Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  Several hours passed before he could slip away from his fans and the welcoming committee, headed by wealthy merchant Grover Whalen* and the city’s mayor, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, and direct a taxi to take him to Kate’s New York address. Unfortunately, the street in front of her house was mobbed with fans hoping to outguess the hero, and so he went on to his suite at the Drake Hotel. The next evening, traveling in separate cars, Kate and Hughes met at the home of Grover Whalen in Short Hills, New Jersey. Rumors now circulated that they were to marry.

  Kate was in a terrible dilemma, not at all sure that marriage to Hughes was what she wanted. Hughes, with gentlemanly diplomacy, flew to Houston for a few weeks to give her time to think. He joined Kate at Fenwick on August 15, and the two of them went to look at a million-dollar yacht with an eye for purchase. The newspapers reported that the boat, The Viking, was to take them on their honeymoon. A week later, when Hughes left Fenwick, Kate had not yet made a decision.

  Monday, September 19, after a particularly festive and crowded weekend, Dr. Hepburn, all the Hepburn guests and most of the family departed Fenwick, leaving Kate and Mrs. Hepburn behind. Around two P.M. on Wednesday, September 21, a northeast wind began to blow. Even when the wind rose and the rain came in horizontal sheets, inhabitants of the area did not believe the hurricane that had been reported as turning away from Florida and moving northward could be approaching them. With New England rationality, they were certain that since there had never been a hurricane in their latitude, there could never be one.

  The day darkened early. Great black clouds rolled across the sky. Kate remained as unsuspecting as her neighbors. She liked the excitement, the challenge of storms. Shortly after lunch, alone, a scarf across her face, she walked out onto the pier. Waves slapped viciously against the pilings. A severe storm watch had been issued, but no mention had been made of an approaching hurricane. Kate braced herself, fighting the wind. Then, gale winds pushing her from behind, she turned back to warn her mother of the force of the storm.

  Fenwick was situated on an open promontory, with the Long Island Sound on one side and the Connecticut River on the other. Built as a summer cottage, the structure was not capable of withstanding the raging hurricane winds. Slashing rain made it difficult to see more than a few feet beyond the windows, which Kate and Mrs. Hepburn had fastened as tightly as they could. One by one the shingles on the roof tore off and whirled away. Trees thundered as they fell, windows smashed, and the floor began waving like a shaken carpet. Clinging together, Kate, Mrs. Hepburn and the maid deserted the cottage and managed to reach a neighbor’s more protected house. They were safe, but Fenwick was lost, along with many other summer homes and the lives of two neighbors. Telephone and power lines were down over the entire area. Knowing her father would be worried, Kate left her mother and walked, fighting the winds, to the main street of town, a good distance in any weather. “My God,” she recalled, “it was something devastating—and unreal—like the beginning of the world—or the end of it—and I slogged and sloshed, crawled through ditches and hung on to keep going somehow—got drenched and bruised and scratched—completely bedraggled—finally got to where there was a working phone and called Dad. The minute he heard my voice he said, ‘How’s your mother?’— And I said—I mean shouted—the storm was screaming so—‘She’s all right. All right, Dad! But listen, the house—it’s gone—blown away into the sea!’ And he said, ‘I don’t suppose you had brains enough to throw a match into it before it went, did you? It’s insured against fire, but not against blowing away!—and how are you?’ ”

  Upon hearing the news of the disaster the next morning (about 300 dead and 230 missing on southern New England’s coastline), Howard Hughes, who was now in California, sent a rescue plane into the area where the Hepburn cottage had been located. The pilot found Kate surrounded by the devastation of the storm, “undistressed, even gay, as she sifted sand with an army of small boys, hunting for the family silver.”

  The role Kate had most desperately wanted when she left Hollywood had been Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Almost no one except Kate thought she was right for it. She had worked with director George Cukor* in four films. Cukor was scheduled to direct David O. Selznick’s† production of Gone With the Wind as soon as Scarlett O’Hara was cast, and both he and Kate had tried to convince Selznick that she would be an admirable Scarlett. Selznick had not wanted to commit himself. A nationwide search for an unknown girl to play the role was in progress, with the kind of press coverage a Hollywood producer dreams about. To cast a familiar face at this stage would have disappointed film audiences. But as Selznick wanted to leave himself as many options as possible, he did not say a final no to Kate.

