Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  In the early stages of their working together, life seemed capable of imitating fiction. Kate, a talented and financially independent woman, also possessed the courage, audaciousness and business acumen that most men did not. She had fallen in love with a strong, stubborn man with private principles as unbending as her own. And, in the beginning, her love for Tracy was stronger than his for her. She could easily have lost him. The majority of her close friends advised her against entering into an affair. They saw it as a no-win situation at best; they reasoned that, if he had not left Louise for Loretta Young when he was younger and less riddled with guilt, he would never set up housekeeping with another woman now.

  The curious fact existed that while other stars’ or executives’ currently nonprofessional wives were referred to in the Hollywood columns frequently by their own names—Mai (Mrs. Ray) Milland, Mayo (Mrs. Humphrey) Bogart, Irene (Mrs. David) Selznick, Rocky (Mrs. Gary) Cooper, Gladys (Mrs. Edward G.) Robinson—Louise had no other identity than as Mrs. Spencer Tracy. Even the newly created letterhead for the John Tracy Clinic bannered the name MRS. SPENCER TRACY, PRESIDENT, which the Metro publicity department used to their good advantage. Tracy’s past affairs and former and current drinking bouts were magically diffused by Mrs. Spencer Tracy’s new eminence. To publicly humiliate Louise by living openly with another woman, or even by being seen in the constant company of another woman, would have been a kind of blasphemy. If Kate chose to press forward in her relationship with Tracy, she would have to accept the clandestine conditions involved.

  For Kate, the restrictions only enhanced the desirability of the affair. Now she could command the privacy that she had attempted to have with Leland Hayward and Howard Hughes. This time the press would be in her corner. The good deeds and admirable achievements of Mrs. Spencer Tracy intimidated even the most voracious of gossip columnists (and Kate as well, who told confidants that Louise’s work—like Mrs. Hepburn’s—was more important than what she did). Then too, Tracy’s obvious entrapment in a marriage in name only made the gossip scribes sympathetic to his predicament. By the end of the making of Woman of the Year, nothing could have stopped the affair from going forward. Kate was deeply, dqdicatedly in love and Tracy saw in her all the answers to his unhappy personal life, a woman who could share his work and who would be willing to accept him on his terms. For a short time, he even checked his consuming thirst for alcohol.

  During the production of Woman of the Year, Kate and Laura lived in the Barrymore house high in the hills north of Sunset Boulevard. To more than one of her guests’ surprise, Kate’s bed was covered with stuffed animals and dolls, which did not seem to fit with her exterior behavior. (The menagerie on her bed was to travel with her from house to house for several years thereafter.) She could well have owned any car she wanted, but she drove an old Ford convertible borrowed from Howard Hughes. She remained as positive as ever in her likes and dislikes and in her strongly pro-Roosevelt political opinions. But, as the weeks of production elapsed, her conversations with those close to her about her personal life and whether it was a good idea for someone in her position to get married revealed a new ambivalence in these areas.

  Woman of the Year was the film that gave birth to the legendary affair of Tracy and Hepburn; in the very first days on the set neither participant thought the eventuality possible. Tracy referred to Kate as either “Shorty” or “that woman” with much exasperation until one day—no one seems able to pinpoint the exact time—when they both came on the set as though a truce had been declared. Kate was now “Kate” or “Kath.” Everyone relaxed.

  A sneak preview of the film was held in early December just a few days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The original ending of the Lardner-Kanin script had Tess Harding take an honest interest in baseball (her husband’s passion) and become more enthusiastic than he at a game, which implied not compromise but growth and love. But Mankiewicz and Stevens were concerned that “the average American housewife, seated next to her husband, staring for two hours at this paragon of beauty, intelligence, wit, accomplishment, and everything else, [could not] help but wonder if her husband [wasn’t] comparing her very unfavorably with this goddess he sees on the screen.” Stevens, who for all his charm was a dedicated male chauvinist, decided with Mankiewicz that Tess Harding had to have her comeuppance. Stevens recalled a kitchen routine he had done in a silent film in which a wife tried to fix a simple breakfast in order to prove her domesticity to her husband and “completely fucked it up.” Lardner and Mike Kanin had already left for New York and so John Lee Mahin* was assigned to write a new ending to specifications. When Lardner and Kanin found out they objected strenuously, but the only concession made to them was that they were permitted to rewrite some of the more objectionable lines.

