Kate Remembered (9 page)

Senior year Kate befriended a townie named Jack Clarke, whose house literally shared a lawn with the campus. “He wasn't some parlor snake,” Kate told me, though he was one of the many young men along Philadelphia's Main Line who had enough money not to have to worry about what she called “the mechanics of life”—men of ease, with apartments in New York City, and limited ambition. Clarke shared another property, a small country farmhouse on twenty acres, with his best friend, a similarly well-fixed young man named Ludlow Ogden Smith.

Kate often went out to the farm, sometimes allowing a few friends from Bryn Mawr to tag along. Unchaperoned, the young ladies flirted with a little danger. One afternoon, when Kate was alone with the two men, she went so far as to pose for some nude photographs. (She was proud of them at the time but wished she knew whatever happened to the set of blowups they sent her. “Long after I'm dead and gone,” she said, “I'm afraid somebody's going to find them and say, ‘Good God, that's Katharine Hepburn!' ”)

At a luncheon that same year, at the home of the dean of Bryn Mawr, Kate met a well-known poet, H. Phelps Putnam. Although a married man, Putnam's reputation as a rake was superseding his reputation as a writer. “Having such a man on the Bryn Mawr campus was like having a fox in the henhouse,” Kate later admitted. “And I found him utterly fascinating.” She used to climb down the vine outside her second-story tower room to take midnight strolls with him. But Kate maintained her virtue; “and I think I drove him wild,” she said, laughing.

Barely twenty, she became the inspiration of his poem
The Daughters of the Sun.

By the time Kate graduated from Bryn Mawr College in June 1928, she had a pack of men pursuing her. But by then, this model of “the living anarchy of love” had set her sights on a career.

She depended on the kindness of suitors. Jack Clarke had some show-business connections, including a man named Edwin Knopf, who ran a theater company in Baltimore. Clarke wrote him on Kate's behalf, and upon graduation she appeared at the theater and was hired on the spot—evidently on looks and personality alone. She got a small part in
The Czarina,
with Mary Boland, a well-known actress of the day; and everything came easily to her. She learned lines and blocking quickly; and Miss Boland took her under her wing, teaching her how to apply makeup and how to make an entrance—“a rapid walk and a slow discovery of the audience.”

After her second play, Knopf decided to include Kate in a production that he was taking to New York, a work called
The Big Pond.
The leading man, Kenneth MacKenna, recognized her talent but also her shortcomings. He strongly supported her inclusion but urged her to invest whatever money she made in voice lessons. He even wrote a letter of introduction to the best vocal teacher in show business, one Frances Robinson-Duff, who could boast that she coached two of Broadway's foremost actresses, Ina Claire and Ruth Chatterton.

“Duff” took Kate on as her pupil, forcing her to perform all sorts of Henry Higgins-like exercises—blowing out candles, speaking with marbles in her mouth, reciting phrases that emphasized certain sounds and syllables. To Hepburn's final days, it pained her to hear people pronounce the word “horrible” as though it were “whore-ible.” She would interject with the Robinson-Duff corrective exercise, “Ha-ha horrible.” (Similarly, “chocolate” was always “chock-lit,” never “chalk-lit.”) She never mastered breath control from the diaphragm, which, she claimed, caused her voice's premature rasp.

Neither of Kate's parents thought much of her career choice. Her father thought acting was just plain silly, a foolish way to spend a life; and her mother had practically no interest in the theater at all. But Kit Hepburn saw it as a way for her daughter to avoid the kitchen and nursery, to advance herself, to lead a life of her own. Despite his misgivings, so did Dr. Hepburn. He grubstaked her.

Kate moved to New York, only to discover what a small town it was. “Manhattan was really like an enchanted island,” she said, “cut off from the rest of the world except for a few bridges.” The theater world was even smaller, with everyone connected to everyone else. Her friend “Phelpie” Putnam, as she called him, was apartment-sitting for his friend Russell Davenport, an editor at
Time
and
Fortune
; and Kate simply moved in with him. Suddenly, she was showing up at fashionable parties, meeting the likes of Robert Benchley and the rest of the Algonquin set, and turning heads.

Her virtue remained safe with Putnam, Kate later reported, as it seemed good enough for him just to be known to be living with a beautiful young actress. After a while, in fact, it was she who became miffed that Putnam did not even make a pass at her. Only later did she learn that her father had permitted this highly progressive living arrangement only after having privately confronted the poet. “Now listen, Put,” he had said to this sophisticated “older man,” “my daughter is like a young bull about to charge and she will do everything she can to seduce you, but if you lay a hand on her, I'll shoot you.” Putnam soon decided to house-sit elsewhere, alone.

Of all Hepburn's suitors, Ludlow Smith was the most persistent. He was also the most convenient—with the mobility to keep up with Kate's desires, socially and otherwise. In addition to business interests that allowed him to work in New York, he had his own car, in which he drove Kate to Fenwick for weekends. He had very little ego and enough self-confidence to let hers run wild. She was often petulant and always impatient; but nothing ever seemed to faze him. More than once he raised the subject of marriage, of leading a long, comfortable life together outside of Philadelphia. But she refused, surrendering only her virginity—one afternoon when they were alone in Jack Clarke's apartment. She felt a kind of love for him—“What else could I call my gratitude for his constant devotion?” she asked me. “I think the Greeks called it ‘philos,' ” I said, “—a deep affection without passion.” Where she had felt lust but little respect toward Phelps Putnam, she found it was the exact opposite with Ludlow Smith. She knew she was using him; and the only thing that made her behavior acceptable in her mind was that he knew it as well. She never veiled her ambition.

