by Anne Edwards
Other members of the company, which included distinguished theater performers of the caliber and long experience of Colin Clive (who had played with her in Christopher Strong), Blanche Bates and Frances Starr, disagreed with Harris’s first impression of Kate.* They found her unsure and they all agreed that Harris drove her unmercifully. One witness confessed, “If she turned her head to the left, he didn’t like it. If she turned it to the right, he liked it still less.”
Kate’s confusion was as noticeable as her infatuation with Harris. Within a week he had undermined Kate’s belief in herself so thoroughly that she was reduced to weeping in his presence. During one of these emotional confrontations, Harris said that to his shock Kate threw her arms around his neck and clinging to him cried, “I could have loved you so.”
“I never thought of loving her or being loved by her. I was intensely embarrassed . . . . She clearly felt she could have been in love with me.” Kate had never met a man she wanted whom she had not been able to win over. Harris’s rejection was not only brutal, but he also walked away as director, turning this duty over to his stage manager, Worthington (Tony) Miner.* Miner had to beg her to go with the company to Washington, D.C., for the final week of rehearsals. He recalled, “. . . she was totally demoralized. She cried helplessly . . . .”
The situation grew worse. Harris disapproved of Kate’s original costumes, which left her only a week to substitute others. Kate borrowed some clothes she thought appropriate from Laura, who had been coming to the theater to watch the rehearsals. Harris insisted she be barred, and Kate left for Washington alone but with faith in Tony Miner’s untried talents. To Kate’s distress and the dismay of the cast, Harris fired Tony Miner when they arrived in Washington. Geoffrey Kerr, who had been the star of Kate’s debacle with the Berkshire Players, replaced him.
Jed Harris had a reputation for brutalizing the actresses who worked for him. But, his treatment of Kate was inordinately cruel, even for him, and foolhardy considering the high stakes that rode on her success or failure. He had put all his money into The Lake. No more assets existed, yet almost immediately he had seen the handwriting on the wall. The Lake was a second-rate play and Kate Hepburn would never be able to make it anything else. He wanted to abandon the project during rehearsal but contractual commitments prevented him. He desperately needed money to finance a vehicle for Margaret Sullavan, something intriguing enough to lure her back from Hollywood and the arms of Leland Hayward, “an agent, My God!” By all appearances Harris believed that if he pushed Kate far enough she would be forced to buy out her contract.
The Lake opened in Washington, D.C., on December 17, 1933, at the National Theatre. A crowd filled every seat and stood rows deep in the rear. Washington had made this evening a glittering social event. Preceding the play, dozens of dinner parties were given throughout the capital city by prominent hostesses. The audience (including alumnae of Bryn Mawr who turned out in force) were dazzling in their jewels and dress. Kate received an ovation when she stepped out on the stage looking very much the college debutante in Laura’s tan jodhpurs. Her confidence returned and remained with her through the entire performance, even when an audible gasp was heard from the audience on her entrance in the second act costumed in a bizarre bridal outfit of brightest red beneath a full black velvet cloak. At final curtain Kate, now dressed in a long, trailing spectral gown of gray crepe, spoke her last lines: “There are ghosts who are friendly ghosts. I shall be back.” Fervent applause rang out.
The reviews were kinder than Kate had expected, for she sensed that her voice had not been in control. The critic for The Washington Post did comment on her “staccato” speech pattern and her timing, but he also noted that “there was never an instant when she failed to command attention, hold the audience’s undivided interest and win its unstinted acclaim.” But the performances Kate gave for the remainder of the week in Washington were not on a par with her first. Jed Harris, his cash supply badly depleted, went to Kate and begged her to agree to tour the show for a month or so before coming into New York. When begging didn’t help, he turned to bullying. She was not ready was his simple verdict. With time, “yes,” but if she went into New York the following week as planned, she would be butchered by the critics. Of course, he also knew that out-of-town audiences would fill houses to see a movie star of Kate’s magnitude, but such exposure before New York would also have given Kate time to work on her performance and her voice. Kate stubbornly refused. Harris then rang her later on the telephone to tell her that his decision was final: He would take the play on the road to Boston or Chicago, or he would close it in Washington. Kate’s version of this conversation is that after she spoke calmly to him about the detrimental effect on her career, he had replied, “My dear, the only interest I have in you is the money I can make out of you.’
