Kate Remembered (29 page)

That winter, Hepburn and the Stratford company took
Much Ado About Nothing
on the road. Although she always had a chauffeur, she liked taking the wheel, driving herself and Phyllis Wilbourn—who, upon the death of Constance Collier, had joined her “family.” During a rehearsal of the play one afternoon, Kate was standing in the wings while Alfred Drake was running some lines. Phyllis, she was startled to notice, was standing there herself, murmuring all the lines to herself. “Oh bliss!” remembered Kate of the moment.

In the summer of 1960 Hepburn would rejoin the Stratford company. She appeared as Viola in
Twelfth Night,
opposite Robert Ryan, another Hollywood player testing his mettle, whom she greatly admired. She fulfilled another commitment she had made to herself—and to Constance Collier—by starring in
Antony and Cleopatra,
playing what they both considered the greatest of the Shakespearean heroines.

Life back in Hollywood proved every bit as dramatic as it was onstage, as Hepburn kept returning to Tracy—a man who had, of late, been raging like Lear and drinking like Falstaff. She used her influence with John Ford—then nursing his dream of ending up in Ireland with Kate—in getting him to cast Tracy in
The Last Hurrah,
a film based on a novel drawn from the career of Mayor James Curley, the legendary political boss from Boston. During the production and afterward, Hepburn assumed her role as loyal spouse, smoothing all the rough waters on the set, turning Tracy's dressing room into a homey apartment, taking long weekend walks with him along the beach.

The next year, while Tracy was preparing for the Clarence Darrow—like character in
Inherit the Wind,
Hepburn assumed the most iconoclastic role of her career—the bizarre Violet Venable in
Suddenly, Last Summer.
It came nearly a decade after
The African Queen
, with Sam Spiegel's reapproaching the star, this time with the rights to Tennessee Williams's controversial play, what had been one act of a double-bill called
Garden District.
Gore Vidal was adapting this nightmarish story of a rich young man named Sebastian Venable, whose strange and sudden death has traumatized his beautiful young cousin, a witness to his grotesque demise. The imperious mother of the deceased goes to great lengths to protect her family name, to the extent of offering a million dollars to a hospital to perform a lobotomy on the babbling niece, to keep her from remembering any sordid details of cousin Sebastian's final moments. Resorting instead to truth serum, a neurosurgeon uncovers the fact that Sebastian has used his cousin to lure young men, as he had formerly used his beautiful mother; and on this occasion, the scheme backfired, inciting a pack of boys to kill him. The play had been one of the most controversial in years, no simple pouring of tea and sympathy but a dark brew of the barely speakable—homosexual procurement, even cannibalism, with plenty of Oedipal undertones stirred in.

“I felt Tennessee Williams was the greatest living playwright at the time,” Kate said, “—brilliant and full of poetry. And I knew it would be a challenge to perform many of his speeches. But I thought he was a truly tragic figure, and this play showed that. I remember reading it and thinking this man keeps going farther and farther ‘out there,' and one day he won't be able to come back.” She found the part of Mrs. Venable “fascinating, showy, and tricky.” She agreed to appear in Spiegel's production but asked for changes that would tone down the material, to keep it from being “cheap and sensational.” All smiles, Spiegel even dropped George Cukor's name as a possible director.

He chose Joe Mankiewicz instead; and he surrounded Hepburn with two of the most high-strung stars of the day—Elizabeth Taylor to play the niece and Montgomery Clift to play the brilliant doctor. “The entire production was a nightmare,” Kate said, “—from day one.” Clift had recently been in a car accident that had slightly disfigured his beautiful looks; he was on pain medication and was what Kate called “a psychological basket case.” Taylor seemed to be ailing through much of the shoot herself and made a point of being the last to arrive on the set every day. “There's nothing more frustrating than wanting to work and not being able to,” Kate observed in talking about Miss Taylor. “It's the rudeness I minded, keeping people waiting when they're all ready to go. Not just the other actors, but the crew . . . and the people paying the bills.” Unlike herself, Hepburn felt that Taylor “preferred being a movie star to being an actress. But don't be fooled,” she added, “because I think she is a brilliant actress, truly brilliant. Especially with the Williams stuff. Look at her performance as Maggie the Cat [in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
]
.”

