnam soon decided to house-sit elsewhere, alone.

  Of all Hepburn’s suitors, Ludlow Smith was the most persistent. He was also the most convenient—with the mobility to keep up with Kate’s desires, socially and otherwise. In addition to business interests that allowed him to work in New York, he had his own car, in which he drove Kate to Fenwick for weekends. He had very little ego and enough self-confidence to let hers run wild. She was often petulant and always impatient; but nothing ever seemed to faze him. More than once he raised the subject of marriage, of leading a long, comfortable life together outside of Philadelphia. But she refused, surrendering only her virginity—one afternoon when they were alone in Jack Clarke’s apartment. She felt a kind of love for him—“What else could I call my gratitude for his constant devotion?” she asked me. “I think the Greeks called it ‘philos,’ ” I said, “—a deep affection without passion.” Where she had felt lust but little respect toward Phelps Putnam, she found it was the exact opposite with Ludlow Smith. She knew she was using him; and the only thing that made her behavior acceptable in her mind was that he knew it as well. She never veiled her ambition.

  Eddie Knopf’s production of The Big Pond went into rehearsal in New York, with Kate understudying the lead, who was suddenly dismissed at the last minute. And there in the wings stood Kate, a fireball of self-confidence. Not two months in the theater and she was already a star—“or at least I thought I was,” she later reported. “I certainly acted as though I was.” She was so carried away with her own pre-Broadway opening-night performance at the Great Neck Theatre on Long Island that she raced through the play, forgetting every lesson Frances Robinson-Duff had taught her. The next day, she was fired.

  Although fished out of The Big Pond, she had made a splash. Two prominent Broadway producers made offers to her that week. One came from J. J. Shubert, who suggested a five-year contract at very good pay. She refused, not wishing to commit herself for that long a period and having to appear in plays she might not like. The other came from Arthur Hopkins, who had been associated with several prestigious productions and who wanted Kate to play a supporting role in a modest play he was opening. She accepted; and the play closed after three performances. But “Hoppy,” as she called him, wanted her to learn lines immediately for another play that was about to premiere—Philip Barry’s Holiday. He wanted Miss Hepburn to understudy the lead, Miss Hope Williams.

  While Kate’s career was not advancing as rapidly as she had egotistically imagined, she liked Hoppy and she liked the play. She agreed to take the part and figured she would simply hope against Hope. “Isn’t it awful?” she said. “I used to pray for her to get sick.” Just two weeks into the run, Kate herself got sick—of waiting. In a fit of impatience, she accepted Luddy’s proposal of marriage.

  While wedding so solid a citizen as Ludlow Smith was as much as any parent could wish for a daughter in the late twenties, Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn were shocked at the conventionality of it all. For them, their eldest daughter’s impulsive marriage was an act of rebellion, a way for her to assert herself without having to rely on them any longer. All they knew was that Kate was still attempting to figure out who she was and who she intended to become. It was a trying time for Kate—“I felt I was just stepping out on a high wire,” she later admitted. “Luddy was my safety net.”

  She told Arthur Hopkins that she was withdrawing from Holiday; and on December 12, 1928, Katharine Hepburn married Ludlow Ogden Smith in her parents’ house at 201 Bloomfield Avenue in West Hartford. Her paternal grandfather, the Reverend Sewell Snowden Hepburn, presided before their collective families. After a short honeymoon in Bermuda, the newlyweds returned to Philadelphia to find a house where they could settle down.

  Thus, after only six months in show business, Mrs. Ludlow Smith rang down the curtain on her career.

  IV

  Morning Glory

  Take off your pants!” Katharine Hepburn barked at me, as I stood in the entry hall at Fenwick.

  It was an early Sunday afternoon in April 1983—cold, windy, and rainy—and I had to return to New York City for a dinner engagement with a woman who over the preceding years had become one of my closest friends, Irene Mayer Selznick. Only a few hours earlier, Kate’s brother Bob had arrived from Hartford with his wife, Sue; and in the few seconds it had taken them to get from their car to the front door, they had gotten drenched.

  While I had been enjoying myself with the charming doctor—“the sweetest man alive,” Kate often gushed, “an angel!”—and his well-read wife, I announced that I had to hit the road. After unsuccessfully arguing how “idiotic” it was for me to make the trip under such conditions, Kate said I should at least have the brains to take off my pants, then dash to the end of the driveway where my car was parked, and move the car to the garage . . . which I could then re-enter through the house after I had put on the pair of trousers that had been kept dry.

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” I said. “I’ll run with a large umbrella.”

  “But your pants,” Kate pointed out. “With the wind, they’ll get soaked.” I assured her that my plan was satisfactory. “Besides,” I said, “I’m waterproof.”

  “You may be,” she snorted. “But your pants aren’t!”

  Of course, in the moment when I sprinted from the door to the car, the rain came down in sheets . . . and I could hear Kate howling with laughter. She met me at the back door to the garage with towels and said, “Now you’ve got to take off your pants, because you can’t drive for two hours in them.”

