Kate Remembered (27 page)

During the next decade Katharine Hepburn also traveled farther—geographically and artistically—than she had at any other time in her life, extending herself physically and emotionally. If anything, the strength of her then decade-long union with Tracy only emboldened her to meet new professional challenges. Practically every role she undertook during this period held greater significance for her than its predecessor.

Maybe I've seen
Born Yesterday
too many times—in which bully Harry Brock slaps his dizzy mistress, Billie Dawn, thereby knocking sense into her; but I got a feeling that Hepburn saw the light the night Tracy struck her. Between 1950 and 1962, as most of the female movie stars of Hepburn's age were being put out to pasture, her choices grew increasingly purposeful; and her work in that period remains at the heart of her vast legacy. Ironically, the years in which she was most “married” proved to be the period in which she truly came into her own.

As You Like It
closed for the summer of 1950, giving its star some time off before an autumn tour. She returned to Los Angeles and moved, at George Cukor's suggestion, into Irene Selznick's house in Beverly Hills, a beautiful estate complete with swimming pool, tennis court, projection room, and staff. Around that time, Hepburn also thought Cukor might play landlord himself, by allowing Spencer Tracy to move into his vacant guest cottage at the foot of his property, fronting on St. Ives Drive. The little house was completely without pretense, which she knew Tracy would appreciate. Kate cozied it up, though Tracy kept warning her, “Nothing fancy.” Because it was to be his place, she obeyed.

While living at Irene's in true luxury, Hepburn received a call from a producer she had never met, a Polish-born “impresario” named Sam Spiegel. He had a few films to his credit; and Hollywood was full of his type—“Big talk. Big dreams. Big belly,” said Kate. He asked if she had read a novel by C. S. Forester (author of the Horatio Hornblower series) called
The African Queen.
The book was, by then, fifteen years old; and she had not. Spiegel said that he was working with John Huston in transporting it to the screen and that the female lead was ideal for her.

Spiegel sent the book over, and Hepburn immediately lit up at the prospect of playing Rosie Sayer, the sister of an English missionary in Africa. Rosie gets tangled up with a cockney engineer, a rummy named Charlie Allnut; and together they navigate a dangerous river in the Congo, plotting to blow up a German warship. Stoking Hepburn's interest, Spiegel met with her to discuss potential costars. They ran through the list of every Englishman they could think of—from Ronald Colman and Errol Flynn to David Niven and James Mason; but each seemed either too dashing or too elegant. Then Spiegel floated Humphrey Bogart's name, suggesting that they simply make Charlie Canadian.

Having reeled in Hepburn, Spiegel used her as bait to hook the other big fish. “That,” said Kate about the vanishing breed who knew how to put big movies together, “is producing.” (She delighted in the fact that this self-made man—who loved America with the same passion as the generation of flag-waving film moguls a generation earlier—used a pseudonym, S. P. Eagle. “Now isn't that wonderful?” Kate asked with glee.) What intrigued her most about this project was what would have repelled most other movie stars—especially the prima donnas accustomed to studio pampering—the opportunity to work in the wilds of Africa.

At last, director and cowriter John Huston came to call on his star. Kate found him then and forever “one of the most exasperating creatures I have encountered in my entire life.” He was “immensely charming,” she said, “and he knew it. And while that should have lessened his charm, it didn't.” Hepburn thought he could be a ponderous windbag; and every time she brought up the matter of the unfinished script, Huston dodged the issue with a gale of words. But she also found him spellbinding and talented, especially admiring
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
in which he had directed his father, Walter, to an Academy Award. “He had this colossal ego,” Kate said of John Huston, “and it was completely and totally absorbing. Somehow, it gave me confidence that he would be able to control all the terribly difficult elements that would go into the making of this picture.”

Hepburn finished her run as Rosalind in
As You Like It,
and she still hadn't seen a reworked script of
The African Queen.
Then, just weeks before she was to go abroad, her mother died—at the age of seventy-three, on one of the very days she was visiting her in Hartford. Kate suddenly had perfectly good personal and professional excuses to bow out of this “cockamamie” project being filmed at the ends of the earth. “But,” she said, “Mother's death, which was sudden, you see, put things in perspective for me. She was a vital woman with a lot in life that she had still wanted to do. And while this movie seemed like a hopeless mess, I wanted to see Africa, and I wanted to work with Bogie . . . and John Huston.” She also felt she could find new dimensions of herself in her strong-willed alter ego, Rosie Sayer.

