Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  I explained that until a week prior I had not known Katharine Hepburn but that over the last few days a friendship had instantly unfolded. I also told Irene that I knew that people in her position were often approached by writers in their efforts to get to more famous people; and though I knew of the close relationship between the two women, I never wanted Irene to think for a minute that that was why I had been spending so much time with her. (She had, for example, recently befriended a man whom she unmasked as someone who really wanted to meet Kitty Carlisle, the widow of Moss Hart.) Similarly, it had not been until my second day at Fenwick that I had told Kate of my friendship with Irene. This information had clearly prompted a call upon my departure, one that came after fifty years of ups and downs between them, a complex relationship in which each clearly admired the other despite diametrically opposed approaches to life.

  After talking about Kate all through dinner and into the early morning, I realized I was about to become a Ping-Pong ball in a game of two experts who played hard and fast. Toward two, Irene got up from her chair, clasped my shoulder (rather melodramatically, I thought at first), and said, “You must go to her.”

  I realized she was dead serious and, as always with Irene, obviously meant more than the literal. I’m sure I looked puzzled at her remark.

  “Kate has nobody,” Irene said, with a touch of pity in her voice, “nobody she can really talk to. She has spent so many years keeping people away, now nobody really comes around.” I said that sounded a little extreme, that she seemed to have an active social life, with people calling and knocking on her door all the time. “But nobody she can talk to,” said Irene, “certainly not that insane brother. Who’s still alive who knew George Cukor? Who knows who Grady Sutton is? Lowell Sherman? Dorothy Arzner? Everyone’s either dead or doesn’t know who they were when they were alive.”

  In a low voice, she said that she loved Kate—“Sister Kate,” she signed her letters to Irene, referring to more than a popular song from their youths—and that the greatest favor she could now do for her friend was to present me to her. I said that I did not see the need for taking sides, that we were all friends here. But Irene said that Kate was quickly going to become even more insistent about her friendship with me, and that I must not fail her, that on those occasions when both would be calling, and I could respond to but one of them, I must “always be there for Kate.” Boy, I thought, sitting in her vast living room—with a stunning Matisse (looking all too much, I thought, like Jennifer Jones, David Selznick’s second wife)—there’s a lot written between these lines. As Irene showed me to the front door, she repeated, “Go to her.”

  I did—the next night, for dinner . . . and the next few nights after that. The drill was generally the same, with Phyllis sitting with us through the meal, occasionally chiming in with some funny observation, then discreetly disappearing so that Kate and I could talk alone. The only part of the dinner routine at Hepburn’s that I didn’t enjoy was that she ate so fast. Sometimes I’d just be finishing my soup while she was impatiently waiting to move on to dessert. In an aside, I once quietly commented to Phyllis that I had heard that many people didn’t like dining at Schönbrunn Palace with the Emperor Franz Josef because he ate so fast, and the half-eaten servings of the guests were cleared as soon as the emperor had finished each course. “What are you two muttering over there?” Kate asked, never wanting to be excluded from any conversation. “Oh,” Phyllis explained, “Mr. Berg was just saying that he thinks of us as royalty.” To this day, I’m not sure how clever Phyllis was.

  Periodically, I would draw Phyllis into the conversation by asking about her background, and Kate would spur her on, insisting, “She has some of the greatest stories in the world, and she’ll take them all to her grave.”

  Indeed, Phyllis Wilbourn was born in England shortly after the turn of the century and trained as a nurse. Sometime in the twenties, the English actress Constance Collier, who was diabetic, decided to settle in America, and she wanted to take a full-time nurse to provide her daily injections of insulin. Phyllis took the job; and through Miss Collier got to know the entire British movie colony in Hollywood—including Ronald Colman, Noel Coward, and, most especially, Charlie Chaplin. Miss Collier—as Phyllis always referred to her—died in 1955. She left Phyllis some pieces of jewelry and furniture and some money, but not enough to insure the future of a middle-aged woman. “Miss Garbo wanted me to look after her,” Phyllis cheerily told me one night, “but then Miss Hepburn stepped in and swept me away, thank goodness.” I asked Phyllis what would have been wrong with looking after Greta Garbo, and Kate interrupted to say, “Oh Christ, I’m much more fun than Garbo.”

