While Cary Grant was at his most charming, full of humor and insouciance, Jimmy Stewart proved to be the revelation in the picture. In a role that got beefed up from the play because of the deletion of another character, that of Tracy’s brother, Macauley “Mike” Connor was more cynical than any Stewart had played before. And, Kate noted, “Jimmy had always been attractive, but for the first time, I think, he was very sexy. He was known, you know, as one of the great bachelors around town, but people outside the business just thought of him as this nice boy next door. Without danger.” That quality, Kate said, led to one of Cukor’s “brilliant” pieces of direction.
Stewart had attempted his crucial speech in the film several times, the one in which he professes his love for the heroine—“You’ve got fires banked down in you . . .”—without nailing it. At last Cukor pulled him aside and said, “Now listen, Jim—just forget that you are that young boy running away to the circus. And play this scene absolutely straight.” Kate said people never really understand what it is that a director can give an actor. That quick tip, she said, was a great example—“divine inspiration.”
Veteran Oscar-watchers often assert that Jimmy Stewart’s winning the Academy Award that year—over such contenders as Laurence Olivier in Rebecca and Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath—was a consolation prize for his having failed to win the year before for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Hepburn disagreed. “I think Jimmy’s absolutely brilliant in Philadelphia Story and completely unexpected. And I think it was his big speech that put him over the top.” Hepburn in her signature role lost the Oscar that year to Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle. Publicly, she said Ginger Rogers deserved to win. Privately, Kate said, “It’s a silly part in a silly soap opera. And I’m still glad I turned the part down.”
The roaring success of The Philadelphia Story (almost $600,000 in six weeks at the Radio City Music Hall alone)—put Hepburn on top again, especially in the eyes of the moguls. “Dad worshiped Kate. It’s that simple,” Irene Mayer Selznick told me of her father. “She represented everything that he thought was good about America. She had a tight-knit family, she had a first-class education, she had elegance—class without airs. And she had a good business head on her shoulders. She talked straight, without ever compromising her femininity.”
More than once Mr. Mayer called upon Hepburn to help “straighten out” one of his studio wunderkinds, Judy Garland. She had been desperately attempting to work her way out of a vortex studio doctors had created in which they had subjected her to amphetamines to help her lose weight and barbiturates to help her sleep. Mayer suggested to Hepburn that the young singing star’s problem was a lack of character, one which Kate could help her overcome simply by being there for her, standing by as a good example. George Cukor later told me that “Judy worshiped Kate, as did most of the women on the MGM lot.” But it wasn’t until years later that Hepburn realized to what extent the studio had been the agent of Garland’s drug-addicted demise. “When I met Judy,” Kate explained, “I didn’t know what was wrong with her. And by the time I learned the source of her problems, it was too late for me to do anything about it.” There was little either star could do but admire each other’s talent.
In the early forties, when Louis B. Mayer sat front-row-center in the famous team photograph of his contract players—the one displaying “More stars than there are in all the heavens”—he insisted on Hepburn’s sitting to his right. (Greer Garson was the other rose to flank the thorny Mayer.)
Irene easily understood her father’s adoration of Kate, though she found it crazy-making. So much of what L.B. admired in Hepburn he kept his own children from enjoying. Irene had a first-rate mind, for example, but was prohibited from attending college—because it would make her “too smart to get a husband.” Where Dr. Hepburn had thrust independence upon his children, Mayer had subjected his daughters to countless rules, all in service of his own whims and needs. Much of Kate’s forthrightness in the Hollywood community stemmed from the fact that she was there virtually on her own. Unlike a great number of actresses, whose mothers accompanied them as chaperones and managers, Hepburn slipped in and out of town alone, without the protection of a husband or even, at that point, an agent. Irene’s father, on the other hand, ranted nightly about his twenty-something daughters being unmarried, banging on the dining-room table as he boomed, “It isn’t enough that I’m L. B. Mayer?”
