Kate Remembered (34 page)

As a result, the entire film gave audiences the feeling that they were eavesdropping, listening in on relatives who had long been part of their collective consciences. The conceit was further enhanced by the actress who debuted in the film as their daughter, Katharine Houghton. The daughter of Kate's sister Marion, and a stunning, literary graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Kathy burst onto the screen displaying a lot of her aunt's zealous personality. Naturally, she looked enough like her to give rise to the rumor that she was, in truth, Tracy and Hepburn's love child and that Kate's sister had simply been their cover. “Now that's one I haven't heard,” Kate said of the canard when I mentioned it to her. “Too bad so many people are alive who remember when Marion was pregnant.”

Everybody's anxiety over Tracy's health only fostered greater efficiency on the set of
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
. But it was a nervous-making shoot for Hepburn, who had to perform double duty—always looking after him and performing a considerably challenging role herself. While the two actors had always stuck around for each other in the past, feeding lines for the other's close-ups, most shots of Hepburn alone were delivered to the script supervisor, thus allowing Tracy to go home early each day, as promised. “I shouldn't say most movie sets, but certainly on a lot of movie sets, you develop a sense of family,” Kate recalled; and, she added, she couldn't remember that feeling ever being so “strong” as it was on the set of this picture.

Tracy and Hepburn had long approached their work differently. He had a phenomenal memory, could read a script, absorb the lines, look over a scene the night before it was shot, and was usually word perfect on his first take. She liked to study a script, learning not only all her lines before production but most everybody else's as well. She considered every possible reading she could give—and was known to pass along advice to other actors as to how they might deliver their lines as well. In the past, when she had suggested they rehearse together, Tracy generally dismissed the notion by saying, “I'm saving it for the set.”

On
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, however, Tracy asked Hepburn to run lines with him every night. He felt he owed as much to his director, for putting his salary on the line. He felt he owed Kate even more, for having put her career on ice for five years. He seemed eager to make this picture especially good, if only to help get her career back on track. So it was disconcerting for the actors to discover that, for the first time, he was having trouble remembering his lines.

The climax of the film was Spencer Tracy's delivery of its message, a kind of verdict. After starting out as the leading opponent to his daughter's marriage and listening to each character articulate his or her position, he takes exception to a comment made by the mother of Sidney Poitier's character, played by Beah Richards. She avers that he has become an old man who has forgotten what it is to love. That spurs him to render his ultimate opinion that “in the final analysis it doesn't matter what we think. The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel for each other. And if it's half of what we felt,” he says looking toward Hepburn, her eyes brimming with tears, “. . . that's everything.” It was a flawless performance; and there was not a dry eye on the set. Everybody knew that Spencer Tracy was a great actor; but that day, they felt he wasn't acting. On May 26, 1967, Tracy shot his final scene and went home. Kate thanked the cast and crew for all their cooperation.

Hepburn had been residing full-time in the Cukor guest cottage on St. Ives, though she continued to rent the Barrymore aviary a few minutes away on Tower Grove Drive. Phyllis spent her nights there. Kate generally sat up late with Tracy in the bedroom on St. Ives until he dozed off; then she repaired to the maid's room off the kitchen. A buzzer sat on his bedstand and she carried the bell, attached to a long wire, wherever she went in the house. Day and night, she monitored his movements, as always, anticipating his needs. Before retiring, she'd put a big kettle of water on the stove, which she kept simmering all night, so that he could instantly prepare a cup of tea if he couldn't sleep.

At three o'lock in the morning of June 10, 1967, Kate heard Tracy come out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. She was getting out of bed to join him when she heard a teacup smash against the floor and then a thud. By the time she reached him, Spencer Tracy was dead of a heart attack. While he had been slowly dying over the last few years, she found immediate comfort in the fact that the death itself had come so swiftly.

Hepburn immediately summoned Phyllis, George Cukor, the couple who lived on the grounds, and Howard Strickling, the MGM publicity chief, who had decades of experience dealing with the press at the death scenes of Hollywood stars. She was packing up her personal belongings and removing them from the premises when she suddenly came to her senses. “This was my house too,” she realized, “and I had lived with this man for most of my adult life.” She returned to the house and called Louise Tracy, their children, and Tracy's brother.

