Jo March chopped off her hair and wrote thundering dramas and moved alone to New York just after the Civil War but found happiness in a last rainy scene under an umbrella with her kindly older suitor; Lady Cynthia Darrington set altitude and distance records on the earliest solo flights but went down in flames for love of a married man; Tess Harding was the New York Chronicle’s ace political columnist and the second-ranked dame in the country—after Mrs. Roosevelt—but swore to give it all up for life in Spencer Tracy’s kitchen. Cutting a path across history, in the guise of more than forty varied screen heroines who shared a singular face and accent, Katharine Hepburn embodied the most sought-after strengths of modern women, and then habitually followed a man into confusion and defeat. The strengths—intelligence, independence, gall—were the memorable part, and formed a dramatic premise in themselves. The dire or merely domestic outcomes of so many of her movies can be easily dismissed as the requirements of a less enlightened age, or as a sign of the ongoing bewilderment about how a truly “modern” woman’s story might conclude. Now that Hepburn’s own story has ended—she was ninety-six—we may be able to learn how such a woman actually lived out an uncensored and unedited freedom, since we have always somehow known that, despite four Academy Awards and a dramatic range from Louisa May Alcott to Eugene O’Neill, for half a century Katharine Hepburn was really playing herself.
She was ostentatiously modern—“more modern than tomorrow,” the filmland magazines declared; “You’ve never seen anything like her!”—from her first screen appearance, in 1932, in a creaky British melodrama called “A Bill of Divorcement.” Yet there was nothing in her impersonation of a British ingénue named Sydney that violated an ensemble acting style still bound to the Victorian stage; at twenty-five, Hepburn was as stilted as John Barrymore, who played to the galleries as her half-mad father. The novelty was not in what she did but in what she was. With her starved, whippetlike grace and overbearing intensity, she herself appeared slightly mad. But the same characteristics also made her seem—as George Cukor, the director, had gambled—a distinctly new type of woman, poised between the nervy and the nervously overwrought.
The quality of a nearly feverish radiance continued to excite audiences even when her character was neither modern nor threatened with hereditary insanity. By the fall of 1933, “Little Women” was breaking box-office records at Radio City, with Hepburn as America’s beloved Jo billed alone above the title. Variety crowned her the second most popular female star in the country—right behind Mae West. Between them, these two unprecedented creatures neatly divided the possibilities: Brooklyn and Bryn Mawr, vaudeville and the classics, flesh and bone or possibly flesh and the ravenous Puritan spirit that consumed it. Still, even if Hepburn looked like the hanger on which Mae West hung her clothes, and seemed as rigid as her own New England scruples, it was she who outlasted every change in the rules of a country that couldn’t quite decide whether such women should exist.
The idea that Hepburn was the parts she played quickly became a studio gambit. Publicizing “Little Women,” Cukor announced that she’d been “born to play Jo,” since she came from just the same sort of large, sternly wholesome New England family that Alcott’s fable was about. And, besides, he added, “she’s tender and funny, fiercely loyal. . . . Kate and Jo are the same girl.” So, too, Kate and Tracy Lord, the imperious “virgin goddess” of “The Philadelphia Story,” of 1940, were the same rare girl—part of the lore of the play was that it was written for Hepburn by her old friend Philip Barry, after months of observation of the same large, although now apparently quite wealthy and eccentric, New England family. When, in 1941, McCall’s named Hepburn its Woman of the Year—borrowing the title of yet another film written for her—the magazine specified that it was honoring her not as an actress but “as a woman” and “a raving individual.” Given the indisputable evidence of movie after movie, the country looked to Hepburn as a figure who merged all our contradictory fantasies of aristocratic lineage and republican conviction, of high spirits and high morals: she was a big-screen Eleanor Roosevelt, with the beauty that only Hollywood can grant as a reward.
“I’m just something from New England, that was very American and brought up by two extremely intelligent people who gave us the greatest gift that man can give anyone—freedom from fear,” she recalled of her childhood. These words only hint at the lifelong gratitude Hepburn displayed for her parents and the domestic paradise they’d built; as an adult, she returned home often and in all her troubled times. (“That’s very unusual, isn’t it?”) Some twenty Hepburn biographies have given increasing attention to this very unusual family romance. The most prodigiously researched, Barbara Leaming’s “Katharine Hepburn,” devotes a quarter of its pages to events that occurred before its subject was born.
