Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  Footnotes

  * Arthur Laurents (1918– ) had many of his play scripts turned into films, among them West Side Story (1961) and Gypsy (1962). He also wrote screenplays for The Snake Pit (1948), Anastasia (1956) and The Turning Point (1977), as well as adapting his book The Way We Were (1973).

  † Rossano Brazzi (1916– ) had been in Italian films for many years when, in954, he went to the United States and made Three Coins in the Fountain and The Barefoot Contessa. In Summertime, Brazzi was at the height of his fame as a romantic leading man.

  ‡ Vincent Korda (1897-1979), brother of film directors Alexander and Zolton Korda, father of writer and publishing executive Michael Korda. Vincent Korda, a Hungarian who lived most of his adult life in Great Britain, was a talented art director. He often worked on his brothers’ films, but Summertime was a production of independent producer Ilya Lopart. Michael Korda was visiting his father in Venice when the scene in which Hepburn fell into the canal was shot.

  * Frances Robinson-Duff had died in 1951.

  † Irene Papas (1926– ) is one of Greece’s finest tragediennes. Tribute to a Bad Man (1956) was her first American film. Her most vivid performances have been as Antiogone (1960), Electra (1962), and opposite Anthony Quinn in Zorba, the Greek (1964). In 1971, Papas co-starred (as Helen of Troy) with Hepburn in The Trojan Women.

  * Robert Wise (1914– ) was known from 1944 to 1954 principally as a director of horror and mystery films. Then he directed Executive Suite (1954) and shortly after transferred his skills to sleek commercial musicals like West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965) and Star! (1968).

  † Howard Strickland had been largely responsible for Metro’s publicity for Gone With the Wind. He remained at the studio through many executive changes,

  ‡ James Cagney replaced Tracy in Tribute to a Bad Man. He was shorter by three inches than Tracy; and Papas towered ludicrously over him in the film, which was not successful.

  * Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) was Tracy’s last film for Metro. John O’Hara in Collier’s (July 1955) called the film “one of the finest motion pictures ever made.” Compared endlessly to High Noon by reviewers, Black Rock came out the unanimous winner and Tracy’s performance lauded as “one of the best you’ll ever see on film.” (O’Hara in Collier’s)

  * The Mountain (1956) was adapted from a Henri Troyat novel.

  * Burt Lancaster (1913– ). His screen debut in the role of Swede in an adaptation of Hemingway’s short story The Killers (1946) immediately made him a star. He won an Academy Award for Elmer Gantry (1960), was nominated for Atlantic City (1982), and won the Venice Festival Award for his performance in Bird Man of Alcatraz (1962). In 1961, he appeared with Tracy in Judgement in Nuremberg.

  * Joseph Anthony (1912– ) directed such well-received plays as The Most HappyFella (1956), The Best Man (1960), Under the Yum Yum Tree (1960), Rhinoceros (1961), Mary, Mary (1961), and the musical version of The Rainmaker—110 in the Shade (1963). He made very few films and of them only The Rainmaker won even moderate success.

  † Hepburn at that time had been previously nominated as Best Actress for Morning Glory (1933), Alice Adams (1935), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Woman of the Year (1942), The African Queen (1951) and Summertime (1955), and had won the award for her first nomination. She was nominated again for The Rainmaker, but Ingrid Bergman won Best Actress of 1956 for Anastasia.

  * Leland Hayward produced such theater hits as South Pacific, Oklahoma!, Call Me Madam and Mister Roberts, and had assisted in their transfer to film.

  * Bob Hope (1903– ), certainly one of the great comedians of the twentieth cen tury. He is memorable for his series of Road films with Bing Crosby, his radio show and television specials and his constant touring to bring entertainment to overseas troops during both peace and war.

  * No screenplay credit is given on The Iron Petticoat. The original story is credited to Harry Saltzman, co-producer of this film and of eight James Bond films. The Iron Petticoat was released in England in July, 1956, but was not shown in the United States until late December of the same year.

  † Ralph Thomas (1915– ), British director best known for Doctor in the House and its several sequels.

  * Fred Zinnemann (1907– ) was nominated for an Academy Award for BestDirector for High Noon (1952) and won it for From Here to Eternity (1953) and A Man for All Seasons (1966).

