by Anne Edwards
Kate and Laura had embarked upon what they called their “Hollywood adventure” unaware that Adolph Zukor, head of Paramount Pictures, the ebullient Miss Billie Burke, one of the stars of the film Kate was to make for R.K.O., and her husband, the great impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, were on the same train, having boarded, like Laura, in New York. The train trip did not prove to be as pleasant as the friends had expected, for the Midwest was in the grips of a heat wave. Without any air-cooling system, their compartment was insufferably hot and the two young women spent considerable time on the train’s sooty observation platform. Just past Albuquerque, a fleck of steel flew into Kate’s eye. When she tried to remove it she forced it to go in deeper and caused it to scratch the retina. Within a short time, the pain was considerable and the eye swollen shut.
Despite the condition, Kate was determined to make a good impression upon her arrival; and for the occasion Laura had purchased for her a gray silk suit with a matching pancake hat designed by New York courturière Elizabeth Hawes. Kate stepped off the train in Pasadena, California (once again to avoid the press), believing she looked quite elegant, if a bit puffy in the eye. To Leland Hayward and his partner, Myron Selznick,* who had driven out from Los Angeles to collect her, Kate’s outfit appeared more bizarre than stylish. Their new star, with her swollen eye and her hair drawn tightly back and tucked under the band of the flat-topped hat she wore, looked like a cross between a nun and a college graduate who had mixed it up a bit the night before. “This is what David’s paying $ 1,500 a week for?” David Selznick’s older brother, Myron, gasped.
They delivered the baggage to the then very chic Chateau Marmont Hotel above Sunset Boulevard, where the two women would be staying until other arrangements were made. Then Kate and Laura were driven to R.K.O. Studios to meet David O. Selznick and George Cukor. Smaller than the major studios, R.K.O. nonetheless presented a strange and fantastic sight to the newcomers. The streets and pathways were filled with a most extraordinary mixed population of Old West gunmen and their blowsy ladies, gypsies in dark makeup, men in tuxedos and women in gala ball gowns. Many of the buildings were mere façades. The vast sound stages festooned with ropes, chains and other “haphazard impediments, were as lofty and awe-inspiring as cathedrals.” The buildings were mere shells that had been constructed so that they could be used when necessary as backgrounds in more than one film. Her first glimpse of the studio was enough to alert Kate to the unreal world she was about to enter. Yet, Hollywood possessed no mystery for her. Films were to be a game and most games bored her unless she knew she could win. She would have to put her considerable energy into that endeavor.
Cukor’s reaction on seeing his “boa constrictor on a fast” for the first time was even worse than Myron Selznick’s. Cukor felt literally faint, believing he had made the most terrible mistake and not knowing what in the world David Selznick would say ar do when he set eyes on this bizarre-looking creature. Kate had arrived at the studio just in time for lunch and Cukor had no alternative but to ask her to join him.
Adela Rogers St. John recalled, “As long as I live I will never forget the first day she appeared on the lot. Everybody was in the commissary at lunch when she walked in with Mr. Cukor. Several executives nearly fainted. Mr. Selznick swallowed a chicken wing whole. We beheld a tall, skinny girl entirely covered with freckles and wearing the most appalling and incredible clothes I have ever seen in my life. They looked like something Lee Tracy [an actor] would design for the Mexican army to go ski-jumping in—yet you could tell they were supposed to be the last word. George Cukor looked across at us. He was a little pale but still in the ring.”
After lunch, Kate was escorted to David Selznick’s office. Selznick, a bespectacled bear of a man, greeted his new star with apprehension. Kate’s appearance had so seriously unnerved him that he even considered sending this bizarre-looking creature and her society friend straight back to New York on the next train. Cukor, trying to ease the difficult situation, brought up the wonders that makeup and wardrobe could accomplish and quickly escorted her out of Selznick’s office and down to his own to show her the costume designs she would wear in the film in her role as an upper-class English girl. If Selznick’s obvious disapproval could be overcome, she was to be on the set for the first scene the next morning. Getting her wardrobe immediately approved and in order was all important, for Cukor’s first reaction had now dissolved into fascination. The girl had a unique quality, Garboesque as he had originally thought. Even her imperious attitude added a dimension of interest to her. To his amazement, Kate rejected one dress after another, declaring them inappropriate, and far too garden-party girly-girly.