  “Oh yes,” Phyllis concurred, “I hear Miss Garbo just sits in that gloomy apartment and stares at the East River all day. Not that I wouldn’t mind a few days of rest here and there.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to rest, dearie,” said Kate, “when you’re dead.”

  “Oh yes,” said Phyllis, in one of those moments when she seemed to turn into Nigel Bruce to Hepburn’s Basil Rathbone, “I suppose I will.”

  In time, I came to regard my dinners with Kate and Phyllis as my own personal production of Arsenic and Old Lace. These “two old spinsters”—Kate’s phrase, not mine—constantly bickered and amused each other, each looking out for the other in a way that was most touching. I can hardly recall an evening in which Kate did not comment—often in Phyllis’s presence—on how indispensable “Miss Phyllis” was to her existence, how she was a “blessing,” an “angel,” a “Godsend.” Periodically Kate reminded me to “speak up—because Phyllis is turning as deaf as a post.” Just as often, if Phyllis found me alone, she would tactfully suggest that I talk a little louder, as “Miss Hepburn is losing her hearing.” In truth, I didn’t really find it to be the case with either of them.

  Despite their employer-employee relationship—“Phyllis is richer than all of us!” Kate would often say. “God knows what she does with her money!”—Kate and Phyllis were like an old married couple, completely onto each other’s foibles and idiosyncrasies, and always mindful of each other’s needs. Although many people over the years have made certain assumptions about Miss Hepburn and her “companion,” there was nothing even vaguely sexual about their alliance. They simply cared for each other, even loved each other . . . and every night, Phyllis hopped onto a bus or (entering her eighties) popped into a cab and went to her own nicely furnished apartment uptown.

  In some ways, however, their relationship hardly differed from Kate’s marriage to Luddy. It was all in service of Kate. For the Ludlow Ogden Smiths, the honeymoon was over within two weeks, when she realized she was happier standing by in the wings of a full house on Broadway than sitting in an empty manor house in Pennsylvania. At her urging, they moved into a small apartment Luddy kept at 146 East Thirty-ninth Street. There she insisted he change his name to S. Ogden Ludlow—just so that she would not be Kate Smith. The name was simply too plain, she insisted, to say nothing of its being that of a popular, overweight singer. Mr. Smith obliged; and once settled in Manhattan, Katharine Hepburn Ludlow went hat in hand to Arthur Hopkins. He said he had been expecting her and that her old job awaited.

  One night, and one night only, the understudy did get to go on for Hope Williams in Holiday. That performance made her realize just how wonderful the star was. While Kate had previously enjoyed what Miss Williams had done with the role of Linda Seton (the unconventional daughter in an upper-class family who falls in love with her sister’s unconventional suitor), those two hours onstage made her positively worshipful. While she felt she had performed the part well enough, she now realized that Williams had played it “brilliantly,” always making the aggressive character extremely attractive.

  Hepburn liked Williams’s portrayal enough to start imitating aspects of it and incorporating them into her own persona—nuances that softened some of her youthful stridency. Where Hepburn had a pushy, overeager walk, for example, Hope Williams had
a sophisticated, arm-swinging stride . . . and always a light touch instead of a heavy hand, insouciance instead of arrogance, a sense of fun. A genuine New York socialite who wore her hair bobbed and parted on one side, she was, Hepburn described, “half boy, half woman.” No performer had a greater influence on the young actress; and Kate stayed in touch with her for the rest of her life, into Williams’s nineties. “Without Hope Williams,” Kate said many times, “Katharine Hepburn would not have gone very far.”

  Hepburn’s theatrical career over the next two years made that very point. Choosing not to have an agent, she would sit in producers’ offices and get parts for herself—giving charming interviews and readings. More than once the jobs were as understudies to the female leads, and more than once she got fired. She was clearly a powerful presence—a different look and sound—one to which people reacted strongly, favorably or otherwise. She had all the makings of a star; the mixture just hadn’t yet come to a full boil.

