Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  Sylvia Scarlett was, in the star’s opinion, “awful.” Even before the film opened, all involved knew they had “a big flop” on their hands. After a preview in nearby Huntington Park, Pan Berman came to George Cukor’s house to commiserate with his director and star. They urged him to forget about this film, assuring him that they would both do another for him for free. “Please,” said Berman, “don’t bother.”

  Although they remained bosom buddies, Hepburn steered clear of George Cukor for a while, at least professionally. She made her next three pictures with more rough-and-tumble directors, none of whom, as it happened, was especially happily married. John Ford—one of Hollywood’s most brilliant filmmakers, who had just taken the town by storm with The Informer—was hired to direct Mary of Scotland, a successful Maxwell Anderson play, which had starred Helen Hayes on Broadway, about the Stuart heir trying to claim the throne of England from Elizabeth I.

  Again, Hepburn was not crazy about her part, the title role. “I thought she was an ass,” she said, “and I would have rather played Elizabeth, who, after all, was the powerful one.” But she knew it was a great vehicle for a star, and she welcomed the opportunity to work with Jack Ford, whom she had known slightly over the past few years. Frederic March, one of Hollywood’s most versatile leading men, played her husband and protector, the Earl of Bothwell—James Hepburn, who was, in fact, a distant ancestor.

  It proved difficult to cast the antagonist of the play, Elizabeth. Bette Davis wanted the role, but Warner Brothers made a practice of never loaning her out. She would limn her own indelible version of the formidable monarch for the studio just three years later. Even Ginger Rogers, forever trying to prove to her studio bosses that she could play serious drama, threw her hat into the ring. “Can you imagine?” Kate said one night, striking a pose of shock. “The Virgin Queen!”

  At one point, Hepburn—whom some wags in town had by then dubbed “Katharine of Arrogance”—suggested that she play both roles. “But if you played both queens,” asked John Carradine, a favorite Ford player who had a supporting role in the film, “how would you know which one to upstage?” Hepburn found nothing amusing about the comment at the time. Years later she roared with laughter telling it.

  Long before shooting finished, Ford lost interest in the project. The sets, staging, and photography were unusually good, but he offered no support in fleshing out the characters, all but reducing the actors—including March’s real wife, Florence Eldridge, as Elizabeth—to pageanteers. One day Ford walked off the set in despair and told Hepburn to direct the scene herself. Said Kate of the final product, “It laid a great big egg.”

  But Ford—born Sean Aloysius O’Fearna—never lost interest in his leading lady. A big, red-haired, melancholy Irishman, who had problems with his wife and with the bottle, he loved nothing more than getting out to sea on his ketch, the Araner, usually with some salty chums and some fun-loving young women and plenty of booze.

  He found Katharine Hepburn even more intoxicating. When he wasn’t lording over her on the set, he privately allowed himself to turn submissive, succumbing to her energy, excitement, and enthusiasm for life. She called him Sean, and found him a slightly tragic figure, full of demons—which he seemed to elude on the water. She often went out on the Araner with him. Although he generally concluded each picture with a long, drunken voyage somewhere, after shooting Mary of Scotland, he hied off with Kate on a healthier retreat to Fenwick. A romance ripened.

  Hepburn followed Mary of Scotland, a flop, with A Woman Rebels, a Victorian costume drama in which her character defies the conventions of her class by having a child out of wedlock and editing a progressive women’s magazine. Mark Sandrich, who had been directing Astaire and Rogers musicals, proved unusually clumsy in this particular outing. The film ended up a “mistake,” said Hepburn, “a complete error on everyone’s part, mostly mine for doing it in the first place.”

  She followed that with “a disaster,” another attempt at recovering some of the charm of Little Women—a second Barrie play called Quality Street. Under George Stevens’s acharacteristic direction, it also proved to be a labored attempt at whimsy, to nobody’s credit. “That made four skunks in a row,” Hepburn recounted, “and I felt I had to get out of town for a while.”

