Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  Irving Berlin had been one of Samuel Goldwyn’s closest friends. Well into his nineties when I began my project, I had written America’s composer laureate several times in hopes of arranging an interview. His eldest daughter had put in a good word for me, as had Goldwyn’s son. Irene Selznick suggested I use her name in one of my entreaties; and even Berlin’s private secretary of many years, with whom I had spoken several times, said she would take up my cause. I had heard stories that Berlin had become senile and was living in his pajamas on the top floor of his town house on Beekman Place, watching television all day and talking to nobody. Then one day he telephoned—to say (with the television blaring in the background) that he could not see me, that it was too exhausting even to think about all those games of gin rummy at which he caught Sam Goldwyn cheating. Before I could even try to engage him in a conversation, he hung up. I figured it was time to play my trump card.

  “You’re always asking if you can help me,” I said to Kate during one of my weeks in New York. “Well, maybe there is. Can you think of any way I might get to Irving Berlin?” For a moment, Kate warmed up to the challenge, then a cold, worried expression came across her face. “I hear he’s become Garbo,” she said, “and that he sees nobody. And I haven’t seen him since RKO”—which meant the mid-thirties. “I understand,” I said. “But if you have any suggestions . . .”

  The next night I returned for dinner from my rounds in New York and found Kate sitting in her chair with a big smile pasted across her face. Her clothes were less casual than usual. She was even wearing a little makeup and some perfume. “Well, I had a most interesting day,” she said, all Cheshire-catlike.

  “Really?”

  Yes, she said. After lunch she had walked to 17 Beekman Place, a five-story Georgian brick house, which is practically around the corner, and rang the bell. A maid answered, and Kate said she didn’t wish to disturb Mr. Berlin, but she wanted to leave a note for him. The maid asked if she cared to come in, and she said no. She just wanted to know that Mr. Berlin was all right. Then, as Hepburn related the story, a clear voice from several floors above sang out, “Kate, is that you?” And she replied, “Yes, Irving, is that you?” He told her to wait a moment, that he would be right down.

  “He looked quite wonderful,” she said. “Especially for a man close to a hundred.”

  “At one hundred,” I responded, “whatever you look like looks wonderful.”

  No, she continued, he looked healthy and was well-groomed and nicely dressed. They sat in the living room, and she explained her mission, that she was calling on my behalf, hoping he might see me. He replied that his stomach got so churned up just thinking about Sam Goldwyn (a common malady, even among Goldwyn’s friends), he couldn’t think of sitting down with a biographer and dredging it all up. But surely, he told Kate, she could stay for tea. Stay she did . . . for more than three hours! “And,” Kate recounted to me that night, “he was wonderful—full of stories and full of life and full of memories. We talked about RKO and remembered things I hadn’t thought of since the thirties. And it was one of the most wonderful afternoons I’ve ever had. And he absolutely refuses to see you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m glad I was able to provide you with a good time. Did you at least ask him anything about Sam Goldwyn?”

  “Oh yes,” she assured me. “He told me several stories about old Sam, and they were very funny, just killingly funny . . . and I was having such a good time I don’t remember a goddamned one of them.”

  The next night at dinner, I found Kate again sitting with another big, smug smile. “Well—I had a most interesting day,” she said. So enchanted was she by Mr. Berlin’s hospitality, she dropped by that afternoon with a bouquet of flowers and a thank-you note. Again, the door was opened and the voice from on high called, “Kate, is that you?” And down came Irving again, and she stayed for another three hours, these more intoxicating than the last. “And,” she said with a huge laugh, “he still refuses to see you. But I must say, he’s most delightful.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Irving Berlin aside, some one hundred fifty people did speak to me about Sam Goldwyn; and Hepburn, after more than fifty years in motion pictures, knew most of them. She especially perked up the week I told her that I had just visited with Joel McCrea, a former Goldwyn leading man. She said she would love to see him again and asked if I would invite him to visit the next time he was in New York. I said I would pass along the invitation, but I was under the impression that he and his wife, Frances Dee, seldom left California. “My God,” she said, “I think those two have been married for fifty years. They were an adorable couple.”

