Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  Mankiewicz explains: “When [Mrs. Venable] spoke of her son we had her look as young and beautiful as was possible, which with Kate was then very possible [with the aid of diffusion lenses].* At the end I remember we shot her hands [first opening and later closing her son’s composition book from his fatal summer] after Catherine had told the truth. I wanted them to look like an old woman’s hands. Kate didn’t like that close-up nor the last one of her before she went to the elevator.† I wanted her suddenly to look old. In other words, the destruction of the legend about Sebastian, her son, destroyed her illusion of youth. I think Kate sensed what Jack and I were up to [that is, removing the diffusion lenses and making her lighting harsh] and she didn’t like what I was doing.”

  Mankiewicz’s biographer, Kenneth L. Geist, supposes that “Hepburn wanted to preserve the illusion of her screen beauty, and the comparison of her seamed and freckled hands and face juxtaposed with close-ups of the gorgeous Taylor is especially unflattering.* No doubt what he wrote is true, but Kate had never minded sacrificing appearance for performance and had hardly looked glamorous in The African Queen, where diffusion lenses were never used. She had an ego, of course, and vanity as well. No one could manage a career in theater and films without both; they more or less came with the territory. To be brazenly deceived was another matter, one of pride. Mankiewicz (and Hildyard too) had been guilty of duplicity, and never was she to forgive either man.

  When Mankiewicz had called the final “cut” on the film, Kate strode across the sound stage to him. “Are you absolutely sure you won’t need my services anymore?” she asked.

  “Yes, I am sure.”

  “Absolutely?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Then, in front of the shocked company, she leaned forward and spat straight into his eye, turned on her heel and marched directly into Sam Spiegel’s office, where she asked him the same question, to which Spiegel also replied, “Yes, I am sure.”

  “Absolutely?”

  “Absolutely.”

  And she spat in his eye as well.*

  “To the best of my knowledge she never saw the film,” Mankiewicz said. “People tell me that she refused to see it.” Kate’s close friends say she won’t even discuss Suddenly, her performance in it or Joe Mankiewicz. The subject is simply closed. But when questioned about the above incident, she commented, “When I disapprove of something, it’s the only thing I can think of to do. It’s a rather rude gesture, but at least it’s clear what you mean.”

  To Columbia’s pleasant surprise, Suddenly was more than the succès d’estime they had anticipated; it was also a resounding commercial success. And it had a strong impact on the future of films, opening the way for movies with more explicit sexual content and erasing most of the taboos that had been applied to films since their inception. Both Kate and Elizabeth Taylor were nominated for Best Actress* and were unanimously reviewed as having given outstanding performances. (Clift did not fare that well. One reviewer said: “[He] has little to do except to look pained and puzzled, as well he might.”)

  If Kate did not see the film, Tennessee Williams at least did and came away enchanted with her performance. “Kate is a playwright’s dream—a dream actress,” he told The New York Times shortly after the film’s release. “She makes dialogue sound better than it is by a matchless beauty and clarity of diction and by a fineness of intelligence and sensibility that illuminates every shade of a meaning in every line she speaks. She invests every scene—each bit—with the intuition of an artist born into her art. Of the women stars that belong to a generation preceding that of the method [acting], Katharine Hepburn impresses me as having least needed that school of performance in depth. Like Laurette Taylor before her, she seems to do by instinct what years of method training [have done] for her juniors. She is limited only by her ladylike voice and manner. Miss Hepburn could never play a tramp or a tenement housewife. No matter. There will always be parts for ladies and we need Kate Hepburn to play them.

  “I don’t think [she] was happy with the part of the poet’s mother in the screen version of Suddenly Last Summer—brilliantly constructed as the screen version by Gore Vidal is—it still made unfortunate concessions to the realism that Hollywood is often too afraid to discard—and so a short morality play in lyrical style was turned into a sensationally successful film that the public thinks was a literal study of such things as cannibalism, madness and sexual deviation. But I am certain Kate knew that what the drama was truly concerned with was all human confusion and its consequence.”

