Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  “I was glad to talk to anyone who looked reasonably all right, so we went off together for a walk through Venice. I suppose they [the film company] all thought I had madly exciting things to do and left me to it. . . . It’s my own fault entirely. I have brought it upon myself. I am rather a sharp person. I have a sharp face and a sharp voice. When I speak on the telephone, I snap into it. It puts people off, I suppose.

  “Being an actor is such a humiliating experience,” she added after much thought. “Because you are selling yourself to the public, your face, your personality, and that is humiliating. As you get older, it becomes more humiliating because you’ve got less to sell.”

  The role of Jane Hudson was another performance that added to Kate’s reputation of creating her film persona in her own image. Everything superfluous was gone, the elements were refined and complete—“the sad mouth, the head-back laugh, the snap of chic in shirtmaker dresses, the dream of enchantment behind wistful eyes, the awakening puritan passion of the girl in love, the Tegular’ way with children, the leggy stride, and always the bones”—the magnificent, prominent, impossible bones which a visiting journalist [English], made somewhat exuberant by the deceptively mild local wine, described as “the greatest calcium deposit since the White Cliffs of Dover.”

  On her way home from Venice, Kate stopped in London to visit with Ruth Gordon, who was in rehearsal for the role of Dolly Levi in the London production of The Matchmaker (later to be the basis of the musical Hello Dolly!), and to see her many English friends, including Michael Benthall and Robert Helpmann, who were preparing an Australian tour for the Old Vic. The plan was to present three Shakespearean plays. They now suggested Kate join them and add the roles of Katharine in The Taming of the Shrew, Isabella in Measure for Measure and Portia in The Merchant of Venice to her repertoire. Kate agreed and returned to New York to prepare for the tour, scheduled for May through part of September.

  Since Constance Collier was not well enough to coach her, Kate went to Alfred Dixon, who had been recommended by Mary Martin. Dixon had unique methods of coaching, one of which “was to make a mooing noise with lips closed, starting very low on the scale, gradually rising higher and higher and then slowly all the way down again, until at last you had to stop for lack of breath. The result resembled a loud, long air-raid warning emitted by a cow, repeated over and over again.” The sounds could be heard up and down the corridors of the Carnegie Hall studios where Dixon coached. Kate was still worried about the throat trouble she had had in The Millionairess, and, like Noël Coward, who had also worked with Dixon, she thought the exercise “the best loosener-upper in the world” and a great help in extending her vocal range with ease. Contrary to the advice of Miss Robin-son-Duff* and Constance Collier, Dixon’s most revolutionary dictum was never to breathe deeply, to inhale just the merest sip of air when needed. Kate’s voice cracked less using this method, and she felt much more confident about the difficult repertoire for which she had contracted.

  In April, 1955, Constance Collier died, and Kate took her friend’s death hard. The years of her close friendship with Collier (1950-1955) had coincided with a certain standoff between Laura and Luddy and herself. More dramatically, the rumors about Grace Kelly, whether true or false, had pointed up Tracy’s sudden availability. He had sought out Grace Kelly’s companionship in much the same way as he had Joan Fontaine’s. And although Kate always gave the impression that Tracy was a rock to be depended upon, in reality the situation was reversed. Kate was the strong member of the team, able to cope when trouble hit, working always to improve her talents, her mind and her physical well-being. Tracy, on the other hand, was quite capable of wallowing in self-pity that invariably led to drinking, quarrelsomeness and painful experiences for all those involved in his life and his career. To add to this, his health was failing and he did very little to help himself.

