Katharine Hepburn Read online

  “Miss Katharine Hepburn comes into her own as Antiope,” wrote Richard Garland† of The New York World-Telegram. “Ever since she supported Miss Jane Cowl in Art and Mrs. Bottle I’ve been waiting for Miss Hepburn to fall heir to a role worthy of her talent and her beauty. Antiope is that role and Miss Hepburn makes the most of it, bringing out its tenderness, its humor, its bite. It’s been many a night since so glowing a performance has brightened the Broadway scene.”

  The play ran for eighty-three performances and during that time Laura helped her fend off reporters and Hollywood talent scouts (“They didn’t like me until I got into a leg show,” was Kate’s comment). Her salary was seventy-six dollars a week, a good living wage in the Depression years. Nonetheless, the Hepburns contributed additional assistance. Kate rented a townhouse at 244 East Forty-ninth Street for one hundred dollars a month so that she would have a proper home to return to each night after the show. Laura, whose taste she trusted, decorated the house for her, turning the basement rooms into a comfortable and charming apartment for Luddy with his own private entrance. Mrs. Hepburn had approved the house with one proviso: that a bathroom be constructed on the ground floor in consideration of any elderly visitors. Kate obliged.

  Directly after each Saturday night performance, Kate would head up to West Hartford (a three-hour drive) and return on Monday morning. Laura and Luddy, as well as members of the cast, often came with her.

  “Hello, everybody! Here I am!” she would shout as she threw open the door. Despite the hour, in a few moments the entire family would gather around her and gifts would be exchanged by all, as if months instead of days had passed since they had last seen each other. Colin Keith-Johnston says of his first visit: “Kate had some little present for everybody, and everybody had a present for her. I remember that two presents were made by the givers’ hands. The children [Marion and Peggy were only thirteen and eleven, respectively, at the time] stood around. We grownups sat where we could—the room was her mother’s combination bathroom and dressing room. We all ate bananas and milk, and all talked at once, and it was all bewildering and warming.”

  Kate’s West Hartford bedroom was a large one with two French windows that allowed sunshine and air to flood the area. The walls were a terra cotta color and the furniture was maple. Her stuffed animals and dolls still littered the bed. Books were scattered about and a Victrola sat upon a small table made for her by Luddy. Everyone met for lunch and tea (an important rite in the Hepburn household) and dinner, but otherwise each member went his or her own way. Monday mornings were always painful departures for Kate.

  Popularity among her peers had completely escaped her grasp. Mostly her friends were loyal subjects caught up in her uniqueness, unable to fulfill their own expectations, living vicariously through her. Her rarefied background had developed her into a hybrid, never at peace with the performers with whom she worked or with the social world that Luddy and Laura inhabited when away from her. Home was where she felt the most complete, accepted, comfortable. She never liked to stay awake late at night. Yet, after her Saturday night performance, she drove at breakneck speed to West Hartford to her father’s house.

  Halfway through the run of The Warrior’s Husband, a Hollywood agent named Leland Hayward* began to court Kate as a client. Kate thought he was “rather horrible and rather awful” and confided to Laura, “I’m just sort of making it difficult for him.” Laura had known Hayward during her debutante days when he had been in the stag lines of several society dances, and she remembered him as “sort of a John Held type with sideburns.” Kate’s unflattering comments notwithstanding, Leland Hayward had a great deal of charm and inordinate good looks.

  Leland Hayward thought Kate’s kinetic personality and striking appearance would best be displayed on film, and he saw in her star potential. He talked to Paramount Studios about her and they made a small offer for her services. Kate turned them down.

  From childhood she had loved films. But to go to Hollywood as a mere starlet, a contract player, would never do. She insisted Leland Hayward set fifteen hundred dollars a week as her price, believing a studio would not be likely to pay such a price for a relative beginner unless they intended to make that person an important player. R.K.O. picked up the bait and asked her to take a screen test in New York under the direction of R.K.O. talent scout Lillie Messenger. She chose a scene from Holiday and asked Alan Campbell* (who was in the cast of The Warrior’s Husband) to play opposite her. Against Hayward’s advice and pleas, she perversely kept her back to the camera during most of the test. The scene was one where the very rich maverick Linda Seton, slightly inebriated from champagne, tells her sister’s fiancé to run off before the wedding. Kate put the champagne glass on the floor beside her and had to swoop down to retrieve it for a drink to emphasize her statement. Then, for a long moment, she turned to the camera, eyes misty but defiant, to announce if she were her sister she would run away with him.

