Kate Remembered (16 page)

Director and actress crossed swords. He insisted that Alice could not possibly keep herself from crying in the scene, that the one who would stifle her tears was Katharine Hepburn! At last, her illogic fractured his normally calm facade, and he flew into a rage, the sheer force of which terrified her into playing the scene one more time—at the window, with tears flowing. “It's a wonderful moment,” Kate recalled half a century later, “but it occurred only because I thought he was going to kill me.”

Alice Adams
became a big hit and one of Hepburn's personal favorites. Both she and the picture were nominated for Academy Awards.
Mutiny on the Bounty
won Best Picture that year; and Bette Davis was named Best Actress for
Dangerous
. More important, appearing in practically every scene in this successful, critically acclaimed film seemed to ensure Hepburn's place in the public's heart and her position as a star. Feeling the rush himself, RKO producer Pandro Berman told her she had only to name her next project.

Hepburn's pal George Cukor—coming off three consecutive blockbuster hits—had become infatuated with a novel by Compton Mackenzie called
The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett.
It was a peculiar picaresque story about a girl who masquerades as a boy, so that she can accompany her father, a crook on the lam. In their travels, they meet up with an odd lot of characters, including a cockney rogue. Hepburn thought it was “a brilliant book,” but she never really saw its cinematic possibilities. Cukor had enough enthusiasm for two. Full of themselves, they told Pandro Berman this was the project they wanted to work on next. The producer could hardly deny them.

The story, with its androgynous sexual interplay, was unlike anything else on the screen; and it was another showy part for Hepburn—for which her hair was cut like a boy's. But as she later admitted, “Just because something is different doesn't necessarily mean it's good.” She felt only one member of the cast really made something of his role, and that was the young actor who played the cockney—Cary Grant. The former Archibald Leach had, in fact, already appeared in some twenty films in his first three years in Hollywood, but he still had not fully developed his screen persona yet. He was handsome but slightly pudgy in this picture; and instead of the clipped English tones for which he would become famous and widely mimicked, he spoke “flawless” cockney, which was, in fact, more akin to his mother tongue. Hepburn had never had so much fun on a movie set with an actor; and she became fast friends with this former “acrobatic dancer” from Bristol, England, who had the know-how to parlay his charm and looks into respectability. Indeed, he would soon become a twentieth-century icon of suavity and breeding.

Sylvia Scarlett
was, in the star's opinion, “awful.” Even before the film opened, all involved knew they had “a big flop” on their hands. After a preview in nearby Huntington Park, Pan Berman came to George Cukor's house to commiserate with his director and star. They urged him to forget about this film, assuring him that they would both do another for him for free. “Please,” said Berman, “don't bother.”

Although they remained bosom buddies, Hepburn steered clear of George Cukor for a while, at least professionally. She made her next three pictures with more rough-and-tumble directors, none of whom, as it happened, was especially happily married. John Ford—one of Hollywood's most brilliant filmmakers, who had just taken the town by storm with
The Informer
—was hired to direct
Mary of Scotland
, a successful Maxwell Anderson play, which had starred Helen Hayes on Broadway, about the Stuart heir trying to claim the throne of England from Elizabeth I.

Again, Hepburn was not crazy about her part, the title role. “I thought she was an ass,” she said, “and I would have rather played Elizabeth, who, after all, was the powerful one.” But she knew it was a great vehicle for a star, and she welcomed the opportunity to work with Jack Ford, whom she had known slightly over the past few years. Frederic March, one of Hollywood's most versatile leading men, played her husband and protector, the Earl of Bothwell—James Hepburn, who was, in fact, a distant ancestor.

It proved difficult to cast the antagonist of the play, Elizabeth. Bette Davis wanted the role, but Warner Brothers made a practice of never loaning her out. She would limn her own indelible version of the formidable monarch for the studio just three years later. Even Ginger Rogers, forever trying to prove to her studio bosses that she could play serious drama, threw her hat into the ring. “Can you imagine?” Kate said one night, striking a pose of shock. “The Virgin Queen!”