  † Henry (1912– ) and Phoebe (1914-1971) Ephron wrote the screenplay of The Desk Set. They always worked as collaborators and had first gained recognition in the theater with Three’s a Family (1943). They had a reputation for lighthearted comedy but were never as polished or sophisticated as the Kanins.

  * The ladies are Dina Merrill (1925– ), Joan Blondell (1909-1979) and Sue Randall (1935-1984).

  † John Sturges (1911– ) had directed Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (1954). He hit the peak of his success with The Magnificent Seven (1960).

  ‡ The final cut of The Old Man and the Sea is made up of footage filmed by several location units; background shots include the Cuban coast and Peru’s Capo Blanco, Nassau and Colombia. Footage was also purchased from Alfred Cassell, a Houston sportsman, and from a Wait Disney collection. Scenic shots of sky and sea werefilmed in June, 1957, in Hawaii, and five weeks were spent at Warners using the tank.

  * Hepburn made the inclusion of The Merchant of Venice a condition for her appearance with the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre. The request was awkward, for the horrors of the Holocaust had rigidly excluded the play from the American theater as anti-Semitic. The ASFT placed a questionnaire in their program listing eight possible Shakespearean productions. To everyone’s amazement The Merchant of Venice was chosen number one above Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hepburn’s demand was therefore met.

  * Morris Carnovsky (1898– ) had been blacklisted in Hollywood by HUAC since 1951. Besides his fine character portrayals in films, his theater appearances were always well-received.

  * Alfred Drake (1914– ) has been mainly a theater performer. He starred as Guriy in Oklahoma! in 1943. In 1946, he played Macheath in Beggar’s Holiday, and starred in Kiss Me, Kate (1948) and Kismet (1953). He also played Othello at the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford in the summer of 1957.

  † John Houseman (1902– ), born in Romania, became the perfect image of anupper-class American. A man for all seasons, he has had success in films and theater as an actor, producer and director. As well as being artistic director of ASFT, he was a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. In 1973 he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in The Paper Chase, a role he re-created on television. As a writer he was co-author of the story of Citizen Kane (1941) and the screenplay of Jane Eyre (1944) and has written three autobiographical volumes: Run-Through (1973), Front and Center (1979) and Final Dress (1983), which are among the most intelligent and revealing books of theater memoirs. Houseman had known Hepburn for years. He had been in the audience when she appeared at the Berkshire Playhouse, and “watched a very young, inexperienced girl with a wide mouth, wonderful bones and an impossible voice take over the stage.” They had met many times, and Houseman had worked with Hepburn in radio on the Mercury Theatre of the Air when she played opposite Joseph Cotten in A Farewell to Arms.

  * Curley later sued Columbia Studios unsuccessfully on the grounds of invasion of privacy.

  † Reviewers criticized Tracy for not even attempting the Old Man’s Cuban accent. In fact, Tracy was extremely good with accents and had used a Portuguese one for Captains Courageous to good effect.

  CHAPTER

  22

  When Kate agreed to play Violet Venable in the film version of Suddenly Last Summer, Tennessee Williams’s Gothic horror story of homosexual martyrdom in New Orleans, she thought the film would be made in Hollywood. After The Last Hurrah, Tracy suffered severe breathing problems that turned out to be emphysema, and she did not want to be separated from him. Sam Spiegel’s decision, however, wa
s to produce Suddenly Last Summer in England, where production costs were considerably less than in the United States, even if an entire American cast had to be sent over to make a film.

  By the end of the fifties, the major Hollywood studios were in decline, their great resources depleted. Foreign capital was almost a requisite for getting a film produced, and stories that could not be filmed abroad or in Mexico were genteelly postponed. Spiegel, as good a “table-stakes player” as ever, refused to let the Southern background of Suddenly hinder his going ahead.

  Kate had not only been conned into making a film on location, but the story, which she had been assured would not be as sensational as the play, had turned out to be even more lurid. For a time she considered backing out, but in the end she honored her contractual commitment. She left for London with Phyllis in June, 1959. Tracy was unable to fly until his condition improved. Instead of staying in a hotel, Kate moved into a country cottage not far from Shepperton Studios, where the film was to be shot. This gave her a garden to oversee in her off time and allowed her to bicycle to the nearby village whenever she could.