  “They still are,” I assured her, having seen her recently when I went to interview him at his ranch. “She’s got a terrific figure, and the two of them seem very happy together.” Hepburn recalled McCrea’s saying that he always wanted to be a rancher—“and that he was using his acting just to get there. And it’s funny, because I really think he was the most underrated actor of his day. He could do everything. Look at him in that Hitchcock thing [Foreign Correspondent ] and then in The Most Dangerous Game . . . and all those comedies—the George Stevens picture [The More the Merrier] and the Preston Sturges pictures [Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story]. And he looked great on a horse. But the problem [and this was one of those words she made all her own, landing on each syllable with equal emphasis] was, he never really had a studio behind him. Nobody to present him . . . to develop him. And that was so important in those early days. With the big studios grooming big stars, you needed that kind of push. That’s what Gable had and Crawford. They weren’t great actors, but they were great personalities, and the big studios got completely behind them.

  “Now who are the big male stars today?” she asked me.

  “Pacino, Hoffman, De Niro, Stallone—”

  “Exactly,” she interrupted. “That’s the prob-lem. Now those old boys—Gable and Cooper and Jimmy and Bogie and Spence, well—they looked good riding a horse . . . or in white-tie and tails. Now who can you name today who can do that?”

  “Who else have you seen?” Kate would ask whenever there was a lull in a conversation. There was always a trace of yearning in her voice. I felt she wanted to know not just whom I was seeing but which of her contemporaries was still alive and working. She enjoyed providing thumbnail sketches, bits of background for the book, which I always found enlightening and entertaining. “Joel put me on to Barbara Stanwyck,” I said.

  “Well, they really had the same problem, didn’t they. I mean, she was a freelance actor, a kind of gun for hire, and in the beginning didn’t really have the backing of a big studio. I mean she had a broad range of things she could do—not the classics, but certainly heavy drama and light comedy. She could make you laugh, and she could make you cry. Chaplin, of course, could make you do both at the same time.”

  Garbo forever remained Hepburn’s favorite movie star. “I think she was a great actress. But even more than that, she carried so much mystery with her. From the moment she walked on the screen, you simply couldn’t take your eyes off her, you wanted to know everything about her, and you knew she wasn’t going to give it to you. That’s a movie star. And that’s what we all wanted to be,” she said of the thousands of girls who took trains and buses to Hollywood to be discovered.

  In the spring of 1934, Katharine Hepburn returned to Hollywood. She was, for that moment, at least, a star with a six-picture contract with RKO—then considered the liveliest studio in town. The most minor of the major studios, RKO prided itself on low budgets, fresh talent, and original material, coming up with such recent hits as the early Fred Astaire—Ginger Rogers musicals (“Fred gave Ginger class; Ginger gave Fred sex appeal,” Hepburn famously observed), Little Women, and King Kong. She was also returning to Leland Hayward, her “beau” (her word), one of the most dashing men in town. Her theatrical experience with Jed Harris only doubled the intensity with which she reapproached her work on the screen. He
pburn was back, with a vengeance—which, unfortunately, occasionally showed.

  In an attempt to replicate her triumph in Little Women, RKO promptly cast Hepburn in The Little Minister. Like the former film, this was based on a nineteenth-century literary favorite, a novel and play by Sir James M. Barrie. With the notable exception of Richard Wallace, a journeyman director standing in for George Cukor, most of the former crewmembers reassembled to craft this project. As before, the Heermans produced the final draft of the screenplay—the love story of Lady Babbie, who often escaped from her guardian’s manor house dressed as a gypsy so that she could walk among the struggling weavers of the Auld Licht Kirk in Scotland, only to fall in love with the kirk’s new minister.

  The film was a mild success, not as big as the studio had hoped or expected or—as Hepburn said—“it should have been.” She believed George Cukor’s presence might have made a great difference; but he had been involved in the making of a genuine classic that year, David Copperfield. The star herself ultimately took the blame for The Little Minister’s failure—largely because, she later admitted, she hadn’t really wanted the part in the first place. “The main reason I did it,” she confessed, “was that I had heard that Ginger Rogers really wanted to play it; and I knew the studio wanted me more and that I could do it better. What an IG-noble reason. I’m still quite disgusted with myself.”

