by Anne Edwards
“Once,” Cukor admitted, “I actually hit Kate. (Not hard enough, probably.) She had to run up a flight of steps carrying some ice cream, and I told her to be very careful because we didn’t have a spare of the dress she was wearing, so she mustn’t spill that ice cream. But she did and ruined the dress, and then she laughed—and I hit her and called her an amateur.”
“You can think what you want,” she snapped back.
Cukor later admitted he had been wrong, she was immensely professional. They had their tiffs; but after each apologized their relationship seemed all the stronger for it, and Cukor and the crew all respected Kate greatly. In the scene in which she wore the copy of her grandmother’s dress, she twirled around in a conceited manner and spoke extravagantly of becoming a great author or opera singer. On that line, to everyone’s delight, including Kate’s, from a crane overhead the crew lowered a large ham at the end of a rope, which they dangled before her.
There had been a lot of Kate in A Bill of Divorcement, the impatient and antiestablishment young woman, and in Little Women, the independent idealist. George Cukor recognized the depth of her own self that Kate gave to each role, and he admired her intensely for never flinching from that reality. Also, during the shooting of Little Women, a strike of sound men was called. Cukor was forced to hire a makeshift, inexperienced crew.
“Kate [who had not felt well] had to do take after take of a very emotional scene simply because the sound men kept messing it up,” Cukor later recalled. “After the fifteenth take, or whatever, they got it—and Kate was so exhausted and agonized by all that weeping she threw up. But not until we’d got the take.”
Even in rough cut, Little Women was an exquisite screen drama skillfully made, and Kate’s Jo March was a memorable performance. Billboards were soon to banner: “Again she weaves her Magic Spell! Katharine Hepburn in Little Women.” And full-page newspaper advertisements were to proclaim under romantic head shots of her: “The radiant Star of Morning Glory marches still deeper into your heart as the best loved heroine ever born in a book. . . . See her . . . living . . . the immortal Jo.”
Little Women was the last film David Selznick was to supervise at R.K.O.,* but the studio’s executives immediately lined up numerous projects for Kate, among them Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, a film based on the life of Sarah Bernhardt; a biography of Nell Gwyn, The Tudor Wench, that took Queen Elizabeth I from age fifteen to old age; an original screenplay, Without Sin, by Melville Baker and Jack Kirkland; and a script based on the play Trigger by Lula Vollmer, about a young, uneducated tomboy faith healer in the Ozark Mountains.
None of these film ideas inspired enthusiasm in Kate. Leland Hayward was no longer persistent in his wooing. A friendship that Kate had struck up with Elissa Landi* had greatly irritated Laura upon her return to Hollywood. Kate’s life had hit a bit of a snag. Hollywood had not taken her to its glittering breast, nor did she care to belong there. New York and Old Saybrook remained home to her and the stage the only exalted career.
Besides that brief meeting with Jed Harris in Ossining, New York, Kate had once auditioned unsuccessfully for him.† The rejection had hurt more than most and she had never been able to forget him. Lean, dark and hungry-looking despite his meteoric success as Broadway’s most newsworthy producer, Harris had “a genius for making enemies” and a reputation for wooing, winning and victimizing the women who came into his orbit. His intelligence was neither predictable nor commonplace. His wit was acid, his behavior truculent. Convinced that he was the greatest man on Broadway, he had little trouble convincing others as well. Jed Harris was and remained the wizard of the Broadway theater.
Wizards by nature possess a power over people. Harris proved no exception. A contemporary wrote that “he had the grin of a sorcerer. . . . He purred when he spoke. His skinny jaw jutted. His eyes were dark and slightly up-turned as if listening to some inner music.” Women found his style, “his athletic use of language, the fresh routes of his nimble mind” seductive, and the sense of menace he exuded contributed to his sexual appeal. Jed Harris had seldom had a problem winning any woman he wanted.
To Kate’s surprise, upon her return to Hartford, Harris called and offered her the lead in a play, The Lake, by Dorothy Massingham and Murray MacDonald, that he planned to produce. Kate suggested he send her the script. During the course of the conversation, she managed to convey to him the information that her parents were away and she had time alone on her hands.
