Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  The audition was held in the elegant living room of Irene Selznick at the Pierre Hotel. Kate, her hair still up á la concierge and dressed in gabardine trousers, sandals and several layers of sweaters that allowed little more than her chin to protrude over the edge of a thick wool turtleneck, stood by a grand piano sipping tea. Halfway across the room sitting in a semicircle and waiting nervously (after all, what could one say to Katharine Hepburn if she was absolutely God-awful?) were Freddie Brisson,† the producer, Mr. and Mrs. Alan Jay Lerner, Patricia (Kennedy) Lawford, Phyllis and Irene Selznick. Edens sat poised, ready to accompany Kate on the piano. Kate put the teacup down on a nearby table and nodded to him to begin. After a few bars of Cole Porter’s campy “Mrs. Lowsborough—Goodby,” everyone relaxed.

  Her style was what Lerner called “talk-singing,” and he later commented that “She’s remarkably musical and unlike most actors who forget to act when they sing, she was always acting.” Edens led her from Porter to Lerner and Loewe (“Camelot”) and back to Porter again (“Miss Otis Regrets”).

  When she and Phyllis arrived back home in Turtle Bay, she called Stanley Kramer on the Coast. “I sang for them,” she announced. “They seemed to like me. They must be desperate.”

  So now Kate had three projects to look forward to: the two films and the musical based on Chanel. She was guaranteed of work for somewhere between one and two years. She had got on with her own life very well indeed.

  With Phyllis, she flew to Paris late in October for a one-week holiday and then continued on to London where, within a few days, Kate, O’Toole, the director, Anthony Harvey,* and the rest of the cast of The Lion in Winter gathered on the bare stage of the Haymarket Theatre to rehearse. Harvey, who had made only one previous film, the small-budgeted Dutchman, commented that “working with [Miss Hepburn] is like going to Paris at the age of seventeen and finding everything is the way you thought it would be.”

  Kate had a great fondness for the character of Eleanor. “She must have been tough as nails to have lived to be 82 years old and full of beans,” she told a reporter. “Both she and Henry II were bigtime operators who played for whole countries. I like big-time operators.” The gentleman of the press, to his surprise, was welcomed quite magnanimously by the formerly press-shy Hepburn. He watched with fascination as Kate stalked “about the stage as Eleanor, laughing, shouting and once startling the rest of the cast by crying real tears.”

  “If we’d had a camera,” Harvey later commented, “and everyone had been in costume, we could have filmed it and released it.”

  At a break in one rehearsal, Phyllis gave Kate a newspaper with a photograph of her on the front page hurrying from a car in trousers and a scruffy raincoat.

  “Look at this!” Kate exclaimed, slapping the newspaper so that it made a cracking, call-to-attention sound. “He did get a picture of me after all. Don’t I look awful? We thought we’d escaped the son-of-a-bitch. He chased us all over the West End. He could have saved us the gas.” Another day she bragged, “We lost [a photographer] in Camden Town. Now Fm one up on them. I love winning. I like to prove I’m the best guy. These London boys are amateurs.”

  In the film, O’Toole might have played the King and Lion, but no one in rehearsals doubted who really wore the crown. “Peter, stop towering over me,” Kate would order. “Come and sit down and try to look respectable.” And he instantly would oblige, to the amazement of the cast who knew his reputation as a tyrant on the set. O’Toole was quick to admit that Kate’s presence reduced him “to a shadow of my former gay-dog self. . . . She is terrifying. It is sheer masochism working with her. She has been sent by some dark fate to nag and torment me.”

  Kate scowled as she replied, “Don’t be so silly.” Then she smiled patiently. “We are going to get on very well. You are Irish and make me laugh. In any case I am on to you and you to me.”

  She relished sparring with O’Toole, who was twenty-four years her junior, and soon it became a kind of bantering, affectionate warfare. After three weeks of rehearsals, Kate and Phyllis left for Ireland, where part of the film was to be shot in a replica of a twelfth-century castle in County Wicklow.