  I sheepishly explained that this was the only pair of pants I had brought up for the weekend. Kate kindly said that would be no problem. She sent Phyllis on a mission to find a dry pair. “Go to Dick,” she said. “Or go to my closet. And if you can’t find anything there, bring him one of your dresses.”

  “I’m not driving into New York wearing one of Phyllis’s dresses,” I said.

  “Oh, you might have to,” she said, delighting herself. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. Phyllis has some lovely things, don’t you, dear?”

  “Oh yes,” said Phyllis, perfectly oblivious to the fact that Kate was now pulling our legs. “But I don’t think he’d fit into any of my things. Too tall.”

  “Phyllis,” I begged, “would you please try to find me a pair of pants?”

  “You know,” Kate began to reminisce, “the first time Spence came up here, we had exactly the same situation, and he made a run for his car.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “And I don’t think he had to put on a dress.”

  Phyllis returned with a pair of faded yellow sweatpants that belonged to Dick, far more conservative than anything I imagined Dick owning, which I gratefully accepted. As I started to go upstairs to change, Kate said, “Oh Christ, just take off your pants right here.” Before I could even protest, she assured me, “Dad used to walk around the house without any clothes at all!”

  “But he was your fa—” I started to sputter, when I suddenly realized that was even worse. When in Rome, I figured . . . and so I turned my back to my hostess and changed pants. “And you should probably change your shirt,” she added. I didn’t even argue, pulling a dry one from my bag.

  “Now,” she said with a big smile, “you’re ready to go. Dinner tomorrow? Drinks at six.” She leaned over for a hug and my hearty thanks for the weekend. While I was saying goodbye to Phyllis and Bob and Sue, she ca
lled out for Dick, who descended from upstairs, wearing a pair of long underwear and a red nightcap. His ethereal friend Virginia Harrington followed.

  “The horn,” Kate said. “Don’t forget to honk the horn on your car—after you’ve left the driveway and you can see the front of the house. Two times long, three short. One, two, one-two-three. Have you got that? One, two, one-two-three.”

  “I’ve got it, but why?”

  “Because that’s what we do here,” she replied, as though I had asked the stupidest question in the world. Then she explained it was a ritual for coming and going, a code that she and Howard had devised years earlier. I said my farewells and drove off. And as I turned left out of the driveway, I beeped the old “one, two, one-two-three,” and looked to the front of the house. Through the rain I saw them all standing in the doorway, waving goodbye, Kate’s hands reaching out wide, reminding me of the last shot of her in Summertime.

  The drive into the city took longer than usual because of the weather, but I used the time to replay in my mind the many scenes from the weekend, moments that seemed to come right out of You Can’t Take It with You, Hay Fever, and, on occasion, Long Day’s Journey into Night. I returned my rental car, and went to the Upper West Side brownstone of my former editor Thomas Congdon, and his wife, Connie, friends who had become a second family to me. Tom handed me a batch of phone messages—Myrna Loy, Sylvia Sidney, Joan Bennett, all of whom were consenting to interviews about Goldwyn. “And a Mrs. Lieberson,” he said. “You’re slipping,” he added. “I haven’t heard of her.”

  “No,” I said, “but she’d interest you the most, because you love ballet, and Mrs. Lieberson is none other than Vera Zorina,” the former star of the New York City Ballet and a former wife of George Balanchine. “And not only that,” I said, “Sam Goldwyn was madly in love with her.”

  Connie was more interested in my pants. “Where did you get those?” she asked.

  “Don’t ask. I’ll tell you later.” I showered and changed and ran off to dinner. “And don’t wait up,” I suggested, “because I know I’ll be late.” I took a cab to the Hotel Pierre on Fifth Avenue at Sixty-first Street. The elevator operator brought me to the tenth floor, and at exactly seven, I walked to the door at the end of the corridor on the left, apartment 1007-10, and rang the doorbell.

  Although nobody embodied as much Hollywood history as she, Irene Mayer Selznick was not too grand to answer her own door. The daughter of legendary film mogul Louis B. Mayer—the former junk dealer who soon parlayed his New England distributorship of films into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the mightiest film studio in history—and the wife of David O. Seiznick—the son of one of Mayer’s archrivals in the early movie business, a young studio mogul himself who quickly became the most celebrated producer of his day, forever remembered for Gone With the Wind—was a longtime resident of the hotel. Some years earlier, she had bought up several suites and combined them into one luxurious apartment overlooking Central Park. I don’t think she was more than five feet tall—with short dark hair in bangs and the shrewdest pair of eyes I have ever seen; and I know she was one of the most powerful presences I have ever beheld.

  As if her lineage were not impressive enough, upon divorcing Selznick, Irene moved to New York and hung out her shingle as a theatrical producer. Her first effort was the landmark production of A Streetcar Named Desire, for which she harnessed the talents of Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, and a young Marlon Brando. She subsequently produced such hits as The Chalk Garden and Bell, Book and Candle. It would be less than precise to call Mrs. Selznick an extremely difficult person, but she was easily the most challenging I have ever met. One never let down one’s guard with Irene, unless looking to be knocked out or thrown out. Emotional, volatile, and analytical, she took nothing at face value, probing layers beneath layers in even the simplest matters.

