Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  Again Barnes took aim at the writing of A Matter of Gravity, which he called, “at sixes and sevens as a play, willfully untidy, subject to dizzy spells, possessed by wanderlust, sometimes downright inexplicable. . . . Yet,” he admits, “[Miss Bagnold] wrote the part Miss Hepburn is playing, and if she hadn’t, in some mysterious way, written it honestly, Miss Hepburn would not have so much to be honest about. There’s just no doubt that Miss Hepburn has got hold of something strong, tangible and real. Something apart from herself. And she had to find it somewhere.” Kate had finally won over the New York critics and in the process redeemed Enid Bagnold’s octogenarian effort single-handedly.

  A Matter of Gravity could have had a long, successful run. But after twelve weeks, Kate insisted on stepping out of the play as originally planned, and it closed the first week in May. Two years earlier, a young director, Richard Colla, had sent her a script that she thought would be a wonderful escapade. Titled Olly Olly Oxen Free, the story was about an eccentric old junkyard proprietress who befriends two adventurous youngsters and helps them repair a hot-air balloon which accidentally takes the three of them aloft for the ride of their lifetimes. Kate had told Colla she would do it if he could find the money, “Because I’ve always wanted to fly a balloon.” Colla now had financing and Kate did not go back on her verbal agreement, even though the budget was modest and the distribution unsure.

  The film was made in California in the summer of 1976. Kate’s role contained some dangerous stunts, and Colla had hired a double to do them for her. For one shot a stuntman, dressed as Kate, was readying himself for the moment when the cameras would start turning; as Kate’s character, Miss Pudd, he was to grab on to a rope hanging from the rapidly escaping balloon. “That man doesn’t look a thing like me at all,” Kate snapped. Sweeping past him and into the shot, she grabbed hold of the rope as it dipped and then lifted her off the ground, holding her airborne for a few moments until crew members pulled her down.

  The picture’s finale was Kate and the two boys descending in the balloon on the Hollywood Bowl concert stage during a rendition of the “1812 Overture.”* After the scene was shot, Kate climbed out of the balloon and announced to the many thousands of spectators who filled the Bowl, “This should prove to all of you that if you’re silly enough you can do anything.”

  Kate was marvelous in the film, her two young co-stars engaging, and the balloon scenes spectacular. But the script never reached the same heights. Colla could not get a release, the fear being that Kate on her own could not carry the low-budget movie. Two years later the film played in midwestern theaters, but Kate’s name had no marquee lure. Film and theater audiences obviously were very different groups. Finally, Olly Olly Oxen Free opened in New York in June, 1981, with no greater success; and after that it became known as Kate’s lost film. Olly Olly Oxen Free contains some of her most enchanting latter-day footage, which makes its unrealized potential just that much more disappointing.

  In October, 1976, she rejoined the company of A Matter of Gravity for a six-month tour, playing in Denver, Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix. A few days after the play opened at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles to excellent reviews, Kate stepped into a hole while gardening at the bungalow and fractured her ankle in three places. She continued in a wheelchair after missing two performances. During one show a woman photographer took a flash picture of her; and Kate, wheeling herself to the footlights, yelled out, “You’re a pig. You have no consideration for the actors trying to concentrate during difficult scenes or for the people who paid good money to come here. Such a lack of consideration is an illness of our society.” Then she pivoted and wheeled herself back to her original position and went on with the scene.

  The transition from being Kate to becoming Mrs. Basil was not as jarring for an audience as one would suspect. The character she played was fiercely involved with issues that concerned Kate—“It’s a me-me-me era,” she said. “Right and wrong are mixed up. Integrity is not held in any great esteem. If we behave like mutts and roll around dissipating, being exhausted, what are we going to be? Mush!” And Mrs. Basil shares these opinions with equal passion.

