Kate Remembered (19 page)

Then came the hurricane of 1938. Hughes sent a pilot to Fenwick that week with huge bottles of fresh water. Upon hearing about this life preserver Barry was throwing to her, he also gave her some advice—to purchase the motion-picture rights of this new play even before it opened. If
The Philadelphia Story
was that good, he reasoned, it could prove to be her vehicle back to Hollywood; and if it did not pan out, an investment this early in the game would hardly be that great. Hughes went so far as to buy the rights as a present for her, withholding a percentage as an investment for himself. While he would soon move on to business ventures and romantic adventures with other partners, Hepburn and Hughes would forever be bound by their joint interest in
The Philadelphia Story.

While Barry was finishing his play, Hepburn set about getting it produced. She felt beholden to the Theatre Guild because they had let her both star in and leave its production of
Jane Eyre
. Barry had had a bad experience with the Guild and wanted to go elsewhere; and neither he nor Hepburn knew that the company was then practically bankrupt. Meantime, the Theatre Guild didn't know that Hepburn had been banished from Hollywood. “We were all washed up,” Kate said, “and nobody knew the whole truth about the other. Hopeless.”

In the end, they all came together, as Hughes and Hepburn each put up a quarter of the production costs, thus becoming profit participants. Under the direction of Robert B. Sinclair, who had recently triumphed with Clare Boothe Luce's
The Women
, they assembled a remarkable supporting cast, while Barry struggled with the play's final act.

From the Mercury Theatre, they grabbed Joseph Cotten to play C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy's first husband; and from
A Woman Rebels
, Kate remembered the virile performance of her costar Van Heflin, who was cast as Macauley Connor, the cynical reporter assigned to cover the Philadelphia wedding. Shirley Booth was cast as his photographer sidekick, and Kate thought her performance was “brilliant,” because she found much more in the part than had appeared on the page. They lucked out further with the discovery of a remarkable ten-year-old named Lenore Lonergan—“a real caution,” said Kate—to play the heroine Tracy Lord's wisecracking kid sister. After one of the out-of-town performances, Lawrence Langner came backstage and said, “Kate, I think the girl is copying you—all your movements, your gestures, your delivery.”

“You've got it all wrong,” she told Langner, dead serious. “I'm copying her.”

At last Barry finished the play, and from that moment on, Kate said, “It smelled like a hit.” Pleasing her as much as the elegance of the comedy—“there was nothing cheap about any of it, just real humor that grew from the character”—was the construction of the drama. “People don't realize how ingenious Phil Barry's play is,” she said, “how he drew three different men, all from different social positions. And up until the last moment of the play, there's a good argument to be made for Tracy to marry any one of them. In the end, I think the play draws the truest . . . and most romantic conclusion.” As if that were not enough, the entire work was tailored to showcase Hepburn—allowing her to rattle off passages of witty dialogue while men fell at her feet. “An actress doesn't get many of those in a lifetime,” Kate said of her role in
The Philadelphia Story
. “And she doesn't need many.”

For yet another reason, the timing of Tracy Lord's entrance into Hepburn's life could not have been timelier. Like most film actresses in the late thirties, she felt she had just lost the role of a lifetime—Scarlett O'Hara—a role that she thought, for a moment, might be hers. A few years earlier, Katharine Hepburn believed she had been the first actress to receive a set of the galley proofs of
Gone With the Wind,
at the behest of the author, Margaret Mitchell. She adored the part and immediately saw herself in it. Pandro Berman's assistant read the book for him; and after hearing the story, Berman felt Hepburn was wrong for Scarlett. RKO passed on bidding for the project, though they could probably have bought the film rights for a song.

A few weekends later, Hepburn and George Cukor went to visit Myron Selznick at his vacation house at Lake Arrowhead. David Selznick answered the door, carrying the galleys of the book. Hepburn said to him, “Don't bother reading it, David. Just buy it. It's sensational.” Selznick didn't need convincing. He immediately grasped its immense possibilities and purchased the film rights for $50,000. George Cukor was to direct; and Selznick said he wanted Hepburn for the role . . . at first.

