Before Kate could explain her swollen red eye enough for them to see the urgency in getting her to a doctor, they whisked her away in a Rolls-Royce to the RKO studios. A Bill of Divorcement was to start shooting in five days, and there was not a moment to lose, what with costume fittings, makeup tests, and rehearsals. She was immediately introduced to George Cukor, an excitable dynamo, who wasted no time in bringing out sketches of her wardrobe, which was already being run up. Determined to take on Hollywood on her own strict terms, the untried ingenue sniffed at the drawings and said, “No well-bred English girl would wear these clothes.” Without missing a beat, Cukor asked, “What do you think of what you’re wearing?” Hepburn knew her outfit was “pretty goddamn queer-looking,” but said, “I think it’s very smart.” Cukor said, “Well, I think it’s ludicrous.” Touché. She liked him already.
As hairdressers and assistants and makeup artists popped in and out of the director’s office, Kate kept trying to ask for a doctor. Then arrived “The Great Profile” himself—at that point in his career, as famous for his alcoholism and lechery as he was for his acting—to pay his respects and look over his young leading lady. With so many people milling about, Barrymore asked Miss Hepburn if they might speak privately. In the hall, he took her hands and spoke of her screen test. “My dear,” he enounced in his most actorly tones, “you’re going to be a big star.” Then staring into her bloodshot eye and reaching into his coat pocket, he handed her a small vial and said, “I have the same problem. Take this. Two drops in each eye.” Kate protested that she was not hungover and insisted that she had something in her eye. With a wink and a smile, Barrymore said, “Yes, of course you do, my dear . . . that’s two drops in each eye.”
Not until the end of the day was Kate able to get medical attention. A doctor pulled three steel filings from her eye, prescribed some painkillers, and gave her an eyepatch. When she dutifully appeared at the studio the next morning, still in pain and wearing her patch, Cukor took one look at her and asked, “What do you think we’re making here? A pirate picture?”
The filming of A Bill of Divorcement began on July 9, 1932, and Kate took to the process immediately. “From the very beginning,” she said, “I found it a fascinating, romantic medium.” By the time she appeared before the cameras, her eye had healed. Other than trimming her hair and streamlining her eyebrows, the studio bosses ordered no changes in her appearance, though they suggested she tone down her voice to soften its metallic quality. The most drastic adjustment she made was one small but painful cosmetic operation she performed on herself. Two nights before shooting, she plucked all the hairs from her nose.
While Hepburn argued every possible reading of every line with George Cukor, she realized that she and her director were, in fact, generally of the same mind. When they were not, she saw that film allowed them the possibility of performing a different interpretation in each take. Stage actors who made films and talked about their “craft” and the difficulties adjusting their gestures and voices to the more intimate sets on soundstages would forever bore Hepburn. “It’s pretty obvious you don’t have to project if there’s a camera three feet away and a microphone over your head.”
Strangely, she felt that John Barrymore, a twenty-year veteran of motion pictures, was not making any such adjustments. She had enough respect for the head of the American theater’s royal family not to say anything; but she felt he knew he was overacting and that she was underreacting to his performance. He often asked Cukor if he could redo a scene; and, Hepburn later reflected, she thought a lot of those retakes were because “he somehow didn’t want to disappoint me.”
Barrymore was out to make a good impression on everybody—especially the ingenue. “He was,” remembered Kate, “utterly incapable of letting a girl walk by without grabbing some part of her anatomy.” A simple slap on the wrist was generally enough to get his mind back to business. On one occasion, however, he would not settle down, and the novice became extremely distracted. “I’ll never play another scene with you!” she screamed at him. To which the great Barrymore replied, “But, my dear, you never have.” A few days later, he asked if she might come to discuss another scene in his dressing room, a swank bachelor’s apartment he had been given on the lot. She knocked on the door and upon entering discovered John Barrymore lying on the couch—which was made up with sheets and a blanket—his head propped on the armrest. He was stark naked.
