Kate Remembered (20 page)

The last time moviegoers had seen her, Katharine Hepburn was running off with Cary Grant at the end of
Holiday
. So she thought this scene would be as much fun for her fans as for those who didn't like her—“Although I must tell you,” she said, “I truly believed that everybody still adored me, that it was nothing but bad material that had made me ‘box-office poison.' ” In some ways, Kate said, “The opening of this picture showed that running off with me could be fun and exciting, but that living with me was clearly no holiday. Life imitating art!” she said, laughing hard.

While Hepburn had never complained about the production values of her pictures at RKO and Columbia, she saw how they paled alongside the work of the legendary MGM production team in full force. Everything there was, as she said, “top drawer.” Joseph Ruttenberg, who had just won the first of his four Academy Awards for
The Great Waltz,
was the director of photography; Cedric Gibbons, who would win seven of those golden statuettes, which he had designed in the first place, was the art director; and Adrian—who designed clothes for Garbo—created the costumes, each one of Hepburn's outfits a vision. Franz Waxman wrote one of his most sophisticated scores. Every supporting player delivered a star turn—including Henry Daniell, Roland Young, and Ruth Hussey in the Shirley Booth role. And Kate said, “We got lucky again with the girl—this time little Virginia Weidler, who had me in stitches. She was so terrifyingly funny I truly had a difficult time doing scenes with her. Honestly, I couldn't look at her, she was so funny.” John Halliday, a veteran of the stage and silent screen, had the small but pivotal role of Seth Lord. He had the responsibility of delivering perhaps the play's most touching moment, a father summing up his daughter's wonderful attributes but feeling compelled to add, “You have everything it takes to make a lovely woman except the one essential—an understanding heart. And without that, you might just as well be made of bronze.”

It is, of course, the stars of
The Philadelphia Story
who carry the day. Hepburn had never looked more glamorous nor been more commanding. She was an utterly contemporary woman, full of herself. Cukor closely monitored her performance, allowing the audience to laugh at her enough so that they would ultimately sympathize with her. While many critics praised her for the originality of her performance and spoke of the emergence of “a new Hepburn,” she knew that she was, in fact, reverting to a former idol for inspiration. “I kept thinking of Hope Williams,” she confessed. “I kept thinking how Hope could make everything so attractive, and how I must use all her tricks to keep Tracy from becoming a deplorable snob.”

While Cary Grant was at his most charming, full of humor and insouciance, Jimmy Stewart proved to be the revelation in the picture. In a role that got beefed up from the play because of the deletion of another character, that of Tracy's brother, Macauley “Mike” Connor was more cynical than any Stewart had played before. And, Kate noted, “Jimmy had always been attractive, but for the first time, I think, he was very sexy. He was known, you know, as one of the great bachelors around town, but people outside the business just thought of him as this nice boy next door. Without danger.” That quality, Kate said, led to one of Cukor's “brilliant” pieces of direction.

Stewart had attempted his crucial speech in the film several times, the one in which he professes his love for the heroine—“You've got fires banked down in you . . .”—without nailing it. At last Cukor pulled him aside and said, “Now listen, Jim—just forget that you are that young boy running away to the circus. And play this scene absolutely straight.” Kate said people never really understand what it is that a director can give an actor. That quick tip, she said, was a great example—“divine inspiration.”

Veteran Oscar-watchers often assert that Jimmy Stewart's winning the Academy Award that year—over such contenders as Laurence Olivier in
Rebecca
and Henry Fonda in
The Grapes of Wrath
—was a consolation prize for his having failed to win the year before for
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Hepburn disagreed. “I think Jimmy's absolutely brilliant in
Philadelphia Story
and completely unexpected. And I think it was his big speech that put him over the top.” Hepburn in her signature role lost the Oscar that year to Ginger Rogers in
Kitty Foyle.
Publicly, she said Ginger Rogers deserved to win. Privately, Kate said, “It's a silly part in a silly soap opera. And I'm still glad I turned the part down.”