  Be this last the case or not, Kate was glad to return to Tracy and the States when Suddenly was finally finished. For nearly twenty years, Kate and Tracy had maintained their relationship protected from public gossip or censure. Around 1960 stories began appearing in the press coupling their names, but always in a dignified manner, Tracy usually being referred to as “Miss Hepburn’s longtime friend.” A mystique enveloped them. Everyone knew what a longtime friend implied. Still, seeing it in print did not convince filmgoers that Tracy and Hepburn had actually been engaged in an affair for all those years. Neither had ever played a steamy sex scene on screen or relied upon sex appeal to sell films. Their sex scenes were playful not passionate—bantering, nudging, any touching seeming to be unconscious—the kind of words and gestures usually associated with youth. Kate’s aloof manner, her prim appearance, the adrogynous way in which she dressed, all were a factor, as was Tracy’s father image, his growing reputation as the grand old man of films. People simply preferred to believe that Tracy and Hepburn were really and truly longtime friends, devoted, faithful to each other, and yet faithful to the tenets of Tracy’s religion and marriage vows. And perhaps that is the truth. No one but them will ever know.

  More important is the fact that Tracy was almost as steadying an influence on Kate as she was on him, and that she liked herself a good deal better for his involvement in her life. One friend remembers Kate as saying that Tracy was probably “the only man . . . man enough to counteract her individualistic femininity.” Another friend quoted her as saying, “To most men I’m a nuisance because I’m so busy I get to be a pest, but Spencer is so masculine that once in a while he rather smashes me down, and there’s something nice about me when I’m smashed down.”

  One of Tracy’s buddies said in 1960, “What would have happened to Spence if Kate hadn’t is a dark thought. He was thrashing about, unhappy, and she put his talent in focus so he could understand it. He’s a queer bird with his own way of doing things, and it took a brilliant girl just to begin to see inside him.” Kate added that “Spencer sees the ludicrous side to everything. That’s why the Irish have the miseries. They see themselves as clowns falling through life.”

  Misery was an emotion that, when alone, Tracy nurtured. He had had his share of it, his youthful struggle to be an actor, John’s deafness. But these had been overcome many years before. Two of his former lady friends claim he had problems of impotency, not surprising in a man who drank as much as he did. According to Larry Swindell, his biographer, he had a deep dislike of homosexuals and any form of perversion.* Yet, in a McCall’s article,† Gar-son Kanin claimed that Kate refused to acknowledge the existence of homosexuality at all, and that in a Paris hotel suite in 1961, he and Tracy described homosexual acts in laborious detail to Kate, “who maintained her firm disbelief in the existence of such ridiculous practices.” (Curiously, the magazine article is represented as an excerpt from Kanin’s subsequent memoir, Tracy and Hepburn [Viking Press, 1971], but it does not appear in the text of the book.) How Tracy could describe acts so supposedly offensive to him is as difficult to comprehend as Kate’s presumed refusal to believe homosexuality existed in the face of her many friendships (Noél Coward, to name just one) with self-proclaimed practicing homosexuals and the open manner in which all sexual matters were discussed in the Hepburn home during her youth.

  In terms of people, Kate liked only the proven, the familiar, those friends who recognized her as a pre
sence. Not sycophants either, but equals, or at least almost equals, otherwise their friendship meant nothing at all. She still loved intellectual debates, which never interested Tracy, but he liked to listen to her while she did all the talking. He would sit back reflectively and wait. Then, when the right opportunity presented itself, he would squash her with one rapier-sharp comment that usually had no connection with the topic under discussion. Kate perversely enjoyed this parry between them. Tracy’s harsh wit stimulated her. She also appeared to enjoy mothering him and doctoring him and administering to him.

