Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  CHAPTER

  8

  Kate’s union with Luddy was never a marriage, but Luddy had been her confidant, her one close good friend. Now she had Laura.

  “I think men and women are more shut off from each other than a woman and a woman,” Kate was to comment. “I think women are more interested in the same things. Two women can live together as friends. It’s more difficult for a man and a woman to be friends and not leap into bed. Of course, it depends on the individual but I’ve always thought that men and women are not too well suited to each other. It’s inevitable that they should come together, but, again, how well suited are they to live together in the same house?”

  She and Laura were well suited to co-habit. Laura had enthusiasm, zing, plus an openness, an honesty. Kate found complicated people “disturbing” and “tiring.” Despite her great wealth, Laura was quite a simple person whose one main concern and interest was Kate and her career. Life in their “dreary” Canyon house was unpressured, almost austere. Kate accepted few invitations. Immediately after a day at the studio she would rush home, eat an early supper, study her lines for the next day, wrap her feet in cold cloths and, about nine, retire. Weekends she and Laura would embark on their “sub-collegiate idiotic” adventures. Men, the dating kind that is, had no part in Kate’s life. She refused to attend premieres with a studio escort or be photographed with any man. Her private life, she maintained, was her own, and her “secret” marriage kept her from appearing in public with a man. Kate greatly respected the vows she had taken (although they were subject to her own interpretation). Cukor, who had become a good friend, was known to be a confirmed bachelor; and her visits to his house provoked no interest on the part of the press.

  Kate’s upbringing was in a good measure responsible for her antisocial leanings. Fury still rankled within her for the snubs she had suffered in West Hartford as a young girl, a fact she also held responsible for her success since it had given her the impetus to get up and do something. Her parents’ beliefs had allowed her to be a nonconformist. Her self-indulgence was never condemned. But her desire to be accepted, though sublimated, remained.

  Shortly after Kate’s return to Hollywood, the proposed film, Three Came Unarmed, which was to have paired her with Joel McCrea, was abandoned because of script problems with the adaptation of the E. Arnot Robertson novel. David Selznick also rejected the idea that Kate, who represented the upper-class young woman to her new audiences, play the unglamorous role of a missionary’s daughter in Borneo. On the other hand, Gilbert Frankau’s novel Christopher Strong had just been purchased by R.K.O., and the role of the aristocratic daredevil aviatrix Lady Cynthia Darrington seemed tailor-made.

  David Selznick thought he had a winning combination when he hired one of America’s few women directors, Dorothy Arzner, to direct Christopher Strong. Arzner, still in her thirties at this time, had once waited on tables in her father’s small Hollywood café and had worked her way up in films from a secretary in the story department of Famous Players to script clerk, film cutter and then to film editor. She had been responsible for the editing of the dramatic bullfight scenes in Rudolph Valentino’s Blood and Sand and for the magnificent editing on the silent-screen classic The Covered Wagon before she became a script writer and finally, in 1927 at the age of twenty-seven, a director, one of the few who had successfully made the transition from silent films to sound­motion pictures. Arzner’s films all had featured independent women. However, from their very first meeting, a competitive rivalry existed between Kate and Arzner.

  Selznick, working a three-way hunch, hired a third woman, author and playwright Zöe Akins,* to script Christopher Strong. An unproduced Akins play, Morning Glory, had just been purchased by Selznick with an eye to casting Kate as the stage-struck lead. Selznick’s hunch proved to be a real clanger. Kate and Arzner never made it on a first-name basis; but as Miss Hepburn and Miss Arzner, they developed a mutual respect (cold, distant and competitive though it was). Arzner remained proud of her roots and had few pretentions. On the other hand, Zoë Akins represented everything nouveau riche that Kate hated. Story conferences with the three women were held in Akins’s palatial pink stucco home in society-oriented Pasadena. Because her husband was terminally ill, she refused to leave him to travel into the studio. Akins was naturally distracted; and Kate, who never believed in exposing one’s personal tragedies to outsiders, was offended by the experience and not at all surprised when the author delivered a pedestrian script.

