Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  Never before had Kate appeared professionally in her hometown, but she thought she knew the kind of people who lived there and that they would be respectful of her privacy. After all, the local press had not been the ones to plague her during Leland Hayward’s visit years before. Concerned about Tracy, lonely without him, growing more and more impatient with Elliott Nugent, his drinking and his inadequate performance, Kate became touchy, irritable and unapproachable. She refused to be interviewed by a boy from Hartford High School or photographed with a fifteen-year-old girl who had won local fame as a budding actress. At one point, when some fans stood waiting for her outside the Hepburn house (now listed in the local guidebook alongside past residences of Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe), she called upon the police to preserve her privacy.

  On opening night after all reporters had been warned away, Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn and Marion and Ellsworth Grant filed decorously into sixth-row seats. (Peggy had been married in Elkton, Maryland, to Thomas Perry a few months earlier and did not live in Hartford.) Kate received enthusiastic applause at the curtain and took seven bows before standing center stage to make a short speech. She confessed in a charming manner that she had twice before appeared in public in Hartford—once in a minor professional part* and once as a student reciting “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” She told of her excitement on reaching the bend of the railroad track just before it hit Hartford. She spoke warmly of the station porters and some of her old friends. Life magazine, uniquely covering an out-of-town opening, called it “a nice speech and [she] sounded as if she really meant it.” They added that she performed her role “with superb style and all the heatless brilliance of fluorescent light.”

  Kate and the Guild directors decided to abandon Without Love for the present. An announcement was made that “Its Broadway opening is postponed until fall while Miss Hepburn makes another movie with Spencer Tracy, whom she may also enlist as her new leading man [on Broadway in Without Love].” Donald Ogden Stewart had sent Kate an adaptation he had done of an unpublished novel by I.A.R. Wylie; but the melodramatic script, Keeper of the Flame, was not one that Metro felt appropriate to follow Woman of the Year. Kate managed to convince the studio to make the film with Tracy and her because she was fascinated by the character of Christine: a strong, resolute woman placed in the tragic position of learning the dead husband she thought was a hero had been a traitor to his country. Tracy played the investigative reporter who discovers the truth. The part was the first full-blown, mature woman Kate had played. Previously, her roles had been, as she said, “girls, all sorts of girls, shy, whimsical, sensitive, flamboyant, tempestuous, but never a woman.” She apparently considered Tess Harding as one of these varieties of girls, for Kate added, “I looked upon Christine as a new acting experience, the one I had been preparing years to play.” But, also, Tracy would be working with her and she could keep an eye on him. As an added inducement, George Cukor had agreed to direct. Kate told Stewart she would certainly consider it.

  Being in California would relieve the terrible tension she had been under, for when Kate was away, Tracy, who did not cope well with loneliness, sought out his drinking companions and went on binges. During the filming of Tortilla Flat, he had taken a suite in the Beverly Hills Hotel, which he was to retain for many years. Possessions had little meaning to him. Nothing personal marked the rooms as his; no photographs or mementos were displayed. Never an apartment or hotel dweller, upon her arrival, Kate set out to find a house for herself.

  Garson Kanin tells a story about searching with Kate for a house to rent. After walking twice through one entire residence, she left Kanin and the rental agent in the downstairs hall while she looked through the upstairs of the house again. After an inordinately long wait, Kanin became concerned. He called upstairs several times; and when he received no reply, he went outside to see if she had left by another exit. When his search proved fruitless, he returned. Kate was descending the stairs.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “Taking a shower,” she replied.

  “A shower?”

  “Of course.”

  “You couldn’t wait till you got home? Or don’t you have facilities there?”

  “Listen, you ass,” she said with little patience. “If I’m thinking of renting a house, I’ve got to find out what it’s like taking a shower in it, don’t I?”

