Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  The more time Hughes spent with Hepburn, the more he wanted to marry her. Thinking that her career slump might make her more open to the suggestion of sharing their lives, he proposed to her—more than once. Hughes had read her wrong. The downturn in Hepburn’s career only made her more ferocious about her independence, more determined to prove herself on her own. “Now look,” Kate said to me one afternoon, “I think Howard really was in love with me, and I really loved being with him. But honestly, what kind of marriage would that have been? I was trying to put my career together again. I was thinking all about me, me, me. And even if my career had been in another place, I don’t think I ever would have married him. I was always straight with him about that. But Howard just didn’t hear me.”

  “Maybe,” I suggested, “he couldn’t hear you.”

  “Howard heard,” she amended, “what he wanted to hear.”

  She had already refused Hughes’s offer when he took off on an around-the-world flight in July 1938—a record-setting journey of three days, nineteen hours, and seventeen minutes, for which he received his ticker-tape parade through Broadway’s “Canyon of Heroes.” The tabloid-reading public buzzed nonetheless about his pending nuptials to Katharine Hepburn.

  In fact, Hepburn was entertaining another suitor that summer, who arrived with an offer far more tempting than marriage. Her old friend Philip Barry, whose career was in a slump of its own, called from Maine one day and invited himself to tea. “I was surprised,” Kate said, “because the last time I had heard from him was when he got me fired from The Animal Kingdom as the understudy”—eight years prior. On the pier at Fenwick, he described two stories he was hatching, plays in which he kept hearing her voice. One was a father-daughter story called Second Threshold. The other centered on a society wedding on Philadelphia’s Main Line, where a rich, young divorcee was about to marry again, this time to a boring self-made man who was “marrying up.” The proceedings would be disrupted by her raffish first husband, who lingers in her life, Luddy-like. Looking out at some sailboats on the sea, Barry and Hepburn talked about the heroine, who, in her first marriage, had proved not to be “yare,” a nautical term meaning easy to handle, quick to the helm. Kate voted for the latter play because it sounded “more fun.” Within weeks, she was reading pages of the first act of The Philadelphia Story.

  Then came the hurricane of 1938. Hughes sent a pilot to Fenwick that week with huge bottles of fresh water. Upon hearing about this life preserver Barry was throwing to her, he also gave her some advice—to purchase the motion-picture rights of this new play even before it opened. If The Philadelphia Story was that good, he reasoned, it could prove to be her vehicle back to Hollywood; and if it did not pan out, an investment this early in the game would hardly be that great. Hughes went so far as to buy the rights as a present for her, withholding a percentage as an investment for himself. While he would soon move on to business ventures and romantic adventures with other partners, Hepburn and Hughes would forever be bound by their joint interest in The Philadelphia Story.

  While Barry was finishing his play, Hepburn set about getting it produced. She felt beholden to the Theatre Guild because they had let her both star in and leave its production of Jane Eyre. Barry had had a bad experience with the Guild and wanted to go elsewhere; and neither he nor Hepburn knew that the company was then practically bankrupt. Meantime, the Theatre Guild didn’t know that Hepburn had been banished from Hollywood. “We were all washed up,” Kate said, “and nobody knew the whole truth about the other. Hopeless.”

  In the end, they all came together, as Hughes and Hepburn each put up a quarter of the production costs, thus becoming profit participants. Under the direction of Robert B. Sinclair, who had recently triumphed with Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women, they assembled a remarkable supporting cast, while Barry struggled with the play’s final act.

  From the Mercury Theatre, they grabbed Joseph Cotten to play C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy’s first husband; and from A Woman Rebels, Kate remembered the virile performance of her costar Van Heflin, who was cast as Macauley Connor, the cynical reporter assigned to cover the Philadelphia wedding. Shirley Booth was cast as his photographer sidekick, and Kate thought her performance was “brilliant,” because she found much more in the part than had appeared on the page. They lucked out further with the discovery of a remarkable ten-year-old named Lenore Lonergan—“a real caution,” said Kate—to play the heroine Tracy Lord’s wisecracking kid sister. After one of the out-of-town performances, Lawrence Langner came backstage and said, “Kate, I think the girl is copying you—all your movements, your gestures, your delivery.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” she told Langner, dead serious. “I’m copying her.”