By the end of the picture, Hepburn felt the pathos of Barrymore’s performance in the film matched that of his life. She thought he was as brilliant and charming an actor as she would ever meet, and just as tortured—a sad, lonely man. She found his portrayal of Hillary Fairfield, a shell shock victim who escapes from an insane asylum only to find his wife about to remarry, “really touching.”
Alongside his melodramatic school of acting, Hepburn’s more naturalistic performance as his engaged daughter—who, fearing future insane children of her own, dismisses her fiance so that she might care for her father—has a quality that is at once both green and evergreen. George Cukor said she was like “a colt finding her legs” during the first weeks of the movie. By the end, he said, she had proved that she was “a thoroughbred.”
Hepburn’s determination to succeed kept her focused on her work; and, at first, she eschewed any kind of social life in Hollywood. “I felt I had my own thing to do,” she said, “and I didn’t want to compromise that.” She and Laura Harding rented a comfortable house up in Franklin Canyon that one of Laura’s society friends had found for them. Another of his friends, a conservatively dressed Mrs. Fairbanks, called on them one day, inviting the two young women to dinner. Kate begged off, insisting that she never went out to dinner while she was in the middle of production. After Mrs. Fairbanks left, an appalled Laura Harding said, “Don’t you know who you just snubbed?”
“Mrs. Fairbanks,” said Kate. “She didn’t look very interesting to me. We’re well out of it.”
“Maybe you are,” said Laura. “But that was Mary Pickford, and I would love to have dinner with her and Mr. Fairbanks!”
Fortunately, a second invitation to Pickfair arrived, which the Hollywood newcomers accepted. Kate got to sit next to Douglas Fairbanks and found him “completely charming”; Pickford proved to be even more interesting, downright shrewd, with “a real nose for business”; and dinner was every bit as grand as she imagined dinner with royalty was. The hosts ran a film afterward, and Kate was already looking forward to a return visit to the town’s most prestigious address. “Oh, I thought I was absolutely fascinating that night,” Kate recalled, “chattering about this and that, and full of opinions on every subject.” Mrs. Fairbanks, evidently, didn’t find Miss Hepburn remotely interesting. She never called again.
“For some reason or other,” Kate also remembered, “I was asked to visit the Hearst ranch—which would have been fascinating—and I said, ‘No.’ Can you imagine anyone as dumb as that?”
Upon completion of photography of A Bill of Divorcement, Kate returned to New York. Then she and her husband embarked on a second honeymoon to Europe. “We traveled well together,” she recalled, in a way that suggested there was more politeness in the marriage than passion. A Bill of Divorcement was released little more than two months after shooting began—while Mr. and Mrs. Ludlow were in Austria—and it proved to be a great success for everybody involved. Many critics commented on the strangeness of both Hepburn’s voice and appearance, but in the end most found her extremely appealing, different but attractive. For that, Hepburn credited one man.
“George Cukor presented me,” she said, practically every time the subject of her first movie came up. “He knew I was an odd creature to most audiences and that I would take some getting used to. And so, he presented me.” After her character first appears in the film—making a showy entrance, skittering down a set of stairs and dancing off in a man’s arms—Cukor inserted a few shots that did nothing whatever to advance the story nor to deepen character. They were simply
lingering shots of Hepburn, moments in which the audience could adjust to her and get acquainted with her. “So few modern directors have any theatrical background,” Hepburn said, “and so they have no sense of entrance, the importance of introducing somebody to the audience. Thank God George did. I don’t think I’d’ve had a career without those few shots, just those few extra seconds of screen time.”
The studio publicity department certainly did its part to help promote her. But, as Hepburn later noted, “I bucked all that publicity stuff. I came back and started to read all these stories about myself, with quotations of things I never said, and, well, frankly, I just didn’t give a damn. Since then I’ve never really taken any interest in what anybody writes about me.” From the start, she entered a false birthdate for herself into the public record—November eighth, her brother Tom’s birthday; and she shaved two years off her age.
