Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  She and Phyllis had stopped in London to see Bryan Forbes for a weekend en route to Atienza, Spain, the location for The Trojan Women. On Sunday, Kate rang up the manager of the Drury Lane Theatre to ask if she could look around, her thought at the time being to bring Coco to London the following spring. The management was happy to oblige; but since The Great Waltz, their current attraction, was a smash hit, it seemed doubtful that Coco could be scheduled for a year, or even two, a great disappointment to Kate, who seemed unwilling to settle for any other theater.

  Monday morning the two women flew to Paris so Kate could see Coco Chanel. For some reason the meeting was held in a park. “Do you know she never sits down when you talk to her?” Kate complained to an interviewer in Spain. “Finally, I was so tired I had to sit down on the ground like this.” She demonstrated by squatting cross-legged on the floor of the small, spare house (overlooking a “vast, parched Spanish plain”) that was to be her accommodation during the filming of The Trojan Women.

  Seeing Kate in person, no one could possibly confuse her with the elegant Chanel. Off the set of The Trojan Women she wore her uniform—khaki trousers, a large black shirt with rolled up sleeves, a wide-brimmed straw hat to protect her from the strong rays of the sun, bare feet stuffed loosely into a pair of men’s leather sandals. The rigor of appearing eight times a week for more than seven months in a monster musical had taken its toll. She was severely thin, and her skin was stretched tightly over her cheek and jaw bones. Her body looked surprisingly slight—almost frail—but the moment she began to talk, one could sense the toughness that constituted her character. For her role as Hecuba, the old queen of Troy, she wore one costume throughout most of the film—a torn black widow’s dress streaked with dust. (The Greeks have conquered the city of Troy with the help of the wooden horse. Hecuba has been imprisoned in a wooden hut in an encampment outside the city walls. Her husband and sons all are dead, and she awaits the orders that will decide her fate.)

  “As the old queen, I have to urge the captive women not to kill themselves, to say death is while life still has hope,” she explained to a visitor. “[Hecuba] was a practical old dame.” Reporters, photographers and visitors now found her quite amenable about being approached. The former belligerence toward such “invaders of her privacy” seemed to have vanished. Tracy’s name invariably crept into the conversation, and she always had a quote or two that stoked fire to his legend of greatness as an actor and to the sanctity of their long liaison.

  Kate and Cacoyannis never did make up differences that began during the first week of shooting. In the unenviable position of directing four such strong and individual actresses as Redgrave, Bujold, Papas and Hepburn, he apparently held to the belief that he must take the upper hand or lose control. His imperious attitude did not help. Kate bristled to it. To add to her discomfort, Kate was twenty to thirty-five years older than her three co-stars and very much aware of how the camera would pick this up. As usual, Kate was everywhere and into everything during the first week; and she had her own ideas on how her scenes should be played, filmed and cut. She and Cacoyannis drew swords instantly in an uneven match, for Cacoyannis not only was the director and the author of the screenplay but had directed The Trojan Women off-Broadway in 1963 to stunning reviews and had filmed the Greek tragedy Electra in 1961 with much success. He considered himself the master of the form and, as a Greek, more knowledgeable of the history of his native land than Kate could hope to be.

  The Trojan Women never rose above the two major problems that were evident from the start: the staginess of the screenplay, which gave it the visual look of filmed theater, and the jarring, disparate accents of the four women in the cast. However, despite the film’s lukewarm reception and the limited distribution it received, The Trojan Women contains some riveting moments. Kate was undoubtedly miscast, the arrogance she portrays setting the wrong tone for the grief-stricken, vengeful Hecuba. Yet in one short scene—when she hisses, “Kill her!” at the Greek king as he is deciding the fate of Helen of Troy—Kate sets the screen afire and Hecuba comes searingly, if only momentarily, alive.

