Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  Cukor had engaged Susie Tracy as the unit’s still photographer. She had had only one previous film assignment until then and was very nervous. She and Kate had met once before, in the summer of 1949, when Susie, a teenager at the time, had visited the set of Adam’s Rib. Tracy had kept his family life and his relationship with Kate quite separate. Having Susie with her in London was a happy circumstance for Kate, who Susie Tracy says, “got a kick out of seeing me loaded down with my cameras.” Kate kept a distance between herself and Tracy’s daughter, but she did try to make her as comfortable as possible and to help in any way she could. “Miss Hepburn is very photogenic,” Susie says. “It is a joy to work with someone like her. When she smiles, her face lights up and her hands are interesting—she uses them! She is warm, vital and humorous.

  “I happened to be driving back to town with her one day when she had the driver stop at a charming nursery. She was walking around looking at the plants, dressed in her own casual way—slacks, a little hat tied on with a scarf, no makeup. Suddenly, a man walked in, came directly to her and inquired, ‘Do you have any gooseberries?’ He had mistaken her for a store employee.

  “Miss Hepburn never skipped a beat. ‘Gooseberries?’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll have to see.’

  “She walked away, found the woman in charge, returned and told him, ‘No, sorry, no gooseberries.’ He thanked her and left without the slightest idea who she was.”

  Kate stayed in the country near the studio and after a day’s work would jump on her bicycle and pedal off down the nearest country lane, a car following her so that she could stop when she got tired—usually quite a distance on. Her recovery from her hip surgery had been close to miraculous.

  Kate and Phyllis returned to New York for three weeks and then left for California. Kate had agreed to co-star with John Wayne in Rooster Cogburn, a sequel to Wayne’s Academy Award film of 1969, True Grit. Meeting him jolted her. “I was born to be your leading lady, Duke,” she told him, “twenty-five years too late.” Others in the room were aware of the tremendous chemistry that passed between them and made a mockery of their years.

  Footnotes

  * The New York Times critic snidely commented that the book should have been titled Tracy and Hepburn and Kanin. Another suggested the name We Three.

  * The house at 201 Bloomfield Avenue was valued at $100,000 in 1972, which made Kate and Dr. Robert Hepburn’s shares worth $18,000. The trustees deed is dated January 17, 1972, and was recorded June 7, 1972, with the quitclaim deeds, in Volume 498 at Pages 865, 868 and 871 of the West Hartford Land Records.

  † The house at 201 Bloomfield Avenue became a combination office/residence for Dr. Robert Vogel, executive director of the Greater Hartford Consortium for Higher Education.

  * David Susskind (1920– ), a talent agent who became a controversial televisionpersonality, hosting his own talk show while producing many high-quality productions for theater, television and films. His films include A Raisin in the Sun (1961), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) and All Creatures Great and Small (1974).

  * Ford died on August 31, 1973.

  * Tony Richardson (1928– ) directed for stage and screen. His direction of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger both on stage (1956) and screen (1958) set the tone for the “Angry Young Men” movement. His other credits include the sensitive The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), the dazzling Tom Jones (1963), for which he won an Oscar, and the misanthropic The Loved One (1965).

  † The role in the revival of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore was played by Tallulah Bankhead.

  * After a slow start, Reid turned in a stunning performance.

  * The Cavett show was filmed in one session but televised in two sections, on the nights of October 2 and 3, 1973.

  * Tennessee Williams comments on this production: “Thank God . . . they cut the narrations down. There was too much of them. And the play itself holds without much narration,” adding, “The narrations are not up to the play.”

  † Olivier had married actress Joan Plowright after his divorce from Vivien Leigh.

  * Both Hepburn and Olivier won Emmy Awards for Best Actress and Actor in a single performance for their roles in Love Among the Ruins.

  CHAPTER

  27

  Kate wrote about Wayne, “From head to toe he is all of a piece. Big head. Wide blue eyes. Sandy hair. Rugged skin—lined by living and fun and character. Not by just rotting away. A nose not too big, not too small. Good teeth. A face alive with humor. Good humor, I should say, and a sharp wit. Dangerous when roused. His shoulders are broad—very. His chest massive—very. When I leaned against him (which I did as often as possible, I must confess—I am reduced to such innocent pleasures), thrilling. It was like leaning against a great tree. His hands so big. Mine, which are big too, seemed to disappear. Good legs. No seat. A man’s body. Rare in these gay times.”

