by Anne Edwards
In January, 1956, Kate flew to London to film The Iron Petticoat at Pinewood Studios, with Bob Hope* as her unlikely co-star. Tracy accompanied her (although the press was not aware of this). Born in Eltham, Hope had left England as a child and viewed this—his first return as a star to his native land—as reason enough for accepting a straight man’s role opposite a performer of Kate’s magnitude. Kate played Captain Vinka Kovelenko of the Russian Air Force, assigned to an American base in Germany.
The Iron Petticoat (originally titled Not For Money) was very close to being a remake of the Greta Garbo-Melvyn Douglas 1939 comedy, Ninotchka, which succeeded where its imitation would fail. While Garbo was given full rein in the role of the Russian officer who becomes Americanized, Hope arrived with an entourage of gag writers who immediately began rewriting the script to tip the film in his favor. Kate’s role began to shrink so that very soon she appeared to be playing straight man to Hope.
Ben Hecht, author of the original story, not only pulled out but asked for his name to be removed from the credits.* Hope’s writers now took over completely, and the film began to play like Hope and Crosby on the road to Moscow. Finally, Kate’s best scenes (according to Hecht in an open letter published in The Hollywood Reporter) were “blow-torched out of the film.”
An air of hostility enveloped the set; and to add to Kate’s problems, her eyes were giving her trouble, tearing badly, burning and itching, still the result of the polluted bath she had taken in the Grand Canal for Summertime. “I used to get by in films on my eyes and my teeth,” she told the Evening Standard reporter, Thomas Wiseman (who had called her the “Sphinx in slacks”). “For this film I think I might have to manage on my teeth.” Tracy was restless; but then the Kanins arrived to help occupy his days, and he soon became the old, sharp Tracy, warm and fun to be with.
Being trapped in a film that promised disaster did not stop Kate from doing her best. Nor did she allow Hope’s gagman style to alter her commitment to her role as written. The director, Ralph Thomas,† sorely inexperienced at that time to deal with an ego the size of Hope’s, was grateful for Kate’s support and cooperation. “She never lost her spirit,” he recalled, “but it was very difficult for her to perform with someone whose stock in trade was telling funny stories.”
The Iron Petticoat was indeed a disaster, more so in the final analysis for Hope than for Kate, who at least looked the part of a Soviet pilot and played it impressively, whereas Hope, as one critic wrote, resorted “to the cheap tricks that in recent years have made many movie goers give up Hope.”
Kate and Tracy flew to Havana shortly after The Iron Petticoat was completed. The Old Man and the Sea was now scheduled for late April, 1956, with Fred Zinnemann* as director. They were put up in a rambling, fourteen-room villa off the coast of Cuba with a full crew of servants.
Originally the plan had been to use a second unit to shoot all the scenes of the Old Man and the giant marlin at Cojímar, hiring a double for Tracy. This had not worked out because the marlin in the area had not been large enough to satisfy the requirements of the script, which called for a fish weighing one thousand pounds. Also, Zinnemann felt a double could be recognized and would spoil the realism he wanted to achieve. Additionally, Hemingway now had second thoughts about Tracy, who he felt had put on so much weight that he looked “too fat and rich” for the role. Tracy had, indeed, gained about thirty pounds since he had stopped drinking. To Kate’s despair, Tracy, in Havana, unhappy about having committed himself to the film, hating what he saw as Zinnemann’s plodding, condescending attitude, and fearing the difficulties before him, began to drink again. Rumors of his disruptive behavior in several of Havana’s bars, linking Kate with him, traveled back to Hollywood, where Jack Warner was duly alarmed. Hemingway was so upset that he wryly remarked that he “hoped to get through the Spring without killing anyone, himself included.”
Zinnemann shot some footage of Tracy and the young boy, Felipe Pazos, at the studio in Havana in preparation for their location work. Hayward and Hemingway did not feel he had caught what they wanted, and Zinnemann was fired and The Old Man and the Sea was once again in limbo. This left Tracy and Kate some unexpected free time, and they returned to California having decided to do a film together.
