Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

The Oscars for 1968 were awarded on April 14, 1969, on the stage of the glittering Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the new Los Angeles Music Center. Ingrid Bergman, looking radiantly beautiful, opened the envelope containing (supposedly) the winner for Best Actress for 1968. For a moment, a look of astonishment came over her beautiful face. In a stunned voice, she cried out, “It’s a tie!” and then read off the names, “Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter,” and then had to wait a moment until the applause quieted down before she added, “and Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl.” Streisand, wearing a shocking, see-through, jeweled black-chiffon pajama outfit with starched white puritan cuffs and collar, ran up to collect her award while Anthony Harvey followed her to the microphone to accept on Kate’s behalf. Streisand held up her golden Oscar and in strident Brooklynese said, “Hello gorgeous!” Then she graciously declared, “I am honored to be in such magnificent company as Katharine Hepburn.” The two women were the first co-winners since Fredric March and Wallace Beery had shared the award in 1932.*

  Kate’s Oscar made her the first three-time winner for Best Actress. Furthermore, with the Lion nomination, Kate’s eleventh, she became the most nominated screen performer in the forty-one years of the Academy Awards. Kate had remained adamant about not owning a television or other “household noise makers,” but she did watch the televised program in New York with Laura and Phyllis at Irene Selznick’s apartment and laughed heartily when Ruth Gordon, looking much younger than her seventy-two years, snapped into the microphone, “I don’t know why it took so long,” when presented with her first Oscar for Supporting Actress in Rosemary’s Baby.

  During the filming of The Madwoman of Chaillot, Kate had said, “I think The Madwoman of Chaillot has more relevance today than it did twenty years ago. The world has gone cuckoo. We’re still dominated by greed, and that’s what Giraudoux was talking about. The Madwoman represents the possibilities of man, she represents hope.” But the final film of Madwoman, which failed either to make this point or to be an arresting movie, was a disappointing follow-up to Kate’s sequential tribute at the Awards. Huston had been right—the contemporizing of the story bound it to the earth when it should have taken off in enchanted, whimsical fantasy. Kate’s interpretation of the Madwoman presented her as far too sensible a woman to be living in the past and only added to the discomforting reality of a story meant to be whimsy. In fact, despite the stellar supporting cast, only Danny Kaye as the ragpicker seemed to belong in Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot*

  Kate spent no time feeling sorry for herself. On Alan Jay Lerner’s insistence, she flew to Paris to meet Coco Chanel. “I was scared to death to meet her,” she says. “I had worn the same clothes for forty years, literally, even the shoes. I thought, ‘If I don’t like her, it will be an agony’ Finally, Alan Lerner said, ‘Don’t be silly, you’ll like her.’

  “So we went to her apartment over her salon in Paris.† I brought her a little African brass medallion [from among her mementos of The African Queen]. I didn’t give it to her. I left it on a table with a note. It was hard to talk to her. She spoke only French and my French is very faltering. We had a delicious lunch and she—after a carefully delayed great entrance—was enchanting. Alan and I went to see her fashion show afterward, sitting on the stairs. Then she went back to her apartment and found the medallion. She was like a little girl, she was so tremendously pleased by discovering the gift. I liked her at once, she was amusing, tough in a good sense, and fun. She got to me. The essence of her style was simplicity. Exactly what I appreciate most.”

  Chanel, on the other hand, commented privately to Lerner, “She’s too old for the role. Why, she must be close to sixty!” (Chanel was in her mid-eighties at this time.) When Chanel had first optioned her life story to Brisson, she had been told that in the book Lerner would encompass only her youthful years—the 1920s and 1930s. During the many rewrites, Lerner had dropped that idea in favor of presenting Coco in 1959 in her seventies after she had been in lengthy retirement. Coco was enormously displeased when she discovered what Lerner had done, especially since she had trusted him implicitly. A story about a young Coco, in far-removed time, was romantic history. But Kate was to play a seventy-year-old Coco—impersonating Coco as she still saw herself—a vital, older woman. (Coco had once declined a marriage proposal from the Duke of Wellington by saying there had been several Duchesses of Wellington, but only one Coco Chanel.) After years of sermonizing on the right of privacy to which celebrities were entitled, Kate apparently closed her eyes to the fact that, when she played Coco Chanel on the stage, she would not only be invading the fashion designer’s privacy but creating a portrait of the woman that might be both erroneous and unacceptable to the woman she portrayed.