Kate returned to Hollywood alone, with RKO lining up one project after another for her to star in. The first was a film, based on a novel, called Christopher Strong. The material was extremely melodramatic, but several elements of the project appealed to her. She would play a fiercely independent aviatrix—not unlike Amelia Earhart, who was one of Hepburn’s heroes, not just for her accomplishments but also for her style and attitude. The lady flyer falls in love with a married man, becomes pregnant, and then—according to the social dictates of the day—meets her death trying to break a world altitude record.
Another reason to appear in the film was the director—Dorothy Arzner, for all intents and purposes, the only female director in the business. Hepburn never completely understood why there were so few women directing; there were, after all, many women writing scenarios and editing film. For that, she did not blame the men who ran the studios so much as the women who chose not to challenge them. “It never occurred to me that I was a second-class citizen in Hollywood,” Hepburn later recounted, “—nor that women had to be.”
While Christopher Strong rather quickly crashed and burned, Hepburn garnered wonderful notices, securing her position as a headliner. That, the new star just as quickly realized, carried certain responsibilities. With even the smaller studios cranking out movies every month, some as many as two a week, Hepburn realized that if she wanted to remain at the head of the pack of actors, she would have to take charge of her career—to the extent of scouting and securing the best possible material for herself.
“I usually don’t look through people’s desks,” Hepburn told me one afternoon—somewhat disingenuously, I thought—“but one day I saw this thing on Pan Berman’s desk.” The thing was a script called Morning Glory, which was based on a play by a popular writer named Zoë Akins, and Pandro S. Berman was a twenty-seven-year-old assistant to David Selznick, then starting his own prestigious career as a motion-picture producer. Hepburn had taken an immediate shine to him and simply walked off with the script, telling Berman’s secretary that she would be back for her appointment with the producer.
“This must have been written for me,” she said to Berman when she returned to his office not two hours later. Few could deny her appropriateness for the part—that of a stagestruck girl from New England who comes to New York in quest of an acting career, stringing along a lover or two, then becoming an overnight sensation when she takes over for the star of a play who has walked out on opening night. No, Berman told her, it had been written, in fact, for Constance Bennett, a silent-screen actress who had just made a “comeback” at the age of twenty-seven in What Price Hollywood? (which George Cukor had directed just before A Bill of Divorcement). This film was to be directed by her costar, Lowell Sherman (who had successfully appeared as an actor in another work by Zoë Akins). “Hollywood was an even smaller town than Broadway,” Miss Hepburn realized. She spent the next several days meeting everybody connected to this production, talking up this “thrilling” screenplay . . . until she convinced them that she was “born to play this part.”
The company rehearsed for a week, then shot the entire film in seventeen days. And, Hepburn recalled, director Lowell Sherman never appeared on the set before nine-fifteen or after five-thirty. Although he was alcoholic and dying of cancer of the throat, Sherman put everything he had into this picture, keeping the entire cast (which included such veterans as C. Aubrey Smith and Adolphe Menjou) constantly engaged and amused. Hepburn’s young romantic interest in the film was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., with whom she became close friends. Although it was ultimately cut from the picture, Hepburn and Fairbanks, Jr., performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, filming it before a small audience that included Doug’s father and stepmother, the Fairbankses. Kate confessed it was one of the few times in her life that she had stage fright.
Hepburn gave a remarkable performance in Morning Glory, one praised for revealing new dimensions as an actress and for bringing originality to potentially trite material. In truth, Hepburn would confess, she had borrowed heavily from another actor in delineating her role. Ruth Gordon had appeared in a play called A Church Mouse, in which she spoke in a monotone at a fast clip, conveying both eagerness and nervousness. Hepburn “copied her totally” in playing this heroine, Eva Lovelace—who was determined to become “the finest actress in the world.” Stolen acting tricks or not, Hepburn proved completely winning and became one of the studio’s prime assets.
Meantime, David Selznick—who had a penchant for translating classic works of literature into motion pictures—had been developing a pet project, one featuring another Yankee with artistic yearnings, Little Women. He had been through several bad versions of the Louisa May Alcott novel about the four March sisters growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, before he assigned a husband-and-wife team to tackle it anew. In four weeks Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman wrote a shooting script, one with a role that seemed to be written for the new queen of the RKO lot.