At one point, Hepburn—whom some wags in town had by then dubbed “Katharine of Arrogance”—suggested that she play both roles. “But if you played both queens,” asked John Carradine, a favorite Ford player who had a supporting role in the film, “how would you know which one to upstage?” Hepburn found nothing amusing about the comment at the time. Years later she roared with laughter telling it.

Long before shooting finished, Ford lost interest in the project. The sets, staging, and photography were unusually good, but he offered no support in fleshing out the characters, all but reducing the actors—including March's real wife, Florence Eldridge, as Elizabeth—to pageanteers. One day Ford walked off the set in despair and told Hepburn to direct the scene herself. Said Kate of the final product, “It laid a great big egg.”

But Ford—born Sean Aloysius O'Fearna—never lost interest in his leading lady. A big, red-haired, melancholy Irishman, who had problems with his wife and with the bottle, he loved nothing more than getting out to sea on his ketch, the
Araner
, usually with some salty chums and some fun-loving young women and plenty of booze.

He found Katharine Hepburn even more intoxicating. When he wasn't lording over her on the set, he privately allowed himself to turn submissive, succumbing to her energy, excitement, and enthusiasm for life. She called him Sean, and found him a slightly tragic figure, full of demons—which he seemed to elude on the water. She often went out on the
Araner
with him. Although he generally concluded each picture with a long, drunken voyage somewhere, after shooting
Mary of Scotland
, he hied off with Kate on a healthier retreat to Fenwick. A romance ripened.

Hepburn followed
Mary of Scotland
, a flop, with
A Woman Rebels
, a Victorian costume drama in which her character defies the conventions of her class by having a child out of wedlock and editing a progressive women's magazine. Mark Sandrich, who had been directing Astaire and Rogers musicals, proved unusually clumsy in this particular outing. The film ended up a “mistake,” said Hepburn, “a complete error on everyone's part, mostly mine for doing it in the first place.”

She followed that with “a disaster,” another attempt at recovering some of the charm of
Little Women
—a second Barrie play called
Quality Street
. Under George Stevens's acharacteristic direction, it also proved to be a labored attempt at whimsy, to nobody's credit. “That made four skunks in a row,” Hepburn recounted, “and I felt I had to get out of town for a while.”

It was not just her recent track record that sent her running. Thinking she had the best of both worlds—living with one man yet having occasional love affairs with others—Hepburn realized she had been living in a fool's paradise. “You might say I lived like a man,” Kate recalled, until she suddenly found herself being dumped by her near-fiance. Leland Hayward had spent a great deal of time in New York that year, tending to his client Edna Ferber, who had written a big hit play with George S. Kaufman called
Stage Door
. It starred Margaret Sullavan, an incandescent rising film star who had already blazed through marriages to Henry Fonda and William Wyler, to say nothing of her flaming affair with Jed Harris. “Well, Ferber and Kaufman were the toast of Broadway, and Margaret Sullavan was the toast of Broadway,” Kate said, “and Leland—well, he always liked toasts.” Despite the seemingly excessive amounts of time he spent on the East Coast that year, he spoke often of his desire to marry Hepburn.

During one of his absences, in November 1936, Kate was dining at George Cukor's house when she heard over the radio that Leland Hayward had just married Margaret Sullavan. A telegram followed. She was distraught—until her mother made her realize that only her pride was wounded, and that she was not really smarting from any genuine matrimonial plans of her own being scrubbed. Kate sent the newlyweds a congratulatory telegram; and in her next face-to-face conversation with her erstwhile agent, she learned that the bride had been pregnant at her wedding. “It was really quite simple,” Kate explained to me. “She trapped him.”

Over the years, Kate spoke of Leland Hayward only in affectionate tones. He treated her similarly. His enduring feelings for her were corroborated by Hayward's third wife, the former Pamela Churchill, whom I got to know when she was later married to Ambassador Averell Harriman, a friend of Sam Goldwyn. She told me—as had Kate—that when Leland Hayward was on his deathbed, she called Hepburn and said, “He loved you the most. He's dying. Will you come to see him?” Hepburn did.