  To the company’s amazement, she swam twice a day in the winter sea, early in the morning and during her lunch break. To O’Toole’s question, “Why on earth would you do a thing like that?” she replied, “It’s the shock—so horrible that it makes you feel great afterwards.” Whatever free time she had she spent roaming the Wicklow hills and collecting broken glass from Georgian ruins, which she had decided she would ship home to make into a chandelier.

  From Ireland the company moved to Wales and then France. The Lion in Winter was the second time Peter O’Toole had played Henry II in a film. In Becket he had portrayed him as a limp, ineffectual king. In Lion, he imbued Henry II with a bold dynamism. History indicates that the former interpretation was probably closer to the truth; but there seems no doubt of Eleanor’s tremendous independence and strength of character, and the reviewers were to be much in accord that as Eleanor Kate was “Triumphant in her creation of a complete and womanly queen . . . an aging beauty who can look her image in the eye, a sophisticate whose shrewdness is matched only by her humor.” One could say that these words also applied to Kate.

  Working with the volatile O’Toole had generated exactly the right sparks to pull Kate out of the depression that followed Tracy’s death. She was sorry when shooting on The Lion in Winter ended and was pleased that she had no time between the end of that film and the start of production at Studios de la Victorine in Nice on Madwoman of Chaillot. She moved into a gracious old house on St. Jean-Cap-Ferrat overlooking the Mediterranean, which in March is gray and cold, although no more so in that month than the waters that bordered Fenwick. She swam daily and bicycled. Most of St. Jean-Cap-Ferrat’s aristocratic houses were shuttered while their occupants either followed the sun or traveled the ski circuit. The small village on the Cap was active with shops and sidewalk cafés catering at this time of year to the less affluent year-round residents. The town of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, with its early Wednesday morning open market, was only a mile’s walk. The Port of Petite Afrique, where a cafe had been named The African Queen, was just a fifteen-minute bike ride away. In March, few people in this area spoke English, so that even when they did recognize her, they were hesitant to speak, supposing she would not be able to understand them.

  Tracy had left her very few material mementos, but she had a tattered old red sweater of his which she often wore over a motley selection of other sweaters as she pedaled about in her slacks and beat-up tennis shoes. She had begun to smoke again, but never until late afternoon. Then she puffed “her way through packs like a Foreign Legion trooper.” She went to sleep at eight-thirty, whether or not she had a call to work the next day. Dame Edith Evans, who was playing with her in Madwoman, told her she was sleeping her life away. “It’s true,” she replied. “I don’t go out much. But when I do, I decide I don’t miss much.” Phyllis was not athletic, and so Kate usually swam and biked alone. Her vitality seemed to have grown with the years rather than diminished.

  On work mornings, she’d stuff her bicycle into the trunk of the car and, dressed in trousers, shirt and sweaters, and an old forage cap that had also belonged to Tracy, she would seat herself beside her chauffeur and let all other passengers ride in the backseat for the half-hour journey to the studio, keeping up a stream of conversation that she flung over her shoulder in her tremendous voice “like machine gun fire deliberately aimed.”

  “Deaf people love me to talk to them,” she once commented. “No one who’s hard of hearing has any trouble making me out.”

  Her appetite had not diminished. She never left her villa without stowing away one of her lumberjack breakfasts. She munched chocolate all day and had a steak and fresh fruit for lunch. Four o’clock tea was observed and was not complete without a plate of sweets. What she called a light supper was pretty solid fare to most people, and it was usually topped at bedtime wi
th a glass of milk and a sweet. But with her Amazonian energy she never put on a pound.

  At the Studios de la Victorine, she would climb the cherry trees behind the executive offices for the fruit and often upon coming down would tell the gaping workmen, “Hide the ladder so no one’ll get the big ones.”

