Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  Since Luddy had no plans to remarry and had even expressed the hope to an interviewer that Kate would come back to him, the press speculated that Kate must have a quick remarriage in her future. Laura, now the official spokesman, told the reporters, “Miss Hepburn has no plans to remarry.” Arrangements were quickly altered; and instead of going down to Key West as Kate thought they would, she and Laura boarded a train for New York and barricaded themselves in the house at Turtle Bay while the press camped on the doorstep.

  Her silence was abruptly broken when a small, newly acquired Persian kitten escaped onto the street from a momentarily opened door off the basement kitchen. Kate shouted to a reporter to stop the cat that was crossing his path and the man scooped the small animal up and met Kate at the basement door, where she let him in, cat in his arms. Her wall of reserve broken down, she granted him an interview right there.

  “You pay a terrible price for fame,” she told him. “The most precious thing you have is your life and it’s almost impossible to enjoy life after you have success in pictures . . . . I suppose the newspapers hate me but I’m not being rude in refusing to discuss my affairs. I always tried to be helpful to newspaper men but they go away dissatisfied and perhaps prejudiced. I fear this prejudice will affect my career and shorten it. . . . Success and fame are all too fleeting . . . . I don’t know how long I will last. . . . Somehow I wish I could paint pictures, play music or write books. Alas, I am not talented at all.”

  Asked about her feelings toward her mother’s work in birth control, Kate replied, “Mother has accomplished a great deal. I detest the newspaper references to her as Katharine Hepburn’s mother. My mother is important. I am not.”

  The reporter, who had not gained entry into the house past the basement corridor, now asked about a report that Leland Hayward was rushing to New York by plane, having just obtained his own divorce decree, to be married to her.

  Kate backed off. “I will never have anything to say about Mr. Hayward or Mr. Smith. You see I won’t discuss my personal affairs ever. They wouldn’t be personal if I made them public.“

  She turned, closed a door between them, and could be heard mounting the stairs beyond. The reporter let himself out and went to write up his story.

  Footnotes

  * The Lake opened at The Arts Theatre Club in London on March 1, 1933, and transferred on March 15, 1933, to the Westminister. (Sir) Tyrone Guthrie (1900–1971) had previously made his name with productions of James Bridie’s The Anatomist and J. B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner. In London, Marie Ney (1895–1981), well known for her classical work at the Old Vic, played Stella Surrege and (Dame) May Whitty (1865–1948) her mother.

  * Colin Clive (1898–1937) is best remembered for his title role in Frankenstein (1931), in which he played Dr. Frankenstein and Boris Karloff the monster, and as Rochester in the 1934 film production of Jane Eyre. He had previously been a leading man on the British stage. Blanche Bates (1873–1941). Frances Starr (1881–1973).

  * Worthington (Tony) Miner (1900–1982) was to work with Hepburn some years later on the Theatre Guild production of Jane Eyre (1937).

  * This story has been quoted as occurring after the close of The Lake in New York. But Edward Chodorov, who was with Harris at the time, claims it occurred in Washington, and that Katharine Hepburn’s contract did not evoke a clause that would hold her to touring with the show after it completed its New York run, but it did state that she would be available for a longer out-of-town run before the New York opening if required.

  * Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), celebrated short-story writer, satirist, poet, screen­writer (co-author of the original A Star Is Born) and lyricist (“Paris in the Spring,” “Hands Across the Table”).

  * The article obviously included Hepburn’s deceased older brother. Mrs. Hepburn had only five living children at the time.

  * Other nominees for Best Actress, 1933, were May Robson, Lady for a Day, and Diana Wynyard, Cavalcade. Best Actor was won by Charles Laughton for The Private Life of Henry VIII. Katharine Hepburn’s award was accepted for her by B. B. Kohane, president of R.K.O.

  † Little Women was nominated for Best Picture, 1933, but lost to Noël Coward’s Cavalcade. Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason won for Best Adaptation for Little Women, the only award the film was to win.

  * The Morro Castle, a Ward liner, built in the United States with government funds, was to have a dramatic end a little more than a year later when on the night of September 8, 1934, it exploded in flames and sank off the Atlantic seaboard on a return cruise from Havana claiming 125 lives. The sinking of the Morro Castle was one of the most famous sea disasters of the first half of the century. The ship’s captain, R. Wilmott, was taken mysteriously ill at dinner that night and died shortly thereafter. Not much later a fire was discovered in the writing room on B Deck. In the eighteen minutes that had elapsed before the new captain ordered a call for assistance, the fire had made too much headway to control. Publicized erroneously as “the safest ship afloat,” the Morro Castle had very little fire-detection apparatus. Its sinking became an American sea scandal.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Few actors can become stars without possessing charm. Some performers acquire it as they grow older; Kate’s co-stars Adolphe Menjou and Billie Burke were fine examples. Good looks are not essential; consider James Cagney and Charles Laughton. Nor is sophistication; the naïve Mary Pickford and the bumbling Harold Lloyd both had it. Charm both pleases and seduces audiences. Eccentricities, foibles and affectations can be acceptable when a person radiates great charm. Since most people do not, they find idols onstage, in films and in the political arena either to admire or to model themselves after.