Kate believed Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman had overstated her dying second husband's feelings in order to get her to make a deathbed appearance. “I think that was the secret to her success; she knew how to please men, and she would do anything for her husband,” Kate explained, quickly amending, “husbands!” Kate did not undervalue her relationship with Leland Hayward. She knew it had been a golden time for him as well, one with no rules and little reality. “We were two helium balloons,” she said, “who popped.”

While she wanted to get out of Hollywood for a while, Hepburn knew that she had become “a joke” on Broadway. The stench from
The Lake
still lingered. She found safe harbor in a group called the Theatre Guild, one of whose founders, Theresa Helburn, wanted to star Hepburn in a production of
Jane Eyre
. She liked the company; and though she had some concerns about the play, she thought they could be worked out on tour. After playing Boston and Chicago, however, Hepburn and the producers found that the playwright refused to make the necessary changes. If Hepburn had learned anything in the last two years, it was that she should not play in anything she instinctively felt was not right. Unable to afford another fat mistake, she decided against taking the show to Broadway.

Hepburn had painted herself into a corner. She had established her career in such a way that she could only appear in starring roles. But in the last year, the public had shown little interest in the leading characters she had portrayed. She had nobody but herself to blame for the flops in her past; and she had no venues or vehicles lined up for the future.

Under such circumstances, most studios would have been through with her. But Pandro Berman convinced RKO to make one more attempt at reviving Hepburn's career. The studio had just purchased a property that he thought might do the trick, mostly because she would not have to carry it alone—
Stage Door
. For Hepburn, playing in this film was like rubbing salt into her wounds. It was bad enough being cast in the very part that had been created by Margaret Sullavan. It was worse that the play was an ensemble piece, a group of struggling actresses all living at the Footlights Club. In fact, RKO's primary purpose in making the movie was to elevate its other star Ginger Rogers—“who was on the up and up”—at least as much as it was to rescue Hepburn—“because I was on the down and down.” The latter's role was that of Terry Randall, a snooty society girl who moves into the boarding house as a way of experiencing what it's like to be an actress, only to feel some of their suffering, thus becoming an actress along the way.

Gregory La Cava, who had a drinking problem, had become that year's hottest talent because of his urbane comedy
My Man Godfrey
. Under his direction, RKO packed
Stage Door
with young talent—Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, Ann Miller, and Gail Patrick. Constance Collier played the tragicomic role of the Footlights Club den mother (a role she began to assume in Hepburn's life). Adolphe Menjou was cast as a Broadway producer, in an attempt to re-create some of the rapport he had with Hepburn in
Morning Glory
. The very touching Andrea Leeds—whose character's demise would allow the amateur Terry Randall to go on with the show—was borrowed from Samuel Goldwyn. Although they were all working from the basic Kaufman-Ferber text, which had been transposed to the screen by Morrie Ryskind and Anthony Veiller, La Cava liked to work by throwing out the script and improvising upon it every day.

For the first two weeks of the shoot, Hepburn felt that she was just standing around, watching other actresses steal scenes. At last she went to Pan Berman and said, “What am I supposed to do? I don't know what my part is or anything about it.” Berman said, “Listen, Kate, you're lucky to be playing a bit part in a successful picture. Just shut up for once, and do what you're told.” She knew he was right . . . but was not ready to acquiesce altogether.

She went to La Cava—whose drinking frightened her at first, until she came to feel it was part of what made him “a very talented, artistic man”—and asked, “Who am I? This character, Gregory, who is she? I don't know who she's supposed to be.” La Cava said, “Kate, she's the human question mark.” Hepburn nodded knowingly and walked away. A moment later, she came back and asked him, “What the hell does that mean?”

“Kate,” he replied, “I'm damned if I know.”

All Kate really knew was that this was probably her last chance at maintaining her position as a star. Sufficiently humbled, she held her tongue and she held back her performance, letting those around her shine. After a few weeks of watching Hepburn's moodiness on the set, La Cava was able to answer the actress's question about her character's identity. He used Hepburn's own feelings of self-pity and exclusion to turn the character around. He enhanced her role—as Terry Randall blossoms into an inspired actress, an artist passionate enough to deliver an anthemlike curtain speech that reaches out to the others in her sorority. Kate later admitted that it had been “terrifying” working on a set in which so much was improvised every day, even more so because the part mirrored so much of her own life.