  The role of Violet Venable was one Kate loathed from the start. Why she accepted the part in view of her disgust of the shocking sentiments she had to express in it can only be answered by her respect for Tennessee Williams as a great writer and poet and her mutual regard for the high caliber director, cast and technicians whom Spiegel had assembled.

  Suddenly Last Summer had premiered in January, 1958, as one half of the double bill with Garden District, and had immediately become “the most talked about off-Broadway production of the 1957-58 season.” The play dealt with such film taboos as “an oedipal relationship, homosexuality, psychosurgery, and cannibalism.” Suddenly, during a summer in North Africa, Sebastian Venable, an American poet and son of the very rich and possessive Violet Venable of New Orleans, dies, supposedly of a heart attack, but the death certificate mentions that the body “was somewhat damaged.” Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor), Mrs. Venable’s niece and Sebastian’s cousin, who had been in North Africa with him, returns in a terrible mental state, incoherently speaking of vile acts and insinuating Sebastian’s body had been ravaged. Mrs. Venable, desperate to protect her son’s name, attempts to bribe Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift), a psychosurgeon, into performing a lobotomy on her niece to render her mentally incompetent. The doctor, in love with Catherine, instead administers a truth serum to her, helping her to overcome her amnesia and reveal in detail the psychotic manner in which Sebastian had used first his mother (until her beauty faded), and then Catherine, to lure young men for his homosexual needs. Finally, she breaks down and explains how his body had been dismembered and partially devoured by a group of “starving Spanish urchins, some of whom Sebastian had courted.”*

  Once again Kate was to work with Joe Mankiewicz as her director. Their relationship had not been stormy during the making of either The Philadelphia Story or Woman of the Year. An engraved silver box and inscribed dictionaries presented to him by Kate on the completion of those films attest to amicable terms between them. But Mankiewicz had committed what Kate considered an unforgivable betrayal. In 1950, on its post-Broadway tour, the production of As You Like It, starring Kate, came to the old Biltmore Theatre in Los Angeles. Kate left a pair of tickets at the box office for Mankiewicz and asked that he come backstage after the performance. Mankiewicz had just bought a magazine story from Cosmopolitan called The Wisdom of Eve and was struggling with the screenplay, but he interrupted his work to attend. After the play, he went backstage and was kept waiting at length with Kate’s other visitors until she had had sufficient time “to disguise her beauty” by smearing her face with cold cream before receiving her guests. She then talked nonstop as people wafted in and out of her dressing room while an uncomfortable Tracy poured himself a drink—an act which did not go unnoticed by Kate. Mankiewicz wrote the scene almost identically as it had occurred into his script, now titled All About Eve, with Margo Chan-ning (played by Bette Davis in the film) doing a fair imitation of Kate. Kate found this an invasion of her privacy, and she had made a point of avoiding Mankiewicz from the time of All About Eve’s release until Suddenly. When Spiegel had first come to Kate with the property, he had said that George Cukor was his choice for director. Cukor, however, was contracted to do Let’s Make Love with Marilyn Monroe, and Kate had been caught in one of Spiegel’s old-time flimflams.*

  She and Mankiewicz were locked in battle from the first day on the set. Kate believed the only way to play such an unsympathetic character was as insane, but Mankiewicz would not hear of it. “Kate wanted very much to direct herself,” Mankiewicz explained. “This is a battle I don’t think a director can ever afford to lose. . . . I insisted on the performance being played my way.”

  Kate’s first scene was Violet Venable’s entrance as she descends in a “gilded, ornately carved elevator cage nestled between two white metal palm poles,” to meet the young doctor she intends to bribe. Kate’s idea was for her to kick the gate open “with a great flourish” to introduce a kind of irrationality and madness in the character. Mankiewicz did not agree and wanted her to confine her behavior to “haughty eccentricity.” At an impasse, Man kiewicz consented to shoot the scene both Kate’s way and his before deciding which one to retain, but he never intended to use her version.

  The dialogue (which Williams felt contained some of his best writing) so repelled Kate that at times she was certain she could not speak it. Before shooting one difficult scene, she took Man-kiewicz aside to tell him, “If you only knew what it means to me when I have to say those things!”