  Ely Landau had gathered together a most extraordinary cast for Madwoman. Besides Dame Edith, there were Danny Kaye, Yul Brynner, Charles Boyer, Giulietta Masina, Margaret Leighton, Donald Pleasence, Richard Chamberlain, Nanette Newman, John Gavin and Oscar Homolka. To Kate’s great disappointment, John Huston had walked off the film just before production began. Landau had wanted the nineteenth-century story to be updated and Huston had not believed a contemporary background would work in a fantasy. Bryan Forbes* had been signed only eighteen days before shooting started, during which time he had rewritten the script to Landau’s recommendations. Kate liked Forbes but kept her distance from him throughout most of the film. Despite the stellar quality of her fellow players, she remained both “the Star and Autocrat.” For the first few weeks, she would not talk to journalists nor pose for photographers. When Yul Brynner (who had given her the bicycle she rode) took out his camera to shoot a candid picture of her, she ordered him off the set as if he were a schoolboy being sent by a school mistress to the principal’s office. Then, early in April, she seemed to do a complete turnabout.

  Previously, she had uncategorically refused to appear in any form of television, believing the medium was unsympathetic and unflattering to film performers. But she had been asked to film a short segment in Nice for the upcoming Academy Awards presentations and she agreed. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner had been nominated in ten categories, her performance and Tracy’s among them. Perhaps she accepted because of her conviction that Tracy would win Best Actor. Whatever her reason, she was seen introducing a section of a film montage covering many of the winning performances in the forty years of Oscar history, including a scene of Tracy as the Portuguese fisherman in Captains Courageous. The audience at the Awards, held in the Santa Monica Auditorium, was well aware of the poignancy of this moment, especially since Louise, accompanied by John and Susie, was present, ready to accept the award for Tracy as she had done years before.

  To Kate’s disappointment, she, not Tracy, won an award. Rod Steiger had taken Best Actor for In the Heat of the Night. When informed, Kate said, “Well, I suspect my award was really given to the two of us.”*

  A few days after the Awards, she told British journalist Alexander Walker, “I had twenty-five years of perfect companionship with this man among men. He had been a rock, a protector. . . . There are very few great actors. Spencer was one. I’m not in his class. Inside him was a light that did a disservice to some poor movies he made—it made them that much shoddier. . . . Our films assumed that if the relationship between us was valid enough, the spontaneity would be there.... If people ask why our partnership was so successful, that’s why—it was based on a natural and truthful completion of needs.”

  She cabled the Academy her thanks with these words: “I’m enormously touched. It is gratifying to find someone else voted for me apart from myself.” And to Roderick Mann of the Sunday Express, she confided that she hadn’t wept when either her parents or Tracy had died. “I don’t have pictures of them about, nothing like that. I don’t believe in guilt or regrets. The only thing is to hope you did your best for people and made them happy sometimes.”

  The day she won the award she put on Tracy’s worn red sweater and cycled off the set of Madwoman to where a small band of newsmen and photographers had assembled. She submitted graciously to their cameras and questions. “Much of what I know about acting I learned from Spencer Tracy,” she said, her eyes glimmering. She called him a “sturdy oak buffeted by the wind—a throw-back to an age of rugged heroism . . . that vanishing American, the self-made man. He was what we imagined our grandfathers to be.” These words opened the way to queries about their longtime relationship and she replied, not with intimate memories but with the eulogies she would utter frequently for the rest of her life. Louise had had the respect, the title, until Tracy’s death. Now the turn was Kate’s.

  Footnotes

  * Louise Tracy never remarried and was, indeed, known publicly as Mrs. Spencer Tracy until her death in 1983. Tracy named her his beneficiary and executrix in his will and she received somewhere around five hundred thousand dollars and full title of the Hill.

  * Peter O’Toole (1933– ) is Irish by birth but grew up in Leeds. He began hisacting career with the Old Vic and became a top film star in 1962 with Lawrence of Arabia. Becket (1964) and Lord Jim (1965) consolidated his position. When Hepburn eventually co-starred with him in The Lion in Winter, O’Toole was one of the leading international box-office attractions and, like Tracy, had star billing over her.

  * In 1962, Davis had made the horror classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with Joan Crawford. Davis went on to do a string of such films—Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte and The Nanny (1965), The Anniversary (1971), Madame Sin (1972), Burnt Offerings (1976) and Return from Witch Mountain (1978). Crawford went the same route with Strait Jacket (1964), I Saw What You Did (1965), Berserk (1967) and Trog (1970).

