The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  In the early 1960s Tracy’s health deteriorated. Hepburn retired from the cinema to care for him, and by 1966 he was recovering. It was then that the producer Stanley Kramer offered them roles in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967), as an upper-middle-class couple whose only child — eventually played by Hepburn’s niece, Katharine Houghton — surprises them with her fiancé, a black doctor, played by Sidney Poitier. It was completed 17 days before Tracy’s death, and Hepburn said that she was never able to watch the film.

  It won Hepburn her second Oscar, which was widely felt to be an award for her work with Tracy over the years, and to mark the end of their careers. But with typical perversity she bounced back the very next year with one of the finest of all her performances, as Eleanor of Aquitaine in Anthony Harvey’s distinguished version of James Goldman’s play The Lion in Winter (1968). This time the Oscar was won in earnest, even if it was shared with Barbra Streisand as a result of the only tie in the history of the Academy Awards.

  Her subsequent films were mostly more distinguished than popular, including two grand movies for television directed by her old mentor George Cukor, Love Among the Ruins, which teamed her for the first time with Laurence Olivier, and a new version of Emlyn Williams’s classic The Corn Is Green.

  But she could still command popularity if she wished it. In 1969 she returned to the Broadway stage, after a long absence, in, of all things, a musical based on the life of Chanel called Coco, in which she scored a great personal triumph, making no claims to a singing voice but working out her own form of speech song as effectively as Rex Harrison’s in My Fair Lady. Six years later she was back on Broadway, with less success, in A Matter of Gravity. Even on film she could still reach a considerable audience, and did so in 1975 with John Wayne in a comedy Western called Rooster Cogburn, which was really a crafty reworking of The African Queen, in a different setting.

  It must have seemed to everybody that her career, somewhat impeded in its later stages by Parkinson’s disease, was coasting to a dignified conclusion, when along came On Golden Pond (1981) to confound all expectations. She played the brusque but understanding wife of crabby old Henry Fonda — who throughout the film wore the favourite hat of Tracy’s that Hepburn had given him — in a rosy but not too sentimentalised view of old age. It was the first time that they had worked together, and it proved to be one of the great hits of the decade. Both won Oscars, hers an unprecedented fourth.

  Subsequently Hepburn made occasional appearances on stage and on television, most notably in One Christmas, a television movie based on a short story by Truman Capote. She devoted much of her energy to writing a short book about the making of The African Queen and a more ambitious autobiography, Me, for which she earned a $4 million advance. It was cranky and teasing in what it revealed and what it glossed over — as both her admirers and her detractors must by then have expected.

  Hepburn began by being, and remained throughout her life, totally original and quite unlike anyone else who starred in Hollywood. For six decades she was an inescapable fact of Hollywood life, more durable than any of the companies she battled with, and more honoured than any other star. Unlike many of those whom she met along the way, she did not bow to celebrity; she considered the greatest luxury imaginable to be “nobody telling you to get out of the bathroom”.

  Nor she did bow to the studios. During the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, she spoke out publicly against censorship, against the wishes of her studio boss, Louis B. Mayer. As a result, J. Edgar Hoover wanted to expose her relationship with Tracy to the public. Hoover was advised by Richard Nixon that this would backfire.

  Though her private life was kept scrupulously to herself, it is known that Hepburn, who said that marriage was not a natural state, married in 1928 the socialite stockbroker Ludlow Ogden Smith, and that the marriage was quietly dissolved in 1934. “I married him, spent all his money, broke his heart and discarded him,” she said. Though her biographers have hinted at other relationships, notably with Howard Hughes, the central emotional involvement of her life was clearly the 27 years that she spent with Spencer Tracy.

  Katharine Hepburn, actress, was born on May 12, 1907. She died on June 29, 2003, aged 96

  GERTRUDE EDERLE

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  FIRST WOMAN TO SWIM THE CHANNEL, WHOSE CROSSING KNOCKED TWO HOURS OFF THE FASTEST TIME BY A MAN

  DECEMBER 2, 2003

  Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel, a feat accomplished despite widespread belief at the time that this was impossible for any female, let alone one aged only 19.

