Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  “Her Phoebe Throssel needs a neurologist far more than a husband,” wrote Frank Nugent at The New York Times of her role in Quality Street. “Such flutterings and jitterings and twitchings, such hand-wringings and mouth-quiverings, such runnings about and eyebrow-raisings have not been seen on a screen in many a moon.” And regarding Herbert Marshall’s performance, Graham Greene, at the time film critic for The Spectator, wrote, “Mr. Marshall, so intractably British . . . does, I suppose, represent some genuine national characteristics, if not those one wishes to see exported; characteristics which it is necessary to describe in terms of inanimate objects; a kind of tobacco, a kind of tweed, a kind of pipe—or in terms of a dog, something large, sentimental and moulting, something which confirms one’s preference for cats” (the latter a reference to Kate’s “clawing, scratching, back-arching” performance as Phoebe ’throssel).

  She went home to West Hartford in time for Christmas with a new admirer and the prospect of doing a play for the Theatre Guild. Most important, she would be near her father, always a steadying influence in her life and never needed more by his headstrong, supremely admiring daughter.

  Footnotes

  * The film was adapted from Compton Mackenzie’s nowel Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett.

  * Hepburn was planning Mary of Scotland as her next film.

  † Hepburn never played Juliet.

  * Transvestism in films had been confined mostly to men dressed as women for comedic purposes until 1935. Wallace Beery (1886–1949) had appeared as Sweedie in a series of silent comedies, Julian Eltinge (1882–1941), an American female impersonator, had made a silent version of the perennial favorite, Charley’s Aunt, and Stan Laurel had appeared in That’s My Wife and Jitterbugs. Other films with situations where men dressed as women followed: Lon Chaney (1883–1930) in The Unholy Three, Lionel Barrymore (1878–1954) in The Devil Doll, William Powell (1892–1984) in Love Crazy, Cary Grant (1904– ) in I Was a Male War Bride, Joe E. Brown (1892–1973) in The Daring Young Man, Dudley Moore (1935– ) and Peter Cook (1937– ) in Bedazzled, Alec Guinness (1914– ) in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Peter Sellers (1925–1980) in The Mouse That Roared, Tony Curtis (1925– ) and Jack Lemmon (1925– ) in Some Like It Hot, Tony Perkins (1932– ) in Psycho, Phil Silvers (1912– ) and Jack Gilford (1917– ) in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Bing Crosby (1904–1977) and Bob Hope (1903– ) in several of their Road comedies, and, more recently, Rex Reed (1940– ) as Myra Breckinridge and Dustin Hoffman (1937– ) as Tootsie. In Turnabout (1940), John Hubbard (1914– ) exchanged bodies with his wife, Carole Landis (1919–1948), and even had a baby. But women disguised as men have been much rarer. After the failure of Sylvia Scarlett (although it had become a minor cult film by the 1960s) studios were opposed to stories involving such a changeover and M.G.M. would not agree to Garbo playing Hamlet. Annabella (1909– ) made Wings of the Morning in 1937 with no more success than Hepburn’s Sylvia Scarlett. Debbie Reynolds (1932– ) starred in Goodbye Charlie, Julie Andrews (1935– ) in Victor/Victoria, and Barbra Streisand (1942– ) in Yentl. To judge by the failure of these films audiences are better able to accept transvestism in men than in women in both comedy and drama.

  * John Collier (1901–1982), British writer famed for his polished macabre stories. Sylvia Scarlett was his first screen work. He also wrote the screenplays of Her Cardboard Lover (1942), I Am a Camera (1955) and The War Lord (1965).

  † This same theme was used to the same startling effect in a musical production number in the film Cabaret (1972) underscoring the brutal extent of anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s.

  ‡ Cukor was to say, “Up to then [Sylvia Scarlett] Cary [Grant] had been a conventional leading man. This part was extremely well written and he knew this kind of raffish life, he’d been a stilt walker in a circus. And he’d had enough experience by this time to know what he was up to, and suddenly this part hit him, and he felt the ground under his feet.”

  * Hepburn and Berman were to make four more films together at R.K.O. and two at M.G.M.

