Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood

by Karina Longworth

  Selznick eventually gave in on the casting of Hepburn, but once she arrived in Hollywood, he changed his mind. The producer had seen photographs of Hepburn that seemed promising (“What legs!” Selznick’s wife, Irene, exclaimed on first viewing of one of Hepburn’s Broadway publicity stills), but Hepburn gave a different impression in person. “I don’t know where she got her clothes,” Adela Rogers St. Johns cattily commented on Hepburn’s appearance on her first day at RKO. In fact, Hepburn had got her clothes at the New York atelier of radical feminist designer Elizabeth Hawes, a place where women only shopped if, as Irene Selznick put it, they were “out to make a statement.”

  This was not a statement to which the chief of production at RKO was receptive. When Hepburn was brought to meet Selznick in the commissary, he was allegedly so unnerved by her appearance that he turned his table over and stormed out. As Selznick’s lunch companions were dealing with the spilled food in their laps, the producer got Cukor on the phone and told him in no uncertain terms: “Send her back to New York.”

  Selznick was serious. He really believed Katharine Hepburn was not good-looking enough to be in movies, and, unable to imagine a movie viewer responding to an actress whom Selznick himself wasn’t sexually attracted to, he figured A Bill of Divorcement was doomed with her in it. But George Cukor threatened to quit if Selznick sent Hepburn away, so both stayed.*

  In the end, Hepburn would look as conventionally lovely in A Bill of Divorcement as she ever would. Hepburn played Sydney, a young woman who is seemingly happily engaged to a milquetoast named Kit, until Sydney’s father (John Barrymore), long interred in an asylum, returns home and throws her household into crisis. Her mother has divorced the father in absentia and is on the verge of marrying someone else. The father is devastated by this news. Sydney feels a connection to her dad, and once she learns from a doctor that her children could suffer from the same mental illness, she decides she will never—can never—marry. “You must . . . go away,” she tells her fiancé. He does, and the film ends with Sydney and her father together, having decided that the people they love will be better off without them.

  This ending is shocking today, so you can only imagine what it would have been like in 1932, when being a never-married woman was more widely considered to be a much bigger disaster than it is nearly a century later. With A Bill of Divorcement, from the beginning of her movie career, Katharine Hepburn was embodying a young woman who didn’t fit the mold, and who chose to go against the conventional path of matrimony.

  Predictably, not everyone was pleased. The Hollywood Reporter’s extremely negative review declared that Hepburn “might have been good if given a chance,” had she not been “forced to dress like, talk like, and slouch like Greta Garbo.” This doesn’t seem anything like an accurate criticism of Hepburn’s performance—in fact, her bright-eyed self-possession seems like the polar opposite of Garbo’s woozy exoticism—but it speaks to the lack of vocabulary that the media had for unconventional women in 1932. Hepburn was only similar to Garbo in that Garbo was a handily available example of a woman who wasn’t easily classified, who projected an ambiguous, often cold sexuality on-screen and wore pants off-screen, and whose unknowability and novelty posed an intangible but distinct threat to the patriarchy as defined by the way the movies depicted options available to women other than traditional marriage.*

  Like Garbo before her, Hepburn embraced her difference. She insisted on playing golf on Sundays on a course reserved for men, on the grounds that, as she put it, “I was a man because like them I only had Sundays off, too.” And in just her second film, she boldly abandoned the Victorian style of feminine dress she had worn like drag in A Bill of Divorcement, to embody an image of modern womanhood that was much closer to her own experience.

