Kate Remembered (18 page)

Kate found such talk ludicrous. “George and I adored each other,” she said. “But whenever things got personal, I'm sure he went to Frances first. He and I had a wonderful rapport . . . but they had a history together. Trust. A deep trust.” While Mrs. Goldwyn and Miss Hepburn never became friends, they were always cordial with each other. Upon Sam Goldwyn's death in 1974, his son learned that there was an extra crypt in the family plot for George Cukor. When the younger Goldwyn raised this subject with his mother, Frances laughed gently and said, “Well . . . at least Kate won't get him there.”

In her first fifteen months of widowhood, Frances suffered from a fast-metastasizing cancer of the nose and trachea, which invaded her brain. Kate fondly remembered the special attention George paid to her during that period. She entertained them for dinner on several occasions, and every time the weakening Frances's nose would run or a little bit of food would dribble from the side of her mouth, George was there to dab her face with a handkerchief. Frances died in 1976 and was buried alongside her husband.

On January 24, 1983—just a few months before I had met Hepburn—George Cukor died at the age of eighty-three. Kate had no idea that in the hours after his death, Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., had immediately informed Cukor's executor that Frances had prearranged for George's burial. The executor found as much in Cukor's will, and those wishes were observed. He rests eternally alongside the Goldwyns (and Frances's batty mother) in the unmarked Little Garden of Constancy, a large private plot within the walled Garden of Honor, which sits behind two locked iron doors, accessible only by private key, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. The day I researched the site for
Goldwyn
, I noticed the grave of Spencer Tracy, only a few gardens away. “How fascinating!” Kate said upon learning this information. “I never knew . . . and I've never been there. . . . You say you need a key to get in? How extraordinary!” Then, with the catchphrase she always used to express that there was nothing more to say on a subject, she added a world-weary, “Life, life, life.”

 

 

Immediately after the hurricane of 1938 had blown past Fenwick, the Hepburns began reconstructing their house. “We learned a lesson from ‘The Three Little Pigs,' ” said Kate, “and built with brick this time.” Choosing the same site, they raised the property by three feet. With the passage of another half-century, Kate realized they had woefully undercalculated, as future storms periodically pushed waters through the ground floor of the house and washed away a little more of their beach each year. In the days following the great hurricane, Kate combed the sand and recovered a dozen of her mother's silver place settings and her complete tea service. After all the upheaval of 1938, two other important pieces of her life remained.

For almost three years, Katharine Hepburn had been keeping company with another beau, far and away the most exciting and complicated of them all—Howard Hughes. The heir to the Hughes Tool Company, a motion-picture producer, a celebrated aviator, and a notorious playboy, the tall and handsome Hughes had been smitten with Katharine Hepburn since she first appeared on the screen. Orphaned as a teenager, he followed his uncle Rupert, a hugely successful writer (for Goldwyn) to Hollywood. He dallied with movie stars, falling in love with the silent-screen queen Billie Dove, who was five years his senior. By 1935, however, his eyes had turned toward Katharine Hepburn.

In early 1936, while she was filming
Sylvia Scarlett
just above Trancas Beach, Kate and George Cukor used to have their staffs prepare picnic lunches for them and selected members of the cast and crew. One day during their break, a small plane circled overhead, zeroed in on them, then landed but a short walk away. Kate suddenly noticed Cary Grant looking sheepish. “That's my friend Howard Hughes,” he said.

Hepburn had heard that Hughes was eager to meet her, and she was put out with her friend Cary for springing their introduction on her this way. “I'm sure the boys thought, ‘Oh, this will be a cute meet,' all very romantic and irresistible. But Howard and I met, and we shook hands, and it was all too self-conscious. So staged. False. There was nothing spontaneous about it. I was so angry I ate my lunch without looking at either one of them.”

A short time later, Kate was playing golf at the Bel-Air Country Club, when Hughes performed a similar stunt, this time landing right on the eighth fairway. “Out of his plane he hopped, carrying a golf bag,” Kate said, “and he finished the nine with my instructor and me. And he was quite a good golfer. But what gall! But you see, Howard was a man of action and not words, and I think this was simply the best way he could think of expressing his feelings.”