  A deep, abiding tenderness between Kate and the thrice-married Wayne was in evidence during the nine weeks they were on location in Oregon for the filming of Rooster Cogburn. Kate and the towering six-feet-four-inch Wayne were the same age* and made of the same tough fiber. Though they had not met before, they each shared a long, close relationship with John Ford, who was Wayne’s mentor and frequent drinking companion. From 1928 to 1939, Wayne portrayed the strong, silent hero who rode tall in the saddle in more than eighty movies. Then, Ford, who had been responsible for Wayne’s first lead in director Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail, cast his friend in the role of the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, and a hero who was to assume mythical proportions was born. To much of the world, Wayne embodied the American spirit—“the crusader of just causes and a leader of men . . . the ultra American, the superpatriot in the most rigid Old Guard style.”

  Politically, Wayne was a reactionary with the kind of superhawk, fundamentalist ideology that Kate had rejected all her life and that Mrs. Hepburn had loathed. Yet somehow, Kate had been able to rationalize his point of view so that she could accept it. “He was surrounded in his early years in the motion picture business by people like himself. Self-made. Hard working. Independent. Of the style of man who blazed the trails across our country. Who reached out into the unknown. People who were willing to live or die entirely on their own independent judgment. [John] Ford, the man who first brought Wayne into the movies, was cut from the same block of wood. Fiercely independent. They seem to have no patience and no understanding of the more timid and dependent type of person. . . . Pull your own freight. This is their slogan. Sometimes I don’t think that they realize that their own load is attached to a very powerful engine. They don’t need or want protection. They dish it out. They take it. Total personal responsibility.”

  Wayne had been the president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a group that was responsible for a great many broken lives and careers during the McCarthy era and against which Kate had once spoken out harshly. He had seemed to have taken on the Vietnam War as a personal crusade, feeling that America had every right to be involved. His craggy features, his huge body in western garb or officer’s uniform, his thunderous voice driving men on to battle and possible death came to represent the ultimate macho American man and made Wayne one of the biggest box-office attractions in American films.

  Unlike Tracy, Wayne never had any wish to cut Kate down to size. Wayne’s great appeal to women was the duality of his personality. “He’s sweet, gentle, and he’s a monster,” Kate said. But seldom was he a monster with women on or off screen. Wayne was, in fact, almost schoolboyish in his abject respect for what he called “good women,” a category Kate automatically fell into. Not only was Kate good, she was tough. “I love her,” Wayne beamed to a visitor on the Rooster Cogburn location. “You should have seen her up on those mountain locations. She can’t ride a hobby horse. But she climbed right up on those horses and gave ’em hell. We had a great girl stunt rider for her, but Kate said, ‘She doesn’t sit as straight in the saddle as I do.’
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br />   “And in one scene she jumped into a kayak and shoved off into a raging river. Yes, sir, she’s tough. Christ! She wants to do everything! She can’t ride worth a damn and I gotta keep reining my horse in so she can keep up. But I’d hate to think of what this goddamned picture would be without her.”

  Kate did all her own stunts. “I haven’t waited all these years to do a cowboy picture with Wayne to give up a single moment now,” she insisted.

  “She’s so feminine—she’s a man’s woman. Imagine how she must have been at age 25 or 30 . . . how lucky a man would have been to have found her,” Wayne confided.

  Less than a year had passed since Kate’s hip surgery and she had not ridden a horse in decades. Wayne knew this, just as she knew that he had had a lung removed and was being monitored for any sign of the return of the cancer that had been cut away. Both hated pity or special privileges. But the combined powers of their personalities overwhelmed Stuart Millar,* their director.

  Susie Tracy joined the company as still photographer and spent more time getting to know Kate. The Oregon terrain was rough, everything was shot outside and often in high wind and biting cold. Kate did not seem to mind the harsh conditions. Susie photographed her out canoeing with a ranger on Todd Lake and picking little earth-colored bouquets from among the rocks and ledges or in the open fields, which she would stick into whatever was handy, usually an old tin can.

