Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  Humphrey Bogart and his wife, Lauren Bacall,* had arrived in London from Paris just about the same time. Bogart, who knew Kate only casually (although he had known Tracy for years), walked over to say, “Katie starts out as a missionary, but after going down river in Africa with me, she ends up as a woman.”

  To which Kate shot back, “I’d say I start out as a woman and end up as a missionary trying to save Bogart.”

  For Kate, Africa evoked exotic images of lush greens and wild animals and tribes of people who had never seen a motion picture, and she could not wait to be off on what promised to be a great adventure. The screenplay of The African Queen was written by James Agee, although John Collier had done an earlier draft. Shortly after he had finished, Agee suffered a heart attack, which prohibited his going to Africa. Peter Viertel† had been signed to work on the final draft, concentrating most of his effort on the last scenes. C. S. Forester had never been satisfied with the way the novel had ended and had published two denouements, the original American edition appearing without the last two chapters of the English edition.‡ Viertel met Huston in Entebbe, where he made his headquarters while scouting locations. As soon as the two of them had completed the script and Spiegel had arrived, they arranged for Kate, Bogart and Bacall to meet them in Léopoldville, which was closer to their chosen locations.

  Kate and the Bogarts were to change planes in Rome for Léopoldville, the capital of the Belgian Congo. Because the Bogarts were occupied with the transfer of their baggage, they had not noticed until they were face to face with a battery of press and klieg lights” that Kate was nowhere to be found. A man said she had been the last to disembark and that he was positive she had gone from one plane to another on the field without bothering to come into the airport lounge. An Italian reporter insisted that was not possible because he had gone aboard the plane and had not seen her. Bogart whispered to his wife to “get on board and look in the ladies room.” There, indeed, she found Kate, “laughing uproariously at having outwitted the press.”

  “We sat chatting for a while,” Bacall remembered, “then to our horror the newsreel man with the klieg light climbed on board. Kate stayed locked in the loo—Bogie and I were photographed to pacify the man—the doors closed—Katie emerged.”

  That night they stayed in a hotel in Léopoldville. The next morning they continued on by boat. Spiegel and Viertel were waiting for them in Stanleyville amid a welcoming celebration—“natives dancing in costume; painted faces and bodies.” The weather was insufferably hot and humid. Kate, comfortable in safari clothes, was wide-eyed with excitement. The next day the film group crossed the Congo River and boarded a train that consisted of two passenger cars, two freight cars, a tin boat on a flat car and the engine. The small caravan moved deeper into the Congo, past primitive grass-hut villages and gawking natives. In Ponthierville, the company transferred to cars and jeeps and proceeded to the small village of Biondo. Then, after an hour ride, they reached a bank of the Ruiki River, where they drove onto a raft that natives poled with four long pirogues to the opposite bank. Another hour’s drive was required before they reached the camp that Huston had had constructed for his company.

  The director met his stars at the Ruiki campsite and regaled them until one in the morning with stories of the terrain, the native superstitions, the wild animals that they would encounter, the bugs, and tales of his own hunting forays. The next morning Kate got her first realistic view of what her life would be like while shooting The African Queen.

  Her bungalow was constructed of bamboo and palm leaves, with small screened windows and curtained closets. The floors were dirt, covered with grass mats. A bottle of water sat by a basin. Outside was a toilet, and as a shower a tin barrel filled with cold water hung over a small platform (an invention borrowed from Huston’s wartime army experience). When a chain was pulled, a disk was raised in the bucket and the water came through the pierced holes that had been drilled into its bottom.

  Without a traveling companion, Kate was forced to make friends with Huston and the Bogarts. She talked compulsively to cover her nervousness. For two solid days after they arrived it rained torrentially. When it stopped, an army of mosquitoes bore their way through the netting around beds, and Kate, who had brought a bag of remedies, was running about applying salves to the ugly, itching red welts that everyone, including herself, suffered. On the first day of shooting it rained again, but this did not deter Huston.

