Kate Remembered (13 page)

Hepburn gave a remarkable performance in
Morning Glory
, one praised for revealing new dimensions as an actress and for bringing originality to potentially trite material. In truth, Hepburn would confess, she had borrowed heavily from another actor in delineating her role. Ruth Gordon had appeared in a play called
A Church Mouse
, in which she spoke in a monotone at a fast clip, conveying both eagerness and nervousness. Hepburn “copied her totally” in playing this heroine, Eva Lovelace—who was determined to become “the finest actress in the world.” Stolen acting tricks or not, Hepburn proved completely winning and became one of the studio's prime assets.

Meantime, David Selznick—who had a penchant for translating classic works of literature into motion pictures—had been developing a pet project, one featuring another Yankee with artistic yearnings,
Little Women.
He had been through several bad versions of the Louisa May Alcott novel about the four March sisters growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, before he assigned a husband-and-wife team to tackle it anew. In four weeks Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman wrote a shooting script, one with a role that seemed to be written for the new queen of the RKO lot.

“I would defy anyone to be as good as I was in
Little Women,”
Kate Hepburn would say of her portrayal of Jo March. “They just couldn't be, they really couldn't be, because I came from the same general atmosphere, enjoyed the same things. And I'm sure Louisa May Alcott was writing about herself and that kind of behavior that was encouraged in a New England girl; and I understood those things. I was enough of a tomboy myself; and my personality was like hers. I could say, ‘Christopher Columbus! What richness!' and believe it totally. I have enough of that old-fashioned personality in myself. Coming from a big family, in which I had always been very dramatic, this part suited my exaggerated sense of things.” David Selznick agreed, and he recruited George Cukor to direct Hepburn a second time.

Based on the earlier scripts, Cukor had resisted the project, thinking the material was frilly and sentimental. Selznick insisted that he read the Alcott novel, with all its hardships of the Civil War era playing in the background of the lives of the March women. Cukor later told me, as I reported to Kate during one of our dinners, that reading the source material had completely turned him around. “Oh, that's such bunk!” she said. “I'm telling you that man never read that book.” I replied that he told me she would say exactly that; and she said, “So, he didn't deny it. I'm telling you George Cukor never read that book. But that didn't matter. We had a wonderful script to work with, one that was really true to the spirit of the novel.”

Director and star bickered throughout the production—never about personal matters, only the material—in a collegial manner that brought them closer together. More often than not, Kate would get her way by either throwing her own New England background in his face or by reminding him, “You haven't read the book.” The only time Cukor genuinely got mad at her on the set was the day she had to run up a flight of stairs carrying some ice cream while wearing a costume for which they had no duplicate. He repeatedly urged her to be careful not to spill on the dress, and finally said, “I'll kill you if you do.” As though preordained, she did—and Kate burst into laughter. Cukor slapped her across the face and screamed, “You amateur!” running her off the set. She spent the rest of the day vomiting.

Hepburn enjoyed playing with her entire cast—which included Spring Byington as “Marmee” and the great character actress Edna May Oliver as Aunt March. Kate's “sisters” included Frances Dee as Meg, Jean Parker as Beth, and Joan Bennett as Amy, her costumes having to be redesigned to conceal her pregnancy. But from that luminous cast, it was Hepburn's portrayal as Jo that shone in the public eye. In less than a year she had become more than a Hollywood leading lady. She was a star.

At a time when the Depression was hardening Hollywood's edge—with movies about gangsters and tap-dancing gold-diggers—RKO suddenly had a big hit on its hands with this modest piece of counter-programming, a family drama full of family values. The film had its share of pain and reality, but its success sprang from the lives of characters the audience cared about. When the six-year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its best pictures of the year,
Little Women
was among the ten nominations. Katharine Hepburn was nominated as Best Actress—though not for the same picture. She got shortlisted for
Morning Glory.