  He took Kate’s acceptance of the Australian tour as a personal blow, an out-and-out rejection, and he began to drink seriously on May 5, the day she left for Australia via Qantas Airlines. Scheduled to begin Tribute to a Bad Man on June 1, he could not accompany her. Grace Kelly had backed out of the project and was irrationally replaced by the volatile Greek actress Irene Papas,† who was completely miscast and stood five ten in her bare feet. The script was weak and the director, Robert Wise,* was unknown to Tracy. Location was set in the Rockies near Montrose, Colorado, and Tracy checked in six days late with no explanation to his distraught director. Two days later he disappeared again, causing hysteria on the set. Calls were placed to Kate in Australia. Finally, after a week, he showed up on the location and announced he could not stand the altitude—the plateau on which the set was constructed was approximately eight thousand feet above sea level—and demanded they disassemble the set and rebuild it lower in the mountains.

  Metro’s vice-president and publicity head, Howard Strickland,† one of the few powerful friends Tracy had left at the studio, arrived on location to attempt to negotiate a peace. He could not convince Tracy to back down and on June 25, Spencer Tracy was fired from a film. A few weeks later his contract with M.G.M. was terminated.‡

  Even in Australia, Kate heard the stories—Tracy was finished—an alcoholic—sick—and would never be hired again in Hollywood. In Melbourne at the time, working in heavy costume and sweltering one-hundred-degree weather with no air conditioning, Kate had her own problems. The first nine weeks of the tour, with limited runs in Sydney and Brisbane, had been highly successful. But Melbourne audiences had not taken well to her New England cadences superimposed upon Shakespeare. One morning after the company’s first production, an ill-chosen Measure for Measure, a review on the front page of the major Melbourne paper exclaimed, “I have no idea why Miss Hepburn chose to come to Melbourne, except that it was quite obvious her career must be over as a motion picture star. And Robert Helpmann’s is certainly over as a dancer!” Unlike Vivien Leigh, who had toured many of the same Australian theaters with the Old Vic Company in a series of Shakespearean plays seven years earlier, Kate did not enjoy the instant acclaim. Her films had never been successful Down Under and many had not been released there. Pat and Mike’s run had been cut short after three days for lack of business. The African Queen had done well, but Summertime had yet to be shown.

  Calls flew back and forth over the Pacific from Tracy, most of them unsettling. Kate immersed herself in the rare beauty of the land and was as fascinated as Vivien Leigh had once been with the Daliesque terrain. “The great shallow blue lakes [near Adelaide] surrounded by glistening white sand, black and white branches of trees sticking up out of the water and birds of every kind and description everywhere.” The bird that fascinated her the most was the extraordinary lyrebird, about the size of a guinea hen, with powerful thigh muscles and long-clawed fingers; it sent forth eerie human sounds as it danced in an almost ritualistic pattern, “like an Indian warrior about to go into battle.”

  Most of Hollywood thought that Tracy’s humiliation at being fired from a film would force him into retirement. Yet the same year he was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Bad Day at Black Rock.* Kate was intrenchably in his corner. The two spent many weeks together upon her return from Australia, and a marked change occurred in their relationship. Kate became almost custodial in her care of Tracy. She all but stopped smoking to help him quit the habit because his smoking and drinking seemed to go together. And she determined that she would not leave him for such a long stretch again and that they would, if at all possible, accompany each other on film locations or any tours she might take. From 1955 on, Tracy was a desperately sick man. Close friends believed he might be dying. Among other things, his heart was weak and his liver seriously damaged. Kate made sure he ate the right foods and took care of himself. She exercised with him and walked with him to help him take off weight. Never, even in the beginning of their friendship, had they been so close, and when Tracy signed with Paramount to star in The Mountain* the story of a plane crash in the Alps, she
accompanied him to Chamonix, France, for the location shooting. The high altitude made Tracy’s breathing difficult and exerted his heart and lungs. Kate remained in the background as discreetly as possible, but seldom left him alone.