The roaring success of
The Philadelphia Story
(almost $600,000 in six weeks at the Radio City Music Hall alone)—put Hepburn on top again, especially in the eyes of the moguls. “Dad worshiped Kate. It's that simple,” Irene Mayer Selznick told me of her father. “She represented everything that he thought was good about America. She had a tight-knit family, she had a first-class education, she had elegance—class without airs. And she had a good business head on her shoulders. She talked straight, without ever compromising her femininity.”

More than once Mr. Mayer called upon Hepburn to help “straighten out” one of his studio wunderkinds, Judy Garland. She had been desperately attempting to work her way out of a vortex studio doctors had created in which they had subjected her to amphetamines to help her lose weight and barbiturates to help her sleep. Mayer suggested to Hepburn that the young singing star's problem was a lack of character, one which Kate could help her overcome simply by being there for her, standing by as a good example. George Cukor later told me that “Judy worshiped Kate, as did most of the women on the MGM lot.” But it wasn't until years later that Hepburn realized to what extent the studio had been the agent of Garland's drug-addicted demise. “When I met Judy,” Kate explained, “I didn't know what was wrong with her. And by the time I learned the source of her problems, it was too late for me to do anything about it.” There was little either star could do but admire each other's talent.

In the early forties, when Louis B. Mayer sat front-row-center in the famous team photograph of his contract players—the one displaying “More stars than there are in all the heavens”—he insisted on Hepburn's sitting to his right. (Greer Garson was the other rose to flank the thorny Mayer.)

Irene easily understood her father's adoration of Kate, though she found it crazy-making. So much of what L.B. admired in Hepburn he kept his own children from enjoying. Irene had a first-rate mind, for example, but was prohibited from attending college—because it would make her “too smart to get a husband.” Where Dr. Hepburn had thrust independence upon his children, Mayer had subjected his daughters to countless rules, all in service of his own whims and needs. Much of Kate's forthrightness in the Hollywood community stemmed from the fact that she was there virtually on her own. Unlike a great number of actresses, whose mothers accompanied them as chaperones and managers, Hepburn slipped in and out of town alone, without the protection of a husband or even, at that point, an agent. Irene's father, on the other hand, ranted nightly about his twenty-something daughters being unmarried, banging on the dining-room table as he boomed, “It isn't enough that I'm L. B. Mayer?”

For several years, in fact, Irene and David Selznick had longed to marry, but Mayer had refused permission until her older sister, Edie, was married. Only one month after a producer named William Goetz (“a schlep with the filthiest mouth in town,” said Irene) walked Edie down the aisle in one of the grandest weddings in Hollywood history, Irene and David married quietly. During one of my late nights at the Pierre, after several shots of “Cary's aquavit,” Irene suddenly burst into tears, describing how she had secretly engineered the entire courtship of Goetz and Edie. She confessed to making up positive remarks each had allegedly said about the other, and making suggestions to her father that might advance Goetz's career. “But,” I said appeasingly, “the ends justified the means. The Goetzes had a long marriage—certainly by Hollywood standards; and Edie said they were very happy. In fact, she even bragged that Bill was more successful than your father.”

“Doesn't that just tell you everything?” Irene said. “It's the thing I feel guiltiest about. But I had no choice.”

All the Mayers feuded the rest of their lives. Irene and Edie went decades without speaking to each other; Irene was always at odds with one of her two sons; and upon his death, L.B. left nothing to Edie or any of her children. But in business, Kate said, “he was the most honest man I ever met in Hollywood. A straight shooter. We closed our deals with a handshake in his office. Then I would go to Benjamin K. Thau [vice president of Loews, Inc., which owned MGM] to discuss the details. And when the contracts were drawn, I'd go to Mr. Mayer and say, ‘Look, I don't have a lawyer, and I know you wouldn't cheat me, so would you please give this to one of your lawyers to look over for me?' ” He would and did. “I think that's what Dad liked most about Kate,” Irene said in the end, “—the trust. She brought out the very best in him.”