Sailing for England with Constance Collier and her secretary, Phyllis Wilbourn, Hepburn met in London with her producer and director. She was more anxious than ever to see a shooting script, but Huston just kept assuring her not to worry about it. While he and “S. P. Eagle” went ahead to scout locations, Hepburn left for Italy, where Bogart and his wife, Lauren Bacall, were also vacationing. Spencer Tracy turned up as well, a visit they had choreographed in such a way that neither the press nor the public ever caught on that they were there together. It was a glorious holiday, which ended when she called his hotel room one day, only to learn that he had already departed for London on his own. He had clearly foreseen the inevitable, her leaving for Africa, and didn't want to face it.

Hepburn traveled by plane, wood-burning train, and raft to a makeshift village in Biondo, almost fifty miles from Ponthierville in the Belgian Congo. Her hut of palm and bamboo had none of the conveniences of home. Plumbing was crude at best. The star's most pressing desire upon arrival was to work on the script, which, she learned, remained unfinished.

While quickly adjusting to the hardships of life in the jungle, Hepburn gradually accepted that the only way she'd get through this picture was to rely on the instincts of the man at the helm, Mr. Huston—even though at one point he simply disappeared, having gone on safari, with no indication when he would return.

During the next few months, Hepburn felt “something really wonderful was going on while we were making the movie. I had heard that Bogie was a big drunk, and he did drink plenty while we were there. But he was completely and totally professional on the job. Really wonderful, manly, and yet a true gentleman.” She also saw that Huston did have in his head the “big picture” of what
The African Queen
would be, thought out to the smallest detail. She recognized that he was enough in control of his cast and crew to allow all the happy accidents that can occur on a movie set to take place. Indeed, much of what would make
The African Queen
so wonderful was its natural, sometimes spontaneous, quality. “We all took John's cue,” Kate said, “and realized that we had to work
with
the bugs and snakes and muck and bad weather, not around them all. To have fought against all the elements would have been futile.”

“That picture was one great adventure,” Kate said; and it also proved to be one of the great challenges of her life. Despite the genuine hardships, Huston was able to capture all her exhilaration on film. That was largely possible because of a now-legendary piece of direction he gave her. On just the second day of shooting—after Hepburn had played the scene in which she had buried her missionary brother—Huston came to her hut, ostensibly for a cup of coffee. “Without stepping on my toes,” Kate later explained, “John gently suggested that he had something to say about my part. I had just played this terribly sad scene. All very solemn. But he didn't think old Rosie was a gloomy creature, you see, and that it would be pretty dreary if she went through the picture that way.” In essence, Huston was trying to get her to see the difference between being solemn and being serious.

“Have you ever seen those newsreels of Mrs. Roosevelt,” he asked, “where she visited the soldiers in the hospitals?” She had. “All very serious,” he said. “But Katie, dear—never grim. Because she always wore that lovely smile. Now you've got this sweet downturned mouth, Katie, and there seems to be something valiant every time you smile.” In the most polite tones, he suggested that Hepburn might adopt Eleanor Roosevelt's demeanor by telling herself, “Chin up, old girl. Things'll get better. Have faith. And always the smile. The society smile.”

Huston left the hut without further discussion. He was merely tossing a pebble into a lake. For Hepburn it rippled through every scene of the film, defining her character. “You know,” Kate said years later, “people often wonder how directors work. And, of course, every one works differently. But that little bit from John was pure inspiration. It was the best goddamned piece of direction I have ever heard—before or since.”

Considering all the surrounding hazards,
The African Queen
proceeded without much incident. Hepburn adored working with Bogart and could not imagine anyone else playing the part. “When you're making a picture,” Kate explained, “you really have no idea whether it will please anyone or not. You just do the best you can and pray that somebody else will like it as much as you. But on
African Queen,
we all really felt we were making something special. We knew there had never been anything quite like it before. And Bogie and I, well, we just played well together. I think we both liked each other, and we respected each other.” (Another bonus from the experience was the fifty-year friendship that evolved between Hepburn and Lauren Bacall. “She's a good girl,” Kate often said about her, having admired the way she looked after Bogart and the way she looked after herself. “Great fun,” she said, “and she loves to work”—two qualities Hepburn always prized.)