  As fate would have it, at R.K.O., David O. Selznick was struggling with the casting of the film version of Clemence Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement. John Barrymore was set to star as the father, and George Cukor to direct. Norma Shearer, Irene Dunne, Anita Louise and Jill Esmond were all being considered for the pivotal daughter’s role. To Cukor’s shock, Selznick suddenly decided to cast his current lady friend, “a pretty little blonde ingenue.” Cukor was ready to quit. “It’s too terrible! It’s fantastic! Nothing on earth could make me do it now!” he told screenwriter Adela Rogers St. John. “She’s a lovely girl [Selznick’s choice]. She’d make a great Little Eva, but if she plays Sydney, one of us will never live through the picture.”

  Leland Hayward got word of the problem at R.K.O. and convinced Cukor to see Kate’s test. Cukor was stunned by that electric moment when Kate bent down, retrieved the glass of champagne and then turned with it full face to the camera. “She had this very definite knowledge and feeling [of the camera],” Cukor recalled. “She was quite unlike anybody I’d ever seen. ... I thought, I suppose right away, ‘She’s too odd. It won’t work.’ But at one moment in a very emotional scene, she picked up a glass. The camera focused on her back. There was an enormous feeling, a weight about the manner in which she picked up the glass.”*

  Cukor had a terrible time even getting Selznick to look at the test. He burst into St. John’s office a few days after Hayward had brought it to him and enlisted her help to get the studio to okay the casting of Kate in A Bill of Divorcement. “She’s too marvelous,” he crowed. “She’ll be greater than Garbo. Nobody wants her but me so come and help me fight for her. You don’t need to see the test. It’s a foul test anyway. She looks like a boa constrictor on a fast, but she’s great.” Cukor grabbed St. John’s arm, propelled her out of her office, and pulled her across the studio lawn toward Selznick’s office, talking all the while “Take my word for it darling. Just say you think she’s great. Start raving. Don’t go too strong. Just say she’ll be better in the part than Katharine Cornell.”

  Meanwhile, The Warrior’s Husband had closed and Kate had taken on a summer-stock engagement at the Croton Playhouse in Ossining, New York, where she was appearing in the role of Psyche Marbury in Will Cotton’s The Bride the Sun Shines On, which Dorothy Gish had done on Broadway. On June 30, during the Thursday night performance, she received a telegram from Leland Hayward telling her that not only would R.K.O. meet her fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-week demand, she was to leave for California on Sunday to appear opposite John Barrymore in A Bill of Divorcement. The Ossining Citizen Register carried the story that “the break that Katharine Hepburn got last night—a telegram from Hollywood, offering Miss Hepburn a lead in Clemence Dane’s ‘A Bill of Divorcement,’ playing opposite John Barrymore—nearly broke up the performance of ‘The Bride the Sun Shines On’ in which Miss Hepburn is appearing . . . the young actress was so excited that her exultation was manifest in her performance, much to the amusement of the audience—which was tolerant and understanding.” Henry Hull, her co-star, was not
nearly so indulgent. Kate had spoken her lines at such a pace that he had trouble keeping up with her.

  A picnic supper was served on the terrace of the playhouse preceding Kate’s last performance and in honor of her departure for Hollywood. Kate, bronzed and glowing in a white sundress, her hair falling gently on her bare shoulders, was nervously accepting congratulations when a short, wiry man with dynamic dark-brown eyes and a kind of snide smile approached her. She smiled back uneasily. The man was the legendary theater producer Jed Harris, whom she had once read for and been turned down by at an audition.

  He gestured at the fawning group nearby. “Not bad for an amateur,” he said grinning, and then walked away before she could reply.

