Katharine Hepburn Read online

  KATHARINEHEPBURN

  BOOKS BY ANNE EDWARDS

  BIOGRAPHY

  Sonya: The Life of Countess Tolstoy

  Vivien Leigh: A Biography

  Judy Garland: A Biography

  Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell

  Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor

  A Remarkable Woman: A Biography of Katharine Hepburn

  NOVELS

  The Survivors

  Miklos Alexandrovitch Is Missing

  Shadow of a Lion

  Haunted Summer

  The Hesitant Heart

  Child of Night

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  The Inn and Us (with Stephen Citron)

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  P. T. Barnum

  The Great Houdini

  The Bible for Young Readers

  KATHARINEHEPBURN

  A REMARKABLE WOMAN

  ANNE EDWARDS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  TO MITCH DOUGLAS

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200

  Lanham, MD 20706

  www.rowman.com

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 1985 by Anne Edwards

  First Lyons paperback edition, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019938238

  ISBN 978-1-4930-3919-7 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-4930-3920-3 (e-book)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  FOREWORD

  I did not come easily to the task of writing a biography of Katharine Hepburn. It was late in her life, midway in mine. She had not yet written her own biography for reasons I well understood. I greatly admired her, which is not always a good thing for a fair recounting of a subject’s life. We had never met. Yet, she was uniquely familiar to me. There was the small tremor in her speech that emanated a fever of excitement, the trill of her laugh, the upright, bravely-held posture and the honesty about her in each of the characters she played. She was a woman who believed in the strength of women, and when she loved a man that love bridged all failings. It did not seem strange to me that upon seeing her on screen my mother came to mind—not an unlikely happening, for they were both Connecticut Yankees born in Hartford, who had lived across Hawthorn Street from one another during the entirety of their childhood and youth.

  My mother was a few years older than Kate, closer to the age of Kate’s brother Tom. There were twelve kids between the two households and there was a lot of back and forth across that street. Also Kate’s father, Dr. Hepburn, although basically an urologist, was the Fish’s family doctor. I remember him standing by my grandfather’s hospital bed shortly before he died. I was five years old and had come with my mother at my grandfather’s request. “He’s a good man,” my mother said after Dr. Hepburn left. Somehow I took that to mean that he was Mr. Goodman and addressed him as such the few times I saw him afterward.

  The first time I spoke to Kate on the telephone she asked, “Whose daughter are you?”

  “Marion’s,” I replied.

  “She was a beautiful woman,” she snapped back. “Smart, too. Went on to college. Not many young women did in those days.” Then she quickly shifted gears. “Well, I can’t stop you from writing a book about me, although I don’t plan to help you. So just tell the truth as you find it.”

  It was sternly told. I kept my distance yet was close enough to family members and the many people she had worked with in films to be well informed and certain about what I was writing. I also made sure that she knew who I was interviewing. When she discovered I had the full details of the youthful suicide of her closest sibling, Tom, she broke the rule herself. “Don’t include that!” she demanded, her voice a-tremble.

  I insisted with a strong apology that I must, for I was much aware of the strong effect his tragic death at age 17 had on her, and though many years had passed, probably still had. I noted that she had taken his birth date (month and day, not year) for her own. I knew her brother’s death had a hard effect on her, and how brave she had been at the time, yet also broken by it.

  “Young Marion,” she said, “I am going to hang up.” And she did.

  The death of family members was always difficult for Kate. Especially that of her mother. I have written that the passing of her mother was traumatic for her. The cut went deeper when only a few months later, Dr. Hepburn remarried. The great reverence she had felt for him, “the joy of companionship”, she transferred to Spencer Tracy (he being her one great and devoted love, whom she could not marry as he was married and Catholic.) I cannot confirm that Tracy was a father image to her. But she was “the submissive young thing” with him.

  I spent about two years living with Kate—so to speak. I never once lost respect for her and my admiration grew. Her talent was astounding. But it was Hepburn the woman who truly took the laurels. Hers was, perhaps, an inconvenient life. When young, always wanting to be more than she was; when a woman having to live two lives—her many years with Tracy played on his terms. She was a consummate actress, mostly choosing only the roles she wanted to play. And to my knowledge and research, never blaming others if a choice she made did not garner the praise she had hoped for. And praise was important to Kate—early on her brother Tom’s, then her father’s, then Tracy’s. The holy wonder of it all is how tall her inner strength made her, never a bowed head—at least in public. She was an amazing woman, unique, memorable.

  I do think I have told the truth as she told me to do.

