Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  As You Like It had not had an outstanding record in contemporary theater. Its longest run in America (and it had not done much better in England) had been sixty performances at the Republic Theatre in New York in 1902 with Henrietta Crosman as Rosalind.* Rosalind is the longest woman’s part in all Shakespeare and only four male roles are longer. This has always attracted the theater’s greatest actresses—Sarah Siddons, Madame Modjeska, Lily Langtry and Julia Marlowe among them—to the part. But their successes were primarily on tour and in repertory. Rosalind’s lure to Kate was another matter. The role was all dreaming and longing and hoping, wonder and magic, and it reminded Kate of when she first came to New York to try her fortune. “I was so happy and so wild with excitement,” she recalled of those early days, “that my feet never touched the pavement, I was always five feet above the sidewalk. . . . We all like to see life in terms of fairy tales.” As You Like It is romance—“pure, idealized, fabulous romance.”

  Shakespeare required more breadth and range and color of voice than was needed for any of the modern roles Kate had played on the stage. For three hours a day for six months, while the play was being mounted and rehearsed, Kate worked with Constance Collier on the rhythm of Shakespearean dialogue, learning how to speak her lines naturally for their meaning. Rosalind could easily have become a mannish, forward young woman, a replaying of Sylvia Scarlett and she took great pains to avoid this mistake. After long discussions with Michael Benthall, she decided Rosalind should be portrayed in a restrained, ladylike manner.

  A nine-week pre-Broadway tour was arranged. Kate was under tremendous pressure in both her private and professional lives. Tracy, having completed Malaya, was finding it impossible to cope without Kate and was on the telephone to her morning, noon and night. Finally, she agreed that he could meet her in Cleveland on tour. Their reunion was like the plot of a cloak-and-dagger film. Tracy’s arrival was kept so secret that members of the cast never realized he was in town. He promised to put an end to his drinking. Believing him, she consented to his coming to New York when As You Like It opened on Broadway. Proud of working on a project she considered worthwhile, Kate invited her mother to accompany her to a few of the cities on tour. Mrs. Hepburn agreed and Kate played to her mother as much as she did to her audiences.

  The out-of-town tour was (as were all other Hepburn tours) a great financial success. The notices were good, and the press mentioned with surprise what a fantastic pair of legs Miss Hepburn possessed. The show opened at the Cort Theatre on January 22, 1950. “There is too much Yankee in Miss Hepburn for Shakespeare’s glades and lyric fancies,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times. “Gorgeously attired in some stunning finery designed by James Bailey, Miss Hepburn is lovely to look at, and she plays the part with pride and modesty. But in the opinion of one reluctant churlish theater goer, Rosalind assumes romantic and disarming graces that are not implicit in Miss Hepburn’s nature. She is an honest and straightforward actress whom it is easy to admire. But she is not a helpless, bewitched, moon-struck maiden swooning through a magic forest. . . . Miss Hepburn has too sharply defined a personality for such romantic make-believe. Her acting is tight, her voice is a little hard and shallow for Shakespeare’s poetry, she has to design the character too meticulously. And is this a New England accent that we hear twanging the strings of Shakespeare’s lyre?”

  Hard words were about all Kate received from the critics, but she never let them trample her spirit. She continued to work with Constance Collier, and her performance did improve and the lines at the box office continued. Nonetheless, Atkinson was right. Kate was physically wrong to portray a limpid Rosalind. She would have been better to go with the boyish quality rather than against it. Her persona was too fixed in the minds of theatergoers. Kate represented the epitome of the courageous woman, able to do battle with or for the man she loved, and she was as phony when playing it coy as Scarlett O’Hara was when trying to be a shy maiden with Rhett Butler.

  Yet Kate seemed not to see herself as a strong woman. Back in the early days Laura had been the dominant one in their friendship. She had lost interest in Howard Hughes and Leland Hayward when they seemed too eager to give in to her. Jed Harris’s chauvinistic treatment had drawn her to him. And part of her attraction to Tracy was his obstinate maleness. Yes, he desperately needed her and he was out of control when she was gone. But, she did have to play a game with him, be the compliant female, cook, serve, nurse, be in attendance. The stuffed animals and dolls that rested at the head of her bed perhaps were not such a contradiction after all.

