Katharine Hepburn Read online

  Kate burst into Miss Robinson-Duff’s fourth-floor studio without knocking, flung herself against a black-laquered chest and, staring at the amazed, portly drama coach (who sat on a red velvet and gilt throne chair on a dais with a reading stand in front of her), said between great breaths, “I want to be an actress. I want to learn everything.”

  Miss Robinson-Duff silently studied her new student. Rain ran from Kate’s untidy hair, down her nose and onto the floor from the coat she held. “Sometimes we have an inward vision, a flash,” Miss Robinson-Duff said later of that first meeting. “I looked at her, huddled there, bedraggled and wet—at the terrific intensity of that face—and something inside whispered, ‘Duse. She looks like Duse.’ ”*

  “Darling,” (she always called her students, male or female, “darling”) she said aloud, “we will begin immediately. First you must learn the proper use of your diaphragm and the control of your breathing. Before learning to act, one must first learn to breathe . . . put down your coat and come nearer.”

  Kate approached the raised platform.

  “Now pant as hard as you can so you can find your diaphragm and then exhale in three strokes to surplus air.”

  Kate obliged. Her drama course had begun.

  For weeks, Miss Robinson-Duff worked on breathing exercises that Kate had also to study at home. Then the drama coach turned to the elements of acting. “You hold your hands like a soldier at attention,” she reprimanded. “And you must never stand with your feet so far apart.” Once, she told Kate, she had taken an Italian actor to an American play. The ingenue, during a touching scene, stood in what she called the “spread base” position. Not understanding English and knowing only his continental pantomime, the Italian naïvely inquired, “They are discussing whether she will sleep with him, no?”

  Kate immediately warmed to Miss Robinson-Duff. She coaxed her to retell stories of her experiences in the theater. She brought Luddy up to meet her and he was equally impressed. Because Kate’s lessons were private, she had little chance to meet Miss Robinson-Duff’s many other students. She did meet one, who had her class directly after Kate, Laura Harding, an athletic blond girl from New Jersey, heiress to the American Express fortune, who had hopes of a stage career but had never yet appeared in a play. “I thought—‘She’s not my type,’ ” Laura Harding remembered. “She had long hair pulled back in a knot, a man’s sweater pinned at the back with a big safety pin—what we called a Brooks sweater—and a tweed skirt.”

  Laura Harding wasn’t the only one to be put off by Kate’s attire. The way in which Kate dressed drove Miss Robinson-Duff to despair, for she appeared more “bedraggled” at each lesson. One day Miss Robinson-Duff could take no more.

  “You won’t wear clothes fit for a decent scarecrow but will you do me a favor?”

  “What?” Kate asked.

  “Throw away that old felt hat and get one without a hole in it.”

  “Good Lord!” Kate replied with astonishment. “What’s the matter with people? Can’t their imaginations supply enough cloth for that little hole?”

  Kate’s arrogance worked as a cover-up for her growing fears and insecurities. The profession of acting had not turned out to be what she had imagined. Auditions for parts were torture and she would arrive at them bathed in perspiration, disheveled, her hair in disarray, and breathlessly late. She relied (as she had all her life) on bizarre dress and behavior to get her through and to command attention. Other hopeful actresses trying for roles did not wear torn clothes held together by safety pins. They dressed neatly and as fashionably as their pocketbooks allowed. They also looked very much alike. Kate, on the other hand, stood out. She was five feet seven inches tall, and her à la concierge hairdo added even more to her height. Her wardrobe consisted mainly of men’s expensive sweaters and pants that were too large for her. She gave the appearance not so much of being dressed carelessly, poorly or sloppily, but of being costumed for a role she had cast herself in.* And the device worked as it always had; she was noticed. The impression given was of a most attractive eccentric; for no matter how curious her attire, Kate chose flattering lines and colors and, by concealing her feminine form, caused the beholder’s eye to concentrate on her striking face.

  Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild recalled that when Kate came into her office for her first Guild audition, “she was carelessly groomed ... an odd looking child. But when she opened the office door it was as though someone had turned on a dynamo. The air vibrated with the electric force of her personality.”

