Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  Much of the film is David Lean’s valentine to Venice, stunning shots of canals and bridges and the glories of the Piazza di San Marco. But the city never outshines its star. Weaving through the most gorgeous movie set in the world, Lean also photographed Katharine Hepburn—lonely at first, later in love—in ways nobody had before. Almost fifty, there were times she looked her age—still beautiful, but not glamorized—with lines on her face, her hair unfashionably pulled back, with scarcely a touch of makeup. Because Lean was a perfectionist about the composition of every frame of his pictures, Hepburn had never felt more challenged by a director, often having only a moment, in which a cloud was about to blow over or the sun would be ducking between buildings, in which to reach some acting crescendo.

  Lean’s direction made Hepburn feel safe enough to plumb previously unexplored depths. Her performance as Jane Hudson is the most neurasthenic but naturalistic she ever gave. Before a setting sun, when she speaks of love with her inamorato—suavely played by Rossano Brazzi—her voice displays a vulnerability and raw sexuality never heard before. In our conversations, Hepburn always seemed slightly uncomfortable talking about this picture, self-conscious; she got embarrassed whenever I noted that her performance stood apart from the rest of her work. Upon my suggesting that of all her roles, this one might have been the most self-revealing, Kate quickly diverted the conversation, crediting her director for her characterization. “I’ve never worked with anybody in my entire career who understood film, really understood it, the feel of it, better than David,” Kate said. “I honestly think film editors, whose senses are so alive to the impact of the images, make the best directors.”

  Or Kate would retell the most famous chestnut about the making of Summertime, the story of the scene in which Jane Hudson, taking a home movie, falls backwards into a canal. The Venetian waterways were, of course, famously polluted; and Hepburn took every precaution before shooting the scene, putting lotion all over her body and even antiseptic unguents on a small cut on one of her fingers. As soon as Lean got his shot, she immediately bathed and gargled with disinfectant. But it never occurred to her to wash out her eyes; and the next morning the whites had turned crimson. A staph infection plagued her for the rest of her life, causing her to tear. “But it’s a cute moment,” Kate said, “—fun,” as though that made it all worthwhile. Hepburn’s performance earned her sixth Academy Award nomination, but that year’s Oscar went to Anna Magnani, in The Rose Tattoo, who was a few years Kate’s junior. The other nominees that year—Susan Hayward, Jennifer Jones, and Eleanor Parker—were all ten to fifteen years younger.

  During Hepburn’s absence, Tracy’s behavior reverted to its most self-destructive. In preparing to work on a picture that would later be called Tribute to a Bad Man, he had a brief but not-so-private affair with his intended costar, Grace Kelly. Instead of running back to him, Hepburn kept pursuing her career. She spent the summer of 1955 in Australia with her friend Robert Helpmann and the Old Vic Company performing Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice—earning serious plaudits. Shortly after shooting began on Tribute to a Bad Man, Tracy went missing in action. While he was still off on a drunken tear, the studio replaced him with James Cagney.

  After her Australian tour—which theatergoers there remembered with enormous fondness a half century later—Hepburn felt ready to come home. “I suppose I had to prove something—to myself,” Kate later reflected. “I felt I had reached out as an actress and felt more fulfilled. And so I wanted to reach out to Spence. I knew that he had to help himself, but I also knew that I could help him too—once I had fortified myself.” Having been more apart than together in the last few years, Hepburn privately vowed from then on to share their lives as much as the vagaries of show business would allow. Having climbed her own personal summit, she went on location with Tracy to the French Alps, where he filmed The Mountain with Robert Wagner. When the film was being completed on the Paramount backlot, Hepburn again felt it was safe to accept what became another of her trademark roles, in a Paramount picture shooting on a neighboring stage.

  Not unlike her part in Summertime, Lizzie Curry in N. Richard Nash’s hit play The Rainmaker is a spinster. She lives with her father and two brothers on a drought-plagued farm in the South-west. Enter Starbuck, a conman who promises to make rain for the vast sum of $100. Although Lizzie resists Starbuck’s charms at first, and discourages her father from buying into the scheme, she gradually succumbs to him, becoming a more fulfilled woman for it.