  From its inception, Christopher Strong was fraught with problems. Kate took seriously ill with influenza during the production and had to be hospitalized for several days. Dr. Hepburn was set to fly her home to West Hartford, but Kate refused to allow it. Another impasse occurred when Arzner warned David Selznick that she would quit unless Miss Hepburn stopped interfering with her direction. Perhaps Kate wished that would occur and George Cukor be brought in to replace her. But Selznick held fast and all three of the women stayed to the end of the film.

  Christopher Strong was, not surprisingly, a disappointment, though it was handsomely produced. The sets were in perfect taste; and the costumes—including one tight-fitting glittering gold lamé moth costume designed by Walter Plunkett and worn by Kate in the costume—ball opening-were striking. The cast, which once again included Billie Burke, was impeccable. Kate, looking the fresh, well-to-do young woman, seemed sprinkled with the same obvious star dust—but Zoë Akins’s dull, desultory script and Dorothy Arzner’s heavy-handed directing could not be overcome.

  Film reviews were still being printed under a heading of “The New Talkies” when Kate’s second talkie opened on March 10, 1933, at Radio City Music Hall during the same week in which Forty-second Street premiered nearby. Jack S. Cohen, Jr., of the New York Sun said of Kate, “She resembles somewhat an aristocratic American Garbo save that she hasn’t got Garbo’s warmth . . . whoever spotted her for the screen after her brief appearance on the stage in ‘The Warrior’s Husband’ knew the camera’s power. Her personality is far more interesting and alluring on the screen than it ever was on the stage.”

  In Christopher Strong, Kate (as the adventurous titled aviatrix, in love with a married man, who—while breaking the world’s record for altitude—crashes her plane rather than tell her lover she is pregnant) stalked around in aviatrix garb in a labored imitation of the lanky air hero Charles Lindbergh. Christopher Strong did contain one postcoital bedroom sequence that was highly effective. But a steamy portrayal of sexual passion is not what Kate’s audience wanted from her film performances; her first film had given them “a woman of breeding and intelligence, spirit and strength, who had more on her mind than bed, babies, and the beauty parlor.” From the time of Christopher Strong, Kate was to approach sex in future films “with a certain fastidious reluctance, nostrils flaring.”

  Leland Hayward included her in his list of the world’s ten most beautiful women—“right up there with Garbo and Dietrich—definitely the best. God yes.” Hayward had fallen in love with Kate. He saw in her what the world now saw—“A certain look in her eyes, a style—an awareness of her effect on people—the way she holds herself, moves, a sense of her own mystery.” Leland Hayward was a man who loved and respected intelligent women. He had married, divorced and remarried Lola Gibbs, a startling Texas beauty and debutante who was also an aviatrix and had taught Hayward how to fly. His knowledge of and passion for planes brought him and Kate closer together during the filming of Christopher Strong. Kate now reversed her original feelings about Hayward, or perhaps (and more likely) her first “loathing” of the man was a cover-up for a sexual attraction to him that had unnerved her. Kate never liked the dizzying feelings brought on by liquor either. She had to feel “in control.”

  Lola and Leland Hayward had been remarried for two years (they had first been married eleven years earlier) when Leland fell deeply in love with Kate. Leland still looked like a character from a Fitzgerald novel: handsome, charming, hair parted debonairly i
n the middle, “an air both haggard and elegant.” He made his way through the executive offices of the major Hollywood studios dressed in white flannels and yachting sneakers. The majority of Hollywood agents either had strong ethnic backgrounds—Russian-Jewish, Italian—or had served an apprenticeship handling vaudeville or burlesque acts. Leland Hayward was a breed apart, the scion of a well-to-do Nebraska family who had spent his youth in eastern prep schools and attended Princeton. Almost courtly with women, he was nonetheless a buccaneer, asking outrageous salaries for his clients, always daring the impossible. Within a matter of a few years he had become an enormous success. “The wives of the moguls were crazy about him,” George Cukor later reminded Hayward’s daughter Brooke. “Mrs. Goldwyn was just crazy about him. So was Mrs. Warner. All the wives were crazy about him and kept talking about him, because he was a very attractive, handsome, dashing man. He should have been a captain in the Austro-Hungarian Army—something like that. He was certainly miscast as an agent. If I were to make a picture about an agent, a very successful agent, and my casting director brought in Leland Hayward, I would say, ‘You’re out of your mind! This is not the way an agent looks.’ That was part of his success. Just charmed the birds off the trees, the money out of the coffers, and ladies into their beds.”