  It was not just her recent track record that sent her running. Thinking she had the best of both worlds—living with one man yet having occasional love affairs with others—Hepburn realized she had been living in a fool’s paradise. “You might say I lived like a man,” Kate recalled, until she suddenly found herself being dumped by her near-fiance. Leland Hayward had spent a great deal of time in New York that year, tending to his client Edna Ferber, who had written a big hit play with George S. Kaufman called Stage Door. It starred Margaret Sullavan, an incandescent rising film star who had already blazed through marriages to Henry Fonda and William Wyler, to say nothing of her flaming affair with Jed Harris. “Well, Ferber and Kaufman were the toast of Broadway, and Margaret Sullavan was the toast of Broadway,” Kate said, “and Leland—well, he always liked toasts.” Despite the seemingly excessive amounts of time he spent on the East Coast that year, he spoke often of his desire to marry Hepburn.

  During one of his absences, in November 1936, Kate was dining at George Cukor’s house when she heard over the radio that Leland Hayward had just married Margaret Sullavan. A telegram followed. She was distraught—until her mother made her realize that only her pride was wounded, and that she was not really smarting from any genuine matrimonial plans of her own being scrubbed. Kate sent the newlyweds a congratulatory telegram; and in her next face-to-face conversation with her erstwhile agent, she learned that the bride had been pregnant at her wedding. “It was really quite simple,” Kate explained to me. “She trapped him.”

  Over the years, Kate spoke of Leland Hayward only in affectionate tones. He treated her similarly. His enduring feelings for her were corroborated by Hayward’s third wife, the former Pamela Churchill, whom I got to know when she was later married to Ambassador Averell Harriman, a friend of Sam Goldwyn. She told me—as had Kate—that when Leland Hayward was on his deathbed, she called Hepburn and said, “He loved you the most. He’s dying. Will you come to see him?” Hepburn did.

  Kate believed Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman had overstated her dying second husband’s feelings in order to get her to make a deathbed appearance. “I think that was the secret to her success; she knew how to please men, and she would do anything for her husband,” Kate explained, quickly amending, “husbands!” Kate did not undervalue her relationship with Leland Hayward. She knew it had been a golden time for him as well, one with no rules and little reality. “We were two helium balloons,” she said, “who popped.”

  While she wanted to get out of Hollywood for a while, Hepburn knew that she had become “a joke” on Broadway. The stench from The Lake still lingered. She found safe harbor in a group called the Theatre Guild, one of whose founders, Theresa Helburn, wanted to star Hepburn in a production of Jane Eyre. She liked the company; and though she had some concerns about the play, she thought they could be worked out on tour. After playing Boston and Chicago, however, Hepburn and the producers found that the playwright refused to make the necessary changes. If Hepburn had learned anything in the last two years, it was that she should not play in anything she instinctively felt was not right. Unable to afford another fat mistake, she decided against taking the show to Broadway.

  Hepburn had painted herself into a corner. She had established her career in such a way that she could only appear in starring roles. But in the last year, the public had shown little interest in the leading characters she had portrayed. She had nobody but herself to blame for the flops in her past; and she had no venues or vehicles lined up for the future.

  Under such circumstances, most studios would have been through with her. But Pandro Berman convinced RKO to make one more attempt at reviving Hepburn’s career. The studio had just purchased a property that he tho
ught might do the trick, mostly because she would not have to carry it alone—Stage Door. For Hepburn, playing in this film was like rubbing salt into her wounds. It was bad enough being cast in the very part that had been created by Margaret Sullavan. It was worse that the play was an ensemble piece, a group of struggling actresses all living at the Footlights Club. In fact, RKO’s primary purpose in making the movie was to elevate its other star Ginger Rogers—“who was on the up and up”—at least as much as it was to rescue Hepburn—“because I was on the down and down.” The latter’s role was that of Terry Randall, a snooty society girl who moves into the boarding house as a way of experiencing what it’s like to be an actress, only to feel some of their suffering, thus becoming an actress along the way.