“It seemed the least awkward thing to do,” Kate explained to me. “To have done otherwise would have required a series of lies and would have served nobody.” Over the next few hours, she did her best to stay out of the way, to let the Tracy family have their final moments of bereavement—thus depriving herself of that same moment of closure. “It was all like a bad dream,” Kate recalled more than twenty years later, “a real nightmare.” It reached its most surreal when the morticians asked how the body should be dressed. Kate had pulled out an old jacket and some trousers, but Louise Tracy took umbrage at not being able to select the clothes herself. In that moment, Kate snapped. “Oh Louise,” she said, “—what difference does it make?” By six o'clock, a doctor had examined the deceased and the undertaking firm of Cunningham & Walsh had taken him away. The press would arrive midday—when they were told that Mr. Tracy's friends Miss Hepburn and Mr. Cukor had come down to the cottage at eleven that morning.

For three evenings the mortuary received mourners. Kate showed up each night after hours. One night she placed an oil painting she had done of some flowers into the casket. The next night she learned that the casket had been sealed at the family's request. She presumed her painting remained with him.

Upon Tracy's death, Hepburn behaved rather as she had during his lifetime, remaining unseen in public with the man she loved. Early on the morning of the funeral, Kate and Phyllis drove to the mortuary and helped place Spencer Tracy's coffin into the hearse. Then from a respectable distance they followed the parade of black cars to the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Hollywood. When they got close enough to see that a crowd had formed, they turned around and headed for home. “Goodbye, friend,” said Kate.

After the funeral, a handful of Tracy's closest friends—those intimate enough to have been part of his actual domestic life—stopped by the house on St. Ives. Hepburn greeted Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, writer Chester Erskine and his wife, Sally, director Jean Negulesco and his wife, Dusty. Hepburn seemed to be in complete control of her emotions. “I wasn't really putting up a brave front,” she later said. “I was just in a complete daze.” It wasn't until the Negulescos left, and Jean made a comment about how angry he was that Spencer had left them, that Kate collapsed into his arms and sobbed.

One night, some weeks later, Kate told me, she telephoned Mrs. Tracy. Thinking she might be of some help with the children, she said, “You know, Louise, you and I can be friends. You knew Spencer at the beginning. I knew him at the end. Or, we can just go on pretending—”

“Oh yes,” Louise said. “But you see. I thought you were only a rumor.”

Kate never got over this story. “A rumor!” she said to me. “Can you imagine? Thirty years her husband isn't there, and she thinks I'm a rumor.” For a minute or two Kate tried to imagine what could possibly have been in Louise Tracy's mind—what hoops of denial she must have jumped through to believe that. I suggested to Kate that Louise Tracy knew the score all along and simply said what she had to get her goat. “But why would she want to do that?” Kate asked in a state of agitation. “Exactly,” I said.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
opened the following year and became the most successful picture at the box office that either Tracy or Hepburn had ever appeared in, together or apart. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards—including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress. William Rose won an Oscar for his screenplay. The late Spencer Tracy was up against Warren Beatty for
Bonnie and Clyde,
Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate
, Paul Newman in
Cool Hand Luke
, and Rod Steiger for
In the Heat of the Night;
the latter won. Hepburn's competition was not quite as stiff: Anne Bancroft for
The Graduate
, Faye Dunaway for
Bonnie and Clyde
, Dame Edith Evans for
The Whisperers,
and Audrey Hepburn for
Wait Until Dark
. With this, her tenth nomination, Hepburn won her second Oscar—thirty-four years after her first. “I felt that was the Hollywood community's way of honoring Spence,” Kate said years later, with undue modesty. There's no denying that sentiment played heavily into the voting that year. But if the Academy was honoring a life and not that particular performance, this was probably more the Academy's way of applauding Hepburn's return to the public arena. By the time her Oscar was presented—as before, in absentia—she had already completed work on another movie and was in the middle of filming yet another.