“I would defy anyone to be as good as I was in Little Women,” Kate Hepburn would say of her portrayal of Jo March. “They just couldn’t be, they really couldn’t be, because I came from the same general atmosphere, enjoyed the same things. And I’m sure Louisa May Alcott was writing about herself and that kind of behavior that was encouraged in a New England girl; and I understood those things. I was enough of a tomboy myself; and my personality was like hers. I could say, ‘Christopher Columbus! What richness!’ and believe it totally. I have enough of that old-fashioned personality in myself. Coming from a big family, in which I had always been very dramatic, this part suited my exaggerated sense of things.” David Selznick agreed, and he recruited George Cukor to direct Hepburn a second time.
Based on the earlier scripts, Cukor had resisted the project, thinking the material was frilly and sentimental. Selznick insisted that he read the Alcott novel, with all its hardships of the Civil War era playing in the background of the lives of the March women. Cukor later told me, as I reported to Kate during one of our dinners, that reading the source material had completely turned him around. “Oh, that’s such bunk!” she said. “I’m telling you that man never read that book.” I replied that he told me she would say exactly that; and she said, “So, he didn’t deny it. I’m telling you George Cukor never read that book. But that didn’t matter. We had a wonderful script to work with, one that was really true to the spirit of the novel.”
Director and star bickered throughout the production—never about personal matters, only the material—in a collegial manner that brought them closer together. More often than not, Kate would get her way by either throwing her own New England background in his face or by reminding him, “You haven’t read the book.” The only time Cukor genuinely got mad at her on the set was the day she had to run up a flight of stairs carrying some ice cream while wearing a costume for which they had no duplicate. He repeatedly urged her to be careful not to spill on the dress, and finally said, “I’ll kill you if you do.” As though preordained, she did—and Kate burst into laughter. Cukor slapped her across the face and screamed, “You amateur!” running her off the
set. She spent the rest of the day vomiting.
Hepburn enjoyed playing with her entire cast—which included Spring Byington as “Marmee” and the great character actress Edna May Oliver as Aunt March. Kate’s “sisters” included Frances Dee as Meg, Jean Parker as Beth, and Joan Bennett as Amy, her costumes having to be redesigned to conceal her pregnancy. But from that luminous cast, it was Hepburn’s portrayal as Jo that shone in the public eye. In less than a year she had become more than a Hollywood leading lady. She was a star.
At a time when the Depression was hardening Hollywood’s edge—with movies about gangsters and tap-dancing gold-diggers—RKO suddenly had a big hit on its hands with this modest piece of counter-programming, a family drama full of family values. The film had its share of pain and reality, but its success sprang from the lives of characters the audience cared about. When the six-year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its best pictures of the year, Little Women was among the ten nominations. Katharine Hepburn was nominated as Best Actress—though not for the same picture. She got shortlisted for Morning Glory.
Hepburn forever believed she was nominated for the wrong movie, that her work in Morning Glory was “very good” but that it was “tricked up, charming, mugging.” In Little Women, however, she said, “I gave what I call the main-course performance, not a dessert.” After much consideration, Hepburn chose not to attend the award ceremony, in the Fiesta Room of the Ambassador Hotel on the night of March 16, 1934. That night Will Rogers presented all the golden statuettes, whose new nickname of Oscar was starting to spread beyond the industry. After announcing that Cavalcade was the Best Picture and Charles Laughton was Best Actor, Rogers pronounced Katharine Hepburn that year’s Best Actress.
The Academy Awards conflicted Hepburn from the very outset of her career, beginning with her believing that somebody so young and new to the game couldn’t possibly win. There was more to it than that. Indeed, even after she was told she had won, Hepburn said she wanted to release a statement saying she did not believe in awards—“or some asinine answer like that.” In truth, she later admitted, “mine was really bogus humility, because I was genuinely thrilled to win.”
Kate Remembered Page 9