  Summer passed with no call from Selznick. Hughes, meanwhile, was still talking about filming The Amelia Eyrhart Story. In September, Kate told the New York Herald Tribune, “Motion pictures could be one of our greatest mediums of education today. However, let a movie try to depict situations in which we are all involved now, let a movie try to wake people up to their own plight, let a movie try to present a moral, economic problem of today honestly and simply, and they are advised to hear nothing, say nothing, do nothing.”

  The frank interview was not one that would cause the Hollywood studios to change their minds about her. Nor did the recent release of Holiday (the film she had made just before her departure).* Decades later Holiday would be called “one of the best-acted comedies in cinema annals” and viewed by critics as a classic. In 1938, the wit and nonconformity of the script and the tomboy beauty of Kate as Linda Seton, the heroine of Holiday, were too off-center to be appealing to the general public. Though reviews lauded Kate’s lively and winning performance, her critical success in the film was a pyrrhic victory.

  But why think about Hollywood (“smog patch,” as she often called the place)? The stage was her first true love. Just before the hurricane, Philip Barry† had visited Fenwick. Barry was the author of the play Holiday, in which Kate, years before, had been the understudy to the role she eventually played on the screen. Wealthy, of a good social background, a man of impeccable taste and grooming, Barry had become famous for his portraits of the ultrarich (although most of his plays eschewed strong social themes). He had come to tell Kate about an idea for a new play that he considered ideal for her. His timing could not have been better.

  “Let’s go on the pier and talk about it,” she said, and they walked off in the stiff Atlantic breeze—Kate in her baggy pants and man’s windbreaker, Barry in a finely tailored suit and a silk cravat. The heroine in Barry’s story was a Philadelphia society girl named Tracy Lord, who at the outset is to be married in twenty-four hours to a stuffy Philadelphia blueblood. Not only does the appearance of her ex-husband, also well born but something of a drunk, confuse her, but she finds herself attracted to a reporter from a scandal magazine. Even in the play’s early conception, there were similarities between Katharine Hepburn and Tracy Lord. The fictional character’s voice patterns and language were distinctly Kate’s, as were Tracy Lord’s arrogance and aristocratic aloofness. The Lord family were, like the Hepburns, rugged individuals (although the Lords owed more to George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Sycamore family in You Can’t Take It with You* than to the Hepburns). Other parallels existed: Kate’s hatred of the press, her demands for privacy, her regard for the artist, her love of swimming and the sea, her dedication to her family and its good name, and—perhaps even more pointedly—her inability to make up her mind to marry. And, of course, Luddy, her exhusband, was a Philadelphia blueblood who had remained close to her family. Perversely unconcerned by these similarities, Kate told Barry to go ahead and work on it. They had more conversations at Barry’s summer house in Maine. For a time, the playwright was working with Kate over his shoulder.

  Howard Hughes offered to finance the new play for her even before he read it. Kate asked her father what he thought, not only of her returning to the stage in The Philadelphia Story but of buying
a part interest in the production herself.

  Dr. Hepburn told her, “The most precarious of all investments is a theatrical venture. As your advisor I could never recommend one.” After a moment, he tapped the playscript. “But this one might be it.”

  Kate put up a quarter of the production costs for an equal interest in the stage profits. She also bought the screen rights from Barry, agreeing that a sizable bonus be paid him based on the Broadway run of the play.

  Her personal situation began more and more to imitate the fictional play Philip Barry had written for her, and she had no clearer answer to her predicament than the playright’s heroine had at the end of act one. Hughes was now beginning to insist upon an answer to his proposal of marriage. The press dogged Kate’s every step. And, in January, 1939, Vivien Leigh† was signed for the role of Scarlett O’Hara. In the short hiatus that existed before Kate was to go into rehearsals on The Philadelphia Story, she decided to rebuild Fenwick. With her beloved home once again there to shelter and comfort her, life would not be so confusing.

