Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  As in the past, Kathy’s summers at Fenwick allowed her to endure life the rest of the year in West Hartford. Suntanned and freckled within a few days of her arrival each summer, she swam and fished and boated up the glinting river and to the Sound. The summer of 1924 took on special meaning; for in September she would leave for college, to live away from home and her family for the first time.

  She arrived at Bryn Mawr College, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, seventeen years old, totally undisciplined scholastically, used to being the focal point both of her family’s attention and their unwavering acceptance as well. The other girls in the college found it impossible to identify with this strange, aloof young woman who took her showers after midnight when the rest of her dormitory was asleep and who had not only waded barelegged in the fountain of the library cloister and then rolled herself dry on the grass, but allowed herself to be photographed in the nude in her dormitory room and then mocked the outraged druggist who refused to print the films.

  Perversely, the first time she entered the dormitory dining hall, she wore one of her most elegant dresses, flame colored and form fitting. “Ah! Conscious beauty,” an upperclasswoman called out. Backs were immediately turned to her and she sat through her dinner alone. Seven months were to pass before she would enter the dining hall again. Even then, no one sat with her, and after that she ate all of her meals in local tea rooms and restaurants.*

  In her freshman and sophomore years, she would have nothing to do with college activities and exerted no effort to make friends. Classmates claimed she called no one by name. She dressed eccentrically in rumpled clothes most of the time and seemed “exhaustingly intense.” Her marks grew worse with each passing term. Told by the dean that his daughter might do better elsewhere, Dr. Hepburn replied, “If I had a patient in the hospital, and the patient grew worse, I should not discharge him, but try to work out a more efficacious treatment.”

  What kept her going was a dream. At some point during her first two years at Bryn Mawr, she had decided she would be an actress. History had been her original major. When she returned to school for her junior term, she changed to English, aware that she could not be eligible for campus dramatics unless her grades were greatly improved. Setting her mind on this goal, she studied night and day. Her grades took a dramatic upswing. Before the year was over, she had appeared in lead roles in two plays—A. A. Milne’s The Truth About Bladys and The Cradle Song. No one thought she showed any special talent. She had finally made a quartet of friends, however, who called themselves, inexplicably, The Tenement.

  The summer following her junior year, Kate and a member of The Tenement traveled together to Europe. Kate’s school friend had accumulated $500 by picking potato buds. Kate said she’d hock her bedroom furniture to go, but in the end Dr. Hepburn matched her friend’s $500. The fare was $210 round-trip steerage to Plymouth, England. When they arrived they hired bicycles, but they hadn’t figured on England being so hilly. They did not get far from the dock when they decided they must get hold of a car. They turned in their bicycles and trained to London, where they found “a very nice man called Mr. Seymour, in Great Portland Street” who let them have a Morris for £95 ($475 at that time). Living proved very expensive. Lodging was 2s. 7d. a night, and with food and the car expenses, their outlay was over $5 a day. They quickly realized they were running out of funds, and so after a week they sold the car back to Mr. Seymour for only £5 less than they had paid for it and took a train for Paris.

  In February, 1927, in the previous year, Kate had attended a Yale prom with one of her Saybrook friends and had met a goodlooking senior, Robert J. “Bob” McKnight. McKnight came from Springfield, Ohio, and was related to J.S.A. Ward, one of America’s best-known nineteenth-century sculptors.

  While they were dancing, Kathy asked McKnight, “What are you going to be?”

  “I’m going to be the greatest sculptor in the world,” he replied. “What about you?”

  “I’m going to be the greatest actress in the world.”

  McKnight spent that Easter break in West Hartford, sharing a room with the much younger Dick and Bob Hepburn, then in their early teens. A gentle man, somewhat a dreamer, from a conservative though artistic family, Bob McKnight had never seen anything quite like the Hepburns, and was amazed at the table conversation dominated by the younger children, who asked questions on sex and their parents’ current work and preoccupations and received full answers. He got along well with Dr. Hepburn, who convinced him he should go to a medical school to study anatomy if he really wanted to be a sculptor. Though she had invited him, Kathy left McKnight to his own devices for most of the visit. Early one morning she woke him up with a fairly passionate kiss and then dashed out of the bedroom he shared with her brothers. McKnight considered this impulsive act a statement and was certain that not only was he in love with Kathy but she with him.