  Kate returned to New York by Christmas and went directly into rehearsals on Coco for a cross-country tour to commence in Cleveland at the Public Music Hall on January 11, 1972. Opening night proved to be dramatic. News reached Kate just before curtain that Coco Chanel had died the previous day in Paris. After her performance, for which she received a standing ovation, Kate stepped to the footlights, tears in her eyes, a catch in her voice, and announced Coco’s death, adding, “Miss Chanel was a remarkable woman with a fine mind and a fine heart and the driving inspiration behind my performance. She is not with us anymore, but I hope that someplace she may be listening.”*

  The pace of the touring show was faster than in the New York production, which helped to point up the brittle laugh lines. Some of the choreography was redone and better executed, and some of the new cast members were more suited for their roles. All in all, the road show of Coco was a better production than the original Broadway show.

  The late hours, the temporariness of hotel rooms and the tepid quality of room-service meals were not easy to bear. But the enthusiasm of the audiences greatly compensated. For an actor, nothing can compare to the instant gratification of a well-received performance. Kate had hungered for this kind of acclaim ever since the success of The Philadelphia Story had piqued her appetite. In Cleveland, a reporter posed the question, “Why would Katharine Hepburn hit the road?” Her answer was simple. She had contracted to tour if the producer chose to do so. Kate, of course, retained a good percentage of the show which, because of its huge initial and running costs, had not yet earned back its investment for Paramount Pictures, who were now reconsidering exercising their film rights. Paramount’s new young executives were doubtful that the current movie-going public would even have heard of Coco Chanel and had grave reservations that Katharine Hepburn, on her own, could carry a film that would have to be budgeted at between eighteen and twenty million dollars.

  Kate’s tour was to be a warm-up for a game that never was to be played. But for six months, as she crisscrossed the country, the Hepburn cult grew. To some of the young men and women who followed her from town to town, theater to theater, she represented the worldly older woman, totally independent of society’s opinion of her; to others, the idealized lover-mother and mistress. Most saw her as the theater and film’s grande dame, a staunch survivor of indomitable strength whose very presence inspired courage. Unlike the members of the Garland cult, few of Kate’s followers ever dared to try to intrude upon her privacy. One fan (a youth in 1972) claims that, existing on peanut butter sandwiches, he hitchhiked to every city on Kate’s Coco tour, did not miss one performance (he has the theater stubs to prove this), stood outside various theaters in the full blast of winter to catch a glimpse of her, and yet never had the temerity either to speak to Kate or to send her a note.

  The high point of the tour was to be her appearance in Hartford at the Bushnell Auditorium, where she had last been seen in 1942 in Without Love. While in Hartford she stayed with her father’s widow in the house on Bloomfield Avenue. Instead of the zenith, Hartford proved to be the nadir of the tour. Everything that could go wrong did—from the mechanical failure of Cecil Beaton’s demon turntable to the worst February snowfall Hartford had experienced in several decades. The reviews were disastrous. (“They said I was quite talentless and should have stayed home,” she is quoted as having commented.) And then there was the case of the assaulting chauffeur, fifty-five-year-old Luella G. West, a trained nurse by trade, whom Kate claims she had hired as a temporary maid-chauffeur and then fired for rudeness.

  Late one night after an evening performance, Kate, Mrs. Hepburn, Phyllis, and Charles Newhill, Kate’s former chauffeur, returned home. As they approached the front door, Kate noticed that a ground-floor window that had previously been shut was open. She insisted she lead the way to rout any intruder who might still be inside. The small group en
tered the darkness single file, Newhill behind Kate, Phyllis behind Newhill, and the seventy-year-old Madelaine Hepburn nervously bringing up the rear. Kate thought she heard sounds at the top of the front stairs and started doggedly up, the others following behind her. When she reached the top, Kate pulled open a closet door and out jumped the sizable Miss West, hammer in hand, ready to strike. She and Kate struggled and Kate went “over and over, down the stairs” as Newhill jumped into the fray. Madelaine Hepburn crouched back against the wall and Phyllis ran to telephone the police.