Harris took this as an outright invitation and, with playwright Edward Chodorov,* set off for West Hartford in a borrowed convertible. Wise enough to realize that The Lake (a brooding spook of a play) could not succeed without a star of Kate’s caliber, Harris wasted no time in pursuing her, convinced that under his direction she could pull off the difficult soap-opera role. He recalled the teary look she so often affected on the screen, the vulnerable tilt of the proud chin.
As soon as he and Chodorov checked into a hotel in Hartford, Harris rang Kate at home. At her suggestion, he left the playwright and drove directly to Bloomfield Avenue. Harris had the instincts of a true gambler but he liked to hedge his bets. Though in a financial slump, he was financing The Lake himself and had sold his last solid asset, his beloved 150-foot sloop, Señorita, to do so. Kate’s present box-office popularity would help secure his investment.
With her marriage at an impasse, her relationship with Leland Hayward threatened, and her friendship with Laura in troubled waters, Kate was especially susceptible to Harris’s charm. His energy and intelligence stimulated her own. An undeniable spark passed between them. To Harris, Kate was the forbidden gentile girl: rich, beautiful, a part of a society that excluded Jews. He obviously made overtures to her as a woman, for later that night he grumbled to Chodorov that “her parents had most unexpectedly returned.” To Kate, Harris’s bullying attitude had the touch of authority she needed at the time.
During her stay in West Hartford, Kate and Harris saw a good deal of each other and Harris was invited to the Hepburn home. He qualified as the kind of guest Mrs. Hepburn adored, for Jed Harris could always be counted on to spark an intriguing and offbeat conversation. Chodorov, his closest friend at this time, could not understand Kate’s great attraction to the acerbic and often ill-kempt Broadway producer who thought nothing of appearing at the Hepburn house unshaven. That Kate was “smitten” with Harris, he had no doubts. Before she returned to Hollywood to film Trigger (almost immediately retitled Spitfire), Kate signed to do The Lake. Her enthusiasm was enormous.
The film was shot mainly in the San Jacinto Mountains in Californi.a near the Mexican border, under the direction of John Cromwell.* This backwoods melodrama was completely different from any of Kate’s previous movies and was a curious choice to follow Little Women. The drama centered entirely on Kate’s characterization of a mountain girl with a religious fervor who is feared, cursed, stoned and almost lynched by her neighbors, as well as deceived by the one man she turns to for love. Kate managed to inject Trigger, the spitfire, “. . . with a free and dynamic spirit.” But her natural elegance could not be buried, and perhaps, as The New Yorker was to comment, “her artistry does not extend to the interpretation of the primitive or the uncouth.”
Spitfire ran into delays caused by the location work required. Originally the film was due to be completed by five P.M. on November 15, when Kate was to take a night plane to begin rehearsals on The Lake the following day. By six-fifteen P.M., two scenes remained to be shot. Kate rescheduled her flight for the next night but agreed to work only five hours and forty-five minutes (the studio’s definition of the time she owed them). When the last of the two scenes had not been shot by the afternoon of the sixteenth, Kate confronted producer Pandro Berman. “You make other people live up to conditions you write into contracts. It’s time you learned to do so too,” she said.
“How much do you want to finish the scene?” Berman asked.
“Ten thousand dollars,” she replied, later explaining, “I
wanted to show them [R.K.O.] that if I set a definite date, I meant to keep it, but they didn’t. Time means a lot to me.”
Berman had no choice but to pay Kate the exorbitant overtime (her pay for the film—four weeks shooting—had been fifty thousand dollars).
Wand thin (105 pounds), her fine-spun hair still bobbed for the role she had just completed, Kate boarded a plane for the East on the night of November 16, 1933. At Cleveland she transferred to a train when she found out hordes of fans were waiting for her at Newark Airport. She had made three demanding films in less than a year and had been under unusual stress. Much of her natural gaiety was subdued. Her high cheekbones loomed higher, her blue eyes were more intense than they had been when she first arrived in Hollywood. The idea of seeing Jed Harris again was a stimulating thought, especially with Leland Hayward so involved with the new young star Margaret Sullavan, who seemed determined to out-Hepburn Kate.
BOW-GAYNOR-DIETRICH-GARBO-HEPBURN-NOW IT’S MARGARET SULLAVAN bannered a movie-page headline in the Los Angeles Times only a few days after Kate had left Hollywood to join the company of The Lake.