  The house Kate rented in 1942 was in Malibu Beach, then a small artists’ colony a long way from the mainstream of things and considered additionally undesirable at a time when seaside homes had to be blacked out at night and gas was being rationed. If she and Tracy could not live or be seen together, with Keeper of the Flame about to be filmed, they could at least work together. Her role in Tracy’s life was multifaceted: wife, secretary, companion, chauffeur, nurse. Weekdays she drove him to the studio and remained with him there even when she was not needed on the set. At the end of the day, she took him back to her house, cooked for him, bolstered his ego, encouraged him and, finally, drove him home. Weekends she kept him as occupied as she could. They walked, talked, painted. She brought in her small circle of close friends hoping to ease him away from those people she thought were a bad influence. On occasion, she had to drag him from a bar and nurse his hangover. He often ridiculed her mannerisms, calling her his “bag of bones.” Sometimes their bantering looked very cruel to outsiders.

  They seemed to enjoy the conflict, the confrontations. Perhaps, as a friend said, the bantering was “a big put on” and they found it amusing for people to think they were having a fight. But to be with them was not depressing. Their wits were sharp, the action fast and both saw the fun in everything. To Tracy, save for his religion, President Roosevelt, Louise and the children, nothing and no one was sacrosanct and all things and people were fodder for satire, wisecracks and jokes.

  Neither Tracy nor Hepburn appeared possessive of the other. Kate’s dedication and, indeed, servitude were an independent choice. Tracy never demanded either of her. Yet, his acceptance of her slavish devotion and his inability to fight his alcoholism on his own were silent screams of need that he knew Kate, being the woman she was, would have to respond to.

  For Kate, Tracy represented “the simple and pure things in life. . . . He was like water, air, earth. He wasn’t easily fooled. . . . He was onto the human race—but with humor and understanding. Yet he was enormously complicated and tortured. He looked out from a terribly tangled maze, like a web. Yet from the center of this tangle would come the simple statement, the total clarity of his work.”

  And Tracy’s work, the artistry that gave him the quality of always seeming to be the character he portrayed, instilled such great reverence in Kate that it made her downgrade her own accomplishments. For the next eight years Kate’s choice of film parts were to be entirely dictated by Tracy’s needs, not her own. When referring to these years in the careers of these two, Hollywood writers always call them the Tracy-Hepburn years. In Kate’s case, this is perhaps true, but not in Tracy’s. Kate made ten films between 1942 and 1950, six of them with Tracy. Of the four she did apart from him, one, Stage Door Canteen, was a vignette appearance in an all-star cast and can be discounted. The other three—all Hollywood made—were not wholly successful and had been compromises on her part to allow her to be close to Tracy. Tracy, on the other hand, made fourteen films between 1942 and 1950, and seven of the eight made without Kate were not only great hits but they affirmed his place in the pantheon of film actors, while Kate was only to prove that she was a marvelous foil for his talent.

  Kate’s drive now was to find scripts for the two of them; but seldom do stories have parts of equal weight, and those that were as right for Kate as for Tracy were few and far between. If a decision was to be made, it appears always to have swung in Tracy’s direction. Kate’s role was substantially smaller than Tracy’s in Keeper of the Flame. When Without Love was filmed, the part of the husband was completely rewritten to feature Tracy. The Sea of Grass and State of the Union w
ere both more Tracy’s films than Kate’s. Only in Adam’s Rib in 1949 did Kate win back the kind of strong role she had played in Woman of the Year.

  Like Citizen Kane, Keeper of the Flame opened in Gothic style with the death of a national hero; a journalist (Tracy) who admires him sets out to write a biography. Kate, as the widow, has to conceal the truth that her husband was an undercover fascist. From that point, although it contains cinematic potential—a fire, a chase, a noble death—the film failed because, as Cukor later commented, “The story was basically fraudulent,” and Kate “had to float in wearing a long white gown and carrying a bunch of lilies. That’s awfully tricky isn’t it? And doesn’t she give long, piercing looks at his [her husband’s] portrait over the mantel? Well. I think she finally carried a slightly phony part because her humanity asserted itself, and her humor. They always did.”