  For nearly forty years, Bryn Mawr College had sponsored a quadrennial Elizabethan May Day. With the school’s English setting—rolling hills and well-tilled fields, gray-stone, ivy-covered buildings of Elizabethan architecture—nothing could have been more apt. Kathy won the lead role of Pandora (“sometime sullen, sometime vain, and sometime martial”) in John Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon, first performed for Queen Elizabeth I in 1597. May Day (actually two days—May 4 and 5) consisted of revels and six plays presented simultaneously on various parts of Bryn Mawr’s sprawling campus.

  Dressed in a white flowing gown, her hair loose and blowing madly in the brisk spring winds, Kathy walked barefooted (as Pandora would have) on the graveled path during the procession of the players. A teacher pressed her to put on sandals to avoid injury to her feet. “You can take them off for the performance,” the teacher assured her. Kathy firmly refused.

  Her wild, militant Pandora startled students and faculty at Bryn Mawr. Her performance was overblown and lacked a sense of ensemble playing. But from the moment she walked barefooted and bare-armed down the library stairs and onto the lawns of the Cloister Garden, head defiant, her hair a red flag of independence, her audience was aware of a powerful presence. A man named John S. Clark, whose home abutted the grounds of the college, saw one of her performances and gave her a letter of introduction to Edwin H. Knopf, a young theatrical producer who was preparing a season of summer stock in Baltimore.

  Without funds at the time and fearing her father would never approve, Kathy called Bob McKnight in New Haven and asked him to send her ten dollars so that she could drive her car (a recent acquisition) down to see Knopf. McKnight dispatched the money immediately.

  Kathy wasted no time after her arrival in Baltimore. To Edwin Knopf’s fury, she entered his office above the Auditorium Theatre without an appointment and over an assistant’s refusal to grant her time. Her hair was drawn back tight into a bun, her freckled skin blotched magenta with excitement. “Her forehead was wet. Her nose shone,” Knopf later recalled. “She was tremendously sincere, but awkward, green, freaky-looking. I told her that my plans for the season were already made and there was no place for her, especially since I only hired professional actors. Then I rose in the hope this would indicate to her that the interview was over. Her parting shot from the door was, ‘Thanks Mr. Knopf, I’ll be back as soon as school is finished.’ ”

  She returned a month later, four days before her graduation. This time she managed to enter a rehearsal in the theater unseen, and sat in the dark directly behind Knopf.

  “You see I’ve kept my promise,” she leaned forward to say.

  “What promise?” he asked, after turning to look hard at her.

  “To come back as soon as school was finished.”

  “There is nothing for you,” he insisted, having finally recognized her. “I never use amateurs.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” she said calmly. “I’ll just stay here and watch.” Three days later she still haunted the rehearsals. Finally, Knopf gave in.

  “There are four ladies-in-waiting in Th
e Czarina,” he called down to her from the stage. “Report [next] Monday morning for rehearsal.” This was on a Wednesday and her graduation from Bryn Mawr was that Saturday. Somehow her family had to be told, for the plans were for her to drive her parents back to Hartford after the commencement exercises (they had taken the train down). Fearing her father would disapprove of an actress in the family, she lost her nerve initially and got into her car without a word. Some thirty miles from Bryn Mawr she blurted out the news that she had accepted a job in a stock company in Baltimore and was due to begin work two days hence. Dr. Hepburn was in turn stunned and furious.

  “You want to be an actress only because it is the easiest and most conspicuous way to show off!” he scoffed.

  She protested loudly and her father shouted at her to stop the car and let him out. “I don’t want to hear anything about it!” he threatened. “I’ll go the rest of the way on the train!”

  The atmosphere in the vehicle had become explosive. Mrs. Hepburn reminded her husband of the hundreds of public appearances she had made. Dr. Hepburn thundered back that she had done so in the public interest while what Kathy planned was nothing but vanity. The argument kept up all the way to Hartford. Finally, the next day, a Sunday, Dr. Hepburn gave in.

