Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  Footnotes

  * Ralph Martin (1920– ), author of Jennie, The Woman He Loved, and Cissy. He interviewed Hepburn at length in 1975.

  * Jane Eyre has had numerous productions in both the United States and England. None of the twentieth-century productions has been successful. An actress named Charlotte Thompson toured the United States intermittently in the first stage adaptation, from 1874 to 1888, with considerable personal success.

  * Dennis Hoey (1893–1960) made his stage debut in 1918 singing in operettas. He appeared in his first film in 1930. His most famous role was that of Inspector Lestrade in six Sherlock Holmes films during the 1940s. Before Jane Eyre, Hoey had finished a season of Shakespeare and starred in an Australian film, Uncivilized.

  * Jane Eyre ended a fourteen-week run in Baltimore on April 3, 1937, after a record road-tour gross of $340,000.

  * The Mad Miss Manton, made finally and unsuccessfully in 1937 (released in 1938) with Barbara Stanwyck in the lead.

  † After twenty-two weeks of full houses, Stage Door had abruptly closed because Margaret Sullavan (Hayward) was to have a baby. Brooke Hayward was born six months later.

  ‡ Ginger Rogers (1911– ) was at the height of popularity at this time with Roberta (1935), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Swingtime (1936) and Shall We Dance (1937) behind her. Rogers also received seventy-five thousand dollars for her work on Stage Door.

  § Gregory La Cava (1892–1949) came into his own with sound though he made numerous silent films. Ephraim Katz (The Film Encyclopedia) says that “La Cava was known for his ability to overcome weak scripts with his vitality and comic instinct and for his knack of drawing superior performances from actors.” Andrew Sarris (The American Cinema) adds, “La Cava was most effective when he could work between the lines of his scenarios and against the conventions of his plots.” He was nominated for an Academy Award for Stage Door and did several films before his premature death, Unfinished Business with Irene Dunne and Preston Foster (in a take­off of Billy Rose) being the best of these.

  * Constance Collier (1878–1955) was born Laura Hardie in Windsor, Berks, England, and made a grand success as a dramatic actress before she was twenty. She appeared in more than one hundred theater productions. She made her film debut in 1916 in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Later she was in nineteen films, mainly playing women in the grande dame manner.

  * Andrea Leeds (1914–1984) was nominated but did not win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Stage Door. That award in 1937 went to Alice Brady for her role in In Old Chicago.

  * R.K.O. was, in fact, the first studio to receive the galleys of Gone With the Wind from Macmillan Publishers. The studio turned the property down without any negotiation or bid on their part. Warner Brothers bid for the book on Bette Davis’s behalf, but refused to go over forty thousand dollars. Selznick bought it for fifty thousand dollars.

  * AFL: Associated Federation of Labor. This dispute had at its heart the AFL’s wish to control the hiring of all theater workers. It was to continue for many years and spread further into the film industry, where a strike did occur.

  † Mme. Olga Celeste was the trainer. Another animal also appeared with Hepburn in the film: a small wirehaired terrier named Skippy, who had won renown as Asta in The Thin Man series and as Mr. Smith in The Awful Truth.

  ‡ Howard Hawks (1896–1977) later directed Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), among other films. Critic Andrew Sarris lists Hawks as one of Hollywood’s fourteen pantheon directors.

  * The screenplay of Bringing Up Baby was written by Dudley Nichols (1895–1960) and Hagar Wilde (1904–1971) from the latter’s original story. Nichols had also written the screenplay of Stagecoach.

  * Holiday had previously been filmed in 1930 by R.K.O. with Ann Harding playing Linda Seton, Robert Ames as Johnny Case, and Mary Astor as Julia Seton. Columbia had paid eighty thousand dollars to R.K.O. in 1936 for a group of old scripts, The Awful Truth and Holiday among them.

  * Bob Thomas, Harry Cohn’s biographer (King Cohn, 1967), wrote, “Cohn liked to surround himself with beautiful things and beautiful people. He supervised with meticulous care the glamour trappings of his female stars; he would sometimes order three revisions of a simple hairdo. Many an expensive gown was scrapped because Cohn declared, ‘It looks cheap.’”