  * Roger Edens (1905-1970) was known at Metro as musical supervisor for nearly twenty-five years. He was also a fine arranger and composer and won Academy Awards for his scoring of Easter Parade (1948), On the Town (1949) and Annie Get Your Gun (1950), a three-year sequential record.

  † Rosalind Russell (1912-1976), Mrs. Frederick Brisson, had originally been slotted for the role of Coco, but she was suffering from acute arthritis and so another Coco had to be found.

  * Anthony Harvey (1931– ) began his film career in England in 1949 as an editor and turned director in 1966 with Dutchman. That film and The Lion in Winter are his two best screen works. He has made several films since then, none of them as successful.

  * Bryan Forbes (1926– ) is as well known for his screenwriting as for his direction. He directed his first complete film, the critically acclaimed Whistle Down the Wind, in 1961. The L-Shaped Room (also screenplay) (1962), King Rat (also screenplay) (1966), The Whisperers (also screenplay) (1967) were among those that followed. He married Nanette Newman, who has appeared in many of his films.

  * George Cukor received the award for Hepburn. In the Heat of the Night won Best Picture for 1967 over Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Doolittle and The Graduate. William Rose won for Best Story and Screenplay (written directly for the screen), the only other Oscar awarded to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. After Hepburn was notified that she had won the Oscar for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, she cabled Screen Actor’s president, Gregory Peck: “It was delightful a total surprise I am enormously touched because I feel I have received a great affectionate hug from my fellow workers and for a variety of reasons not the least of which being Spencer Stanley Kathy and Bill Rose. Rose wrote about a normal middle aged unspectacular unglamorous creature with a good brain and a warm heart who’s doing the best she can to do the decent thing in a difficult situation. In other words she was a good wife. Our most unsung and important heroine. I’m glad she’s coming back in style. I modeled her after my mother. Thanks again. They don’t usually give these things to the old girls you know.”

  CHAPTER

  25

  By the time Kate finished Madwoman, Alan Jay Lerner and Coco’s composer, André Previn,* had not worked out their problems with the book. Coco would be postponed at least another season. Kate had no immediate plans and decided to stay for a while in the south of France with Phyllis. William Rose, who had written Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, visited her for a week, bringing with him an original first-draft screenplay which he promised would enable Kate “to end her sixteen year film career in a blaze of glory.” Kate had, of course, been a star for many more than sixteen years and had no intention of ending her career, period, and she did not like Rose’s projected story. To Kate’s further consternati
on, the American and English press carried a story that she and Rose planned to wed. Rose, who was in the midst of divorcing Tania, his English wife and co-author of many of his screenplays, returned to London where he “confided” to the Sunday Express, “I’m rich, fat, burned out, and I’m looking for someone to come with me in my claret-coloured Maserati to Italy next month. I’ve rented a villa in Portofino and I want to be there for my 51st birthday at the end of August.” Portofino was entirely too close to Gap Ferrat for Kate’s comfort, and she and Phyllis left France to spend the rest of the summer at Fenwick.

  While Coco was still going through rewrites, Irene Selznick, who had been successful as a Broadway producer with A Streetcar Named Desire and The Chalk Garden, thought she would like to try her hand at film producing; and she approached Kate with an offer for her to direct. Mrs. Selznick owned the rights on two related novels—Martha, Eric, and George and Martha in Paris—by British author Margery Sharp. Their plots centered around the unusual career of a gifted English girl who goes to Paris to become a painter, a role Kate might well have played herself thirty years earlier. Kate had always been interested in directing and had discussed the possibility with Louis B. Mayer not long after Woman of the Year, but nothing had come of it. In 1958, John Ford had encouraged her to follow up on the idea, but then Tracy had become too ill for her to tackle such a big task. Her great enthusiasm for striking out on this new career ended in the spring of 1969, by which time several attempts to adapt the lengthy books into a tidy screenplay had failed.