by Anne Edwards
The British writer John Collier* was signed to do the script, a fact that in itself showed that Kate and Cukor thought Sylvia Scarlett would be a breakthrough film—because Collier (who had never before worked for films) had a literary reputation for the sophisticated and bizarre. Collier, in fact, had just won critical acclaim for a brilliant, satirical novel, His Monkey Wife, about a man who marries a monkey.†
“We got John Collier for the script,” Cukor later admitted, “so I must have been thinking in that way [a dating film].”
But Sylvia Scarlett failed (and it appeared at the time to be a spectacular failure) not when it attempted to be daring but when Cukor and Kate tried to play it safe. Collier wrote a sensitive and probing script of a woman forced by circumstances before the opening of the film to don men’s clothes. Because of her impersonation she begins to examine her own sexuality and her response to men.
Fearful that the audience would not react well to seeing Kate straightaway dressed as a man, Cukor hired Gladys Unger and Mortimer Offner to tone down Collier’s script and to tack on a ten-minute prologue and a fifteen-minute end that would show Sylvia Scarlett first as a bereaved daughter whose mother has just died, and then as a dazzling young woman. To do this, the film became caught up in a tangled and superficial plot. (Kate wrote at the time, “This picture makes no sense and I wonder whether George Cukor is aware of the fact, because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”) Despite its convoluted plot, Sylvia Scarlett was beautifully made; Kate gave a superb performance and Cary Grant as a Cockney con man was a revelation, exhibiting the kind of insolent humor that made him a star.‡
Cukor had attended the sneak preview of the film in Pasadena and the experience had been a nightmare. People rushed out up the aisles at the point of Kate and Bunny Beatty’s ardent kiss. Kate, of course, was dressed as a man and Miss Beatty in her role as a maid did not know she was kissing a woman. (This same dramatic scene was replayed by Barbra Streisand and Amy Irving in Yentl with a similarly uncomfortable result.) Nonetheless, Kate had been seen as a sympathetic, lovely young woman in that tenminute prologue and the audience could not accept the situation.
At the preview Kate sat next to Natalie Paley, who had a supporting role in the film. Both of the women thought that several scenes were meant to be—and were—hilariously funny, but the audience didn’t laugh. Finally, Natalie whispered, “Oh, Kate, why don’t they laugh?” And Kate replied, “Natalie, they don’t think it’s funny.” During a climactic scene that showed Kate in a full-face close-up reciting an entire Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, the audience began leaving in droves. “It’s a disaster,” Kate sighed as she slouched down in her seat.
Kate and Cukor found Pandro Berman, their producer, waiting for them at Cukor’s house after the preview, nervously cleaning one fingernail with another as he often did in times of tension.
“Pandro, scrap the picture,” star and director concurred. “We’ll do another picture for you for nothing!”
Berman replied, absolutely serious, “I never want to see either of you again!”*
R.K.O. held back the film for many months, first thinking they might shelve it and then having Jane Loring edit the “offensive” scenes so that they would be less obvious. Kate had come East and she and Leland Hayward spent time together at Fenwick and in West Hartford. Margaret Sullavan’s marriage to William Wyler had ended abruptly; and Kate could hardly have not known that Hayward was once again seeing her, for the gossip mongers had gone immediately to work. Luddy remained a confidant, as did Jane Loring on the West Coast and Laura on the East Coast. And one day during the filming of Sylvia Scarlett, a biplane had settled on a landing strip on the film’s Malibu location and out stepped R.K.O.’s backer, Howard Hughes. He had come over to where Kate and Cukor sat eating during their lunch break and, in the strained, high-pitched voice that the hard of hearing sometimes possess, he introduced himself. Kate found him somewhat laughable—a stiff, off-center outsider—and displayed her old arrogance. He walked off and flew away, but returned often. Kate gave him no chance for personal conversation. Yet once she had left Hollywood, he began sending her flowers and she saw him a few times, considerably revising her first impression.
