Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  From that first nomination, Hepburn vowed never to attend the Academy Awards ceremony, a vow she was not proud of. “I think it is very noble for the people who go and lose, and I think it is very ignoble of me to be unwilling to go and lose,” she confessed. “My father said that his children were so shy because they were afraid they were going to a party and they were not going to be either the bride or the corpse. And he may be right. I can’t think of a single, logical defense of someone who occupies a position in the industry that they refuse to go to the biggest celebration that that industry has to offer. I think it’s unpardonable, but I do it. . . . I have no defense.”

  At the same time, Hepburn added, she believed the industry and the public at large exaggerated the importance of the prize. A lot of it, she insisted, is luck and timing. “If you have a very good part,” she said, “you have a very good opportunity . . . and sometimes you can shine in a dull year. But honestly,” she added, “if you give an award-worthy performance, you know it. And I do think I’m terribly self-indulgent in refusing to appear.” When I asked Kate in 1982 where her Oscars were, she could not say, other than that she had given them to a museum in the Empire State Building. “I mean, if I don’t go to the ceremony,” she explained, “I can’t very well put them on my mantelpiece, can I? I simply have no right to.”

  Having risen to the top of her new profession in little more than a year, Hepburn still felt she had plenty to prove. Triumphant on the West Coast, she told her studio bosses that she wanted to return to New York, to the theater. She thought she could take Manhattan by storm by appearing in a new play called The Lake. RKO would not release her, unless she agreed to make one more picture before leaving. Star and studio found themselves stalemated, until Kate had the nerve to say she would appear in a movie called Spitfire. Feeling capable of anything, she said she would star as the heroine—an uneducated, barefooted tomboy, an Ozarks faith healer named Trigger Hicks. She demanded $50,000 for four weeks of work plus $ 10,000 for each day beyond that. Hepburn gave it her all (and collected $60,000 for her efforts) and had banked enough good will with the critics to escape virtually unscathed.

  The few who ever saw Spitfire rank it among the worst movies Katharine Hepburn ever made. The star felt the same, later chastising herself by saying, “The few times I did something for the money, it was mediocre material, and I did mediocre work.” While Kate kept few photographs of herself on display around any of her homes, a picture of her as Trigger Hicks remained for years in a place of prominence just outside her bedroom at Fenwick. “A reminder,” she told me with an arch of an eyebrow. “Trigger keeps me humble.”

  Besides the theater, Hepburn had another reason for returning east. Her marriage. Few in Hollywood even realized that Katharine Hepburn had a husband back in New York, in the business world. It appeared that Kate herself had forgotten all about him. Although she continued to live quietly in the hills with Laura Harding (fueling speculation of a lesbian relationship), Kate was occasionally seen in the company of attractive men.

  She went on a few dates with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., but the nights always ended earlier than he would have liked. She spent her sunniest days off work that year with a young actor raised in Southern California, Joel McCrea—“so good-looking, so charming.” They would drive up the coast, then picnic and swim at Zuma Beach; their friendship also remained platonic. Increasingly, she was secretly spending her nights at the Franklin Canyon house with her agent, the urbane Leland Hayward. Like her, he was married; and their friendship became something more than that.

  Hayward was virtually a singular presence in show business— as handsome and debonair as many actors, extremely tasteful, and intelligent in matters of business. He had already created a presence for himself in Hollywood and on Broadway. He was known at the time as Hollywood’s only “Princeton man,” which was accurate if one counted his single year there. His passion was women—the more challenging the better. In his aloof new star, suddenly considered the most sophisticated presence in movies, he had met his match.

  While Hepburn was outdoorsy, athletic, and liked to be in bed early, Hayward’s most active sport was late-night club-hopping. Despite their conflicting clocks and calendars, Kate said, “We were really mad for each other”; and they constantly scrambled to make time to be together. They enjoyed a sexually charged affair, in which it was difficult to ascertain who had the upper hand. Equally infatuated with one another, he suggested that he would divorce his wife, an adventurous Texas beauty named Lola Gibbs, if Kate would divorce Luddy. Returning to New York would keep Hayward in mad pursuit.