“I’m sure Miss De Lima [Josette De Lima, the designer] is very talented,” she conceded as she wiped the tears from her inflamed eye, “but I want my clothes designed by someone like Chanel or Schiaparelli.”
“Considering the way you look, I can hardly take your judgment seriously,” Cukor replied.
Kate was stunned at his retort. “I thought these clothes were pretty fancy. I paid a great deal for them,” she answered, head back, voice arched, never revealing the fact that the outfit had been purchased for her.
“Well, they’re terrible. You look ghastly. I think any woman who would wear such an outfit outside a bathroom wouldn’t know what clothes are. Now, what do you think of that?”
An awkward moment passed. Kate appraised the solid, stocky man whose dark eyes held her steady in their gaze. About the same height as she, Cukor was a man who would never easily back down. Only seven years her senior, he gave the impression of also being a person of infinite wisdom. When he spoke, his thicklipped mouth opened and closed with steely precision. His handshake was hard and sure and his gestures like semaphores. “You win!” she finally said. “Pick out the clothes you want.” Kate extended her hand and Cukor took it, convinced for the first time since her arrival at the studio that he had made the right choice in hiring her. Leland Hayward then drove Kate and Laura to an eye specialist in downtown Los Angeles. The cinder was removed from Kate’s eye, but since the retina had been scratched, she was asked to wear a patch for a few days, which would delay her first scene before the camera.
The motion-picture production company that brought Kate to Hollywood had a highly complex corporate history. After near bankruptcy and numerous mergers and acquisitions, in 1928, under a group led by Joseph P. Kennedy,* it had become RadioKeith-Orpheum, or R.K.O. The studio’s financial position had remained shaky despite the recent success (1931) of its Academy Award–winning western, Cimarron.† As it struggled for its survival, the studio changed its top brass yearly. When Kate and David Selznick (considered a thirty-two-year-old “boy wonder” at the time) met, he had just joined R.K.O. as head of production at a large salary with the hope that he would bring the studio out of its $5.5 million deficit. Selznick was a compulsive gambler to whom winning meant a great deal. Meeting the arrogant, unconventional young woman he had hired at the crunching weekly salary of $1,500 was not reassuring. Kate’s actions the next few days made him increasingly dubious.
The first thing Kate did upon returning to het hotel the day of her arrival was to call an agency to hire a “distinctive” car and a chauffeur. She had always loved stylish cars and was delighted when an enormous imported Hispano-Suiza that had been used by Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel was delivered to the Chateau Marmont. The next morning, she had the liveried chauffeur park the limousine directly under Cukor’s office window, then honk loudly as she emerged dressed in her old pinned-together sweater and baggy pants (she disregarded doctor’s orders and had not worn her eye patch). She thought the incident would amuse Cukor, but she had miscalculated. Cukor was once again beginning to become as insecure as Selznick about R.K.O.’s new “star.” As the day progressed, his nervousness increased.
Kate’s first studio appointment was with the press departmeht. It lasted no more than five minutes, during which time she announced that her private life was her own and that she d
id not believe in publicity. (The R.K.O. publicity department did not learn until much later that she was married.) Meetings with the makeup and hairdressing department heads proved equally difficult. Kate was certain she could groom herself better than they could. Cukor, who felt Kate had a special quality that should not be lost, backed up some of her arguments. Her natural, intelligent good looks were to be preserved; the freckles and frizzy hair were to go. (For years heavy makeup blotted out her freckles on screen and an air brush was used to remove them from stills.)
A stoty circulated about Kate’s first meeting with her co-star, the notorious womanizer and former matinee idol John Barrymore.* Supposedly, the man of the magnificently carved profile and the dissolute reputation studied her puffy eye for a moment and then offered her a vial of eye drops he kept in his pocket, with the comment, “I also hit the bottle occasionally, my dear.”