  As soon as Kate returned to New York, she began work with two music coaches, Susan Seton and Alfred Dixon’s former assistant, Lynn Masters. To Kate’s shock and grief, Roger Edens, who had given her the confidence she had needed to accept the challenge of a singing role, had died suddenly just before the show was scheduled for rehearsal. Under Edens’s brilliant guidance, she had learned to interpret a lyric as she would dramatic lines in a script. He had also helped her with her phrasing, and Previn had tailored Coco’s songs so that they did not exceed Kate’s limited range.* Masters taught her how to project and yet save her voice for eight performances a week, while Seton concentrated on the actual songs that she must perform.

  Coco was budgeted at close to nine hundred thousand dollars, which made it at that time the most expensive show in Broadway history.† The decision was to rehearse for six weeks and preview the show in New York for five more weeks before the scheduled December 18 opening. The first rehearsal at the Mark Hellinger Theatre was called on September 29. Kate swept onstage, where the company had been gathered. She was dressed in clumsy looking sandals, baggy beige gabardine trousers, a white cotton T-shirt and a black, long-sleeved, high-necked outer sweater. Lerner commented that she got most of her energy “from simplifying her life. She has 20 pairs of beige slacks, white shirts and black sweaters. When she gets up in the morning, she knows what she’s going to wear. She never considers what she’s going to have for dinner, because her cook knows she eats simply (a steak, potato and salad). All the decisions that exhaust the normal person, she has eliminated.”

  From the beginning, Kate was the first to arrive for rehearsals and the last to leave. She knew not only her own lines but the entire script. Coco was to run two and a half hours and Kate’s role called for her to be onstage for all but twelve minutes. Very few scenes could be rehearsed without her. But she never complained of the demands of the script, the complicated machinery of the main set, or the constant revisions she was forced to memorize every night. “She’s Man Mountain Dean,” Jerry Adler, the production stage manager, told a Time reporter. “She leaves the younger folks for dead at the end of the day. When she’s not in a scene, she perches on a staircase munching things—packets of meat and cheese and fruit she has brought from home—listening and watching the onstage action over and over.”

  Cecil Beaton had designed two basic sets, Chanel’s salon and the apartment over the salon. These were constructed on a giant turntable that rose, split, revolved and descended in whole or in part, depending upon the needs of the script. This “mechanical marvel” was more of a monster to the players, who found themselves having to improvise rather athletically when it malfunctioned. The first night of previews, Kate was faced with playing a scene with another performer across a four-foot chasm when the two sections did not reunite as planned. The stage manager was about to lower the curtain when to his amazement Kate leaped across the aperture, even though, had she made a misstep, she could have dropped about twenty-eight feet onto a concrete floor. Kate and Beaton were no more than polite to each other. Each respected the other’s reputation but Kate had felt both the set and the costumes were too complicated to work with and that they owed more to Edwardian England* than to Chanel’s Paris salon.

  Coco’s f
inale featured a fashion show of Chanel designs from 1918 to 1959. The set was transformed into mirrors, platforms and rings, each going in different directions, everything flashing and turning at once. This production number clearly pointed up where Lerner, Previn, Beaton and director Michael Benthall went wrong. The essence of Chanel was simplicity, and the production of Coco was a great dinosaur of a musical that managed to overwhelm the uninspired music, lyrics, and story, but still could not KO Kate.

  Kate played a seventy-year-old Chanel who, after fifteen years in retirement, decides to make a comeback by reopening her salon. She succeeds, but her collection is a flop with the Paris fashion world. After she believes she has been bankrupted, four department store buyers from across the Atlantic† save her. Through a series of flashbacks using filmed sequences shown on mirrored screens, Coco’s past love affairs are recalled, but never is her current life shown to be in personal jeopardy. She develops a motherly feeling for one of her young mannequins and becomes more meddlesome than an active participant in a flimsy triangle involving herself, the mannequin and the girl’s lover. A venomous designer who “has gone way past homosexuality” gives Coco a setback or two, but he never threatens her ability to survive imperiously as Coco Chanel.