  Still, she believed a strong director would have curbed what she called “a rather fancy performance.” Looking back, she said, “I thought I had discovered what magnificent hands I had; and I remember that they became the most important part of my performance. Most peculiar.” Viewing the film today, one sees the accuracy of Hepburn’s memory. In almost every scene her hands appear self-consciously folded or clasped or flapping or floating. Beyond that distraction, the part calls for whimsy, an almost otherworldly elfin quality; and, Hepburn admitted, “I think I’m probably just too down-to-earth for that.” Adopting a Scottish burr—which came and went from scene to scene—forced her voice into its highest registers, often proving irritating for both the actress and her audience.

  She proceeded immediately to her next picture, a deservedly forgotten modern romance called Break of Hearts. It was intended as another vehicle for Hepburn and John Barrymore—she as an aspiring composer, he as an alcoholic conductor. This time, however, she would have the star billing. But Barrymore turned down the sentimental melodrama, and it fell to Charles Boyer, one of the few French actors to achieve leading-man status in American films and one of Hollywood’s great lovers—on screen and off. Rumors immediately spread that she and Boyer were intimately involved. Kate later denied them, insisting that it was not for her lack of trying. She called the film, which garnered her worst reviews to date and fared poorly at the box office, “a mistake,” one she explained away by saying, “I felt I was sitting out there in Hollywood, and my career was such that if I wasn’t moving ahead, I was falling behind. And so I did the picture out of a kind of desperation. Never a wise move.”

  Just as she was about to overstay her welcome with the public, one of the most appealing screen roles ever written came her way. While she was finishing Break of Hearts, RKO was adapting Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams, which had already been a successful silent film. The eponymous heroine, a socially ambitious, middle-class girl in the Midwest who falls for a handsome man above her station, was, in Hepburn’s words, “a big plum—a sweet and juicy role. I had read Tarkington growing up and always thought he was a wonderful writer, a great social observer with a lot of heart. And I thought the script captured Alice’s desperation to be more than she was or than she could be. . . . She was in a race that she couldn’t win. And, of course, that’s great fun to play because she doesn’t know it’s hopeless and the audience does. So the harder Alice works at it, the more heartbreaking she becomes.”

  What appealed to Hepburn most about the part, and what she believed she could bring to the role more than any of her competition in Hollywood, was the gentle humor. To ensure its place in the film, she insisted on a director with a comic bent. The studio was about to sign William Wyler, a promising young man just coming into his own as Samuel Goldwyn’s prize director, primarily of social dramas. But Hepburn had reservations and kept stalling. Then her friend Eddie Killy, who had served as assistant director on practically all of her RKO pictures, recommended a young director named George Stevens. He had broken in under Hal Roach, the king of two-reel comedies, and had recently directed an episode in a popular comedy series featuring two different families, the Cohens and the Kellys. Hepburn asked to meet him.

  “I thought he was a really odd duck,” she said of Stevens, a big man with a weathered face and an aloof air. “He hardly spoke. And at first I wasn’t sure if he was just plain dumb or so smart that he was busy analyzing everybody else.” Whether or not to let him direct Alice Adams virtually came down to the toss of a coin. Producer Pan Berman flipped a quarter, and when it came up heads—Wyler—he and Hepburn looked at each other. He asked if they should flip again, and Hepburn said yes. “I just felt George was strong and fun. We signed him up, mostly on my hunch, I would say, which, in this case, proved to be very good.”

  Her hunch was not entirely professional. Although she still told herself that her future with Leland Hayward was advancing—possibly toward the altar—she still found herself attracted to a growing number of men, especially directors. The inherent drama between the man calling the shots and the woman who had to perform created a sexual tension that most people never thought existed on the sets of Katharine Hepburn movies. But during the course of shooting Alice Adams, it became apparent to those around them that Stevens and Hepburn were having an affair.