Over the next few months, Selznick heard from every important actress (and her agent) in Hollywood. While much has been said over the years about how Selznick ultimately believed Clark Gable as Rhett Butler would never go through years of the war lusting after Katharine Hepburn, it was, in fact, the actress's greatest supporter who first dissuaded the producer from casting her. George Cukor, as Kate herself related, “felt that it was unsuitable for me, that I was a heroine and Scarlett was this wicked sort of sexual creature.” That Cukor, who was the director of the film from its earliest days of preproduction to its first days of filming, felt so strongly about Kate's unsuitability gave Selznick license to keep widening his search.

The longer Selznick delayed in casting his lead, the larger his problem became, as the “search for Scarlett” became an international treasure hunt, one of great interest among moviegoers. As the date by which they had to start filming approached, Hepburn went to Selznick and said, “David, you've got to have an unknown girl in the part. You've made this big thing now, and you have to deliver. You can't cast me or anyone else who is well known because audiences would walk in with certain expectations.” At the same time, she still dreamed of playing the role. So she made one last-ditch play. “Look,” she said, “you've got Walter Plunkett doing the clothes, and Walter knows me backwards. He could do five costumes in one night for me and would. So, if you're stuck, you can just let me know twenty-four hours before it's too late.” Hepburn didn't like being in a second (or possibly tenth) position like that, but she knew her only prayer at getting the role lay in some desperate act of midnight casting. Hardly a week later, Selznick met Vivien Leigh—and the contest was over.

While
Gone With the Wind
was being filmed, most of the other leading ladies in Hollywood were busy appearing in what would prove to be signature roles, contributing to what would become the most glorious year in Hollywood history—1939. Garbo was in
Ninotchka
; Crawford played her first important unsympathetic “bitch” role in
The Women,
alongside Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, and Joan Fontaine. Greer Garson debuted in
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
; Bette Davis was in
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Dark Victory, The Old Maid
(opposite Miriam Hopkins), and
Juarez
(as the Empress Carlotta); Jean Arthur was in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
with Jimmy Stewart, and
Only Angels Have Wings
with Cary Grant; Irene Dunne made
Love Affair
with Charles Boyer; Ginger Rogers was twirling with Fred Astaire (in
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
); Judy Garland went over the rainbow in
The Wizard of Oz
; and even Snow White got to cavort with seven dwarfs.

Katharine Hepburn—after fifteen motion pictures in six years—was nowhere to be seen on the screen that year. She was, instead, trodding the boards in Wilmington, Washington, Boston, and the title city in
The Philadelphia Story
. For five weeks out of town, she and the play received rave notices, and the star begged the producers to keep the show on the road as long as possible, building up good word of mouth before coming into Broadway. “The critics are funny about me,” she tried to explain to Philip Barry and the Theatre Guild, her financial partners in the venture, “they'll just land on me.” Despite the vehemence of her protest, they outvoted her, and
The Philadelphia Story
opened at the Shubert Theatre on March 29, 1939.

The play was a “huge hit”—Kate's assessment—critically and financially. But it took a while before it performed the trick she hoped it would—providing the opportunity to reprise the role on film. She employed an agent named Harold Freedman—who represented playwrights and a handful of actors (such as the Lunts)—but forbade him from telling anybody that she controlled the film rights. Indeed, all the major studios called, hoping to buy the source material for their biggest stars; but upon his client's instructions, Freedman stalled them. Meantime, Hepburn carried on to nightly acclaim, playing more than four hundred performances on Broadway. (She would later play in another two hundred fifty performances on the road.) In the end, Hepburn made close to a half million dollars in salary and profits. More important, the play had warmed up enough audiences nationwide to rekindle her career.