  In the struggle, the woman had bitten the index finger of Kate’s left hand through to the bone and then had disappeared out the front door. “The finger hung by a thread,” Kate recalled of the bizarre encounter. “Phyllis got me to a doctor. I was in agony. Next day, I had to go on for a matinee in a splint. My brother Robert, who’s a doctor, found a Dr. Watson, a wonderful man, who grafted it back on.”*

  In every city on the rest of the tour, Kate was seen by a hand specialist to make sure no infection set in, which could have cost her the finger. Yet not only did she refuse to sink the road tour, or even to interrupt it, she never missed a performance; and unless they had read about it, no members of the audience were aware of her pain or her inability to do much with her left hand.

  The tour ended at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in June. Kate had won over theater audiences (if not reviewers) across the country, but not the hardheaded executives at Paramount Pictures. Coco was not to be filmed.

  Kate was exhausted and not at all sure of what she wanted to do next. For the second time, Fenwick and the activity of the growing Hepburn clan did not appeal to her. She felt lonely and belatedly bereaved. In California, Tracy’s spirit hovered close by and everything seemed a reminder of their years together. George Cukor suggested she confront her loneliness. He offered her Tracy’s bungalow for as long as she wanted it. Kate gratefully accepted.

  Cukor had kept up the property, but it had remained unoccupied since Tracy’s tenancy. A golden June sun blazed overhead and vibrant fuchsia covered one entire side of the small white house. Bowls of fresh-cut flowers—a welcome gift from her landlord—graced most of the rooms inside. Above the fireplace hung one of Tracy’s few acquisitions—a model of an antique sailing ship—and on the walls, some of Kate’s own landscapes, painted when she and Tracy had been in Cuba. Tracy’s favorite big black-leather chair sat in a corner of the living room, commanding a view of the outdoor path to the front door. His bedroom door was closed; and Kate, Phyllis behind her, threw it open. Sun streamed in rivulets across the hardwood floors. The hospital equipment was gone. Otherwise, the room remained as it had been the day Tracy had died.

  Footnotes

  * André Previn (1929– ) was born in Berlin and came to the United States at ageten. In his late teens, he became a top arranger for Metro. In 1954, he composed the background score for Tracy’s film Bad Day at Black Rock. He won four Academy Awards, three for scoring of a musical film—Gigi (1958), Porgy and Bess (1959) and Irma La Douce (1963), and one for My Fair Lady (1964), for musical supervising and conducting. After Coco he became more involved with conducting and is currently conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

  * Wallace Beery won his 1932 Oscar for The Champ, Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  * Tennessee Williams commented, “Has anyone ever understood the irresistible gallantry and charm of old ladies, in and out of the theater, so well as Giraudoux in The Madwoman of Chaillot? Kate Hepburn was just not quite old or mad enough to suggest the charisma of their lunacy.”

  † Chanel also had an apartment at the Ritz Hotel across the street from the salon that she had maintained for years.

  * Because of Previn’s commitment with the London Symphony Orchestra, he and Lerner were separated by the Atlantic Ocean during much of their collaboration. Previn claims that some of their conferences were conducted over the noise in airport lounges. Lerner had recently ended his long collaboration with Frederick Loewe (with whom he had written Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady and Camelot, among other shows) and was floundering for another partner. Previn and Lerner, as men and as artists, did not seem to be simpatico, and the resulting music and lyrics are at odds with each other. Lerner wrote glib, sophisticated but straightforward lyrics which Previn mismatched with nonmelodic music that took awkward twists and turns in an attempt to be modern.

  † Coco was wholly capitalized by Paramount Pictures, which also put up $2.75 million for film rights.

  * Beaton had designed the sets and costumes for the film version of My Fair Lady and the costumes for the stage version.

  † The New York stores represented were: Saks, Best, Ohrbach’s and Bloomingdale’s.

  * Danielle Darrieux (1917– ). A major star of French and international films, her career began in 1931 as a romantic ingenue in Le Bal, and progressed through the decades to chic, women-of-the-world roles. La Ronde (1950), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1955), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). After World War II, she was accused of collaboration with the Nazis based on her participation in some shows before Nazi troops. Finally, exonerated after narrowly escaping execution, she resumed her career as successfully as before.