  Mankiewicz was not sympathetic. “That’s the play and that’s what we have to do,” he told her, confiding to others that since she had played Shakespeare she thought of herself as the grande dame of the theater. But despite the confrontation with Kate, Montgomery Clift was Mankiewicz’s greatest trial.*

  Mankiewicz had had a hard enough time in the past dealing with heavy drinkers like Gable and Tracy, but they at least had “worked diligently with the star system, they were big moneymakers for their studios, superstars who kept their grief off the set.” Tracy had caused film delays and pushed up budget costs, but he had never come onto a set drunk or unprepared for the scene to be shot. Clift was “a crazy drunk, a pillhead, confused, quarrelsome . . . no longer a hot property—simply a bad risk,” and Mankiewicz was saddled with him to appease his star—Elizabeth Taylor.† (For the first time since her film career began, Kate was supporting another woman star.) Taylor’s life was in tremendous chaos. Her third husband, Mike Todd, had been killed in an air crash the previous year; and her current marriage to Eddie Fisher, the singer, had brought headlines, calling her a home-wrecker. (Fisher had been married to actress Debbie Reynolds.) Fisher was with her on the set (which was closed to reporters) and they seemed very much in love, although there were rumors that Taylor was having an affair with political columnist Max Lerner. To complicate matters, Mankiewicz was—if not in love with Taylor—at least badly smitten, feelings that added to his stress.* Taylor’s language was obscene both in the script and on the set, and Mankiewicz had to have Fisher talk to her about her constant use of profanity, which terribly offended the British crew. If, because of Taylor, Clift had been cast as the doctor, it was also because of Taylor that he had not been replaced when good sense warned Mankiewicz to do so.

  Clift, a homosexual, had been a close friend of Taylor’s since 1951 when they had made A Place in the Sun together, a friendship that had been consolidated in 1957 when they co-starred in Rain-tree County. During the filming of that movie, Clift almost lost his life in an automobile accident and had to have extensive plastic surgery on his face, one side of which still had little movement. The accident was responsible for giving his speech a curious slur. That he could act at all was a miracle. But, in fact, these impediments, plus a scar from the surgery, gave his screen presence “added strength and pathos.” Difficult before his injuries, Clift had now turned
to drugs and liquor to ease the pain. Taylor apparently felt that he needed the role as Dr. Cukrowicz to maintain his visibility. After Spiegel saw the first rushes, he told Taylor he would have “to get rid of him.” Taylor snapped, “Over my dead body.” Clift remained.

  Kate now became involved with Clift’s problems. In pain a lot, “he washed down his codeine pills with brandy” and could not remember his lines. “He used to have the most peculiar expression on his face,” Kate recalled. “Whenever we’d shoot a scene big beads of sweat would pop out on his forehead.” She convinced him to spend a weekend with her at her country cottage and tried to talk some sense into him there, but “none of my arguments,” she said, “did any good. I thought he was weak. Simpatico but weak.”

  Despite her protective attitude toward Clift, this one weekend was all the private time Kate gave him. She had little patience with people who did not at least try to help themselves, particularly those who did not appreciate her advice. (Tracy, after all, had gone off the wagon whenever she pressed hard enough.) Taylor and Mankiewicz worked desperately to keep Clift going. “I had all sorts of scenes with Monty,” Mankiewicz says, “scenes with me comforting him and his relying on me.” He had slept over several times at Mankiewicz’s hotel suite at the Dorchester (Taylor and Fisher also had a suite there), Mankiewicz having taken him home to sober him up the same way he had a drunken Tracy so many years before. But Clift “was in a bad shape” and passed out not only at the Dorchester but more publicly “in limousines conveying him and members of the company to several social functions.”

  Kate’s animosity toward Mankiewicz grew as filming progressed. Not only did she disagree with him over her interpretation of her character, she caught on early that by the use of camera technique Violet Venable was being twisted into an utterly repugnant character. Her fury was finally pushed to the limit when he and his cameraman, Jack Hildyard (who had photographed Kate in Summertime), devised a way to transform Mrs. Venable into an aged harridan without (they thought) Kate knowing what they were doing.