  Kate not only had charm, she had an abundance of that other indefinable quality, class. The combination of charm, class and a photogenic appearance had made her a star in her first film, held her audience in her second (Christopher Strong) despite its poor reviews, and given a distinction to her role in Morning Glory, which had won her an Academy Award. Like many performers of her day who had entered films by way of theater and for love of money and immediate fame rather than love of the medium, Kate, despite her infatuation with the camera, had only small regard for the art of film. Later, as her respect for films grew, so did the depth of her performances. But in 1934, receiving the Academy Award for Morning Glory and being partly responsible for the critical and commercial success of Little Women* did not compensate for her terrible failure in The Lake, for the latter was theater and the former only talking pictures.

  She had agreed to make Spitfire only so that she could return to the Broadway stage in The Lake; R.K.O. would not have allowed her to do so otherwise. Spitfire was to fail almost as disastrously as her stage venture and for many of the same reasons. Kate had been able to overcome second-rate material in Morning Glory, where her role had permitted her personality to shine through. Trigger Hicks, in Spitfire, is an uneducated, primitive, relatively uncouth mountain girl. Kate attempted a dialect and tomboy gait that almost obliterated her own qualities. Only in her one love scene with her leading man, Robert Young,* was her talent evident. Unfortunately, she lost her mountain speech in this scene, so that the moment jars rather than highlights the performance.

  Free now from even the loose strings of her marriage to Luddy, Kate had no obligations toward any individual. Her contract to R.K.O. would shortly come up for renewal and since she was financially independent, she could do as she pleased where her film career was concerned. She planned to return to the stage, and was considering a dramatization of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice† for producer Arthur Hopkins for the following Broadway season. It would have been ridiculous for her to go about pretending that the debacle of The Lake would not make this difficult. Nor did she take the view that “criticism was a sort of envious tribute.” The harsh reactions of her peers in the theater pad meant she remained an outsider to the select and current theater greats.

  With the box-office su
ccess of Little Women, R.K.O. pressed for another costume role—Joan of Arc (based on George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan) or a biographical film on George Sand. Both proposals called for her to depart as far as possible from the natural charm she was able to contribute to the role of Jo March. Sensibly, she turned them down and returned to the East Coast in early June to walk the beach at Old Saybrook and think about what she should do. She certainly had not proved to be a very great success as a stage actress or as a wife. The standards she set for herself were perhaps too high for her to live up to. Another woman might have rested quite smugly on her film triumphs, but not Kate. Even discounting Dorothy Parker’s vitriole, her theater reviews had been painful. Brooks Atkinson at The New York Times had sighted “her limitations as a dramatic actress . . . and a voice that has unpleasant timbre.” Another critic had called her “too young and too shy, in the presence of an audience to seem as commanding a personality on the stage as on the screen.” Robert Benchley at The New Yorker had said, “Not a great actress by any manner of means, but one with a certain distinction which, with training, might possibly take the place of great acting in an emergency.” That one took a bit of extra pondering. Everyone had accused her of affecting a voice that was too high and flat. But it was her natural voice, adding to her special charm. To affect another voice would make her self-conscious. Perhaps Broadway audiences had to get used to her voice in the same way that film audiences had to—by constant exposure to it.

  Curiously, once she was divorced from Luddy, she missed him. He had retained the apartment in the house in New York. Now he came to join her at Fenwick to help placate her fears and restore her pride, moving into an upstairs room and a place in Kate’s life for as long as he lived. Luddy was one person who could always be counted on to take her side. No pretensions need ever exist between them. They were not man and woman but two close buddies apathetic to each other’s gender. Their unusual postdivorce relationship led to stories in the press about a possible reconciliation, to which neither of them responded.

  With Luddy’s encouragement, in June, 1934, she agreed to return to the Ivoryton Playhouse as Judith Traherne, the dying heroine in George Brewer’s tragedy, Dark Victory.* The hope was that Dark Victory would move on to New York with Kate in it. Her co-star was to be Stanley Ridges, a solid English character actor.* Dark Victory was to be the first play of the summer season and Kate’s appearance was a great plum for the theater’s directors, Milton Steifel and Julian Anhalt. Rehearsals did not go well. Kate blamed the casting of Ridges, who made her uncomfortable. A few days before the opening, she decided she could not continue. Ridges gallantly withdrew from the production, citing an illness in the family, and a cancellation notice was posted. The theater offered to present her in Holiday as the last play of their season, but Kate refused. The management at the Ivoryton Summer Theatre threatened to take action with the Actors Equity Association but never did.

  Joined by Laura, Kate boarded a train for Hollywood, where they rented another house.

