Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  When looking at some stills with Tracy and Mervyn LeRoy on the set of The Devil at Four O’Clock, Kate exclaimed, “Spence, these are wonderful character studies!” Tracy snapped back, “Kate, those aren’t character studies, they’re just pictures of an old man . . . the truth is I’m old, so old that everyone has changed. . . . Not just the movie business but the whole country.” At sixty-one, he did look like an old man, although his abstaining from liquor and cigarettes had improved his physical condition, as had the quiet life-style he and Kate lived.

  Now together most of the time, they still maintained two hotel suites when traveling. Unless on the road, they never went out. Their intimate friends came to them a few people at a time because Tracy did not like large groups: Chester Erskine, the Kanins, and Cukor and Kramer in California; Laura, the Hepburns, and again the Kanins (who had two homes) on the East Coast. Tracy held court and exchanged gossip, news and conversation. Kramer claims that “no matter what play or performance or book might be discussed, nothing could match his insatiable desire for plain gossip. What went on at the Daisy Club [a Hollywood night spot] was really a fascination. He announced and savored as a choice tidbit each new pairing off of the jet set. I never understood his sources—most of the time I thought he made it all up—but usually he was right.”

  Kate continued her domestic position in their relationship, doing the cooking, the cleaning, the carting. Once when some of their close friends were guests, she rose, “casually picked up a big log and threw it on the fire. Tracy calmly watched and then said [harshly], ’Don’t ever do that again in front of company.’” Kate giggled nervously and sat down, her face flushed, but more loving than ever in her attention to him, accepting being “smashed down” by him without a whimper because she had crossed the line into his territory.

  Her position in his Court was as Consort. She made sure problems other than his work did not filter through to him. He remained in close contact with Louise and still saw her frequently. Kate respected this. John’s wife had divorced him, a fact that deeply troubled Tracy. Susie’s accomplishments as a fine photographer and a good musician gave her father great pride. From 1959 to 1962, except for the summer season at Stratford in 1960, Kate devoted herself to Tracy’s care. In 1961, when Kramer begged him to take the role of the American judge in Judgement at Nuremberg, which was to be filmed in Germany, she once again set off to be with him, but only after a shaky start.

  As they approached the check-in gate at Idlewild Airport, Tracy suddenly had second thoughts. Breathing was always difficult for him on planes and he had not felt well for a few weeks. He had doubts that he could stand the trials of location shooting. Some of the film company’s executives, who had accompanied Kate and Tracy to the airport, were frantic—shooting was scheduled to begin in five days. Kate took Tracy aside and talked to him for about five minutes. Then she planted a kiss on his cheek and he walked back with her to board the plane. They flew together; but when the car that had picked them up from the airport near Nuremberg was within two blocks of their hotel, Kate ordered the driver to stop, got out and walked the rest of the way alone, entering the hotel where they both had suites through the service door. The press knew Kate had accompanied Tracy, but she managed to be elusive enough to avoid photographers.

  Montgomery Clift, very ill now, was also in Nuremberg. Clift had even more difficulty in remembering his lines than he had had in Suddenly. According to Kramer, “he was literally going to pieces. Tracy just grabbed his shoulders and told him he was the greatest young actor of his time and to look deep into his [Tracy’s] eyes and play to him and the hell with the lines.” It pulled Clift through for he did exactly that—speaking in character but often in his own words.

  The theme of Nuremberg was summed up in a statement made by Tracy at the close of the film: “This, then, is what we stand for: truth, justice, and the value of a single human being.” Because Tracy believed in Nuremberg and felt it outweighed in importance any of the other films he had made in his long career, his earnestness had a tremendous impact on both the making of the film—for his fellow actors caught his fervor*—and the final product.