  There was yet another reason lurking behind Hepburn’s leaving Los Angeles—a man she would later call “hands-down the most diabolical person I have ever met.” His name was Jed Harris; and in the colorful theater world of the 1920s and ’30s, nobody was as revered and reviled (at the same time) as much as he. The brilliant producer and director, largely responsible for such highly regarded hits as The Royal Family, The Front Page, and, later, Our Town (also the man on whom Laurence Olivier would later model his performance of Richard III, evil incarnate), Harris had fallen into a slump in his career. He was trying to climb out by mounting a production called The Lake.

  Sinister in looks and satanic in ambition, Harris was extremely seductive—especially to actresses, who found themselves vulnerable to his promises of artistic success. He had already captivated Ruth Gordon, fathering and abandoning a child with her; and he had lured Margaret Sullavan away from her husband, a budding actor, Henry Fonda. In this case, however, it was not the fox who went after another hen, but Hepburn who approached Harris. Flush with success, the young Hollywood star dared to pick up a telephone and call him directly.

  The Lake was the story of a woman desperate to marry; on her wedding day, she skids the car in which she is driving her husband into the lake, killing him. Hepburn later confessed that she was simply so consumed with the notion of working with Harris that she did not know whether the play was even any good or not. Her motivation, she claimed, was “to help restore him to his throne . . . and I felt powerful enough to do that. Crazy! What was I thinking?”

  Only years later did she realize that she wasn’t thinking at all, that it was sheer hubris that drove her to believe her sudden status as a movie star was enough to meet the challenge. Helen Hayes, whom Hepburn barely knew, sent her a note out of the blue, warning her not to work with Harris. But after “conquering Hollywood,” Hepburn was vain enough not even to consider this enterprise a contest. Alas, she didn’t realize that Harris was sociopathic, and her munificent gesture of riding to his rescue (if that’s what it was) only angered him even more, making him hell-bent on doing her harm.

  She showed her vulnerability at the start, agreeing to a much smaller salary than a star, to say nothing of a movie star, was entitled to. Then, at the first rehearsal, Harris set about breaking her. He stopped her every few moments, correcting every move, generally insisting she do the exact opposite. At last, in a scene that required her to play the piano—or at least fake playing the piano—she could not position her hands to match the music that was being piped in and say her lines at the same time. He made her play the scene again and again, delighting in her failure to improve. When she finally protested, he said, “Helen Hayes learned to play the piano for me!” That knocked whatever confidence she retained out from under her. As a result of this relentless torture, she felt her performance becoming robotic.

  The Lake previewed in Washington, D.C., where there was a huge advance sale. The crowd was enthusiastic. “There really is nothing as generous as an American audience,” Hepburn long maintained, “especially for a movie star trying to stretch. I’m always amazed that more movie stars, especially those actresses who hit their forties and fifties and complain that Hollywood isn’t writing any parts for them anymore, don’t take to the stage. If Broadway is too scary, there are hundreds of wonderful theaters all over the country who would be thrilled to have them. Actors sh
ould act.” But Hepburn herself was not pleased with her performance. Feeling she was “a bore” in these preview performances, she looked forward to some new direction from Harris and a chance to rehearse further.

  After seeing the advance ticket sales in New York, however, Harris chose not to give the play another thought. He simply brought the company into town and opened it. “I felt as though I were sleepwalking through a nightmare,” Hepburn said of the experience, “and I kept hoping I would wake up.” She claimed never to read reviews, but after this play opened, she knew perfectly well that the critics had a field day with her. Very proudly, she recited to me Dorothy Parker’s famous review of sixty years earlier, one of the legendary wit’s most famous quips: “Go to the Martin Beck and see Katharine Hepburn run the gamut of emotion from A to B.” Kate pronounced the word “gam-MUTT,” saying, “That’s what I was—a great big mutt.” After a few weeks, the crowds dwindled, but not quickly enough for the star, who was locked into a run-of-the-play contract. She just wanted out.