  Kate termed the new breakfast-scene ending “the worst bunch of shit I’ve ever read,” but Mankiewicz left it in after women at the next preview cheered, “not only with admiration,” he said, “but relief. Now they could turn to their schmuck husbands and say, ’She may know Batista, but she can’t even make a cup of coffee you silly bastard.’ ” Ring Lardner and Mike Kanin agreed with Kate that Mankiewicz’s contribution to the film had vulgarized their script, and they never were happy about it.

  Filmgoers loved it. Woman of the Year was even more successful than The Philadelphia Story.† Critics were unanimous in their opinion that Tracy and Hepburn made a fine team, each complementing the other. The critic at the New York World-Telegram summed it up when he wrote: “The title part is played by Miss Hepburn, who has never looked more beautiful. It is played with such humor, resourcefulness and contagious spirit that I think it is even better than her performance in The Philadelphia Story, and that was just as fine as anything could be. No less satisfactory is Mr. Tracy. There isn’t a false note in his characterization of the sportswriter. And the things he can do with a gesture, with a smile, are nobody’s business . . . what an actor!”

  Kate may have been Woman of the Year, but Tracy received top billing.‡ When Garson Kanin chided him about this, Tracy, “his face all innocence asked, ‘Why not?’ ”

  “Well, after all,” Garson Kanin argued, “she’s the lady. You’re the man. Ladies first?”

  “This is a movie, Chowderhead,” Tracy replied, “not a lifeboat.”

  Kate was not the only woman who had fallen desperately in love with a married man, nor the first star to have done so. Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier had been lovers for several years before either of them divorced their mates. Rhea Gable had taken no less time to agree to a divorce so that Carole Lombard could marry her husband. In both these cases the studios involved had been tremendously protective of their stars, making sure the public was kept unaware of the truth. For the preview of Gone With the Wind, David Selznick insisted Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier fly to Atlanta on different flights and stay in separate hotels. Louis B. Mayer paid Rhea Gable one hundred thousand dollars above her settlement to seek a quiet divorce from her husband on the nonsensational grounds of irreparable differences. Until the day Mayer was dethroned from M.G.M. in 1951, he remained grateful to Kate for her handling of Tracy and her affair with him. He must have also blessed the quirks in her personality that made her such a rare and remarkable woman.

  From the onset of their relationship, Tracy knew Kate doted on the concept that theirs was a very private affair. Indeed, the public knew nothing about it and would not for years to come. The Hollywood film community remained quite another matter. Tracy and Hepburn (and he received top billing even in their personal lives) were the most discussed couple in filmdom. In the beginning, there was speculation about whether Kate would withdraw at the point where Tracy could not function well without her, or perhaps live openly with him without benefit of marriage.

  In some ways, the relationship bore a strong likeness to Kate’s marriage to Luddy. The secrecy of it kept people guessing—were they or weren’t they? And the fact of it kept all other beaux away. These were positive a
spects of the relationship for Kate, who feared marriage, wanted no children, and felt of superior mind, will and stamina to most of the men in her world. Tracy’s outspokenness, his intelligence, his quick wit and deliberate nature—the pure maleness of his personality—attracted Kate. She respected his talent, thought him wise and uniquely fair, a man a woman could trust. His staunch loyalty to Louise overshadowed his chauvinistic attitude toward all women, Kate included. She admired his dedication to the principles of his religion in the same way she did her father’s dedication to the principles of his oath to medicine.