  Footnotes

  * Death Takes a Holiday played 180 performances and then was filmed with Fredric March in the Philip Merivale role of Death and Evelyn Venable as Grazia. Rose Hobart replaced Kate as Grazia when Death Takes a Holiday opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on December 26.

  † Rouben Mamoulian (1898– ). Born in Russia, he had just recently made hisfirst film, Applause. An innovative film director, he went on to direct many classics, the Fredric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Song of Songs (Marlene Dietrich), Queen Christina (Greta Garbo), Becky Sharp (Miriam Hopkins), and the musicals Summer Holiday and Silk Stockings, among others. But he never abandoned the theater and staged the original productions of A Farewell to Arms (1930), Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma (1943), Carousel (1945) and Lost in the Stars (1949). Rouben Mamoulian and Kate Hepburn were never to work together again.

  * The role (played in the Theatre Guild production by Eunice Stoddart) was that of Viera Aleksandrovna, a young woman whose girlish love succumbs to a jealous woman’s treachery.

  † Cheryl Crawford (1902– ) was casting director for the Theatre Guild from 1926 to 1930. In 1931 she helped found the Group Theatre and remained with that organization for eight years before she became an independent producer. Some of her many productions were: One Touch of Venus (1943), Brigadoon (1947), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Paint Your Wagon (1951) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959).

  ‡ Hortense Alden years later appeared as Mrs. Violet Venable in the off-Broadway production of Tennessee Wiliams’s short play Suddenly Last Summer, the same role Katharine Hepburn portrayed on the screen.

  * Richard Hale (1893–1981) sang with the Metropolitan Opera. He also narrated the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first United States concert of Peter and the Wolf under the direction of Serge Prokoviev and repeated the role in the popular recording. He went on to Hollywood in the 1940s, appearing in character roles in numerous films, but never was to work with Katharine Hepburn again,

  † Osgood Perkins (1892–1937), a star of numerous silent films, father of Tony Perkins. Mary Wickes (1912– ) went on to play wisecracking busybodies; her most famous role was as the nurse in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942). Leo Carroll (1892–1972), born in Weedon, England, became known to American television audiences as Cosmo Topper in TV’s Topper series and Mr. Waverly in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Aline MacMahon (1899– ) later appeared with Katharine Hepburn in Dragon Seed and was nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role. George Coulouris (1903– ), born in England, had made his stage debut in 1929, theyear before he came to the Berkshire Playhouse. He went to Hollywood in 1933, appearing as a villain in several dozen character roles. He became a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre and appeared in Citizen Kane. He returned to England following the war and pursued a successful career as a character actor. Walter Connolly (1887–1940) went to Hollywood the following year (1932) and remained there until his death only eight years later. During that time he made nearly fifty films, playing supporting roles in all but one—The Great Victor Herbert—in which he played the title role.

  * Alexander Kirkland (1908– ). His third wife was Gypsy Rose Lee; went on to films but not too successfully; retired as an art dealer in the 1950s.

  † Martínez Sierra was the pen name of the husband and wife writing team—Don Gregorio Martínez Sierra and Marie Lejárrago.

  ‡ Edith Barrett (1907–1977) married actor Vincent Price while they were both appearing in a Broadway production of The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1938) and left the stage for Hollywood that same year. She appeared in numerous films in supporting roles in the forties and fifties but did not fulfill her early stage brilliance.

  § George Kelly (1887–1974), author of The Show-Off and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Craig’s Wife. Grace Kelly was his niece.

  * Benn W. Levy (1900–1973), married to actress Constance Cummings, was best known for his later plays, Springtime for Henry (1931) and Skylark (1942).

  † Jane Cowl (1887–1950). Besides starring in many plays and films, she co-authored a number of plays. One, Smilin’ Through, was filmed twice (1932 and 1941).

  * Henry Hull (1890–1977). Best known on the stage for his role as Jeeter Lester in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. He made several dozen films, playing the title role in The Werewolf of London (1934) and Emperor Franz Josef in The Great Waltz (1938). In July, 1932, he appeared in summer stock at the Croton Playhouse in Ossining, New York, with Hepburn in The Bride the Sun Shines On.