  Cukor also later admitted to there being “a wax work quality” about the film but defended the excellent acting of his cast, especially Spencer Tracy—“marvelous as the journalist, a difficult part . . . but you believe him.” He also agreed that “as a piece of storytelling, the unfolding of a mystery, the first half of Keeper of the Flame is what you’d call a damn good show.” However, Kate was offscreen during most of that segment of the film.*

  The momentum of Kate’s career began to grind down once again. The war had drastically altered the sphere of entertainment. Films had to depend on home revenues. Stars whose movies relied on their foreign markets became a poor risk. Garbo and Dietrich were both in this category. Americans became terribly nationalistic. They wanted American faces and American stories.* At home and abroad, United States servicemen could not get enough of the Hollywood pinup girl. The careers of Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner soared. Actresses representing the girl back home were in demand. Kate fell into neither of these categories. Her attraction was mostly to the thirty-five- to fifty-year-old, upper-middle-class, well-educated men and women who wanted films that would relieve the grim reality that they were experiencing: young men going off to be killed or maimed, Europe in chaos, the threat of Hitler—of fascism creeping into their own country (echoing the theme of Keeper of the Flame), the great debts that war incurs for a nation. Kate’s timing was curiously askew. Just when she had made film audiences conscious of her great comedic talents and her vulnerability and tremendous charm in The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year—just when she could have had her audiences in the palm of her hand—she became once again the unknown quantity. And although Keeper of the Flame was a “romantic glamor girl part,” Tracy and Hepburn were not lovers in it. The film was gloomy and depressing, a great disappointment to the folks who had bought movie tickets and waited in line to see Tracy and Hepburn in another effervescent charmer like Woman of the Year.

  Kate agreed to return to New York for a fourteen-week limited run of Without Love in November only after Tracy promised to join her there for most of the time. He remained on the West Coast during the brief pre-Broadway tryout of the play in Detroit, where her apprehensions mounted. Philip Barry had done some major rewriting without improving the central problem of superficiality, Elliott Nugent had not been replaced, and being separated from Tracy made her tense, which may have accounted for the stiffness of her performance. Robert Sinclair had joined the armed forces and Kate’s old friend Arthur Hopkins had restaged the production; but he had brought no new insight to the direction.

  She felt better when Tracy arrived in New York. He stayed at the Waldorf Towers, just a few blocks from Turtle Bay. Kate relaxed and her performance improved. Nonetheless, Without Love, which began the Theatre Guild’s twenty-fifth subscription season, opened on November 10, 1942, at the St. James Theatre to unenthusiastic notices. The majority of the critics were in agreement that the writing was mainly responsible for the play’s failure. About Kate’s performance, Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times was more wounding than faultfinding. “Even at her best Miss Hepburn,” he wrote, “is not a virtuoso actress. As a wealthy Washington widow with a New England heritage, she has several stunning visual moments to contribute to Without Love. But it is hard for her to sustain a scene in a trifling play that is generally uneventful.”

  The lure of the Hepburn mystique managed to keep the play running for the length of its engagement to fairly full houses. Had Kate’s major interest not been elsewhere, the daily grind of playing to lukewarm audiences might have been singularly depressing. But Tracy was generally nearby, even backstage during some performances. And after the curtain she could cook a small private dinner for the two of them. Tracy never went into the kitchen when Kate was around. He felt such an act would be an invasion of her territory. According to Kate, he did brew “a hell of a good cup of coffee,” but only in Hollywood in his studio dressing room. At Turtle Bay, Kate kept a pot constantly heated to combat the urge for a drink, and she served Tracy endless cups of coffee before and after a meal.

