Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  Most of the Hartford crowd had left Fenwick by mid-September, but the big wooden Hepburn house, built on brick piles, was more than a summer cottage. Kate intended to stay there indefinitely—until the afternoon of the twenty-first, when a hurricane, which had been threatening the eastern seaboard all week, gusted northward, heading right for the Connecticut River. Kate swam and golfed that morning, but by the afternoon, the waters had turned ferocious, swamping the lawn and pounding against the house. After the chimneys toppled, the windows imploded, and a wing of the house snapped off, Kate, her mother, her brother Dick, and the cook fled to higher ground. They looked back and saw their uprooted house wash out to sea.

  “I think,” said Kate looking back on that entire year, “God was trying to tell me something.”

  VI

  In Bloom Again

  In 1929 book editor Maxwell Perkins joined Ernest Hemingway in Key West for eight days of fishing. Toward the end of his visit, the editor looked at the panorama of life there in the Gulf Stream and asked his author why he didn’t write about it. Just then a big, clumsy bird flew by “I might someday but not yet,” Hemingway said. “Take that pelican. I don’t know yet what he is in the scheme of things here.”

  During the ten years I worked on my biography of Samuel Goldwyn, I thought of Katharine Hepburn as my “pelican”—this unusual creature that was so much a part of the Hollywood landscape but somehow always flapping above it. I used my understanding of her role in the motion-picture community to measure when I was ready to stop researching and begin writing.

  She proved to be a good yardstick. Although she never worked with Samuel Goldwyn, her name surfaced practically every day, either in a document or during an interview. In fact, she provided a most pungent comment about Sam and Frances Goldwyn herself, observing, “You always knew where your career in Hollywood stood by where you sat at the Goldwyn table.” For somebody who considered herself a Hollywood outsider, she left lasting impressions there over six decades.

  Lucille Ball (who broke in as a “Goldwyn Girl” before attaining costar status in Stage Door) remembered Hepburn with adoration and admiration. “We all wanted to be Katharine,” she said, thinking mostly of Kate’s self-assuredness. “Even Ginger. No, especially Ginger.” Joan Bennett from Little Women (who had first worked for Goldwyn as a child in silent pictures) said, “Kate was always the star, there was no mistake about that. But she was always busy giving everybody advice. But it was good advice.” Joseph L. Mankiewicz (who directed Guys and Dolls for Goldwyn) was talking about Hollywood’s bringing out the best and the worst in people when her name entered the conversation. “You know,” he said, to illustrate his point, “Katharine Hepburn actually spat at me.” As I was wondering whether he was describing the worst being brought out in him or in her, he sheepishly added, “I had it coming.”

  By the time I met Edith Mayer Goetz, she had not spoken to her sister, Irene Selznick, for about a decade. (“We fought over who was top dog, socially, in town,” said Irene dismissively, from which I was to infer that there had been seventy years of sibling rivalry, the causes of which Edie was too superficial to understand.) When I interviewed her, Mrs. Goetz brought up Hepburn’s name, bragging how she and Spencer Tracy used to come to her magnificent art-filled house in Holmby Hills. “Oh, the vulgarity,” Irene groaned of the boast when I told her, “and the falsity.” I was surprised myself at the claim, as Kate had told me she and Tracy saw few people as a couple, and the Goetzes were hardly on their social roster.

  I asked Mrs. Goetz about their “friendship.” Without missing a beat, Edie produced the guest lists of every one of her fabled parties, and there, indeed, were Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy attending a party for the newlyweds Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow. (“I never really cared for Frank,” Kate later told me, “and you must never ask me about the girl.” I later learned that she considered Mia Farrow’s father, an Australian-born writer-director named John, so “depraved” that there was “no way that girl could have any moral structure to her life.”) “But Spence and Frank were friends, and he liked to go out, and so we went to that ‘wedding party’—in separate cars. But, honestly, I don’t remember seeing the inside of the Goetz house more than twice in my life.”) As I was leaving my interview with Mrs. Goetz, her butler (whom, she proudly told me, she had lured from Buckingham Palace) had evidently fallen asleep on the job and was nowhere to be found. My hostess herself walked me to the door, where I had trouble figuring out the unusual handle. “Mrs. Goetz,” I said, after fumbling for a few seconds, “can you help me get this door open?”

