by Anne Edwards
La Cava leaned strongly toward improvisation. He would gather his cast together on the set and say, “The situation for today is thus and so. Talk and act as you naturally would under those circumstances.” Kate would spend hours after a day’s shooting discussing the next day’s scene and arrive early on the set the following morning to discuss it alone with him again. Because Kate did not trust improvisation, she would work on a scene herself before playing it, writing in and memorizing bits. The main text of the famous calla lilies speech, which constituted Terry Randall’s big moment onstage, Kate lifted from The Lake and was a scene she had played previously well over eighty times.
What saved Kate during the trying production was the beginning of a fine, lifelong friendship with the well-known middleaged stage performer Constance Collier,* who played the role of a drama coach in the film. Collier’s experience in Shakespearean productions and her highly acclaimed theater background very much impressed Kate, who turned often to her for advice on interpretation. But, also, the older woman had a warm, generous nature and a lively intelligence.
Midway through the film, Kate’s role somehow became more dominant than Ginger Rogers’s. Temperaments flared and La Cava used his two stars’ rivalry to the film’s advantage. When La Cava shot Kate’s calla lilies speech, he made sure Ginger Rogers was not on the set. “Ginger is strictly the menthol type,” La Cava later explained. “The only way I’d ever been able to get her to cry before was to tell her her house was burning down.” Rogers was required by the script to shed tears after Kate’s speech. When Kate was finished with the scene, Ginger Rogers was called onto the set. La Cava committed the impossible. He now told her dramatically that her house had burned to the ground. She wept. (A story spread throughout Hollywood that during the filming Kate had deliberately thrown a pail of water on Ginger Rogers’s new mink coat with Ginger in it and then screamed, “If it is real mink, Ginger, it won’t shrink!”)
Terry Randall in the final film version of Stage Door is a rich society girl who desperately wants to be an actress. To help her succeed, her father backs a production so that she can play an important role. Kaye, the girl who she replaces (Andrea Leeds),* commits suicide. During all of this Terry has been living at The Footlights Club, which is home to a less affluent group of wouldbe actresses. Terry is disliked by one and all, but her most violent antagonist is her acid-tongued roommate, Jean Maitland (Ginger Rogers). The tragedy of Kaye’s death-leap from a high window dispels Terry’s arrogance and adds great emotion and meaning to the role she has taken from her. With her humble curtain speech, Terry wins the respect of Jean Maitland and the rest of the girls at The Footlights Club.
(In the stage version, Terry Randall suffers all manner of setback but sticks to her guns and becomes a legitimate actress while Jean, her roommate, goes to Hollywood and loses what talent she had.).
The film, though certainly not a probing drama of any great insight, had much more logic and vitality than the play, and La Cava’s smooth comedy touches and the abundance of smart repartee gave the picture style and pacing.
The critic for Life magazine wrote: “To both of its female stars, Stage Door is likely to be a career milestone. Before this picture Katharine Hepburn, following a succession of costume pictures which stifled her talent, was in danger of losing her status as a star. Ginger Rogers on the other hand had become No. 3 box-of-fice attraction as one-half of a dancing team but still faced the problem of what she would do without Fred Astaire in a straight dramatic role. Stage Door answers both these problems. It proves that Miss Rogers is a talented comedienne and that Miss Hepburn really is, as her early pictures indicated, potentially, the screen’s greatest actress.”
La Cava said of Kate, “She is completely the intellectual actress. She has to understand the why of everything before she can feel. Then, when the meaning has soaked in, emotion comes, and superb work.”
George Stevens agreed: “Moreover, when the emotion takes hold, she isn’t the kind of actress who counts six steps forward, then two to the left. She goes into a scene and lives it, and you have to steer her like an automaton through the mechanical part.”