  Nine days before the opening of The Big Pond and only three weeks from the time Kate had commenced lessons with Miss Robinson-Duff, the leading lady quit and Kate was suddenly shifted from a supporting role to appear opposite Kenneth MacKenna. She worked frantically to memorize her lines. On opening night, she arrived only fifteen minutes before curtain, and, rushing to apply her makeup, got mascara painfully in her eye. Then, as she slipped into her costume, she realized the elastic on her lace panties was loose. An instant before her entrance, in fear that they might fall off onstage in full view of the audience, she stepped out of them and stuffed them in the hand of an astonished stagehand. She claims she was terrified, at wit’s end, certain she would fail. Then, after an amusing opening scene, the audience applauded a humorous line. Her timing was thrown and she speeded up her delivery.

  Her performance was so appalling—rushed lines, voice higher and higher, body stiff—that by the final curtain the audience was laughing at her, not with her, but she was not aware of it.

  Knopf could not bring himself to tell her that Lee Shubert, part owner of the play, had ordered “that Park Avenue amateur” to be fired and replaced with “a real actress.” Knopf delegated the un pleasant task to Miss Robinson-Duff, who, when she saw Kate in her studio the next day, was surprised to hear the young woman ask, “Aren’t you proud of me, Miss Duff, aren’t you proud?”

  Miss Robinson-Duff ran her hand over her marcelled gray head and took a deep breath.

  “You don’t mean I’m fired?” Kate asked.

  “Yes, you’re fired,” was the instant reply.

  Kate drew herself up to her full height and threw her head back. “Look how I’m taking it. Not a tear! I know you’re proud of me now.”

  “I’d have some hope if you wept,” Miss Robinson-Duff answered. “How can I ever make an actress of you, if you keep that shell over your emotions?”

  The Hepburn pride could not be quashed. She returned to Knopf’s company and said good-bye to the rest of the cast. Then she and Luddy drove up to West Hartford to show her family how she could take it on the chin. To her astonishment, she received a call from producer Arthur Hopkins, who had been in the audience on the night of Kate’s opening. Hopkins had seen a quality beneath her poor performance that struck him as unique. He offered, and she accepted, a small part in a play, These Days,* which he currently had in rehearsal. The story was about a group of mostly upper-crust young women at a finishing school. While rehearsing, she hardly saw Luddy, or anyone else for that matter. She was not only working daily with Miss Robinson-Duff but also taking dance lessons from the renowned Mikhail Mordkin (whom she had seen dance with Pavlova two days before her brother’s suicide). These Days opened at the Cort Theatre on Thursday night, November 12, 1928, and closed after eight performances. The New York Times did not single Kate out, but John Anderson of the New York Evening Journal noted that “a perfect passage of repressed deviltry is done gorgeously by Miss Katharine Hepburn.” This comment referred to a scene Kate had with the overpowering Helen Freeman, who played the finishing school’s head mistress. Kate had only two lines that she repeated in this scene—“Yes, Miss Van Alstyne” and “No, Miss Van Alstyne”—but she used them to good effect.

  The torturous rounds of producers began again. Her courage was flagging. Arthur Hopkins rehired her as understudy to Hope Williams in Philip Barry’s Holiday, which had just opened successfully in New Haven and was on its way to New York. Kate watche
d rehearsals from atop a thirty-foot ladder used by the stagehands to reach upper ropes and pulleys. Arthur Hopkins, unable to bear seeing her teeter back and forth precariously, finally ordered her down with the threat of firing her. When the show opened, she stood in the wings every night and made Hope Williams extremely nervous. At the end of the first week she and Luddy went to West Hartford together and applied for a marriage license. The Hepburns were surprised, but they wanted her to have a proper wedding. Staunchly, she refused to agree to more than the most intimate family members in attendance.

  Recognizing the hopelessness of understudying a star who would never miss a performance, Kate went straight to Hopkins on her return to New York that Monday and handed him her uncashed salary checks for the two weeks, announcing, “I’m getting married.” Hopkins asked to whom. When she told him it was Luddy, he was surprised. He had assumed they were just good friends, as had other members of the cast and Miss Robinson-Duff.