Dr. Thomas Hepburn was a urologist who worked toward the public recognition and treatment of venereal disease; Katharine Houghton, his loving wife, campaigned for legal birth control and led the battle for woman suffrage in Connecticut, but was always home in time for tea. In a sprawling house in Hartford, these high-minded individuals raised six exceptionally bright children who swung on the birch trees in the back yard and won blue ribbons for diving and tennis and anything else that was up for the winning. The family was so immoderately strong and fearless and happy that there was never any need to mention the suicide of Mrs. Hepburn’s father or of her father’s brother or even of Dr. Hepburn’s own oldest brother—Uncle Charlie—since there was nothing to be done about these matters and, as their famous daughter later remarked of her parents, “They simply did not believe in moaning about anything.”
The oldest children, Thomas and Katharine, were born one and a half years apart—Tom in 1905, Katharine in 1907—and they formed a little club unto themselves. Early photographs show a pair of nearly identical freckled cherubs, hand in hand. By the age of ten, Kathy is sporting cropped hair and a boy’s wardrobe, ready and able to follow her big brother into anything. In March, 1921, the pair, aged thirteen and fifteen, took the train to New York City with their mother and stayed several days in the Greenwich Village house of one of her suffragist friends, their “Aunty Towle.” They saw Pavlova dance on a Wednesday and on Thursday their mother went back to Hartford. On Friday, they went to the movies with Aunty—it was “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” and Tom complained that a scene of a hanging in it gave him “the horrors.” On Saturday night, after supper, Tom played his banjo to entertain them, and on Sunday morning, when the children were to get the train home, Kathy went upstairs to Tom’s attic room and found that he had hanged himself from one of the rafters.
It would seem to require an Electra or an Antigone, not a wholesome American heroine like Jo March, to produce the sentence with which Katharine Hepburn, in her autobiography, describes what happened next: “In a state of numb shock I cut him down and laid him on the bed.” This is not quite accurate; the police report contradicts her memory of horrified competence with its account of a young girl clinging hysterically to her brother’s body as she attempts to hold it upright. The noose that Tom had fashioned out of a torn bedsheet had proved too long, and when he jumped from a packing case his feet had hit the floor; he’d had to pull hard against the line in order to strangle himself. Tom needed not to be cut down but to be raised up, and his sister was still supporting his body in her arms when the doctor arrived. In “Me,” published in 1991, Hepburn was still worrying over the truth of one particularly tormenting part of her story—that is, whether her brother really came to her the night before to say “You’re my girl, aren’t you? You’re my favorite girl in the whole world.” She knew that she had repeated these words to others but wondered, seventy years later, if Tom had ever really said them.
Dr. Hepburn insisted that his son’s death was the result of a boyish stunt gone awry, and tried to get the newspapers to retract their accounts of suicide. But however he managed to alter the truth for himself, he could not alter it for his daughter—the sole family witness to the will it took for Tom to go on dying once his feet were on the ground. This was a memory she knew to keep to herself. She saw her mother cry for what she swears was the first and only time (“She was stalwart”) on the trip to the crematorium, and reported that she herself now acquired the skill of shedding tears when tears were called for: “This was what I thought I should do. People die—you cry—but inside I was frozen.”
Are there families in which suicide runs like intelligence or cancer? Two days after Tom’s death, news arrived of the death of another of Dr. Hepburn’s brothers: he had run his car’s engine with the garage door closed. For the family, it was not difficult to annul the existence of an uncle who had lived as far away as Annapolis; it must have exacted more of an effort in the case of Tom, and yet, once the facts of his death were satisfactorily revised, he was not spoken of at home again. When Kathy became too moody to continue at school, the family brought in tutors; she later recalled how she enjoyed playing golf during her free time in the afternoons. She went on to Bryn Mawr, where she received poor grades but a great deal of attention—for the way she dressed, for her snooty manner, and, when all else failed, for jumping into the campus fountain. It was there that she decided to make a career out of expressing emotion in front of as many people as she could get to watch.