Stunned, Kate stammered, “How much?” meaning what would it take for him to open in New York.*
“How much have you got?” he asked.
“Wait a minute.” She put down the telephone and opened her checkbook. “I’ve got exactly fifteen thousand, four hundred and sixty-one dollars and sixty-seven cents.”
“O.K.,” Harris replied, “I’ll take that.”
Kate wrote out a check for the full amount and the next day the company left for New York.
Opening night, December 26, the entire Hepburn family, as well as Laura Harding, Frances Robinson-Duff and Leland Hayward, were out front for support. A light snow had fallen. People arrived a little late and Kate sat nervously in her dressing room being told every few moments which celebrity had arrived-Noël Coward, George S. Kaufman, Amelia Earhart, Dorothy Parker, Kay Francis, Judith Anderson were all present. Leland Hayward came backstage to wish her well, a painfully awkward moment for Kate, still hurt by his affair with Margaret Sullavan and knowing as well that he had heard about her failed romance with Jed Harris.
A replay of what had happened to Kate years before in Baltimore occurred during the New York opening of The Lake. She started at such a fast pace that her timing was thrown off and her voice grew steadily more frenzied in decibel and pitch. The next day a New York critic was to write pungently, “Miss Hepburn began the first act in hysteria.” At intermission, her maid put a Bible in her hands to help her get herself into a properly solemn mood for the second act. She carried it onstage at curtain’s rise, but the high emotion demanded by the drama of the second-act climax never was achieved.
Noël Coward came backstage. “Don’t let it get your goat,” he told her. “It happens to everyone.” But Kate could not be so easily placated. The next day Dorothy Parker’s* famous barbed quote appeared in the press: “She ran the gamut of emotion from A to B.” Parker was not a theater critic, and the cruel remark was not an excerpt from a review that might have also said some flattering things to offset it. Yet this quote (because of Dorothy Parker’s celebrity and its obvious humor) was printed in almost every major newspaper in the United States and England. The effect on both Kate’s stage career and the fate of The Lake was devastating.
Kate returned to the studio of Frances Robinson-Duff, and her performance did improve. No critics returned, however, to see the improvement. Advance sales kept the show going—but Just. Kate, with a run-of-the-play contract, assumed that a closing notice would be posted momentarily and managed to cope on a day-to-day basis as she did with her personal life, now at its nadir. Margaret Sullavan had shocked everyone by marrying director William Wyler, whom she had only known a few weeks, and Kate sensed that Leland had taken this news harder than she might have wished. Jed Harris had been incensed by it and irrationally blamed Kate. Luddy spoke of a divorce, and Laura had been cool to her ever since Kate had encouraged a friendship with a woman named Suzanne Steele. To add to these tensions, the Hepburn tribe were all involved in Mrs. Hepburn’s current national notoriety after appearing on the stand of the House Caucus Room in Washington in passionate argument on behalf of the Pierce Bill to permit dissemination of birth-control infor
mation by physicians.
Amid the flashing of news cameras, Mrs. Hepburn spoke out against the Pierce Bill’s arch opponent, Father Charles E. Kaufman, who had argued that birth control was a step toward communism and that “100 years from now Washington will be Washingtonsky and you’ll foster it if you uncriminalize contraceptives.”
“Ridiculous!” Mrs. Hepburn had disdainfully exclaimed.
When her opponent brought up the declining birthrate, Mrs. Hepburn retorted, “With twelve million on public support [welfare] I would think that was the last thing one had to worry about now!“
An interview in The New York Times carried the headline STAR’S MOTHER FIRM IN STAND and a prominent photograph of Mrs. Hepburn with her hand raised in some emotional response. The caption identified “the women’s rights leader fighting for birth control” as “Mrs. Thomas N. Hepburn mother of 6 children, including Katharine Hepburn, the actress.”* To the question of people’s reaction to her controversial stand, Mrs. Hepburn came back, “I have ceased to worry about people being shocked—they’re shocked already and I want to get it over with—humans have always done so many stupid things and under such righteous terms that it is very difficult for us really to use our intelligence about anything.”