  But Jed Harris was not done with her. Even though neither the play nor the star was very good, he realized Hepburn’s name on a marquee was enough to draw people in for a few weeks in any city in which they opened. With Hepburn preparing to jump ship the moment the show closed in New York, where it had made its investment back, Harris announced they were moving to Chicago and then onward across the country. At last, she put her foot down, asking why he would continue with this play in which neither he nor the public had much interest. “My dear,” he said, “the only interest I have in you is the money I can make out of you.”

  She respected the honesty of the answer and came right back to him, asking how much she would have to pay to see the show close. “How much have you got?” he replied. She grabbed her bankbook and read him the balance, some thirteen thousand dollars. He said, “I’ll take it.” The check arrived in the morning, and the show closed in New York after a few more performances. Except for a chance meeting of no consequence in a theater years later, by which time Harris had become a broken man, Hepburn never saw him again.

  Leland Hayward encountered Harris years later. “You know,” said the producer, by then completely washed-up, reflecting on The Lake, “I tried to destroy Katharine Hepburn.” Hayward was dumbfounded by the revelation. At last, he mustered wits enough to say, “You failed, didn’t you?”

  By the start of 1934, however, Jed Harris had come close to getting his wish. For one of the few times in her life, Katharine Hepburn’s confidence in herself was terribly shaken. Spitfire opened and raised doubts about her future in Hollywood; and her marriage, at last, was no longer proving to be even one of convenience. For $100 a month, the “Ludlows” had moved into the Turtle Bay house on East Forty-ninth Street; and Luddy had relocated his business—a corporate payroll system for big companies, which Kate never completely understood—to New York. At the same time, she knew that she had better hurry back to Hollywood, to continue her climb up the career ladder, and that Luddy was excess baggage. He was willing to move to Hollywood, even to stay in New York and keep the home fires burning. But by then, Hepburn was feeling more romantic toward Leland Hayward than toward her own husband, and she couldn’t bear the thought of “using” him more than she already had. Though Luddy moved out of the Turtle Bay house, he was content to remain in marital limbo. At last, however, Kate decided, “I should perform one act of generosity for my husband—divorce him.” In April 1934, she flew to Mérida, in the Yucatán, accompanied by Laura Harding, and filed for a Mexican divorce.

  Some fifty years later, while she and I were tidying up the kitchen before going up to bed, I asked why she had bothered to marry Luddy—whom I never met—in the first place. After giving the counter a final swipe of the sponge, she looked me right in the eye and, without thinking twice, said, “Because I was a pig.”

  After having practically every dinner with Hepburn that week after my first visit to Fenwick, I had to return to Los Angeles. The bulk of my Goldwyn research was there, and I had to pull together the interview with her that I was preparing for Esquire. As she walked down the stairs to send me off that Thursday night, she took me into the kitchen, where she pulled a key out of the table drawer. “Now, look,” she said, pressing it into my hand, “you’re obviously coming back to New York, and you’ll need a place to stay; and hotels are so damned expensive, and they’re so cold and impersonal. And, well, you know the way here now. So, dinner is always at seven, drinks at six, and if you’re eating with us, let us know by three. There’s always a bed upstairs.”

  She opened the door and followed me to the little black iron gate at the sidewalk, looking up and down Forty-ninth Street. I wondered if she wanted to be seen or not. “Let us know when you’re coming back,” she yelled, when I was a few doors away; and I turned back to see that several passersby, recognizing the voice, had, in fact, stopped and stared at her.

  She was smiling.

  V

  Katharine of Arrogance

  Can you hear this?” the voice of Katharine Hepburn asked over my telephone a few days later, clinking a spoon against a glass dish. ”I am just finishing the most delicious hot-fudge sundae I have ever eaten. Dick has added exactly the right amount of coffee into the fudge and created the perfect sundae—over coffee ice cream. It’s an absolutely perfect spring day, and the sunlight is absolutely brilliant. Did you send me that arrangement of flowers in New York—all sorts of lilies and irises?”

