Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  Tracy told Sherwood straightforwardly, “I could be good in this thing all right. But then, who knows? I could fall off and maybe not show up.”

  Sherwood’s World War II drama was about an idealistic newspaper editor who gets fired for his articles against the encroachment of fascism and becomes, successively, a cook on an American destroyer, a guerrilla fighter and, finally, a dead hero. Although it had the aura of frequently tried ground, the play contained moments of suspense and a few fine speeches, but either Tracy or Kate should have been able to predict the almost certain failure of the enterprise. The only explanation can be Kate’s desire to see Tracy back onstage and his own wish to see if he could still perform in the theater.

  Finally, with Kate’s encouragement and an agreement from Metro that he could do it, Tracy went into rehearsals in the heat of the New York summer. Kate was always close by, ready to ameliorate a situation or simply make sure his needs were taken care of. The play opened in Providence, Rhode Island, and immediately problems set in. The script needed a lot of rewriting and Tracy fell ill with a flu bug. He managed to make it through every performance with Kate nursing him before and after. He did not want the press to think alcohol had caused a possible absence. By the time the show reached Boston he simply could not go on and four performances were canceled. The press hinted darkly at other reasons and claimed he had simply walked out.*

  On the morning of November 10, 1945, the date The Rugged Path was to open at the Plymouth Theatre, neither Tracy nor Kate could be located. Kanin, checking things backstage, saw a woman on her knees scrubbing the bathroom of Tracy’s dressing room. He went in to ask the cleaning woman if she had seen Tracy. Kate grinned up at him. “Damn place is filthy,” she said, amending it to—“was.” Tracy arrived by curtain and, according to critic George Jean Nathan, “gave a performance that injected at least a superficial belief into the unbelievable materials provided him.”

  Kanin and Tracy shook hands after the curtain. Garson says, “I tried to convey confidence, but his resentful gray eyes rejected me. Ruth and Kate looked on. We had all tried to behave well but knew that the circumstances had sullied our fine friendship.”

  Tracy’s name kept the show going and Sherwood never stopped rewriting until it finally closed after eighty-one performances. Tracy had begun to drink again.

  Not long after their return to Hollywood, Kate and Tracy agreed to make a film for Metro based on Conrad Richter’s thoughtful novel The Sea of Grass, about the conflict between those who would monopolize the range lands for grazing and those who would portion it out to homesteaders and their ploughs. Kate’s role as the principal range holder, Colonel Brewster’s citified wife, Lutie, had to be developed. A complicated love story with another man (Melvyn Douglas*) and an illegitimate son was superimposed, throwing the script completely off-balance. A young actor-director, Elia Kazan,† who had made only one previous film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, was hired to direct. Kazan saw the problems from the start but claims to have been “too dumb to quit.” Uncomfortable with Kate, who remained cool to him for unexplained reasons throughout the film, intimidated by Tracy, who thought Kazan’s acting methods “a lot of high-flown mumbo-jumbo,” and not permitted free rein in production, Kazan never was in real control. To make matters worse, The Sea of Grass, which was mainly about the grasslands of New Mexico, was filmed without a blade of grass being photographed because Metro had ten reels of background footage of grazing ground in its library that they insisted Kazan use. All outdoor scenes were therefore shot on a sound stage before a rear projection screen.

  No one knew quite what to do with the project when filming was completed. Finally, Mayer decided to shelve it, and for a time it looked as though the film might never get a release. Kate tried unsuccessfully to get M.G.M. to back another project, the Anita Loos play Happy Birthday, but Eric Johnson, the head of the Motion Picture Association, which formed the censorship board for films, refused to give his go-ahead on the grounds that Happy Birthday was proalcohol. No matter how ridiculous this verdict (Happy Birthday was a light comedy about a thirty-five-year-old teetotaling spinster who gets inebriated on her birthday and wakes up in the morning with a husband), Metro refused to support Kate’s wishes to go forward with the project.