  Starbuck was played by Burt Lancaster, then the hottest actor in town. He had recently taken Hollywood by storm in Come Back, Little Sheba, From Here to Eternity, The Rose Tattoo, and Trapeze. His own independent production company had produced the Best Picture of 1955, Marty. Kate found him “a most peculiar man, full of unexpected rushes of energy” and felt she never connected with him. But that blind acceptance fit right into her role. She received another Oscar nomination, clearly finding a place in the hearts of Academy members, critics, and the public in playing love-starved spinsters.

  “Did you have a maiden aunt in mind when you took on these roles?” I asked Kate one day during a walk in Fenwick.

  “Well, of course, there was my aunt Edith,” she said, “but I wasn’t playing her. With Lizzie Curry and Jane Hudson and Rosie Sayer—I was playing me. It was never difficult for me to play those women . . . because I’m the maiden aunt.”

  In the midst of this third flowering in her career, Hepburn got snookered into what she would always consider the worst film on her resume. Spencer Tracy discreetly accompanied her to London, where Bobby Helpmann had induced her into costarring with him in a film called The Iron Petticoat. It was a knockoff of “Ninotchka,” with Hepburn playing a coldhearted captain in the Russian Air Force who spars with an American pilot about communism, only to warm up to the comforts of capitalism. Her leading man was to be Bob Hope!

  Hepburn knew that going in; but with a script by Ben Hecht that was witty enough, she felt safe. She did not know that Bob Hope was, as she later recounted, “the biggest egomaniac with whom I have worked in my entire life.” Nor did she know that he would immediately turn the picture “into his cheap vaudeville act with me as his stooge.” Hope brought in his own team of writers to punch up his lines, and he shamelessly ad-libbed. “I had been sold a false bill of goods,” Kate explained. “I was told that this was not going to be a typical Bob Hope movie, that he wanted to appear in a contemporary comedy. That proved not to be the case.” Kate claimed never to have seen the finished product.

  She atoned for her sin by accompanying Tracy to Cuba, where he was to film The Old Man and the Sea for director Fred Zinnemann. Before the production team was summoned home to Hollywood, under the helm of a different director, John Sturges, Hepburn and Tracy were able to squeeze in some pleasant vacation time together. Although she never cared much for restaurants, gambling, or clubs, she allowed herself to go out on the town with Tracy and sample Havana’s nightlife. By day, they both painted a lot, with Kate taking up watercolors. For all the sincerity of Tracy’s performance in the film, it proved to be a sluggish exercise, taking almost as long to watch as to read the book.

  So upon its completion, it came as something of a relief when Twentieth Century—Fox asked Tracy and Hepburn to reteam. The vehicle they had in mind was a tepid reworking by Henry and Phoebe Ephron of a play called The Desk Set, to be directed by one of Fox’s contract directors. It meant the stars could work together again for the first time in five years in their most public-pleasing genre—romantic comedy.

  Desk Set was the story of Bunny Watson, the know-it-all head of the reference department of a large television network who comes up against Richard Sumner, the inventor of a huge electronic brain, which is about to render Bunny and her colleagues obsolete. In the end, humanity prevails, and Bunny winds up in Sumner’s arms. It was a hybrid of the early Tracy-Hepburn films and the later Hepburn-as-spinster films—appearing, as she does once aga
in, with her hair pulled back and pinned up tight. As such, Desk Set is little more than an amiable one hundred minutes of romantic comedy, with a moral that addressed a new fear of its time, that of machines taking the jobs of people. Hepburn was grateful for the opportunity to work with Tracy in an eighth film.