  Constance Collier’s former companion, Phyllis Wilbourn, was now in Kate’s employ as “secretary-companion-assistant-indispensable.” She accompanied Kate to France and would travel with her wherever Kate and Tracy went. She quickly became an extension of Kate, although her presence created some thorny moments with Tracy, who, while grateful for her help to him and Kate, found her prim “gentle-gentlewoman” personality a bit hard to take; and “he would often nag or hector or tease her.” Tracy was by nature combative, but with Phyllis he sometimes took on a cruel tone that made his resentment at her constant presence most evident.

  By the time The Mountain was completed, Tracy had achieved a devastating imitation of Phyllis. Kanin says, “He found the precise tone and pitch of her voice, the lovely lilt of her speech, the best of her upper-class British accent, and when the mood struck him, would reply to her questions in her own voice. She would blush and he would continue . . . to twit her, mainly because she reacted so sharply.

  “Aeeeeoh! Miss Hepp-bunn,” he’d say, becoming Phyllis to the pursing of her lips and the fluttering of her lashes. “Hahow viddy, viddy kind!”

  Kate invariably stepped in and tried to ameliorate what Tracy said with some especially warm words or small gesture of appreciation. But Phyllis remained always close-at-hand, ready for any emergency or request for her assistance.

  Tracy was equally cutting with Laura, whom he considered too spoiled and too rich. He did like Irene Selznick, whom Kate saw in New York or whenever they both happened to be in California. The two women often went swimming together. “Mind you,” Irene Selznick recalls, “nothing as convenient as the pool at George’s [Cukor]. Kate would bring masses of towels, a huge lunch, and we’d make a day of it. . . . We’d swim our way across town, from one pool to another, until we reached the surf at Malibu. We gave our patronage to friends and strangers alike, showing up uninvited, unexpected, but we assumed welcome. . . .

  “An house and a sparkling pool had the effect on us of a formal invitation.” Irene had sold her old house in 1953. “[Afterward] . . . on each trip West our first drive about included 1050 Summit Drive to see how it was faring . . . [one time] we were dying to get inside . . . but every door was locked. However, there was one near the pantry that we knew was apt to be left unlocked; it was at the top of the stairs leading from the basement. We knew how to get there through the garage. . . . We felt like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

  “For two people so passionate about privacy, this was a hell of a thing to do. We knew better, but somehow felt entitled.”

  As they were inspecting the bedrooms, they heard a woman’s voice, “shrill and frightened from below.

  “Kate, instantly mobilized, called out, ‘We’ll be right down. It’s all right, I assure you.’”

  The woman was startled to see Katharine Hepburn walking down her stairway to meet her and after an uncomfortable few minutes of apologies on Kate and Irene Selznick’s part eased up enough to show them the living room as she led them to the front door.

  When Tracy returned to Hollywood late in 1955, Kate accepted the role of Lizzie Curry in the film adaptation of N. Richard Nash’s successful play The Rainmaker, about a tense spinster who cares for her father and two brothers on a southwestern farm plagued by draught. Her co-star was Burt Lancaster,* who played Starbuck, a sensual, good-looking, sweet-talking con man who claims he can bring rain into the area for one hundred dollars but secretly hopes he can turn Lizzie into a woman ready for love before he leaves.

  Filming in Hollywood for Paramount, the same studio that had made The Mountain, allowed Kate and Tracy to be together (although they still maintained separate domiciles). Apart from this advantage, Kate liked the screenplay, adapted by the playwright himself, and especially loved the comfort of playing a role that, except for one dress, permitted her to wear pants or a cotton shirt dress throughout.