  Tracy had been good when they had met in Cleveland. Back in New York, he started drinking again, and neighbors saw him reeling into Kate’s night after night and leaving shortly thereafter in a condition not much improved. He returned to Hollywood to make Father of the Bride, and Kate continued with As You Like It.

  Footnotes

  * Hepburn had known President and Mrs. Roosevelt personally since the mid-thirties and had been their guest at several large functions. At one famous picnic in 1934, Hepburn was reported to have been surprised by the President as she waded barefoot on the grounds of the Roosevelts’ home at Hyde Park,

  † Henry Agard Wallace (1888-1965), Vice-President of the United States, 1941-45. His family had founded an influential agricultural periodical, Wallace’s Farmer, which he edited in the 1920s. His articles on agrarian matters soon made him an authority. In 1933, Roosevelt appointed him secretary of agriculture. In 1944, Wallace was by-passed for the vice-presidency. Truman was nominated and elected on Roosevelt’s ticket. Wallace became secretary of commerce, a post he held until his resignation in September, 1945 (attributed to his strong opposition to Truman’s cold war tactics with Russia). In 1948, Wallace helped launch a new Progressive party and appeared as its presidential candidate, with Senator Glen A. Taylor as the vice-presidential candidate. He polled slightly more than 1,150,000 votes. Truman defeated Thomas Dewey by the narrow margin of about 500,000 votes. If Wallace had been stronger, the papers that prematurely printed Dewey had won could well have been right.

  * J. Parnell Thomas’s committee consisted of nine men, among them future President Richard M. Nixon.

  † Garland pleaded, “Before every free conscience in America is subpoenaed, please speak up! Say your piece. Write your Congressman a letter! Let the Congress know what you think of its ‘Unamerican Committee.’ Tell them how much you resent Mr. Thomas’s kicking the living daylights out of the Bill of Rights!”

  * Frank Capra (1897– ). The majority of Capra’s films, including the classics It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), dealt with “the triumph of honesty and justice over selfishness and deceit.” State of the Union was no exception.

  * Metro costume designer Irene Gibbons (1901-1962), known professionally by her first name, had costumed Hepburn for Without Love, Undercurrent, Dragon Seed and Song of Love, and so had little problem in hastily providing a wardrobe for Hepburn.

  * Angela Lansbury (1925– ) was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her first film, Gaslight (1944). Her role as Kaye Thorndyke in State of the Union also won her a nomination, as did her performance in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). She became a Broadway star with Mame and Sweeney Todd as her best known theater roles. She never worked with either Tracy or Hepburn again.

  † Edward, My Son, based on the play by Robert Morley and Noel Langley, co-starring Tracy and Deborah Kerr, was a dour film, never fully realized. Tracy’s performance is seldom convincing. He seemed, and was, uncomfortable in the role of a man who commits arson, goads two people to suicide and drives his wife to drink and death when she tries to stand in his way of making their son a “success.”

  * The Kanins’ screenplay was nominated for, but did not win, an Oscar. The only sour note in the entire first-class production was a Cole Porter song, “Far
ewell Amanda,” which Time magazine suspected the composer “must have written while waiting for a bus.”

  * Malaya (1950) starred Tracy, James Stewart, Valentina Gortesa, Sydney Green-street, John Hodiak, Lionel Barrymore and Gilbert Roland and was directed by Richard Thorpe. The film was only mildly successful.

  * Michael Benthall (1919– ) had directed many plays of Shakespeare for the OldVic Theatre, as well as productions of Aida and Turandot at Covent Garden. He later directed Hepburn in The Millionairess (1952).

  † The jet plane was not in operation in 1949 and the flight from England to New York took thirteen hours. Then another seven- to eight-hour flight was necessary to reach California.