  The critic for the Hollywood Daily Variety wrote: “As the presiding judge, Tracy delivers a performance of considerable intelligence and intuition, a towering but gentle figure, compassionate but realistic, warm but objective, a man of insight and eloquence, but also a plain man who finds himself caught between politics and justice. He’s calm, unflappable, but the wheels of his jurist’s mind are always sensed working behind that wise, sometimes tired brow, and you never feel that there is any shred of inordinate pride in the man. It’s Tracy’s point of view through which we see and feel the events of the trial and outside the courtroom. . . . Tracy seems to be Kramer’s alter ego—he actualizes on screen Kramer’s own bewilderment, his horror, his passion about the primacy of conscience. . . . T want to understand,’ Tracy says with humility and a kind of epic bereavement for all the unnamed and unknowable dead who were the victims of Hitler’s madness. ‘I really do want to understand. I have to. I must.’”

  At the end of the film, Tracy had a speech that ran thirteen minutes and forty-two seconds, a record for movies at that time. Most actors would have split it and done it in two or three takes that would then have been spliced together. Tracy insisted on shooting it in one; two cameras were used so that different angles could be filmed.

  Some months after Kate and Tracy returned to the States, Ely Landau, who had produced Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh with Jason Robards, Jr.,* for television, and now had the rights to produce the playwright’s great autobiographical work Long Day’s Journey into Night as a low-budget film, approached Kate with the idea of her playing Mary Tyrone. She read the script, brilliantly written by O’Neill himself,† and knew that she wanted to do it and that she could do it well. But she did not think that she should leave Tracy for the time such a project would take. Landau thought he had the solution. Tracy would be ideal for the role of her husband, James Tyrone. Kate asked Landau to come for breakfast at Tracy’s the next morning, and she would have him read the script that night.

  Landau quickly accepted the invitation. “It was extraordinary to watch her with Spence,” he said. “She was a totally different person. She turned really submissive—it’s the only word I can use—and hardly opened her mouth, other than introducing us. She smiled, laughed at everything he said—-which, by the way, was quite justified; he was the most charming man I’ve ever met—and finally when we got down to business I explained to him, ‘I don’t have to tell you what it would mean to have you.’ He replied, ‘Look, Kate’s the lunatic. She’s the one who goes off and appears at Stratford in Shakespeare—Much Ado and all that stuff. I don’t believe in that nonsense—I’m a movie actor. She’s always doing these things for no money! Here you are with twenty-five thousand each for Long Day’s Journey—crazy! I read it last night and it’s the best play I ever read. I promise you this: If you offered me this part for five hundred thousand and somebody else offered me another part for five hundred thousand, I’d take this!’ and Kate exclaimed, ‘There he goes! No! It’s not going to work!’ Indeed, she tried to change Tracy’s mind but could not. Tracy, after the hard assignment on Nuremberg, simply did not feel well enough to tackle such a tough role knowing as he did that the film would be made for under four hundred thousand dollars and would require many sacrifices on the part of the cast and crew.

  In the end, Kate, with Tracy’s urgings, decided to accept the role. Abe Lastfogel, who had been Tracy’s agent for years, now represented Kate; and a deal was made with Sir Ralph Richardson* to play James Tyrone, with Robards playing their son Jamie, the character molded after O’Neill.

  Tracy was not wrong in expecting the shooting schedule and working conditions of the film to be trying. In the fall of 1961, the cast and Sidney Lumetf, the director, at greatly reduced salaries, rehearsed for three weeks in New York, enabling them to shoot the film in thirty-seven days. Fi
rst, all the exterior scenes were shot on location at an old Victorian cottage on City Island in the Bronx. Then the company moved to Production Center Studio in lower Manhattan for the interior scenes. Lumet approached his task in the manner of filmed theater, and the critics would complain about this. But, whatever it might be called, Long Day’s Journey into Night is a riveting film. The experience was an exhilarating and exhausting one for Kate.

  The role of Mary Tyrone was both physically and mentally demanding. Kate allowed herself to be photographed with no filters and no artful lighting. Her part required her to grovel on the floor, her hair disheveled, telltale traces of age exposed and naked of makeup. Though she lost the Academy Award that yeari‡ to Anne Bancroft for The Miracle Worker, the role of Mary Tyrone was her greatest professional achievement. There seemed to be not one dissenting critic. Most thought she had either capped her distinguished career” or “surpassed even herself.”