  “All right,” he said wearily. “I’ll give you fifty dollars to help pay your expenses for a couple of weeks, until you recover from this madness, but that’s the last penny you’ll get from me until you do something respectable.”

  She took the money and packed a suitcase in a matter of minutes. All the Hepburns stood out on the front porch waving to her as she drove away. The trip to Baltimore was a day’s journey. But no matter what happened after she arrived, she would not give up or return home beaten. A Hepburn might be many things—an intellectual snob, bullheaded, self-motivated—but never a quitter.

  Footnote

  * Years later, Hepburn developed a phobia about eating in restaurants. In 1924, women did not eat in restaurants alone as a rule. A woman who did, particularly a young woman, would quite naturally be stared at.

  Kate: A Malady of Madness

  CHAPTER

  5

  In Baltimore Kathy was renamed “Kate.” No declaration was made to this effect. The members of Edwin H. Knopf’s stock company simply adopted the Shakespearean diminutive of Katharine, which seemed to fit the determined, shrewish newcomer to their company.

  Eddie Knopf—urbane, literate, young (only twenty-nine in 1928), most attractive and possessing a tremendous enthusiasm—made a strong impression upon Kate. He had begun his career as an editor at his brother Alfred Knopf’s publishing house, but he soon switched to acting and had played leads in New York and abroad before joining with William Farnsworth to form the Auditorium Theatre Players in Baltimore. Unhappily married at the time to Mary Ellis, the lovely singing star of the musical Rose Marie, and discontented with the critical acceptance of his stock company, Knopf had one eye on Hollywood and the possibility of becoming a film director.* He, therefore, had little patience with an amateur who bristled each time she was corrected. He gave her a walk-on, nonspeaking role in Melchior Lengyel and Lajos Biro’s The Czarina (about Catherine the Great) and figured Kate would give up and go home in short order.

  Both Knopf and the company, which included the future film star Robert Montgomery, were overwhelmed at the transformation that took place when Kate, as a lady-in-waiting to Mary Boland’s Catherine the Great, walked onstage dressed in her Russian Court costume and curtsied deeply.* The girl with the bunched hair, sloppy clothes and mannish golf-stride step had disappeared, and for that moment Kate commanded the stage. During the first two days of rehearsals, Knopf’s star, Mary Boland, found her terribly disconcerting and complained that she sat in the wings staring at her and making her feel very uneasy. But she also confessed that she had “never seen anyone more beautiful than that eager girl, so proud to walk across a stage that she and the costume seemed borne up by light.”

  The Hepburns did not travel to Baltimore for their daughter’s stage debut. Kate’s Aunt Edith attended a performance of The Czarina, as did some old Johns Hopkins associates of Dr. Hepburn, and the word went back to West Hartford that Kate had made a good show of herself. During the third week of her Baltimore engagement a letter arrived from Dr. Hepburn. “I won fifteen dollars at bridge last week. Here it is—a present.” The next week a larger check arrived.

  A small role as a flapper in Russell Medcraft and Norma Mitchell’s The Cradle Snatchers followed her brief appearance in The Czarina. The male lead was Kenneth MacKenna,† an actor who had already made a name for himself in silent films. Self-conscious because of the transition he would have to make to adapt his voice to the new talking pictures, MacKenna was also fearful that Kate’s high-pitched nasal voice would be a future hindrance and gave her a letter to Frances Robinson-Duff, one of New York’s finest voice coaches. (Before this he had convinced Knopf that Kate could play a small part in an upcoming Broadway production, The Big Pond, to which Knopf owned the rights.)

  During Kate’s last year at Bryn Mawr, Bob McKnight had proposed. She had avoided an answer with maddening charm. Kate had visited him at Yale and walked with him to a spot that commanded a magnificent view of New Haven. This is where, he told her, he always came to make decisions. He sat down with her on a rock. The sun made a fiery circle of her hair. Her long legs were caught up under her chin and as he waited for an answer Kate began a breathless dissertation on her dream of becoming an actress. An hour was to pass before she finished, stood, grabbed his hand and, running, led the way back to the campus. McKnight took this as indecision on her part, but not necessarily rejection, and he remained an ardent admirer. He did not know that another young man whom Kate had met at a Bryn Mawr dance was also pursuing her and that she found him more intriguing for reasons McKnight could not have understood.