They chose William Marchant’s The Desk Set, a slight Broadway comedy “about the milder terrors of technological unemployment,” which had been successful in 1955. In order to accommodate two stars, the screenwriters† had built up Tracy’s role and expanded the story until “it almost burst at the seams.” The only thing that made the film tolerable and sometimes amusing for viewers was the occasion of Tracy and Hepburn being together again for the first time in five years. Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that “they lope through this trifling charade like a couple of old timers, who enjoy reminiscing with simple routines. Mr. Tracy is masculine and stubborn, Miss Hepburn is feminine and glib. The play is inconsequential.”
The film cast Kate as Bunny Watson, head of a major television network’s reference library and capable of answering or locating in a matter of minutes any question put to her. Tracy is an engineer who has invented “Emmy,” an electronic brain that the network plans to install. Bunny and the girls in her office* fear they are soon to be replaced. Tracy’s job as the inventor, Richard Sumner, is to prove to Bunny that Emmy will simply leave her more time for research and him.
One reason Kate had been keen on making the film was that she had been told that it would be shot in New York. However, Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio responsible for The Desk Set, refused to spend the additional money that location work required. Production took place in Hollywood. In the end this proved beneficial. The warmth and casual life in California restored Tracy to an even keel so that he could cope with the strenuous work on The Old Man and the Sea, which went into production in August with John Sturges† replacing Zinnemann.
After an abortive session back in Cuba, during which tropical storms made shooting impossible, the company with Tracy, Kate by his side, returned to California, where most of The Old Man and the Sea was to be shot at the Warner Brothers studios in Burbank. A tank filled with 750,000 gallons of water was built to simulate an ocean and stocked with artificial marlin the size of Hemingway’s fisherman’s fantasy.‡
The year 1957 was not an easy one for Kate and Tracy. It had begun with the news that Humphrey Bogart was terminally ill with cancer. They had their last visit with him on a Saturday night. Bogart, emaciated and in great pain, still managed to smile and joke. After a half hour by his bedside, Kate stood up and leaned over and kissed him. Tracy took his hand. “Goodbye, Spence,” Bogart said. Kate was startled. Bogart never said “goodbye,” always “good night” or “see you.” They left Bacall at the door of his bedroom. Then Tracy turned to Kate and said, “Bogie’s going to die.” In fact, he lapsed into a coma the next day and was dead twenty-four hours later.
Both Kate and Tracy were conscious of their ages now. Kate was fifty, but looking better than she had since The African Queen. Tracy, his hair snow white, his face creased with lines, his body paunchy, appeared much older than fifty-seven. It did not help either of their egos that the reviews of The Desk Set referred to them as “getting on.” Tracy spoke about retirement, but Kate would not hear of it; and when no films she liked came her way, she contracted to appear in two productions of the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, as Portia in The Merchant of Venice* (the role she had played on the Australian tour) and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. She arrived in Stratford late in June; and although she had been offered a number of charming houses, she chose instead Lawrence Langner’s broken-down red fisherman’s shack built on stilts out over the Housatonic River, whose rising tides sometimes lapped into the screened-in porch where she slept. The house had once belonged to a woman who sold bait and “People,” she said, pleased, “kept coming to ask if I had any worms. I’d say, ‘Sorry not today. Would you like some coffee?’” Phyllis W
ilbourn occupied a room with a local family across the road. Kate swam every morning in the chilly waters of the Housatonic and used her afternoon break to speed up and down the river in a red outboard motorboat, sometimes going seventy miles an hour “getting drenched by the water and revelling in it.”
Rehearsals for The Merchant of Venice went comparatively smoothly. Since Portia and Shylock never appear onstage together except for their final confrontation in court, Kate rehearsed separately from Morris Carnovsky, one of the theater’s most distinguished performers,* who played Shylock. Carnovsky brought to the role a brilliant poignancy that seemed a new interpretation and certainly was poles apart from Robert Helpmann’s baroque, stylized portrayal, which had colored the Australian production. Perhaps because of the separate rehearsals, Kate played her final scene with Carnovsky as though the two characters had wandered in from other productions—Carnovsky being realistic and Kate stylized. Somehow the discrepancy did not detract from Carnovsky’s performance, of which critic John Gassner crowed: “If there was a better Shylock than Carnovsky’s in the entire stage history of The Merchant of Venice, it is not apparent to me from my personal experience or my reading. He has rendered him a completely comprehensible man, capable of wringing a sympathy that Shakespeare, writing in the time he did, could hardly have intended . . . and when Shylock finally leaves the court, he is an unforgettable picture of a human made small by his own malevolence.” Carnovsky’s dazzling performance served only to discredit Kate’s own approach. Walter Kerr at The New York Times commented, “Miss Hepburn is a highly giddy adolescent who has been reading far too many novels. . . . I wish I knew what she had in mind for Shakespeare’s quick-witted maiden.”
