Cinema: The Hepburn Story

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Hollywood, which is crowded with luscious cuties, decided that Katharine Hepburn was no great beauty. Her body suggests a collection of fine bones held together by freckles. Her vivid, angular face is topped by red hair pinned up any which way. Her penetrating voice can be as disturbing as some of her strong opinions. When she first arrived in Hollywood, her agent, Myron Selznick, took one look and groaned: “My God, are we sticking them $1,500 a week for this!”

Broadway felt much the same way about her abilities. Critic Dorothy Parker helped brush Kate off the stage with the withering comment: “She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.” Producer Joseph Verner Reed thought she might be better at high hurdles than at acting. Playwright Benn Levy said flatly: “She looks a fright, her manner is objectionable, and she has no talent.”

In Kate Hepburn’s 24 years on stage and screen, her detractors have been many. Yet most of them have had to eat their words. The most damning thing ever said of her was in 1938, when Harry Brandt, a movie exhibitor, labeled Kate “boxoffice poison.” But this year Kate is stronger than she ever was: her last two films, The African Queen and Pat and Mike, are top box-office hits of the season.

Two years ago, Kate dazzled Broadway and the road as Rosalind in As You Like It. This week, in London, she is playing to packed houses and critical huzzahs in the title role of Bernard Shaw’s The Millionairess. Written in 1935 when Shaw was a spry septuagenarian, the play deals with a forceful, bossy young woman who makes her own rules and discards husbands and lovers the way other people discard paper napkins. The play was considered indifferent Shaw and dull theater until Kate turned it into a personal triumph. The critics drowned in their own superlatives: “A blockbusting performance”—”A human hurricane”—”Conquest by storm”—”One feels as excited as the man who went over Niagara in a barrel.”

Passionate Pro. Her great personal success in the Shaw play may be explained by the fact that the part suits her down to the ground. For Kate Hepburn is a Shavian heroine in real life: strong-minded, talkative, alternately irritating and fascinating, bursting with electric energy and remedies for all the world’s ills. In Shaw’s words, she is the born “decider, dominator, organizer, tactician and mesmerizer.”

Kate is full of theories, from a special way of brushing your teeth to a special way of digesting a meal (“You just have to get the seat of your pants higher than your head”). She believes that it helps her think more clearly to take at least five baths a day; she shampoos her hair oftener than Mary Martin has to in South Pacific; she likes to wrap her feet in wet cloths. Her insatiable curiosity is equaled only by her dauntless enthusiasm. She strides earnestly through each new city, inspecting everything from museums to maternity wards. When she got to Africa for the filming of The African Queen, she caroled: “What divine natives! What divine morning glories” and began searching for a bamboo forest, because she wanted to know what it would feel like to sit alone in the middle of one.

At golf, tennis, figure skating and swimming, she is a passionate amateur. She can pilot a plane, drive a car and paint a passable landscape. But at acting she is a passionate pro. She does more than merely act in a movie: she somehow gives the impression that she has had a hand in writing, directing and cutting the film. She is never satisfied with a scene and will exhaust herself and everyone around her to get it right.

Peculiar Jab. Her personality is a mixture of puritanism and passion: the two qualities are powerful partners. Though she sometimes swears like a trooper, she does not like to hear others swear. She sips at a drink occasionally to be sociable, but she is eloquent on the evils of hard liquor. She seldom understands a double-meaning joke, and if she does, she is annoyed. While on location for The African Queen, Director John Huston and Humphrey Bogart would often tease Kate by telling off-color stories or pretending to an excessive thirst for alcohol. Finally Kate told them airily: “You boys think you’re awfully wicked, don’t you? Why, you don’t know what the word ‘wicked’ means.” That settled their hash. Says Bogart, still brooding over it: “Now what the hell she meant by that, I don’t know.”

Kate often leaves them wondering. “I strike people as peculiar in some way, although I don’t quite understand why,” she says. “Of course, I have an angular face, an angular body, and, I suppose, an angular personality which jabs into people.”