  Ludlow Ogden Smith believed unequivocally in Kate’s ability to succeed as an actress. Indeed, he found the idea of her being an actress exhilarating. Luddy’s mother was the beautiful Gertrude Clemens Smith, wife of Lewis L. Smith, of Strafford, Pennsylvania, where the Smiths’ estate, Sherreden, on Deepdale Road, was the scene of many lavish weekend parties. The son of wealthy parents, educated at exclusive boarding schools and having graduated the University of Grenoble in France, Luddy possessed a quality of sophistication that Kate found attractive. He had a degree in industrial engineering that he never used. Charming, socially oriented, he preferred to pursue a career as an insurance broker.

  Twenty-nine in 1928, tall and lean with a profile that could have belonged to a matinee idol, Luddy dressed elegantly and impeccably, handkerchief just so in his breast pocket, imported silk tie for evening, paisley silk ascot and blazer for the country. He spoke perfect French and colored his speech with short Gallic phrases, skied, boated, was wonderfully amusing, knew all the right people and small bits of information on the most esoteric subjects, and seemed to have a quotation for every occasion.

  In Luddy, Kate had found an attentive escort, an amusing companion, a sympathetic friend, and a man who would never stand in the way of her career. She saw a good deal of him while she prepared for her role in The Big Pond, and every weekend they went up to West Hartford together. Kate was always busy, but Luddy did not object to trailing after her.

  In a townhouse at 235 East Sixty-second Street between the Second and Third Avenue Els in New York, Frances Robinson-Duff taught actors and actresses how to breathe and then how to act. David Belasco had called her the greatest acting teacher in the world. Now a grande dame in her fifties, Frances Robinson-Duff had studied voice in Germany, been a Wagnerian soprano, acted in France, then for eleven years was a member of actress Julia Marlowe’s theater company and played all over America with the best-known artists of the time. Miss Robinson-Duff’s mother was also a teacher of voice and drama in Paris, where the two women became famous in the theater world for their stellar list of students and the exuberance of their Sunday afternoon salons.
Miss Robinson-Duff knew every theater personality of consequence in Paris: Sarah Bernhardt, Mount-Sully, André Bacque of the Comédie Française, Réjane. She had studied a method of breathing control and voice projection with Sarah Bernhardt’s teacher, and that method was the one she had embellished, refined and now taught. Mother and daughter had returned to the United States at the outbreak of World War I, bought a townhouse and created in New York the same aura of celebrity as they had had in Paris. Clark Gable,* Mary Pickford, Mary Garden, Helen Hayes, Margalo Gillmore, Billie Burke, Mary Boland, Dorothy Gish, Corinne Griffith, Hope Hampton, Kenneth MacKenna, Libby Holman, Ilka Chase and Ina Claire were only a few of the performers who had been coached by her. Kate was awed by “the Great Teacher’s” credentials and was certain the association would lead to stardom. She had sent in a two-hundred-dollar check in advance to cover two lessons a week for a period of three months.

  September skies delivered a thundery cloudburst on the morning of Kate’s first drama lesson with Miss Robinson-Duff. Not able to find a taxi, Kate ran nearly the entire distance from her small midtown hotel to Miss Robinson-Duff’s studio and home. A French butler, fully liveried, opened the door to her and stood back from the bedraggled young woman he faced. She removed, but held on to, her dripping raincoat and assured the man that she had an appointment. He directed her to a stairway although there was a hand-pully elevator (later she learned this was for the personal use of the occupants of the house and their private guests), and informed her that Miss Robinson-Duff’s studio was three flights up on the top floor.

  Louis XVI decor dominated the house. Ornate gold-gilt framed portraits of costumed performers lined the narrow staircase. Kate took the steps at breakneck speed. On the second floor Miss Robinson-Duff’s elderly mother taught singing, and a soprano voice could be heard going through some vocal exercises to the thumping beat of the hard tip of a cane against a wooden floor.