  Gregory La Cava, who had a drinking problem, had become that year’s hottest talent because of his urbane comedy My Man Godfrey. Under his direction, RKO packed Stage Door with young talent—Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, Ann Miller, and Gail Patrick. Constance Collier played the tragicomic role of the Footlights Club den mother (a role she began to assume in Hepburn’s life). Adolphe Menjou was cast as a Broadway producer, in an attempt to re-create some of the rapport he had with Hepburn in Morning Glory. The very touching Andrea Leeds—whose character’s demise would allow the amateur Terry Randall to go on with the show—was borrowed from Samuel Goldwyn. Although they were all working from the basic Kaufman-Ferber text, which had been transposed to the screen by Morrie Ryskind and Anthony Veiller, La Cava liked to work by throwing out the script and improvising upon it every day.

  For the first two weeks of the shoot, Hepburn felt that she was just standing around, watching other actresses steal scenes. At last she went to Pan Berman and said, “What am I supposed to do? I don’t know what my part is or anything about it.” Berman said, “Listen, Kate, you’re lucky to be playing a bit part in a successful picture. Just shut up for once, and do what you’re told.” She knew he was right . . . but was not ready to acquiesce altogether.

  She went to La Cava—whose drinking frightened her at first, until she came to feel it was part of what made him “a very talented, artistic man”—and asked, “Who am I? This character, Gregory, who is she? I don’t know who she’s supposed to be.” La Cava said, “Kate, she’s the human question mark.” Hepburn nodded knowingly and walked away. A moment later, she came back and asked him, “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Kate,” he replied, “I’m damned if I know.”

  All Kate really knew was that this was probably her last chance at maintaining her position as a star. Sufficiently humbled, she held her tongue and she held back her performance, letting those around her shine. After a few weeks of watching Hepburn’s moodiness on the set, La Cava was able to answer the actress’s question about her character’s identity. He used Hepburn’s own feelings of self-pity and exclusion to turn the character around. He enhanced her role—as Terry Randall blossoms into an inspired actress, an artist passionate enough to deliver an anthemlike curtain speech that reaches out to the others in her sorority. Kate later admitted that it had been “terrifying” working on a set in which so much was improvised every day, even more so because the part mirrored so much of her own life.

  To help Hepburn confront some of her career frustrations, La Cava decided that the play within the film, in which Terry Randall ultimately triumphs, should be Hepburn’s old bête noire, The Lake. “It was a brilliant idea,” Kate realized the moment he suggested it, “because it allowed me to take my most miserable moment in the theater and turn it into something fun.” As a result of La Cava’s instincts, audiences would forever remember Hepburn fondly, not foolishly, for uttering, “The calla lilies are in bloom again. . . .”

  The film was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award and still plays like gangbusters, but it was a box-office disappointment—financially successful, but only barely so. For the small profit margin, industry pundits blamed Hepburn. Believing she had at least bounced back from intense unpopularity, RKO figured the way to keep reversing the trend was to make her even bouncier. They cast her in a farce called Bringing Up Baby.

  Like most “screwball comedies,” the plot to this wisecracking, nonsensical love story crossed the traditional lines of social class and sexual roles. In this case, a persistent heiress sets her madcap on a paleontologist, losing an important dinosaur bone and gaining a pet leopard named Baby along the way. Howard Hawks, who had theretofore been making his name with action-packed dramas, turned to producing as well as directing with this comedy, creating the template for most of the best pictures of his career. He liked his comedic leading men to be good-looking and good-natured and his leading ladies to be fast-talking and slightly androgynous, able to wear the pants in the picture. He kept every scene galloping at a breakneck pace to a finish in which all the disparate pieces of plot fall into place.