  Christopher Strong was directed by Dorothy Arzner, the female filmmaker with the most sustained career in early-twentieth-century talking pictures. It’s a romantic tragedy about a woman marked as a sexual outsider, doomed to suffer for her attempts to live and love because she cannot conform to the hypocritical standards of her society. Hepburn’s Lady Cynthia, a daring aviatrix, is lured into the decadent world of Monica (Helen Chandler), a wild party girl whose constant carousing and affair with a married man conspire to drive mad her angelic mother (Billie Burke) and politician father Lord Christopher (Colin Clive, already famous for having played the Doctor in Frankenstein). In the course of a party game, Monica and her beau are sent out looking for a married man who has never been unfaithful, and a woman over the age of twenty-one who has never had a love affair. Monica drags in Lord Christopher as an example of the former, and Cynthia is discovered to be the latter. When the model married man meets the freak of sexual virtue—who has chosen her aviation career over romance, and who insists that she’s “not attractive that way” while dressed for a costume ball in a slinky silver lamé gown and moth antennae headdress—his streak of fidelity snaps. But though Hepburn is styled, framed, and lit like Garbo or Marlene Dietrich (high-glamour androgyny, supersexiness mixed with strangeness, as in that insane insect costume), Lady Cynthia is not a typical movie temptress. She doesn’t seduce Lord Christopher; instead, his unwillingness to take no for an answer slowly wears down her resolve, and then at the moment of her peak success as an aviator, having won a round-the-world flying race, she agrees to give up her thrilling career in order to be his mistress.

  Arzner depicts Lady Cynthia’s movement into the realm of the sexual—and thus, from the rarefied space literally above sexuality and onto the playing field of the average, sullied woman—as a fall from grace into bondage. The initial consummation is elided; we see only Cynthia’s arm wearing a large bangle, and hear her tell her lover, “I love my beautiful bracelet . . . Now I’m shackled.” Shortly thereafter, Arzner shows us Christopher’s wife, sadly removing a whole armful of bangles when she realizes her husband isn’t coming home to her. As the affair progresses, Lord Christopher shows only weakness, refusing to leave one woman for the other, even as party girl Monica and her rake boyfriend reform their ways and join conventional society in matrimony and parenthood. When Lady Cynthia becomes pregnant, she is forced to understand that there will be no “going straight” for her. She and her unborn child attempt to break another aviation record, and then, in a fleeting moment of desperation, she removes her oxygen mask, immediately loses consciousness, and plummets to her death.

  A Bill of Divorcement introduced Hepburn as an unconventional new leading lady, but Christopher Strong really pushed this new star into a realm of subversion that suited her well. You could say Katharine Hepburn got into movies at both the right time and the wrong time. The early 1930s was the only period of the first half of the twentieth century that could have accommodated both Hepburn’s inherent refinement (which read as rich and entitled, even when, as in Christopher Strong, her character is the only one in the movie who works for a living) and the new concepts of womanhood that she embodied. And yet, as she was building her screen career, the Hays Code and the process of enforcing standardized film censorship was solidifying. More often than not in the 1930s, Hepburn would find herself in films that attempted to thread a very tight needle between subversion and conformity. In a perfect world, she would have gone on to play nothing but Lady Cynthias, and at least some of those Lady Cynthias would have been allowed to fly away from cowardly Lord Christophers, and raise their babies as single working women.

  Hepburn faced a similar challenge off-screen. She was a married woman working three thousand miles away from where her husband lived, and in her initial encounters with the Hollywood press, she neglected to mention that she was married at all. When reporters figured it out, they were happy to deliver the fiction that Hepburn’s failure to publicize her husband was a consequence of Katharine’s confusion in the suddenly descending spotlight, and fear that “Hollywood and the curse it puts on all its marriages might shatter her own marital security.”

  In reality, while RKO cast her in one film after another,
the marriage remained in purgatory. Luddy seems to have been happy to take what he could get. Hepburn seems to have been willing the marriage to fade away.

  “I look back in horror at my behavior,” Hepburn wrote in her autobiography. “At the time, I was looking forward to the future and not our future but definitely my future. I was obviously trying to climb to the top of the ladder.” The worst part? “I was apparently totally unaware of my piggishness.”

  And then she began having an affair with her agent, Leland Hayward. Hayward, like Hepburn, had a spouse kept in distant New York. Kate eventually told Luddy about her affair, and he insisted it didn’t matter. In late 1933, Hayward proposed to Hepburn. The agent was prepared to leave his spouse, if Hepburn would leave hers. Hepburn prevaricated. Having returned to New York to star in the play The Lake (a disaster, inspiring Dorothy Parker’s famous comment that Hepburn ran “the gamut of emotions from A to B”), Katharine asked Luddy to move out of their shared apartment in New York. He relocated into a flat so nearby that he could see into her bedroom from the window of his.