  The play closed in Phoenix in March, whereupon Kate joined her family at Fenwick. Aunt Kat’s coming was much looked forward to by her nieces and nephews. The house—despite the March gale winds whipping around the corners, a pearlescent, depressing gray sea and bleak vistas seen through the many-windowed rooms—was always lively with Kate’s arrival. Rooms were littered with reminders of her occupancy; canvas bags filled with scripts and books covered tabletops and were propped against furniture, scarves and old hats were balled up in the corners of chairs, glasses (misplaced constantly) could be found on ledges or windowsills and shoes kicked off might be in the way from one room to another. Kate loved to cook, and the big six-burner kitchen stove kept the windows steamed a good part of the day while countertops were covered with equipment and ingredients and the wastebasket was filled to overflowing. Her unmistakable voice filled Fenwick’s large, comfortable rooms with enthusiastic conversation, her hardy laughter punctuating her speech. When the telephone rang more than she wished, she would pick it up and, if the caller was not a family member or close friend, say, “Katharine Hepburn? She’s not here. This is her sister.”

  Marion and Peggy had matured into serious-minded women. But when Kate was with them, they regained their youthful spirit and sense of fun. Kate had always been and remained a strong-willed, opinionated woman, hard to win a point from in a heated discussion. She believed that standards must be passed from one generation to the next, and none of her nieces or nephews was spared her views. God “was a concept too vast for her mind to consider,” but she believed in “the lessons of Jesus Christ” despite her feeling, shared with Marx, that “religion was a sop for the masses.”

  Late that summer she went to London as a guest of Enid Bagnold to discuss the possibility of presenting A Matter of Gravity in the West End. The older woman told Kate quite frankly that she should have a facelift, confessing that she had had one in 1956 “as a sort of celebration for the success of my play The Chalk Garden. ” Bagnold directed Kate to a Glasgow plastic surgeon, John Mustarde. Kate traveled incognito to Scotland with Bagnold and made immediate arrangements. Bagnold, in an unguarded interview that Kate did not appreciate, acknowledged that hers “was done by the late Sir Archibald Mclndon, who took enough skin off my face to cover a handbag. Kate,” she claimed, “didn’t need anything like that. She only needed the skin beneath her eyes raised to correct a downward slant. . . . After the operation Kate said to the surgeon, Til go home and go to bed.’

  “But he said, ‘Rubbish. Absolutely no need. Go and take some photographs of our beautiful Scottish coastline.’

  “In the end it almost went wrong. Kate was staying at a hotel under some very carefully chosen alias, but her secretary [Phyllis] had forgotten to change the luggage labels which all said Miss Katharine Hepburn.”

  The possibility of a London production of A Matter of Gravity ended, and not long after the facelift Kate and Phyllis flew home. For several months Kate relaxed at Turtle Bay and at Fenwick, swimming whenever she could no matter how cold the water. In January, 1978, George Cukor came to visit her and to see if she would work with him one more time. Cukor, now almost eighty, did not feel he could stand the pressures of a major film—but, perhaps, another television production? Kate would have found it difficult to deny Cukor anything, and he suggested they collaborate on Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green. She got the play and read it. It had power and hope and was about “. . . someone moving forward, not falling backward, about someone at the wheel of their life instead of being dominated by excuses.”

  Agreeing straightaway, she immediately pressed for the play to be shot in its proper locale—Wales. Within a few weeks she and Cukor were in London and Wales searching for a cast and locations. Eight weeks later they had completed both tasks. “Walking from George’s apartment,”
Kate recalled, “—I was living just down the way from him—I have to say a fleeting thought crossed my mind.

  “What about those two young ones we’d just interviewed and cast [Ion Saynor and Toyah Wilson]? They are pretty attractive. Who’s going to look at you, Kathy?

  “Oh, hell, who cares. It’s a great play . . . and it’s life isn’t it? You plow ahead and make a hit. And you plow on and someone passes you. Then someone passes them. Time levels.”

  Miss Moffat in the 1941 Broadway production of The Corn Is Green had been Ethel Barrymore’s last great stage role.* Five years later, Bette Davis had given a memorable performance as Miss Moffat in the screen version.† As with The Glass Menagerie, Kate was taking on a role closely identified with other actresses.