The reviews of Sylvia Scarlett upon its release in early 1936 were exactly what Kate had expected. All the major critics found the film ineffective, offensive, or not to their liking. Kate’s personal reviews, on the other hand, were extremely good. “The dynamic Miss Hepburn is the handsomest boy of the season,” wrote Richard Watts, Jr., of the New York Herald Tribune, adding, “I don’t care for Sylvia Scarlett a bit, but I do think Miss Hepburn is much better in it than she was as the small-town wallflower in Alice Adams.”
Time declared: “Sylvia Scarlett reveals the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn is better looking as a boy than a woman. . . . Miss Hepburn plays with her best intuition, a scene in which a woman who has played a man so long that she has abdicated her sex tries to become a woman for the man she loves.” Thornton Delehanty of the New York Post concluded, “And [Sylvia Scarlett] is a tour de force, made possible by [Miss Hepburn’s] physical resemblance to the adolescent male [but] there is no justification for Miss Hepburn’s throwing herself away on a part that demands little more than a studied imitation of gesture and intonation. Cary Grant comes near to stealing the picture with his bitingly humorus portrait of a Cockney ne’er-do-well.”
Grant was paid $15,000 for the six weeks of filming Sylvia Scarlett, considerably less than Hepburn’s $50,000 fee.* Grant recalls their first meeting: “She was this slip of a woman, skinriy, and I never liked skinny women. But she had this thing, this air, you might call it, the most totally magnetic woman I’d ever seen, and probably have ever seen since. You had to look at her, you had to listen to her, there was no escaping her. But it wasn’t just the beauty, it was the style. She’s incredibly down to earth. She can see right through the nonsense in life. She cares, but about things that really matter.”
Viewed today, Sylvia Scarlett can be seen as amazingly ahead of its time, and Kate’s androgyne a remarkable portrait of a sensitive, vital, straightforward woman facing her own sexuality in an engaging and often enlightening manner. But the film’s release in 1936 was damaging to Kate’s popularity. Her choices of Mary of Scotland, A Woman Rebels and Quality Street, all heavy period dramas, as her next three films, almost finished her career entirely.
Maxwell Anderson’s* Mary of Scotland, starring Helen Hayes as Mary Stuart and Fredric March as the Earl of Bothwell, had been the succès d’estime of the 1933–34 theater season. Dudley Nichols’s adaptation eliminated the blank verse of the original, but otherwise it remained faithful. As with Elizabeth and Essex and Henry VIII, the heroic proportions of Mary Stuart’s life have a fascination and validity that even a poor or faulty† retelling cannot destroy.
From the moment Kate had seen the play she had been convinced she should portray Mary Stuart on screen and had been equally certain that Cukor should direct her in it. But after the disaster of Sylvia Scarlett, Pandro Berman refused to team them together again. Berman wanted—and got—John Ford,‡ considered at the time to be the greatest American film director since D. W. Griffith. Ford was a masterful storyteller and his images had a sense of poetry to them. But his own patently made chauvinist feelings were reflected in the film, and Mary of Scotland failed because of them. None of Kate’s or Mary Stuart’s strength was allowed to show through. Instead, Mary became “a soft-focused unfairly slandered Madonna of the Scottish moors.”
At the start of shooting, Kate and Ford “fought, bickered, and fussed.” Except for Cukor, she had never encouraged camaraderie during filming with her directors or, for that matter, with any of her leading men or the cast members. Her buddies continued to be the technicians; and on Mary of Scotland Jane Loring acted as film editor and the two women were almost inseparable. The choice of Loring as editor, whomever’s choice it might have been, was a serious error in judgment. Loring, albeit a talented wo
man, lacked the kind of vision the film needed. Nor did she have an understanding or perception of history. She cut the film to best frame Kate and highlight her performance, which did not heighten the film’s dramatic impact. But perhaps the most serious error on Kate’s part was falling hard for her director midway through the film and subduing her views to his autocratic control.