  “Yes, they’re from me.”

  “You must forgive me for not thanking you sooner. The card was signed, ‘Your Parcheesi partner,’ and so I called Marion, because we played Parcheesi every day when I was recovering up there, and she was always my partner. And she said she didn’t send any flowers, and then I realized it must be you. And I thought you really are quite silly, because you are completely hopeless at Parcheesi, truly incompetent, and I will not play that game with you ever again.”

  “May I hold you to that promise?”

  We talked on the telephone for several minutes. I could tell that she didn’t want to hang up—not that I wanted her to—that she was strangely content just to make small talk. She had told me early on that she felt her social life had been “very boxed” for most of her adult years—living in the same house and getting to know few people. And while Fenwick had long been her retreat to sanity, with few callers, I realized that her activity since her accident had slowed down radically. There was more forced quietude to her life than she liked. She suggested that I call her frequently—“Because who knows?” she said. “The next time you call, I may be dead!”

  Over the next fifteen years, I called regularly. If more than a week ever went by, she usually greeted me with, “I thought you died.” She always asked when I was visiting New York next and how my work was progressing.

  In fact, our work together—the interview for Esquire’s fiftieth-anniversary issue—took an odd turn. In the fortnight after my return to Los Angeles from our initial meeting, I learned, by chance, that Esquire had, in fact, commissioned a number of pieces on other Hollywood personalities, designating such stars as Gary Cooper and John Wayne as among the “Fifty People Who Have Made a Difference.” I didn’t necessarily disagree with their choices, but—as I promptly reminded the magazine editors—my chief argument in coaxing Miss Hepburn into our interview had been Esquire’ s assurance that she would be the only Hollywood figure represented. “Don’t tell her,” suggested the editor in chief.

  I told him that was unacceptable. What was more, I reminded him, I had not yet received either a contract or any money for the piece—so, legally speaking, I could just walk away from the assignment. “That’s terribly unprofessional,” the editor insisted. “I think it’s more unprofessional for you to break a promise you made to a writer and one of your honorees,” I replied.

  On my next visit to New York a few weeks later, I explained the situation to Miss Hepburn. “But if you don’t turn it in,” she worried, “you won’t get pai
d.” I assured her that the money they were offering was not enough even to factor into the decision. “Well,” she said, “it’s not as if I need it for my career.” That settled that.

  When I reported the verdict to the editors at Esquire, they were furious. They quickly turned their indignation into invention. As the forty-nine other authors were turning in their assignments, they evidently received an unpublishable piece from Truman Capote. Desperate to have his name on their cover, and now just as eager to have a piece on Hepburn, they asked him to write about her. He didn’t know her but said he had an anecdote in which he stepped on her foot at the theater one night. “I told you they were slick,” Hepburn said to me when I brought her a copy of the final product. “Who knew they were morons?” As a result of the incident, my stock with Kate soared.

  I returned to my Goldwyn book more dedicated than ever. I was visiting New York to interview supporting players in his life five or six times a year, thus allowing me to see Hepburn often. She always wanted to hear about my latest interview or conversations with anyone from “the old days.”

  With the number of her own projects decreasing, Hepburn delighted in dabbling in mine. Over the next several years, she consistently asked how she might help. In retrospect, it occurs to me that all her largesse—the time we shared, the meals, lodging, intimate conversation, and lots of dark chocolate (“the best in the world,” she insisted, came from a small shop on upper Broadway called Mondel’s—turtles, almond bark, and breakup)—had always been given freely, before I even had to ask. I never made a single request of her . . . with one exception. After conducting literally scores of interviews for my book, only one important source kept evading me; and I thought Kate—who prided herself on pulling rabbits out of hats—might be able to help.