For most of what she remembered as “a completely miserable experience,” she blamed the director. “Joe Mank had nothing to offer me in the way of direction, and he spent most of his time with Monty and Elizabeth, and not in a way that I felt was productive. He was absolutely cruel to Monty—tormenting him when he was clearly having a hard time. And rather than try to help him, he just kept beating him down. He was even worse with Elizabeth. I thought he sensationalized her part, had her posing unnecessarily. And it was simply vulgar. Some directors love to work with actors, to play with them. I don't think Joe really liked actors. He felt quite superior to them, and I think got great pleasure out of demeaning them. Some actors need to be treated that way.”

Hepburn did not. On the last day of filming, after the last take of her last scene, she turned to her director and asked, “So that's it? I'm finished?”

“You're finished,” Mankiewicz said. “And you're marvelous. It's just great.”

“But you're sure you're finished with me? You don't need any close-ups or reshoots?”

“I'm sure,” he said. “Your work is finished here.”

“You're absolutely sure?”

Mankiewicz again assured her there was nothing more for her to do on the picture. With that, Hepburn turned to the director and said, “Well, then, goodbye.” Then, she said, in front of the cast and crew, she spat in his face and walked off the set. Mankiewicz later confirmed the story, except he said she spat at his feet. Irene Selznick, a stickler for accuracy, also told me that it was at his feet . . . and that Kate then marched to Sam Spiegel's office and bade him a similar farewell.

In truth, there were probably a few more reasons that
Suddenly, Last Summer
had been such a miserable experience for Hepburn. For one, she never felt completely comfortable with the raw substance of the play. And though she never mentioned it to me, I thought more than once that it could not have been easy for her to be appearing in a motion picture in which for the first time she was not, strictly speaking, the female lead. There she was playing an exotic mother-figure alongside an erotic beauty, then considered not only the most glamorous woman but also the hottest commodity in Hollywood. The Academy would nominate Hepburn for the eighth time as Best Actress, alongside Taylor. The picture became a great success, a trailblazer in breaking taboos and bringing a new frankness to the screen.

The entire experience was enough to put Hepburn off making any more movies. She rededicated herself over the next few years to Tracy, who continued to age rapidly. While succumbing to binges less often, he continued to drink steadily. He gained weight; he developed ulcers and skin cancers; his energy waned. Like him, Kate smoked cigarettes and shared his diet of red meat and ice-cream sundaes. But she remained fit by playing tennis regularly at the Beverly Hills Hotel and swimming in George Cukor's pool. She maintained a separate residence—a favorite among her many rented houses, this one a former home of John Barrymore, the Aviary, up on Tower Grove Drive in Beverly Hills. As often as possible, she dragged Tracy out for walks around the Franklin Canyon Reservoir or on the beach at Malibu, where they liked to fly kites.

Hepburn still believed work was the best tonic for each of them and was grateful every time an opportunity presented itself to Tracy—even if it meant shooting on location, which had become difficult for him. Despite the additional strains on her, she accompanied him to Hawaii in 1960 and sat with him on the set of
The Devil at 4 O'Clock.
The next year she accompanied him to Germany, where he filmed
judgment at Nuremberg
for producer-director Stanley Kramer. She had pressed hard for him to accept the role as the presiding judge not only because she knew it was too good for him to pass up but also, as she explained, “I couldn't bear the thought of watching somebody else in that part, especially delivering that long verdict in the picture”—practically a fifteen-minute speech. “Who else,” Kate asked, “could have done it?”

By 1962 a seemingly irresistible offer came to Hepburn and Tracy. A television producer in New York had a small budget with which to film a production of Eugene O'Neill's
Long Day's Journey Into Night
. The playwright's autobiographical tragedy depicted the Tyrone family during the course of a day and night in 1912—two sons and their father, a former Irish-American matinee idol, and their mother, a faded beauty who has become addicted to morphine. Kate thought the O'Neill play was “the greatest this country has ever produced” and that the aging mother, Mary, was “the most challenging female role in American drama.” The raging father, James, Sr., was no less formidable—so daunting that Tracy did not seriously consider it for a moment. “I think he would have been brilliant,” Kate insisted; and she suggested at first that she thought he didn't feel “up to the physical challenge.” Later she implied that material as profound as that made Tracy so self-conscious that he doubted his ability to master it. Even though he knew the film was to be shot back east, he felt Hepburn must not let this opportunity pass her by. He sent her off with his blessing.