“Pappy” Ford was a powerful personality, a strong Irish Catholic, a hard drinker, and a man’s man. He possessed a magnetic charm and a gift for storytelling. Within a short time, he had won Kate over and members of the cast and crew suspected that they were having an affair. Ford, married and the father of two children, was twelve years Kate’s senior. His age and accomplishments made Kate look up to him. He had an authoritarian quality not unlike Dr. Hepburn’s and would take only so much of her bossiness before he let her know he would stand for no more. His green eyes turning hard, he would pull from his mouth the pipe he constantly smoked and knock it against a wall or into an ashtray—a signal for her to behave. Weekends they met at Kate’s house and then stole away with elaborate precaution to spend time together on Ford’s yacht, the Araner. He liked to fish and sail and Kate baited his hook and her own and helped him rig the sails and clean the decks and drop anchor. On Mondays, back on the set, Kate’s portrayal of Mary of Scotland began to mellow and form itself more into Ford’s concept of the role than her own.
In Mary of Scotland, as in all her earlier films, Kate refused to have a stunt woman double for her in dangerous shots. She reveled in undertaking the physically difficult things that no one expected her to be able to do. For a scene in Sylvia Scarlett, against Cukor’s wishes, she had climbed a rainspout to rooftop height and hung by her hands. Suddenly her fingers started slipping and if it had not been for alert crew members who had caught her she would have been seriously injured. The scenario of Mary of Scotland called for Mary, wearing high-heeled pumps and a voluminous gown that weighed fifteen pounds, to run down a flight of stone steps and then, with no pause, vault to the back of a spirited horse, unassisted, and ride away at breakneck speed sidesaddle. Ford insisted Kate let a stunt woman do the scene, which he would shoot from a distance. “Mary of Scotland supposedly did it,” Kate balked, “and I’m a damned good horsewoman.” Ford refused to back down. In the end, Kate won out and did the hazardous scene, not once but eleven times before Ford, determined to teach her a lesson, was satisfied with the results. As she walked back to her dressing room, the entire crew stood at attention and applauded. No wonder the technicians held her in such great awe. Unfortunately, that kind of derring-do, perhaps because of the courage and grit it displayed, created a negative reaction in her co-actors, who were not athletes and had to use doubles, and in her director, whose authority had been challenged successfully.
With the finish of Mary of Scotland in the spring of 1936, Kate returned East to Fenwick for a month and Ford pursued her. They sailed on the Long Island Sound and played highly competitive golf matches at a nearby country club. Neither could stand losing to the other. They went to New York and spent time with Laura and Luddy, much to Ford’s displeasure, then they returned to Fenwick. Dr. Hepburn had not been too keen on the young Irish Catholic boy Kate had been enamored of as a young girl. Ford impressed him little better. As far as Dr. Hepburn was concerned, Ford was a philandering married man using Kate poorly. By summer, the romance had diminished.
Work filled Kate’s life during the rest of 1936. She had rented a five-acre estate in Laurel Canyon which she shared with a cookhousekeeper, chauffeur, maid, two black-and-white cocker spaniels named Michael and Peter (the monkey having long ago been given to the Los Angeles Zoo), Button, a small French poodle, and Cocoa, a Siamese cat. She never attended any Hollywood parties or premieres. Occasionally she would turn up unexpectedly at George Cukor’s on a Sunday afternoon, and Leland Hayward returned to figure prominently in her life.
She followed Mary of Scotland with A Woman Rebels, based on the novel Portrait of a Rebel by Netta Syrett. The story of a woman’s struggle against the strict conventions of her time (the 1870s) intrigued Kate for obvious reasons. The rebel in the title, Pamela Thistlewaite, becomes a crusading editor of a women’s magazine and has an affair with a young man (Van Heflin*) who leaves her with an illegitimate child. Pamela then refuses the safe refuge of marriage to a man (Herbert Marshall)† who has always loved her.
A Woman Rebels represents an effort on the part of R.K.O. and Kate to re-create the success of Little Women. Both films were set in the Victorian period and dealt with the revolt of a young woman against convention. But A Woman Rebels had none of the vitality or the story detail of Little Women and the basic theme of a woman refusing to marry for the sole purpose of legitimizing her child bordered on soap opera. Kate’s “well-modulated” performance saved the film from complete mediocrity. Mark Sandrich,‡ who directed, was entirely out of his element with a film so flagrantly lavender and old lace. Sandrich had directed the first three Astaire and Rogers musicals and went on to do two more. He possessed a lighthearted, light-handed talent for comedy of a sophisticated, contemporary nature. Lacking any depth of understanding of Kate’s character, he concentrated with meticulous detail on evoking the period through lighting, camera angles, costumes (Kate had twenty-two changes designed by Walter Plunkett) and set direction. The result was a historically accurate but dull and slowly paced film.