  * Hepburn also had a large percentage of the profits, but by 1984 the film had not yet recouped its original cost of one million dollars.

  * Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for Both Your Houses, which was on Broadway the same year as his Mary of Scotland.

  † Both play and film include a dramatic confrontation between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I, but history does not record a meeting between the two queens.

  ‡ John Ford (1895–1973), born Sean Aloysius O’Fearna. Ford changed his name to become an actor and appeared in small roles in some films of his older brother, film producer Francis Ford (1883–1953). John Ford directed his first feature film, Straight Shooting, in 1917. By 1936, with Arrowsmith, The Lost Patrol, The Whole Town’s Talking, The Informer and Steamboat ’Round the Bend to his credit, his reputation was thought to be at its peak. But Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home, How Green Was My Valley, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man and The Searchers, among many others, were still ahead.

  * Van Heflin (1910–1971) made his film debut in A Woman Rebels. Later he appeared on the stage with Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story in the role played by James Stewart in the film. He and Hepburn were never to work together again. His many films included Johnny Eager (1942), for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award, Shane (1953), Battle Cry (1955) and Patterns (1956); there were notable stage performances as well, among them A Case of Libel (1954) and A View from the Bridge (1955).

  † Herbert Marshall (1890–1966) lost a leg in World War I but successfully disguised the handicap throughout his long career as a Hollywood leading man, perhaps best known for his performances in The Letter (1940) and The Little Faxes (1941).

  ‡ Mark Sandrich (1900–1945) directed The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Shall We Dance (1937) and Carefree (1938), all with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He also produced and directed Skylark (1941) and Holiday Inn (1942).

  § Quality Street, by James M. Barrie, was first presented in London in 1900 and brought to the United States the following year by Charles Frohman. Marion Davies starred in a 1927 silent film based on the play, which had starred Maude Adams.

  * Anita Loos (1893–1981), best known as the author of the 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Dr. Hepburn at fifty-seven still looked extremely youthful, his red hair brushed artfully with gray, his strong, angular face dominated as always by his wide-set brown eyes, and his six-foot body kept compact and trim by daily exercise. His agile mind and firm resolve had only sharpened with the years. Whenever Kate spoke to him—and they were in steady contact—she came away mindful of his high intelligence and good common sense. She believed in him completely, trusted his judgment, and constantly quoted his opinions whenever a point was to be made. He showed an enormous interest in everything she did and was a source of infinite strength. More than that, he had never let her down. Kate looked for her father’s qualities in every man she met, and found each lacking.

  Approaching thirty in 1936, Kate still referred to the men in her life as “beaux.” She considered her parents’ relationship unique and ideal–one in which a man and a woman could live in the same house and yet respect each other’s need for time alone. “In my relationships,” Kate admitted, “I know that I have qualities that are offensive to people–especially men. I’m loud and talkative and I get onto subjects that irritate. If I feel these things causing a break, I know something has to give. I never think the man is going to give—or anyone else, for that matter—so I do. I just deliberately change. I just shut up-—when every atom in me wants to speak up.” Resentments thus accumulated threatened the stability of her close relationships. She rationalized that marriage was not for her anyway. “Well, I’ll never marry,” she recalled thinking at this time. “I want to be a star, and I don’t want to make my husband my victi
m. And I certainly don’t want to make my children my victims.”

  Nonetheless, she had considered marrying Leland Hayward and knew he was a man who liked and wanted children. Howard Hughes was another matter, a man who did not know how, or care, to share anything, particularly the attention of a woman he desired, with demanding, small people.

  A long time would pass before Kate would bring Howard Hughes home to meet her parents. “I’m like the girl who never grew up you see?” she told writer Ralph Martin.* “I just never really left home, so to speak. I always went back there [West Hartford and Fenwick] almost every weekend of my life when I wasn’t filming. I kept my life there, my roots. . . . And when I went back there I didn’t go to my atmosphere: I went to their atmosphere–of which I was a part. I was going to my father’s house . . . that’s very unusual, isn’t it? Very, very unusual that someone who’s sort of made it in the big world could still want to go home to their father’s house?”