  In the summer of 1960, with Tracy in better health, Kate returned to Stratford as Viola in Twelfth Night and as Cleopatra to Robert Ryan’s‡ Marc Antony in Antony and Cleopatra. John Houseman had left to accept a position with CBS on the West Coast, and Jack Landau had taken over as artistic director. Ryan had appeared with Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock and Kate very much respected his talent. He often was cast in the role of a hard, unbending hero or a psychopathic or vicious heavy, but in real life he possessed a quiet, strong personality and was committed to many liberal causes. Kate enjoyed long discussions with him and performed at her peak as Cleopatra, receiving her best stage reviews to date with the exception of The Philadelphia Story. She brought to the role a sensual quality that was quite surprising; and in the early scenes, costumed most provocatively, she became “a half-naked woman with a genuine capacity for enjoying the wanton, sporting pleasures of the bed.”

  Her Viola was not so well received. Once again she and Morris Carnovsky (as Feste) seemed to be performing in two different plays. But the accolades for her glowing beauty were especially soothing after her experience with Joe Mankiewicz. Walter Kerr, then on the New York Herald Tribune, noted, “Miss Hepburn has always been one of the most fetching creatures to have been bestowed upon our time, and fetching isn’t the half of it as the lady takes a stubborn, or a petulant, or a slightly fearful stance in her white ducks, brass buttoned jacket and sleek black boater.”

  Kate again stayed in Lawrence Langner’s old red cottage, swam early every morning as she had done during the 1957 season, and seemed to the members of the company to possess “boundless energy.” She truly loved playing the Shakespearean roles in repertory. The fact that her salary was $350 a week only added to her pleasure, because it signified her sincerity. She held on to the notion that Britain’s theater flourished in a way the American theater did not because England’s best performers kept repertory going.

  Asked by Newsweek reporter Calvin Tomkins if she had any ideas on the possibilities of an American—as distinct from a British—style of playing Shakespeare, she mused, “You’d have to take our greatest actor—who is he? Spencer Tracy, I’d imagine—and contrast him with their greatest—Larry [Olivier] or [John] Gielgud. There’s something about the great American actor that’s like a clipper ship in action, a sort of heart’s directness. Spencer has it. He could do Shylock or Lear, or Macbeth—we could do Macbeth together.”

  When asked about American playwrights, she said, “Tennessee Williams, now—he uses words brilliantly. But whose time is he writing about? Not mine, certainly. Williams gives us the middle-aged woman’s answer to sex—she can go ahead and sleep with her son [Suddenly Last Summer]. Or look at Lillian Heilman’s new play [Toys in the Attic]. All the characters are such jackasses. . . . Shakespeare took into consideration the violence, the waywardness of man, but he also gave him the sun and moon and stars, and his own dreams.”

  Tennessee Williams had asked her to star in the first production of his newest play, The Night of the Iguana, which he claimed he wrote with her in mind (although it is not clear which of the two main women characters she would have played).* Saying no to such a flattering request was not easy, especially since she would not have known that Williams used that ploy quite often in getting a well-known actress for one of his dramas. But Kate liked the subject matter of Iguana no better than that of Suddenly. Nor did she want to commit herself to what might possibly be a long New York run. Tracy was about to film Inherit the Wind for Stanley Kramer,† and she wanted to be available to travel with him.

  Kate greatly respected Kramer. Most of the time she sat in a corner of the set wearing a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up and khaki pants, her lap filled with knitting—a sweater for either Tracy or herself—glancing over the rims of her glasses at the scene being readied or shot. When she had an opinion she spoke out. Tracy had quit drinking and smoking, but his red hair was now pure white and his appearance portly. Kate said that “he was much too impatient for the time and place in which he found himself. His impatience generally displayed itself with agents and lawyers and publicity men and reporters and photographers and directors and the whole damned system.” Yet, though irritable and ill, “he stood under the hot lights and perspired through the extra takes and the technical nuisances.” When the cameraman, Ernest Laszlo, asked for another take, Tracy would stare back with disgust, but everyone knew he would repeat the scene.

  Inherit the Wind required little makeup, which greatly pleased Tracy. It meant that he and Kate had an extra hour before driving to the studio, where he could “breeze in ready for work with no nonsense.” Kramer says that “if a makeup man tried to powder-puff his forehead, Tracy would push him away and give him a look as though he were somebody he had just thrown up.”