  On December 12, 1928, she and Luddy were married with a good deal of unexplained secrecy by her grandfather Hepburn, the oldest Episcopalian minister in the state of Virginia,* at the West Hartford home of her parents. (“If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married,” Mrs. Hepburn told her.) Because no marriage announcement was printed in Hartford, Philadelphia or New York—Kate’s circle of association—the question of whether she planned to give up her career in the theater would not be asked.†

  Marriage, Kate frequently said (and continued to say), was not a natural state. While in her teens she had insisted she would never have children; her early dedication to her younger brothers and sisters satisfied any need she might have had for mothering, and the preponderance of children, all under ten years of age, who filled Fenwick every summer (first cousins from Baltimore and Detroit, besides the cook’s son and the children of the visiting governess) turned her “off kids.” Many “oldest daughters” never married, never had children. And, anyway, marriage would interfere with the pursuit of her career. Since Kate did not appear to be so in love with Luddy that her heart might overcome reason, why would she marry when he did not seem to be head over heels in love with her either? They were wonderfully good friends. And Kate showed more of a protective interest in him than he did in her; Luddy was coming to terms with his relationship with his mother, his own sexuality, his lack of enthusiasm for a career, and his lack of need to earn a living. Perhaps he filled her brother Tom’s place in her life and she anticipated being able to help him surmount problems similar to those that had overwhelmed Tom.

  According to Kate, after their secret wedding in West Hartford on December 12 (a Tuesday), she and Luddy went to Bermuda for a short honeymoon. Then they looked at houses on the Main Line in Philadelphia while they stayed with Mrs. Smith at Sherreden. Kate later admitted asking herself, “What am I doing? I couldn’t live here!” Luddy, she claimed, “was swell about it,” and they moved into a small walk-up apartment on East Thirty-ninth Street, where he joined her on weekends. Very few people in New York had even heard that Kate had been married.

  It has been written that Kate’s marriage to Luddy was a platonic arrangement. Her contracts, as in the past, were signed Katharine Houghton Hepburn (that is the name she has used throughout her life on all legal documents as well as on her personal printed stationery). She seems not to have been known as Mrs. Smith, but the knowledge of Luddy’s presence—however platonic—in Kate’s life meant that she did not have to play either the flirt or the cool virgin or listen to any proposals of marriage. Luddy, or rather the knowledge that she had a husband, had liberated her from all that.

  Footnotes

  * Edwin H. Knopf (1899–1981) went on to Hollywood as a writer, director and producer in December, 1928, remaining to make nearly thirty films, the most notable being The Santa Fe Trail (1940), The Trial of Mary Dugan (1941), Cry Havoc (1944), The Valley of Decision (1945) and Lili (1953). He made two films with Spencer Tracy—Edward My Son (1949) and Malaya (1949), which brought him once again in contact with Hepburn.

  * Mary Boland (1880–1965) made her Broadway debut in 1905 and was a successful tragedienne, but her fame as an actress came as a comedienne onstage in the 1920s and in film during the 1930s and 1940s portraying scatterbrained wives and mothers. A few of her best films were Ruggles of Red Gap (1936), The Women (1939) and Pride and Prejudice (1940). She never again appeared with Hepburn.

  † Kenneth MacKenna, born Leo Mielziner (1899–1962), brother of noted stage designer Jo Mielziner. MacKenna had an early film career as an actor and director in silents and sounds. In the mid-thirties he turned to script editing, at one time heading the M.G.M. story department and teaching theater arts at U.C.L.A. He returned to films in 1960 and played a small part in Judgement at Nuremberg (1961).

  * Clark Gable (1901–1960) had played occasional extra roles in films and appeared with touring stage companies before he worked with Miss Robinson-Duff in 1928. His first lead on Broadway in Machinal (1928) was the direct result. He then costarred with the well-known actress Alice Brady in Love, Honor and Obey (1930), which led to his going to Hollywood.

  * Eleanora Duse (1859–1924), the Italian actress, was considered to be Sarah Bernhardt’s equal.