At lunch a studio photographer took some shots of Kate with Billie Burke and Barrymore. Later that same day several copies of the stills were presented to Kate for her to autograph for some visiting out-of-town executives. Although her co-stars had already obliged, she refused to sign them. Cukor was furious and turned on her. “You! Do you really think anyone would want your autograph alongside Barrymore’s and Miss Burke’s? Those two are actors! If you study for twenty-five years, maybe your signature will be worthy to go with theirs!”
Cukor’s sharp words spurred Kate to immerse herself in the script or A Bill of Divorcement as soon as she and Laura had moved from the Chateau Marmont to a small cottage in Franklin Canyon, found for them by a friend of Laura’s. They kept the glittering Hispano-Suiza and embarked upon a kind of unorthodox behavior that alienated most of Hollywood. When not before the cameras, Kate would dress in overalls, a fireman’s shirt and torn canvas tennis shoes. Invited to a formal tea at the home of one of the studio executives, Kate sent the properly dressed Laura inside while she paraded on the front lawn of the mansion in her usual, eccentric attire. No one in Hollywood knew quite what to think about Kate. On one hand she demanded privacy, while on the other she created public scenes that invited censure and created gossip and secret speculation. Most people felt her demands for privacy were all an act. Others called attention to her odd, masculine dress, her imperviousness toward men (her marriage to Luddy was still not known) and her symbiotic relationship with Laura.
Filming of A Bill of Divorcement began less than two weeks after Kate had arrived in Hollywood. Generally, Laura was right on the set with her. In the evenings, however, Kate remained at home while Laura made the rounds with her West Coast friends. A day seldom passed without Kate calling her parents. On one of these calls, after Laura and Kate had been in California for several weeks, Dr. Hepburn inquired as to what Kate had done with her salary. She replied that she had spent it all. Dr. Hepburn was furious and insisted she direct her checks to him and he would in turn send her an allowance sufficient for her needs. She obliged, an odd action for a woman not only independent financially but married.
During the filming of A Bill of Divorcement, with Cukor’s and Barrymore’s help and her own dedication, Kate started to become a competent film actress. Ten years later, Barrymore remembered “every hour” of their working together. “Something about her recalled my mother, Georgiana Drew,* the best actress who ever lived. Miss Hepburn’s talent was so clearly perceptible, and she was so intelligent in learning, that working with her was all pleasure. But Lord, she was innocent! I’d have to punch her black and blue to force her upstage in front of the camera. You have to knock most actresses practically unconscious before you can get yourself into the picture.”
And about the same time Kate replied, “I learned a tremendous lot from Barrymore. One thing in particular has been invaluable to me—when you’re in the same cast with people who know nothing about acting, you can’t criticize them, because they go to pieces. He never criticized me. He just shoved me into what I ought to do. He taught me all that he could pour into one greenhorn in that short time.” Some time later, she remembered watching Barrymore’s first scene and thinking, “‘You’re not much good . . . hmmmmm . . . phony.’ That’s what I thought. But later, I changed my opinion when we had the scene together in which I said, ‘I think you are my father,’ and he came over to me and took my face in his hands. He looked long at me, and he was absolutely shattering.”
Barrymore was an aging matinee idol in 1932, his dark, handsome face marked by years of drinking and a fast, hard life. His debauchery was legend, and few of his leading ladies escaped his lustful overtures. In an interview about a decade later he recalled that he gave Kate the eye a few times, “Then I stopped till she gave me the eye. After a few more days we gave each other the eye. So I knew the time was ready. I’m never wrong about such things. I never have been.” Kate claimed he suggested they run over the scene “we were going to shoot after lunch—imagine how I leaped at that chance—to be coached by John Barrymore. I was absolutely fascinated by him. What an actor! I went over to his dressing room . . . . We ran the scene and he did help me enormously. Then as I was getting ready to go, he suddenly took off his dressing gown—one of those ridiculous flannel ones, the kind we used to wear when we were children. His was absolutely repulsive, filthy, food-stained, and caked with makeup on the collar—simply revolting. Anyway, he slipped it off and stood there stark naked. My first thought was to get out, but I simply couldn’t move. I was petrified—couldn’t speak.”