  I had by this evening known Irene Mayer Selznick for about five years. At the start of my research on Goldwyn, Sam Goldwyn, Jr., had said the most perceptive person I could possibly speak to about his father would be Irene Selznick; and, he added, she probably wouldn’t speak to me. So warned, I didn’t approach her until I had been researching for more than a year and could ask questions in an informed manner. Then I sent her a letter outlining my goals and included a copy of Max Perkins. A second letter announced that I would be coming to New York in the near future and if she could spare a few minutes it would be helpful to meet her. Several weeks passed before she called me in Los Angeles one night, after ten.

  She was working on her memoirs, she said, and she had a few technical questions about “the merger” in 1924 of the Metro and Goldwyn companies. Could I possibly straighten out some of the dates for her and direct her to any documentation? We talked for more than an hour; and the next day I sent by overnight mail Xeroxes of a few relevant documents—providing answers I believed she already knew. The following night, at eleven, she telephoned again, inviting me to call upon her the next time I was in New York. Many long calls over the next few months ensued, during which time she had been diagnosed with cancer of the nose.

  Before I arrived in New York, I heard from a mutual acquaintance that Mrs. Selznick was seeing nobody, having just undergone an operation in which half her nose was removed, as was some skin from her forehead to fashion a new one. I called her anyway, to wish her well, and she apologized for her inability to receive visitors. Five minutes later, she called back to say she had not seen anybody in ages, and as I didn’t know what she had looked like previously, I would not be shocked by any disfigurement. She clearly wanted company; and I seemed the perfect visitor—a friendly stranger. Could I see her after dinner that night? I packed a notepad in my jacket breast pocket.

  Upon arriving at her apartment, she ushered me into a small library, where the lights had been turned down. I could still see fine, raw red marks between her eyebrows and down the bridge of her nose. She asked how I was getting along with the Goldwyn family, then slowly—and in a voice so low I had to strain to hear—she spewed details of the feud between her father and Sam Goldwyn. I sat there spellbound, too mesmerized to take notes. Once or twice I instinctively reached for my pen, but I hesitated before drawing it. A little after one in the morning, I said, “Mrs. Selznick, I feel you should be getting some rest.” She showed me to the door and said, “It’s a good thing you didn’t write anything down. If you come back for dinner tomorrow, I’ll let you take that pad out of your pocket.”

  Over the next decade, we spent countless hours together—in person, when I was in New York, and on the telephone, when I was in Los Angeles, usually after her city had gone to sleep. Her insights about Goldwyn and Hollywood and even the world were invaluable; but she came to exert an even greater influence on me, leading me to dig constantly for deeper meanings. Her years undergoing professional analysis—to say nothing of her own insightful mind—and living with two of the most compulsive men in a community of severe personality disorders had taught her to look for the truths that lay beneath all the falsities of Hollywood. Everything had a subtext, Irene believed, an inner truth more interesting than anything the naked eye could see. She was always more interested in that which was unspoken, in all that was not said. For her, little was ever stated directly; every sentence was fraught with cryptic messages.

  As a result, conversations were like chess matches—in which Irene was always thinking two moves ahead. During one of our midnight phone conversations, for example, her second phone rang. She said she had to take the call and would call me back. When she did call—a little after three in the morning in New York—she started by saying, “No, your name didn’t come up.” I was immediately meant to deduce that she had only one friend who called her at that hour—William S. Paley, whom I had recently interviewed. Another time, when I was in the midst of writing, she asked how the book was going. As I prepared to describe the “delicate stage” I was at, she simply asked, “Fenestration?” I didn’t quite grasp what she was saying, so I proceeded to explain ho
w I had finished laying down the entire story, and had gone through it a second time, stuffing in as many facts as possible, and that I was about to go through it again, this time taking things out, letting in air, opening up windows. “Ah,” she said after my two-minute description, “fenestration.”

  In the middle of one extremely intense late-night conversation in apartment 1007, a siren outside sounded, and she saw my eyes move toward the window and hold there one beat too long. “Well,” she said, “I just lost you. You were gone. We’ll pick up this story next time.”

  It took me two days to figure out what she meant when she described a beautiful chorus girl her father had been attracted to as a “double-gater”—someone who swings both ways.

  She had a wicked laugh, over which she would occasionally lose control; and nothing ever got past her. Her response to anything new, shocking, or hard to believe was, “You go to hell, go right to hell!”

  “So, how did you get on with that brother?” Irene asked that wet Sunday night, not four hours after I had left Fenwick. We went into the cozy library, where we ritually sat for drinks. I went to the rear closet, next to an exquisite picture of a little girl by Mary Cassatt, and fetched a canister of thin wheat crackers, while she pulled from the refrigerator a crockery jar of herring and a chilled bottle. “Cary’s aquavit,” she always called it, a rare brand her longtime friend Mr. Grant had introduced to Irene years earlier. Because it apparently could not be obtained outside Sweden, he always kept her stocked with a case of it. “Oh, the chemistry,” she never failed to say in response to the initial reaction in our mouths of the herring with the wheat and the aquavit. After a few gentle moans of ecstasy, and a toast to Cary, she said, “You never told me you knew my friend Kate.”