  † Donald Ogden Stewart (1894–1980), formerly an actor, had played the role of Johnny Case’s friend, Nick Potter, in the stage version of Holiday that Hepburn had understudied. (Philip Barry had in fact written the role with his friend Stewart in mind.) He scripted three more Hepburn films: The Philadelphia Story (1940), Keeper of the Flame (1942) and Without Love (1945). He was the author, as well, of several books.

  * George Cukor was replaced on Gone With the Wind by Victor Fleming after three weeks of shooting. Differences of opinion between Cukor and Clark Gable, cast as Rhett Butler, have been generally thought to have precipitated the change. A much more likely reason would be Selznick’s feelings that Cukor was undermining his control.

  * Walter Plunkett (1902-1982) designed Katharine Hepburn’s costumes for Little Women, The Little Minister, Alice Adams, Mary of Scotland and Quality Street.

  † Whether Selznick was responsible or not, Hepburn’s name did appear in publicity releases, first as having been Margaret Mitchell’s choice for Scarlett O’Hara (denied publicly by Miss Mitchell) and then as being one of the “hottest contenders.” However, Selznick used Paulette Goddard, not Hepburn, as a backup, for he never considered her right for the role.

  ‡ Stage Door’s four Academy Award nominations were: Best Picture (won by The Life of Emile Zola), Best Supporting Actress, Andrea Leeds (won by Alice Brady in In Old Chicago), Best Director (won by Leo McCarey for The Awful Truth) and Best Screenplay (won by The Life of Emile Zola). Nominees for Best Actress had been Luise Rainer (The Good Earth), Greta Garbo (Camille), Janet Gaynor (A Star Is Born) and Barbara Stanwyck (Stella Dallas).

  § Luise Rainer (1910– ). Born in Vienna, she won two successive Academy Awards. Her first was for The Great Ziegfeld, in which she portrayed Anna Held, one of Ziegfeld’s wives and one of his greatest stars. Her meteoric career was short. She made only six more films after The Good Earth, The Great Waltz being the best of them.

  ∥ When Tracy examined his statue, he found it to be misinscribed “Dick Tracy.”

  ¶ Louise Treadwell Tracy (1896-1983) appeared in minor roles and performed in stock. She married Tracy in 1923, appeared with him in some stage productions, and then retired to have and raise their children.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Kate, accompanied by Laura, in the spring of 1938, returned to New York by train. Marlene Dietrich, Gertrude Lawrence* and Noël Coward were also onboard, Coward having just spent three weeks in Hollywood where he had been “the belle of The Thing.” Much time was spent in Nod’s drawing-room accommodation discussing the published list of film stars named the biggest poison at the box office, which had been headed by Kate, Marlene and Garbo. Kate insisted that figures proved her the biggest poison. Marlene argued that since Paramount had simply paid her good money not to make another film (Kate, after all, had been offered Mother Carey’s Chickens), she took first place. Marlene and Gertie Lawrence had a serious debate regarding the size and splendor of the gifts given them by admirers. Marlene lost this round for she had never received a yacht and Gertie had.

  In New York, Kate spent a few days shopping for presents for her family. She then left for West Hartford alone, the usual pattern being that Laura would stay at her home in New Jersey when Kate was either in West Hartford or at Fenwick.

  Kate’s arrival, as always, generated much excitement. For several days the family clustered about, listening to all her tales of Hollywood. But soon it seemed as though she had been home for months. Marion was planning to be married to a Harvard man, Ellsworth Strong Grant, on June 12, in exactly the kind of society
wedding Kate had once shunned. Marion had graduated Bennington College in Vermont and had recently returned from Washington, D.C., where she had helped the C.I.O. (Congress of Industrial Organization), a labor union, picket hotels for better wages for hotel employees. Their younger sister, Peggy, still attended Bennington, where the tuition was high, the enrollment small and select and the curricula the last word in progressive education.* Brother Dick wanted to be a playwright and from under his closed door the click of the typewriter could be heard at all hours of the day and night. Bob, following in his father’s footsteps, had just completed his internship at Boston Hospital.