  * As You Like It had had only six previous recorded professional New York productions in the first half of the twentieth century. The others were presented by the Chicago Repertory Company (1930), The Shakespearean Repertory Company (1932), the Surrey Players (1937), Alfred Drake and Helen Craig (1941) and Sir Donald Wolfit and Rosalind Iden (1947).

  CHAPTER

  19

  When As You Like It closed on Broadway after 180 performances, Kate and the production went back on the road, touring the Midwest. Tracy was on the telephone daily to her and Constance Collier remained nearby. In each new town, Kate would wait in the theater until the scenery was up. Asked why, she replied, “I don’t want it to feel lonely.” She also admitted she could not stand to “hang around” when the set was being taken down. Between performances, she slept, ate and curled her hair (“any woman who has corn silk instead of hair will understand when I say it takes a long time to curl my hair”).

  By the time Kate reached Tulsa, Oklahoma, her nerves were on edge. Her driver had been stopped for speeding with her in the car on their way to the city. Kate was summoned and had to appear in court, where the traffic policeman who had issued the ticket informed the judge that they had been traveling at eighty miles an hour.

  Pacing the floor of the courtroom much in the manner of the woman lawyer she had recently played in Adam’s Rib, Kate glared at the policeman. “We would have been glad to slow down if you had just warned us. You don’t have enough sense to be an officer.” She stepped back and against an electric heater, scorching her mink coat, and then jumped quickly away as she tore off the fur to check the damage.

  “It probably did not hurt that one thousand dollar coat too much, Miss Hepburn,” the judge commented.

  “One thousand?” Kate snapped back as she smoothed the mink. “This coat cost five thousand five hundred dollars.”

  “Well, the fine will cost you ten dollars,” the judge replied, adding, “but you better leave this courtroom now before I change my mind.”

  Grumbling, Kate paid the fine and left.

  She stayed at Irene Selznick’s house in California over the holidays, ironing out her personal problems with Tracy. His drinking had not stopped but he seemed able to control it better. They had a warm few weeks together playing chess, talking endlessly, walking around the grounds of Cukor’s estate. Tracy still considered it a matter of principle that they not live together, although both of his children were grown, and John, despite his deafness, had married. Metro was keeping Tracy busy at this time. He had completed Father of the Bride and Father’s Little Dividend while Kate had been appearing in As You Like It; and now the studio wanted him to take on the role of the criminal attorney in The People Against O’Hara,* which meant he would have to be in California until the following summer.

  Kate was desperate for a script that would enable her to return to Hollywood; but good stories, as always, were hard to find. At forty-four and beginning to take on a more mature look, she could not be cast in parts that required either glamour or youth. Very few stories centered on a middle-aged woman, although such roles for men were plentiful. Then, too, Hollywood was in chaos. Television had risen to challenge movies; and to combat the young intruder, films were attempting to be bigger and better than ever. This meant shooting a film on locations real and exotic, giving movie audiences entertainment that they could not get on their television screens. Major studios were in a period of decline. The postwar market had been a great disappointment, and antitrust laws had forced the studios to divest themselves of their theaters. Nor could they pay their stars the fees and percentages being offered to them by the new independent producers.

  Sam Spiegel (then using the pseudonym S. P. Eagle),† a master promoter, was one of this new breed. Spiegel liked a C. S. Forester* novel, The African Queen, and knew the only way to get a film financed was to present a complete package to the money people, including lead players and a director who were considered bankable. Kate did not fall into that category—Humphrey Bogart and John Huston† did. But Spiegel needed good bait to hook them, and Kate, whom he admired tremendously, was it. He therefore gave her the book to read, first telling her (a lie) that he had Bogart and Huston. The book was about the curious romance of Rose Sayer, a prim English spinster, and Charlie Allnut, a “gin-swilling ne’er-do-well riverboat pilot,” in German East Africa during the early stages of World War I. Kate liked the character of Rose and especially the idea of working with Bogart and Huston. She readily agreed to go ahead for a promised sixty-five thousand dollars in cash, an equal amount in deferred payments and 10 percent of the film’s profits. Spiegel now told Bogart that he had Kate and Huston, and informed Huston at the same time that he had Kate and Bogart.‡ In fact, he did not even own the rights to the property. These were controlled by Warner Brothers, who had bought The African Queen for Bette Davis from Columbia Studios, which had originally purchased the rights from Forester himself with the idea of casting Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton in the leads. Warners wanted fifty thousand dollars, which Spiegel did not have. He unsuccessfully tried to borrow the money, and then, desperate, went to Sound Services, Inc., which supplied sound equipment to the studios, and told them he had Hepburn, Bogart and Huston for the film and that not only would he use their equipment on location, he would give them credit in the titles. Sound Services had never loaned money for a film before, but miraculously they agreed.