  At last Barry finished the play, and from that moment on, Kate said, “It smelled like a hit.” Pleasing her as much as the elegance of the comedy—“there was nothing cheap about any of it, just real humor that grew from the character”—was the construction of the drama. “People don’t realize how ingenious Phil Barry’s play is,” she said, “how he drew three different men, all from different social positions. And up until the last moment of the play, there’s a good argument to be made for Tracy to marry any one of them. In the end, I think the play draws the truest . . . and most romantic conclusion.” As if that were not enough, the entire work was tailored to showcase Hepburn—allowing her to rattle off passages of witty dialogue while men fell at her feet. “An actress doesn’t get many of those in a lifetime,” Kate said of her role in The Philadelphia Story. “And she doesn’t need many.”

  For yet another reason, the timing of Tracy Lord’s entrance into Hepburn’s life could not have been timelier. Like most film actresses in the late thirties, she felt she had just lost the role of a lifetime—Scarlett O’Hara—a role that she thought, for a moment, might be hers. A few years earlier, Katharine Hepburn believed she had been the first actress to receive a set of the galley proofs of Gone With the Wind, at the behest of the author, Margaret Mitchell. She adored the part and immediately saw herself in it. Pandro Berman’s assistant read the book for him; and after hearing the story, Berman felt Hepburn was wrong for Scarlett. RKO passed on bidding for the project, though they could probably have bought the film rights for a song.

  A few weekends later, Hepburn and George Cukor went to visit Myron Selznick at his vacation house at Lake Arrowhead. David Selznick answered the door, carrying the galleys of the book. Hepburn said to him, “Don’t bother reading it, David. Just buy it. It’s sensational.” Selznick didn’t need convincing. He immediately grasped its immense possibilities and purchased the film rights for $50,000. George Cukor was to direct; and Selznick said he wanted Hepburn for the role . . . at first.

  Over the next few months, Selznick heard from every important actress (and her agent) in Hollywood. While much has been said over the years about how Selznick ultimately believed Clark Gable as Rhett Butler would never go through years of the war lusting after Katharine Hepburn, it was, in fact, the actress’s greatest supporter who first dissuaded the producer from casting her. George Cukor, as Kate herself related, “felt that it was unsuitable for me, that I was a heroine and Scarlett was this wicked sort of sexual creature.” That Cukor, who was the director of the film from its earliest days of preproduction to its first days of filming, felt so strongly about Kate’s unsuitability gave Selznick license to keep widening his search.

  The longer Selznick delayed in casting his lead, the larger his problem became, as the “search for Scarlett” became an international treasure hunt, one of great interest among moviegoers. As the date by which they had to start filming approached, Hepburn went to Selznick and said, “David, you’ve got to have an unknown girl in the part. You’ve made this big thing now, and you have to deliver. You can’t cast me or anyone else who is well known because audiences would walk in with certain expectations.” At the same time, she still dreamed of playing the role. So she made one last-ditch play. “Look,” she said, “you’ve g
ot Walter Plunkett doing the clothes, and Walter knows me backwards. He could do five costumes in one night for me and would. So, if you’re stuck, you can just let me know twenty-four hours before it’s too late.” Hepburn didn’t like being in a second (or possibly tenth) position like that, but she knew her only prayer at getting the role lay in some desperate act of midnight casting. Hardly a week later, Selznick met Vivien Leigh—and the contest was over.

  While Gone With the Wind was being filmed, most of the other leading ladies in Hollywood were busy appearing in what would prove to be signature roles, contributing to what would become the most glorious year in Hollywood history—1939. Garbo was in Ninotchka; Crawford played her first important unsympathetic “bitch” role in The Women, alongside Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, and Joan Fontaine. Greer Garson debuted in Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Bette Davis was in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Dark Victory, The Old Maid (opposite Miriam Hopkins), and Juarez (as the Empress Carlotta); Jean Arthur was in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington with Jimmy Stewart, and Only Angels Have Wings with Cary Grant; Irene Dunne made Love Affair with Charles Boyer; Ginger Rogers was twirling with Fred Astaire (in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle); Judy Garland went over the rainbow in The Wizard of Oz; and even Snow White got to cavort with seven dwarfs.