Barrymore corroborated her memory. “She just stood there looking at me, and finally, I said, ‘Well, come on. What’re you waiting for? We don’t have all day. Cukor’s one of those finickers who goes into a spin if you’re five minutes late.’ She didn’t move, so I did and started to grab her, but she backed away and practically plastered herself against the wall, by God! I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and she said, ‘I cahn’t.” I said, ‘Never mind, I’ll show you how.’ She started babbling, ‘No! No! Please. It’s impossible. I cahn’t.’ I’ve never been so damn flabbergasted. I said to her, ‘Why not?’ and what do you think she said? ‘My father doesn’t want me to have any babies!’ and she edged over to the door and made a quick exit.”
Barrymore’s fury lasted for some days, but he was an artist who greatly admired talent and he felt that Kate possessed a special spark—although he considered her “a creature most strange. A nut. She must come from Brazil ‘where the nuts come from.’”*
Once Kate moved before the camera, all of George Cukor’s fears dissolved.† Her impatience and directness, her quality of cutting through the extraneous, made her ideal for the role of Sydney Fairfield. She lacked the tenderness Katharine Cornell had brought to the part on the stage, but this gave reality to the melodramatic nature of the story (which bore a strong likeness to Ibsen’s Ghosts). A shell-shocked victim of World War I (Barrymore) escapes from an asylum, returning home on the very day his wife (Billie Burke), who has divorced him, is to marry again. His daughter (Kate), who also has plans to be married, gives up her own future (once she realizes that his affliction is not from the war and might be inherited) to care for her father.
Cukor was hard on her. One time during the shooting she turned to him and said, “Just because you don’t know what you’re doing don’t take it out on me!” He quickly grew to respect her instincts. She looked at things with “the cold eye of youth,” as he called it, and made her own evaluation. In the scene where Hillary Fairfield (Barrymore) returns home, Sydney (Kate), his daughter, is concealed halfway up a flight of stairs as he wanders around the room, gazing at mementos of his former life. Kate played the scene with the attitude “I never knew my father, how can I necessarily be expected to love him?” Cukor felt another actress might have found it necessary to indicate “of course I’d never really be mean to my own father.”
Because Kate had always been a day person, rising and retiring early whenever she could, the ten- and twelve-hour days required in filming well suited her. She and Laura rose at six-thirty and were at
the studio an hour later. Kate still took numerous showers and baths each day and claimed she brushed her teeth with Ivory soap almost as frequently (an eccentricity which, if true, she might have stolen from her grandfather). She set up her dressing room as home and ate a hearty lunch there (usually steak and salad and some fresh fruit and milk), seldom joining her fellow workers in the studio commissary. Her strict regime impressed everyone on the set. She endeared herself to the crew, who shared jokes with her and ate the candy she passed around at four P.M. when she liked to stop for tea and a sweet. To them, she quickly became one of the gang, although remaining a bit aloof with the cast and executives in the front office. All of the artifices and strange behavior that had marked her stage work disappeared. Cukor has said he saw immediately that Kate had a quality “made for the screen.” Her face had a light, a radiance, and it moved correctly. All her “odd awkwardness, her odd shifts of emphasis” worked to bring her alive on screen. “She wasn’t too smooth, she was fresh.”
Kate found it easier to communicate with Barrymore than with Billie Burke.* In her youth, Miss Burke, a great beauty, had been the toast of Broadway and had married the flamboyant Florenz Ziegfeld. When her husband left for work, he left to work with the most beautiful women of the day—the Ziegfeld Follies girls. For years, her life had been geared to holding on to a man who found monogamy almost impossible. Now, at forty-seven and still married to the suave but ailing impresario, she considered herself an expert in affairs of the heart. She advised script girls, makeup women and wardrobe ladies alike, “It’s your job to creep out of bed early—ten minutes early will do, five in a pinch—brush your hair and your teeth, put on something crisp, use some scent, and—no matter how tired you are, no matter how your head aches, no matter how late you were up last night—look kissable!”