  At F.A.O. Schwarz, a toy store in New York City, she bought a large set of children’s blocks. Then, in the living room of the Hepburn home in West Hartford, where she had lived as a young woman, she gathered the family on the floor about her and with their help constructed a model of what the new Fenwick would be like. Each Hepburn had a hand in the plans and not always did they agree. One thing, however, was certain. Fenwick would remain the place where Hepburns could come for sustenance and protection, always.

  Footnotes

  * Howard Hughes (1905–1976). At eighteen, Hughes inherited a large fortune; at twenty, he began investing in Hollywood films. In 1932, after winning great success with his film Hell’s Angels, Hughes left Hollywood to pursue his love of aviation. In 1935, he broke the world’s speed record in an airplane of his own design. In 1937, he bettered his own mark, and in 1938, he flew around the world in the record-breaking time of a little more than ninety-one hours. This last was during the time of his romance with Katharine Hepburn. In addition to Hell’s Angels. which he also directed, his four major Hollywood films were: The Front Page, Scarface, Bombshell and The Outlaw (also directed).

  * Mother Carey’s Chickens was made and released by R.K.O. in July, 1938, with Anne Shirley in the role originally offered Katharine Hepburn. The film drew good reviews and was moderately successful.

  * Amelia Earhart (1898–1937), first woman to cross the Atlantic by airplane (1928), first woman to make solo flight across the Atlantic (1932), and first person to fly alone from Honolulu to California (1935). In 1937, she attempted with a co-pilot, Frederick J. Noonan, to fly around the world, but her plane was lost on the flight between New Guinea and Howland Island.

  * Grover Whalen (1886–1962) was a man of many and diverse careers. He was at various times general manager of John Wanamaker department store (1924–1934), chairman of Schenley Products (1934–1937), president of the New York World’s Fair (1939–1940) and police commissioner of New York (1928–1930).

  *George Cukor (1899–1983) had directed Katharine Hepburn in her first film, A Bill of Divorcement, as well as in Little Women, Sylvia Scarlett and Holiday. One of the pantheon of Hollywood directors, Cukor was known as a “woman’s director,” and most of his finest films have memorable performances by great women stars, i.e., Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Audrey Hepburn and Judy Garland.

  † David O (liver) Selznick (1902–1965), the son of film magnate Lewis J. Selznick (1870–1933), had produced Katharine Hepburn’s debut film, A Bill of Divorcement, in 1932. Selznick went on to make many film classics—Gone With the Wind, Rebecca, Spellbound and The Third Man among them.

  * Originally titled Free to Live in Great Britain; rereleased as Holiday.

  † Philip Barry (1896–1949), American playwright, best known for The Animal Kingdom, The Philadelphia Story, Without Love and Holiday.

  * You Can’t Take It with You (1936), written by George S. Kaufman (1889–1961) and Moss Hart (1904–1961) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1936.

  † Vivien Leigh (1913–1967) starred in many English films before coming to Hollywood in 1938 and her appearance in Gone With the Wind. While in Hollywood, she married Laurence Olivier. They appeared together in numerous stage productions. Leigh made many films after Gone With the Wind, the most noteworthy probably being A Streetcar Named Desire, for which she won an Academy Award.

  The Hepburns

  CHAPTER

  2

  Katharine Martha Houghton, Katharine Hepburn’s mother, had been orphaned along with her two younger sisters when she was thirteen.* The Houghtons, a rich and socially prominent family, had founded the Corning Glass Works. The girls were assured a certain income and the home and protection of their wealthy uncle, Amory Bigelow Houghton. This meant moving from Buffalo, New York, to Boston, Massachusetts, and to a home very much at odds with their former life. The sisters, with Kit, as Katharine Houghton was known, as their leader, were inseparable renegades, bringing considerable chaos into their uncle’s home.