  Charlie Allnut’s boat, The African Queen, was the real thing, having once been a functioning riverboat. Huston was convinced that no stranger flotilla had ever navigated African waterways than The African Queen and its river caravan, consisting of four rafts that were pulled by the power generated from the Queen.

  On the first raft was a replica of the Queen. That raft became the stage, with cameras and equipment on it for photographing mock-up shots.* The second raft carried lights and props; the third the generator. The fourth, conceived by Huston to give Kate some comfort while working under such primitive conditions, contained a privy, a full-length mirror and Kate’s very own dressing room. Within a few days, Kate’s luxury raft was detached and she had to use the jungle for her toilet and a small piece of the broken mirror for her vanity. The fourth raft had simply proved too much for The African Queen to tow. Kate and Bacall would stand watch for each other whenever they had to relieve themselves.

  “The natives didn’t know what we were about,” Bacall claims. “When a match was struck and a flame followed, they’d mumble in Swahili.”

  For the first few days of shooting, Huston let Kate play her scenes (the burial of her missionary brother) as she saw the character. Her performance just wasn’t right; and early in the morning of the fourth day, he came to her hut while she was having breakfast on the veranda. “I hope you’re not planning to have breakfast with me every day,” Kate snapped, “because I rather prefer to eat alone.”

  “No, no,” he replied. “I only want a few minutes of your time.”

  Kate sensed the seriousness in his attitude. (Recalling the confrontation later, Kate said, “Now you know I’ve a sort of hollow face and a sort of a [sharp] jaw and my mouth goes down, and when my face is serious, it is very on the down side. If I can smile I’ve a lot of nice teeth. I can cheer everything up quite a bit. So I smiled big.”)

  “Well, what is it John?” she asked.

  Huston told her, “Your interpretation of Rosie is doing harm to the picture as well as hurting the character.” He then sat down and asked, “Did you ever see Mrs. Roosevelt visiting the soldiers in the hospitals in the newsreels?”

  Kate replied that she had.

  “Well, I think of [Rosie] a little bit as Mrs. Roosevelt.” Then he got up, tipped his safari hat and was off.

  “Well,” Kate recalled, “it was the most brilliant suggestion. Because [Mrs. Roosevelt] was so ugly that she always smiled. So I smiled. Otherwise he said very little to me on the set. But it was an awfully clever piece of direction. . . . Very right.”

  The company worked seven days a week from six-thirty in the morning until dark, coping with the most awesome physical obstacles. In view of the tremendous courage of both Kate and Bacall, none of the men dared complain. At one point, the raft with the generator got jammed into the thick growth on the banks of the Ruiki and a boiler toppled, nearly scalding Kate and Bogart and burning Guy Hamilton,* Huston’s assistant director. A few nights later The African Queen sank. When Huston talked to Spiegel by radio (their only communication), the producer laughed. “I thought you said The African Queen sank.”

  “That’s right,” Huston replied.

  “Oy!”

  The fifty-five native workers and thirty English crew members managed to raise The African Queen from slime, water and tangled weeds, clean it, patch the holes and get it once again to function.

  Not long after that, the location was attacked by black wasps from the forest twice in one day; and Kate and Bogart—almost everyone, in fact—were badly stu
ng. Despite all these hardships, Kate loved Africa. She wrote long daily letters to Tracy, which were taken by native runners once a week back to the village of Biondo and then picked up by launch, carried to Ponthierville and finally sent on their way to Léopoldville, where a post office existed.

  Bogart never liked Africa. An urbane, sophisticated man, son of a fashionable New York portrait painter and her successful physician husband, graduate of Andover and heir to a family inheritance, Humphrey DeForest Bogart came from a background similar to Katharine Houghton Hepburn’s. They differed in that Kate looked her real-life role and re-created facets of it for the screen, while Bogart in private life resembled the tough, hardened man whom he portrayed professionally. This dual personality was always the first shock people got upon meeting Bogart. The bloodshot eyes, the sallow complexion, the mouth that seemed mocking even in a smile, added to the low timbre and the clip of his speech, contradicted the innate gentility, grace, grasp of language and intellectual pursuits that lay behind them. Bogart was a well-bred gentleman of the first order. Alistair Cooke observed, “Upon meeting Bogart, [I found I was] dealing here with two characters, one fictional, the other private, almost as sharply defined as Chaplin, the man, and Charlie, the tramp. There was the movie Bogart, a character at once repellent and fascinating; and the complex private man . . . a product of upper middle-class respectability.”