Jane Loring retained her position as film editor on A Woman Rebels, but when production began on Quality Street§ in October, 1936, she was not assigned to do the film, which reunited George Stevens and Kate. Stevens, who had not appreciated Loring’s subjective work on Alice Adams, insisted she be barred from the set (reminiscent of Jed Harris’s refusal to continue rehearsal of The Lake until Laura Harding had left the theater). Kate always liked her “gang” close by when she worked. At that time, besides Loring, it included Kate’s dresser-secretary, Emily Perkins, and her stand-in, Eve March. Stevens felt this group influenced Kate too deeply. “Kate was confused by them,” he said. “Their advice was so diverse, she didn’t know what she was doing . . . she had a very good head on her shoulders, but she picked out lightweights to think with, and that was a mistake. She doesn’t need a lightweight . . . she needs someone who will question her judgments.”
All the women on the set, Kate included, seemed to be secretly in love with Stevens. Part Cherokee Indian, he possessed striking, dark good looks and could have been called the strong, silent type. He would sometimes pace for hours with his pipe rammed in his mouth, eyes averted, saying nothing while the whole company waited for his next instruction. (Once, during the making of an early Ginger Rogers film, Rogers shouted out, “Eureka!” Everyone turned to look at her. “I know what George is thinking when he paces like that—not a fucking thing!”)
Feeling not any better matched to the material of James Barrie’s stylized whimsy in Quality Street than Mark Sandrich had been to the melodrama of A Woman Rebels, Stevens had not wanted to direct this story, about a spinster schoolteacher in 1805 who gets revenge on the man who once spurned her by masquerading as her own nonexistent flirtatious niece. A determined Kate finally got him to agree, but his resentment at his own weakness in doing so remained throughout the making of the film. “I don’t think I did her any good,” he admitted. “She became precious, and preciousness was always her weakness. . . . Quality Street was a precious play, anyway, full of precious people, and that infected her; I myself didn’t have sufficient familiarity with the British background to save her.” (Why R.K.O. chose to make Quality Street after the failure of The Little Minister, another one of J. M. Barrie’s stylized dramas, is difficult to comprehend.)
During the entire filming of Qyality Street, Kate was under tremendous stress. Leland Hayward did not come around as often as before and the fact that he was her agent and manager as well made things very difficult. Then, at one of George Cukor’s Sunday salons in November–halfway through Quality Street—the news came over the radio that Hayward an
d Margaret Sullavan had just married. Kate managed to get through the afternoon, but the information had visibly shaken her. She sent the newlyweds a congratulatory telegram. For several days, Kate was so distressed by this news that she was sick to her stomach on the set, confessing to co-worker Joan Fontaine how deeply she had been hurt. She kept to herself a lot and looked somehow like “a little lost boy,” perched on a stool in either her slacks or a hiked-up costume, leaning forward, arm on knee, puffing away at a cigarette as though she might be sneaking a smoke behind the garage. California suddenly became oppressive, her friendship with Jane Loring had hit a snag, and her expectations of working again with George Stevens had disappointed her. To the surprise of most of her associates, she began to see Howard Hughes on a fairly steady basis. “[I don’t know] what she was doing with Howard Hughes,” Kate’s friend, author and screenwriter Anita Loos,* said. “He had a whole stable of girls, and Kate simply wasn’t the type to have anything to do with that kind of thing.”
However, that was a challenge in itself to Kate, who seemed to like difficult, individualistic men. Then too, she and Hughes shared several enthusiasms—aviation, golf and films, and Hughes had a monied background like herself.
His vast wealth gave him power that he did not have to seek; his genius gave him “stardom” without personal compromise; he welcomed challenge, breaking new ground and setting new records. Kate had nothing but admiration for such a man, no matter what his other weaknesses. But, perhaps most important, Hughes found Kate’s unbound and adventurous spirit irresistible. With her life at sixes and sevens, Quality Street a complete failure and her career at low ebb, Kate was susceptible.