  On March 16, 1934, less than two years after her arrival in Hollywood, Hepburn won her first Oscar, for the backstage romance Morning Glory, in which Hepburn gives a truly great performance as a fully naive aspiring actress who is crudely taken advantage of by an older, male producer. After spending the night with her, this producer doesn’t even offer her a role as trade, and it falls to his playwright partner to secretly nurture the actress and set her up for her big break. This may have been a milieu Katharine knew well, but the character’s deluded self-determination, which blurred the line between eccentric and clinically insane, was not who Hepburn was; nor was the story, about a girl who is such a failure at self-sufficiency that she would literally starve to death if not for the intervention of a series of men, drawn from Hepburn’s real life.

  Shortly after she was honored for this performance, Katharine went to Mexico to get a quickie divorce. Fan magazines suggested Hepburn was heartbroken, and that it was her own fault. In a story headlined “Can Hepburn Ever Find True Love?” Hollywood magazine claimed that Hepburn had “tried to save her romantic happiness by hiding her un-photographed husband . . . but divorce ended her romantic dreams and he fades into the background, a victim of her career.” Leland Hayward assumed that he was the true love that Katharine had found, and he swiftly obtained his own Mexican divorce. But Hepburn didn’t want to get remarried right away.

  The peak of Hepburn’s first wave of stardom came with Cukor’s adaptation of Little Women, which allowed her to add the iconoclastic Jo to her repertoire of convention-defying women. Hepburn’s Jo would inspire a generation of girls, among them a twelve-year-old named Ernestine Jane. A skinny tomboy herself—the kids on the schoolyard teased her with the nickname “Bones”—Jane was so enamored with Hepburn that, in a fan letter, she asked the patrician star to come visit her at home, on the ranch where she lived with her family in the San Fernando Valley. “I thought she was the living end,” Jane recalled later, after she had become a very different kind of movie star under the name Jane Russell.

  Hepburn’s work spoke to adolescent girls, who saw in her ideas about femininity that were otherwise largely absent from movies. And yet some close to Katharine—particularly men—insisted on lecturing the actress as to how she could better represent her gender. One male friend wrote to Katharine that his “generation has waited for the appearance of an actress with the ability to play great parts at an age when her charm and loveliness are near their height, and when such a century bloom appears, must we get” films like Morning Glory and Little Women, which he wrote off as merely a story “of a girl seeking and finding success through the love of a good man. . . . In short, it’s superficial stuff, and superficial stuff, my dear Katharine, is not for such as you.”

  Later, in 1935, Russell Davenport, editor of Fortune magazine and an old friend, sent Hepburn a long letter assessing her career and her latest film, Break of Hearts, a romance featuring Hepburn as a composer smitten with Charles Boyer’s conductor. “As an artist, who and what are you?” Davenport asked, before falling back on negatively comparing Hepburn to her predecessor in ingenue mold-smashing. “Garbo has never to my knowledge played in a picture in which she lost as much personal dignity as you [in Break of Hearts].” Finally, citing Hepburn’s recent film Sylvia Scarlett as an example of what Hepburn should not be doing, Davenport proclaimed, “You are a full grown woman and you must step into women’s roles. Let Sylvia be the last.”

  Sylvia Scarlett featured Hepburn as a young woman who decides to dress as a boy in order to travel with and protect her father. It took what was now the Hepburn brand—the woman who refuses to accept her lot as a member of the second sex and infuriatingly insists on acting like a man, or at least demanding some of the privileges reserved for men—to the point of parody. Unfortunately, it was not intended as a comedy, and both Cukor and Hepburn would agree that it was their most regrettable collaboration. Nonetheless, it would bring two men into Hepburn’s life who would have lasting impact.

  Scarlett would be the first film in which Hepburn would appear opposite Cary Grant, who would become her most reliable on-screen partner until she was paired with Spencer Tracy. They shot much of the film at Trancas, up the California coast north of Malibu. One day, at lunchtime, an airplane circled above the long picnic table where the cast and Cukor had congregated to eat, and then landed—so close to the lunch party that a wing could have swept the table clean.

  “Who the hell would—” Kate began.