  * Hepburn always said that she chose to wear pants to avoid such uncomfortable female accoutrements as garter belts and high-heeled shoes. But she had worn boys’ clothes as a young girl when such things were not necessary.

  * These Days was written by Katharine Clugston and filmed by R.K.O. in 1934, retitled Finishing School and starring Frances Dee and Ginger Rogers. Ironically, Katharine Hepburn’s stand-in, Adylyn Davis, appeared in the film in a small role but Hepburn did not.

  * “We’ve had some nuts in the family,” Hepburn later recalled. “My grandfather was one. He never owned a toothbrush. He’d say he didn’t want to become dependent upon anything. So he cleaned his teeth with the same soap and washcloth he used for the rest of his toilet.”

  † Hepburn later said of this marriage, “I wasn’t fit to be married. He [Ludlow Ogden Smith] was a nice man and no nice man should marry an actress or anyone else whose mind is always on herself—I know if I were a man I wouldn’t be dumb enough to marry someone who couldn’t pass a mirror without looking into it.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  The Broadway production of Holiday closed in June, 1929, without Kate ever appearing in the role of Linda Seton. A month later, she and Luddy crossed to France for their own holiday. Luddy intended to show her the scenes of his youth and Kate wanted to share with him some of the Left Bank locations of her previous visit. But the crossing (first class at Luddy’s insistence) had been difficult. Despite Kate’s love of boats, she had been ill most of the time. Once they were on land, other difficulties arose between them. The vacation was cut short and they returned to New York within two weeks. In the time of her absence, Holiday had reopened in the Riviera Theatre at Ninety-seventh Street and Broadway in preparation for a cross-country tour. Kate finally had her chance to step in for Hope Williams when the star took sick one night. Arthur Hopkins watched her from the back of the theater, and he thought her performance was “even more compelling” than any he had seen his leading lady give.

  On Hopkins’s recommendation, Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild offered Kate $225 a week to appear in the ingenue’s role in S. N. Behrman’s Meteor, with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Kate accepted, then backed out just before the play went into rehearsals. She had been offered the lead in the fantasy-drama Death Takes a Holiday by Alfredo Casella, which Walter Ferris had adapted from the Italian. Throughout rehearsals and for the five weeks out of town, Kate and the play’s director, Lawrence Marston, were battling. Kate wanted to play the role of Grazia as a gamin, a tomboy, and Marston felt her interpretation made the story implausible. Three days before the opening, Lee Shubert, the play’s producer, sent word asking for her resignation.

  “Resign hell!” Kate claimed she told Lawrenc
e Marston. “If he wants me out of the cast he can fire me.” Shubert obliged, firing Marston along with her. Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn drove all the way from West Hartford to Philadelphia to catch her last performance.

  Right after the final curtain, Dr. Hepburn came “storming” backstage. “They’re absolutely right!” he shouted. “You are carrying on on that stage. You are galumphing there like a maniac. Who’s going to believe that my daughter, a big healthy girl like you, could fall in love with death. With death, for God’s sakes!” *

  Kate spent Christmas with Luddy and her family in West Hartford. The country had been in an economic depression since October. Wall Street had suffered paralyzing losses. Luddy’s new career as an insurance broker was in serious jeopardy. Dr. Hepburn’s money was invested in the manufacture of medical equipment and the Hepburns’ financial security seemed unthreatened. Nonetheless, a pall existed throughout the Christmas season. The competition for roles would be keener, fewer plays would be produced. Dr. Hepburn stressed the need for even greater excellence during hard times and Kate agreed with him. Her decision was to return to her studies with Miss Robinson-Duff upon the New Year.

  Back in New York, she swallowed her pride and reapproached the Theatre Guild with the possibility of taking on their original offer for Meteor, which was only now going into rehearsals. They refused to reconsider her, but suggested she see Rouben Mamoulian,† the director, who had adapted Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country for a Theatre Guild production in early spring. Alla Nazimova was to star. Kate went to audition for the ingenue role. Mamoulian had already seen about fifty young women when Kate, shaking, hair askew, perspiring profusely, entered his office.