  Miss Moffat is a strong-minded English spinster and teacher who inherits a cottage in a Welsh mining village and dedicates her life to educating the young boys in the town who are forced at age ten to go down into the mines to work. She finds one extremely gifted student, Morgan Evans [Ion Saynor], and works diligently to help him win a scholarship for Oxford. Evans is seduced by a young woman [Toyah Wilson]. When he learns the girl is pregnant, he is ready to sacrifice his future to do his duty by her and the child she will bear. But Miss Moffat insists he leave and agrees to adopt and raise the child herself.

  All the exteriors for The Corn Is Green were shot in Isybyty-Ifan, a small, bleak Welsh village. Nearby was a farm called Hafod Ifan—a stone house on the slope of a great hill with a group of long, beautiful stone cattle barns that housed Welsh Blacks. Hafod Ifan was to be Miss Moffat’s home; the barns, her school. A short distance east of the town of Wexham was the Bersham Colliery, an old but still operative coal mine. In 1890, the period of the play, boys worked twelve-hour days in the Bersham, digging in places too small for a man to reach.

  Kate insisted she go down in the mine with some of the film crew. “They put on coveralls, gloves, hard hats, boots.... I only needed a hat. My ordinary clothes were suitable, including my shoes,” she wrote later. They descended thirteen hundred feet in the pitch dark in a two-level, open-cage elevator, each carrying a lamp, a gas detector and a gas mask. Kate and the men who accompanied her walked through a narrow tunnel over uneven ground to a darkish room where some miners were gathered drinking tea from thermos jugs. “There was a constant draft of wind,” Kate remembered, “persistent and somehow exhausting. And . . . cold.”

  She talked to the curious men for a few minutes and then started back up. As she rose in the elevator she heard “a beautiful tenor voice . . . others gradually joined in. . . .” The experience was unforgettable for Kate, who reached ground level covered in coal dust—“thrilling.”

  Kate and Phyllis had a small three-hundred-year-old cottage at Capel Garmon, near Bettsw y Coed, with a great fireplace in the living room made of three big blocks of slate, quarried in the area. Capel Garmon also had several nearby woolen mills and Kate “spiffed up the room with big spools of wool. . . . Red, blue, white, blue-and-white mix.”

  Film work invigorated her as theater never did. Every day she did something different. She got up at five, devoured a huge breakfast—“Fruit, eggs, bacon, chicken livers, toast, marmalade, coffee” from a tray she had prepared and brought up to her room herself. For an hour she would study the script, then take a cold shower or bath and go out for a bike ride before the car arrived around seven to take her to the location. At night she had dinner on a tray “in front of the fire,” she wrote. “Pretty. First thing I do when I get home is to wash my hair. Eve always tended to that myself. Saves repeated nuisance. I do it every night. I pile it up wet. And it sort of dries before the fire while Fm eating.”

  Cukor and Kate had a lot of good-natured arguments. Cukor said, laughing, “Our relationship is give and take. I give and she takes.”

  One scene in the film called for Kate to ride an 1890 bicycle (“stiff and it weighed a ton”) up to the top of a steep hill. For one of the few times in her life, Kate could not do what the script required. A young woman athlete who bore a fair resemblance to Kate (at least from a distance) shot the scene for her. “I was humiliated,” she said. “Nearly had a stroke. But I just could not pump up that hill. Infuriating failure. I have always been able to do my own stuff. But my legs just could not push hard enough to keep that bike from a drunken wobble. They thought that I was silly to be so mad that she could and I couldn’t. Yes, I suppose so. But, there it is. I still am mad. Damned old legs.”

  She left Capel Garmon with sadness—“the hills, valleys, skies, flowers, fields, stone farmhouses, barns, narrow roads lined with pink and purple foxgloves. Sheep roaming the hillsides—every possible view. The mountains of Snowdonia appearing and disappearing in the distance . . . were intoxicating. Lifted the soul.” Somehow, cast and crew were never able to rekindle the wonder and spirit of it all once they were at work on a London sound stage.