  Arthur Knight of The Saturday Review wrote: “Her transformations are extraordinary as, in recollection, she suffuses her tense and aging face with a coquettish youthfulness or, in the larger pattern of the play, changes from a nervous, ailing but loving mother into a half-demented harridan. Her final scene, which contains some of O’Neill’s most beautiful writing, is in every way masterful. . . .”

  As Pauline Kael commented: “From being perhaps America’s most beautiful comedienne of the thirties and forties,” Kate had “become our greatest tragedienne.” Viewing the film nearly twenty-five years later one is startled, no, perhaps assaulted, by this realization. The performance is brilliant, shattering. Kate simply becomes Mary Tyrone—“that terrible smile, those suffering eyes—” Kael called her “the Divine Hepburn.” Her career had reached an apogee that could not have been foreseen even in the time of The Philadelphia Story or The African Queen. Kate’s destiny as the reigning queen of films had been fulfilled. One producer dusted off a screenplay about Sarah Bernhardt, another wanted to remake Garbo’s great classic, Queen Christina, with Kate in the title role.

  But Kate’s private life had taken a tragic turn. During the filming of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Tracy (on the West Coast) had suffered a serious attack of emphysema and her father had taken very ill in West Hartford. She hardly knew in which direction to go first. Some weekends she drove to West Hartford late Friday, spent Saturday there before flying to California Saturday night to be with Tracy for a few hours on Sunday, and then returned to New York that same night to be ready to film the following morning. When her work was completed on the O’Neill film, she commuted weekly for several months between California and Connecticut. On November 20, with all his children at his bedside, Dr. Hepburn died.

  They say that one doesn’t really mature until both of one’s parents are dead. In many ways and for many people that thesis is valid. But often life—and death—are not quite so straightforward. Kate’s relationship with each of her parents had been unique. They were, of course, extraordinary people, but Kate’s attachment at age fifty-five to family and home, considering her worldly experiences, her independent life, and her rebellious nature, was a key to the essence of her personality. Her mother’s death had been more difficult for her to cope with than her father’s. Dr. Hepburn’s remarriage within months of his bereavement could have been seen by Kate, as both a woman and a daughter, as a kind of betrayal of Mrs. Hepburn. The great reverence she had felt for him, the joy of comradeship, had transferred itself to Tracy. One cannot say Tracy had become a father image to her; but Kate was very much the submissive young thing with him. The verbal cuffings, the smashing downs, were merely to show her who was boss and, at the same time, were regarded as a display of his true love for her. To discipline meant to care; and if Kate was strong-tongued or dictatorial with her close friends, her words were meant to show them how much she cared.

  Although Dr. Hepburn was dead, his former secretary, Gloria Roberts, now on Kate’s payroll, continued to send her a weekly allowance from Hartford to wherever she might be, and Fenwick was still there to harbor the Hepburn clan.

  To Leland Hayward she wrote, “Dad had a stink of a time for nine months. He said ‘thank God it was me and not your mother.’ He heaved a sigh and was gone with a little sigh. . . . How lucky I have been to have been handed such a remarkable pair in the great shuffle.”

  Kate remained on the East Coast for a week after her father’s funeral, sharing Thanksgiving with what was left of her family before flying to California and Tracy, determined that she would never leave him again and that she would fight for him to remain alive and productive with all her strength and good sense. Unlike Mary Tyrone, she did not have to grope back to the past for “dimly remembered moments of happiness.” She still loved being with Tracy, a great artist (she conveyed to close friends that her Mary Tyrone would not have seemed so “towering” if Tracy had played James Tyrone, for his performance would have “pierced the sky”) and her best friend in the world. Nothing would have been too much of a sacrifice to make for him. It turned out to be five years of her life, years that had promised, with Long Day’s Journey into Night, to be the most rewarding of her long career. She traded them gladly for her chance to prolong Tracy’s life and to be with him until the end.

  Footnotes

  * Suddenly Last Summer contained many autobiographical elements of Tennessee Williams’s life. In his Memoirs (Doubleday, 1975), Williams describes the violence he had encountered in “his own homosexual pursuits” as well as the lobotomy on his sister that his mother, “whose sensibilities were offended by her disturbed daughter’s obscene speech,” had authorized. Williams had written the first draft of the screenplay, and Gore Vidal the final draft, which was extremely true to the original dialogue in the play.