From her first weeks in New York, in the summer of 1928, Hepburn walked straight into leading roles. But she was frequently thrown straight out as soon as she got near the stage. What was so attractive at an audition was precisely what went wrong in performance: electrifying tension and insufficient control. She hired a vocal coach—under pressure, her voice rose to incomprehensible heights and speeds—and took movement classes with Pavlova’s former partner, Mikhail Mordkin. Still, she was fired at least four times in the next two years. She was even fired from a play that Philip Barry wrote with her in mind, “The Animal Kingdom,” suggesting the remarkable fact that she couldn’t yet play herself.
She finally had a hit in a boulevard version of “Lysistrata” called “The Warrior’s Husband,” playing the Queen of the Amazons—she made her entrance running down a flight of steps with a dead stag over her shoulders—who is happily overcome by a stronger man. It is a success worth noting, for this was a character that she would repeat in some ways for the rest of her life. The capitulating Amazon won her a screen test, reportedly excruciating, but George Cukor saw past the extravagant emoting and the Theda Bara makeup—he said she looked like “a boa constrictor on a fast”—and pushed the reluctant powers at R.K.O. to give her a chance. What he’d loved, he said, was the way she swooped to put down a glass, with her back to the camera, and then turned to do the scene with her eyes suddenly filled with tears.
She got to Hollywood in July, 1932, and was as pointedly outrageous there as she’d been at Bryn Mawr, only now Bryn Mawr was part of the act. She was an East Coast aristocrat, the Mayflower in heels—or, rather, in slacks, since the Mayflower didn’t need to dress, which made the biggest impression of all on the folks from steerage who ran the studios. Her publicity stressed how she hated publicity; she didn’t pose for pictures, except when caught unawares with a rented pet monkey on her shoulder. She was probably an heiress. She would soon go back to playing Shakespeare, or O’Neill. Her personal life was mysterious, and there were rumors about those slacks and her women companions. In fact, she’d left behind in New York a fairly new and barely used husband—one Ludlow Ogden (Luddy) Smith, a college beau acquired in a moment of professional discouragement, whom she quickly bequeathed to her family as a kind of permanently hovering extra brother. And she was having an affair with her agent, Leland Hayward, who was then married to his first wife for the second time. There were many reasons to maintain a veil of mystery, even aside from its excellence as a tactic.
In 1934, the magazine Picturegoer made a stab at rending the veil with an astrological treatise entitled “What Her Birth Date Means to Katharine Hepburn”: born in early November, 1909, she was a Scorpio and therefore “strongly individual, very uncompromising, critical and judicial in a clear, decisive fashion.” Exactly right, of course, except that she was born on May 12, 1907. That an aspiring movie star should take two years off her age is less than notable; it’s rather meek. That she conscientiously changed the month and the day, however—and for decades biographies listed Hepburn’s date of birth as November 8th—is more problematic, since the date she’d taken over, with her parents’ knowledge and consent, was her brother Tom’s.
“I wasn’t afraid. Not for a long time. When I lost a part, I thought it was because I was a genius and geniuses always have a hard time,” confides the giddy little starving genius of an actress Hepburn played in “Morning Glory,” which won her an Academy Award in 1933. Determined but purehearted Eva Lovelace has come to New York to be very famous, to play Juliet and Lady Macbeth, and to die at her zenith onstage, preferably as Cleopatra grandly ending it all herself. Audiences loved Hepburn best in roles like this, part swan and part odd duck, where her patrician quiverings were framed in awkwardness and aspiration. The most exquisite of these hybrid creatures appeared two years later, in “Alice Adams”—her best early performance, as Booth Tarkington’s desperate dreamer trapped in the banality of Main Street, putting on airs and wasting her ambition on the kind of small-town suitor that Eva Lovelace had fled for her life. Given an excuse to be as flutteringly absurd as she often was anyway, Hepburn is heartbreaking.
But no one concerned with her career seemed to understand the mixture of comedy and pathos that gave these movies their appeal. Her next four films were box-office fiascoes, and none worse than the cross-dressing cult favorite “Sylvia Scarlett” (1936), Cukor’s vague Shakespearean reverie on Hepburn as a boyish girl who passes herself off as a girlish boy. On the edge of professional disaster, she took on tragedy queens and Victorian damsels, and toppled right over into the abyss. “Mary of Scotland” (1936), a clanking opera-without-music, survives mainly as fodder for speculation about the star’s affair with her director, John Ford. There is something understandably alluring, almost patriotic, in the mating of these two distinctly American birds of prey, and their respective biographers have been at odds over the extent of what went on. (Ford was, and remained, a very married man.) But, for all that her directors fell under her spell, Cukor’s Hepburn sent audiences fleeing in confusion and Ford’s put them out cold.