  “No,” she replied. “Doors have always been opened for me.” (Irene howled about that for years . . . and trotted out the line almost every time I left her apartment.)

  Of course, no conversation with George Cukor was complete without some reference to Kate, with whom I think he had more fun than anybody on earth. And yet Kate had always felt she played second fiddle in his life. They worked together nearly a dozen times, he was her landlord for years, and she was the only person licensed to walk into his house unannounced—whether it was a weeknight dinner party (“He always seated me below the salt, usually at the very end of the table with Irene Selznick”), Saturday garden parties where, decade after decade, the other great actresses could let down their hair and pick up acting pointers . . . or even the private Sunday pool parties for men only. But Kate knew the leading lady in George’s life was Sam Goldwyn’s wife, Frances.

  As theater novices in upstate New York, they had lived in the same boardinghouses and had become instant friends. Something of an outcast, he found a great admirer in Frances, who appreciated this “angel,” a generous soul who took her under wing and shared his wealth of artistic ideas. For his part, he enjoyed having a Galatea who was such a quick and appreciative study, an icy beauty. Their friendship deepened over the next fifty years, during which time “George’s harem,” as Frances Goldwyn often referred to his coterie of famous Hollywood women, widened. Even with Cukor’s constant devotion, from the 1930s on, Frances found herself admitting, “I’m really his second favorite. Kate’s his first.” In her mind, she invented a rivalry for his affections.

  Kate found such talk ludicrous. “George and I adored each other,” she said. “But whenever things got personal, I’m sure he went to Frances first. He and I had a wonderful rapport . . . but they had a history together. Trust. A deep trust.” While Mrs. Goldwyn and Miss Hepburn never became friends, they were always cordial with each other. Upon Sam Goldwyn’s death in 1974, his son learned that there was an extra crypt in the family plot for George Cukor. When the younger Goldwyn raised this subject with his mother, Frances laughed gently and said, “Well . . . at least Kate won’t get him there.”

  In her first fifteen months of widowhood, Frances suffered from a fast-metastasizing cancer of the nose and trachea, which invaded her brain. Kate fondly remembered the special attention George paid to her during that period. She entertained them for dinner on several occasions, and every time the weakening Frances’s nose would run or a little bit of food would dribble from the side of her mouth, George was there to dab her face with a handkerchief. Frances died in 1976 and was buried alongside her husband.

  On January 24, 1983—just a few months before I had met Hepburn—George Cukor died at the age of eighty-three. Kate had no idea that in the hours after his death, Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., had immediately informed Cukor’s executor that Frances had prearranged for George’s burial. The executor found as much in Cukor’s will, and those wishes were observed. He rests eternally alongside the Goldwyns (and Frances’s batty mother) in the unmarked Little Garden of Constancy, a large private plot within the walled Garden of Honor, which sits behind two locked iron doors, accessible only by private key, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. The day I researched the site for Goldwyn, I noticed the grave of Spencer Tracy, only a few gardens away. “How fascinating!” Kate said upon learning this information. “I never knew . . . and I’ve
never been there. . . . You say you need a key to get in? How extraordinary!” Then, with the catchphrase she always used to express that there was nothing more to say on a subject, she added a world-weary, “Life, life, life.”

  Immediately after the hurricane of 1938 had blown past Fenwick, the Hepburns began reconstructing their house. “We learned a lesson from ‘The Three Little Pigs,’ ” said Kate, “and built with brick this time.” Choosing the same site, they raised the property by three feet. With the passage of another half-century, Kate realized they had woefully undercalculated, as future storms periodically pushed waters through the ground floor of the house and washed away a little more of their beach each year. In the days following the great hurricane, Kate combed the sand and recovered a dozen of her mother’s silver place settings and her complete tea service. After all the upheaval of 1938, two other important pieces of her life remained.