  * Tennessee Williams wrote in his Memoirs that he had made his own deal for Suddenly Last Summer with Spiegel. “Sam asked what I wanted for the movie rights. . . . I said, ‘How about $50,000 plus 20% of the profits?’ Sam said, ‘It’s a deal,’ and it was.”

  * Montgomery Clift (1920-1966) received an Academy Award nomination for his first film role in The Search (1948). All of his subsequent roles contained “a rare psychological dimension,” but he did not make many films. Hepburn was to see him again when Tracy made Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) with him. He appeared in Freud in 1962, and died of a heart attack at the age of forty-five,

  † Elizabeth Taylor (1932– ) had just completed Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (also by Tennessee Williams) and was one of Hollywood’s highest paid actresses. Her appearance in both these films brought her Academy Award nominations, but she won for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Taylor was married seven times: (one) Nicky Hilton; (two) Michael Wilding; (three) Mike Todd; (four) Eddie Fisher; (five and six) Richard Burton; (seven) Senator John Warner.

  * On the ill-fated Cleopatra (1963), Mankiewicz came in to replace Rouben Mamou-lian, and he and Taylor were thrown together again. Taylor was still married to Fisher, but the marriage was in trouble. In the end, Taylor left Fisher, not for Mankiewicz, but for Richard Burton, one of her co-stars in the film.

  * Diffusion lenses are often used in films to give a glow to a scene as well as to make a star look younger. However, they are put to good use in the latter way. Hepburn’s photographers had been using diffusion lenses with greater frequency since Summertime.

  † The nonfiltered close-ups of Hepburn consist of three full-scale reaction shots and two shots of her hands.

  * Years later, Hepburn told television interviewer Dick Cavett that her act had not been prompted by her compassion for Montgomery Clift—“I didn’t spit for Monty Clift! I spit for the way they treated me!” she snapped.

  * Won by Simone Signoret for her role in Room at the Top, possibly because Hepburn and Taylor had split the Suddenly vote.

  * Swindell says he “refrained from including these facts in his book, Spencer Tracy, A Biography, out of respect to Louise Tracy, who was alive at the time of publication.”


  † “The Private Kate,” February, 1970, pp. 109-110.

  ‡ Robert Ryan (1908-1973) was one of Hollywood’s most versatile and reliable performers. He made about eighty films, giving fine performances in diverse roles—the anti-Semitic murderer in Crossfire (1947), the washed-up boxer in The Set-Up (1949) and, repeating his stage role, the cynical lover in Clash by Night (1952). He returned to the New York stage in The Front Page in 1968, and was one of the founders of the UCLA Theatre Group, as well as of a nonsectarian children’s school.

  * Bette Davis played the part of Maxine (replaced later by Shelley Winters) and Margaret Leighton the other woman’s role in the Broadway production. The film starred Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr.

  ‡ Stanley Kramer (1913– ) began as a film producer and successfully made many prestigious low-budget films: Champion (1949), Home of the Brave (1949), Death of a Salesman (1951), High Noon (1952). He directed his first film, Not As a Stranger, in 1955. With The Defiant Ones (1958) his reputation for “bucking the Hollywood system” as an independent producer-director was made.

  * Fredric March (1897-1975) married Florence Eldridge in 1927. From that time on they appeared in plays together, but only occasionally did she make a film with him. March had been a leading man for more than thirty years.

  † Gene Kelly (1912– ), one of the most innovative dancers and choreographers in film, also has given splendid acting performances in such films as The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). He began directing in 1952, The Tunnel of Love (1958) and Hello, Dolly! (1969) being among his best efforts.

  * Frank Sinatra (1915– ) turned to acting in 1952 when his vocal cords had suddenly hemorrhaged. For his first nonsinging performance, as Maggio in From Here to Eternity (1953), he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and was nominated for Best Actor in The Man with the Golden Arm (1954). His voice then returned and he became a superstar. He was at the height of his popularity at this time.