  Bogart might never have become a star had not playwright Robert Sherwood (against all advice) decided to use him as the killer with the sharp tongue in The Petrified Forest, the role that won Bogart a Hollywood contract. Thirty-four at the time, he had spent a decade on Broadway as a “dark haired juvenile who loped through French windows wearing tails or a dinner jacket . . . [seeming] to be cast for life as a Riviera fixture.” With one role he had made the swing from the “tennis, anyone?” set (a phrase he had supposedly uttered in one of his ignominious early stage roles) to “the cryptic Hemingway tough, the huddled man in the trench coat who singed the bad and the beautiful with the smoke he exhaled from his nostrils.”

  The role of Charlie Allnut was a natural culmination of all Bogart’s film characters. Here was the aging, caustic, disillusioned tough—self-exiled from the real world but still with a spark of that animal courage that made him, unbeknownst to himself, an extraordinary man. Kate’s Rose Sayer was the catalyst who would bring out the best in him at the same time that he unlocked the vulnerable woman harbored inside her hard-shelled exterior. The sparks from the tremendous magnetism generated between these two seeming opposites were evident in the early rushes. Spiegel felt certain The African Queen would be a successful film. At the Ruiki campsite, cast and crew were only hoping that they would survive to see a finished film. Dysentery and malaria spread through the company. Kate suffered an extreme case of the former, and constant nausea as well. Still, she never missed a day’s shooting.

  She later confessed, “The big joke was on me because I was rather self-righteous and I thought, ‘Well, I’m traveling with two drunks [Huston and Bogart] I’d better not drink anything’—so I drank lots and lots of the water. John [Huston] never got sick, Bogie never got sick—and I nearly died of the dysentery because the water was poisoned—shows how sensible they were.”

  The day The African Queen was declared river-worthy once again and shooting recommenced, the company returned to their camp to find it had been invaded by an army of ants. The floors of the bungalows were inches thick with the crawling black creatures; clothing, toiletries, everything was covered—and moving. All night long, kerosene fires were kept burning in hastily dug ditches encircling the camp to keep out further armies of these soldier ants. The company swatted and battled the ants in the compound, with Kate in the middle swinging away; “the Jeanne d’ Arc of Ruiki” Huston called her.

  The shooting at Ruiki required another three days; and Huston and his crew worked night and day to finish on time because they knew that the ants, which had been temporarily routed, would come back. Bacall and Kate were now fast friends, sharing a greater taste for adventure than Bogart did. Kate described Bacall as “soft and sleek . . . sloe-eyed . . . [Bogart] has penned a lioness. . . . No claws for those she loves—babies—mate—and even friends. . . . But if you do not belong; look out. . . . No Zulac from the bazaar has a sharper knife—”*

  The day they left Ruiki the chief arranged a musical farewell for them and the natives performed ceremonial dances. Bacall remembers that she joined in “with my Bdingo† in hand, and with their drums we had an old fashioned jam session.” The company was in high spirits. Almost half of the location shooting was done; and they were moving on to a section near Butiaba, certain that the worst was over. After all, what could top an invasion of devastating ants?

  The beginning of the film takes place in a settlement in German East Africa, where Rose Sayer and her brother, Reverend Samuel (Robert Morley‡), run a mission that is burned to the ground by German soldiers. The church gone, her brother dead, the spinsterish Rose finds sanctuary with the desolute Charlie Allnut and the idyll of The African Queen is begun. A village was constructed by the film crew for the express purpose of burning it down. Huston needed enough natives as villagers to make the scene seem real, and he contracted with a nearby chief to furnish him with people. The first day of shooting came, but no natives appeared. Investigating the cause, Huston discovered that since cannibalism was still a reality in that area,§ the villagers were fearful that Huston’s offer was a trap.