  The press was permitted on the set by Wayne, and Kate accepted the intrusion (which she did not like). On the last day of shooting, the presence of the press made her nervous and the final scene had to be reshot several times. When the cameras had stopped turning, Wayne shoved the eye patch he had worn for his role in the film up onto his forehead, took Kate in his arms, and kissed her soundly on the mouth. After he released her, Kate stood stunned for a moment looking around at the strangers on the set and then walked hurriedly away and disappeared. Wayne cleared his throat, lighted a cigar (defying doctor’s orders) and spat on the sound-stage floor. His voice “a crash of boulders,” he said, “Damn! There’s a woman!” He puffed contentedly on his cigar until she returned a short time later, out of costume and in an attractive pantsuit, to share a toast with the cast and crew. Again, Wayne gave her a big bear hug.

  “What a wonderful experience,” she said, her eyes shining as she stared up at her co-star. Then, turning to the press, “He’s one hell of an actor!” They were not to see each other more than a few times again. Kate went back to New York, and Wayne made only one more film before he began his courageous but losing three-year battle against death, undergoing open-heart surgery and then the removal of his stomach.*

  One critic called Rooster Cogburn “Something of an African Queen Goes West.” The stories did bear a certain similarity. Kate is Eula Goodnight, a spinster whose clergyman father is murdered by outlaws. The Indian native village where father and daughter taught their faith is destroyed. Wayne, as Cogburn, is a hard-drinking marshal on the skids who reluctantly takes Eula with him to track down the murderers, and just as reluctantly finds a soft spot in his heart for her. Unlike Hepburn and Bogart in The African Queen, the two do not end up together.

  Rooster Cogburn, released in October, 1975, was a tremendous commercial success. The critics all pointed out the second-time-around feeling of the plot and the pedestrian direction, but they were almost unanimous in their gratitude for a film “featuring two stars of the grand tradition who respond to each other with a verve that makes the years disappear.”

  In June, 1974, Kate returned to Hartford to narrate a film entitled Resolved to Be Free, produced by her brother-in-law, Ellsworth Grant, and sponsored by the Society for Savings (a banking concern) in conjunction with the State Bicentennial Commission. The film, a half-hour documentary on Connecticut’s role in the War for Independence, was to be available, free of charge, to schools and other interested groups, following its premiere in early 1975. Kate is especially stirring when she repeats the famous lines, “Men, you are all marksmen—don’t one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes!”* Duke Wayne could not have done better.

  The house in Turtle Bay had not undergone any changes, but one of Kate’s neighbors was now Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim. During the winter of 1974-75, Sondheim was working through the nights on the score for A Little Night Music and the piano kept Kate awake. One night, in a fury, she got up and, barefoot and clad only in thin pajamas, sloshed her way through the snow in her back garden, climbed the fence between the houses and made her way to the ground floor of Sondheim’s music room. “I pressed my face against the window and looked in,” she later admitted. “I must have looked like an old witch. He had another young man with him and they had drinks in their hands, and all of a sudden they both looked at me, and absolutely froze. I just stood there. Seconds passed. They just stared at me. I stared at them. I disappeared. Afterwards—Silence.”

  She still kept very much to herself. The six-thirty group gathered several evenings a week. She had them to early dinner and dismissed them shortly after. Occasionally, she went to a friend’s house for dinner or to a movie. One night she came out of a movie on Fifty-eighth Street to find her car hemmed in by a double-parked truck. Her only recourse, she decided, was to drive her car deep onto the sidewalk and make a sharp turn out. The line of people waiting to get into the theater had recognized Kate, and they stood back to make room and to watch what she would do. “I gave it the gas,” she explained, “aimed at the crowd—and turned amid cheers—“That’s it Katie, ride em!’ It was thrilling.”

  She once had claimed that she had no pictures of the dead displayed. But a framed photograph of Dr. Hepburn now rested on the bureau in her third-floor bedroom and one of Tracy—youthful, handsome, wearing a polo helmet and flanked by some elegant polo ponies—occupied a major portion of her bedside table. Behind it rested a portrait of Tracy, seated, pensive, painted by her in the sixties. Elsewhere in the room was a small bronze bust, “that I did of him in wax in about ten minutes once . . . that profile, I think it’s really caught him!” she boasted.