  “Now I had a very strong body,” Kate said of herself, “and that allowed me to play broad, physical comedy very well, because I had complete confidence in my moves. And I was haughty enough in the mind of the public that it would be funny for them to see me roll in the mud or have the back of my dress ripped off.” Cary Grant, who had become Hollywood’s number-one romantic comedy star upon the release of The Awful Truth, was an obvious choice for David Huxley, a Harold Lloyd—like professor. “We were very good together,” Kate observed, “because it looked as though we were having a great deal of fun together, which we were.”

  For all the wonderful moments in the film—including scenes with such familiar character actors as Charles Ruggles, Walter Catlett, and Fritz Feld—Bringing Up Baby fizzled at the box office. Some have argued that it came at the tail-end of the “screwball” cycle, when a Depression-weary public was tired of watching silly escapades of the rich. But several classics of the genre, in fact, would appear over the next three years. The awful truth seemed to have been the public’s genuine disinterest in the star.

  So thought one Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theatre Owners of America. Speaking on behalf of the hundreds of businessmen whose movie houses were not part of the big studio chains, he published a list of actresses he claimed were “box-office poison”—including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and Katharine Hepburn. He even posted their names on big one-sheets, which he had pasted around town. Those actresses didn’t draw patrons into theaters, Brandt claimed, and he asked the moguls to stop hitching their vehicles to such dim stars.

  Nobody at RKO could disagree. Two or three big hits out of fifteen pictures were not enough to warrant greater investment; and Hepburn had already survived five years as a star, the standard run for all but the sacred few. The studio had clearly lost interest in her, offering her an obviously inferior “B” picture called Mother Carey’s Chickens. Refusing to pull the trigger on her own career, Hepburn bought up the rest of her RKO contract for some $200,000. That her father had been prudently investing her hefty paychecks over the years made her bold move affordable.

  George Cukor stepped in with an offer that even made it desirable. Columbia Studios, the poor cousin to the more established majors, had recently bought a parcel of old scripts from RKO, including the rights to Holiday (which had been filmed in 1930 with Ann Harding). Columbia head Harry Cohn hired Cukor to direct the film, figuring they could get Irene Dunne to play Linda Seton, the spunky girl who attracts her socialite sister’s impractical fiance. Cukor vigorously argued that the roles were ideal for Hepburn and Grant. Again, Cukor’s enthusiasm carried the day. “I knew that Harry Cohn was legendary as the biggest pig in town,” Kate said, “but except for some coarse language, he was never anything but a gentleman with me. More than that, he took a chance on me. He knew how bad my track record had been, and he stuck by me anyway.”

  Kate thought Holiday displayed some of her best acting, and definitely her best work with Cary Grant. After two pictures together, their acting rhythms were in complete synch with one another. And, like their characters, they both found amusement in
pretentiousness. “This,” Kate liked to remind me, “was before Cary got too rich, while he still had to work for a living and had fun doing it.” Ten years after she had understudied Hope Williams in the role of Linda Seton, Hepburn made the part indelibly her own, committing to celluloid a performance that is at once moving and comic, complete with her executing double somersaults with Cary Grant. Donald Ogden Stewart, who had acted in the Broadway production, had adapted the play into a fast-clipped scenario; and George Cukor made Hepburn look more glamorous than she ever had before. The film flopped.

  The star girded her loins to fight yet another round in Hollywood, when she received a script from MGM with an offer of $10,000—a lower fee than she received when she first landed in Hollywood. She didn’t need anyone to tell her it was time to get out of town. In the summer of 1938, Katharine Hepburn retreated to Fenwick with absolutely no prospects for a future in show business.

  “I always liked that poem by Robert Frost,” Kate said, referring to The Death of the Hired Man—“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” (It was the only line of poetry I ever heard her recite.) She knew a summer by the sea, with her family and a few select friends, playing tennis and golf, would help her find her bearings. While Hartford was where she came from and New York was where she lived, Fenwick was the place that felt like home, the place she loved most, her family haven for the last twenty-five years.