  In addition to her dedication to Tracy, Kate’s energies were given over to the war effort. Daily, friends and co-workers were leaving for various army posts at home and abroad. George Cukor had just enlisted. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, whom Kate had met through Garson Kanin and had even accompanied on their wedding elopement, had returned to England.* James Stewart and Clark Gable were both in the air force. The list was long and included many of the theater and film’s greatest talents. A strong flame of patriotism burned in Tracy and he would have given anything to have been able to join in this fight. During the Broadway run of Without Love, Kate narrated the documentary Women in Defense for the Office of War Information; and Tracy, Garson Kanin’s Ring of Steel. Kate gave time to hosting servicemen at the Stage Door Canteen and donated her salary from her appearance in the film about the Canteen to its upkeep.

  Tracy, who was committed to film A Guy Named Joe,* returned to Hollywood in late May, 1943, while Kate went up to West Hartford to visit with the Hepburns. Happy in her “father’s house” (as she always called the Hepburns’ big brick home on Bloomfield Avenue), she dressed “like an old bum” in frayed white shorts and a baggy cotton sweater and rode her “wonderful English racing bike 90,000,000 miles an hour” through the quiet suburbs of West Hartford. “I get my hands way down on the bars,” she explained to an interviewer, “and my bottom way up on the seat and I go like mad. People see my bottom in white shorts and my long legs pedaling madly and from the back I guess it really looked like I had absolutely nothing on. It was enough to make them say, ‘What the hell is that?’ Then they’d see it was me and try to be nice.”

  She weeded her father’s garden and made a friend of her four-year-old nephew, Jackie (Marion’s son), and just stayed home whenever she wasn’t bicycling or playing tennis or golf. Her spirits were splendidly high until mid-June, when Tracy informed her that a decision had been made to postpone production a few months to accommodate the tight schedule of Tracy’s co-star, Van Johnson.† Kate, edgy at being separated from Tracy when he had so much time on his hands, anxiously looked for a film property that, if not suitable for the two of them, would at least bring her actively back to Hollywood.

  Theresa Helburn reintroduced the idea to Kate of getting Metro to film Mourning Becomes Electra. Her hope was that Garbo, who had been off the screen for only a year, might be convinced to postpone her retirement for a project as worthy as O’Neill’s American classic. Kate was even more enthusiastic this time and upon Helburn’s arrival in California campaigned to get Mayer to agree to have a screenplay developed. But Louis B. found the project too sexually provoking for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Furious at his reaction, Kate went on record with the press saying, “Really deep consideration of the issue of sex, the problems that may arise because of it, has no chance to be translated onto the screen under the present system of censorship. It makes no sense at all when at the same time in musicals and other lighter entertainment you find sex exploited in an intriguing and vaguely peeking sort of way that is more meretriciously alluring than artists’ dramatic
studies and impressions. It all seems so terribly false and unintelligent and even harmful if you want to believe harm arises from such things.”

  The press had discovered a new Hepburn, a fully mature, most intelligent, political woman, ready to speak out honestly about issues of great consequence to her. They weren’t to know, but with Keeper of the Flame she was to have played her last glamour girl role. Tracy’s influence was now to be seen. Not that he changed Kate in any way. But as a result of his demand that she be the best of herself, all her true intelligence and social consciousness came to the surface. She saw some of her father’s support of her mother’s activities in Tracy’s encouragement of her opinions, and it bound the two of them even closer.

  Furthering her crusade on behalf of Mourning Becomes Electra, she told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, “I will fight to have this picture produced and others I believe would benefit the screen—there is need to think of the post war world when we will again be appealing to the European public as well as our own. We simply cannot confine ourselves to typical musicals and light comedies and expect in all ways to satisfy the people in foreign countries. . . . I have great respect for O’Neill and I feel that his plays might prove a good means of carrying a message about our creative achievements to foreign countries. If censorship stands in the way, then perhaps there is some need for modification and change. . . . I’m afraid I agree with George Bernard Shaw who said that censors are like decayed teeth—not good for the purpose for which they were intended and the cause of much painfulness besides.” She had always been a rebel in her personal life, and now her verbalized rebellion against false values (according to her gospel) had begun.