  † Leslie Howard (1893–1943) went on to star and co-star in many films, and to play Ashley Wilkes in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Howard was a passenger on a plane that was lost on a Lisbon-U.K. flight during World War II. His body was never found.

  * Colin Keith-Johnston (1896– ), an English actor who made his debut on the stage at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1919. Well known for his Shakespearean and classic roles.

  † Mr. Garland was the same critic from whom the great entertainer Judy Garland (nee Frances Gumm) took her professional name when she was a child appearing at the Chicago World’s Fair.

  * Leland Hayward (1902–1971) began his career in the publicity department of United Artists and in the scenario department of First National. Next he became a talent agent, and then a highly successful stage and film producer. Mister Roberts (stage and screen) was one of his greatest hits. He second wife was actress Margaret Sullavan.

  * Alan Campbell (1905–1963), actor and author, future husband of author Dorothy Parker.

  * Hepburn saw this test for the first time in 1938 at a party at the end of shooting of the film version of Holiday, in which she starred. “The company laughed themselves sick,” Hepburn recalled in 1948 to an interviewer for The New York Times. “I didn’t think it was so awfully funny. It’s true, I looked terrible in it. But there was something awfully heartbreaking about the girl I was in those days. I was trying so hard—too hard. I was so eager—too eager.”

  Early Stardom

  CHAPTER

  7

  “The very rich are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about Kate’s generation of monied families. “They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

  Kate most certainly was different, “a queer fish” in the jargon of the 1930s. So preposterously different was she from the people with whom her work brought her in contact that she might as well have been a foreigner. Not only did she have an accent that was peculiarly high-toned, but her habits and attitudes displayed a distinct disdain for almost everyone except her few intimates, like Luddy, Laura, Bob McKnight and the close members of her family. Yet, even in these circles, she was not happy unless she was the center, a position she had the ability to achieve. Upon meeting her or simply seeing her enter a room or walk down a street, people recognized her not as an actress but as a rich young woman who had attended one of the nation’s best schools.

  Kate was a stranger to compromise. She wanted it all and on her terms. Their marriage offered very little for Luddy other than the knowledge that he had a beautiful and extraordinary wife. Her refusal to accep
t what most of the world considered proper marital behavior seemed irreverent rather than unconventional. Her confident manner, brusque speech and air of superiority when paired with her Yankee independence, her impatience with others and her attitude of self-righteousness, alienated almost everyone who crossed her path while at the same time endowing her with a distinctiveness that made a lasting impression. In any walk of life other than the acting profession, Kate’s personality might have done her in, as it had at Bryn Mawr. But she had looked a star for a very long time. Now, she was on her way to being one.

  That July in 1932 when Luddy saw Kate and Laura off to Hollywood on the Super Chief, the Depression had settled into an American way of life. Straggling, sullen breadlines and soup kitchens appeared in most major cities. Newspapers reported that an estimated fifteen million people were out of work and another estimated thirty million were living on public welfare or private charity. Millions more survived by depleting the savings that were meant to see them through retirement and old age. But the Hepburns, the Hardings and the Smiths had not been seriously affected. Perhaps this was the reason that Kate, Laura and Luddy could hang on so securely to their ideals of independence and good times. They all shared one dream—Kate’s future stardom, a curious dream on Luddy’s part, since he had to know it would place a distance between Kate and him.

  When Kate met the Super Chief on Sunday morning in Harmon, New York, during the train’s brief three-minute stop to connect with its dining car before starting its cross-country journey, Laura was already onboard. Kate was in high spirits, first because she believed she had outfoxed the press, who would have expected her to depart for Hollywood from Grand Central Station, and second, she had made the cover of Vanity Fair magazine and was waving the issue in the air as she looked for Laura. The two women were to share a compartment and Laura stuck her head out the window and shouted to Kate, who was surrounded by luggage on the small platform. A mad dash followed to get Kate and all her baggage onto the train in so short a time. Their laughter co-mingled and was nearly drowned by the churning of the train’s engine as it ground its way out of the station where Luddy stood futilely shouting, “Good luck!”