  Not long after Rooster Cogburn was finished, Kate agreed to appear later in the year on Broadway for twelve weeks in Enid Bagnold’s A Matter of Gravity, tour with it on the road for five or six weeks beforehand,* and for six months after the New York engagement. Kate had encountered Enid Bagnold thirty years before when R.K.O. purchased the English author’s best-selling novel National Velvet for her.† Kate eventually decided the role (later played by Elizabeth Taylor and filmed by Metro) did not suit her.

  Kate and Bagnold, who was eighty-six at the time, struck up a friendship. “Enid is quite extraordinary,” Kate commented. “My God, imagine writing a play at her age!”

  Presumably, Kate chose this play because of her admiration for the elderly playwright and author, because the role was strong, and because, as she said, “I always feel that if something is difficult—as the theater has always been for me—it must be good for me to do it.” A Matter of Gravity was portentous and ponderous and the characters unlikely and disagreeable except for the eccentric Mrs. Basil, “the old lady of the mansion”—a thirty-room estate at Oxford in which Mrs. Basil had chosen to live in only one room. A new cook-housekeeper named Dubois enters Mrs. Basil’s world and the grandson she has doted on brings home four dubious friends. The woman who has feared change and death, who did not believe in God, nor the breaking down of class distinctions, suddenly witnesses a miracle. “She sees, with her own eyes, Dubois rise in the air as stately as a zeppelin, and bounce off the ceiling with plaster in her hair. Now she knows, as she says incomprehensibly: ‘If only there were a mystery it would be the ladder to all mysteries.’”

  The failings of the play were irrelevant. Audiences who came to see A Matter of Gravity came to see “Miss Hepburn play rather than the play Miss Hepburn is in.” A Matter of Gravity opened in Philadelphia. Luddy had moved back to his family home a few years earlier and the two held a reunion after the show. The following morning Lu
ddy met her at her hotel and they had breakfast in her suite. Luddy was now seventy-seven. Ill and aging, he still had the old natty look, the gallant manner, and his devotion to Kate had never wavered. From Philadelphia, the show went to Washington, New Haven, Boston and Toronto. By the end of the preBroadway tour, A Matter of Gravity had recouped its original investment. And the reason was Kate.

  “I have rarely seen Miss Hepburn better even in the movies,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times on February 4, 1976, the morning after A Matter of Gravity opened on Broadway. . . her acting is now in the lambent heat of its Indian summer. Even her stylizations have become style in the certainty of their execution—so her startled and amused gentility, her crisp, ineffably unanswerable way with a cliche, all are unforgettable. Admirers of acting in that grand mannerism nowadays so easily lost, should see this performance and etch it on their memories. . . . A Matter of Gravity is not especially grave and there is probably too much matter, and too little art, but there is always Miss Hepburn, whose very presence could make a bonfire out of an old East Grinstead telephone directory.”

  Barnes returned to see the play a second time. Unable to contain his admiration for Kate within the boundaries of a review, he followed up on his daily review with a tribute in the Sunday drama section of The Times on February 15: “In A Matter of Gravity Miss Hepburn ... is acting better than she has ever before in her life. I’m allowing for some fine performances, particularly in films, and rather discounting the sheer loveliness that made gossamer of The Philadelphia Story. The loveliness is still with us, ostentatiously older, not as much older as proclaimed. But, there is something different here, now. It’s as though the feathery bravura and the challenging nasality and a chin held so high that one scarcely dares question the authenticity behind so much panache had all dissolved at last, had been absorbed into simplicity, had come home to roost and rest, leaving only a clear intention in the eye, an economy of gesture (except for that walking stick the lady dropped twice on opening night, obviously because she had no conceivable use for it), and a directness of address—sometimes forceful, sometimes most quietly bemused—that together bespeak plainly the actress’s sincerity. She isn’t decorating, she means every bloody word of it. . . . In her tartness and her melting laughter, Miss Hepburn is integrity incarnate, piercingly authentic.”