  Anne Edwards

  2019

  CONTENTS

  1938: The Turning Point

  The Hepburns

  Kate: A Malady of Madness

  Early Stardom

  A Historic Affair

  A Life on Her Own

  Film Chronology

  Theater Chronology

  Television

  Television Interviews

  Radio

  Awards and Nominations

  Main Repositories for Hepburn Material

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  MIKE (low): “There’s magnificence in you, Tracy. I’m telling you. . . .A magnificence that comes out of your eyes, that’s in your voice, in the way you stand there, in the way you walk. You’re lit from within, bright, bright, bright. There are fires banked down in you, hearth-fires and holocausts—”

  TRACY: “You—I don’t seem to you—made of bronze, then—”

  MIKE: “You’re made of flesh and blood—that’s the blank, unholy surprise of it. You’re the golden girl, Tracy, full of love and warmth and delight—”

  —Act 2, Scene 2, The Philadelphia Story, Philip Barry

  1938: The Turning Point

  CHAPTER

  1

  _____________

  The Hollywood columnists crowed that she had got “just what she deserved.” Katharine Hepburn, after six years of film stardom and seven straight flops, had bought out her R.K.O. contract for $220,000, packed her bags and headed for her beloved family summer home, Fenwick, at Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Guarding her privacy with her usual ferocity toward the press, she refused to
talk about her departure from Hollywood or her headlined romance with millionaire aviator and film producer Howard Hughes.*

  At Fenwick, warm May breezes and a close family circle greeted her arrival that spring of 1938. The Hepburns were a clannish group. Their Kate had been publicly chastised as rude (“Katharine of Arrogance” one newspaper called her), “the Czarina,” and “Box Office Poison.” Overbearing at times, her moods chameleon, Kate’s behavior was still considered more “true to herself” than outrageous among her family. All her life (she had celebrated her thirtieth birthday that previous autumn) she had openly fought for what she wanted and believed in and thought that everyone else did the same. She had never experienced financial hard times. Home and Hepburn money were always there if she needed them. That anyone had to kowtow to anyone else, in the paralyzing fear that otherwise job and security might be lost, had never dawned upon her. Yet, she had been wise enough to see that R.K.O. was forcing her hand when they cast her in a modest programmer called Mother Carey’s Chickens.* The studio had wanted to get rid of her. They had counted on her pride and won. Kate, however, viewed her high-priced freedom from R.K.O. as a victory. She refused to work in second-rate films or to concede that her departure from Hollywood might be professional suicide.

  Once she was home at Fenwick, her confidence soared. She swam and played golf and tennis. Tall, slim, leggy, dressed in baggy trousers, white tennis dress or conservative bathing suit, bronzed, her fly-away red hair caught up and pinned in a careless fashion (as though no mirror had been consulted), her keen gray-blue eyes defiant, Kate charged through the summer months with her usual amazing energy. She glowed with a golden radiance and looked more like a woman in love than one whose career had just collapsed.

  Kate had been seeing Howard Hughes since November, 1936. Hughes bridged the worlds of film and society in which she moved. He was a mover and a shaker, a man of adventure and daring, and they shared many of the same interests: golf (Kate played near championship level), flying (he had had a stretch of beach adjacent to Fenwick prepared for a landing field and taught her to be a fine pilot), and films (as a producer, he had launched the career of Jean Harlow in Hell’s Angels). Both Kate and Hughes were tall, angular, handsome young people with the self-assurance old money gives. Both were individualists who loved fame and would have expired without attention. Yet, perversely, they loathed publicity and the press and enjoyed nothing better than dodging and outwitting reporters and autograph hunters.

  Howard Hughes remained in California when Kate left for Connecticut. He was preparing his plane, the New York World’s Fair 1939, for a record-setting flight around the world. Nonetheless, he secretly managed to fly to see Kate several times in May, June, and July, 1938. Few people impressed Kate, but Hughes—already a hero having broken the transcontinental speed record—had an aura of excitement about him. He believed in her talent and held an ardent and sincere interest in her career. At Fenwick on July Fourth he told her that he wanted to star her in a film, The Amelia Earhart Story, about the aviatrix whose mysterious disappearance in the South Pacific near the end of her around-the-world flight the previous year had been haunting him.* He admired Amelia Earhart enormously and thought Kate would be magnificent in the role. Kate agreed, but for the time being they kept the planned project to themselves.

  Other film offers—each smaller and more demeaning than the one before—were refused by Kate without indignation. Hollywood’s interest, however belittling, meant the industry had not given her up entirely and the studios knew Katharine Hepburn’s unique contribution to films could not easily be dismissed.

  In fact, everything about Kate and the Hepburns was extraordinary. On weekends, when the family—Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn, their sons, Robert and Richard, their three daughters, Katharine, Peggy and Marion, and Marion’s husband, Ellsworth Grant—were all in residence, their impact on one another was explosive. Kate’s ex-husband, Ludlow Ogden Smith (introduced by Mrs. Hepburn as “our dear, sweet ex”) had his own room at Fenwick. “Luddy” and Kate remained good friends despite their divorce four years earlier.

  The Hepburn life-style at Fenwick and at their West Hartford home was organized chaos. “The Doctor says he runs the family, Mrs. Hepburn thinks she does and Kate knows she does,” an observer once said. All the Hepburns functioned on sheer nervous energy. There were no schedules. Breakfast could well be served at noon, lunch at four and dinner at nine. Visitors always seemed to arrive in the middle of a meal, and there was a great deal of walking about the dining room, plate in hand, as one Hepburn found the distance to another inhibiting to a lively conversation that could have had as a topic anything from the atomic bomb to birth control. The only note of formality about dinner was the carving of the roast, done by Dr. Hepburn with surgical expertise.