  Even after several more plays, including a season of summer stock at the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and another with the Ivoryton Players (in a charming theater in Ivoryton, Connecticut, a short drive from Fenwick), Katharine Hepburn was still getting fired almost as often as she was hired. The problem was not, as was often suspected, her know-it-all attitude and troublesome stubbornness. It was rather, as playwright Philip Barry told her when he suggested she be replaced before opening in the lead role in his play The Animal Kingdom, because she was “simply no good.”

  Undaunted, Kate continued to make the rounds, acquiring contacts and becoming known. She made fast friends with a fellow student of Miss Robinson-Duff named Laura Harding, with whom she costarred in Stockbridge. Laura was the perky daughter of a financier and later an heiress to the American Express fortune. Living in a Fifth Avenue mansion, Laura had the kind of wealth the public later ascribed to Hepburn. In truth, Kate credited Laura for introducing her to such grandeur. “Laura thought I was fascinating, as fascinating as I thought she was,” Kate recalled, “and I think we brought out the best in each other.” After playing together in the summer of 1930, they carried their friendship into the city, where they staked out producers’ offices together.

  One day they heard about a theatrical troupe being formed that was holding an organizational meeting that very night—The Group Theatre. Kate and Laura went to hear Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford talk about this exciting new venture. The two novices were fired up by all the enthusiasm in the room, until Strasberg said, “And we will do all kinds of plays and play all kinds of parts. And everybody will be equal. One week you’ll be the star, and in the next play you’ll carry a spear.” That was all Kate needed to hear. She stood up, said, “Not me,” and walked out of the hall.

  In early 1932 a leading role fell from the skies into her lap, in a play called The Warrior’s Husband. The author, Julian Thompson, had already written a one-act version of the love affair between Theseus and Antiope, the sister of the Queen of the Amazons; and after a successful production at The Comedy Club in New York, he expanded the work into a full-length play. Hope Williams had originally starred as Antiope, and the playwright hoped she would reprise the role. By the time the new play was finished, however, she had a prior commitment she would not break. The producers naturally turned to her recent understudy, the athletic Miss Hepburn, who would be required to make her entrance bounding down stairs, three at a time, carrying a stag over her shoulder. A few anxious weeks for Hepburn passed while the producers sought bigger names for the part. In the end they settled on her.

  “I knew it was a great role for me,” Kate told me one night after dinner, “—very showy.” She got to wear a dazzling costume—a metallic tunic with a spiraled cone over each breast, an ornate helmet, and silver leather shin guards “that would make anybody’s legs look good.” And her entrance, which concluded with her throwing the stag to the ground then collapsing to one knee, brought the house down every night. The play received mixed notices, but Hepburn received raves and became the talk of the town. It was only a matter of time before Hollywood would knock on her door.

  “Here’s the moment I really got lucky,” Hepburn would later pinpoint, “—right place at the right time.” At that moment, she explained, David O. Selznick, then head of production for RKO in Hollywood, was preparing a film version of a Clemence Dane play called A Bill of Divorcement for John Barrymore, the greatest actor of the day. Selznick and the director, George Cukor, were consciously looking to create a new movie star by casting a first-time film actress in the ingenue role, Barrymore’s daughter—a part that had made a star of Katharine Cornell a decade earlier.

  Hepburn’s timing was more exquisite than that. Hollywood was just coming out of the tailspin it had entered five years earlier when The Jazz Singer opened and introduced talking pictures. The careers of most of the great silent stars had dissipated, some overnight, and the producers had become desperate to fill the vacuum. They combed legitimate theaters across the country for promising new directors, playwrights, and, most especially, actors. It was no longer enough for actors to have faces the public liked. They also needed good voices.

