Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  “I tried to put her at ease,” Mamoulian later remembered. “I asked her to sit down, and I said to her, ‘This is going to be difficult because it’s a very big part.* Have you ever done anything?’ She said, ‘No.’” (Untrue, of course, but Kate could easily have considered her past experience too inadequate to qualify.)

  Rouben Mamoulian gave her a scene to read and told her to go into the next room to study it for ten minutes or so and to return. Her reading reflected her inexperience and Mamoulian told her he did not think she was ready for such a large part. “However,” he confided in his soft, rolling Russian accent, “if I have a chance for you, an opening for a smaller part, I would like to call you.” After she left he went in to speak to Cheryl Crawford, the casting director.† “Cheryl,” he said, “I want you to take this girl’s name down because the kid has something. Whenever I have an opening remind me.” Later he recalled, “There was something about her—it’s very difficult to describe in words. You can’t describe music. There was—is—a kind of luminosity . . . there are some faces that project the light; hers does.”

  Cheryl Crawford offered her a job as understudy to the ingenue at a salary of $30 a week, a humble comedown from the $225 a week the Guild had previously offered her. Even so, Kate accepted. A Month in the Country opened to fair reviews on March 17, 1930. Five weeks later, Kate replaced Hortense Alden‡ as Katia, the maid, maintaining her duties as understudy to Eunice Stod-dart. Kate asked for a five-dollar raise in salary but the Guild refused, saying that they could get plenty of girls at thirty dollais to handle both jobs and that she could quit if dissatisfied. She stuck but harbored harsh feelings toward the Guild. (Miss Stoddart failed to miss even one performance.)

  Kate by now had become great friends with Laura Harding, and the two young women decided to put in a summer of stock with the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Laura had apprenticed the previous year. Luddy planned to join Kate on weekends and he seemed to have no objection to his wife’s arrangement to share a room with Laura in the home of a minister named Bradley, his Southern wife and their three teenaged daughters. Nineteen other members of the company were also established at the minister’s huge old eighteen-room house—all of whom shared one bathroom, which was next to Kate and Laura’s room. Kate infuriated everyone in the house by taking “endless baths”—eight, nine and even ten baths a day into the late night, shouting out French poetry as she bathed. On the weekends, Luddy washed her hair for her in the bathtub and brought her ice cream from the village where he had a room in the local hotel, the Red Lion Inn.

  The company was a diverse group with extreme and conflicting political and artistic opinions. Kate fought violently with almost everyone but Laura. The two women got to know each other very well over the summer and, according to Laura, “laughed an awful lot.” Laura had a strong personality, a talent for easy persuasion. She could get Kate to agree to small adventures, rather childish pranks to play on fellow company members. With Laura, Kate seemed to regain some of the sense of camaraderie she had experienced with her brother Tom, and she reacted warmly to it.

  Richard Hale,* a well-known actor and concert singer, and Kate were constantly battling. Hale’s mother was a violent antifeminist and an adversary of Mrs. Hepburn’s; his brother-in-law was the arch-conservative Heywood Broun and Kate and Laura hated him categorically. Osgood Perkins was a member of the company, as were Mary Wickes, Leo Carroll, Aline MacMahon, Walter Connolly and George Coulouris.† Coulouris immediately took a dislike to this “skinny red-haired girl [who] ran in saying, ‘I’ve come all the way from Hartford with a golf tee between my teeth!’ in a high, squeaky voice.” She had driven to Stockbridge in her new and luxurious LaSalle convertible and though she dressed in trousers and ate her meals with her knees almost up to her face, “she played the prima donna from the time of her arrival.”

  Kate took tremendous pleasure in baiting Coulouris, and their arguments usually reached a crescendo over Rev. Bradley’s meal table. During one dinner Coulouris rose from the table indignant at something Kate had said and she got up and pursued him at a mad clip through the house, both of them holding their cutlery midair in a threatening gesture. Finally Coulouris, much winded, turned on his heel and wagged his fork at her.

  “You’re a fool, Katharine Hepburn! You’re a fool!” he shouted. “You’ll never be a star. You’ll never be important in the theatre. You don’t make any sense at all.”