  Kit grew into a tall, startling, dark-haired beauty, strong willed, haughty, an aristocratic young woman of such independent ideas that she constantly puzzled and shocked her conservative uncle. Kit believed that tradition was numbing, liked nothing better than a good argument on politics (considered a taboo subject for women in the 1890s) and insisted she and her sisters, Edith and Mary, be allowed to fulfill their mother’s wish and attend Bryn Mawr College. At Bryn Mawr, her wild chestnut hair swept up in a high pompadour, her nasal voice strident, Kit presided at a salon in her sitting room and, to her Uncle Amory’s constant agitation, spent far more than her generous allowance. Uncle Amory’s oldest son, Alanson,† had taken his post-graduate courses in Paris before entering the family glass business in Corning, New York, in 1889, and Kit had set him as an example.

  Upon her graduation in June, 1898, she sailed for Paris over Uncle Amory’s strong objection and despite the fact that he refused to advance her the next installment of her allowance (not due for another six months). Determined to see a bit of the world before marriage and children took up her life, she landed in Paris with just ten dollars. A bistro owner near the Gare du Nord rented her clean rooms over his establishment on credit, obviously believing her story that she was from a well-to-do family and that he would be reimbursed.

  Fundless, Kit haunted libraries and museums during the day and spent most of her evenings under the watchful, somewhat paternal eye of the bistro patron. Her French grew fluent and her naïveté worked to protect her. The following January her allowance arrived, and with it an additional sizable check (meant to be used as her return fare) that more than paid up all her debts and allowed her to purchase a first-class train ticket to the Riviera. At Monte Carlo, she won two hundred dollars at the tables and promptly sailed home. Boredom, not homesickness, had suddenly overcome her. She went directly to visit her sister Edith, who was studying medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

  Norval Thomas Hepburn was born in 1879 in Hanover County, Virginia, seventeen miles from Richmond near the Civil War battlefield of Cold Harbor, where his father, the Reverend Sewell S. Hepburn, originally from Missouri, had come to be an Episcopal clergyman. Of Scottish descent, the Hepburns could trace their ancestry back to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. “Torn” Hepburn had graduated from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, and, in 1901 when he met Kit Houghton, was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. A big, brawny, red-headed young man with a booming Southern voice that made one think of generals on a field of battle, Tom Hepburn was so much an original that Kit told her sister just after having been introduced to him—“That’s the one!” Edith, being more practical, pointed out that the gentleman didn’t have a penny. “I’d marry him even if I knew it meant I’d die in a year—and go to hell!” Kit replied.

  In June, only a few months after their first meeting, the ne
w Dr. Hepburn (without declaring himself) left for Heidelberg, Germany, as a special exchange scholar in surgery. Letters made their way back and forth across the Atlantic, Kit’s provocative, Tom’s merely informative. After four months had passed, in desperation Kit wrote, “The best thing about our relationship is that whenever one of us marries, it won’t hurt that relationship at all.”

  “How can you say such a thing?” he replied, and added, to her great delight, “If I don’t marry you, I’ll never marry anyone!”

  Uncle Amory was never keen on the idea of a marriage between his niece and Tom Hepburn, the profession of medicine being considered only a mite more respectable than being in trade. True, the Hepburns were a genteel family, but they were not an old rich, influential family. The Reverend Sewell S. Hepburn was a country preacher, and his wife, Selina Lloyd Powell Hepburn, had had to augment their meager income by taking in boarders. Furthermore, their son was radical and too free speaking for his own good. Nonetheless, in 1904, after Kit had earned a master’s degree in art at Radcliffe and Tom had returned from Germany to take up an internship at Hartford Hospital, they were wed, the young doctor thus becoming the hospital’s first married intern. For thirty dollars a month (a good share of his income) they rented one half of a small “ugly” red house opposite the doctors’ entrance of Hartford Hospital. Within a year, their first child, Thomas Houghton Hepburn, was born. The following year, having completed his internship, Tom senior opened an office on High Street for the practice of surgery. The formerly unheard of idea of surgical specialization was considered too radical by the standards of Hartford Hospital. The daring move, therefore, delayed Dr. Hepburn’s appointment to the staff for several years.