  Tracy, at forty-one, had serious health problems caused by his drinking. His liver and kidneys had been affected. After his periodic binges, he suffered melancholia; before them, he could often be moody, rude and short-tempered. His sarcastic humor contained an edge of cruelty and Kate received no exemption from it, nor from an early introduction to his drinking bouts. Halfway through Woman of the Year he disappeared. None of the Metro staff could find him at any of his usual watering spots. Kate went from one bar to another until she located and brought him home, fed him, sobered him and covered for his absence. For a long while, keeping Tracy on the wagon promised to be her mission in life. To Kate, the combination of flaw and masculinity seemed irresistible. Then too, Tracy had a vulnerability “like an animal or a child that ‘got to her.’ ”

  Kanin wrote, “On the conscious level [Tracy and Hepburn] jealously guarded individuality. As they worked together, however, there came to be a trading of the other’s world. They helped each other in many ways. Spencer kept his partner-friend down to earth. She can be flighty, whimsical, impractical, wildly overimaginative, and often unrealistic. Spencer kept his sharp eye on her and used the tender weapon of humor to reveal her to herself; to show her a better way.”

  In the last four weeks of the making of Woman of the Year the relationship became even more intense. No dating was involved. Kate and Tracy were together whenever possible. Kate put aside her own ego; she stopped posing and dropped all the sophomoric artifices of the past. Love had matured her at the same time that it placed her in a bondage that she perversely found energizing. Never had she looked so vital. Whatever the problems of her liaison, Kate was a very happy woman.

  Between the time of Woman of the Year’s completion in October, 1941, and its release in early 1942, the Japanese had struck at Pearl Harbor and America was at war. Hollywood was thrown into instant chaos. Many films about to be released were thought to be too frivolous. Others starred young actors who would soon be off to war, and films and careers in Hollywood were built on continuity. Woman of the Year was never in jeopardy. Tracy’s age and health exempted him from the armed forces. If the picture worked, the team of Tracy and Hepburn could continue; and, indeed, it met with instant success.

  “Actors Hepburn and Tracy have a fine old time in Woman of the Year,” wrote James Agee for Time. “They take turns playing straight for each other, act in one superbly directed love scene, succeed in turning several batches of cinematic corn into passable moonshine.”

  Donald Kirkley at The Baltimore Sun concurred that “each complements the other. . . . Gone for good are [Miss Hepburn’s] mannerisms, the tricks, the superficiality which marred much of her previous work. Her performance in Woman of the Year shows even more subtlety and depth.”

  Footnotes

  * Jean Simmons (1929– ), English by birth, appeared opposite Tracy in The Actress (1953), based on a personal memoir by Ruth Gordon. She starred in many films, among them Guys and Dolls (1955), Spartacus (1960), and Elmer Gantry (1960).

  * John Lee Mahin (1902–1984) was a Metro writer who could always be relied upon to do a workmanlike job. He had scripted Captains Courageous (1937), Boom Town (1940), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) and Tortilla Flat (1942).

  † Hepburn was nominated for Best Actress but lost to Greer Garson (Mrs. Miniver).

  ‡ Tracy received top billing on all nine of the films he and Hepburn made together.

  CHAPTER

  16

  Humphrey Bogart once said that Kate was an expert on subjects as diverse as St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and the spreading of manure on diochronda. Hollywood considered her an intellectual, dedicated to her own independence, a “high-class,” “hoity-toity” woman who looked down on their society. Still, its residents were drawn to her and wanted to believe that underneath that glacial exterior lived a person not entirely unlike themselves.

  Tracy was no dummy himself. Basically a simple man, he loved the sea as Kate did. In Hollywood, they would walk the beaches at Malibu and Trancus together. Each loved to paint, and they painted together—paintings of the sea, of the landscape wherever they were, even rooftops through hotel windows. He possessed all the Irish charm and the storytelling that still goes with it. Kate liked to sit at his feet, knees drawn to her chin, and listen to his blarney. She glowed with pride at his masculine appearance. Once she asked a drinking buddy of Tracy’s what size shirt he wore. The man replied, “Size 17.”

  “Spence has a bull neck too,” she smiled. “Size 17 is a man’s neck.”

  Their social circle was limited to Kate’s closest friends--—Cukor, Ruth* and Garson Kanin, Laura, and producer-director Chester Erskine*—and, to Kate’s constant distress, Tracy’s drinking companions, Victor Fleming, and actors Lynne Overman, Pat O’Brien, James Cagney and Clark Gable. In addition to Tracy’s marital status and Kate’s love of privacy, his alcoholism was another reason for their limited social life. “He could be a mean bastard if he got too drunk,” one friend commented. At the beginning of their relationship, this was a too common occurrence.

