Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  One moment everything was falling into proper order, and the next, disintegrating all around her. In the fall of 1971, McCall’s printed “excerpts from a soon-to-be-published book by Garson Kanin, Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir.” Kate reeled with the blow. The memoir was not as intimate as the public might have wished. Mostly the book was a succession of anecdotes, a few with genuine insight, some warm or humorous or just curious. And in almost all instances, the narrator was present, and no revelations were actually made about Kate and Tracy’s relationship.* Kanin’s book treated their close friendship with extreme good taste and warmth. To Kate, however, its publication marked a public betrayal by Kanin, placing, as she said, “a great strain on our friendship.” The situation between Kanin and Kate was made even more difficult due to the proximity of their homes.

  The Christmas holidays reunited her with her family in Hartford and for the last time at her father’s house. Madelaine had found the place too large for one person to live in and maintain. Dr. Hepburn’s will had divided shares in the property to his widow, Kate and his son Robert. After some negotiation, Robert, his father’s trustee, made an arrangement with the University of Hartford to buy Madelaine’s share for eighty-two thousand dollars. He and Kate then signed quitclaim deeds to the property, giving the university their shares.*

  “There was a lifetime of living in that house,” Kate recalled, “and we had quite a job of cleaning it up. I was covered with filth, crawling around the floor, thinking the thousand thoughts you can imagine I might be thinking of this place where I had been brought up. Then, in comes my sister Marion with a strange man, both of them looking down at me and Marion saying, ‘Oh, Katty, this is Dr. Woodruff, the Chancellor of Hartford University.’ I was at a loss for words.” Her father’s house was finally turned over to the university on January 20, 1972.† Kate was by this time back in California, burrowed into Tracy’s bungalow.

  For months, she concentrated on her work on Travels with My Aunt, so much so that a good portion of the screenplay came from her pen. James Aubrey, then head of Metro, was stunned when he saw the script his company was scheduled to film. For him, the charm of the book had been lost. Also, he now thought Greene’s aunt should be shown as a younger woman in flashbacks in the film; and seeing Kate, he knew this could no longer be possible.

  “Well, you know I’m not going to be able to shoot that script,” he told Kate in a telephone call that she claims she could tell was monitored. Then he said, carefully, “I think . . . and Metro thinks . . . and I agree with them, that we should put it aside for a time.”

  “You mean I’m fired?” Kate asked. Aubrey managed to get off the telephone without giving a direct reply.

  The next day Kate’s agents received word that she was being given notice because she had refused to work. “I would never refuse to work ten days before a picture was scheduled to start,” Kate commented. “I would consider that an outrage. And I said, ‘Go ahead and say I’m fired. It’s all right with me.’” Well, anyway they hired Maggie Smith and within ten days they were shooting.

  “I thought of suing them because I don’t feel things like that should be allowed to happen. The script was practically all mine. Gut to hash, but practically all mine . . . but, then I thought it is a bore, trying to prove that you’ve been misused. I was never paid a sou for eight months work, sixteen hours a day. I would be curious to know why I was fired. I don’t know whether it was Aubrey. . . . The only thing that he did that really offended me was to write me a letter to KathErine. I thought the least he could do when he fired me was to spell my name right.”

  Added to these setbacks, Kate had developed a painful arthritic condition in her hip and the first signs of the palsy condition that would continue to plague her ever after. Her head and hands shook slightly and her voice developed a quaver. Age and illness were two enemies she could and would gallantly battle. She worked hard to control her movements and to get the shake in her voice to work for her in underscoring and emphasizing words and phrases. Amazingly, she succeeded, but the effort was enormous.