  Kate yelled back, “You’re the fool! I will be a star before you’re ever heard of!”

  Becoming a star meant a great deal to Kate. Good reviews and love of the theater were all well and good, but she wanted to be recognized. This meant maintaining her own strong personality even while becoming the character she played—a difficult task. To some her voice was irritating, the aggressive tone containing a certain kind of violence. (“Well I like that. And I feel good, so I’m violent. I come by that naturally,” she replied to such allegations.) Her voice was a challenge, the edge she put on words seemed to say, “What the hell are you going to do about this?”

  She had been hired for a five-week engagement with an option on her services for an additional five weeks if she did well. Piqued at being cast in a role no larger than Laura Harding’s in the first play of the season, Sir James Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, she ignored the director’s instructions and treated him with rude disdain. Portraying Lady Agatha and Lady Catherine (two rather silly young women), Kate and Laura were generally onstage together. Onstage alone in only one scene, Kate was to step to the wings and call out, “Catherine? Lady Catherine?” Throughout rehearsal week she yelled, instead, “Lau-au-ra! Lau-au-ra Ha-a-rding!” Alexander Kirkland,* who was directing, lost his temper.

  “Miss Hepburn, you just can’t do that!”

  “No?” Kate asked. “Who’s going to stop me?”

  The Admirable Crichton opened on June 30 starring June Walker (who had gained wide recognition on Broadway as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and Richard Hale. The play, and especially Miss Walker, received good reviews in local and neighboring papers, but neither Kate nor Laura gained so much as a mention, or an “also in the cast.”

  Kate chomped at the bit and fought fiercely to be given the lead in the Berkshire Playhouse’s second production, The Romantic Young Lady. Biographical profiles usually state that she played the lead in the Martínez Sierra comedy,† but Edith Barrett,‡ the star of Michael and Mary (a Broadway hit the previous season), performed the role of Rosario. And while Kate did everything to command attention (including wearing her dress backward one night and her hat reversed another), once again the reviews made no mention of her appearance.

  George Kelly’s§ farce, The Torch Bearers, followed on July 21, starring Aline MacMahon. The day before the opening, the drama editor of The Hartford Courant wrote: “I do not know whether or not Kath[a]rine Hepburn is to have a part in The Torch Bearers. She had played in the three plays already given [Kate had a minor role in the third production, Romeo and Juliet] and I understood was to be in the company five weeks. I have never seen Mr. Kelly’s play and I hope to be able to get to Stockbridge next week to enjoy it. I also am inclined to hope that I may see Miss Hepburn in the cast for I belong to the I-knew-her-when Club—when she was a very small child indeed!”

  Mr. Brown was disappointed; for Kate, in a huff, and with Laura in the front seat beside her, had left Stockbridge in her “marvelous LaSalle convertible” the night that Romeo and Juliet closed, after completing three weeks of her five-week contract. “I asked for decent parts and they gave me strictly mediocre,” she later explained.

  Other company members claimed that her “disruptive perverseness” had become so great by the end of the three plays that Alexander Kirkland would never have picked up her option for the second five weeks and that Kate quit to have the last word. Their opinions reinforced by the unprofessionalism of her action, most of the stock company were glad to see her leave; certainly, her cont
ribution and Laura’s had been so small they were not missed.

  Kate has said, “I just don’t like to be half good. It drives me insane. And I’m willing to do anything to try to be really good. I’m very aware when I’m very good—and I like to be very, very good. Oh, I think perfection is the only standard for people who are stars.”

  But in the fall of 1930, Kate Hepburn was not a star and her idea of perfection seldom corresponded with the views of her directors and the actual stars of the plays she appeared in. Ensemble playing was not something she ascribed to. She had to stand out from the crowd, be noticed. Her dedication and commitment—which were awesome—were not so much to the theater as to fulfilling her ambition to become a star.

  By now her parents and Luddy believed in Kate almost as much as she believed in herself. Backing would be no problem. Her already ample self-confidence increased. Theatrical agents whose offices she haunted said she was too aristocratic looking to play anything but a society girl. She answered haughtily that they were stupid, and she called on producers herself. She heard that British playwright Benn W. Levy had arrived in New York to supervise the casting of his forthcoming Broadway production of Art and Mrs. Bottle.* Jane Cowl† was to play the lead and a young woman was needed for the small but showy role of her daughter.