Kate felt certain the bad years were behind her and that she had won over the critics and Hollywood. Gone With the Wind had been published the previous year and she had wanted to play Scarlett O’Hara from the time she read the galleys.* Pandro Berman had not been enthusiastic about the idea of another costume picture when the second set of galleys was sent to him, and so, to Kate’s great disappointment, R.K.O. had passed on the project, and the option was picked up by David Selznick. Scarlett O’Hara had still not been cast when Kate finished Stage Door, and she badgered Selznick for a chance to do it. Selznick refused to commit himself. He did not think Kate had the necessary sex appeal for the role. La Cava had felt quite differently. To him, Kate generated great sex magnetism on screen—a kind of excitement no other actress had. “To win her, to beat down that proud, impervious hauteur, is a challenge only the most virile and dominant male could afford to take up. That’s the sort of man who should play opposite her . . . and if he were strong enough to make her melt—oh—that would be worth filming. She’s never had a leading man like that. They’ve always let her be the master.”
Against R.K.O.’s advice, Kate now became a leader in a theatrical union jurisdictional fight between actors’ unions and stagehands. Newspapers carried headlines like HEPBURN HURLS BOLT AT AFL IN THEATER BATTLE.* Issuing a strong statement that indicated she would participate in a theater actors’ strike if the AFL disregarded the claims of the actors’ union, the Associated Actors and Artists of America, she threatened to fly to Atlantic City to protest at an AFL convention (which she did not do). The image of the battling activist was not helpful to her popularity, no matter how right her cause might have been.
When Kate began work on a new film—Bringing Up Baby, opposite Cary Grant—Laura rejoined her on the West Coast. Howard Hughes, after two years, was still chasing her and, not unlike Scarlett, Kate had succeeded in keeping him interested without any commitment on her part. Bringing Up Baby was a zany madcap farce. The “baby” of the title is an eight-year-old leopard named Nissa, owned in the fiim by a spoiled heiress who manages to persuade a zoologist (Grant) whom she fancies to take care of it, with the sole intent of winning his affections—the zoologist’s that is.
Kate had no qualms about working with Nissa and even agreed to the trainer’s† request that she wear a certain perfume that never failed to make the leopard playful. Nonetheless, Kate did put resin on the soles of her shoes to prevent a sudden slip that might alarm Nissa. Nissa’s impressed trainer commented, “If Miss Hepburn should ever decide to leave the screen she could make a very good animal trainer. She has control of her nerves and, best of all, no fear of animals.”
Both Kate and Cary Grant reacted well to Howard Hawks’s “bullet-speed direction.”‡ Hawks was not fully appreciated by the critics in 1938, perhaps because of the eclectic list of credits he had at the time—from the violent Scarface (1932) to the slapstick Twentieth Century (1934) on to the adventurous Ceiling Zero and The Road to Glory (1936). Bringing Up Baby had a theme that almost all his later films contained: the concept that “a man is measured by his work rather than his ability to communicate with women.” Kate respected Hawks’s good sense and firm attitudes. The admiration was returned. Hawks said of Kate, “She has an amazing body—like a boxer. It’s hard for her to make a wrong turn. She’s always in perfect balance. She has that beautiful coordination that allows you to stop and make a turn and never fall off balance. This gives her an amazing sense of timing. I’ve never seen a girl that had that odd rhythm and control.”
As filming neared completion, the Independent Theatre Owners Association published the names of performers who were “box office poison.” Kate’s name led the list, which included Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. That all these women portrayed mature, independent, often rebellious, characters and that the most p
opular “women” on the box-office poll were Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin and Ginger Rogers provides insight into the taste of cinema audiences in 1937–38. With Europe in ferment and the Depression not yet behind them, American filmgoers looked to movies for easy forgetfulness. Bringing Up Baby would one day be an acknowledged classic. But despite its farcical content, its major characters were intellectuals (Grant even wore glasses), and the dialogue was considered too literary.*
R.K.O. took the press’s verdict on Kate seriously. The film, by the time of completion of principal photography, had cost nearly one million dollars; but the studio decided to shelve it rather than invest another hundred thousand or more to edit, score and advertise it. Howard Hughes came to the rescue, bought it from R.K.O. and sold it to the Loew’s chain.
“For Bringing Up Baby [Hepburn] plumps her broad A in the midst of a frantically farcical plot involving actor Cary Grant, a terrier, a leopard, a Brontosaurus skeleton and a crotchety collection of Connecticut quidnuncs, and proves she can be as amusingly skittery a comedienne as the best of them,” wrote the Time critic. Others labeled her performance “invigorating,” “breezy,” and equal to “Miss [Carole] Lombard’s best.” She had now proved to be “a comedienne of the highest order,” but she had been late in making such a film. The vogue for screwball comedy was over.