  For almost three years, Katharine Hepburn had been keeping company with another beau, far and away the most exciting and complicated of them all—Howard Hughes. The heir to the Hughes Tool Company, a motion-picture producer, a celebrated aviator, and a notorious playboy, the tall and handsome Hughes had been smitten with Katharine Hepburn since she first appeared on the screen. Orphaned as a teenager, he followed his uncle Rupert, a hugely successful writer (for Goldwyn) to Hollywood. He dallied with movie stars, falling in love with the silent-screen queen Billie Dove, who was five years his senior. By 1935, however, his eyes had turned toward Katharine Hepburn.

  In early 1936, while she was filming Sylvia Scarlett just above Trancas Beach, Kate and George Cukor used to have their staffs prepare picnic lunches for them and selected members of the cast and crew. One day during their break, a small plane circled overhead, zeroed in on them, then landed but a short walk away. Kate suddenly noticed Cary Grant looking sheepish. “That’s my friend Howard Hughes,” he said.

  Hepburn had heard that Hughes was eager to meet her, and she was put out with her friend Cary for springing their introduction on her this way. “I’m sure the boys thought, ‘Oh, this will be a cute meet,’ all very romantic and irresistible. But Howard and I met, and we shook hands, and it was all too self-conscious. So staged. False. There was nothing spontaneous about it. I was so angry I ate my lunch without looking at either one of them.”

  A short time later, Kate was playing golf at the Bel-Air Country Club, when Hughes performed a similar stunt, this time landing right on the eighth fairway. “Out of his plane he hopped, carrying a golf bag,” Kate said, “and he finished the nine with my instructor and me. And he was quite a good golfer. But what gall! But you see, Howard was a man of action and not words, and I think this was simply the best way he could think of expressing his feelings.”

  Hughes was a practical dreamer, prone to planned “impulsiveness.” He liked to act on the spur of the moment, but only after he had thought through the details of his action. In this instance, he suddenly found his plane sitting in the middle of a golf course—which had provided enough room to land but not enough to take off again. Hughes had thought that through as well. “There were few problems a little of his money could not solve,” Kate pointed out. “He simply had some mechanics come and dismantle the plane and cart it off. As for getting himself home, he’d just assumed I’d cart him off. What gall! God, he was exciting. Great fun.”

  Hepburn gave Hughes a lift to the Beverly Hills Hotel. In almost no time, she learned that after having produced Hell’s Angels, The Front Page, and Scarface, he had really had no great passion for picture-making: “He was a brilliant man,” said Kate, “and not as silly as that.” But he did have a passion for movie stars.

  In 1936, when Hepburn toured with Jane Eyre, Hughes would suddenly arrive before her performances in Boston, and then Chicago. In time, she got caught up in the rush and surrendered. “I think we were both thrill-seekers, you might say,” Kate suggested. “I always liked to go, go, go; and Howard was always up for adventure. Now, he always liked to think things through, and I was always more instinctive. But we had a lot of common interests.”

  Not the least of these interests, Kate admitted, was “courting fame.” She said, “When I met Howard, the man he admired most was Lindbergh—not just for what he accomplished but for all the acclaim. Howard was determined to set new records in aviation, but I think that was largely because he really wanted the big parade. And, you see, I too wanted to be a star, desperately wanted to be a star.” Paradoxically, neither Hepburn nor Hughes liked crowds. In fact, they expended much of their energy evading the public, craving privacy. They were always on the run, from newsreel cameras and popping flashbulbs.

  “I think that was part of the fun for the two of us,” said Kate, “that we could indulge in this game with the public together. It was definitely more fun together. And, in a way, that was the basis for our relationship. We were both famous and came from comfortable backgrounds. We understood each other. I think we felt we were right for each other, and secretly I think we felt the public thought we were somehow right for each other. Going around together enhanced both our reputations. But there was a basic problem. . . . I am, by nature, a loner, and that’s not a very good basis for a serious relationship.”