Hughes was a practical dreamer, prone to planned “impulsiveness.” He liked to act on the spur of the moment, but only after he had thought through the details of his action. In this instance, he suddenly found his plane sitting in the middle of a golf course—which had provided enough room to land but not enough to take off again. Hughes had thought that through as well. “There were few problems a little of his money could not solve,” Kate pointed out. “He simply had some mechanics come and dismantle the plane and cart it off. As for getting himself home, he'd just assumed I'd cart
him
off. What gall! God, he was exciting. Great fun.”

Hepburn gave Hughes a lift to the Beverly Hills Hotel. In almost no time, she learned that after having produced
Hell's Angels, The Front Page
, and
Scarface,
he had really had no great passion for picture-making: “He was a brilliant man,” said Kate, “and not as silly as that.” But he did have a passion for movie stars.

In 1936, when Hepburn toured with
Jane Eyre
, Hughes would suddenly arrive before her performances in Boston, and then Chicago. In time, she got caught up in the rush and surrendered. “I think we were both thrill-seekers, you might say,” Kate suggested. “I always liked to go, go, go; and Howard was always up for adventure. Now, he always liked to think things through, and I was always more instinctive. But we had a lot of common interests.”

Not the least of these interests, Kate admitted, was “courting fame.” She said, “When I met Howard, the man he admired most was Lindbergh—not just for what he accomplished but for all the acclaim. Howard was determined to set new records in aviation, but I think that was largely because he really wanted the big parade. And, you see, I too wanted to be a star, desperately wanted to be a star.” Paradoxically, neither Hepburn nor Hughes liked crowds. In fact, they expended much of their energy evading the public, craving privacy. They were always on the run, from newsreel cameras and popping flashbulbs.

“I think that was part of the fun for the two of us,” said Kate, “that we could indulge in this game with the public together. It was definitely more fun together. And, in a way, that was the basis for our relationship. We were both famous and came from comfortable backgrounds. We understood each other. I think we felt we were right for each other, and secretly I think we felt the public thought we were somehow right for each other. Going around together enhanced both our reputations. But there was a basic problem. . . . I am, by nature, a loner, and that's not a very good basis for a serious relationship.”

But it was obviously pleasurable for these two enormously attractive people. I never heard Kate talk about anybody with more of a glint in her eye, making it very clear that this was the lustiest relationship of her life. It was not the most profound, but it was definitely the one built most on plain physical attraction. Eros.

During their time together, Kate increasingly found Hughes to be a loner as well. Losing his parents as a teenager was one apparent cause for that; but she believed there was another, equally strong. “People simply don't understand how deaf Howard was,” she explained, “—from the age of fifteen. And I think this contributed to everything that happened to him in his life, for both good and bad. It made him terribly detached and a real self-starter. But it also started him down an endlessly lonely path, really cut off from people.”

In my experience, Kate always expected one to speak clearly, concisely, and audibly. If one rambled on too long in her presence, she'd interrupt to ask, “What's your point?” If one mumbled, she'd interrupt to say, “I don't understand you,” or “Speak up, I can't hear you.” That, she said, was something Howard Hughes never did; and that failure condemned him to isolation. The deafness, she explained, was not his great weakness so much as his failing to acknowledge it in public, thus forcing him to miss parts of conversations and often to misunderstand those parts that he had heard. Quite simply, Kate said, “It ruined his life.”

“I mean, what does that do to a person?” she wondered out loud decades later. “It forced Howard into a world of his own, one in which he dwelt more and more on himself, becoming obsessed with the details of his own life. From the time we first started going around, he was concerned about germs and disease. He washed his hands a lot and he took a lot of showers, and nobody else was allowed to use the same shower. It had to be disinfected after each use. Now a lot of that just makes common sense. Doctors tell us today that it's good to wash your hands a lot to keep them from spreading germs. And I always took a lot of showers. But in his loneliness—and I think there was a well of loneliness within Howard—he gradually crossed the line, that line between peculiar behavior and what I guess one would call ‘neurotic.' Then you must remember his upbringing, which left him virtually alone in the world. . . . And then years later, you know, he suffered terribly after an airplane accident and got hooked on ‘hard stuff'—morphine. And, then again, there was his deafness. I know he heard ringing in his ears; and I'm sure he heard voices in his head for years and years. So, you see, we really are extremely fragile creatures . . . because here was this absolutely
brilliant
man, I mean
brilliant
in everything he attempted, and yet he was never more than an inch away from crossing that line into the land of cuckoo.”