  Kate returned to the road to complete her tour of As You Like It just after the first of the year, not knowing if Spiegel would succeed in obtaining the financing for the venture. The idea of going to the Congo to film a picture fascinated her. Finally, Spiegel informed her that the funds had been raised and the film was scheduled to begin shooting in Africa in April.* Kate had only six weeks from the end of the tour until her scheduled departure for London, where she would be fitted for her wardrobe.

  She came home to West Hartford the second week in March, physically exhausted but feeling much more at ease about her future. She claimed she would never marry again. She told a reporter a few months later that “it is difficult enough making friends with your own sex—let alone deciding to spend your life with someone of the opposite sex. It is not easy to be interested—and marriage means to be interested—in someone else all the time.” If Kate became the second Mrs. Spencer Tracy, she could not see herself being free to accept a film role that would take her thousands of miles away from her husband. Her status quo with Tracy seemed ideal.

  Life on Bloomfield Avenue, despite the fact that her brothers and sisters were all married and living away, had not changed. At seventy-five, her father still went to his office on weekdays. Her mother’s devotion to birth control and women’s rights had not wavered. More guests showed up for Sunday dinner than were invited; and the decibel of the conversations, with fourteen grandchildren now in the family, sounded as though a brawl were in progress. As always, afternoon tea was served punctually at four o’clock in the dining room.

  March 17, St. Patrick’s Day and a Saturday, Kate and Dr. Hepburn came in from a brisk walk a few minutes late for tea. They found the table set, the teapot filled with hot, freshly brewed tea, and the house unnaturally quiet. Mrs. Hepburn seemed nowhere close by. They both sat down for a moment and then, exchanging frightened glances, rose without a wo
rd and ran upstairs. Mrs. Hepburn had had a recent small heart infarction and they were not wrong in suspecting what they would find. Kit Houghton Hepburn, at seventy-three, was dead, lying gracefully across her bed, where, apparently feeling faint after setting the tea, she had gone to rest for a few moments until her husband and daughter returned home.* The phone calls began, and the family gathered. For a few days they were closer than they had ever been, grasping each other, remembering the good times, the times when they were whole, trying to put off that moment when each one would finally accept the fact that they would never be complete again.

  “The thing about life is that you must survive”, Kate later said. “Life is going to be difficult and dreadful things will happen. What you do is to move along, get on with it and be tough. Not in the sense of being mean to others, but tough with yourself and making a deadly effort not to be defeated.”

  She packed her bags, got all the dreadful shots she needed to travel to Africa and, with Constance Collier for support, boarded the small Cunard freighter-passenger ship Media, arriving at Liverpool on April 13. The two women were driven in a Rolls-Royce to London, where they slipped in through the baggage entrance at Claridge’s to be ensconced most luxuriously in a large suite (which Kate was certain Sam Spiegel could not afford). The following Monday, Kate, wearing cream slacks, a loose-fitting man’s-style jacket, and brown suede shoes, stalked into one of the hotel’s ballrooms where a welcoming party had been arranged. “I’m tall, skinny (117 pounds) with a lot of freckles, and I can’t stop growing. I’m five feet eight inches now, and I’ve put on an inch in the last year. You could call me an antelope; swift, lean, graceful (I hope) and freckled,”† she announced.