Whacked Children. The angularity of mind and body was hers by inheritance. She was born 42 years ago in Hartford, Conn., the second of the six children of Katharine Houghton and Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, a noted urologist and surgeon. Her father, a transplanted Virginian, was so moved by Brieux’s crusading play about syphilis, Damaged Goods (and by the preface written to it by Bernard Shaw), that he risked ostracism by his campaign to bring the facts about venereal disease into the open. With Harvard’s Dr. Charles Eliot, he founded the American Social Hygiene Association. Kate’s family-proud mother gave each of her children the same middle name, Houghton, and worked energetically at her own pet crusades: women’s suffrage and birth control. She picketed the White House and delivered speeches on street corners. Young Kate was often beside her, handing out pamphlets.

In the rapt and rambling Hepburn household, no one ever changed the subject when young Kate came into the room: she heard all there was to hear. But freedom had its limits. When his children’s squabbles got beyond the control of reason, Dr. Hepburn whacked them all impartially. Kate was spanked until she was nine, when she figured out how to stop the spankings: by taking them without crying.

Hartford’s more orthodox citizens looked somewhat askance at the perpetual ferment seething in the Hepburn house, and this attitude was sometimes reflected in the brutal behavior of the neighbors’ pitiless young. Kate took to shaving her head every summer so as to give her playmates less of a hand-hold when they locked in combat. One day, a cattily candid friend remarked to Mrs. Hepburn that it was a pity Kate was such a frail child. Kate, seeing through the pity to the insult, charged across the lawn and hurled herself headlong against a tree. If that wasn’t a sufficient answer, Kate figured it should have been.

Kate was largely educated by private tutors. When she arrived at Bryn Mawr as a freshman, she knew neither what to do nor what to expect. To nerve herself for her first appearance in the dining room, she put on a flame-colored dress and made a queenly, solo entrance. In the stunned silence, an upperclassman said clearly: “Ah, conscious beauty!” It was months before Kate could bring herself to return to the dining room.

Bryn Mawr has high scholastic standards, and Kate very nearly flunked out. Then she discovered that, to act in the college plays, she had to get high grades. She got them. She also alternated between living like a hermit and making a public show of herself. Sometimes she would wait until the rest of the dormitory was asleep before she would take a bath. But once, she took a bath in the library fountain and rolled herself dry on the grass. She got away with that one. But when she was caught smoking a cigarette (her first), she was suspended, briefly.

Two-Room Walkup. Graduated from Bryn Mawr and determined to be a great actress, Kate pursued the theater with such intensity and such conviction as her fellow actors had seldom seen and generally resented. One screamed at her: “You’re a freak of nature—you’ll never last!” She played stock in Baltimore, studied dramatics in New York under Frances Robinson-Duff, landed a bit part in These Days, a Broadway flop. For six months she understudied Hope Williams in Holiday. Sculptor Robert McKnight, who wanted to marry her, took her to the country for an afternoon. She talked so continuously of love, life, art and Katharine Hepburn that he never had a chance to interrupt with his proposal.

But somebody did manage to get a persuasive word in edgewise. In 1928 she married a Philadelphia socialite named Ludlow Ogden Smith. Realizing the impossibility of asking Kate to take on a commonplace name like Smith, he changed his name to Ogden Ludlow.

Temporarily dazzled, Kate said goodbye to the theater, honeymooned in Bermuda and even went to look at houses on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Then she came to and asked herself: “What am I doing? I couldn’t live here.” The bridegroom gave everything up, quietly. They left the Main Line for Manhattan, the theater, and a two-room walkup apartment that was short on furniture and long on classical records.

When she divorced Ogden in 1934, he was promptly enrolled as a good friend of Kate and the Hepburn family. This was the fate of many another Hepburn admirer. Some of them found it galling. Because Kate dislikes nightclubs, and lives a fairly cloistered life, only two of her romances have figured in the gossip columns. One was with Producer Leland Hayward (see PRESS), whose reading and tennis Kate tried hard to improve. The other was Howard Hughes, who was richer, taller, and better at golf than she was. But neither lasted.