  Most actors worry that each job will be their last. Spencer Tracy’s deteriorating health offered good reason for him to believe as much. In his mid-fifties, he increasingly spoke of retirement, repeatedly saying, “I really don’t need this anymore.” Intent upon looking after him, Hepburn knew such idleness would surely hasten his deterioration. She believed more than ever that work—the harder the better—was the essence of life. She kept an ear open for new projects for him; and she could not resist an invitation for herself. The Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, asked her to appear in The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing that summer. The great Yiddish actor Morris Carnovsky played Shylock to her Portia, and Alfred Drake played Benedick to her Beatrice. Even more than her deservedly good reviews, Katharine Hepburn continued to be the only Hollywood headliner of her day willing to risk her reputation by tackling Shakespeare.

  Although Stratford was a short drive from Fenwick, Hepburn chose to live that summer in a red fishing shanty right on the Housatonic River. She remembered it as “the happiest summer of my life”—waking up at dawn to see the local fishermen, swimming in the river and biking through the country, performing Shakespeare to packed houses every night. During our weekend jaunts through Connecticut, we’d periodically drive by the site of the old shack and she would stare longingly at other little houses built on other rivers throughout the state. I knew she was remembering that summer of 1957. I realized that while she enjoyed the perquisites of fame and having more money than she ever needed, her supreme ambition was to be an actress, a player who took her work seriously and was appreciated.

  That winter, Hepburn and the Stratford company took Much Ado About Nothing on the road. Although she always had a chauffeur, she liked taking the wheel, driving herself and Phyllis Wilbourn—who, upon the death of Constance Collier, had joined her “family.” During a rehearsal of the play one afternoon, Kate was standing in the wings while Alfred Drake was running some lines. Phyllis, she was startled to notice, was standing there herself, murmuring all the lines to herself. “Oh bliss!” remembered Kate of the moment.

  In the summer of 1960 Hepburn would rejoin the Stratford company. She appeared as Viola in Twelfth Night, opposite Robert Ryan, another Hollywood player testing his mettle, whom she greatly admired. She fulfilled another commitment she had made to herself—and to Constance Collier—by starring in Antony and Cleopatra, playing what they both considered the greatest of the Shakespearean heroines.

  Life back in Hollywood proved every bit as dramatic as it was onstage, as Hepburn kept returning to Tracy—a man who had, of late, been raging like Lear and drinking like Falstaff. She used her influence with John Ford—then nursing his dream of ending up in Ireland with Kate—in getting him to cast Tracy in The Last Hurrah, a film based on a novel drawn from the career of Mayor James Curley, the legendary political boss from Boston. During the production and afterward, Hepburn assumed her role as loyal spouse, smoothing all the rough waters on the set, turning Tracy’s dressing room into a homey apartment, taking long weekend walks with him along the beach.

  The next year, while Tracy was preparing for the Clarence Darrow—like character in Inherit the Wind, Hepburn assumed the most iconoclastic role of her career—the bizarre Violet Venable in Suddenly, Last Summer. It came nearly a decade after The African Queen, with Sam Spiegel’s reapproaching the star, this time with the rights to Tennessee Williams’s controversial play, what had been one act of a double-bill called Garden District. Gore Vidal was adapting this nightmarish story of a rich young man named Sebastian Venable, whose strange and sudden death has traumatized his beautiful young cousin, a witness to his grotesque demise. The imperious mother of the deceased goes to great lengths to protect her family name, to the extent of offering a million dollars to a hospital to perform a lobotomy on the babbling niece, to keep her from remembering any sordid details of cousin Sebastian’s final moments. Resorting instead to truth serum, a neurosurgeon uncovers the fact that Sebastian has used his cousin to lure young men, as he had formerly used his beautiful mother; and on this occasion, the scheme backfired, inciting a pack of boys to kill him. The play had been one of the most controversial in years, no simple pouring of tea and sympathy but a dark brew of the barely speakable—homosexual procurement, even cannibalism, with plenty of Oedipal undertones stirred in.

  “I felt Tennessee Williams was the greatest living playwright at the time,” Kate said, “—brilliant and full of poetry. And I knew it would be a challenge to perform many of his speeches. But I thought he was a truly tragic figure, and this play showed that. I remember reading it and thinking this man keeps going farther and farther ‘out there,’ and one day he won’t be able to come back.” She found the part of Mrs. Venable “fascinating, showy, and tricky.” She agreed to appear in Spiegel’s production but asked for changes that would tone down the material, to keep it from being “cheap and sensational.” All smiles, Spiegel even dropped George Cukor’s name as a possible director.