  And home she came for Thanksgiving, 1936, her six-film deal with R.K.O. completed, her popularity slipping, and her feelings for Howard Hughes confused by the too recent betrayal of Leland Hayward. Despite the winter cold, she spent the weekends at Fenwick, swimming every day in Long Island Sound, staying in the water as long as she could bear it, then rushing out, bundling up and, in a short while, dashing back in again. She took long, brisk walks, straight uphill or through the woods, crawling under bushes and climbing over fences in her direct path. Paradise was “getting up at 4:30 or five o’clock in the morning . . . the house absolutely quiet . . . a big roaring fire . . . and a great big breakfast; bacon, chicken livers, steaks and eggs . . . orange juice and a big pot of coffee . . . then I watched the sun rise. Oh, golly, Paradise!”

  Paradise was interrupted by a telegram from the Theatre Guild asking her to accept their offer of $1,000 a week to play Jane Eyre on tour before bringing it into New York. Promptly she demanded $1,500. When the Guild agreed, she pointed out that the extra $500 was payment for the humiliation she had suffered seven years earlier when they had refused a salary increase from $30 to $35 a week during the run of A Month in the Country.

  The new adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel, written by Helen Jerome, had opened in London at the Queens Theatre on October 13, 1936, to mixed reviews. Jane Eyre had appealed to actresses as a starring vehicle within only six months of the novel’s publication in England in October, 1847.* For Kate, the role was a startling choice. Jane Eyre is melodramatic and Victorian to the last inch and Helen Jerome’s version retained the speech, the manners and the spiritual essence of the period drama. One would have thought that, after the dazzling failure of her last three costume dramas, Kate would have chosen a more contemporary and lighthearted play in which to return to the stage, especially in view of the unsuccessful, melancholic production of The Lake. However, no other play was in the offing; and having learned from her experience with Jed Harris, this time she planned to stay on the road until the play and her performance were polished.

  To her delight, Worthington (Tony) Miner, who had been the one responsive person connected with The Lake, was to direct. The production was to go into immediate rehearsal in New Haven. This meant she could commute from West Hartford and be home for Christmas as well. Not wanting to drive after a full day’s rehearsal, Kate had the company manager, Herman Bernstein, hire her a chauffeured car, not easily available in small cities during the depth of the Depression, especially during a Christmas holiday. Bernstein, a resourceful gentleman, discovered that the one available limousine in town was owned by Weinstein’s Funeral Home. The car—a long, sleek, black number—was used in funeral processions. When Harry Weinstein heard who was to be driven to West Hartford each night, he offered his own services as chauffeur, for Katharine Hepburn was his favorite film star.

  Dressed in his best black undertaker’s suit, Weinstein waited outside the theater every evening Kate was in New Haven. A man of old-world charm and sly good humor, he and Kate—who very much enjoyed his Yiddish stories—got on well. One night they had to drive through a terrible ice storm and the trip took twice as long as usual.

  “You must be hungry, Mr. Weinstein,” Kate said as they pulled into her father’s driveway. “You better come in and have something to eat and drink before you turn around.”

  Weinstein explained that he was an Orthodox Jew and that he ate only kosher food. “My wife would kill me if I ate traif” He thought a moment. “But then on the other hand, she’d kill me if I didn’t go in and see your house.” And he followed her to the door.

  Jane Eyre opened in New Haven on December 26, 1936. Kate’s name appeared at her request below the title and in the same size print as the other actors. The Theatre Guild had settled upon Dennis Hoey,* a reliable English stage and film actor generally featured in supporting roles, to play Mr. Rochester. Jane Eyre traveled from New Haven to Boston, and then on to Kansas City, Missouri, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and ended its tour in Baltimore on April 3, 1937. Kate’s reviews along the way had been mixed, Hoey’s notices excellent. But Helen Jerome’s retelling of the story of the little governess who goes to Thornfield Hall and falls in love with her gruff employer had third-act trouble from the start, and despite constant rewriting on the road and good business, the Theatre Guild was afraid to bring the show into New York. Kate’s name had worked miracles at the box office in cities that weren’t often able to see a film star on­stage. Broadway audiences had their choice of the greatest names in theater.