“Oh, these men—the Mayers and Goldwyns and the rest—make no mistake about it, they were pirates, real buccaneers,” Hepburn said. “But they were also romantics and gamblers, and they weren't afraid to express their opinions and put their money where their mouths were. Because they believed in the movies. The movies were their dreams. And I—and Greer and Joan [Crawford] and Garbo—were all part of those dreams.”

After the triumph of The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn and Mayer were determined to work together again. The studio head even urged the star to become a director or producer. “I was a one-track Charlie,” Kate used to tell him. “I was too interested in being a star to get bogged down in the details of the rest of the production.” But she always made her voice heard on even the most minute points of every production, whether they affected her directly or not. She and Mayer did work together ten more times over the next fifteen years—on successive three-year contracts loose enough to amount to her working on an ad hoc basis.

Upon filming
The Philadelphia Story,
Kate honored her commitment to the Theatre Guild by returning to the road, completing the tour of the show. (She knew it could only create buzz for the upcoming release of the movie.) Not until the film's premiere did the producers close the play, appropriately, in Philadelphia. On February 15, 1941, just before going on the stage of the Forrest Theatre for the final performance, Hepburn went to the stage manager and said, “If I give you a sign at the end of the show, don't pull the curtain down. Let there be a pause.” At each big moment in the play that night, the star realized from the reactions that practically everyone in the theater had seen the play before and that she was playing to “a real fan audience.” By the curtain calls, the crowd had gone “absolutely mad.” So Hepburn stepped forward for her final bow, coming out of Joseph Cotten's arms, thinking what a terrible moment it is when a play has to come to an end. She signaled to the stage manager, quieted the audience, and said to them, “The curtain will never be rung down on this play.” With that, the cast simply walked off the stage; and as the audience left the theater for the streets of Philadelphia, the crew set out the worklights and dismantled the set.

A few weeks later Kate heard that Helen Hayes—“The First Lady of the American Theater,” whom she admired greatly—had said to a friend, “That goddamned Kate, resorting to that cheap little piece of business, when there are a million actors with a lot more hits. I can't believe I never thought of that.” Commented Kate in the end, with an enormous cackle: “I really should have been disgusted with myself.”

At the start of the new decade, however, she was feeling too good for that. Hepburn was in demand again. In 1940 Franklin D. Roosevelt invited her to Hyde Park, where she pledged support of a third term for the President in a radio broadcast. A few months later, Eleanor Roosevelt asked Hepburn to narrate an Office of War Information documentary called
Women in Defense.
Back in Hollywood, not only was L. B. Mayer pushing to make another picture with her, but writers were once again composing scripts with Hepburn in mind.

Ring Lardner, Jr., for example, was fashioning a story about a prominent newspaper columnist, modeled on Dorothy Thompson, who falls in love with her paper's sportswriter. It was a natural setup for a witty battle of the sexes, rife with the comic possibilities imposed by the attraction of opposites. A centerpiece of the story would be the couple's attending a baseball game together—turf that was as foreign to her as global affairs were to him. Lardner gave the story idea to his friend Garson Kanin—a young writer in Hollywood, who was married to Ruth Gordon and was friendly with Hepburn—in hopes of drafting the script together. Hepburn liked Kanin and thought he was “extremely clever,” though she often found him “quite full of himself.” He was a good fifteen years younger than his wife, and that always made Hepburn a little wary of him as well. “Princes,” she said of spoiled men married to much older women, “—looking for Mother.” All that aside, she liked this new idea. Kanin worked on the treatment with Lardner before enlisting in the armed services as the nation approached war. Then he suggested his younger brother might fill his boots in cowriting the script.

The two fledgling writers, Michael Kanin and Lardner, wrote several drafts, tailoring the character of Tess Harding for Hepburn. Just as important, Hepburn made clear from the start, was that the sportswriter, Sam Craig, be skewed toward attracting the one actor with whom she most wanted to work—Spencer Tracy. Kate would later insist that she had no personal designs on Tracy in baiting this trap, only professional ones. She felt, quite simply, that “he was the best movie actor there was.”