Hepburn forever believed she was nominated for the wrong movie, that her work in
Morning Glory
was “very good” but that it was “tricked up, charming, mugging.” In
Little Women,
however, she said, “I gave what I call the main-course performance, not a dessert.” After much consideration, Hepburn chose not to attend the award ceremony, in the Fiesta Room of the Ambassador Hotel on the night of March 16, 1934. That night Will Rogers presented all the golden statuettes, whose new nickname of Oscar was starting to spread beyond the industry. After announcing that
Cavalcade
was the Best Picture and Charles Laughton was Best Actor, Rogers pronounced Katharine Hepburn that year's Best Actress.

The Academy Awards conflicted Hepburn from the very outset of her career, beginning with her believing that somebody so young and new to the game couldn't possibly win. There was more to it than that. Indeed, even after she was told she had won, Hepburn said she wanted to release a statement saying she did not believe in awards—“or some asinine answer like that.” In truth, she later admitted, “mine was really bogus humility, because I was genuinely thrilled to win.”

From that first nomination, Hepburn vowed never to attend the Academy Awards ceremony, a vow she was not proud of. “I think it is very noble for the people who go and lose, and I think it is very ignoble of me to be unwilling to go and lose,” she confessed. “My father said that his children were so shy because they were afraid they were going to a party and they were not going to be either the bride or the corpse. And he may be right. I can't think of a single, logical defense of someone who occupies a position in the industry that they refuse to go to the biggest celebration that that industry has to offer. I think it's unpardonable, but I do it. . . . I have no defense.”

At the same time, Hepburn added, she believed the industry and the public at large exaggerated the importance of the prize. A lot of it, she insisted, is luck and timing. “If you have a very good part,” she said, “you have a very good opportunity . . . and sometimes you can shine in a dull year. But honestly,” she added, “if you give an award-worthy performance, you know it. And I do think I'm terribly self-indulgent in refusing to appear.” When I asked Kate in 1982 where her Oscars were, she could not say, other than that she had given them to a museum in the Empire State Building. “I mean, if I don't go to the ceremony,” she explained, “I can't very well put them on my mantelpiece, can I? I simply have no right to.”

Having risen to the top of her new profession in little more than a year, Hepburn still felt she had plenty to prove. Triumphant on the West Coast, she told her studio bosses that she wanted to return to New York, to the theater. She thought she could take Manhattan by storm by appearing in a new play called
The Lake
. RKO would not release her, unless she agreed to make one more picture before leaving. Star and studio found themselves stalemated, until Kate had the nerve to say she would appear in a movie called
Spitfire.
Feeling capable of anything, she said she would star as the heroine—an uneducated, barefooted tomboy, an Ozarks faith healer named Trigger Hicks. She demanded $50,000 for four weeks of work plus $ 10,000 for each day beyond that. Hepburn gave it her all (and collected $60,000 for her efforts) and had banked enough good will with the critics to escape virtually unscathed.

The few who ever saw
Spitfire
rank it among the worst movies Katharine Hepburn ever made. The star felt the same, later chastising herself by saying, “The few times I did something for the money, it was mediocre material, and I did mediocre work.” While Kate kept few photographs of herself on display around any of her homes, a picture of her as Trigger Hicks remained for years in a place of prominence just outside her bedroom at Fenwick. “A reminder,” she told me with an arch of an eyebrow. “Trigger keeps me humble.”

Besides the theater, Hepburn had another reason for returning east. Her marriage. Few in Hollywood even realized that Katharine Hepburn had a husband back in New York, in the business world. It appeared that Kate herself had forgotten all about him. Although she continued to live quietly in the hills with Laura Harding (fueling speculation of a lesbian relationship), Kate was occasionally seen in the company of attractive men.

She went on a few dates with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., but the nights always ended earlier than he would have liked. She spent her sunniest days off work that year with a young actor raised in Southern California, Joel McCrea—“so good-looking, so charming.” They would drive up the coast, then picnic and swim at Zuma Beach; their friendship also remained platonic. Increasingly, she was secretly spending her nights at the Franklin Canyon house with her agent, the urbane Leland Hayward. Like her, he was married; and
their
friendship became something more than that.