  Golf at the Hepburns’ country club occupied a good portion of Kate’s time. She played an awesome thirty-six holes a day and then enjoyed going into the caddy house and chinning with the club’s “pro” about her game. She always passed up the club room and its jolly drinkers; though a heavy smoker, she had no tolerance or liking for liquor. She never lunched at the club, coming home between games. The Hepburn luncheon table remained lively, and even Dr. Hepburn joined his family when he could. Kate was intensely concerned with all of his current cases and discussed the medical details without any sign of squeamishness. The half hour or so after lunch was set aside as a time for Kate and Mrs. Hepburn to confer. Kate remained intensely proud of her mother’s continuing hard work on behalf of birth control. A family friend commented, “Every time Kate looks at her mother, she recalls the meaning of service to others.” Certainly in this aspect of Scarlett O’Hara’s character, Kate was Scarlett, not surprising when one learns that Margaret Mitchell’s own mother was a suffragette who fought valiantly and outspokenly for many of the same causes so revered by Mrs. Hepburn, and that Mrs. O’Hara was molded after the author’s mother.

  Howard Hughes visited Kate during the spring and summer of 1938, both at West Hartford and at Fenwick. After one of his visits, Dick began working diligently on a new play. Four weeks later he gathered the family together in the living room of their Bloomfield Avenue home and read it to them. The play centered on a “handsome and attractive young millionaire who comes to visit the family of a girl who happens to be an actress.” Writer­director Garson Kanin,* a new friend of Kate’s at that time, read it and thought highly of it. “It seems to me,” he said, “a fascinating and entertaining portrait of a kind of American family. In style it is not unlike Noël Coward’s classic Hay Fever. The character representing Hughes is sympathetically drawn, acting as a catalyst to reveal many things about the members of the family to themselves and to one another. It may have been written before its time.“

  The Hepburns, however, were shocked and offended that “a member of the family had so blatantly invaded their privacy.” Dick was equally shocked by his family’s request that he destroy the work. Labeling their attitude an attempt to throttle his own right to freedom of expression, he stood his ground and vowed he would proceed to try to get a theater producer interested in presenting it.† In the end, though the work received some attention, no producer wanted to chance a possible lawsuit from either Hughes or the Hepburns. But this rebellious act on the part of Dick Hepburn was only one dissident note in the usual Hepburn harmony.

  Kate went to Fenwick in May to remain throughout the summer, returning to West Hartford as maid of honor for Marion’s formal garden wedding, at which she wore a huge, soft-brimmed, white garden hat tied with bright ribbons about her neck and a pastel-blue, short-sleeved, organdy and lace full-length gown.‡ She carried a large bouquet of summer flowers and almost stole the show from the bride. Dr. Hepburn seemed surprised that any one of his daughters had caught a man and told Kate, “All you New England girls look at a man like a bull about to charge. You’re very forthright and truthful but you do sort of put a man off.”

  Swimming and walking the beach were Kate’s main occupations at Fenwick. Though approaching her thirty-first birthday, she seemed unconcerned about remarrying. “Health is youth,” Dr. Hepburn told her, and she believed his axioms and followed through on her regime of exercise as she always had. When not working, she regarded physical exercise as a must to keep her body in shape, just as discussions were necessary to keep her mind alert. Kate still took “endless cold showers,” sometimes as many as seven or eight in the course of a day. Aside from her belief that cleanliness was next to godliness, “she use[d] cold baths, as a hair­shirt-sort-of self-discipline, to strengthen the character and drive.”

  In view of Kate’s adamant stand about her brother Dick’s manuscript, her enthusiasm for the play Philip Barry brought to her that summer is puzzling, for The Philadelphia Story also bore many parallels to her own life. However, it did not contain actual biographical detail. Tracy Lord was not an actress, her father not a doctor, her mother was light-headed where Mrs. Hepburn was the antithesis, and no character even vaguely resembling Howard Hughes appeared. Barry visited her often at Fenwick where they discussed the project at length, and there remains no doubt that he wrote Tracy Lord with Kate in mind.