Their time alone together was, for the most part, a great romp. They were, Kate insisted, “in love—at least with the
idea
of each other.” They flew together—with Hepburn once taking off in a seaplane under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. They skinny-dipped in the Long Island Sound, diving off the wing of his plane. They golfed in Fenwick—where they were often joined by Luddy, who always seemed to have a movie camera in his hand. Once, while golfing with Kate and her father, Hughes objected not only to Luddy's omnipresence but to the invasion of his privacy with the camera clicking away. “Howard,” Dr. Hepburn interjected, “Luddy has been taking pictures of all of us for years before you got here, and he'll be taking them years after you've gone. He's part of this family. Now drive.”

Hughes never felt comfortable with the Hepburns . . . or, Kate pointed out, with anyone else's family. “It's hard to understand what it's like to be really close to your family,” Kate said, “unless you come from a close family yourself. You get that,” she said to me, knowing I was close to my parents and three brothers, “and I get that. But Howard never did.”

Left to themselves, Hepburn and Hughes “played house”—sharing some tranquil domesticity in his large, Monterey-style house on Muirfield Road, which bordered the Wilshire Country Club. “Golf balls,” Kate said, “used to fly into our backyard.” On quiet days—which they both cherished—they'd crawl under the fence and play nine holes there themselves. Meantime, they pursued their careers—Hughes becoming increasingly potent in aviation, just as Hepburn was becoming “poison” in the movie business.

The more time Hughes spent with Hepburn, the more he wanted to marry her. Thinking that her career slump might make her more open to the suggestion of sharing their lives, he proposed to her—more than once. Hughes had read her wrong. The downturn in Hepburn's career only made her more ferocious about her independence, more determined to prove herself on her own. “Now look,” Kate said to me one afternoon, “I think Howard really was in love with me, and I really loved being with him. But honestly, what kind of marriage would that have been? I was trying to put my career together again. I was thinking all about me, me, me. And even if my career had been in another place, I don't think I ever would have married him. I was always straight with him about that. But Howard just didn't hear me.”

“Maybe,” I suggested, “he couldn't hear you.”

“Howard heard,” she amended, “what he wanted to hear.”

She had already refused Hughes's offer when he took off on an around-the-world flight in July 1938—a record-setting journey of three days, nineteen hours, and seventeen minutes, for which he received his ticker-tape parade through Broadway's “Canyon of Heroes.” The tabloid-reading public buzzed nonetheless about his pending nuptials to Katharine Hepburn.

In fact, Hepburn was entertaining another suitor that summer, who arrived with an offer far more tempting than marriage. Her old friend Philip Barry, whose career was in a slump of its own, called from Maine one day and invited himself to tea. “I was surprised,” Kate said, “because the last time I had heard from him was when he got me fired from
The Animal Kingdom
as the understudy”—eight years prior. On the pier at Fenwick, he described two stories he was hatching, plays in which he kept hearing her voice. One was a father-daughter story called
Second Threshold
. The other centered on a society wedding on Philadelphia's Main Line, where a rich, young divorcee was about to marry again, this time to a boring self-made man who was “marrying up.” The proceedings would be disrupted by her raffish first husband, who lingers in her life, Luddy-like. Looking out at some sailboats on the sea, Barry and Hepburn talked about the heroine, who, in her first marriage, had proved not to be “yare,” a nautical term meaning easy to handle, quick to the helm. Kate voted for the latter play because it sounded “more fun.” Within weeks, she was reading pages of the first act of
The Philadelphia Story
.