Margaret Sullavan* had been signed to films by Leland Hayward six months earlier. Sullavan had an image of herself as a femme fatale. Originally from Virginia and the perennial Southern belle, she was outrageously flirtatious and seemingly irresistible to men. Petite, lithe, fun-loving, with a “kind of off-beat and naughty” sense of humor, Margaret Sullavan also possessed Kate’s rebellious individuality. Kate’s pride was hurt by Leland Hayward’s affection for his twenty-four-year-old protégée. Hayward had fought hard to keep Kate from signing Jed Harris’s contract. But Kate’s perversity was a reflex action, as was her penchant for running away from difficult personal situations. That Jed Harris was to direct as well as to produce The Lake was an added arrow she could sling at Hayward. Kate had no idea at the time that Sullavan had also had an affair with Jed Harris and that it had ended her marriage to the yet-to-be-discovered Henry Fonda.* In fact, the Harris-Sullavan affair was not yet over, Leland Hayward notwithstanding. The two women were competitors on more than one level. Displaying a Hepburnian quirkiness, she wore blue jeans (definitely not “in” at the time) and rode a motorcycle back and forth to the studio. She refused to make personal appearances, would not show up on opening nights, and “when in New York [spent] most of her evenings barging up and down on a Third Avenue streetcar, dressed in something which [looked] as if it had been discarded by the Salvation Army.” Leland Hayward thought she was a brilliant actress. So did Jed Harris, who had originally acquired the American production rights of The Lake for her just before she had left for Hollywood. The lead role in The Lake had to be played by what Jed Harris called “a classy broad.” Margaret Sullavan fell into that category, as did Katharine Hepburn. In fact, Harris referred to Sullavan as a Southern Katharine Hepburn.
Kate arrived in New York with only three weeks for rehearsal, believing she was Harris’s first and only choice for The Lake and that he would dedicate himself to her success in the play because of his respect for her as a stage actress. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.
Footnotes
* Zoë Akins (1886–1958). In addition to the play that was the basis for Hepburn’s next film, Morning Glory, Akins’s plays—Her Private Life, The Old Maid and How to Marry a Millionaire—were all adapted for the screen.
* Pandro S. Berman (1905– ) produced at R.K.O. from 1931 to 1940, where he was responsible not only for several of Katharine Hepburn’s films but for many of the Ginger Rogers–Fred Astaire musicals. In 1940, he went to M.G.M., where he and Hepburn were once again to team together on three more films, Dragon Seed (1944), Undercurrent (1946) and The Sea of Grass (1947).
* Constance Bennett (1904–1965), sister of Joan Bennett. Sophisticated comedy was her specialty, but she often played teary-eyed heroines. Except for Topper, none of her films was especially memorable. In the 1950s she returned to the stage, appearing mostly in road-show revivals.
† Bankhead was to say that Kate was “one of the most stimulating women I know. She’s unfeminine in that she scorns gossip, back biting, and log rolling. . . . She spits out her opinions no matter how unpopular they may be. . . . She’s a gal I’d like to have on my side.”
‡ Hepburn was later to say (upon seeing Morning Glory forty years later), “I should have stopped then. I haven’t grown since.”
§ Lowell Sherman (1885–1934) also directed Mae West in She Done Him Wrong. Film critic Andrew Sarris wrote of Sherman (who also had a brief early career as an actor), “Sherman was gifted with the ability to express the poignancy of male lechery when confronted with female longing. His civilized sensibility was ahead of its time, and the sophistication of his sexual humor singularly lacking in malice.”
* Morning Glory was remade unsuccessfully in 1958 as Stage Struck starring Susan Strasberg and Henry Fonda in the lead roles.
* Joan Bennett (1910– ) was married to her second husband, writer-producer Gene Markey, at the time. She divorced him in 1937 and married Walter Wanger in 1940. Her best films, Man Hunt, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street and The Secret Beyond the Door, were all directed by Fritz Lang and produced by Wanger in the 1940s. She never made another film with Hepburn, but both of them were strong contenders for the role of Scarlett O’Hara.
* David O. Selznick had actually left R.K.O. for M.G.M. prior to the making of Little Women but had returned to do it as the one film left in his contractual agreement with R.K.O.