  However, when the American landed at Kingsdown in Kent, on August 6, 1926, her time of 14 hours 39 minutes was almost two hours faster than any of her five male predecessors, a dynasty which had begun with Captain Matthew Webb in 1875.

  After a crossing completed despite severe weather conditions, she was taken by escort boat to Dover. There, she had to wait for two hours for the immigration authorities to allow her to disembark, because they did not believe that she had swum the Channel. Her comment to the world was: “I knew it could be done. It had to be done. And I did it.”

  She was subsequently accorded a ticker-tape parade in New York, met President Coolidge, toured in vaudeville and played herself in a film entitled Swim, Girl, Swim.

  Gertrude Ederle was born into a New York family, which was devoted to swimming. She said in 1926: “I have three sisters and two brothers and they all swim like fishes, even my youngest brother, who is only six years old.” She was renowned for her excellence at shorter distances, taking part in the 1924 Olympics in Paris. Although travelling to Europe took the edge off her form, she still took bronze medals in the 100 and 400 metres freestyle and then swam the lead-off leg for the US team that set a world record in winning the 4 x 100 metres relay.

  Ederle then started a long-distance swimming career. In 1925, she completed the 21 miles from the tip of Manhattan to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in seven hours 11 minutes, breaking the men’s record. She then tried the English Channel but was forced to give up seven miles off the English coast after swimming for about nine hours. A worried trainer grabbed her when she started coughing, and under the rules of Channel swimming she was immediately disqualified.

  She began preparing for another attempt the following year. Ederle was slightly built, and so did not possess much subcutaneous fat, which is valuable for warding off some of the worst effects of the cold water. However, she presaged the later development of marathon swimming because she was sufficiently fast to complete the course before becoming overcome by hypothermia. She used the crawl stroke, which was then still unusual for long-distance swimming. Many people preferred the trudgen because, they believed, wrongly, that the crawl was too tiring to sustain for many hours. One of her American contemporaries, Aileen Soule, also pointed to a key attribute for her success, remarking: “She had the stubbornness.”

  On August 6, 1926, she set off at 7.05am on the ebb tide from Cap Gris Nez, with Thomas Burgess, who had been the second man to complete the crossing, as her trainer on the accompanying boat. Little was then known about the importance of a regular intake of carbohydrates and she did not take her first meal until midday, when she consumed some chicken broth and cold chicken. With weather forecasting also less precise than it is nowadays, she then had to combat conditions that would have postponed the attempt had she known about them in advance.

  The tide, choppy sea and driving southwest wind forced her off-course and Burgess tried to persuade her to give up. But she replied: “What for?” The morale of those in the escort boat, rather than of the swimmer herself, was maintained by a phonograph playing records such as Let Me Call You Sweetheart and After the Ball is Over. Soon, however, the phonograph began to jump grooves because of the movement of the boat.

  The weather continued to worsen, with white-capped waves being commonplace, but Ederle survived the ordeal to land at Kingsdown. The Times was so impressed that it devoted
a leader to her performance, stating that “her intention not to try again is sensible”. Her record time stood for 24 years until another American, Florence Chadwick, achieved 13 hours 23 minutes in 1950.

  Ederle returned to the US to be fêted as a national celebrity, a role which she performed, with attractive modesty, until 1933, when she fell down a flight of stairs, damaging her spine. Although she took part in the 1939 World’s Fair, she was now suffering from deafness, something with which she had been afflicted since a childhood bout of measles. By the 1940s she was completely deaf, and she then devoted her life to teaching deaf children to swim, saying: “Since I can’t hear either, they feel that I am one of them.”

  In her last days, she lived at the Christian Health Care Centre in Wyckoff, New Jersey. She did not complain about her incapacity, telling one interviewer: “I am not a person who reaches for the moon as long as I have the stars.”

