Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  His peers considered Tracy “almost the best” actor in films. Asked why, Humphrey Bogart† replied, “The thing about his acting is there’s no bullshit in it. He doesn’t go in for those hammy disguises some clowns think is acting. . . . Spencer does it that’s all. Feels it. Says it. Talks. Listens. He means what he says when he says it, and if you think that’s easy, try it.”

  Clark Gable, upon whom Tracy bestowed the title, “the King,”* added, “The only thing I mind about him is that humble act he does once in a while. Don’t you believe it. He knows how good he is. And that’s as good as anyone has gotten up to here and now in this business. Any actor or actress who’s ever played a scene with Spencer will tell you—there’s nothing like it. He mesmerizes you. Those eyes of his—and what goes on behind them. Nobody’s better than when they act with him.”

  Kate had not only seen most of Tracy’s films over and over, she had heard stories about his brilliance and professionalism from many of his co-stars, directors and crew members who had also worked with her—Joe Mankiewicz, James Stewart, and Ruth Hussey among them. His wry humor was legend, his intellectualism considered unique among actors in films. She had heard equally as many tales about his hard drinking and his womanizing. But one point was always made. Tracy never appeared on the set drunk or unable to perform at his best. If “indisposed,” he simply would not appear at all. The ultimate compliment came from Laurence Olivier, who said, “I’ve learned more about acting from watching Tracy than in any other way. He has a great truth in everything he does.”

  Had Tracy not remained in Hollywood, Hollywood party talk concluded, he would have been America’s best stage performer, the equal of anyone in England, Olivier included. Kate could not help but have been in awe of the man she was about to meet, even had she not been such a longtime fan.

  Tracy, on his part, had not seen any of Kate’s films and requested a screening of The Philadelphia Story. When the lights came up in the Metro projection room, he commented that the lady was “a damn fine actress.” Nonetheless, he remained wary of any woman who chose to wear trousers publicly. But he liked the script and agreed with Mankiewicz that he and Kate were both right for it. Mankiewicz reported back to Kate, “Tracy likes it and will do it.”

  Kate was tall for a Hollywood star, five feet seven inches, and she had learned years before to use her height to her advantage. She owned several pairs of specially built platform shoes which she wore whenever she felt the need to “put down—literally—the men with whom she came in professional contact.” Mayer and another Metro executive, Benjamin Thau, were both under five feet seven. Only nine days after Kate’s original call to Mankiewicz, Kate, in her built-up shoes (which increased her height by four inches), her hair piled high and her back rigid, joined Mankiewicz, Benny Thau and Mayer in Mayer’s office. She looked, to say the least, imposing, but she claims she was terrified, afraid Mayer would talk her into promising something she had no intention of doing. “He began,” Kate recalled, “by saying a lot of nice things to me—still not knowing who wrote the story or how much I’d ask. And I said a lot of nice things to him—the final preliminaries to hitting each other over the head.”

  Mayer wasted no time. “How much do you want for it?” he asked.

  “Two hundred and eleven thousand dollars—a hundred thousand for the story, and a hundred and eleven thousand for me.”

  Mayer protested that so far all he had seen was a first-draft script; good, yes, right for her and for Tracy, yes, but still only a first-draft script.

  “Listen, Mr. Mayer,” Kate replied. “[I agree] we really shouldn’t discuss whether two hundred and eleven thousand dollars is a large or small figure until you’ve read some of the shooting script. . . . I can deliver you sixty pages on Monday.”

  Mayer was called out of the office to answer a private call and Kate was left alone for a few moments with Mankiewicz and Thau. She grasped her head in a “Victorian gesture” and exclaimed, “This is absolutely terrible! I don’t know what I am doing!”

  Looking at her coldly, Thau said, “You’re doing all right.”

  As soon as Mayer returned, Kate stood up and said she had to go. Mankiewicz left with her and once outside the office leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. “What’s that for?” Kate asked.

  “I’ve just kissed the Blarney Stone,” he answered.