* Elissa Landi (1904–1948) claimed to be the stepdaughter of an Italian nobleman and a descendant of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. She starred in Cecil De Mille’s The Sign of the Cross in 1932. The Warrior’s Husband proved a mistake for she was miscast in the role of Antipe, which R.K.O. had refused to buy for Hepburn.
† Jed Harris (1900–1979). Born Jacob Horowitz, he never legalized his professional name. He attended Yale University and became one of Broadway’s most successful producers at the age of twenty-five. By 1934, he had already produced Broadway (1926), The Royal Family (1928), Front Page (1928), Wonder Boy (1932) and The Green Bay Tree (1933). Subsequently, his best known works were Our Town (1938), The Heiress (1945) and The Crucible (1953).
* Edward Chodorov (1904– ). Jed Harris had directed and produced Chodorov’s first Broadway play, Wonder Boy (1932). His best-known play was Oh Men! Oh Women! (1953). He also wrote and directed for films. Craig’s Wife, Yellow Jack and The Hucksters are among his credits.
* John Cromwell (1888–1979) came into his own on his next film, Of Human Bondage. Among other films, he also directed Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Prisoner of Zenda, Algiers, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Since You Went Away, The Enchanted Cottage, Anna and the King of Siam and The Goddess.
* Margaret Sullavan (1911–1960) was born Margaret Brooke. Her temperament and disdain of Hollywood kept returning her to Broadway. She won the Drama Critic’s Award for Voice of the Turtle in 1943. She will probably be best remembered in films for Three Comrades (1938) and The Shop Around the Corner (1940). Married four times, clinically deaf at the end of her life, she died of an overdose of barbiturates at the age of forty-nine.
* In Fonda, My Life, 2 Henry Fonda (1905–1983) recalled: “I’d wait until night, and then I’d go . . . down from the sidewalk and into the garden. I’d lean against the fence and I’d stare up at our apartment with the lighted windows on the second floor. I knew Jed Harris was inside with her and I’d wait for him to leave. But instead the lights would go out. . . . I couldn’t believe my wife and that son-of-a-bitch were in bed together. But I knew they were. And that just destroyed me, completely destroyed me. Never in my life have I felt so betrayed, so rejected, so alone.” Fonda’s last performance was to be opposite Hepburn in the film On Golden Pond, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor (1982).
CHAPTER
9
With Kate on the West Coast, Harris’s interest in her had paled. Margaret Sullavan had joined her family in
Virginia while Leland Hayward ironed out some contractual problems for her in California. Harris spent so much time in the succeeding weeks in Virginia that New York newspaper columnists printed the rumor that he was negotiating “a play with some Southern playwright and one of the Broadway games is to guess which.” Harris now not only resented the fact that Kate, not Sullavan, was playing the role of Stella Surrege in The Lake, he thought he had made a grievous error in casting her.
Despite its melodramatic content (a blighted young society woman whose husband drowns in a lake the first day of their marriage suffers tremendous guilt because she loved a married man instead of him), The Lake had been a tremendous success in London, where it had been directed “in high-toned English drawing room” style by Tyrone Guthrie with an unusually large cast of twenty-seven.* Noël Coward had warned Harris that the play would not travel well. American audiences liked their heroines to be rebels and did not subscribe to stories of young women dominated by their mothers and living their lives by the laws set down by high society. Stella Surrege was anything but the rebel. To succeed, the actress playing the role had to exude great pathos and a brooding sense of implacable tragedy.
Harris’s first instincts had been right. Onstage, Margaret Sullavan’s piquant personality inspired great sympathy. Kate’s appeal was her strength. The teary eye and flashing vulnerability moved her audiences only because they knew the character she portrayed would fight valiantly to overcome such moments of weakness.
Kate reported for rehearsals directly upon her arrival in New York. Within forty-eight hours, she and Jed Harris had reached an Impasse.
Jed Harris claimed that Kate came to that first day of rehearsal without the slightest doubt that she could play the role. “I could see she was hopeless. I fought with her—I begged her to stop posing, striking attitudes, leaning against doorways, putting a limp hand to her forehead, to stop being a big movie star and feel the lines, feel the character. I was trying the impossible, to make an artificial showcase of an artificial star, and she couldn’t handle it. Tremendous artificiality! It’s as though she had seen her own performance and liked her own rather charming babbling at everything, and she had decided that was acting.”