  Gertrude Ederle, swimmer, was born on October 23, 1906. She died on November 30, 2003, aged 97

  DAME ALICIA MARKOVA

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  DANCER OF GREAT TECHNIQUE AND STYLE WHO BECAME AN INTERNATIONAL STAR WHILE HELPING TO ESTABLISH A BRITISH BALLET TRADITION

  DECEMBER 3, 2004

  Alicia Markova was still two months short of her 20th birthday when British ballet effectively began in October 1930 with the foundation of the Ballet Club (which later became Ballet Rambert) and the first performances of the Camargo Society. This was a producing organisation which put on special programmes bringing together all available local talent, including Rambert’s dancers and those of Ninette de Valois, who were soon to become the Vic-Wells Ballet although at that time still only supplementing the operas at the Old Vic. But the teenager Markova already had experience in leading roles with Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet; she was blessed with a phenomenal technique and beautiful style.

  Inevitably, she became the first ballerina of all these emerging ventures. Just as inevitably, they were unable, with their limited resources, to contain her talent for long and she left for international fame. Most of her career was spent touring the world at the head of various companies and later as a guest star.

  However, her presence at a critical time proved invaluable in founding a British ballet tradition, not only by attracting audiences to the early efforts of the young companies but by the inspiration she provided both to creative artists and to other dancers.

  To a later generation, Markova’s fame has been hidden by the universal admiration for Margot Fonteyn; but Fonteyn, a decade younger, was one of the dancers who learnt much from Markova’s example, and while they were both working there was no need for rivalry because their gifts were different and complementary.

  Lilian Alicia Marks was born in Stoke Newington, North London, and showed an early interest in theatre, music and dancing, encouraged by her Irish mother. But her first formal lessons in “fancy dancing” were taken on medical advice to correct weak feet and legs. She revealed an astonishing facility and at ten earned the considerable sum of £10 a week as principal dancer in the pantomime Dick Whittington at Kennington Theatre, billed as “Little Alicia, the Child Pavlova”.

  This unwise sobriquet caused Alicia and her mother to be angrily turned away when they first applied for her admission at the age of 11 as a pupil of Seraphine Astafieva, the leading teacher in London; but the child’s tears led to an audition and acceptance. In Astafieva’s studio in King’s Road, Chelsea, her serious education began; here too she first met Anton Dolin, with whom her career was to be closely linked, and she was shown off to Serge Diaghilev.

  When the Marks family were in straitened circumstances following the sudden death of her father (a mining engineer of Polish ancestry), it was Astafieva who persuaded Diaghilev to consider the child, still only 14, for his Russian Ballet, and after a long audition with his new choreographer George Balanchine she was accepted. Diaghilev renamed her Markova and placed her at first in the care of Ninette de Valois, whose initial reluctance to be saddled with her quickly turned to the beginning of a lifelong friendship and mutual admiration.

  Markova was so tiny that it was difficult to cast her except in carefully chosen solos. In her first season, Balanchine created for her the role of the Nightingale in his Chant du Rossignol; he also made solos for her in the world premiere of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. There were child roles she could play in La Boutique Fantasque, Petrushka and Aurora’s Wedding (as Red Riding Hood) and she was given Papillon’s solo in Le Carnaval. Later she grew sufficiently to be put into the corps de ballet, which Diaghilev thought an essential step in her development, but she also danced leading parts for him in Balanchine’s La Chatte, Massine’s Cimarosiana and (laying the foundations of her future fame in classic roles) the “Bluebird” pas de deux and a single performance of Swan Lake Act II.

  On Diaghilev’s death in 1929 the company broke up. Markova returned to London and had no employment, except for a three-month opera season in Monte Carlo, until Frederick Ashton invited her to appear in dances he was doing for Nigel Playfair’s production of Marriage à la Mode at the Lyric, Hammersmith.