  The two of them headed across the lot to get a cup of tea in the commissary. Ironically, Tracy was leaving just as they entered. There she stood in her trick shoes, towering over his wide-shouldered five-feet-nine-inch frame. Mankiewicz introduced them, and Kate’s first words were, “I’m afraid I’m a little tall for you, Mr. Tracy.”

  They shook hands. Kate recalled that she was still trembling from her meeting with Mayer. Tracy remembered that she had a handshake that didn’t make the trousers she wore seem unnatural and that he remained disapproving of her clothes. He stared hard at her for a long moment and then a smile plowed its way across his strong, broad jaw. “Don’t worry, Miss Hepburn,” he replied. “I’ll cut you down to my size.”*

  Mankiewicz felt a chemistry pass betweetl these two in this first confrontation and was more certain than ever that they would generate the same sparks on screen. He remained convinced of this even when Tracy turned to him and said, “Not me, boy, I don’t want to get mixed up with anything like that.”

  For the rest of the week, Kate, Ring Lardner and Mike Kanin worked on the script day and night. At seven A.M. on Sunday morning, she surprised George Stevens with an unannounced visit to his house to ask him what he thought of the story and to convince him to direct the film. Stevens said he liked what she had and made a few suggestions. Kate returned to the bungalow at the Garden of Allah, where she, Lardner, Mike and Garson Kanin,† “and two clattering typists” worked all night. Kate masterminded it all. She read, responded, scanned, frowned, suggested cuts and word changes, and read aloud, “always with enthusiasm and optimism.” She sent out for food—“gourmet stuff from Chasens.” By Monday morning, she had 106 pages rather than the 60 she had promised Mayer. (The secretaries’ fingers “were too stiff to hold a cigarette.”) Kate delivered the script personally to Metro, went back to her own bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and waited. Twenty-four hours later, Sam Katz, another Metro executive, called. “Kate, I will give you one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars for the whole business,” he offered.

  “You don’t seem to understand,” Kate replied, “I really want two hundred and eleven thousand.”

  “Why the eleven?”

  “Ten thousand for my agent* and one thousand for telephone calls and things” she replied, obviously deciding she should not have to stand the cost of her own travel and hotel expenses.

  “Well, you know we’re going to give it to you.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I do know that.”

  “So now you can tell us. Who wrote it?”

  After she told him Katz was silent a moment. “Mike Kanin and Ring Lardner have never made more than $3,000 for a script before and we’re paying them $50,000 each! This picture should be called Agent of the Year!”

  The sale of Woman of the Year took place early in May, 1941. For the next six weeks revisions were made. Kate had little to do with this stage except for the rewriting of one scene, which involved a speech to be made to an audience of women. Kate sent it to her mother and Mrs. Hepburn returned it without changes, saying in a note that none was necessary.

  The story of how Kate had won out over Metro with Woman of the Year was soon a Hollywood favorite. Most people were incredulous that a woman had so successfully bucked a big studio on her own. But they had not realized that Kate had been brought up in a family where she was taught to think for herself, to face life with courage and to fight for her convictions. Tracy was not only impressed, he liked Kate Hepburn all the more for her brassiness. He had also read the shooting script and thought it a hell of a good job despite the fact that the majority of the scenes in it now cen
tered on Kate. When Kate asked him what he thought, he replied, “It’s all right. Not much for me to do as it stands—but, Shorty, you better watch yourself in the clinches!”

  Footnotes

  * The Philadelphia Story was nominated for Best Picture (won by Rebecca), Best Actor, James Stewart (won by Stewart), Best Actress, Hepburn (won by Ginger Rogers), Best Supporting Actress, Ruth Hussey (won by Jane Darwell), Best Screenplay, Donald Ogden Stewart (won by him), and Best Director, George Cukor (won by John Ford). Cary Grant was not nominated. Hepburn won the New York Film Critics’ Award.

  * Except for The Philadelphia Story, most films Hepburn made at Metro without Tracy failed commercially, even when she was co-starred with other box-office favorites.

  † Greta Garbo had made two recent films, Ninotchka (1939) and Two-Faced Woman (1941), when she decided to retire. She never appeared in another film. But in 1941, Mayer was trying to renegotiate a new seven-year contract with her.