  In her usual bizarre audition clothes, Kate burst into Benn Levy’s office, in the same way she had done in Baltimore with Edwin Knopf, and announced brusquely that she would consent to take the part. Unlike Knopf, the British dramatist was amused. This girl was so lanky, bony and freckled that her air of assurance struck him as absurd. However, most of the applicants had been too attractive to please the aging Miss Cowl. Kate was “homely enough,” and her reading, if not exactly right, did show promise. Jane Cowl approved her and Kate was hired. As soon as rehearsals began, Levy’s enthusiasm collapsed. She came dressed in men’s faded silk pajamas, a Chinese coat and scruffy slippers, wore no makeup, was rude, and refused to listen to his direction. Levy fired her but, after unsuccessful interviews with fourteen other applicants, rehired her at Jane Cowl’s insistence.

  “What does she use to get that shine?” Levy demanded to know, when Kate appeared each day with glittering cheeks and nose. Kate carried a concealed flask of alcohol and doused her face from it. She still took eight, nine or ten baths a day and at night wrapped her feet in wet cloths when she was unable to sleep. Whether her obsession with cleanliness and her need to feel cool were at the root of her splashing her face with alcohol could be debated. The gleam on her face was visible halfway back into the auditorium and picked up the light from overhead spots.

  When the play opened on November 18, Miss Cowl insisted Kate submit to makeup. Kate agreed grudgingly, but continued to splash the alcohol on her face, which streaked the makeup and made her look garish. To add to this, on her initial entrance early in the first act, she had to kiss Miss Cowl on the cheek. Opening night, Miss Cowl heard a murmur in the audience from that point. When the first-act curtain came down she learned why. Kate had left a vivid lipstick print on her cheek. Miss Cowl demanded Kate use indelible lipstick.

  The incident repeated itself the following night. Jane Cowl was furious. “Didn’t I ask you to get some indelible lipstick?” she asked Kate.

  To which Kate replied, “Well, I just thought I mightn’t like it,”

  “An uncommonly refreshing performance was given by Katharine Hepburn as the young daughter,” said Alison Smith of the New York World of her performance as Judy Bottle. Despite the fact that she had been outrageously rude to Jane Cowl, the leading lady, who had a reputation for gentility, was so impressed with Kate’s “promise of power” that she commented later, “I don’t think anything that child could have done could have turned me against her.”

  By the summer of 1931, Kate and Laura Harding were inseparable friends. Since her marriage to Luddy was in name only, Kate had no hesitation in pursuing her own aims in life. In fact, never during their marriage did they act the part of a married couple. Nonetheless, a great loyalty existed between them.

  When Kate contracted for the season of summer stock at Ivoryton, Connecticut, Laura, who had given up all thoughts of an acting career, went with her. Because great wealth had deprived her of the need to work, Laura could afford to follow Kate around; and she was willing to live vicariously through her friend’s achievements, becoming a catalyst for Kate, cheering her, pushing her on. At Ivoryton, Kate got her opportunity to play major roles in three plays—Just Married, The Man Who Came Back (opposite Henry Hull*) and The Cat and the Canary.

  Theater producer Gilbert Miller caught her in one of her performances at Ivoryton and offered her a choice role in a play that he and British actor Leslie Howard† (who was also to star) were bringing into New York that fall. The play was The Animal Kingdom by Philip Barry. Kate was to appear as Daisy Sage, a character who bore a kinship to his Linda Seton in Holiday. Kate was ecstatic. After Ivoryton, Luddy joined her and Laura at the Hardings’ Pennsylvania mountain retreat, the Lodge. Every day for three weeks Kate ran through her part with her husband and close friend.

  Rehearsals began in Boston at the end of August. From the moment Kate and Leslie Howard faced each other onstage, war was declared. Howard hated her “outrageous posturings” and her “insufferable bossiness.” Philip Barry, on the other hand, was quite taken with her and on the second day of rehearsal added some lines to her part that she herself had inspired. Leslie Howard began to apply pressure on Gilbert Miller to remove her immediately from the cast. Actors Equity ruled that if an actor rehearsed with a show for six days, he or she was entitled to two weeks’ notice with pay. The fifth day was a Friday and Kate drove home to West Hartford afterward to spend the weekend, as she almost always did, usually without Luddy.