For several years, in fact, Irene and David Selznick had longed to marry, but Mayer had refused permission until her older sister, Edie, was married. Only one month after a producer named William Goetz (“a schlep with the filthiest mouth in town,” said Irene) walked Edie down the aisle in one of the grandest weddings in Hollywood history, Irene and David married quietly. During one of my late nights at the Pierre, after several shots of “Cary’s aquavit,” Irene suddenly burst into tears, describing how she had secretly engineered the entire courtship of Goetz and Edie. She confessed to making up positive remarks each had allegedly said about the other, and making suggestions to her father that might advance Goetz’s career. “But,” I said appeasingly, “the ends justified the means. The Goetzes had a long marriage—certainly by Hollywood standards; and Edie said they were very happy. In fact, she even bragged that Bill was more successful than your father.”
“Doesn’t that just tell you everything?” Irene said. “It’s the thing I feel guiltiest about. But I had no choice.”
All the Mayers feuded the rest of their lives. Irene and Edie went decades without speaking to each other; Irene was always at odds with one of her two sons; and upon his death, L.B. left nothing to Edie or any of her children. But in business, Kate said, “he was the most honest man I ever met in Hollywood. A straight shooter. We closed our deals with a handshake in his office. Then I would go to Benjamin K. Thau [vice president of Loews, Inc., which owned MGM] to discuss the details. And when the contracts were drawn, I’d go to Mr. Mayer and say, ‘Look, I don’t have a lawyer, and I know you wouldn’t cheat me, so would you please give this to one of your lawyers to look over for me?’ ” He would and did. “I think that’s what Dad liked most about Kate,” Irene said in the end, “—the trust. She brought out the very best in him.”
“Oh, these men—the Mayers and Goldwyns and the rest—make no mistake about it, they were pirates, real buccaneers,” Hepburn said. “But they were also romantics and gamblers, and they weren’t afraid to express their opinions and put their money where their mouths were. Because they believed in the movies. The movies were their dreams. And I—and Greer and Joan [Crawford] and Garbo—were all part of those dreams.”
After the triumph of The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn and Mayer were determined to work together again. The studio head even urged the star to become a director or producer. “I was a one-track Charlie,” Kate used to tell him. “I was too interested in being a star to get bogged down in the details of the rest of the production.” But she always made her voice heard on even the most minute points of every production, whether they affected her directly or not. She and Mayer did work together ten more times over the next fifteen years—on successive three-year contracts loose enough to amount to her working on an ad hoc basis.
Upon filming The Philadelphia Story, Kate honored her commitment to the Theatre Guild by returning to the road, completing the tour of the show. (She knew it could only create buzz for the upcoming release of the movie.) Not until the film’s premiere did the producers close the play, appropriately, in Philadelphia. On February 15, 1941, just before going on the stage of the Forrest Theatre for the final performance, Hepburn went to the stage manager and said, “If I give you a sign at the end of the show, don’t pull the curtain down. Let there be a pause.” At each big moment in the play that night, the star realized from the reactions that practically everyone in the theater had seen the play before and that she was playing to “a real fan audience.” By the curtain calls, the crowd had gone “absolutely mad.” So Hepburn stepped forward for her final bow, coming out
of Joseph Cotten’s arms, thinking what a terrible moment it is when a play has to come to an end. She signaled to the stage manager, quieted the audience, and said to them, “The curtain will never be rung down on this play.” With that, the cast simply walked off the stage; and as the audience left the theater for the streets of Philadelphia, the crew set out the worklights and dismantled the set.
A few weeks later Kate heard that Helen Hayes—“The First Lady of the American Theater,” whom she admired greatly—had said to a friend, “That goddamned Kate, resorting to that cheap little piece of business, when there are a million actors with a lot more hits. I can’t believe I never thought of that.” Commented Kate in the end, with an enormous cackle: “I really should have been disgusted with myself.”