  * The two documentaries were Fellow Americans and Ring of Steel, both in 1942. Kanin continued to produce documentaries throughout World War II.

  † Michael Kanin (1910– ) had been a musician until 1939, when he wrote the screenplay for They Made Her a Spy. He won an Academy Award with Ring Lardner, Jr., for Woman of the Year and collaborated with Lardner and with his wife, Fay Kanin, on The Cross of Lorraine, but none of his other films was as successful as Woman of the Year.

  ‡ Ring Lardner, Jr. (1915– ), son of the celebrated humorist. Lardner had come to Hollywood as a wunderkind in 1937 and worked without credit on the screenplays of A Star Is Born and Nothing Sacred. Woman of the Year was his first major credit. He collaborated on numerous screenplays during the forties, Tomorrow the World (1944), Cloak and Dagger (1946) and Forever Amber (1947) among them. In 1970, after many years of being a blacklisted McCarthy victim, he staged a spectacular comeback with M*A*S*H.

  * It was filmed and released in 1946 with Gregory Peck in the Spencer Tracy role.

  * The John Tracy Clinic is now located at 806 West Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, and is the largest educational center anywhere in the world for parents and their preschool deaf children. By 1983, more than sixty thousand young deaf children and their parents had received services at no cost. Louise Treadwell Tracy was the active president of the clinic until her death in 1983.

  * Tracy was to play a priest in four films: San Francisco (1936), Boy’s Town (1938), Men of Boy’s Town (1941) and The Devil at Four O’Clock (1961).

  † Tracy played the lead in The Truth by Clyde Fitch.

  * Pat O’Brien (1899–1983), born in Milwaukee and a childhood friend of Tracy’s. Both attended the Jesuit school and joined the Navy together. O’Brien started his stage career as a song-and-dance man. He preceded Tracy to Hollywood in 1 929 and had already made a name for himself by 1931 when he co-starred in The Front Page. He made more than one hundred films, but will probably be best remembered as Knute Rockne—All-American, in which future President Ronald Reagan was to play “the Gipper.” O’Brien and Tracy made one film together, The People Against O’Hara (1951).

  * Fritz Lang (1890–1976). Born in Vienna, Lang became one of the world’s outstanding film directors. Fury (1936) was his first American film. Earlier, his German films, Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) among them, had made him an international celebrity.

  † Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) is perhaps best remembered for his roles in High Sierra (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1943), Key Largo (1948), The African Queen (1951) and The Caine Mutiny (1954).

  * Clark Gable (1901–1960) often led the box-office poll and, after his memorable performance as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, was probably Hollywood’s most internationally famous male star.

  * In retelling this story, Tracy always claimed credit for this put-down to Hepburn. Mankiewicz insisted he spoke the now-famous line, but said, “He’ll cut you down to his size.”

  † Garson Kanin had not been involved in the writing of the first draft of Woman of the Year, but did contribute some ideas to the shooting script. He received no credit. His trip to Hollywood was to tie up his affairs prior to going into the army.

  * Hepburn can only have meant Leland Hayward.

  A Historic Affair

  CHAPTER

  15

  From the moment that Kate and Tracy faced each other before the cameras, their sexual awareness of one another transferred itself onto the screen. On the surface, they upheld the theory that opposites attract . . . the hard-drinking Irishman and the Yankee lady from Hartford who was stronger and more outspoken than a woman was supposed to be. Stevens saw immediately that they balanced each other’s natures, that Kate’s defiant personality, her fiery temper and brash manner, and Tracy’s “big-bear, Midwestern simplicity . . . his sense of the ridiculous,” his bossiness, made them representative of the American female and the American male’s fantasies of themselves. To his credit, he also recognized how much alike they really were—both being private people, intellectuals with large and educated appetites for almost everything from food to sports to politics. Both had wit and humor, loved nothing more than a good fight, stood for no nonsense, could not abide sycophants and flatterers. Both were Democrats, admired President Roosevelt with almost religious awe, had outrageous egos, loved their work, and had respect for anyone who was doing a good job or an important task; and both considered the men who built their sets as important as those who produced their films.