When everything fails, you laugh. That was the lesson of Depression movies, and Hepburn learned it very late. While the studio dawdled over whether she should play Empress Josephine or Sarah Bernhardt, she went off in a Theatre Guild touring production of “Jane Eyre”—which she hoped to lure Ford into filming. When neither her performance nor a headlining affair with Howard Hughes made Ford jump at the project, she returned to Hollywood and, in the spring of 1937, took on one more movie tailored just for her. The role of the ambitious actress Terry Randall, in Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s Broadway hit “Stage Door,” was converted into another Hepburn vehicle, reflecting the audience’s latest view of the fading star: an heiress, a bit of a pompous ass, a self-conscious tragedienne, whose ghastly “calla lilies are in bloom” speech was lifted from one of her own stage flops—“The Lake,” which had earned her Dorothy Parker’s famous verdict that her acting “ran the gamut of emotion from A to B.” The only difference was that this time it was all meant to be funny.
“Stage Door” may be the warmest ensemble comedy Hollywood ever produced. In the embracing camaraderie of its rooming house filled with aspiring actresses, for most of whom careers and mutual loyalty are crucial and for whom men offer little more than a way to a role or a steak dinner—where getting married is an admission of defeat—it may also be the only truly feminist film Hepburn ever made. Not that anything of the sort was intended: under Gregory La Cava’s improvisatory, seat-of-the-pants direction, the script changed from day to day and the movie just sort of happened as it went along. Originally, one of the two leads—Hepburn or Ginger Rogers—was to be married off to the big producer, played by Adolphe Menjou, but somehow that plotline disappeared: what happened between the women was so much more interesting.
The cast was delectable—Lucille Ball and Eve Arden threw in the salt and pepper—but it was Rogers who got things cooking. “She gave him sex and he gave her class” was Hepburn’s expert sizing up of Rogers’s trade-off with Fred Astaire. But the wisecracking blonde gave Hepburn something equally important: the kind of populist foil that she learned she couldn’t do without. Easy banter, teasing jabs, a clear-eyed American common sense that tried Hepburn’s mettle and made her unbend—she got all that from Rogers, and not from any actress again. That’s a loss, because Rogers challenged Hepburn to be a decent, feeling, regular guy of a human being, while her later replacements—above all, Spencer Tracy—challenged Hepburn only to be a more regular dame.
“Stage Door” was a moderate commercial success, but the two madcap heiress movies that followed—Howard Hawks’s now canonized “Bringing Up Baby” (with Cary Grant and the leopard and the dinosaur bones) and Cukor’s “Holiday” (Grant and Hepburn fleeing the oppression of wealth)—were box-office flops. However adorable the highly advertised “new Hepburn” was designed to be, and however much the buoyancy and liberal spirit of these films have won them contemporary fans (recent scholarship has found that “Baby” demonstrates the decline of the patriarchy and the collapse of the phallus), audiences at the time were simply irritated. Hepburn seemed more unbearably superior than ever, as—in both films—Grant played up to her (rather than down), her character won every round, and the high speed of screwball comedy turned her voice into a drill. Reviewers blamed her for headaches and exhaustion. In 1938, she made the theatre owners’ dreaded list of stars whose very names had become box-office poison.
With R.K.O. fed up and offering her no roles that she was willing to play, she took herself off to Fenwick, her parents’ Connecticut seashore home, for the summer and fall of 1938. Philip Barry had spent time there, too, not as a suitor but as a playwright fascinated by the suitor situation, particularly as it involved the constant presence of her far too cheerful ex-husband. (Luddy took photos of her visiting beaux—Hayward, Ford, Hughes—and liked to assure visitors that he was the sanest member of the family.) It was Luddy who came from the Main Line Philadelphia society that Barry gave the Hepburns as a background in “The Philadelphia Story.” When Barry showed Kate the play, she thought it good enough to invest in the production and to secure herself the movie rights (with money borrowed from Hughes). She left only one important contractual escape: all bets were off if she landed the role of Scarlett O’Hara.