At the start of the new decade, however, she was feeling too good for that. Hepburn was in demand again. In 1940 Franklin D. Roosevelt invited her to Hyde Park, where she pledged support of a third term for the President in a radio broadcast. A few months later, Eleanor Roosevelt asked Hepburn to narrate an Office of War Information documentary called Women in Defense. Back in Hollywood, not only was L. B. Mayer pushing to make another picture with her, but writers were once again composing scripts with Hepburn in mind.
Ring Lardner, Jr., for example, was fashioning a story about a prominent newspaper columnist, modeled on Dorothy Thompson, who falls in love with her paper’s sportswriter. It was a natural setup for a witty battle of the sexes, rife with the comic possibilities imposed by the attraction of opposites. A centerpiece of the story would be the couple’s attending a baseball game together—turf that was as foreign to her as global affairs were to him. Lardner gave the story idea to his friend Garson Kanin—a young writer in Hollywood, who was married to Ruth Gordon and was friendly with Hepburn—in hopes of drafting the script together. Hepburn liked Kanin and thought he was “extremely clever,” though she often found him “quite full of himself.” He was a good fifteen years younger than his wife, and that always made Hepburn a little wary of him as well. “Princes,” she said of spoiled men married to much older women, “—looking for Mother.” All that aside, she liked this new idea. Kanin worked on the treatment with Lardner before enlisting in the armed services as the nation approached war. Then he suggested his younger brother might fill his boots in cowriting the script.
The two fledgling writers, Michael Kanin and Lardner, wrote several drafts, tailoring the character of Tess Harding for Hepburn. Just as important, Hepburn made clear from the start, was that the sportswriter, Sam Craig, be skewed toward attracting the one actor with whom she most wanted to work—Spencer Tracy. Kate would later insist that she had no personal designs on Tracy in baiting this trap, only professional ones. She felt, quite simply, that “he was the best movie actor there was.”
In 1940, that was a widely held opinion. Spencer Tracy had, by then, appeared in more than forty pictures, playing everything from gangsters to priests and winning back-to-back Oscars for his performances as Manuel the Portuguese fisherman in Captains Courageous and Father Flanagan in Boys Town. He had become something more than an actor or even a successful movie star. With his unaffected delivery, Tracy had become a national icon, appearing over and over as a kind of truth-teller in movies, the solid American. He was, Kate suggested in an incautious moment, “completely male.”
And he was not afraid to turn that trait to sentimental use, maintaining a gruff exterior to disguise an obviously emotional inner life. She thought his performance in Fritz Lang’s Fury—playing an Everyman who stands up to a mob—was “one of the greatest ever put on film. Absolutely thrilling in its simplicity.” And, she told me one night, “I’ve watched Captains Courageous at least seven times, and I’ve never seen the end of it, because I’m always in tears once Spence dies without letting the boy know he’s lost his legs.”
When Hepburn thought Kanin and Lardner’s extensive treatment was ready for the marketplace, she sent it to Joe Mankiewicz—without the writers’ names on the pages. She gave him twenty-four hours to respond—not only to its quality but also to its ability to entice Tracy. “I want him or no dice with MGM,” she insisted. When Mankiewicz called to say it scored on both counts, she left for Los Angeles to meet with Mr. Mayer.
As with The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn controlled the material. Mayer asked how much she wanted for the story and who wrote it. She requested $125,000 for herself and as much again for the writers. She refused to name them, knowing novices could not demand that high a figure. When Mayer kept insisting on hearing their names, Hepburn sensed his vanity was about to get in the way of his negotiating a deal. Again she remembered her mother with the elders in Hartford and how she never let her own ego detract from her causes. “Just pour the tea, Kath,” Kate told herself. So before Mayer was forced into making a decision about buying the script, Hepburn quickly added that she had not come that day to close a deal, merely to see if MGM and Spencer Tracy were interested. Clearly Mayer was, enough for Hepburn to encourage her writers to polish the script. Tracy, unfortunately, was booked up, filming Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s classic tale The Yearling in Florida.