Prop Deer. Hepburn’s early assaults on Broadway were easily repulsed. She was fired from the casts of Death Takes a Holiday and The Animal Kingdom. Critics then, as now, disagreed about her talent. Kate says: “One lot said I was a lovely, graceful young creature. Another lot said I was gawky, hoydenish, gaunt, like something escaped from a tomb.” In The Warrior’s Husband, she was fired and rehired before the show reached Broadway. The play was a hit and so was Kate. As Antiope, an Amazon queen, Kate came hurtling down a ramp, lugging a prop deer; she wrestled with Actor Colin Keith-Johnston; she made prodigious leaps across stage; she wore a short tunic that showed her long and lovely legs. She caught Hollywood’s eye.

RKO gave her a screen test. She was making $79.50 a week in The Warrior’s Husband, but she demanded $1,500 a week from Hollywood, and meant it. Nevertheless, when RKO actually met her stiff price, Kate phoned her close friend Laura Harding and said: “They must be insane out there. You’d better come to the Coast with me.”

Director George Cukor describes Kate’s early attitude toward Hollywood as “sub-collegiate idiotic.” She went out of her way to insult everyone in sight, at sight. She told reporters that she couldn’t remember whether she was married or not, but that she did have five children—”three of them colored.” She wore a baggy sweater and patched blue dungaree pants (now a national fad but in 1932 a scandal), and read her mail sitting on the curb outside the studio.

In Kate’s first movie, A Bill of Divorcement, she played John Barrymore’s daughter. Barrymore soon took some of the starch out of her by inviting Kate to his dressing room and trying to seduce her. Kate retreated across the room, quavering: “There must be some mistake!” Barrymore grimly agreed and showed her the door. That nonsense over, they became friends. Kate remembers him warmly: “He never criticized me. He just shoved me into what I ought to do before the camera. He taught me all that could be poured into one greenhorn in that short time.”

Divorcement was an unexpected success. The nation’s moviegoers took to the nasal voice, the angular face, the Bryn Mawr accent. Kate’s second film, Christopher Strong, was a flop. But then she won an Oscar for her acting of the stagestruck girl in Morning Glory. As Jo in Little Women, her performance was so moving that Tallulah Bankhead knelt to congratulate her.

Talent Graveyard. After the three hits and one flop, she played in half a dozen bad films, and Hollywood rumor said that Kate was through. When RKO asked her to play in a feeble B picture called Mother Carey’s Chickens, Kate saw that she was headed for the talent graveyard, and she paid RKO $220,000 to be released from her contract. She begged David Selznick to let her play the lead in Gone With the Wind: “The part was practically written for me. I am Scarlett O’Hara.” Selznick shook his head: “I just can’t imagine Clark Gable chasing you for ten years.”

Broadway was as cold of heart as Hollywood. Kate had failed dismally in The Lake, and, after several weeks of out-of-town tryouts, refused to come to New York with the Theatre Guild’s Jane Eyre. She retreated to Hartford to lick her wounds.

Cut to Size. Then Playwright Philip Barry came to see her at Fenwick, the Hepburn summer house on Long Island Sound. Sitting on an old pier, he outlined for her the plot of The Philadelphia Story. Kate liked the sound of it. She agreed to invest in the play as well as act in it, and foresightedly bought up the movie rights. At first glance, it looked like a marriage of failures: five of Kate’s last six movies had flopped; so had all three of Barry’s last plays. The night they opened in Manhattan, Kate stood trembling in the wings, terrified at the prospect of again facing a New York audience and the roughshod New York critics. She tried to mesmerize herself by repeating over & over: “This is Indianapolis!” The play was a smash Broadway hit, ran for 417 performances, and as a movie broke all records at the Radio City Music Hall.

Kate has a true Yankee respect for money and for the sanctity of contracts. She once collected $10,000 overtime from RKO for a little more than an hour’s work, and then lectured the studio’s lawyers: “You make other people live up to the conditions you write into contracts. It’s time you learned to do so, too.” Her neatest business coup was accomplished with Woman of the Year, written by Michael Kanin and Ring Lardner Jr., neither of whom had ever got more than $3,000 for a movie script. Kate removed the first page of the script, which listed the authors’ names, and sold the story for them to M-G-M for $100,000, plus an extra $10,000 commission for herself. Part of the deal, of course, was that she was to play the lead.