Only toward the end of the location shooting did Hepburn and several members of the crew become extremely sick to their stomachs. The malady was doubly difficult for her because she had scoffed at her director and leading man throughout the shoot for imbibing so much liquor while she had temperately stuck to bottled water. At last, the company doctor determined that the bottled water she had been drinking was nothing more than that—impure water in bottles—while the Bogart-Huston liquid diet had been germ-free—“or at least strong enough to kill any bug that might have gotten inside them.” By the time they had completed their filming in Africa, Hepburn had lost twenty pounds. The company moved on to six weeks of shooting at a studio in London, where she was met by Spencer Tracy and put under a doctor's care.

The African Queen was released just before year's end and became a huge hit among critics and fans. Facing stiff competition that year, Bogart would receive his only Academy Award. Hepburn would receive her fifth Oscar nomination but lose to Vivien Leigh for
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Fifty years later, the American Film Institute would conduct a survey among filmmakers, critics, and historians, asking them to select the greatest screen legends of the century. Bogart and Hepburn—who never worked together again—were the number-one choices.

Back in California that fall, Hepburn leased a secluded house above the Beverly Hills Hotel (where she often came down to play tennis, sometimes with “Big Bill” Tilden; other times she played with Chaplin on his nearby court). By then, Tracy had settled into George Cukor's guest cottage. The two stars happily reunited, in life and on the screen, this time in another comedy by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, again directed by Cukor.

Pat and Mike
was Hepburn's favorite of the nine films they made together. This story of a plodding sports promoter who takes on a prodigious female athlete was the most feminist in its attitudes, one of the few films that believably allows the female of the species to demonstrate her physical superiority. In so doing, it allowed Hepburn to show off her athletic prowess—her running, swimming, golfing, basketball, and tennis skills. At forty-five, Hepburn had the body of a woman twenty years younger. “Not much meat on her,” Mike says of Pat, “but what's there is cherce.” Tracy, hoary and paunchy, was at times looking at least ten years older than his age, then fifty-two.

The plot of
Pat and Mike
veers into implausability from the start, with Pat's losing her concentration every time her dull fiance appears at one of her competitions. But that silliness had the positive effect of making light of what were strong feminist images for the Eisenhower-era audience, which liked to view women as happy homemakers. For further box-office appeal, George Cukor resorted to a lot of stunt casting, including such well-known athletes of the day as Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Gussie Moran, and Don Budge. The picture became one of the team's most critically acclaimed and popular. Tracy hoped it might mark Hepburn's return to Hollywood for a good while.

But she had her eye on the road again. While she had been in London, she had met with some producers to discuss a production of George Bernard Shaw's
The Millionairess
—a role the playwright had hoped a decade earlier that Hepburn might perform. Epifania—a rich, spoiled heiress, the capitalistic incarnation of the Shavian Life Force—suddenly appealed to Hepburn. As she would literally throw over one silly suitor (Cyril Ritchard) for another, a brainy Egyptian doctor (Robert Helpmann), the role demanded that she perform all sorts of strenuous physical business while spouting pages of dialogue in practically every scene of the play. “I always found her too bossy and without much humor,” Kate said, by way of explaining why she had long resisted the part. “Now, I never really minded the bossy part, but I didn't like her being so serious. Once I found a way to make her more fun, I thought this could be a splendid role for me. And I think every actress should get to play Shaw, and so few realize that. I think old GBS liked me because I was agile—I was quick on my feet and quick with words, and you really need to be both if you're going to play any of his women. I'm sorry I came around to his work too late to have played Ann in
Man and Superman
, because it's a great part and I think I could have done a good job with her. Mother, of course, knew every word of Shaw backward and forward, and he was so much a part of our growing up. That's probably why I rediscovered him so late in life”—alas, after Kit Hepburn had died.