Reminded that her opponents had called birth control “the suicide of the species,” Mrs. Hepburn’s eyes flashed with indignation. “Nonsense! Women want children but they want them when they can afford them physically and economically.”
Kate still managed to go home on those days when the theater was dark, but she kept her problems to herself. Finally, to Kate’s relief, on February 10, 1934, after fifty-five New York performances, The Lake closed.
After more than fifty years the enigma of Suzanne Steele remains. The story that has appeared in two previous biographies of Katharine Hepburn presents Miss Steele as a mature, “plump” former opera singer who had been giving Kate private coaching during the weekends for the run of The Lake. In fact, Suzanne Steele was an attractive woman, amusing and exceptionally clever and well educated. Not only had she never sung in opera, her Broadway debut had occurred at the Little Theatre as a protean actor eight months before The Lake opened at the Martin Beck. Having been schooled in France, Miss Steele chose for her first public appearance her own English translation of the Molilère classic The School for Wives, portraying in dramatic reading all the characters, male and female. “Miss Steele,” wrote the critic for the New York Sun, “. . . has two kinds of voices, one for male characters and the other for female characters. But her ability to differentiate her characterizations is rather limited . . . . Let me suggest that Miss Steele confine her work for the present to women’s clubs and to other audiences in which she will not be judged by too high a standard.”
Kate later said that Miss Steele, a complete stranger, appeared in her dressing room one night after a particularly bad performance and offered to privately coach her on weekends. Although Kate was already working with Miss Robinson-Duff at the time, she accepted the offer. Perhaps she was grasping for straws, a way to approach the role with new insight. Suzanne Steele did possess certain intriguing qualities. Her French was impeccable. She had, after all, translated Molière, and she had presented a series of three Sunday evening programs of “Literature Across the Footlights” in April, 1933, with the Little Theatre.
Shortly after The Lake closed and just a few days before Kate learned that she had won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1933 for her role in Morning Glory,* she booked passage for the two of them under the names of K. Smith and S. Steele on the Paris, leaving for France on March 18. Kate’s intention was to continue to Cannes, where she had won a Cannes Film Festival Award for Little Women,† and then spend several weeks on the Riviera and touring France, learning the language and venturing beyond the tourist spots with Suzanne’s linguistic help.
Kate came aboard the Paris a few steps in front of Suzanne at eleven-thirty A.M. via the lower level of the pier and the thirdclass gangway, scrambling through a group of reporters and photographers. Refusing to pose for the news cameramen, she shouted over her shoulder as the cameras clicked despite her warnings, “The pictures will be lousy!” (One paper ran a photograph with the notation “Katy Was Right”). Once they reached their state-room, Kate and Suzanne locked themsel yes in. Members of the press do not easily go away, and they pounded insistently on the door. Suzanne finally stepped out to say that she was “an old friend of Miss Hepburn’s” and that they would be “abroad for four or five weeks, visiting Paris and the Riviera.”
The Paris made the Atlantic crossing in six days, landing in Le Havre on March 24, 1933. The weather was rough and Kate was not a good sailor. Suzanne had expected a more festive crossing than Kate could manage. Meals were served in their state-room, constitutional walks were taken at six A.M. and eight P.M. (when the majority of the first-class passengers were inside dining). The women began to bicker, Suzanne to drink. By the time they reached Le Havre they hardly spoke. (United Press snidely reported, “Miss Hepburn sought to elude admirers when she landed at 5 AM and hurried to a motor car . . . the fact that she wore men’s trousers somewhat thwarted her efforts to avoid attention. Miss Hepburn wore men’s garb during the entire voyage aboard the liner Paris.”) After four days in Paris, Kate decided to return to the United States.