By her own estimate, Kate has earned more than $3,000,000 in movies and the theater. Most of the money goes straight to Hartford, where her father takes time off from his medical practice to manage her investments.

Her co-star in Woman of the Year was Spencer Tracy. When they met, on the set, Kate said coolly: “I’m afraid I’m a little tall for you, Mr. Tracy.” He replied: “Don’t worry, Miss Hepburn, I’ll cut you down to my size.” In spite of these tough words, both spent the first days studying each other’s films—Kate in one projection room, Tracy in another. When shooting started on Woman of the Year, Producer Joe Mankiewicz was puzzled. The strident Hepburn delivery was unaccountably soft and mumbled, the Tracy toughness was strangely polished. “There they were,” says Mankiewicz, “imitating each other.” Kate and Tracy went on to make five other films together and to become fast friends.

Fiery Speech. Kate’s rollercoaster career eased into a second decline. It dipped to the vanishing point when she ran afoul of the Un-American Activities Committee because she made a fiery speech of protest when Candidate Henry Wallace was barred from using the Hollywood Bowl for a campaign address. But, as usual, Kate came back up faster than she went down.

Her friends say that the past ten years have mellowed Kate. She no longer has head-on collisions with producers, reporters and autograph hunters. Director George Stevens thinks she is misunderstood: “She’s rude, but no more than any other woman who’s definite. She just says things without adding that grace note.” Director George Cukor thinks the important thing about Kate is that, whatever she does, she’s prepared to take the consequences. “It’s a peculiar thing,” notes Cukor, “but the movie audience is hostile to Kate at the start of a picture. You can almost feel the hostility. By the middle of the picture they’re usually sympathetic and, by the end, they’re rooting for her.”

That, in a way, is the story of her life. Hollywood, which detested Kate at first sight, now gives her the ultimate compliment of calling her by her first name. In Hollywood, “Darryl” means Zanuck, “Hedda” means Hopper, and “Kate” means Hepburn. And she has a deeper, if quieter, claim to fame. Her strongest boosters have always been the backstage crews and supporting players. She usually knows every technician’s name and most of his personal problems.

Bathroom Wall. When she is in Manhattan, Kate lives in a comfortable, eleven-room house in the East 40s. With its narrow, steep stairs, white-painted walls and serviceable colonial antiques, it has a New England look. There are fireplaces on every floor and the house overflows with well-thumbed books. One wall of her bathroom—where she spends much of her time bathing—is covered with photographs of her good-looking family. Her mother died last year. Her younger sisters, Marion and Margaret, are married and live close to Hartford. Her brother Robert is a doctor whose practice is in Hartford, and brother Dick lives part of the year in New York and writes plays. Her brother Tom died in his teens.

The house is run by a stocky Irishman, white-haired, 52-year-old Charles Newhill, a former boxer who has worked for Kate for 20 years. He was Kate’s bodyguard in her more strenuous days, and now functions as chauffeur and trusted retainer.

Hartford Bound. From London, Kate is looking forward to October, when she will bring The Millionairess to the U.S. for its New York opening. She says philosophically: “It might lay an egg or it might be successful. No one can tell.” And she adds: “I think it went over so well here because American vitality has a great appeal for the British. You can see that in the popularity in England of Judy Garland, Danny Kaye and others. But back home, vitality is not so bloody unique.”

Next year she will do another movie for John Huston, an adaptation of a British novel called Miss Hargreaves, in which she plays a 70-year-old woman who scandalizes a cathedral town. Beyond that, she has no plans — “But that could change tomorrow.”

In one respect, Kate agrees with some of her critics: “I’ve never considered myself necessarily an actress. I’ve always felt I might do something else one day —something in which I won’t be personally so prominent. And it will be something where I don’t have to try to sell myself, which is a humiliating endeavor, although very well paid. I’ve always had a strange and strong dream that if I stopped and went back to Hartford, I wouldn’t remember a thing about my acting career.” She paused meditatively, and added: “Not one damn thing.”