  “How do you stand politically?” was Mrs. Hepburn’s first question to a visitor. If the reply was in any way conservative, the far-Left Mrs. Hepburn’s usual retort was, “How dull, how awfully dull.” After such a pronouncement the guest might be ignored completely.

  The Hepburns could be charming or intolerant, but were always outspoken. The “untouchables,” the “dumb,” the “complacent” and the “conservative” were immediately labeled to their faces “hopeless” and quickly dispensed with. On the other hand, the family was instantly and intensely excited about “anybody doing something interesting or eager to talk about something interesting.” Writers, artists, actors, directors, political and social activists, inventors, and any other intellectually stimulating exhibits were thus frequent guests at the Hepburn table. Though Howard Hughes certainly fit into this category, Mrs. Hepburn was not too pleased with his visits to Fenwick. For one thing, he refused to eat when the family did, and for another, his slight deafness kept him from joining into the family’s lively discussions. Hughes found the Hepburns’ nonchalant attitude and their disordered life irritating and was not silent in his criticism.

  Indeed, if not for Dr. Hepburn, a bill would never have been paid, a mechanical device repaired, nor any of the Hepburn cars filled with gas. Marion and Peggy were apt to drive off with no gas and fifty cents borrowed from a maid. When a canopy was put over part of the lawn for Marion’s wedding, no one ever got around to having it taken down. Kate had been on her own for nearly a decade, yet not only did her father take care of all her finances, she still considered Fenwick home and presented any serious beau for her father’s approval. Dr. Hepburn reserved judgment at this time on Howard Hughes. Therefore, so did Kate.

  The five Hepburn offspring had inherited brains, looks and money. A progressive upbringing had contributed much to their uniqueness. Kate’s brothers and sisters were every bit as much a maverick as she. Partly responsible was the elder Hepburns’ fierce dedication to independent ideas and the fact that they set a careful intellectual stage upon which their children were allowed full expression. Since the death of an older brother when she was thirteen, Kate had been the eldest of the siblings. This could have accounted in part for her being their leader. Certainly her adult fame might have also contributed. Still, Kate had had an imperious personality since childhood, a take-command attitude; bossy, outspoken to an eccentric degree, she wore what she wanted (boys’ clothes and shaved head at nine), did what she wanted, and said what she wanted, discounting the censure of either of her parents.

  “I find it droll that Kate, who is not a democrat but a Democrat, should create such a royalist atmosphere,” one of her closest friends was to say.

  The cut-through nasal voice, the proud posture, the self-possession, along with a “beguiling femininity,” became Kate’s trademarks. She thought for herself. If she gave the impression that her determination was “to remold this man’s world,” at the same time she made it quite plausible that it could be a woman’s world. There had been many serious beaux besides Howard Hughes. Most remained as loyal a friend to her as her ex-husband did. At Fenwick in the summer of 1938, these old flames came and went, as did Luddy and Hughes. Some were c
elebrities. Others were relationships that went back to her girlhood days in West Hartford and her college years at Bryn Mawr. Kate was irreplaceable, an original. Her curious but dynamic personality could not be easily exorcised. Kate’s friendship was addictive, and once won not easily forfeited.

  The Hollywood pundits wrongly believed Katharine Hepburn had retreated to her family’s summer cottage to nurse her wounds. Throughout May and June, the “fallen” star was happier than she had been for years and was certain that in no time at all she would make those Hollywood dolts eat every last nasty word they had said of her.

  At seven-twenty P.M., July 10, 1938, Howard Hughes’s plane thundered along the thirty-five-hundred-foot runway at Floyd Bennett Airfield in New York. The evening was insufferably hot and some five thousand spectators who waited to witness Hughes’s take-off on his flight to break Lindbergh’s record welcomed the momentary breeze created when the plane lifted off the ground, banked to the left over Jamaica Bay and started across Long Island. A few minutes later, the plane’s wings dipped over Fenwick as Kate stood on the pier and enthusiastically waved Hughes on. Sixteen hours and thirty-eight minutes after leaving New York, he arrived at Le Bourget Airfield in Paris, cutting Lindbergh’s time in half. Before he left the cockpit, he asked that Kate be notified of his safe arrival. Eight hours later, with a telegram from her in his pocket agreeing to meet him in New York on his return, Hughes got back into the plane to continue his flight to Moscow, across Russia, through northern Siberia, to Fairbanks, Alaska, and then on to New York. Three days, nineteen hours and seventeen minutes after take-off, he arrived back at Floyd Bennett Airfield with a new record for flying around the world. Immediately he was one of the most famous men in America. Crowds that met him were so dense that he could not be reached by a messenger who had a note for him from Kate.