  The possibility of appearing on Broadway in a new Philip Barry play fired Kate’s energies. She never looked more radiant. Bronzed, trimmer and leaner than ever, she glowed with a happiness that the Hollywood doom predictors could not understand. Hughes courted her in fine fashion, flying a private plane in and out of Old Saybrook and bringing her costly presents, much to the disapproval of Dr. Hepburn, who thought expensive jewelry and the like an indulgent frivolity. And, indeed, Kate seldom adorned herself with jewels. Not much for swimming or walking at the kind of pace Kate set, Hughes let her fly his plane or went boating with her. She talked to him about The Philadelphia Story and he flew her to Maine for further conferences with Barry.

  By the end of August, Barry had completed his work. Kate convinced him she should ask the Theatre Guild to produce it. The Guild liked the play as much as she did but was not in a financial position to be the sole backer. After consulting with Hughes and Dr. Hepburn, Kate proposed a deal for the Guild to put up half the backing and she and Hughes the remaining half. The optimism of all involved is amazing; for the Theatre Guild had had a recent succession of failures, Barry’s three preceding plays had flopped, and Kate’s last six films, including Stage Door, had not been money-makers.

  Kate now owned one quarter of the play, securing herself an equal amount of profits should there be any. Next, she bought the screen rights from Barry for an additional twenty-five thousand dollars. Instead of a guaranteed salary, she took 10 percent of the gross profits from the New York run and 12½ percent of profits on the road. With Howard Hughes’s backing, Kate had become an entrepreneur.* For the first time in her professional career she could (or thought she could, at least) have some control over a play in which she was to star. Her one proviso was that the play would be postponed for the time it would take to make Gone With the Wind should Selznick call her to Hollywood to play Scarlett O’Hara.†

  The hurricane that swept the Connecticut seaboard in September was a devastating blow in more ways than one. That Fenwick had been destroyed seemed inconceivable. No Fenwick meant no home! Kate’s dash for higher ground and a neighbor’s shelter with her mother and the Hepburn maid was too much like Scarlett’s escape from burning Atlanta to seem real. Of course, there had been no newly delivered mother or newborn children to protect, but, like Scarlett, Kate had had to crawl over and through brambles and rubble and flooding lands with her two charges. Unlike Tara, nothing was left of Fenwick except the love it had inspired in its occupants.

  Fenwick had to be rebuilt, that was certain. Kate spearheaded the project, but all the Hepburns joined in with the planning. Work was scheduled to begin in the spring so that Fenwick could receive them all for the summer. The first week of January, Kate learned through a press release that Vivien Leigh had been signed for Gone With the Wind.* The Philadelphia Story went directly into rehearsals. Barry began a rewrite of the third act, which Kate and the show’s director, Robert B. Sinclair,† did not feel sufficiently resolved the story.

  At thi
s stage, great emphasis was placed upon the hostile relationship between Tracy Lord and her father, who was having a fling with a Russian ballerina. Kate never felt comfortable in the scenes where she righteously upbraided Seth Lord for his unseemly behavior, and Barry was reducing these daughter-father confrontations to a minimum. The play, which opened in New Haven before the new third act was finished, was well received by audience and critics. Whether this version would have met with equal or more success in subsequent productions is unanswerable. The third act was still not ready when the play opened in Philadelphia on February 16 to even more enthusiastic reviews. Finally, the new act was included in their Washington, D.C., performances. The play was now light and romantic, filled with laughter and sharp, sophisticated dialogue.

  At the end of the short Washington run (which played to consistently full houses), Kate, Phil Barry, Theresa Helburn, Bob Sinclair and Lawrence Langner (of the Guild) sat around the hotel most of the night balancing the pros and cons of whether they should or should not take the show into New York.

  “For God’s sake,” Kate exclaimed, “don’t throw away your money. Let’s be practical about this. We’ve got a fortune if we stay out of New York [and tour].”

  Theresa Helburn thought that by keeping the show on the road for a long time, “the bloom would be off it” by the time they did bring it in. Barry agreed a risk was involved in going to New York but felt the risk was worth taking. Langner and Sinclair weren’t sure which course would be more hazardous. Finally everyone but Kate decided the show should go to New York.