  When Kate began work on Woman of the Year, she had been dating George Stevens for five or six months. Nobody close to her thought anything serious would come of it. Despite their conflicts on Alice Adams, Kate had great respect for Stevens, both as a director and as a man. They had fun, talked much the same language and had many mutual friends. Still, they did not display any of the intimacies of lovers—the exchanged knowing glances, shared cigarettes, an acceptance of each other’s choices (“two whiskeys,” “steaks rare,” “coffee black”) that so often announce lovers. Yet, Kate’s insistence that Stevens direct Woman of the Year or Metro had no deal created an aura of speculation and gossip in the first days of shooting. Curiously, Stevens bore a strong physical resemblance to Tracy.

  The initial scene Kate (Tess Harding) and Tracy (Sam Craig) played together took place on a set duplicating the old Herald Tribune bar in New York. “I accidentally knocked over a glass,” Kate explained as she recalled that day. “Spencer handed me a handkerchief, and I took his handkerchief and I thought, ‘Oh you old so-and-so, you’re going to make me mop it up right in the middle of a scene.’ So I started to mop it, and the water started to run down through the table. I decided to throw him by going down under the table, and he just stood there watching me. I mopped and mopped and George Stevens kept the camera running. Spencer just smiled. He wasn’t thrown at all.”

  Stevens added, “From the beginning of the picture, and their relationship, Spence’s reaction to her was a total, pleasant, but glacial put-down of her extreme effusiveness. He just didn’t get disturbed about doing things immediately; she wanted to do a hundred and one things at once; he was never in a hurry. She ‘worried the bone’; he just took it and padded off with it. Slowly.”

  Kate loved to rehearse, to try something new, and make just one more take. Conversely, Tracy acted instinctively, trusting the moment of creation, firmly convinced that performers went stale by overrehearsing. He could work for hours on a piece of business like cracking nuts or peeling an orange in just the right way. Otherwise, he believed that acting should be a matter of instinct rather than design and his best shots were most often his first takes. Kate had to change her approach (since Tracy was not about to change his) or lose her hold on the film. Tracy had spoken the truth when he had warned her to watch herself in the clinches.

  Before the film commenced, Tracy had been a bit flirtatious, as was his habit. But when they began to shoot, something happened. He was not the flirt or the star, he was Sam Craig challenged by Tess H
arding, trying to maintain an uneasy kingdom, always working to be the ultimate boss of the situation. As another of his leading ladies, Jean Simmons,* said, “He’s a sort of sorcerer. I confess I’d never known anything like it. . . . I wasn’t me—I was the part I was playing. I fairly broke out. And it would happen again and again—startling really. One never quite got used to it—to him.” Kate, however, did, and within a few weeks.

  Everyone on the set realized what was happening. The two stars had fallen quite simply and sincerely in love. Stevens backed away from his relationship with Kate in a true gentlemanly fashion (although no alternative seemed viable). Mayer had told him that Tracy was difficult, that he drank. Stevens warned Kate and reaffirmed the facts—Tracy’s seriousness where his religion and the vows of marriage were concerned, and his inability to resist alcohol. Kate ignored the first and brewed pots and pots of strong tea and served them on the set as a substitute for the second.

  “She was the rarer beast of the two,” Stevens said. “Spence would come over before work to my little office and sit and talk, or I’d go in his dressing room. All of a sudden, there’d be a knocking on the door. The door would open and it was Kate. She’d say, ‘What are you two conspiring about?’ He would say, ‘Kate, I like guidance about things, and this man is our director.’ She said, ‘And what about my guidance?’ Spence said, ‘How could I be such a damn fool as to get into a picture with a woman producer and her director, how can I be such a dumb bastard as that?’ ”

  Midway through the shooting of the film, a new feminine glow could be noted in Kate. The actress who had been a beauty on screen now became one in private. Trousers were still her habitual garb, but she had suddenly traded the men’s clothes and faded patched overalls that had once startled Hollywood for splendidly tailored ones that complemented her figure. About Tess Harding, the character she portrayed, she told a reporter, “I’m alive, alert, enthusiastic—and also egotistical. I love Spencer, but I won’t give up too much of myself to him. ... I try to dominate him, put things over on him. I almost lose him.”