  * On the album Hepburn sings “The World Belongs to the Young,” “Mademoiselle Cliche de Paris,” “On the Corner of the Rue Cambon,” “The Money Rings Out Like Freedom,” “Coco,” “Ohrbach’s, Bloomingdale’s, Best and Saks,” and “Always Mademoiselle.”

  † Vanessa Redgrave (1937– ), English star of Isadora (1968), Came lot (1967), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971). She later won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Julia (1977). She is a member of the famous Redgrave family of actors.

  Irene Papas (1926– ), Greek star of Antigone (1954), Electra (1962) and Zorba the Greek (1964).

  Genevieve Bujold (1942– ). Born in Montreal, she starred in many French and American films and received an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress in 1969 for Anne of the Thousand Days.

  ‡ Michael Cacoyannis (1922– ) had won high critical acclaim for his direction of The Trojan Women in the off-Broadway production in 1963, as well as popular recognition for his film direction of Zorba the Greek.

  * Chanel was buried the following day in Lausanne, Switzerland, but the show did not close in memorium.

  * Hepburn’s assailant had nearly severed the finger from Kate’s left hand when Hepburn put her hand over the woman’s chin and mouth in an effort to push her away. The incident occurred on February 21, 1971. Luella G. West was fined fifty dollars and given a suspended six-month jail sentence on September 11, 1971. Hepburn had not pressed charges, but Miss West’s lawyer was quoted as saying, “Attacking Katharine Hepburn in Hartford is like attacking the judge before sentencing.”

  CHAPTER

  26

  While Kate was on the West Coast, Kate’s old school friend Elizabeth Rhett (Murphy) lived in her house in Turtle Bay. Laura, now an elegant gray-haired lady with a vulnerable, cultured catch in her voice, came into New York from her farm in Holmdel, New Jersey (where she raised long-haired weimaraners), two days a week. She stayed at her own smart beige apartment on Beekman Place overlooking the East River, but she always stopped by Kate’s house to make sure things were in order. Except for the acquisition of a television set, nothing much had changed. The gang—“a brace of Marienbadish chic people”— still wandered about the four-story brownstone with six-thirty drinks in their hands. If Kate had been there, perhaps iced tea would also have been served. But otherwise, the faces, the conversations, would have been the same. The gang (Luddy, Laura, Susan Seton and her husband, Florence Rich, and Elizabeth Rhett, among others) gathered in Kate’s house much as she had once been drawn to her father’s house and now felt toward Tracy’s bungalow. The Turtle Bay house was a form of continuum for those who came there, for Kate’s personality dominated the rooms even in her absence. Her desk looked as though she had just interrupted some work and was likely to return momentarily to complete
it. And, despite Elizabeth Rhett’s occupancy for a period of over a year, all of Kate’s memorabilia was where she had left it. One wall in her bedroom remained dominated by a profile portrait of her mother, the picture centered and surrounded by dozens of framed photographs of the Hepburn clan. Her Oscar won for Morning Glory was on a shelf in the fourth-floor bedroom that she had turned into a small upstairs den. Her two more recent Oscars gleamed in the firelight of the living room from their positions on either side of the mantel, and a most treasured, inscribed photograph of Ethel Barrymore (whom she had gone to visit every day during the last months of her life) had been left on the table beside the couch.

  The friends Kate had back East were the ones who truly mattered to her, the ones she considered really interested in her problems. In California, she had only “three or four people” whom she called true friends—Cukor, of course, and the Erskines. It helped that Phyllis was with her and that she could swim every day and take long walks. She seldom played golf anymore because she suffered from back problems and the game required a snap. She went to bed at eight-thirty and rose at five A.M. Her life was not glamorous, but Cukor had been right—living in Tracy’s house had made her feel far less lonely. She longed to make a film in Hollywood, which she said would be the best of all possible worlds for her at that time. Cukor gave her a copy of Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt, which he planned to film. At first, she did not see how the story—a collection of anecdotes revolving around a young man and his eccentric, vital aunt in her seventies—would make a screenplay. She read the book fifteen times and then finally, seeing a way it could be done, agreed to make the film.