  It was an intense love match—real, emotional duels as opposed to the more jocular jousting on George Cukor’s sets. “We were both incredibly strong-willed,” Kate said of her first picture with George Stevens. “I seemed to have the upper hand because I was the bigger star; and I had been largely responsible for his being hired. But George had the upper hand because he was, after all, the director, and a very tough director at that. He would not budge. And he made us do one scene [with her handsome, easygoing leading man, Fred MacMurray] close to eighty times.”

  For Stevens, these battles were more than simple lovers’ quarrels. “Now George Stevens was a really brilliant director,” Kate averred many times. “And this was not just some personal conquest on his part. I think he felt he really had something to offer me. I had had some success, but I was still pretty new to the movie game. And he believed he could direct me to become better. Not necessarily different than I had been, but somehow more than I had been.”

  That was never more evident than in one of the film’s most famous scenes: Alice has just returned from a society dance, which proved to be a series of slights and humiliations for her from start to finish. Throughout the night she has maintained her pluck and dignity. Only after she returns from the party in the rain, raps on her parents’ door to let them know she’s home, and goes into her own bedroom, does she allow herself to cry. In playing the scene, Hepburn intended to throw herself onto her bed and sob into her pillow.

  Stevens had what he thought was a better idea. Using one of his trademark shots, a huge screen-filling close-up, he thought Alice should walk to the window and look out into the rain, so that the drops running down the pane would accentuate the tears running down her cheeks. Hepburn liked the idea. But when she had to perform the scene, the tears would not flow. She claimed, at the time, that cold water had dripped through the leaky set window and frozen her up. She attempted the scene repeatedly, but to no avail. Then, instead of admitting that she was having a technical acting problem, she insisted the problem was in the staging, that throwing herself on the bed was not only the way she had envisioned playing the scene but that it was truer to Alice’s character, that Alice would stifle her crying.

  Director and actress crossed swords. He insisted that Alice could not possibly keep herself from c
rying in the scene, that the one who would stifle her tears was Katharine Hepburn! At last, her illogic fractured his normally calm facade, and he flew into a rage, the sheer force of which terrified her into playing the scene one more time—at the window, with tears flowing. “It’s a wonderful moment,” Kate recalled half a century later, “but it occurred only because I thought he was going to kill me.”

  Alice Adams became a big hit and one of Hepburn’s personal favorites. Both she and the picture were nominated for Academy Awards. Mutiny on the Bounty won Best Picture that year; and Bette Davis was named Best Actress for Dangerous. More important, appearing in practically every scene in this successful, critically acclaimed film seemed to ensure Hepburn’s place in the public’s heart and her position as a star. Feeling the rush himself, RKO producer Pandro Berman told her she had only to name her next project.

  Hepburn’s pal George Cukor—coming off three consecutive blockbuster hits—had become infatuated with a novel by Compton Mackenzie called The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett. It was a peculiar picaresque story about a girl who masquerades as a boy, so that she can accompany her father, a crook on the lam. In their travels, they meet up with an odd lot of characters, including a cockney rogue. Hepburn thought it was “a brilliant book,” but she never really saw its cinematic possibilities. Cukor had enough enthusiasm for two. Full of themselves, they told Pandro Berman this was the project they wanted to work on next. The producer could hardly deny them.

  The story, with its androgynous sexual interplay, was unlike anything else on the screen; and it was another showy part for Hepburn—for which her hair was cut like a boy’s. But as she later admitted, “Just because something is different doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good.” She felt only one member of the cast really made something of his role, and that was the young actor who played the cockney—Cary Grant. The former Archibald Leach had, in fact, already appeared in some twenty films in his first three years in Hollywood, but he still had not fully developed his screen persona yet. He was handsome but slightly pudgy in this picture; and instead of the clipped English tones for which he would become famous and widely mimicked, he spoke “flawless” cockney, which was, in fact, more akin to his mother tongue. Hepburn had never had so much fun on a movie set with an actor; and she became fast friends with this former “acrobatic dancer” from Bristol, England, who had the know-how to parlay his charm and looks into respectability. Indeed, he would soon become a twentieth-century icon of suavity and breeding.