Rumors had it that Kate had come to Paris to arrange a divorce. Suzanne’s last statement as “official spokesman” for Kate was, “Kate has no intention of getting a divorce. She wants to stay married.” The Associated Press dispatch reported that “Miss Suzanne Steele, concert singer, traveling companion and official spokesman for Katharine Hepburn, motion picture actress, sailed with Miss Hepburn.” Suzanne Steele’s name, however, did not appear on the passenger list of the return voyage of the Paris.
The passenger list on the homebound journey included Kate Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich (traveling with her eight-year-old daughter, Maria) and Ernest Hemingway. Upon hearing Kate was aboard, Hemingway sought a meeting. Greatly admiring the famous author, Kate agreed. Hemingway worked wonders on her. They strolled the windy decks together, dined together and argued enthusiastically. When the ship docked in New York on April 4 Gust seventeen days after Kate had first embarked), they sat together as reporters clambered aboard.
“Don’t be a mug!” the rugged Hemingway was heard to say to her.
Her long, thin face was very pale except for a crimson slash of lipstick.
“I’m not a mug,” she snapped back, and then turned on her best screen smile. “Really, I’m not disagreeable. How many reporters are there?“
She was told there were twelve.
“Well—steward,” she said, “bring champagne for twelve gentlemen of the press.“
She smiled again at the reporters.
“I never meant to cause you any inconvenience,” she told them. “The only reason I didn’t see you when I went away was that I had nothing to say. I talk so little for publication because I’m so indiscreet.”
Then she proceeded to talk volubly about everything from her penchant for wearing men’s trousers (the chic, tailored, bluewool suit and matching beret, shoes and gloves she wore notwithstanding) to her desire to return to the stage in the face of The Lake’s poor notices. She denied emphatically that she had gone to Paris to arrange a divorce. “I just needed a vacation and took it—that’s good enough reason, isn’t it? And I came back because I got homesick.”
“For what?” a reporter asked.
“I’m sure I don’t know. I just didn’t see anything in Paris, so I came back on the same boat.”
Hemingway grinned mischievously. “Obviously, Miss Hepburn needed a guide,” he quipped.
Hemingway told the reporters that he was “going to Key West for a season of intensive writing in order to go back to Africa.” Hemingway later claimed that Kate had invited him to tea the next day at her house in Turtle Bay and informed him he “need not wait to earn enough for another safari. She would provide the nec
essary money and go along with Pauline [Mrs. Hemingway] on the trip.” Hemingway said he considered Kate’s offer and politely declined.
One week later, Kate’s difficulties with Laura having been overcome, the two women booked passage from Miami on one of America’s few cruise ships, the S.S. Morro Castle,* for a long sea voyage that would stop at Morro Castle (the fort at the entrance to the harbor of Havana, Cuba) before continuing on through the Panama Canal and up the coast of Mexico, where Kate intended to file suit for divorce. (Her seasickness did not disturb her as much as she claimed, obviously.) Hemingway often fished for giant marlin in the ocean off this harbor. The previous year he had even written an article for Esquire magazine about an hourand-a-half fight he had had there with a 750-pound giant marlin.
From Miami, Kate telephoned Hemingway in Key West. He told her truthfully that he was hard at work on a new book.
* * *
Kate and Laura registered at the Hotel Itza in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, on April 24. The first thing they did was to reserve two airplane seats to Miami for the evening of the day the Mexican lawyer had scheduled Kate’s plea for divorce. Then they went to look at Mayan ruins with Lady Edwina Mountbatten, who was touring Mexico at the time. On April 26, the lawyer filed divorce papers in the Second Civil Court on Kate’s behalf. And, on the thirtieth, with Laura as her only principal witness, the hearing was held, without Luddy, who was represented by an attorney he had instructed to help Kate in any way possible. “Deep disagreement as to life, incompatibility of character and separation for more than 300 days at a time” formed the basis of the divorce decree. When the “secret” divorce finally became public two days later, much was made of the fact that the court had also ruled that the usual thirty-day restriction on remarriage would not be imposed.