Kate took her generally bad notices in stride, having received worse in her life, although she did not feel the reviews were justified. Her interpretation of Portia had not been altered since her appearance with the Old Vic in Australia. Despite the reviews, her contribution to the success of the season was enormous. As always outside New York, many in the audience came just to see Katharine Hepburn, movie star. During one performance, a fan stood up and took a flash photograph. Kate stopped center stage and faced the audience:
“There will be no more of that or we won’t go on,” she said, her booming voice met with shocked and silent surprise. She waited a few moments and then went back into her scene. When criticized for interrupting the flow of the play, Kate replied with a laugh, “Well I guess I would have been a great school principal.”
As Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing she had as her co-star Alfred Drake,* one of the great actors of the musical stage. During early rehearsals, John Houseman,† artistic director of the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre, recognized that his company was in danger of being split by the overwhelming egos of his two major players. Drake’s habit, whenever possible, was to extend his romantic stage association with his current leading lady into real life. “I am sure that he cherished no serious hope of adding Miss Hepburn to his conquests,” Houseman said, “but he did entertain visions of a gallant, glamorous stage relationship with his fellow star.”
Kate, however, found Drake a boor; and a terrific contest of wills—and spite—followed. She mocked and provoked him backstage whenever she could. Finally, her stinging assaults (labeled by Drake “unfeminine and unprofessional”) made their way onstage. Drake’s Benedick, the pompous wooer, was too close to reality for Kate to ignore. In one rehearsal her reading of her lines became so outrageously pointed that Drake was thrown off-balance and had to stop. Kate laughed uproariously at him before the entire company, which remained solemn and silent. Drake stormed off.
After this episode, Houseman hurried first to Kate’s dressing room, where he found her “weary but exhilarated—like an athlete after a sports contest in which she felt herself the winner.” When he went to Drake’s room, Kate’s co-star handed Houseman his resignation from the cast. “I reminded him that he had a contract, he declared that he refused to work with the bitch.” Houseman finally managed to convince Kate to temper her conduct, and he brought a kind of peace between them that would allow a professional relationship to exist.
Houseman claims that Kate had learned, “. . . at the knee of Constance Collier who had been her coach for many years—that stardom is achieved . . . above all, through the bravura that an audience comes to expect from its favorite performers. In every star role there are one or more opportunities for such peaks. . . . In Merchant [inserting her own interpretation of a scene that called for her to enter quietly] . . . a Chinese bungalow rolls silently forward in the dimlit stage. It had barely come to a stop when the door bursts open and [Kate] appears in the brilliantly lit portal. .. . Ravishing to look at in her undernourished way, she swoops around the stage, and, at last, falls into a pool of satin on the floor—to rapturous applause. In Much Ado [she] selected [a scene] in which the frivolous Beatrice turns suddenly serious and demands of her lover that he kill . . . her cousin’s betrayer. Kate played it as grand tragedy—raging, kicking hassocks around, and howling like a banshee. It was hysterical, insincere, embarrassing and utterly unbelievable, but it shook up the audience and confirmed her star status.”
Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times found Much Ado “not only shrewd but fresh and joyous and admirably suited to the personality of our leading lady.” Obviously Kate’s star turn had done her no harm, nor had her contest with Drake, for Atkinson added, “Miss Hepburn is an extraordinary star, an actress who commands an audience with glamor and personal magnetism. She is beautiful, debonair, piquant, with a modern personality. Her lovely-looking and humorous-minded Beatrice is one of her best characterizations, and the Benedick who has been snared into loving this sharp-tongued hoyden is one of Mr. Drake’s finest jobs.” . . . .