  Although most of the silent-screen stars with foreign accents were the first to plummet to oblivion—Vilma Banky, Pola Negri, Nazimova, to name but a handful—the mysterious young actress from Sweden became one of the last to subject her voice to public scrutiny and was greeted with even greater applause. In becoming the greatest of the silent-screen stars to make the leap to talking film stardom, Greta Garbo also changed the public’s attitudes toward beauty. Before Garbo, most leading ladies were rounder of face and fleshier of body, more curves than angles. As Irene Selznick had reminded me that first night we talked about Hepburn, “Producers were desperate to find an American Garbo—somebody with her looks but an all-American attitude.”

  From a friend in New York, Selznick’s executive assistant Merian Cooper had received a photograph of the young actress in The Warrior’s Husband. “What legs!” Irene Selznick gasped to her husband when she saw the publicity still; and he ordered his East Coast staff to make a screen test. Hepburn welcomed the opportunity, but when it came time to shoot the test, she refused to play the scene they handed her. She said she preferred to perform a scene from Holiday, a part she had honed and which would show her off to better advantage, rather than one she was stepping into cold. She asked her friend Alan Campbell, a handsome actor who would later marry Dorothy Parker, to play in the scene with her.

  The test did not bowl over either George Cukor (a recent transplant from a theater company in Rochester, New York) or David Selznick. There was something jerky about Hepburn’s movements and jarring about her voice. But Cukor liked one particular moment, when she lowered a glass and set it on the floor, a moment he found real and theatrical and graceful at the same time. “Original,” weighed in Irene Selznick upon seeing the test.

  David Selznick offered the twenty-five-year-old untried film actress a respectable $500-a-week contract, which Hepburn refused. He kept returning in $250 increments, until he had climbed to three times his starting offer. (Actually, he offered her $1,250 with a four-week guarantee; but Hepburn said she preferred three weeks at $1,500, thus setting her rate higher than she had any right to.) The producer agreed. Luddy was prepared to go west with his wife and stay throughout the filming; but Kate asked him to remain in New York. On July i, 1932, she boarded the Twentieth Century with her friend Laura Harding instead. They changed trains in Chicago, catching the Super Chief to Los Angeles.

  Excited about the journey, Kate found the journey passing quickly until the first night on the Super Chief, when she went back to the observation car for some fresh air and a glimpse of the moon. As she opened the rear door of the last car and walked onto the platform, something flew into her left eye. Each blink made it feel worse. Rushing to a mirror, she saw the sclera turning crimson. She suffered through the rest of the trip, hoping to see an eye doctor upon her arriv
al. Her eyelids began to swell.

  Attached to their train was the private railway car of Florenz Ziegfeld, then fatally ill, traveling with his wife, Billie Burke. Unbeknownst to Kate, Miss Burke—who would later become best known for her role as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, in The Wizard of Oz—was coming to Hollywood as well, to play Hepburn’s mother in A Bill of Divorcement. (The job, Kate would soon learn, was just another example of George Cukor’s legendary generosity toward his friends.) Before pulling into the Pasadena station, Kate—then in considerable pain to say nothing of dismay over her appearance—changed into the special outfit she had bought for her July Fourth arrival, the latest design from Elizabeth Hawes, the most expensive couturier in New York.

  “Anybody who went to Elizabeth Hawes,” Irene Selznick later remarked, “was out to make a statement.” What a statement this was! Hepburn wore a gray silk suit, an extremely tailored, collarless tailcoat and almost ankle-length skirt with a ruffled turtleneck blouse; her gloves, pumps, and purse were navy blue. The crowning touch was a straw toque hat, one she later remarked that “made me look like I was wearing a beanbag on my head.” Said Mrs. Selznick, “This was an outfit that cried out, ‘I’m different. I’m special. Watch out!’ ”

  Waiting for Hollywood’s latest arrivals were two men who had become Kate’s West Coast agents, Leland Hayward and Myron Selznick, David’s brother. Laura Harding immediately recognized the former, one of the most urbane men in show business, a handsome swain she had known from her debutante days in Manhattan. The other was long considered one of Hollywood’s liveliest characters, not the handsomest man in town but certainly one of the most amusing. Kate delighted in retelling what she later heard he had said when she stepped off the train: “Jesus, they’re paying fifteen hundred dollars a week for that!”