  Grant finished: “That’s my friend Howard Hughes.”

  Grant quickly explained that Hughes had wanted to meet Hepburn, so Grant had suggested he come to lunch. Hepburn was furious that Grant had not only invited an interloper, but had created this situation in which Hepburn, with no advance warning, would be expected to play the role of the damsel charmed by the prince in the biplane. “So staged,” she recalled. “False. There was nothing spontaneous about it. I was so angry I ate my lunch without looking at either one of them.”

  She softened a bit when, awhile later, Howard repeated the trick, landing in the middle of her golf lesson at the Bel Air Country Club. The move was vintage Hughes—completely selfish, oblivious to how it impacted others, plainly disrespectful of convention, and totally spectacular. “I must say it gave me pause,” Hepburn wrote. “I thought that he had a hell of a nerve and was very pushy. The Club was furious. Howard Hughes was nothing daunted.”

  Over the first months that Hughes was attempting to insert himself into Hepburn’s life, she was emotionally preoccupied with a much tougher customer. After filming Scarlett, Hepburn went right into starring in Mary of Scotland, directed by John Ford. If Cukor was Hollywood’s top “women’s film” director, Ford was the quintessential “man’s man” director. Hepburn and Ford became close on the set of the film, developing a relationship that wasn’t quite a romance, but wasn’t entirely platonic. Usually when a movie wrapped, John Ford went on a long drinking binge, with the blessing of his wife, Mary. When Mary of Scotland wrapped, Ford accompanied Hepburn to New York, and then to Fenwick, her family’s rambling estate on Block Island Sound in Connecticut, where the Hepburns regularly congregated. The clan consisted of Katharine’s parents, urologist Thomas Hepburn and women’s rights advocate Katharine Martha Houghton, and five additional children; their eldest son, Tom, had died by an apparent suicide in 1921. The Hepburns were monied, thanks to Thomas’s successful medical practice, but also extremely progressive and eccentric. When they all got together at Fenwick, they made a tough crowd for an outsider to break into.

  But Ford quickly endeared himself to the Hepburns at Fenwick. Though they were careful not to be photographed in public together, that summer John Ford was by Katharine Hepburn’s side as though he were her boyfriend. Though she found Ford “sexy,” Hepburn said, the two “never had a physical affair” because of Ford’s marriage. Theirs, said Hepburn, was “a sort of affair of the minds. Ours
was a special friendship, and it might have been more had the circumstances been right.”

  While this was going on, Hepburn believed herself to still be in a relationship with Leland Hayward, despite the fact that she had rejected several marriage proposals from the agent and had become close to other men, not only Ford but also her Alice Adams director, William Wyler. “You might say I lived like a man,” Hepburn mused years later of this period, when she explored intimacies without monogamy. But freedom to spread one’s wings brings with it the risk of a fall, and Hayward was about to show her the potential consequences of her aversion to, as she put it, “the business of capturing anyone into a marriage.”

  Hayward spent the fall of 1936 in New York, where two of his clients, writer Edna Ferber and actress Margaret Sullavan, were launching a new play, Stage Door. The play was a hit and Sullavan became the toast of the town. As Hepburn put it, “Leland—well, he always liked toasts.”

  Then Sullavan became pregnant. Hepburn was at Cukor’s house one night when news of Leland’s marriage to Sullavan came over the radio. Hepburn was hurt and furious. Amid this romantic turmoil, she left Hollywood; she had committed to starring in a touring stage production of Jane Eyre. Staying at the Ritz in Boston, she noticed in the newspaper that Hughes was also in town. Then she realized he was staying at her hotel. Lonely on the road, she agreed to have dinner with him that night after the show. This soon became a nightly routine.

  If you had only ever met Hughes with a group of people around, spending time with him one-on-one was like meeting a new person. “He had guts and he had a really fine mind, but he was deaf—quite seriously deaf—and he was apparently incapable of saying, ‘Please speak up. I’m deaf,’” Hepburn wrote. “I think that this weakness went a long way toward ruining Howard’s life and making him into an oddball.” In the intimate environment of a late-night dinner table, Hughes shined, and by the end of the Boston engagement of Jane Eyre, Hepburn had been charmed.