  She agreed to do a film, Daisy Bates, with her old friend Chester Erskine, who in the end could not get financing. In February, 1972, producer David Susskind* made a special trip to California to try to convince her to appear in his planned television production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie as the faded Southern beauty, Amanda Wingfield. He had started on what he calls “the longest wooing for a part in a lifetime of dealing with stars” back in 1965. “That part belongs to Laurette Taylor [who created it],” she told him then. He went back to her in 1967 and she repeated her refusal, adding, “I can’t get the memory of Laurette Taylor out of my mind.” Susskind was so certain that Kate should play Amanda, he put the property on a back burner, not submitting it elsewhere in the hope of one day persuading her to accept the role. Now he pointed out that Helen Hayes, Gertrude Lawrence, Shirley Booth and Maureen Stapleton had all played Amanda Wingfield and that two generations had never even seen Laurette Taylor.

  “I’m too thin,” she insisted.

  “What do you mean, you’re too thin?”

  “I see her as buxom and rounded and I’m sharp and angular, and I’m too old to learn the new technique of [television] taping.”

  Susskind said the show could be shot like a film. She still refused but he felt she would eventually capitulate and returned to New York to put together a television package (star, director, scriptwriter).

  When Susskind left, she went down to see John Ford in Palm Desert, a vacation and retirement community 140 miles from Los Angeles. Ford had terminal cancer and had been living a reclusive life for years. Although he had remained married to his wife, Mary, for more than forty-five years, his affair with Kate in 1937 had changed things in their marriage. Any pretense of monogamy had been given up and Mary had stood back, giving Ford free rein just so long as he kept his affairs from becoming public knowledge. Kate’s visit to Palm Desert could have been awkward, but Mary Ford was a selfless woman who wanted her husband’s last days to be as happy as possible. Also, she knew his real vice had always been alcohol, not women.

  Appalled by his wasted appearance and deeply affected by his courage and remaining acerbic wit, Kate spent a week in Palm Desert talking with him for hours on end about old times. Ford tried to sustain these talks, but in the end he asked her to leave—and she understood that he no longer could keep up the faćade.*

  Kate spent the summer of 1972 at Fenwick. Ely Landau, the producer of Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Madwoman of Chaillot approached her with the idea of playing Agnes, the mother in Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, which he planned to film in England for the American Film Theatre. Kate greatly respected Landau, but she had reservations about the role of Agnes, a character who is required to describe in some detail her husband’s predilection for coitus interruptus, and who flirts with madness. Perhaps she would not have accepted Landau’s offer had it not been that Joseph Cotten, her co-star in the stage version of The Philadelphia Story, would be appearing with her along with Paul Scofield. Also, Tony Richardson* was to direct.

  Kate had first met Richardson when she appeared in the London production of The Millionairess. Richardson, only twenty-four at the time, had just come down from Oxford and he says he “thought she was sensational, and wrote to her with enormous enthusiasm and said in the letter, rather boldly . . . ‘Do drop over and have tea.’” To his amazement, Kate appeared at his modest flat at Hammersmith. “I didn’t have enough money to buy cakes,” he admits, “so we had nothing to eat. She was absolutely sweet and charming.” Kate and Richardson met again when he wanted to cast her in a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.† Tracy had been ill and Kate had not wanted to leave him.

  Richardson’s task of persuading her to undertake the role was not easy, for Kate loathed the character of Agnes. He found this odd because, as he says, “There’s a lot of that same kind of inflex
ible, authoritarian quality in her. She suited the part terribly well, the obsession with the home—the New England background—all very ‘Kate.’”

  Kate claims she took the role to understand it. When filming began in a house just outside London, she recognized that Albee had written about self-protection. “I think we are all enormously self-protective. I identified with these people who resented the intruders in their privacy, and I think that’s what made me, after not wanting to do it at all, finally decide to go ahead,” Kate says. “I’m a very private person. Here were these people, miserable though they might be, and they wanted to keep their ‘shell’ intact. When two people came in and established a position in the household, they became threatening. The intruders expressed opinions. You don’t want people to express opinions in your house. You only want your own opinion to be expressed. I think all of us banish people when they intrude in any sense. Yes, I grasped the play finally. But it wasn’t easy.”