  “I’ve felt all along that Coco and I were alike,” Kate said at the time, “that we’re two females who have never been intimidated by the world, who never shifted our stripes to conform to public opinion. She is practical, vulnerable and a fighter. She’s not afraid to put herself on the chopping block. She’s taken some real body blows. And her capacity for survival is what fascinates me. You know, I’d play this part for free. Because that’s me, Coco, on the chopping block now.” But none of these qualities was in Lerner’s script. For Coco’s audiences, the heroine existed purely as a reflection, an extension, of the personality and life of Katharine Hepburn.

  Kate had not submitted to Coco any more than she had to Tracy Lord. Both were indivisibly Kate. “Now that I’ve become like the Statue of Liberty or something—now that I’ve come to an age where they think I might disappear—they’re fond of me,” she said of her audiences, who packed the house for every performance. Unable to dance, she kicked and pranced outrageously. Confined to a small singing range, she nonetheless expanded it by using the pattern of her voice to imply singing. Locked into a book that had little charm, she managed to dissolve her audiences into gales of laughter on the strength of her delivery of a constant stream of sharp, often catty, one-liners. Striding across to midstage and pausing, she could spew the word “shit!” in a rasping Hepburnian contralto that implied she had just invented the expletive. This last device, which had been her own idea, opened the second act, and Coco Chanel was appalled when she heard of this “vulgarity.” The rich and middle class looked to her and to her designs for true elegance, a legend that Kate seriously threatened by suggesting Coco Chanel could be publicly profane.

  Kate might have been adored by her audiences, but the company was not entirely enamored of her. For one thing, she set a terrible pace for everyone to follow; and for another, during rehearsals, she insisted the theater be kept at a cool 60 degrees with the stage door open to the winter winds. By the time of the previews, almost everyone in the cast had colds. After listening to their complaints, Kate arrived one morning with a huge box of sweaters. Dumping them in her dressing room, she informed the cast that anyone who was chilly could have a sweater but that, since she liked the cold, the door would remain open and the thermostat down.

  December 18, opening night, was like “a disastrous party. Everyone who was anyone was there,” Time reported, “primed for some kind of theatrical night of nights. Dramatically, the champagne was flat, the hors d’oeuvres tasted of sawdust and the small talk on- and offstage sagged into yawns.”

  Clive Barnes, of The New York Times, wrote that “[Miss Hepburn’s] . . . presence is a blessing. She growls out the most ordinary lines as if they were pearls of great price, gems of wit, nuggets of wisdom. She grins and she is enchanting. She prowls gloweringly down to the footlights, mutters a word for ordure in an idiomatically terse fashion, and remains devastatingly charming.

  “This is not acting in any of the accustomed fashions of acting. Her singing voice is unique—a neat mixture of faith, love and laryngitis, unforgettable, unbelievable and delightful. Dear Miss Hepburn—perhaps they should have made a musical of your life rather than a dress designer. They say some beauty is ageless—yours is timeless.”

  Most of Kate’s good friends attended the after-the-opening party—Luddy, Laura, Ruth and Garson, Lauren Bacall, Sue Seton, Irene Selznick. Alan Lerner’s wife, Helen, wore a marvelous Chanel gown, but Kate appeared in beige pants and black sweater. The one person who had not attended the opening—although Lerner had believed until the last minute that she would—was Coco Chanel, who never did see the musical based on her life. If she had, one cannot help but wonder what she would have thought or if any part of it would have been familiar to her. The story had become pure fiction and Kate’s performance a parody of her own personality rather than Coco Chanel’s. Indeed, Kate had been honest when she had said, “That’s me, Coco.”

  Despite reviews that were uniformly harsh to the production, Kate, by sheer force of her personality, not only kept Coco running for more than seven months but she filled the theater every performance. Those reviewers who had pointed out what had gone wrong with the show were now asking themselves, “Can Hepburn single-handedly be keeping this outdated musical showboat afloat?” The answer became clear after August 1, 1970, the night Kate waved farewell to her last audience, who stood and cheered until she raised her hands for silence.