  Mrs. Hepburn had recently mounted the rostrum at Carnegie Hall and picketed the White House on behalf of birth control. A Life magazine article reported that “The Hepburn house is a piquant compound of Margaret Sanger’s emporium—Madame Recamier’s salon and the Roman Coliseum.” In West Hartford, the Hepburns were considered “pink, arty and Godless” and those who dared come close were either stimulated or incensed by their forcible and contentious natures.

  Kate’s intense energy and austere intellectuality combined with a rare facial beauty and physical gaucherie caused her to stand out from the crowd. And she wore her “strangeness” with panache. Pleased that she struck others as peculiar, she was quick to admit, “I have an angular face and body and I suppose an angular personality that jabs into people.” She never considered herself in the same category as those young actors who sat around in Sardi’s or the Penn-Astor Drugstore, or stood in the hallways outside producers’ offices waiting for auditions. Those hopefuls thought of her as a “high-class broad who was going to make it.” So did Kate. And the role of Daisy Sage could have been the vehicle to catapult her into stardom.

  If Kate believed her mother would be impressed with the size of her new role, she was quickly disappointed. Mrs. Hepburn glanced at the playscript, judged it “la-de-da commercial” and did not think it had “enough to do with what really mattered in the world.” Despite her mother’s lack of enthusiasm, Kate was thrilled to be cast in The Animal Kingdom and her spirits were high.

  The usual turmoil and excitement greeted her arrival in West Hartford. She talked a blue streak, the words tumbling over each other in her enthusiasm. Her brother Dick, several of his Harvard friends, her brother Bob, and her sisters, Marion and Peggy, sat cross-legged with her on the living-room floor as she told them all about the week’s rehearsal. Later she went up to her room (still—and always—as she had left it), unpacked and went to bed. She rose before anyone else the next morning and breakfasted by herself while she read a book. The sun poured in through the two sets of French doors of the dining room. The day would be good for tennis (which she played on a nearby court). The doorbell rang just as Dick and his college friends appeared for breakfast. A registered letter had been sent fro
m Gilbert Miller: “Pursuant to clause C-l in your contract, you are hereby given notice of the termination thereof.” She had been fired again. This time, the shock and the disappointment were tremendous.

  First she blamed Leslie Howard, who she said hated her because she was taller than he. She ranted and raged through the house and finally reached Philip Barry by phone in Mount Kisco, New York, where he was then living. Barry claimed she then went into “a fish wife tirade.” After he had listened to her abuse for a few minutes he shouted back, “They’re right about you! Nobody with your vicious disposition could possibly play light comedy! You’re totally unsuited to the part! I’ me glad they threw you out!”

  “I think Leslie Howard didn’t like me,” Kate later rationalized. “It’s agony to be fired. And it’s nice to be able to make up a lot of reasons proving you’re the hero. That firing was a big blow to me and I thought, ‘I’ll never survive this.’”

  Kate was certain that the play would fail without her. A young woman named Frances Fuller replaced her and the show was a great hit when it opened on Broadway, January 12, 1932. A few weeks later, Kate was hired to play an Amazon queen in Julien Thompson’s farce, The Warrior’s Husband, loosely based on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. All of her past athletic training, her vivid coloring, her statuesque carriage and her volatile personality combined to make Antipe a perfect role for her. She also displayed to great advantage her extremely shapely legs in the short costumes designed for the character. Nonetheless, her usual perverseness got Kate fired and rehired twice before the play opened at the Morosco Theatre on March 11, 1932.

  From the moment on opening night when Kate entered in her short-skirted Greek costume, a prop stag wrapped around her shoulders, and “bounded down a treacherous forty-step stairway three steps at a time, threw the stag down and wrestled with her leading man,” Colin Keith-Johnston,* her claim to stardom was staked. The role called for her to display a facet of her personality that was infallibly appealing; seemingly indomitable strength made vulnerable by a man stronger than she. Kate represented the distilled essence of the battle between the sexes.