  Tracy once told an Associated Press reporter† who was also a drinking cohort, “Kate and I never go any place where you bastards will see us. It’s as simple as that [the public ignorance of his and Kate’s affair].”

  During the period directly following the completion of Woman of the Year, Kate conducted a vigorous campaign to separate Tracy from the men with whom he drank. One of them recalls dragging a drunken Tracy to Kate’s door where she called him “every name in the book” for being a bad influence on Tracy, and then, once Tracy was put to bed, she came at the unfortunate man with an umbrella she had taken from the front hallway.

  Clark Gable and Tracy had been friends since 1936 when they starred in San Francisco. Both actors owed their start in films to their stage portrayals of Killer Mears in The Last Mile.‡ As well, both had had at different times serious affairs with Loretta Young. Test Pilot and Boom Town had consolidated the friendship. Alcoholic consumption during working hours was a serious infraction of Metro rules. But Tracy and Gable regularly dropped into each other’s dressing rooms for “a shot or two.” Gable had the ability to hold his liquor without showing it, but Tracy “would usually turn ugly and argumentative,” at which point Gable would always manage to persuade Tracy to “put the bottle away” to avoid any trouble. Before 1939, when Gable married Carole Lombard,§ he and Tracy would take off on drinking sprees to other cities. One time they started drinking in Los Angeles and ended up in Tucson, Arizona, where they got into an improbable but rather wild game of jacks played for extremely high stakes. When Mayer finally reached them by telephone, a drunken, almost incoherent Tracy came on the line. Mayer angrily asked to speak to Gable. Tracy told him that was impossible.

  “Why?” Mayer demanded to know.

  “Because he’s on his threesies,” Tracy slurred, and hung up.

  In January, 1942, the plane carrying Carole Lombard back from a War Bond tour crashed into a mountain, killing everyone onboard. Tracy was one of the few friends at Carole Lombard’s small private funeral (not attended by Kate). Shortly after the tragedy, Gable joined the air force,* and Tracy fell into a deep depression. The Theatre Guild had offered Kate the lead in the new Philip Barry comedy, Without Love. She wanted Tracy to costar but the Guild refused, being concerned about his drinking problem. Determined not to leave him behind, she persuaded him to accompany her on the tour.
Instead of Tracy, the Guild cast Elliott Nugent,† who turned out to drink almost as much.

  Witty and unsubstantial, Without Love revolved around a confused New England widow and a scientist-investor who have both renounced love but marry for convenience only to find love again with each other. With Elliott Nugent signed to co-star with Kate and Robert Sinclair once again the director, the play was scheduled to open in New Haven on Thursday evening, February 26, for four performances, then run one week at the Colonial Theatre, Boston, and a week at Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C., before opening in New York some time during the week of March 23.

  Kate and Nugent were ill suited personally and professionally. Though possessing a debonair charm, Nugent lacked sex appeal and a certain macho quality, which were the essence of the role written by Barry. “The play never jelled,” Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild said. “And as a result of Kate’s feeling about Nugent not ‘working’ with her, she overplayed extremely, trying to make up for his deficiency, his inadequacy, and her whole performance failed to soar ... we all knew it was a blunder. It was very hard on poor Elliott.”

  The pressures began to mount. Nugent, to the surprise of almost everyone but Tracy, turned up drunk shortly after the play opened in New Haven. Kate was now working desperately to keep both Tracy and Nugent sober and to conceal from the press Tracy’s presence on the tour. They did not stay at the same hotel or eat a meal out together, nor were they seen together coming or going to the theater or the train station. What began as a romantic adventure soon became burdensome. To add to Kate’s growing dissatisfaction, audiences received the play lukewarmly. A meeting was held in a Washington hotel room the day before the play was scheduled to go into New York. This time the decision was to remain on the road. Kate suggested Hartford as the next stop, and Theresa Helburn, Lawrence Langner and Philip Barry all thought that a marvelous idea. Once the dates were set (April 28–May 3) and the huge Bushnell Memorial Auditorium (capacity 3,277) booked, Tracy returned to Hollywood to film Tortilla Flat*