  Katharine Hepburn—after fifteen motion pictures in six years—was nowhere to be seen on the screen that year. She was, instead, trodding the boards in Wilmington, Washington, Boston, and the title city in The Philadelphia Story. For five weeks out of town, she and the play received rave notices, and the star begged the producers to keep the show on the road as long as possible, building up good word of mouth before coming into Broadway. “The critics are funny about me,” she tried to explain to Philip Barry and the Theatre Guild, her financial partners in the venture, “they’ll just land on me.” Despite the vehemence of her protest, they outvoted her, and The Philadelphia Story opened at the Shubert Theatre on March 29, 1939.

  The play was a “huge hit”—Kate’s assessment—critically and financially. But it took a while before it performed the trick she hoped it would—providing the opportunity to reprise the role on film. She employed an agent named Harold Freedman—who represented playwrights and a handful of actors (such as the Lunts)—but forbade him from telling anybody that she controlled the film rights. Indeed, all the major studios called, hoping to buy the source material for their biggest stars; but upon his client’s instructions, Freedman stalled them. Meantime, Hepburn carried on to nightly acclaim, playing more than four hundred performances on Broadway. (She would later play in another two hundred fifty performances on the road.) In the end, Hepburn made close to a half million dollars in salary and profits. More important, the play had warmed up enough audiences nationwide to rekindle her career.

  After the play had packed houses for a year, Howard Hughes approached the studios on behalf of the film rights’ co-owner. Because he kept a private office for himself on the Samuel Goldwyn lot, he started there. Goldwyn was interested enough to send his number-one director, William Wyler, to New York to convince Hepburn that they were the best team for the project. Sitting in the garden in Turtle Bay, she told the director exactly what she had told Goldwyn herself, that she would make a deal on the spot if they could deliver Gary Cooper to play C. K. Dexter Haven. She explained that this was not any kind of ploy for more money; it was simply that she had left Hollywood as “box-office poison” and she was smart enough to know that she needed a strong man or two by her side as antidotes. Although Cooper was under contract to Goldwyn at the time, he would not agree to play opposite Hepburn.

  Warner Brothers was willing to take a chance with her, offering a lot of money, the opportunity to produce the picture, and Errol Flynn. Hepburn was considering the deal when she got the call she had hoped for, from the biggest man in movies, Louis B. Mayer himself. He came to see The Philadelphia Story in New York, with Norma Shearer on his arm, and went backstage to offer his congratulations. The next day he called to say he wanted to come speak to her about the film. “Oh, no, Mr. Mayer,” she said, remembering the way her mother used to influence the local powers in Hartford, “I’ll come to you.”

  In his New York office, L. B. Mayer said everything he could to wheedle the rights away from Hepburn so that Shearer might play the part. At last Hepburn said, “Mr. Mayer, you are deliberately charming me, and I know it, but the remarkable thing is that I’m charmed. Now, you’re a real artist. But this property is not about making money for me. I’ll sell it to you for exactly what I paid for it, without a dime of profit. It’s quite simply about getting a good part for me, and I want only what would be a reasonable salary for myself. But what I really want from you are two stars.” Mayer asked which two.

  “Gable and Tracy,” she said, aiming for the top. Mayer said he doubted either of them would accept the offer but that he would try them both. He promptly reported that one wasn’t free (Tracy, she learned) and the other didn’t want to do it. (Despite Gable’s star-power, she was, in truth, just as happy not to get him, because she thought he was “wrong for both parts, though he could have played the newspaperman—which is the part Spencer should have played.”) Then Mayer said, “I can give you Jimmy Stewart [who did not yet have much control over his roles] . . . and I’ll give you $150,000 to get anyone else you can get.” That was a lot of money, Hepburn thought—enough to allow her to call upon her friend Cary Grant. He was delighted with the offer, selected the role of C. K. Dexter Haven, and ultimately contributed his three weeks of salary to the British War Relief Fund. Mayer assigned Joseph L. Mankiewicz—one of the most formidable talents in Hollywood—to produce the picture.