  Butiaba not only had cannibals, it had black mambas. The deadly snakes took a liking to the company’s portable privies, which, once in use on the location site, did more for clearing up the rampant dysentery than any of Kate or Bacall’s assorted pills. (Bacall had luckily brought antibiotics, which proved lifesaving when one of the English members of the crew suffered an attack of appendicitis.) While the company was at Butiaba, its home was a 125-foot side-wheel paddle steamer, called the Lugard II, with a line of small but comfortable cabins on the main deck. After nearly two weeks in Butiaba the company moved on to Murchison Falls, where again they lived on a paddle steamer.

  Huston, who considered himself a white hunter, would go out early in the morning before the day’s filming began, or sometimes in the late afternoon when work was finished, to bag deer or game for the pot. Kate, who could not conceive of killing an animal, finally could stand it no longer. “You seem to be such a sensitive person,” she said accusingly. “How can you shoot anything as beautiful as these creatures? Are you a murderer at heart?”

  “Katie, there’s no explaining it. You’d have to go and see for yourself to understand.”

  After a considered silence, she snapped, “All right, I will!”

  For several mornings, she accompanied Huston, refusing to shoot anything but carrying his light rifle for him. Nothing could convince her that she should take aim, but the beauty of the jungle and the thrill of the hunt got to her. Huston agreed she could come with him and a supposedly professional white hunter to hunt elephant. After about an hour they found a herd and tracked it. “Presently,” Huston relates, “we entered some very heavy foliage and were slowly working our way through it when I heard an elephant’s stomach rumble. The sound came from only a few feet away. A few minutes later I heard it again—this time on the other side of us—I had accidentally worked us into the middle of a herd of elephants. The thing to do in such a situation is to retrace your steps as quietly as possible, getting clear of the herd. We started to do this, but the elephants picked up our scent, panicked and trumpeting, began to crash through the jungle all around us like big locomotives. One came bearing down on us. . . . Our white hunter broke and hightailed it. . . .

  “I looked around to see how Kate was taking this. She was carrying a little Manlicher rifle—a peashooter capable of putting out an elephant’s eye but nothing more. There she was, one heel to the ground, her little rifle up, and her jaw line clean . . . as game as could be. I was carrying the Rigby .470 express rifle, but I don’t min
d admitting that I didn’t feel safe even with that.”

  Miraculously, the herd stopped as it drew close and then dispersed, perhaps not seeing Kate and Huston, both of whom stood frozen. The hunters headed back to camp, Kate with her long-striding walk in the lead. Suddenly she stopped, having sighted something, and, leaning her rifle against a tree, raised her eight millimeter movie camera to photograph the object. Huston, coming up behind her, was horrified to realize that the object of her photography was a three- to four-hundred-pound wild boar with enormous tusks. Quietly, Huston said, “Stop, Katie,” but Kate kept advancing until her camera ran down, and she paused to rewind.

  “By this time,” Huston continues, “we were so close I was afraid to shoot the boar because, even with a bullet in his heart, one of these animals can maintain a charge. I was sure he was going to attack—and I was actually squeezing the trigger. At this instant his family ran across the open space in the trail behind him. He turned to look at them, looked back at us and suddenly veered away into the brush to join his family.”

  Bogart never went out on a hunt. He preferred either to “sit in camp, drink in hand, and tell stories,” or to read one of the library of books he had brought along. Best of all, he would have liked the film shot in comfort at the studio. Charlie Allnut had not even been a role he had cared for too much before he had come to Africa. He had been lured into the project by the chance to work with Huston again. Then, “all at once he got under the skin of that wretched, sleazy, absurd, brave little man [Charlie Allnut],” and would say to Huston, “John, don’t let me lose it. Watch me. Don’t let me lose it.”

  Sickness plagued the company in Murchison Falls, as it had in Ruiki and Butiaba. After a few simple tests, the river waters were pronounced contaminated. Bottled water brought in from Nairobi was found to be equally contaminated. Spiegel, who had arrived at Murchison Falls for the last segment of the shooting, realized now what his production unit had had to suffer.