Eddie Knopf's production of
The Big Pond
went into rehearsal in New York, with Kate understudying the lead, who was suddenly dismissed at the last minute. And there in the wings stood Kate, a fireball of self-confidence. Not two months in the theater and she was already a star—“or at least I thought I was,” she later reported. “I certainly acted as though I was.” She was so carried away with her own pre-Broadway opening-night performance at the Great Neck Theatre on Long Island that she raced through the play, forgetting every lesson Frances Robinson-Duff had taught her. The next day, she was fired.

Although fished out of
The Big Pond,
she had made a splash. Two prominent Broadway producers made offers to her that week. One came from J. J. Shubert, who suggested a five-year contract at very good pay. She refused, not wishing to commit herself for that long a period and having to appear in plays she might not like. The other came from Arthur Hopkins, who had been associated with several prestigious productions and who wanted Kate to play a supporting role in a modest play he was opening. She accepted; and the play closed after three performances. But “Hoppy,” as she called him, wanted her to learn lines immediately for another play that was about to premiere—Philip Barry's
Holiday
. He wanted Miss Hepburn to understudy the lead, Miss Hope Williams.

While Kate's career was not advancing as rapidly as she had egotistically imagined, she liked Hoppy and she liked the play. She agreed to take the part and figured she would simply hope against Hope. “Isn't it awful?” she said. “I used to pray for her to get sick.” Just two weeks into the run, Kate herself got sick—of waiting. In a fit of impatience, she accepted Luddy's proposal of marriage.

While wedding so solid a citizen as Ludlow Smith was as much as any parent could wish for a daughter in the late twenties, Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn were shocked at the conventionality of it all. For them, their eldest daughter's impulsive marriage was an act of rebellion, a way for her to assert herself without having to rely on them any longer. All they knew was that Kate was still attempting to figure out who she was and who she intended to become. It was a trying time for Kate—“I felt I was just stepping out on a high wire,” she later admitted. “Luddy was my safety net.”

She told Arthur Hopkins that she was withdrawing from
Holiday;
and on December 12, 1928, Katharine Hepburn married Ludlow Ogden Smith in her parents' house at 201 Bloomfield Avenue in West Hartford. Her paternal grandfather, the Reverend Sewell Snowden Hepburn, presided before their collective families. After a short honeymoon in Bermuda, the newlyweds returned to Philadelphia to find a house where they could settle down.

Thus, after only six months in show business, Mrs. Ludlow Smith rang down the curtain on her career.

T
ake off your pants!” Katharine Hepburn barked at me, as I stood in the entry hall at Fenwick.

It was an early Sunday afternoon in April 1983—cold, windy, and rainy—and I had to return to New York City for a dinner engagement with a woman who over the preceding years had become one of my closest friends, Irene Mayer Selznick. Only a few hours earlier, Kate's brother Bob had arrived from Hartford with his wife, Sue; and in the few seconds it had taken them to get from their car to the front door, they had gotten drenched.

While I had been enjoying myself with the charming doctor—“the sweetest man alive,” Kate often gushed, “an angel!”—and his well-read wife, I announced that I had to hit the road. After unsuccessfully arguing how “idiotic” it was for me to make the trip under such conditions, Kate said I should at least have the brains to take off my pants, then dash to the end of the driveway where my car was parked, and move the car to the garage . . . which I could then re-enter through the house after I had put on the pair of trousers that had been kept dry.

“I don't think that's necessary,” I said. “I'll run with a large umbrella.”

“But your pants,” Kate pointed out. “With the wind, they'll get soaked.” I assured her that my plan was satisfactory. “Besides,” I said, “I'm waterproof.”

“You may be,” she snorted. “But your pants aren't!”

Of course, in the moment when I sprinted from the door to the car, the rain came down in sheets . . . and I could hear Kate howling with laughter. She met me at the back door to the garage with towels and said, “Now you've
got
to take off your pants, because you can't drive for two hours in them.”

I sheepishly explained that this was the only pair of pants I had brought up for the weekend. Kate kindly said that would be no problem. She sent Phyllis on a mission to find a dry pair. “Go to Dick,” she said. “Or go to my closet. And if you can't find anything there, bring him one of your dresses.”

“I'm not driving into New York wearing one of Phyllis's dresses,” I said.

“Oh, you might have to,” she said, delighting herself. “And there's nothing wrong with that. Phyllis has some lovely things, don't you, dear?”

“Oh yes,” said Phyllis, perfectly oblivious to the fact that Kate was now pulling our legs. “But I don't think he'd fit into any of my things. Too tall.”

“Phyllis,” I begged, “would you please try to find me a pair of pants?”

“You know,” Kate began to reminisce, “the first time Spence came up here, we had exactly the same situation, and he made a run for his car.”

“And?” I asked.

“And I don't
think
he had to put on a dress.”

Phyllis returned with a pair of faded yellow sweatpants that belonged to Dick, far more conservative than anything I imagined Dick owning, which I gratefully accepted. As I started to go upstairs to change, Kate said, “Oh Christ, just take off your pants right here.” Before I could even protest, she assured me, “Dad used to walk around the house without any clothes at all!”

“But he was your fa—” I started to sputter, when I suddenly realized that was even worse. When in Rome, I figured . . . and so I turned my back to my hostess and changed pants. “And you should probably change your shirt,” she added. I didn't even argue, pulling a dry one from my bag.