  For the first time since he had come to Hollywood, Tracy went almost a year without making a film. He was ill for most of the time with stomach problems. Kate nursed and cared for him, although they still had separate homes (Tracy had moved into a modest guest cottage that George Cukor had on his grounds and Kate into a hilltop house that had once belonged to silent-screen star John Gilbert). Her plan was to help nurse him back to health before considering a film.

  They had both lived in California for more than fifteen years, yet they still behaved like guests who had simply stayed too long at a party. Possessions were scoffed at, and Cukor’s guest house (one of three on the estate)—several acres removed from the director’s own luxurious West Hollywood residence—was sparsely furnished. If Tracy’s landlord-friend expected that Kate would quickly decorate it, he did not reckon with Tracy, who believed that “everything you own, every possession, gets to be a burden. Nothing—that’s my idea of heaven. . . . I like to check in and check out.” The interior of the small bungalow remained as monastic while Tracy lived there as it had been before he moved in. He visited the Hill every Friday night to see Louise and the kids, but he never thought of it as his home anymore.

  To Kate, home was where her family happened to be—Fenwick or Bloomfield Avenue. Her money was still being sent to Dr. Hepburn, her bills paid by a secretary in Hartford and an allowance sent her. (Once, when she wrote her father that she needed extra money for a dress, he replied, “You already have a dress. What do you need a new one for?” And he refused to send her the extra money.) All personal possessions were kept in her bedrooms in both these homes and in her house in Turtle Bay. Whether her stay in California encompassed a week, a month or a year, she could pick up at any time and transport all she had in a few pieces of luggage. That is not to say that she did not have a nesting quality, because she did. However, it took a simpler, more basic form.

  What Kate achieved was a kind of expertise on what was essential in her own and Tracy’s day-to-day life. Always a font of information on the most diverse of subjects, Kate knew exactly “where in the bedroom the bed should be placed” for privacy, view, comfort and convenience; she found the best dentist, the pharmacy that delivered at any hour, the market that gave the most personal attention to its customers, the shortest way to get to places either of them had to go. Flowers were important to her, and her rooms were brightened with strategically placed vases containing simple arrangements of homegrown varieties. Favorite books were stacked beside the bed or on tables. Afternoon tea was a ritual, and some homey confection usually accompanied it. Somehow, within a week of moving into still another furnished house, Kate made it look as though she had lived there for years.

  In essence, Kate ran two households, hers and Tracy’s; and although she had plenty of staff, everything could not have gone so smoothly if not for her exceptional talent for “no-nonsense” organization. Tracy believed that men and women had decided roles and that neither should cross the line of the other. Anything connected with the kitchen, interior decoration or household purchases was defined by him as woman’s work, and he honestly felt he was being “considerate” in staying out of such matters and letting Kate handle them. Yet he much enjoyed Kate’s independence, her ability to manage things alone, and the absence in her nature of supposedly feminine fears, such as being “unprotected” by a man in the house or driving late hours alone. Back in 1939, she had interrupted a burglary in her Turtle Bay house and chased the thief out to the street and into the arms of the law. “Fear is no builder of character,” was one of her favorite axioms. She chose not to wrestle with her own fears, to avoid the cause rather than to suffer the effect. Obviously, if she never dined in a restaurant, she was saved the terror of peo
ple watching her eat.

  Her admiration of Tracy never wavered. Her closest friends felt she idolized him. Pride rose forcefully in her when she spoke about him; and when they were together, no one could doubt the extent of her devotion—or, for that matter, Tracy’s for her.

  Pandro Berman had sent her the script of Undercurrent, a suspense melodrama written by Edward Chodorov, and asked her to consider it. Kate really adored Berman, who had absolutely no intellectual pretensions, and their long history, combined with Chodorov’s friendship to her during the debacle of The Lake, made a refusal difficult. Often gruff and irascible, possessed by a violent temper that exploded most often around actors (for he had no patience with their egos and their whims), Berman had almost always made an exception with Kate. He had also been responsible for some of her favorite films, Morning Glory, Alice Adams and Stage Door. Kate accepted.