  Boston felt she played “her not too exacting role with much simplicity and straight-forward intelligence,” Cleveland found her “thoroughly delightful . . . she essays the variety of moods her role calls for with the authority of a more seasoned stage player. Even when sitting still she seems to command the mood of the scene by the flutter of a hand or slight change of posture.” Baltimore claimed she presented “Charlotte Brontë’s prim, yet volatile, heroine with an illuminating insight into the very veins of the little British governess,” and Washington “applauded her the more for the fine fervor with which she tackled a difficult part,” then added, “Her voice remains her least prepossessing quality as an actress. . . . One wonders . . . if her own vivid personality does not obscure the character she plays—wonders if it is not easier to see Katharine Hepburn in Jane Eyre than Jane Eyre in Katharine Hepburn.”*

  Theresa Helburn, representing the Guild, had stayed with the show whenever possible. “Kate . . . knew how to do the little pieces of the mosaic by which a film is built up, but she had no conception of building a character through three acts. It was wonderful to watch how she did it, groping her way from a stale performance that had a certain brilliance and charm, but no solid characterization, to the full realization of the woman whom she was portraying.”

  The tour had been a grueling experience for Kate, more because of the loneliness of the road than because of the hard work. Her friendship with Tony Miner helped, but they did not have the kind of intense camaraderie Kate demanded of close friends. And, although she had insisted upon equal billing with other members of the cast, her interest in them went no further. Howard Hughes’s surprise appearance when the show opened in Chicago was therefore much welcomed. Their meeting also made national headlines. Speculation had them about to marry. Once more, as with Leland Hayward, Kate played the Garbo role with the press, taking great joy in sneaking in or out of a theater without being photographed either alone or with Hughes.

  With Jane Eyre dissolved, having never been brought into New York, Kate returned to her house in Turtle Bay, now buying and paying the full price (thirty-three thousand dollars) for it so that it became hers outright. She spent a blissful summer, mostly at Fenwick, bolstered by the closeness and warmth of her family as well as by the renewed loyalty of Luddy and Laura. Hughes visited her at Fenwick. The relationship was not on solid ground, but his attention was reassuring and his influence at R.K.O. more than helpful.

  Leland Hayward now negotiated a new film
deal for her at R.K.O. for seventy-five thousand dollars per picture, a feat that would seem impossible considering the failure of her last three films. She refused the project first offered her* and suggested she play the role of Terry Randall in Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s Stage Door, which had been a huge hit during the 1936 Broadway season with Margaret Sullavan in the same part.† Not until she reached Hollywood in September and read the final screenplay was Kate aware that another part in the film—Jean Maitland, to be played by Ginger Rogers‡—had been built up to equal hers in importance. The inclusion of a star as popular as Ginger Rogers indicated that with seventy-five thousand dollars riding on Kate in one film, R.K.O. wanted to hedge their bet. A second shock came when she received a tentative credit sheet that ranked her name in third place after Ginger Rogers (star billing) and Adolphe Menjou. The studio front office had taken note of the fact that Kate had appeared in seventieth place and Ginger Rogers third on the most recent box-office popularity poll.

  Howard Hughes and Leland Hayward had been able to negotiate a high-figured contract for her, but nothing more. Kate confronted Pandro Berman, who was producing the film, demanding better billing. Berman replied, semijokingly, “You’d be lucky if you played seventh part in a successful picture.” Stage Door now took on the aura of a championship battle.

  Director Gregory La Cava§ had been hired without Kate’s approval. La Cava was a legend, and his ability to handle comedy with a delicate but firm and sophisticated touch was well accepted. W. C. Fields gave La Cava credit for having the best mind in Hollywood for comedy, next to Fields’s own. Two of his recent films, both screwball social comedies, She Married Her Boss (1935) and My Man Godfrey (1936), had been tremendous box-of-fice successes. Stage Door was more of a comedy-drama, but R.K.O. wanted to be sure that the film never tipped the scale into bathos; and the tearful quality of some of the story could have caused this to happen.