  But it was obviously pleasurable for these two enormously attractive people. I never heard Kate talk about anybody with more of a glint in her eye, making it very clear that this was the lustiest relationship of her life. It was not the most profound, but it was definitely the one built most on plain physical attraction. Eros.

  During their time together, Kate increasingly found Hughes to be a loner as well. Losing his parents as a teenager was one apparent cause for that; but she believed there was another, equally strong. “People simply don’t understand how deaf Howard was,” she explained, “—from the age of fifteen. And I think this contributed to everything that happened to him in his life, for both good and bad. It made him terribly detached and a real self-starter. But it also started him down an endlessly lonely path, really cut off from people.”

  In my experience, Kate always expected one to speak clearly, concisely, and audibly. If one rambled on too long in her presence, she’d interrupt to ask, “What’s your point?” If one mumbled, she’d interrupt to say, “I don’t understand you,” or “Speak up, I can’t hear you.” That, she said, was something Howard Hughes never did; and that failure condemned him to isolation. The deafness, she explained, was not his great weakness so much as his failing to acknowledge it in public, thus forcing him to miss parts of conversations and often to misunderstand those parts that he had heard. Quite simply, Kate said, “It ruined his life.”

  “I mean, what does that do to a person?” she wondered out loud decades later. “It forced Howard into a world of his own, one in which he dwelt more and more on himself, becoming obsessed with the details of his own life. From the time we first started going around, he was concerned about germs and disease. He washed his hands a lot and he took a lot of showers, and nobody else was allowed to use the same shower. It had to be disinfected after each use. Now a lot of that just makes common sense. Doctors tell us today that it’s good to wash your hands a lot to keep them from spreading germs. And I always took a lot of showers. But in his loneliness—and I think there was a well of loneliness within Howard—he gradually crossed the line, that line between peculiar behavior and what I guess one would call ‘neurotic.’ Then you must remember his upbringing, which left him virtually alone in the world. . . . And then years later, you know, he suffered terribly after an airplane accident and got hooked on ‘hard stuff’—morphine. And, then again, there was his deafness. I know he heard ringing in his ears; and I’m sure he heard voices in his head for years and years. So, you see, we really are extremely fragile creatures . . . because here was this absolutely brilliant man, I mean brilliant in everything he attempted, and yet he was never more than an inch away from crossing that line into the land of cuckoo.”

  Their time alone together was, for the most part,
a great romp. They were, Kate insisted, “in love—at least with the idea of each other.” They flew together—with Hepburn once taking off in a seaplane under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. They skinny-dipped in the Long Island Sound, diving off the wing of his plane. They golfed in Fenwick—where they were often joined by Luddy, who always seemed to have a movie camera in his hand. Once, while golfing with Kate and her father, Hughes objected not only to Luddy’s omnipresence but to the invasion of his privacy with the camera clicking away. “Howard,” Dr. Hepburn interjected, “Luddy has been taking pictures of all of us for years before you got here, and he’ll be taking them years after you’ve gone. He’s part of this family. Now drive.”

  Hughes never felt comfortable with the Hepburns . . . or, Kate pointed out, with anyone else’s family. “It’s hard to understand what it’s like to be really close to your family,” Kate said, “unless you come from a close family yourself. You get that,” she said to me, knowing I was close to my parents and three brothers, “and I get that. But Howard never did.”

  Left to themselves, Hepburn and Hughes “played house”—sharing some tranquil domesticity in his large, Monterey-style house on Muirfield Road, which bordered the Wilshire Country Club. “Golf balls,” Kate said, “used to fly into our backyard.” On quiet days—which they both cherished—they’d crawl under the fence and play nine holes there themselves. Meantime, they pursued their careers—Hughes becoming increasingly potent in aviation, just as Hepburn was becoming “poison” in the movie business.