Kate’s animosity toward Drake is easy to understand. Since her confrontation with John Barrymore during the filming of A Bill of Divorcement, she had not had to deal with the personal humiliation of fending off a co-star’s advances. For years the degree of her stardom and the caliber of her leading men (and producers and directors) had protected her from such belittling experiences. By the time she appeared with Drake, she had assumed her age, her reputation and the knowledge of her love for Tracy would inhibit such a display.
From the beginning of the Stratford engagement, she spoke openly about Tracy “always with a mingling of loyalty, tenderness and admiration.” Several times that summer “she joyfully announced his imminent arrival, then reported that he had been detained or prevented,” Houseman recalls. (Tracy was in Hollywood reshooting scenes for The Old Man and the Sea) “Finally, during Much Ado, the great day came when Kate, with a young girl’s enthusiasm, proclaimed that this time Spencer was really coming. His plane ticket was bought and all arrangements were made. On the evening of his arrival—carefully chosen as an Othello day (Kate did not appear in this play), she drove off alone, in a state of high excitement, that she made no attempt to conceal, to Idlewild [Kennedy Airport] to meet him. Soon after she had left there was a phone call from California. Somehow, on the way to Burbank, Spencer had got lost and missed his plane. He never did appear.”
Kate went on winter tour in Much Ado About Nothing with the American Festival Theatre. Bernard Gersten, who was executive stage manager of the company, drove with her from city to city, with Phyllis and the chauffeur seated in the backseat while Kate did most of the driving. She kept elaborate logs on their mileage; and if they came to a pretty wood, she would park and insist everyone get out with her and hike.
Gersten recalls that they ‘Traveled with trunkloads of food for picnics and with other necessities, including plants she’d been given and couldn’t bear to leave behind. Once, someone had apparently neglected to wrap a beautiful, delicate plant against the weather and when [we] opened the trunk [we] discovered it had given up the struggle against the cold. Miss Hepburn cried.”
Kate returned to Hollywood at the end of the season. Irene Selznick was in California, occupying the gues
t suite at George Cukor’s. This time the two women were not in the mood for sophomoric pursuits. Irene’s father, Louis B. Mayer, was dying of leukemia and she had come West to do whatever she could for him. Mayer was not permitted visitors; but Kate, at his request, went to see him at the hospital. Mayer was quite moved by the visit and told his daughter he was glad “they were such good friends.”
Mayer died in the spring of 1957. Tracy was ill and depressed, still talking about retirement. Kate persuaded him to accept the role of Frank Skeffington, a Boston-Irish politician (a dead ringer for Boston’s Mayor James M. Curley)*, in the screen adaptation of Edwin O’Connor’s best-selling novel The Last Hurrah. The film reunited both Tracy and Kate (as a bystander only) with John Ford. Ford had directed Tracy’s first film, Up the River, in 1930, and Kate had not seen him since the end of their affair in 1936. The trials of The Old Man and the Sea had depleted Tracy’s energy, and she happily joined him at Columbia Studios (where she had filmed Holiday) to make sure he took care of himself.
The atmosphere on the set was high-spirited. Besides Ford, most of Tracy’s Irish friends, his former Wednesday night drinking circle, were in the cast—Pat O’Brien, James Gleason, Frank McHugh, Ed Brophy and Wallace Ford. A good deal older now, none of the men, including Ford, was the hard drinker of the past. Yet Kate’s vigilance could well have been prompted by a fear that any one of them might have encouraged the others to fall off the wagon.
Production began early in 1958. As it progressed, Kate saw the life and artistry return to Tracy. He told an interviewer, “I’ve joked about retiring but this could be the picture. I’m superstitious—you know that’s part of being Irish—and I’m back with John Ford again. . . . I feel this is the proper place for me to end. Even the title is prophetic.”
Kate had been right about The Last Hurrah. Released in the fall of 1958 only two weeks after The Old Man and the Sea, it counteracted the harsh reviews of the latter.† The film was an unqualified success; and Tracy, far from retiring, was suddenly catapulted into becoming “the grand old man of films.”