Despite Howard Hughes’s bailout, Bringing Up Baby lost $365,000 for R.K.O. The studio was in a quandary as to what to do about Kate, to whom they were committed to pay $75,000 for each of two more films. The front office was well aware of Kate’s considerable personal fortune. They also had first-hand experience with her tolerance level for any attempt to undermine her position (her fight to gain top billing in Stage Door over Ginger Rogers being proof). To follow Bringing Up Baby, the studio perfidiously offered her one of the leads in Mother Carey’s Chickens, a small-budget film scheduled as a programmer to fill out a double bill, a step above a short subject. Kate refused. The studio insisted she would have to appear in it or buy out her contract. With her father’s approval, she decided (as the studio moguls had hoped she would) to do the latter, at a cost of $220,000, confident that one of the major studios would offer her a good role in a top film for a commensurate salary. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, despite the fact that Joan Crawford had also been labeled “box office poison,” had resigned her to a new five-year contract for $1.5 million a year, three pictures a year, and had cast her opposite one of the top box-office favorites----Spencer Tracy—in Mannequin. Leland Hayward let it be known that Kate was available and would feel comfortable at a studio where good stories were a prime consideration for their stars. Metro offered her $10,000 for a one-film deal, but George Cukor came to Kate’s rescue.
Cukor was set to direct a remake of Holiday for Columbia Studios.* Harry Cohn, Columbia’s studio head, wanted the film to reunite Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, who had scored a hit the previous year in The Awful Truth. Cukor urged Cohn, who was renowned for his pursuit and conquest of beautiful women, to sign Kate for the role. Forty-six years old at the time, his hair thinning and his broad, short body tending to flab, Cohn nonetheless retained a striking appearance that many women found attractive. He had the sharp-cut features, a square, firm jaw, decisive body movements and intensely blue eyes that let a woman know in a most unguarded fashion that he desired her. Chameleon in his approach to women, he could be courtly with a regal actress like Ethel Barrymore and blunt with a woman he either knew or suspected might not be exactly as she seemed. At the end of a private conference with Margaret Sullavan, he had remarked, “Willie Wyler tells me you’re great in the hay.” Sullavan rose and replied scornfully, “You didn’t hear that from Willie. He is too much of a gentleman to discuss such things with you.” As she reached the door on her way out, she paused a moment to add, “But I am.”
He used the same line with Kate, substituting Leland Hayward’s name for Wyler’s. Kate went on talking at a fast clip as though she hadn’t heard him. Cohn repeated himself. Kate still did not pause in her conversation or give any indication that she had heard what he said the second time either. He agreed with Cukor that she should play the role she had once understudied on Broadway and never made another stab at a come on again. Once the picture was in production, he spared no cost in making Holiday.*
Kate worked well with Grant under Cukor’s suave, knowing hand, and the additional smart, literate dialogue inserted into the Barry play by screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart† helped immeasurably. Howard Barnes at the New York Herald Tribune called Kate’s Linda Seton “a vibrant, moving performance . . . first class screen acting.” Time was certain her performance as Linda Seton would “refute the argument of New York’s Independent Theatre Owners Association . . . that her box office appeal was practically nil.” The usually dissenting Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times wrote that “Miss Hepburn—the ‘New Hepburn’ according to the publicity copy—is very mannish in this one, deep-voiced, grammatically precise, and is only a wee bit inclined to hysteria,” but added, “Holiday comes close to being one . . . and a pleasant one too.”
Film audiences of its time unfortunately did not agree. In 1938, when any decent job was still hard to come by, Johnny Case’s terribly impractical plan to give up solid, high-salaried employment to see the world while young enough to enjoy it, and Linda Seton’s supposed courage in breaking away from her gilded existence to join him, did not inspire enthusiasm. Columbia did not offer Kate a second picture.