  The reviews of The Corn Is Green were not enthusiastic. Kate’s performance was lauded; but in the years since Williams had written his semiautobiographical play, the story had become dated and Miss Moffat stereotyped. Kate had not brought new insight to the character as she had to Amanda Wingfield. The problem may have been that she felt too comfortable with the role, or that Cukor was not as strong as he should have been.

  Cukor, in fact, was failing, and shortly after they both had returned to the States he confided to Kate that he had to sell his house and Tracy’s old bungalow because he could no longer cope with such a large responsibility. He begged Kate to buy it, but she could not see herself making any more films in California and she knew if Cukor was not there, nothing would be the same anyway. Subsequently Cukor sold the place, and in March, 1979, the new owners asked Kate to please pack up her belongings and leave. An era had ended.

  Footnotes

  * John Wayne (1907-1979), born Marion Michael Morrison, known as “Duke” from his football days at U.S.C. and originally as Duke Wayne when he entered films in 1928. He made more than 150 movies. The role of the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach (1939) made him a major star. A few of his best films were The Spoilers (1942), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Quiet Man (1952), The Alamo (1960) and True Grit (1969), for which he won the Academy Award.

  * Stuart Millar (1929– ) gained his first credits as a producer and made some strong films with star performances—Bird Man of Alcatraz (1962) with Burt Lancaster, I Could Go On Singing (1963) with Judy Garland, The Best Alan (1964) with Henry Fonda, and Little Big Man (1970) with Dustin Hoffman. Rooster Cogburn was his second directorial effort.

  * Wayne’s last film was The Shootist (1976). When he died, a congressional medal was awarded him posthumously.

  * Credited to William Prescott during the battle on Breed’s Hill, June 17, 1775.

  * The show actually stayed on the road for twelve weeks before the Broadway opening.

  † Enid Bagnold (1890-1981) was also the author of the novel Serena Blandish and the very successful play The Chalk Garden. In private life, she was Lady Jones, widow of the one-time Reuters Press Chairman Sir Roderick Jones.

  * For this shot, Hepburn, McKenzie and Dimster were held aloft over the stage until, on signal, the balloon was slowly pulled down by ropes as the orchestra darted out of its way.

  * Barrymore played the role of Miss Moffat in The Corn Is Green on Broadway and on tour for the next six years.

  † Davis also starred in a musical version of The Corn Is Green, but it closed out of town.

  CHAPTER

  28

  A sign spelling out the name H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D spreads across the stubby fagade of the Hollywood Hills. But Hollywood, that fabled, glittering movieland of stars, dreams fulfilled and hopes dashed, never really existed.

  The early studios were located there, but with sound new studios were built elsewhere—Warner Brothers, Universal and Republic over those hills and in the valley, Twentieth Century-Fox in the more verdant Beverly Hills, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Selznick-International in nearby Culver City.
Film stars always chose to live in the more select of Hollywood’s neighboring towns—in the old days Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel Air, Santa Monica, Malibu and the canyons; more recently in the great expanses of the elite valley communities. Film circles in the thirties drove to Hollywood for premieres at Grauman’s Chinese, a hot-fudge sundae at Brown’s, lunch at Lucy’s or Musso & Frank’s or the Hollywood Brown Derby on Vine Street, an appearance on CBS or NBC or a chat with Louella Parsons on the radio show from the Hollywood Hotel.

  The social life of the film community soon moved east to the new Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles and west to the restaurants and clubs frequented by the Rodeo Drive habitues. By the sixties, like the old Movietone News—“they covered the world”—film production was moving to Europe and other, more exotic places. Never mind. In the beginning came the word and it appeared at the end of a movie’s credits: “Made in Hollywood, U.S.A.” To filmgoers Hollywood was a symbol for films and film stars—especially those great ones who had remained constant for decades.