  The film company of A Delicate Balance ran immediately into problems. The location site proved a terrible handicap; the rooms in the house were not large enough to allow the cameras and equipment enough space to be moved around. The lighting was poor. Kim Stanley, who had been cast as Agnes’s alcoholic sister, suffered a nervous collapse and had to withdraw from the film and be replaced by Kate Reid, who had not had the benefit of the two weeks’ rehearsal time given the rest of the cast.* Richardson and Kate drew swords over every scene. Richardson treated A Delicate Balance more like theater than film and in the end it remained claustrophobic and static and, indeed, had the feeling of canned theater, an accusation that had been made toward others of Landau’s films.

  Kate very much enjoyed London. The memories were pleasant. She had come there as a young woman on her first true adventure, been acclaimed there as a stage performer, and shared some happy moments there with Tracy. When filming of A Delicate Balance had been completed, she decided to stay on and accept David Susskind’s offer to film The Glass Menagerie in nearby Dulwich. Susskind had fulfilled her final request—that she have a director she could trust. When Susskind announced that he had hired Tony Harvey, who had directed her in The Lion in Winter, Kate agreed to make the film—her first for television.

  The Glass Menagerie had always been one of Kate’s favorite plays. She considered it a classic that said “more about what a lack of money can do to human beings than any play I know.” Williams had put all his early suffering, his frustrations, into it, and Kate understood that Amanda Wingfield was the “most tenderly observed, the most accessible woman he ever created.” In fact, Kate had a great and deep empathy for the character. After all, Dr. Hepburn had been a Southerner, a Virginian, and the Hepburn family was genteel and educated, but they had almost all known hard times and better days. Kate had had aunts and cousins to base the character upon. She worked hard on the Southern accent with some coaching, but relied mostly on memories of her father’s family.

  The Glass Menagerie had been filmed before, in 1950, with Gertrude Lawrence as Amanda. Those were the days when a big star simply did not play a frowsy, aging desperate creature. Then a star had to prove how eternally young, fascinating and beautiful she was. Filmed as middle-aged and still vital, Lawrence, in her performance, lost the sense of a woman who refused to accept the truth of having been reduced to humiliating and irrevocable circumstances. Kate played the role more as it had been created for the stage by Laurette Taylor and subsequently by Maureen Stapleton (who appeared in a revival) as older, more ravaged.

  Susskind’s The Glass Menagerie was not beset by the troubles Eli Landau had experienced on A Delicate Balance. Still, they both share the feeling of being artificially contained, of plays not fully transformed into movies. The great difference was in the basic material. Williams’s talk floats, flowers, ascends and haunts; Albee’s nettles, pontificates, puffs along and finally sinks.

  After filming ended on The Glass Menagerie, Kate’s feelings about television did a turnabout. She now decided the medium could be a tremendous challenge and that she might be able to attempt new and different roles, parts she might not be able to sustain on the stage and that a film company would no longer finance. To everyone’s surprise, she accepted an invitation from talk-show host Dick Cavett.

  Nervous about her first television appearance, she came early to the ABC sound stage where Cavett’s show was to be taped.* Aside from Phyllis and some members of Cavett’s staff, no studio audience was present. An amazed Cavett hurried from his office onto the set to greet her, alerting the director and camera crew first, thinking that, perhaps, she had confused the times. He found her wandering about in slacks, sandals, turtleneck shirt and a short jacket (not the usual attire for a female guest) and apparently made the decision to shoot the interview anyway just in case she did not return at the appointed hour. The cameras started turning as Kate, unaware she was already on camera, strode onto the set calling out orders to the stage and technical crew as they complained about her lack of makeup and the short time they had to prepare.

  “Don’t tell me what’s wrong, just fix it,” she ordered.

  Cavett, in shirt sleeves and white tennis shoes, appeared even more nervous than his guest as he escorted her to her seat.