Hayward was virtually a singular presence in show business— as handsome and debonair as many actors, extremely tasteful, and intelligent in matters of business. He had already created a presence for himself in Hollywood and on Broadway. He was known at the time as Hollywood's only “Princeton man,” which was accurate if one counted his single year there. His passion was women—the more challenging the better. In his aloof new star, suddenly considered the most sophisticated presence in movies, he had met his match.

While Hepburn was outdoorsy, athletic, and liked to be in bed early, Hayward's most active sport was late-night club-hopping. Despite their conflicting clocks and calendars, Kate said, “We were really mad for each other”; and they constantly scrambled to make time to be together. They enjoyed a sexually charged affair, in which it was difficult to ascertain who had the upper hand. Equally infatuated with one another, he suggested that he would divorce his wife, an adventurous Texas beauty named Lola Gibbs, if Kate would divorce Luddy. Returning to New York would keep Hayward in mad pursuit.

There was yet another reason lurking behind Hepburn's leaving Los Angeles—a man she would later call “hands-down the most diabolical person I have ever met.” His name was Jed Harris; and in the colorful theater world of the 1920s and '30s, nobody was as revered and reviled (at the same time) as much as he. The brilliant producer and director, largely responsible for such highly regarded hits as
The Royal Family, The Front Page
, and, later,
Our Town
(also the man on whom Laurence Olivier would later model his performance of Richard III, evil incarnate), Harris had fallen into a slump in his career. He was trying to climb out by mounting a production called
The Lake.

Sinister in looks and satanic in ambition, Harris was extremely seductive—especially to actresses, who found themselves vulnerable to his promises of artistic success. He had already captivated Ruth Gordon, fathering and abandoning a child with her; and he had lured Margaret Sullavan away from her husband, a budding actor, Henry Fonda. In this case, however, it was not the fox who went after another hen, but Hepburn who approached Harris. Flush with success, the young Hollywood star dared to pick up a telephone and call him directly.

The Lake
was the story of a woman desperate to marry; on her wedding day, she skids the car in which she is driving her husband into the lake, killing him. Hepburn later confessed that she was simply so consumed with the notion of working with Harris that she did not know whether the play was even any good or not. Her motivation, she claimed, was “to help restore him to his throne . . . and I felt powerful enough to do that. Crazy! What was I thinking?”

Only years later did she realize that she wasn't thinking at all, that it was sheer hubris that drove her to believe her sudden status as a movie star was enough to meet the challenge. Helen Hayes, whom Hepburn barely knew, sent her a note out of the blue, warning her not to work with Harris. But after “conquering Hollywood,” Hepburn was vain enough not even to consider this enterprise a contest. Alas, she didn't realize that Harris was sociopathic, and her munificent gesture of riding to his rescue (if that's what it was) only angered him even more, making him hell-bent on doing her harm.

She showed her vulnerability at the start, agreeing to a much smaller salary than a star, to say nothing of a movie star, was entitled to. Then, at the first rehearsal, Harris set about breaking her. He stopped her every few moments, correcting every move, generally insisting she do the exact opposite. At last, in a scene that required her to play the piano—or at least fake playing the piano—she could not position her hands to match the music that was being piped in and say her lines at the same time. He made her play the scene again and again, delighting in her failure to improve. When she finally protested, he said, “Helen Hayes learned to play the piano for me!” That knocked whatever confidence she retained out from under her. As a result of this relentless torture, she felt her performance becoming robotic.

The Lake
previewed in Washington, D.C., where there was a huge advance sale. The crowd was enthusiastic. “There really is nothing as generous as an American audience,” Hepburn long maintained, “especially for a movie star trying to stretch. I'm always amazed that more movie stars, especially those actresses who hit their forties and fifties and complain that Hollywood isn't writing any parts for them anymore, don't take to the stage. If Broadway is too scary, there are hundreds of wonderful theaters all over the country who would be thrilled to have them. Actors should act.” But Hepburn herself was not pleased with her performance. Feeling she was “a bore” in these preview performances, she looked forward to some new direction from Harris and a chance to rehearse further.