  Happily for Kate, Joseph Anthony,* who had directed the play of The Rainmaker, was hired by Paramount to direct the film version. Anthony had had a long distinguished career as a stage director but had never directed a film before. He had also had a prestigious if eclectic background as a screenwriter, playwright, actor (theater and films) and premier dancer with Agnes DeMille. Consequently, The Rainmaker took on a balletic as well as a bal-ladic quality. Never had Kate moved so well as under Anthony’s graceful direction. Her mannered movements and cracked voice were smoothed into a swell of loneliness that, when it erupts at the climax of the film, has great impact. “Overactive” actresses distressed Anthony. “Don’t just do something,” he once shouted at a leading lady in one of his plays. “Stand there!” Kate’s performance was the most restrained of her career; and it gave her scenes with Lancaster, as the swaggering pitchman, a startling force. Nonetheless, she never fully captured the sound and manners of a farm woman of limited formal education. Since she had failed so badly years before in Spitfire with a country accent, either she or Anthony made the decision that she would simply tone down her own airy vocal intonations. It apparently worked, for Kate won her seventh Oscar nomination for her performance.†

  The Rainmaker was finished shortly before Christmas, 1955, and Tracy accompanied Kate to Fenwick for the holidays. The family now accepted the fact that Tracy and Kate would probably never marry. They never felt the same closeness for him as they had (and still felt) for Luddy. Some competitiveness existed between Tracy and Dr. Hepburn. In fact, the two men were too similar in many ways to like each other and both resented the other’s power over Kate.

  Leland Hayward was currently married to Slim Hawks, former model and ex-wife of film director Howard Hawks. Kate seldom saw Hayward and had been out of touch with him throughout most of the 1940s and early 1950s (although Hayward and Dr. Hepburn kept up a vigorous correspondence regarding Kate’s early film earnings, which still came through Hayward’s office). However, their paths were once again to cross.

  Hayward, now a producer,* had acquired the film rights to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, published that same year. From the start, Hayward was convinced Tracy was the only actor to play the Old Man. Kate, after her experience with The African Queen, realized the difficulty of shooting a film in primitive locations, all the more so if the action was to take place in a small boat on rough water. She conveyed her fears to Tracy, whose unstable health promised to make such a precarious venture even more of an ordeal. Hayward had his work cut out for him. He had to persuade Kate and Tracy that the role was one Tracy should play; he had to overcome Hemingway’s personal doubts that his masterful short novel (which was to help him win the Nobel Prize that year) could make a film; and he had to persuade a film company that a movie about an old man and a boy (Cubans at that) fishing for marlin would be of any interest to moviegoers.

  To soften the public and prove the commercial value of The Old Man and the Sea. Hayward had proposed that Tracy and a child actor should first read aloud from the book in a series of one-night stands across the country. Hemingway had approved the idea in principle, but Tracy refused to subject himself to the ardors of such a tour. Not to be daunted, Hayward then came up with an alternative scheme. The film would be made as a documentary using “local people on a local ocean with a local boat” and Tracy would then only have to narrate. Tracy found this approach more to his liking and agreed to make the film. By the spring of 1955, with Tracy’s name inked to a contract, Hayward managed to gain financing from Warner Brothers, whom he told that Tracy would play the Old Man. Tracy felt that Hayward had used him badly and wanted to back out; but Hayward, still the old charming flimflam man, talked him into visiting Hemingway before he made any final decision.

  Kate, at this time, had been preparing for the Australian tour; and Tracy and the Haywards flew to Havana, where they were then driven to th
e Finca, Mary and Ernest Hemingway’s home. Tracy, who was within a few weeks of starting the ill-fated Tribute to a Bad Man, was on the wagon so diligently that Hemingway thought he was a teetotaler. Hemingway, “browned to a colour he called ‘Indio Tostado,’” was in an especially happy mood as he accompanied Tracy to the nearby small port of Cojimar, originally planned as the location for The Old Man and the Sea. Tracy even had the good fortune to see old Anselmo Hernandez (the fisherman whom Hemingway had used as his model for the Old Man) asleep in his shack after having fished all through the previous night. Tracy endeared himself to Hemingway by rising at six-thirty each morning while the Haywards slept until noon.

  Back in California, with Kate now in Australia, Tracy slipped back off the wagon. After he had been fired from Bad Man, Warner Brothers, who had Peter Viertel working on a screenplay of The Old Man and the Sea, grew very nervous.