  “Do you want to hear the story of my life?” she asked. “I presume that’s why I’m here.” She then launched into a narrative “brimming with no-nonsense practicality and thoroughly opinionated charm.” As she told about her family and Hartford and her early stardom, she neatly inserted comments on such things as scene-stealing, which she explained to a chagrined Cavett was “like you wiggling that white foot while I’m trying to be fascinating.” Asked about her ability to sleep easily, she snapped back, “Clear conscience,” adding, “I just think I’m an old bore—I do what I’m supposed to—I come on the program—if I’m supposed to talk, I talk. I go to bed to sleep. I have some food, I eat it. I’m uncomplicated.” Cavett came off as the fledgling drama student who had to play a scene with a revered performer. Kate simply took the situation in hand and more or less interviewed herself.

  Ostensibly, Kate’s appearance on Cavett’s show was to coincide with the opening of A Delicate Balance. But it kindled a fresh interest in her, and articles and interviews appeared at a stunning rate. The failure of A Delicate Balance (which did not get a major release) was offset by the excitement that had been drummed up over her soon-to-be-released first-ever television film, The Glass Menagerie. Members of the press seemed to be conducting a race to get there first with an exclusive interview or breathless review. The film was to be televised on Sunday evening, December 18. One film critic had managed to review the production laudatorily, four weeks earlier. On December 14, John J. O’Connor, The New York Times television critic, called the production lovely “but not flawless. Miss Hepburn’s Amanda is a wonderfully effective blend of Southern gentility and fierce determination, but occasionally, only occasionally, she is overly dominated by another personality, that of a strong-willed, intensely mannered actress named Katharine Hepburn.

  “When a temporarily stymied Amanda sits on a couch, puts her chin in her hands and turns in her feet, so that the weight of her legs is resting on her ankles, the portrait is pure Hepburn. The effeet is hardly fatal, merely obtrusive. . . . Any reservations about this Glass Menagerie are relatively slight. It is a special TV event, demanding attention.”*

  During her Cavett interview, her host had asked Kate if she was not sorry she had never made a film with Olivier. “Well, neither one of us is dead yet,” she retorted sharply enough for Cavett to stumble nervously on in a kind of apologia. Not long after that, George Cukor sent her a script by James Costigan, Love Among the Ruins which he had agreed to make for ABC television and for which he hoped she might consent to play opposite Olivier. The osteoarthritis in Kate’s hip had been giving her progressive trouble and she had recently submitted to a hip-replacement operation. But the project was too irresistible for Kate to decline. Six months after the surgery, she return
ed to London to make the film, which had a twenty-day shooting schedule.

  Love Among the Ruins is an Edwardian comedy, and Kate plays Jessica Medicott, grande dame and former Shakespearean actress, being sued for breach of promise by a young man whose marriage proposal she had accepted in “one mad, impetuous moment.” She seeks out a famous barrister, Sir Arthur Granville-Jones (Olivier), to represent her. Fifty years earlier, while touring as Portia in The Merchant of Venice, she had had an affair with a poor law student in Toronto. That young man had been Sir Arthur. But despite his attempt to jog her memory (“We made love continuously one weekend”), she fails to recall the man or the incident. Nonetheless, in the manner of romantic comedy, the now wealthy, glamorous pair, both “outrageously candid and addicted to sparkling conversation,” fall in love.

  Olivier claimed he had been dreading appearing with Kate all his life. Somehow he had assumed she would be very much the prima donna, temperamental, a star rather than an actress. Her professionalism astounded him, as did her stamina. They went back a long way in friendship. Kate had, after all, been a witness at his marriage to Vivien thirty-five years before,† and Olivier had been an admiring friend of Tracy’s.

  Working with Cukor again for the first time in twenty years (since Pat and Mike) was a great joy for Kate. Cukor was fastidious about every aspect of her appearance in the film. Her costumes were magnificent and marvelously flattering—high necks trimmed in soft lace, her hair femininely coiffed, sumptuous hats that cast kind shadows on her face and framed it becomingly. Carefully lighted in soft focus, Kate looked timelessly lovely. The sets were elegant and the final film never has a sense of being hurriedly made. What Love Among the Ruins lacked was a strong story line and interesting peripheral characters. As long as Kate and Olivier are on screen, the film glitters, but it disintegrates into nothingness when they are gone.*