Sidney Lumet, a young director who had already demonstrated a flair for adapting heavy drama from the stage to the screen, surrounded Hepburn with three superb actors. Jason Robards, Jr., and Dean Stockwell played the emotionally afflicted sons, and Ralph Richardson the beguiling but paralyzing father. The thrill for Hepburn came in rehearsing with the talented company for three weeks, before moving onto their sets at a studio in Manhattan and a dowager Victorian house on City Island in the Bronx. Because of the subtle transitions of emotion throughout the play, it was filmed largely in sequence, an unusual practice.

Except for Spencer Tracy, Hepburn never spoke of an actor more glowingly than she did of Sir Ralph Richardson. “He was mad as a hatter—until he got inside somebody else's character,” she observed. “What was so thrilling about this performance,” she noticed in their scenes together, “was that his character never lost his charm, not even in his most horrible moments.”

Kate believed her work in Long
Day's Journey
Into Night was the best she ever did on screen. It was one of the few performances I ever heard her brag about—for both taking it on and pulling it off. Once, when a mutual friend of ours was raving about the performance Constance Cummings gave in the same role in a television production of the play, Kate listened politely for a few minutes of his gushing, then said, “All right, that's quite enough.”

At the end of shooting, there was a small wrap party—supper and a few musicians—which Hepburn attended. Kate was talking to Richardson's wife, actress Meriel Forbes, known as Mu, when he came over and asked his costar to dance. “Oh, Ralph,” she said, begging off (pronouncing his name in the Irish fashion, “Rafe”), “I haven't danced in years.” But Mu encouraged her to step out onto the floor with him. For a number or two they tripped the light fantastic until, at last, the music stopped—at which point Richardson held her by the shoulders and stared into her eyes. “I say,” he said with a look of astonishment on his face, as though seeing her for the first time, “you're a very attractive woman!”

“Mad as a hatter!” Kate howled, after telling the story. “But brilliant. Maybe the best of those boys”—meaning Olivier, Gielgud, and Richardson.

Hepburn received her ninth Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of Mary Tyrone but lost to Anne Bancroft in
The Miracle Worker
, a performance she had admired immensely on Broadway. Then she disappeared from the stage and screen for the next five years—far and away the longest time she had been out of the public eye since embarking on her career in 1928.

“I never talk about that period,” Kate had said to me during my first visit to Turtle Bay, referring to 1962—1967. Over the years she did—but only to reveal that it was an extremely quiet time in her life, sad but satisfying. Her father, who had married his nurse just months after the death of his wife, died in 1962 at the age of eighty-two after a few years of pain and a general diminution of his faculties. Although a generation younger, Spencer Tracy was beginning to decline into a similar health pattern. Keeping a tank of oxygen close at hand became more necessary than precautionary, and his kidneys were slowly failing; he was hospitalized for a pulmonary edema and a prostatectomy; he was chronically fatigued. After one medical emergency at a house she rented at Trancas Beach, Hepburn accompanied Tracy in an ambulance to the hospital, called Louise Tracy, then disappeared before the press arrived. Even then, Tracy chose not to recuperate at home with his wife but rather in his cottage on the Cukor property. Kate moved in to nurse him back to health.

In 1963 Stanley Kramer induced Tracy into a few weeks of work, playing the dramatic foil to dozens of comedians in
It's
a
Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Aside from that, he and Hepburn contented themselves with quiet pursuits: reading (“Spence always loved his dime novels, his mysteries, but he began reading some big, serious novels too. Even poetry. Yeats.”); listening to music (“He liked jazz but was listening to classical music. Beethoven symphonies. Schumann.”); and they both painted a lot. “We were just quite happy being quiet together. Truth be told,” Kate revealed after I had been coming to Fenwick for about five years, “not much to say about those years. We just loved each other. Nothing more to say.”