  Still, Leland Hayward was married and so was Kate, and they could not be seen in public together. He invaded Kate’s Cold Water Canyon house, lounging on the couch, his long legs hanging over the end, and constantly talking on the telephone while Kate cooked away in the kitchen, apparently loving both attending to him and the enforced privacy their relationship demanded. She held him in great esteem; he was bright, successful, strong, and—most important—quick and decisive. Like her father, he encouraged her idiosyncrasies and her independent mind. His plans for her stardom became her ambition. He negotiated a new contract for her with R.K.O. with an unprecedented percentage of the gross, approval of co-stars and director, and a guarantee that she would have time between films (a minimum of two a year) to appear on the stage.

  Shortly thereafter, while waiting for a meeting with Pandro Berman* in his office, she picked up a script off his desk and began to read it. “I thought, ‘Oh—my—God—that’s the most wonderful part ever written for anyone,’” she remembered of her first glance of Morning Glory. She slipped it in her bag and took it home, finished it, and returned to announce to Berman, “This is what I’d like to do.”

  “It’s not for you.”

  “Who’s it for?”

  “Connie Bennett.”*

  “Has she read it?”

  “No.”

  “Me, me, me!”

  Akins had modeled the role of Eva Lovelace on Tallulah Bank­head.† Kate disliked Bankhead (whom she referred to as “your friend, Miss Bankhead” to Cukor), finding her rude and foulmouthed. The character in the first version of Morning Glory was neither of these things, but she did have a strong sense of sarcasm. Kate wanted changes and they were supposedly made by scenarist Howard J. Green (although it is likely that Akins, without Kate’s knowledge, had some hand in it). The script, even when rewritten, had great limitations. But the role of Eva Lovelace was ideally suited to Kate’s talents.‡

  Using the unusual technique of rehearsing and filming in continuity, Lowell Sherman,§ the director of Morning Glory, shot the film in an unprecedented eighteen days, during which time Laura (who did not approve of the Hayward-Hepburn relationship) was in New Jersey and Kate spent almost every evening surreptitiously with Leland. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (along with Adolphe Menjou), was cast in the film with her. Fairbanks tried unsuccessfully for days to get Kate to go out with him. Finally, she accepted. Halfway through dinner, she complained of a headache. Fairbanks drove her home but didn’t drive off, watching as she entered the house. “Suddenly,” he recalls, “the front door flew open and Kate came running out. Another car I hadn’t noticed was hidden further up the driveway under some trees. She hopped in, and I saw a man at the wheel [Leland Hayward]. They drove right past me without noticing me. She was laughing happily, her hair blowing over her face.”

  Within a week of the opening of Morning Glory, Kate knew that her performance had been a grand success. More than 130,000 people had paid to see her in the first week of the film’s run at Radio City Music Hall, an attendance closely approximating that of its then greatest box-office triumph, Cavalcade. It had to be Kate the public came to see because Morning Glory was a slim film with a familiar plot that contained no surprises. But Kate, as a bookish, art-for-art’s-sake girl from a small town in New England who goes to New York to conquer the stage and does, was not only fresh and earnest in the role, her performance was riveting. All of Selznick’s previous efforts to implant her on the public’s mind as a sort of American exotic, an American Garbo (a paradoxical figure of the imagination to say the least), had been dispelled by her appearance in Morning Glory.*

  “Miss Hepburn shines,” wrote one critic, “as a stage-struck girl named Eva Lovelace, whose curious nature is a mixture of ingenuousness and cleverness, and persistence and pride. There are even moments when she does not appear quite rational, particularly when she declares that possibly when she reaches her zenith she will end her life. But let it be said here that she attains success and does not intend to be a morning glory, a flower that fades before the sun is very high.”