Cukor, who had just been signed by David Selznick to direct Gone With the Wind,* tried to convince him that Kate would be a splendid Scarlett O’Hara. Selznick still disagreed, feeling it would hurt “the quality of the picture having a girl who has the audience’s dislike to beat down.” Kate confronted Selznick directly and, after an exhausting hour of her insistence, he offered to test her. Kate refused, telling him, “You know what I look like on the screen. You know I can act. And you know this part was practically written for me. I am Scarlett O’Hara. So what’s the matter?”
“All right, I’ll tell you,” Selznick said. “I just can’t imagine Clark Gable chasing you for ten years.”
Kate shouted back, “I may not appeal to you, David, but there are men with different tastes!” When she had calmed down and her good sense returned, she reminded him, “Well, you’ve gone out on a limb to find an unknown girl—and you can’t tell me you’re going to be stupid enough not to find one! So, let us say this, if you get within two days of shooting—and the man who’s doing the costumes has dressed me many times—Walter Plunkett*—he could do the first dress in forty-eight hours—you send for me . . . you wouldn’t have to pay me anything—and I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t pay me anything.” She then cautioned him about making any premature press announcements concerning her possible casting that could be refuted later if an unknown was found, for that would be humiliating.† Selznick promised and Kate got ready to leave Hollywood. A few days before her departure, the annual Academy Awards dinner (for films made the year before, 1937) was held. Stage Door had received four nominations, but neither she nor Ginger Rogers was nominated for Best Actress.‡
Luise Rainer§ won her second Oscar as Best Actress for her role as O-lan, the Chinese peasant woman in Pearl Buck’s saga of Chinese farm life, The Good Earth, and Spencer Tracy, who had played the role of Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman in Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, was named Best Actor.∥ Tracy’s wife, Louise Treadwell Tracy,¶ accepted the Oscar for her thirty-eight-year-old husband, who was at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Hollywood, recuperating from a hernia operation. After a lengthy and emotional acceptance speech by Rainer, Mrs. Tracy, tall, slim, dark, and dressed and coiffed elegantly, had risen and said simply, “I accept this on behalf of Spencer, Susie [their daughter], Johnny [their son] and myself.” Her few words were met with a thunder of applause. The next morning Ed Sullivan wrote in his daily column, “Mrs. Tracy stole the show. She is just the sort of person you expect Spencer Tracy’s wife to be. Simp
le and unaffected.”
Just one week before the Awards, another columnist had announced that the Tracys were separating. Rumors circulated that a longtime liaison between Tracy and actress Loretta Young was the cause. So when Mrs. Tracy mentioned her children, herself and Tracy in her acceptance, “everyone present got an immediate picture of a family of four challenging the world to break it up.” The rumor that ci!culated among those attending the 1938 Awards was that Tracy’s hospitalization was really to help him “dry out.” Tracy was an alcoholic, some went as far as to call him a drunk.
Kate had never met Spencer Tracy, but she had seen all his films and claimed, by her own count, to have sat through Captains Courageous fifty-two times and cried each time when Tracy “went down, smiling with his ship.” That kind of courage moved her. She admired Tracy as an actor, but she also liked his looks: the craggy, granite face, the intelligent eyes, the gruff, deliberate voice that could contain such a surprising degree of tenderness when directed to do so. She had not attended the Awards, and never would attend such an event; she claimed they gave her dyspepsia. If she had known Spencer Tracy then, she might have repeated one of her father’s axioms to him: “If you must drink, drink when you’re happy. It”ll make you happier. If you drink when you’re miserable, it’ll only make you more so.” Or Dr. Hepburn’s opinion that “Drinkers are people who’re looking for easy solutions to their problems. The short cuts. There aren’t any. Problems have to be faced and solved. You don’t do anything with them by getting besotted and pretending they don’t exist.”
Spencer Tracy’s problems were not likely to disappear. A Catholic who did not believe in divorce, a husband who was no longer in love with the wife he respected more than any other woman, a father who had had to come to terms with the physical disability of his only son, and an actor caught in a studio system diametrically opposed to his own free spirit—Spencer Tracy felt desperately alone. So did Kate. But when such feelings overwhelmed her, she headed home to her father’s house.