  As always, Tracy was prepared for whatever scene was to be shot, had a prodigious memory and could not tolerate less professionalism in his co-stars. Fredric March,* whose wife, Florence Eldridge, was also in the film, found memorization more difficult. March (who had appeared with Kate years before in Mary of Scotland) mentioned to her that Tracy was a wizard at retaining long speeches. “It’s his concentration—his theatrical background you know,” she said.

  March, who, unlike Tracy, throughout his career had spent long periods of time on the stage, bowed to Kate and in a sarcastic voice replied, “Thank you, Mrs. Shakespeare.”

  As the film progressed, the two men became highly competitive. March had a straw fan he used as a prop in many of his scenes; and when Tracy launched into an oration (for his role as the lawyer Clarence Darrow), March would fan himself vigorously. Kramer said, “Tracy had no props, but he got even. He sat behind March and picked his nose during a three-and-one-half minute summation [of March’s as the prosecuting attorney, Matthew Horrison Brady].”

  Tracy’s films always started with a closed set, and Inherit the Wind was no exception. Kramer says, “Tracy didn’t want a bunch of idiots clambering all over the place. One week later it was like Las Vegas. Everybody was there to see him; bookies, ball players, fighters and press, along with a million actors just there to watch.” No one was in greater awe of him than Kramer himself. Another co-star in the film, Gene Kelly,† admitted to Kramer, “I finally stepped out of my class. I just can’t keep up with [Tracy].” Kramer confesses, “I was afraid to say, ‘Spencer you’re a great actor.’ He’d only say, ‘Now what the hell kind of thing is that to come out with?’ He wanted to know it; he needed to know it. But, he didn’t want you to say it, just think it.” Kramer, who by this time had worked with some of the most respected actors in Hollywood—Brando, Cooper and Bogart included—says that Tracy “thought and listened better than anyone in the history of motion pictures. A silent close-up of Spencer Tracy said it all.”

  The ambience of every Tracy set was that of adulation for him above and apart from any other performer. Whatever his image might be to the movie-going public, to his peers Tracy was the consummate film performer. He seemed instinctively to add to the depth of every scene with a look or a nuance that they had not imagined. If Zinnemann and Sturges on The Old Man and the Sea had not left him to his own devices, his performance might have been a far different one. But few directors had the temerity to lock horns with Tracy over an interpretation, because he so seldom was proven wrong.

  To understand Kate’s own veneration of his talent, one has to grasp the impact his acting had upon her. Though she m
ight have made comments to Kramer, they never were about Tracy or his performance. She believed him to be a great artist, deserving of homage, respect and—service. And when he signed next to make The Devil at Four O’Clock, which was to be filmed mainly in Hawaii, she put aside all other considerations and went with him. Tracy’s co-star was Frank Sinatra.* “Nobody at Metro ever had the financial power Frank Sinatra has today,” Tracy commented, adding that his own days as “a box-office favorite were over” as he shrugged and looked quizzical from under his brows, as if hoping for a contradiction.

  Sinatra called Tracy “the Gray Fox” and had agreed to Tracy’s receiving first billing, emphasizing that he would give the top spot only to Tracy, “the greatest actor in Hollywood.” Tracy had a strong personal affection for Sinatra, but he did not think he approached his work with enough respect. “Tracy was on the set early,” his director, Mervyn LeRoy,* said. “Sinatra arrived when he chose, and seldom before lunch. Sinatra was a spontaneous worker. Tracy was tightly disciplined.”

  Tracy complained that he had to play his over-the-shoulder close-ups with a coat hanger because Sinatra wasn’t there. Nonetheless, “he would twinkle and say Sinatra had called him and told him he wanted him for his next picture.”

  His directors soon found that “still photographers drove him crazy.” Kramer had observed that, when a still was to be shot, Tracy “pretended that he didn’t care by looking down at the ground or turning half away from the camera. Then he’d argue that that was the way people stood or looked naturally. He posed for a hundred thousand stills in his time and claimed none of them ever appeared ‘except in the B’nai B’rith Messenger.’”