  The role of Eva Lovelace came as close as Kate would come to self-parody. After two films, she settled into her lifelong love affair with the camera. “I can remember thinking,” she later recalled, “Oh, this is great! Oh, the camera! That’s a friend. This is all very easy. Warm! Cozy!” and admits being “madly anxious to succeed.”

  Along with Kate’s newfound celebrity and her sudden multitude of fans came the Hepburn detractors who would complain from film to film that she reduced them in no time at all to a state of galloping twitches. Morning Glory and Eva Lovelace did, indeed, cast the first mold for the Hepburn cinema mannerisms that were so distinctive they led almost instantly to burlesque impersonations of her by radio amateurs and nightclub professionals. Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times was one critic to whom Kate gave “the jitters,” and he listed in the Times the many reasons for this: “The way she walks—those little scurrying steps, with her body inclined forward like a student roller-skater who hopes desperately to reach a catch-hold before falling on his face. The way she talks—the breathless, broad A’d style, with meaningless breaks and catches, the so-soulfully brave, husky tones with the pipe of hysteria beneath them. The way she plucks at this and that, and drapes her throat with tulle, and flutters and is so fearfully feminine that almost any normal woman would seem a Tarzan in comparison.” Yet even her dissenters would have to admit that Katharine Hepburn was an “original“—as much so as Garbo and Dietrich and no less mannered than either of these ladies.

  Kate was ecstatic when Selznick told her George Cukor would direct her next film, Little Women, adapted from the classic by Louisa May Alcott. Since A Bill of Divorcement, Cukor had directed the highly acclaimed What Price Hollywood and Dinner at Eight, and Kate was convinced he was a genuine artist. Like her father, he treated her with a certain indulgent affection while at the same time not allowing her to get away with anything.

  Little Women had always been a personal favorite of Kate’s; but Cukor, who had thought of the book as “a story that little girls read” was startled when he read it for the first time. Louisa May Alcott had written “a very strong-minded story, full of character, and a wonderful picture of New England family life.” At the time he would not have known how close the theme and substance of Little Women were to Kate’s own life, which was filled with the same “admirable New England sternness.” Kate and Cukor pitched into the preproduction work on the film with a fervor and togetherness that would bind them irretrievably from that time as creative artists and friends.

  The concentration required on her new film and her delight in working on a project she so endorsed kept Kate from having to dwe
ll on the confusion in her personal life. The schoolgirl pranks suddenly ended. Laura returned from the East more subdued. Kate had to deal with her feelings for Leland, the responsibility of perhaps causing him to divorce his wife to marry her, and the issue of her own probable divorce from Luddy.

  George Cukor has said that Kate was born to play the part of Jo March in Little Women. Tender and funny, fiercely loyal, inclined to play the fool when she felt like it, Kate also had a purity about her, a Yankee conservatism—all the qualities that were the essence of Jo March as well. Kate was to say the role was the most autobiographical she ever undertook. She had never known her maternal grandmother, but from the stories her mother had told her she felt a close kinship. Jo March would have been Grandmother Houghton’s contemporary, and Kate played her with this in mind. She even had wardrobe designer Walter Plunkett copy one costume exactly from a tintype she had of Mrs. Houghton.

  Cukor claims Kate cast “a spell of magic [over the film], a kind of power that dominated even those scenes she’s not in.” Little Women appeared deceptively simple; “no obvious effects, no big scenes.” The film’s adaptors, Victor Heerman and his wife, Sarah Y. Mason, had constructed a loose, episodic script very true to the novel, no plottiness, no false or contrived tying-up-of-ends. Hobe Irwin’s sets were designed without chichi. The Louisa May Alcott house was reproduced with great taste and detail. Walter Plunkett’s costumes retained a sense of New England frugality, and the four March sisters wore clothes that they borrowed from each other from time to time—very real.

  Problems occurred. Joan Bennett, who played young Amy March, had not informed the studio she was pregnant, hoping she would complete the film before her condition was noticed.* But midway through the production it became evident. Walter Plunkett did a masterful job of camouflage by reworking Bennett’s costumes, and Cukor reblocked the scenes that included the character Amy so that she was shot from the waist up.