  “I’m sure we’ll get along,” she told Vincente Minnelli, who was signed to direct. To Minnelli “It sounded like both an order and a threat. Never had I met anyone with such self-assurance. She made me nervous.” A director of slick musicals, Minnelli was a strange choice. He had done only one previous straight drama, The Clock, starring his wife, Judy Garland, and Kate was not struck with the idea of his directing the film any more than she was with Robert Mitchum* co-starring with her and Robert Taylor.†

  For the first few weeks of the production, Kate often locked horns with Minnelli. Undercurrent required a different acting style from the one she felt comfortable with. Suspense did not demand her usual in-depth probing of the character she was to portray. Her greatest challenge was “getting the right horrified reaction.”

  Under current is about a young, rather naïve, woman who marries a charming and wealthy industrialist (Robert Taylor). The husband confesses to her that he has a psychopathic brother (Robert Mitchum) who has committed murder and is a constant threat. When the brother finally appears, the wife is taken by surprise. He is an articulate and sensitive man and to her dismay she finds herself falling in love with him. The doubts she had had about her husband can no longer be suppressed. Is he the psychopathic killer? When she realizes this is the case, he is about to murder her. A harrowing horse chase follows in which he is trampled to death and she is saved by the brother. The denouement has the wife being pushed in a wheelchair (she is convalescing from the trauma of the experience) to the piano, where the brother is playing the melodic theme from Brahm’s Fourth Symphony, which has been used recurrently throughout the film.

  Minnelli produced a fine sense of mood, but the genre was not one he had yet mastered. Kate knew this as well as she knew that her role was better suited to the talents of an Ingrid Bergman. She grew to like Minnelli personally. He and Garland had just had a daughter, Liza, and Kate took an interest in the child’s progress. Until this time, she and Garland had never been close. They had often sat next to each other early in the morning under hair dryers in the makeup department, but seldom exchanged more than a few words. Kate now recognized Garland’s shaky emotional state and did what she could to be helpful, including making things easier for Minnelli on the set. Mitchum was another matter.

  In one of the last shots in the film, a piece of lighting equipment blocked the line of vision for Mitchum while he was playing a scene with Kate.

  “Can you see me, Miss Hepburn?” he asked.

  “Not for dust,” she replied tartly.

  Passing by Mitchum’s dressing room shortly after the scene was shot, she caught sight of Boyd Coheen, Mitchum’s stand-in, drawing. Curious, she stepped inside and glanced at the work and then started to leave.

  “You know young man,” she said, pausing, “you have obvious talent. You really should do something with it instead of working for some cheap flash actor like Mr. Mitchum.”

  Fiercely loyal to Mitchum (who was privately one of Hollywood’s most caring people), Coheen replied, “Thanks for the advice, Miss Hepburn. Now, may I make a request?”

  “Yes, of course,” she agreed.

  “Should I survive you, would you bequeath me that lovely collection of bones?” And he shut the door in her face. Shocked, Kate turned to find Mitchum facing her. “You can’t be all bad with friends like that,” she said and strode away.

  Undercurrent was not a great film (not even a particularly good one), but it was well made and generally well acted by a good supporting cast.* Kate gave a “crisp and taut performance.” Taylor “brooded meanness” throughout and Mitchum was “appealing.” But both screenplay and direction dissipated whatever tension the performers achieved. The best that could be said for Undercurrent was that the filming of it kept Kate active as she tended Tracy and it called so little upon her resources, she had the energy to cope well with her personal situation.