 

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald once commented that in American lives there were no second acts. Had he enjoyed a normal life span, he would have been able to see the curtain go up on the fourth act of the life of one of his favorite actresses, Katharine Hepburn—then sixty years of age.

Kate recuperated from her loss on Martha's Vineyard as the guest of the Kanins. Long swims, long drives, and long talks contributed to her recovery. But, as always with Hepburn, it was work, not recreation, that brought her back to life.

That summer the arrival of a screenplay called
The Lion in Winter
spurred her into action. James Goldman had adapted his own successful play, the story of the marriage of Henry II of England and his imprisoned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who is sprung for the Christmas holidays in 1183. During the course of the play, they argue the question of succession, a decision that will affect nations on both sides of the Channel. Peter O'Toole, who had played Henry II in
Becket
, would wear the same crown once more.

“What was fascinating about the play,” Kate said, “was its modernness. This wasn't about pomp and circumstance but about a family, a wife trying to protect her dignity and a mother protecting her children.” She grew even more excited about the project after seeing a film made by the director O'Toole was favoring—
Dutchman,
which presented a harsh look at urban life, with a woman stabbing a black man on a New York subway train. It hardly seemed an appropriate screen test for a film about twelfth-century European royalty, but Kate found director Anthony Harvey's work “absolutely riveting. It grabbed you by the throat. Exactly the approach that our material needed. Not that glossy old MGM stuff, but cold people living in cold castles.” Furthermore, Harvey—an Englishman then in his mid-thirties—had been a film editor (for Stanley Kubrick, no less, on
Lolita
and
Dr
.
Strangelove)
; and Hepburn had long been partial toward the profession. Similar to what she had said about David Lean, Kate reminded me that “nobody has the same love affair with film that cutters do. It's a tactile medium for them.” She felt an instant rapport with the director, and they became great friends for the rest of Kate's life. Nobody championed him more than she; and in her final years, nobody cared for her more than he.

The company—which included a young Anthony Hopkins as her son Richard (soon to be “the Lion-Hearted”) and an even younger Timothy Dalton as King Philip of France—rehearsed for two weeks in the Haymarket Theatre in London. Then they all moved to Dublin to shoot interior scenes and to Fontvieille, a small village in the south of France, where they filmed in an old abbey.

Hepburn admired everyone in the cast. O'Toole was wild and rambunctious, “sometimes utterly impossible, a real Irishman,” Kate said, “—too much charm and too much liquor. But I was used to that. And what an actor! Great voice. Great performance. Great fun.” His great vigor, she suggested, helped restore her vitality. Years later, she would take pride in the deserved success of Hopkins. And when Dalton was hired to play James Bond, she bragged that she “knew him when.”

The film was another triumph for Hepburn, with the public and within the industry. Again, her film was nominated in all the major categories—Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay. Again the screenwriter won . . . and so did Hepburn. This third victory was unprecedented. (So was the fact that there was a tie that year—with Hepburn sharing Best Actress honors with twenty-six-year-old Barbra Streisand, who had debuted in
Funny Girl
. After saying, “Hello, gorgeous” to her gleaming trophy, Streisand said what an honor it was to be in the same company as Hepburn, whose award was accepted by Tony Harvey.)

By then, Hepburn had left one locale in southern France for another, this time to appear in a production of
The Madwoman of Chaillot
. When she had signed on to appear in this film version of the Jean Giraudoux play, John Huston was meant to direct. By the time shooting began, however, Bryan Forbes had replaced him. “John was no fool,” Kate said of his abandoning this allegory, in which a quixotic noblewoman, the Countess Aurelia, takes on the greedy capitalists of the world. She holds a mock trial and lures all the villains into a bottomless pit by telling them of an oil reserve beneath her house. “The big problem,” Kate said, “is that material like this plays better on a stage than on screen, which requires something more literal. I mean, you have to photograph something. And I think it's difficult for a movie audience to accept an entire film that is so abstract and stylized.”