  With the beginnings of regular ballet seasons by British dancers later that year, Markova was immediately in heavy demand, and she became Ashton’s first muse. At the Ballet Club and for the Camargo Society he made a great many highly contrasted roles for her: among them the title part in his languorously poetic La Pen, the witty polka in Façade (ending with a double tour en l’air in pointe shoes which nobody attempts nowadays), a sexy Creole girl in Rio Grande, the insolently proud ballerina in Foyer de Danse, the immensely chic and naughty lady friend in Les Masques, and the tragic Marguerite in Mephisto Valse. Many roles she took brought out a gift for shrewd comic characterisation far removed from the pure classic perfection for which she was widely celebrated.

  But the tiny fee which was all Rambert could afford was only enough to keep Markova in ballet shoes; to support herself she also had to dance three times a day between films in a cinema at Marble Arch, the choreography again by Ashton.

  During 1932 Markova began dancing sometimes for de Valois’s company at Sadler’s Wells, too, and staged Les Sylphides for them (the first evidence of her exceptional memory for choreography, largely based on her great musicality). In 1933 Markova and Ashton both joined the Vic-Wells Ballet. The first role he made for her there was in Les Rendez-vous, a triumphant display of her wit, charm, romantic lyricism and brilliant technique.

  Markova’s arrival as her regular ballerina enabled de Valois to begin mounting the old classics: The Nutcracker, Giselle and Swan Lake. These were to provide a staple of Markova’s repertoire from then on. For many years her Giselle was acknowledged as the best in the western world, unrivalled for the tragic depth of her acting, her phrasing of the solo in Act I or the illusion of ethereality she brought to the act. But the apparently less profound ballerina role in The Nutcracker almost equally revealed her supreme artistry, with its crystalline delicacy and beautiful detail.

  During this early period of her career Markova performed for other choreographers too, most notably in ballets by de Valois, who created for her the wickedly vulgar, riotously funny role of La Goulue in Bar aux Folies-Bergère as well as the gullible pure young girl in The Rake’s Progress.

  In the summer of 1935 Mrs Laura Henderson, owner of the Windmill Theatre with its famously undressed revues, underwrote a West End season and a provincial tour for the Vic-Wells Ballet, with Markova and Dolin as its stars. This led to the idea of their starting the Markova-Dolin Ballet which toured successfully for two years with a repertoire including Nijinska’s Les Biches, with Markova as the ambiguous person in blue, and what may have been the first murder-mystery ballet, Keith Lester’s Death in Adagio, where, wearing a blonde wig, she was improbably but enjoyably cast as a homicidal typist. But the strain of eight performances a week prompted Markova in 1938 to accept Léonide Massine’s invitation to join the new Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Her new roles there included cre
ations in two of Massine’s symphonic ballets, Seventh Symphony (Beethoven) and Rouge et Noir (Shostakovich No 1).

  Her commitments with the Ballet Russe resulted in Markova’s finding herself in America during the war and (with no obvious work for her at home) she joined Ballet Theatre in 1941, creating further roles including Princess Hermilia in Michel Fokine’s last ballet, Bluebeard, the gypsy Zemphire in Massine’s Aleko, and Juliet in Antony Tudor’s hauntingly beautiful Romeo and Juliet to music by Delius. She also played Taglioni in Dolin‘s Pas de Quatre with a subtle mixture of charm and aloofness that eluded all successors, as did too her apparent ability to soar across the stage with no regard for the power of gravity. During her Ballet Theatre days, Markova took time off to dance with Dolin in the world premiere of Stravinsky’s Scènes de Ballet for a revue, The Seven Lively Arts, and to tour central America with a new Markova-Dolin group.

  Further tours with this group followed, and guest appearances with Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where John Taras created Camille for her (in beautiful costumes by Cecil Beaton), and de Basil’s Original Ballet Russe, where she appeared in one of Jerome Robbins’s early works, Pas de Trois.

  These occupied her time until she and Dolin reintroduced themselves to British audiences through a guest season with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet at Covent Garden, summer 1948, during which they both danced the full Sleeping Beauty for the first time.