  In late 1946, while Tracy filmed Cass Timberlane with Lana Turner, Kate made Song of Love, an overromanticized story based on the marriage of Clara and Robert Schumann. For her role as Clara Wieck Schumann, Kate studied daily with pianist Laura Dubman, a pupil of Arthur Rubenstein (who made the piano recordings for the film), and she mastered “the proper techniques of playing difficult compositions for close-up shooting.” But her technical achievement could not compensate for the sloppiness of the script. Time found she portrayed Clara “with skill and feeling. . . . She is fascinating to watch at the piano, using the claw-like 19th Century style; her ‘reactions’ to the men’s music, in various dramatic contexts, are the backbone of the picture.” Her portrayal of Clara Wieck Schumann called upon her most skilled effort and Kate delivered. By itself, it reveals one of her finest performances. Seen together with Paul Henreid’s torpid Schumann and Robert Walker’s† ludicrous Brahms (“[he] plays Brahms as though he were a musician whose fate depended on bobby-soxers”), Clara seems to have wandered into some kind of bizarre fantasy.

  Unfortunately for Kate, The Sea of Grass was now released. Although it fared much better than all concerned thought it would, it did not help to increase her popularity. Despite Kazan’s worst fears, the use of rear projection had not destroyed the visual potential of the film. In fact, the process had worked well enough to fool the majority of the critics. One noted with high regard, the “vast, flat New Mexico desert with the ‘sea of grass’ high on a table-rock mesa, waving now lazily, now stormily, ended like a sea as far as the camera eye can reach.”

  Appropriately, the next Tracy-Hepburn film was titled State of the Union. In 1948, the state of the union was pretty deplorable and Kate, with echoes of her mother’s political outspokenness, let her opinions be heard.

  Footnotes

  * Cecil Beaton (1904-1980), knighted in 1972, gained fame as a photographer of the British Royal Family and of noted personalities. He was a great artist in design and won the Academy Award for his work as designer for Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964).

  † One of the plays Ruth Gordon was working on at this time—Over Twenty-One—was successful on stage and screen. At the same time, Kanin had begun work on his play Born Yesterday (1946).

  * Mainbocher—the designer. The Duchess of Windsor also wore his clothes almost exclusively.

  * The Burns Mantle Theatre annual for 1945 also claims, “Tracy quit in Boston, walked out one night, but returned a few days later and went on with the play to New York.”

  * Melvyn Douglas (1901–1981). One of the most popular leading men in films during the thirties and forties, Douglas was also an acclaimed stage performer. He won a Tony for The Best Man and by the sixties became a much honored supporting player. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Hud, 1963.

  † Elia Kazan (1909– ) went on to become a celebrated theater and film director. His stage credits include: All My Sons (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949). His best known films are Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Splendor in the Grass (1961) and America, America from his own novel (196
3).

  * Robert Mitchum (1917– ) catapulted to stardom in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. His most memorable films include The Night of the Hunter (1955), The Longest Day (1962), Two for the Seesaw (1962) and Ryan’s Daughter (1970).

  † Robert Taylor (1911–1969), one of M.G.M.’s principal players. Best known for his roles in Camille (1936), Waterloo Bridge (1940) and Johnny Eager (1941).

  * Edmund Gwenn (1875–1959) played Hepburn’s father in the film as he had a decade earlier in Sylvia Scarlett.

  † Robert Walker (1918–1951) had played Hepburn’s son in The Sea of Grass.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Throughout his term of office, Kate had been a staunch Roosevelt supporter* and a dedicated Democrat. But unable to rationalize America’s use of the atomic bomb or the growing lack of detente between Russia and the United States, she shifted her allegiance from Truman and the Democrats to Henry A. Wallace, former vice-president under Roosevelt, who was campaigning for the presidency on a third-party ticket as a Progressive, a political organization previously active only in the presidential elections of 1912 and 1924.† (Tracy remained loyal to the Democratic party.) Endorsed by the Communist party and the American Labor party of New York State, Henry Wallace and his supporters were looked upon as pinkos, arch-liberals, and pro-Communists.