  Tears welled in Kate’s eyes and a kind of breathless emotion charged her voice as she spoke. “It’s obviously an enormously confusing experience to stop in the middle of something that means as much to me as this play did—has—does—and the things that it has represented to me in what people can do for each other. Alan Lerner had the confidence to trust me to do it. I had two good friends—Roger Edens—who’s dead, and Sue Seton—who teaches me every day—who had the force to convince me that I would be able to do this. Then I started rehearsals and I was very, very frightened—and all these people whom you see in back of me really gave me the faith to go on. Then there was the terror of the opening night, and for some wonderful reason for me, you people gave me a feeling that you believed that I could do it. I’ve lived a very, very fortunate life because I had a father and mother who believed in me. I had brothers and sisters who believed in me—and a few friends who have believed in me—and I cannot begin to thank you enough—and I hope that you learn the lesson that I have learned. That is—I love you and . . . you love me.”

  A few days after Coco had opened, Walter Kerr had written in The New York Times: “The show has become a showcase, a form of endearment, a gesture of assent, an open palm of respect. Miss Hepburn will never be old enough or tired enough to undergo one of those official evenings of tribute at which everyone gathers to summarize and reminisce. And so it’s been arranged right now, with her doing all the work. If Coco is anything, it is Miss Hepburn’s gala Benefit Performance for our benefit.” Kate’s “I-love-you-and-you-love-me” speech was a fitting ending to such a benefit.

  Kate’s audience had not reseated themselves for her farewell words. As she finished, bowed slightly and then with a grand sweep of her hand paid tribute again to the cast, her fans moved forward toward the rim of the stage. Kate smiled a last smile and hurried off.

  What happened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre that night exposed the same kind of audience-performer interaction that had existed at Judy Garland concerts. That Kate should become a cult figure was ironic, for she had been expounding on her disregard of public adulation for nearly four decades. “Just do your job and get on with it” had been both her and Tracy’s motto. But by the end of Coco she had recognized the truth, that all along she had needed the love of her audiences, and had tested them—as she had Tracy and h
er father—by being as difficult as she could. Several times during the run of the play, when a flash camera went off in the theater, she halted the performance by moving to the footlights to address the culprits like a high-school principal who had just found a student smoking marijuana. At least once she refused to continue until two people in the audience stopped talking. Another time, outside street noise of construction distracted her (the stage door still remained open at her command), and at intermission she went to ask the construction workers to silence their equipment during her matinees.

  Tracy’s death had brought an overwhelming amount of sympathy her way. In the four years that had passed since then, Tracy and Hepburn had become a romantic legend. Louise had been turned into the unbending wife, and Kate, with dignity, had sacrificed a normal life for a back-street existence. Kate was now regarded as that exceptional woman who had been faithful to her personal standards and had made the world accept those standards as its own. Tracy would belong to her in death as he never had in life. Kate—the rich, the beautiful, the famous, the arrogant—had loved devotedly, selflessly, without any of the rewards a marriage would have brought and in the face of possible public censure. She had given, taken, suffered and survived, and had done so without any loss to her great and ebullient spirit. More than that, to her audiences, Kate, not unlike Judy Garland, had been a constant throughout their lives. For thirty-seven years, Katharine Hepburn had been making films and they had watched her grow from a beautiful young rich girl to a magnificent older woman.

  The fine French actress Danielle Darrieux* replaced Kate in Coco. Darrieux could sing and dance and looked gloriously chic in Beaton’s costumes. Even so, the show closed in less than two months after Kate left the cast.

  During the run of the play, Kate had been nominated for a Tony as Best Actress in a musical. (She lost to her good friend Lauren Bacall for her performance in Applause, the musical adaptation of All About Eve.) For the televised award proceedings, she had filmed Always Mademoiselle, a moving production number from the show, and the clip remains as visual evidence of Kate’s daring adventure in the musical theater. Directly after she left the cast, she made her debut as a recording artist when she re-created the role of Coco for the Paramount Records cast album.* Two weeks later, she departed for Spain to co-star with Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Papas and Genevieve Bujold† in The Trojan Women for Greek director Michael Cacoyannis.‡ Asked why she wanted to film the Euripides drama written in 415 B.C., Kate replied, “I’ve never done Greek Tragedy and before my time runs out I’d like to have done everything.”