After the play had packed houses for a year, Howard Hughes approached the studios on behalf of the film rights' co-owner. Because he kept a private office for himself on the Samuel Goldwyn lot, he started there. Goldwyn was interested enough to send his number-one director, William Wyler, to New York to convince Hepburn that they were the best team for the project. Sitting in the garden in Turtle Bay, she told the director exactly what she had told Goldwyn herself, that she would make a deal on the spot if they could deliver Gary Cooper to play C. K. Dexter Haven. She explained that this was not any kind of ploy for more money; it was simply that she had left Hollywood as “box-office poison” and she was smart enough to know that she needed a strong man or two by her side as antidotes. Although Cooper was under contract to Goldwyn at the time, he would not agree to play opposite Hepburn.

Warner Brothers was willing to take a chance with her, offering a lot of money, the opportunity to produce the picture, and Errol Flynn. Hepburn was considering the deal when she got the call she had hoped for, from the biggest man in movies, Louis B. Mayer himself. He came to see
The Philadelphia Story
in New York, with Norma Shearer on his arm, and went backstage to offer his congratulations. The next day he called to say he wanted to come speak to her about the film. “Oh, no, Mr. Mayer,” she said, remembering the way her mother used to influence the local powers in Hartford, “I'll come to you.”

In his New York office, L. B. Mayer said everything he could to wheedle the rights away from Hepburn so that Shearer might play the part. At last Hepburn said, “Mr. Mayer, you are deliberately charming me, and I know it, but the remarkable thing is that I'm charmed. Now, you're a real artist. But this property is not about making money for me. I'll sell it to you for exactly what I paid for it, without a dime of profit. It's quite simply about getting a good part for me, and I want only what would be a reasonable salary for myself. But what I really want from you are two stars.” Mayer asked which two.

“Gable and Tracy,” she said, aiming for the top. Mayer said he doubted either of them would accept the offer but that he would try them both. He promptly reported that one wasn't free (Tracy, she learned) and the other didn't want to do it. (Despite Gable's star-power, she was, in truth, just as happy not to get him, because she thought he was “wrong for both parts, though he could have played the newspaperman—which is the part Spencer should have played.”) Then Mayer said, “I can give you Jimmy Stewart [who did not yet have much control over his roles] . . . and I'll give you $150,000 to get anyone else you can get.” That was a lot of money, Hepburn thought—enough to allow her to call upon her friend Cary Grant. He was delighted with the offer, selected the role of C. K. Dexter Haven, and ultimately contributed his three weeks of salary to the British War Relief Fund. Mayer assigned Joseph L. Mankiewicz—one of the most formidable talents in Hollywood—to produce the picture.

Permitted to choose her director, Hepburn considered nobody but George Cukor. “George saw the show in Chicago,” Kate remembered, “and he thought it was awful, just plain awful—not the play itself, which he liked, but the direction. Of course, that's partly because he didn't get to direct it. Now, I don't think he was being self-important in not liking it. It's more that George was a brilliant director, who knew how to keep things moving all the time. He didn't believe in fussy business or lots of mannerisms, but he knew each character had to keep things moving at all times, that a good play had to be like a solar system, in which all the planets are spinning in their orbits at all times. He felt our director [Bob Sinclair] hadn't done that. And, of course,” she added, “George really knew
me
, and he wanted to ensure that the film would be a great showcase for me.”

By then, Hepburn and Cukor spoke the same language. “And so when it came time to make the movie,” Kate explained, “I said, ‘Look, I don't want to make a grand entrance in this picture. Moviegoers haven't seen me in over a year, and they already made it clear that they think I'm too la-di-da or something. A lot of people want to see me fall flat on my face.' ”

“Or your ass,” Cukor corrected.

From that suggestion, Donald Stewart, the screenwriter who was adapting the play, devised what Hepburn considered an “ingenious” opening for the film. While Cukor had done “a brilliant job” in “presenting” Katharine Hepburn in
A Bill of Divorcement,
he would prove equally invaluable in “re-creating Katharine Hepburn” in
The Philadelphia Story
. In the opening scene, Tracy Lord is throwing her husband, C. K. Dexter Haven, out of the house, golf clubs and all. When she cracks one of the clubs over her bended knee, she has gone too far. He comes back to push her in the face, knocking her right on her backside. “Oh, I loved it,” Kate said. “Just what Tracy—and I—needed.”