  Not long after Kate and Laura had returned to Hollywood, Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild arrived with the intent of selling Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra to the movies. She had the idea of Garbo and Kate appearing in the roles of mother and daughter created on the stage by Alice Brady and Alla Nazimova. Kate became terribly excited about the possibility and even went so far as to approach Louis B. Mayer at Metro with the suggestion that he buy the play and borrow her from R.K.O. to co-star with Garbo in a film adaptation.† “Louis B. said only over his dead body,” Helburn stated. “Surprisingly Kate didn’t shoot him on the spot.“‡

  Disappointed that she could not appear in the O’Neill drama, Kate turned down numerous scripts that R.K.O. sent her, including an adaptation of J. M. Barrie’s The Little Minister. R.K.O. then approached Margaret Sullavan to play the role of Lady Babbie. As soon as Kate heard Sullavan was in negotiation with R.K.O. she changed her mind. “I really didn’t want to play it until I heard another actress was desperate for the role,” she later admitted. “Then, of course, it became the most important thing in the world for me that I should get it.” Ungraciously, she added, “Several of my parts in those days I fought for just to take them from someone who needed them.” But that kind of avarice seems foreign to Kate’s personality. Except for her tenacious battle for the role of Scarlett O’Hara (won by Vivien Leigh), and another to be cast by M.G.M. in The Gorgeous Hussy (finally portrayed by Joan Crawford), she seldom displayed a competitive nature. And even in those two cases, the two actresses finally cast had not been involved when she originally went after the roles. A sense of true rivalry did, however, exist between Kate and Margaret Sullavan.

  The Little Minister was as unsuitable a vehicle for Kate as The Lake had been. R.K.O. reasoned that her success in one period drama (Little Women) would engender success in a second. The Little Minister might be defined as a bit of whimsy, and though two silent film versions had been made,* they had not transposed well to screen. Maude Adams,† the American stage star, had twice played the role on Broadway and her magnetic personality and tremendous box-office appeal had made both productions successful. Kate had always admired Miss Adams and was most flattered when told (as she often was) that there was a resemblance, although the older woman’s diminutive size and gamine looks made the comparison difficult to understand. But the role of Lady Babbie in The Little Minister—itself a dated story—was too ill-defined to have real substance.‡

  Both Laura and Leland Hayward urged her not to accept the part, but Kate’s willfulness excluded all outside influence. Reviewers already called her “the incomparable Katharine Hepburn.” Her legend was in the making. Still, despite her “unconquerable gift for turning lavender and old lace into something possessing dramatic vitality and conviction” and her fame as “one of the major wonder workers of Hollywood,” she could not overcome the lack of appeal of The Little Minister to film audiences. It now became clear that, unlike many other stars, Kate could not bring audiences to movie houses in an inferior film.

  She had alienated the press from the time of her arrival in California to make A Bill of Divorcement. The result was that they did not present intelligent, earnest portraits of Kate or sympathetic analyses or insights into the worthwhile sides of her character, just her pranks and the eccentricities—the things about her that made readers mutter, “Why doesn’t she grow up?” and pass by theater marquees with her name with disinterest unless the film itself was sufficiently intriguing.

  The Little Minister was a dismal failure. The studio wanted to counteract any effect this would have on Kate’s popularity by having her win over the press, be cordial, give more interviews. Kate refused to cooperate, citing her right to privacy. Certainly fame should not deny a performer the right of privacy. But fame in films, where one becomes a public figure recognizable on sight by millions of people, makes protecting that right to an extreme a contradiction in terms. Why become a film star if you seek total privacy?

  Kate began once again to see Leland Hayward. Both free and single now, they no longer needed the cloak of secrecy they continued to hide behind. Never did they dine in public or attend parties or premieres. The ground rules were Kate’s. “When I’m asked if I take a shower or tub then I have a right to take to the tall timbers,” she claimed. But being seen and getting about were important in the career of an agent. Hayward had negotiated a six-picture deal for her at R.K.O. for fifty thousand dollars a film. Considering that at that time the average major Hollywood film had a four- to six-week production schedule* and that in 1934 banks and businesses were failing in frightening numbers and the median weekly income of a family of four was fifty dollars, Kate’s salary, which was higher than that of President Roosevelt, was astronomic. Still, Hayward was not strong enough either to convert her to his preferred life-style or to influence her choice of material.

  In one of her few garrulous periods, she told an interviewer, “For the independent woman the marriage problem is
very great. If she falls in love with a strong man she loses him because she has to concentrate too much on her job. If she falls in love with a weakling, who[m] she can push around, she always falls out of love with him. A woman just has to have sense enough to handle a man well enough so he’ll want to stay with her. How to keep him on the string is almost a full time job . . . . ” If Kate really believed this, she did not follow her convictions; she hardly devoted full time to Leland Hayward, although she did convey the impression that she wanted to marry him.

  Upon the completion of The Little Minister, she and Leland flew to New York, where Kate was plagued by reporters. The day after she arrived, she boarded the Europe-bound Majestic to wish David and Irene Selznick bon voyage and let it slip that she and Leland would be married within a month, after which she would “join them in Paris and bring him along too.”

  The New York Herald Tribune pondered: “How she got on the boat [the Majestic] is as much a mystery as where she and Hayward went yesterday.

  “News gatherers who talked to her early Friday night through an inhospitable crack in the front door of her house at No. 244 E. 49th St. kept watch until after midnight and would take an oath that she never left the house.

  “But, sad to recall, Katie’s mythical husband Ludlow Ogden Smith maintains an apartment on the back side of Katharine’s four-story brownstone. She may have gone out the back way.