  He chose Joe Mankiewicz instead; and he surrounded Hepburn with two of the most high-strung stars of the day—Elizabeth Taylor to play the niece and Montgomery Clift to play the brilliant doctor. “The entire production was a nightmare,” Kate said, “—from day one.” Clift had recently been in a car accident that had slightly disfigured his beautiful looks; he was on pain medication and was what Kate called “a psychological basket case.” Taylor seemed to be ailing through much of the shoot herself and made a point of being the last to arrive on the set every day. “There’s nothing more frustrating than wanting to work and not being able to,” Kate observed in talking about Miss Taylor. “It’s the rudeness I minded, keeping people waiting when they’re all ready to go. Not just the other actors, but the crew . . . and the people paying the bills.” Unlike herself, Hepburn felt that Taylor “preferred being a movie star to being an actress. But don’t be fooled,” she added, “because I think she is a brilliant actress, truly brilliant. Especially with the Williams stuff. Look at her performance as Maggie the Cat [in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof].”

  For most of what she remembered as “a completely miserable experience,” she blamed the director. “Joe Mank had nothing to offer me in the way of direction, and he spent most of his time with Monty and Elizabeth, and not in a way that I felt was productive. He was absolutely cruel to Monty—tormenting him when he was clearly having a hard time. And rather than try to help him, he just kept beating him down. He was even worse with Elizabeth. I thought he sensationalized her part, had her posing unnecessarily. And it was simply vulgar. Some directors love to work with actors, to play with them. I don’t think Joe really liked actors. He felt quite superior to them, and I think got great pleasure out of demeaning them. Some actors need to be treated that way.”

  Hepburn did not. On the last day of filming, after the last take of her last scene, she turned to her director and asked, “So that’s it? I’m finished?”

  “You’re finished,” Mankiewicz said. “And you’re marvelous. It’s just great.”

  “But you’re sure you’re finished with me? You don’t need any close-ups or reshoots?”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “Your work is finished here.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  Mankiewicz again assured her there was nothing more for her to do on the picture. With that, Hepburn turned to the director and said, “Well, then, goodbye.” Then, she said, in front of the cast and crew, she spat in his face and walked off the set. Mankiewicz later confirmed the story, except he said she spat at his feet. Irene Selznick, a stickler for accuracy, also told me that it was at his feet . . . and that Kate then marched to Sam Spiegel’s office and bade him a similar farewell. />
  In truth, there were probably a few more reasons that Suddenly, Last Summer had been such a miserable experience for Hepburn. For one, she never felt completely comfortable with the raw substance of the play. And though she never mentioned it to me, I thought more than once that it could not have been easy for her to be appearing in a motion picture in which for the first time she was not, strictly speaking, the female lead. There she was playing an exotic mother-figure alongside an erotic beauty, then considered not only the most glamorous woman but also the hottest commodity in Hollywood. The Academy would nominate Hepburn for the eighth time as Best Actress, alongside Taylor. The picture became a great success, a trailblazer in breaking taboos and bringing a new frankness to the screen.

  The entire experience was enough to put Hepburn off making any more movies. She rededicated herself over the next few years to Tracy, who continued to age rapidly. While succumbing to binges less often, he continued to drink steadily. He gained weight; he developed ulcers and skin cancers; his energy waned. Like him, Kate smoked cigarettes and shared his diet of red meat and ice-cream sundaes. But she remained fit by playing tennis regularly at the Beverly Hills Hotel and swimming in George Cukor’s pool. She maintained a separate residence—a favorite among her many rented houses, this one a former home of John Barrymore, the Aviary, up on Tower Grove Drive in Beverly Hills. As often as possible, she dragged Tracy out for walks around the Franklin Canyon Reservoir or on the beach at Malibu, where they liked to fly kites.