Hepburn didn’t know at the time that The Yearling had been plagued from the start with bad weather and bugs, which were not only eating the actors alive but also swarming around the camera, rendering much of the footage unusable. Providentially, the film soon shut down (and would not recommence for another five years—then starring Gregory Peck); and Spencer Tracy was looking for a new picture. “The boys,” as Kate called young Kanin and Lardner, completed their script posthaste. Tracy liked it and committed to appear in it.
In early August of 1941, Hepburn was walking out of the Thalberg Building on the MGM lot when she saw Joe Mankiewicz walking with Spencer Tracy on their way to lunch. Although the two stars worked for the same studio, they had never met. They approached each other, and Mankiewicz made the unnecessary introductions. Kate held out her hand and sized up her new leading man from head to toe. Then she made a comment about her high heels and coquettishly remarked, “Mr. Tracy, you’re not as tall as I expected.”
“Don’t worry, Kate,” Mankiewicz interjected, “he’ll cut you down to size.”
VII
Yare
How is your friend Irene?” Kate invariably asked at some point in every telephone conversation or visit. It was a loaded question, fraught with baggage—great interest tinged with melancholy.
Katharine Hepburn and Irene Mayer Selznick had, after all, been friends for more than fifty years. Kate had known Irene through most of her fifteen-year roller-coaster ride of a marriage to Benzedrine-fueled David Selznick; and they became closer in its aftermath, when the divorced Irene reinvented herself as a major force on Broadway. For her part, Irene had been ringside for Kate’s arrival in Hollywood, her exile, and then her comeback, as well as the five successful decades that followed. She had also observed Kate’s serial love affairs of the thirties yield to the one serious romance that consumed her for the next twenty-five years. With one Selznick son or the other almost always on the outs with his mother—sometimes Jeffrey and Danny were “in the doghouse” at the same time—“Sister Kate” became a favorite “aunt” to them. Despite all that shared history, by the end of the 1980s, the two women had all but stopped speaking to each other. But I can hardly remember a single telephone conversation or visit in which Irene did not ask, “How is your friend Kate?”
They had experienced less of a rift than a drift, two seemingly parallel lives that gradually arced in different directions. Born a month apart, each entered her eighties differently. Irene, a lifelong hypochondriac (the only way to get attention growing up alongside a sickly sister), was proud of her age. While often complaining of undiagnosable aches and pains, she bragged that she had “all her marbles,” and she worked steadily on a book of memoirs. Kate never said boo about her foot, which refused to heal properly; she stoically applied ice packs and stuck to her physical regimen as best she could; and she continued to ent
ertain offers to work. She complained only that she couldn’t remember things so well as she used to. For years, I had been suggesting that she commit episodes of her life to paper—something I learned she had already quietly been doing; but their actual publication struck her as a kind of death knell to her acting career. She didn’t celebrate birthdays, though every year—usually on the wrong date that she had disseminated for publicity purposes back in 1932—the press ballyhooed the occasion. In May of 1989—her eighty-second birthday—one newspaper announced that she had just turned seventy-nine. “It’s bad enough that I have to get older every year,” Irene dashed off in a note she mailed to Kate. “But do you have to keep getting younger?” Irene never received a reply. “The Kate I used to know would have called up and laughed,” Irene told me a few nights later at dinner.
Without ever saying a word directly on the subject, to each other or to me, their life-paths seemed bound never to recross. For one, Irene didn’t get around much anymore. While she was still “full of piss and vinegar” (as she used to say) on almost any topic, from politics to Broadway to her children, her social life was shrinking to long telephone conversations with her intimates—Kitty Carlisle Hart, Leonora Hornblow, Jean Kerr, and Mr. Paley chief among them—and dinners for two in her apartment. Every now and then, she would say to me, “I’ve got to have that bean soup at the Post House” or “I’ve got to have some Chinese food tonight”; and without a moment’s thought, we’d tear down to Chinatown and eat five or six courses, each in a different restaurant—one specializing in dim sum, another in Szechuan soup, another in Peking duck. Such nights became rarer, and with each visit to the Hotel Pierre, I found her a little less willing to venture out.
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