  Permitted to choose her director, Hepburn considered nobody but George Cukor. “George saw the show in Chicago,” Kate remembered, “and he thought it was awful, just plain awful—not the play itself, which he liked, but the direction. Of course, that’s partly because he didn’t get to direct it. Now, I don’t think he was being self-important in not liking it. It’s more that George was a brilliant director, who knew how to keep things moving all the time. He didn’t believe in fussy business or lots of mannerisms, but he knew each character had to keep things moving at all times, that a good play had to be like a solar system, in which all the planets are spinning in their orbits at all times. He felt our director [Bob Sinclair] hadn’t done that. And, of course,” she added, “George really knew me, and he wanted to ensure that the film would be a great showcase for me.”

  By then, Hepburn and Cukor spoke the same language. “And so when it came time to make the movie,” Kate explained, “I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to make a grand entrance in this picture. Moviegoers haven’t seen me in over a year, and they already made it clear that they think I’m too la-di-da or something. A lot of people want to see me fall flat on my face.’ ”

  “Or your ass,” Cukor corrected.

  From that suggestion, Donald Stewart, the screenwriter who was adapting the play, devised what Hepburn considered an “ingenious” opening for the film. While Cukor had done “a brilliant job” in “presenting” Katharine Hepburn in A Bill of Divorcement, he would prove equally invaluable in “re-creating Katharine Hepburn” in The Philadelphia Story. In the opening scene, Tracy Lord is throwing her husband, C. K. Dexter Haven, out of the house, golf clubs and all. When she cracks one of the clubs over her bended knee, she has gone too far. He comes back to push her in the face, knocking her right on her backside. “Oh, I loved it,” Kate said. “Just what Tracy—and I—needed.”

  The last time moviegoers had seen her, Katharine Hepburn was running off with Cary Grant at the end of Holiday. So she thought this scene would be as much fun for her fans as for those who didn’t like her—“Although I must tell you,” she said, “I truly believed that everybody still adored me, that it was nothing but bad material that had made me ‘box-office poison.’ ” In some ways, Kate said, “The opening of this picture showed that running off with me could b
e fun and exciting, but that living with me was clearly no holiday. Life imitating art!” she said, laughing hard.

  While Hepburn had never complained about the production values of her pictures at RKO and Columbia, she saw how they paled alongside the work of the legendary MGM production team in full force. Everything there was, as she said, “top drawer.” Joseph Ruttenberg, who had just won the first of his four Academy Awards for The Great Waltz, was the director of photography; Cedric Gibbons, who would win seven of those golden statuettes, which he had designed in the first place, was the art director; and Adrian—who designed clothes for Garbo—created the costumes, each one of Hepburn’s outfits a vision. Franz Waxman wrote one of his most sophisticated scores. Every supporting player delivered a star turn—including Henry Daniell, Roland Young, and Ruth Hussey in the Shirley Booth role. And Kate said, “We got lucky again with the girl—this time little Virginia Weidler, who had me in stitches. She was so terrifyingly funny I truly had a difficult time doing scenes with her. Honestly, I couldn’t look at her, she was so funny.” John Halliday, a veteran of the stage and silent screen, had the small but pivotal role of Seth Lord. He had the responsibility of delivering perhaps the play’s most touching moment, a father summing up his daughter’s wonderful attributes but feeling compelled to add, “You have everything it takes to make a lovely woman except the one essential—an understanding heart. And without that, you might just as well be made of bronze.”

  It is, of course, the stars of The Philadelphia Story who carry the day. Hepburn had never looked more glamorous nor been more commanding. She was an utterly contemporary woman, full of herself. Cukor closely monitored her performance, allowing the audience to laugh at her enough so that they would ultimately sympathize with her. While many critics praised her for the originality of her performance and spoke of the emergence of “a new Hepburn,” she knew that she was, in fact, reverting to a former idol for inspiration. “I kept thinking of Hope Williams,” she confessed. “I kept thinking how Hope could make everything so attractive, and how I must use all her tricks to keep Tracy from becoming a deplorable snob.”