But Atlanta, of course, was set alight without her—David Selznick insisted that audiences disliked her too intensely, and, in any case, she lacked the “sex qualities” needed for Scarlett. And so “The Philadelphia Story” went ahead and opened on Broadway in March, 1939, to reviews nearly as apologetic for past abuse as they were delighted with the work at hand. The show ran for more than four hundred performances, and Hepburn set her terms for the movie at M-G-M with Louis B. Mayer: a large degree of script control and Cukor to direct. She tried to get Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable for the roles of her ex-husband and an interfering reporter—she’d never met either, but they were the biggest male stars in the country (aside from Mickey Rooney). Mayer managed to persuade her that Cary Grant and James Stewart would be adequate to the tasks. Thus, with some rather more delicately balanced notions of masculinity than she’d intended for her opposition, she made the movie in which the shrew was tamed and finally forgiven, by her men and the country alike.
For Hepburn’s real populist foil—whether represented by Rogers or Stewart or Tracy—was, of course, the moviegoing population of the United States, which has always exalted its aristocrats right up to the point of democratic revenge. As Tracy Lord, Hepburn has a cold perfection that is denounced as the source of everyone’s troubles, particularly the men’s. The actress’s social and moral affronts were now firmly tied to her deficit in “sex qualities”: Tracy is reprimanded as a “prig,” a “perennial spinster,” and one of “a special class of the American female, the married maiden.” The silent opening battle tells it all: Grant storms out the door, she throws his golf clubs after him, he storms back to give her a shove—and over she goes, stiff as a poker. It’s a slapstick routine, a Punch and Judy show, and it was put in right at the start to make sure no one missed the point: this woman has to learn to bend.
Apart from cinema’s eternal little girls—like Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford—Hepburn was probably the least sexual beauty ever to become a movie star. The lack of femme fatality may be ascribed to her uncommon self-possession: the stubborn vertical bracing of that pratfall also kept her from assuming the conventionally vulnerable (or predatory) female sexual postures. This is the Hepburn women still want their daughters to watch. But Hepburn can also appear just too tightly wound and scrubbed—she enthused about taking several cold showers a day—for anything as stickily human as sex. In the entire range of her movies, it is difficult to call up an image of her in a clinch or a kiss or an unembarrassed sexual situation: except for “Woman of the Year,” the 1942 film that followed “The Philadelphia Story” and forms nearly a genre in itself.
“Woman of the Year” was her first movie with Spencer Tracy, whom she still hadn’t met when she offered Mayer the terrific script that Ring Lardner, Jr., and Michael Kanin had written for her, with her collaboration, and told him she wouldn’t let M-G-M make it without giving her Tracy this time. How determined she was to capture the rough-on-smooth sexiness that Ginger gave to Fred was made explicit in her choice of directors: “I had to explain to Cukor”—whose reputation as a “woman’s director” was privately attributed to his homosexuality—“that this script had to be directed by a very macho director from the man’s point of view and not the woman’s. I’m sure that George was very disappointed.”
The macho replacement was George Stevens, known for his touch with comedy—he had worked with Laurel and Hardy, and directed “Alice Adams”—and also with his leading ladies, onscreen and off. The first we see of Hepburn in “Woman of the Year” is a fabulous outstretched leg in a silk stocking and a high-heeled shoe—who knew she had legs?—and the rest of her is hardly less alluring. The role is a radically new female fantasy: a political columnist whose family is intimate with the Roosevelts and who converses brilliantly in half a dozen languages. (We hear her do Bryn Mawr shades of Spanish and German and Russian, but Mayer vetoed Yiddish; the virgin goddess might lay herself down, but the Connecticut shiksa remained inviolate.)
Hepburn’s Tess Harding is everything Jo March and the generations of world-seeking girls who modelled themselves on Jo ever dreamed of becoming, a woman immersed in a life of adventure and achievement and importance. In her relationship with Tracy—he’s a sportswriter for the same paper—she’s the intellectual force and the big success. Reversing all the clichés, it’s he who gets upset when she’s preoccupied with her work or fails to notice that he’s bought a new hat. And she’s the sexual aggressor, too: in one breathtaking scene—considering that it’s Hepburn—they neck for a bit, clinging tight, and she shocks him by casually preparing for him to stay the night. Retribution inevitably arrives, with marriage and the familiar accusations: she’s heartless, thoughtless, too self-involved to be a mother or wife—in fact, he points out, she isn’t really a woman at all.
And so, in one of the most lyrically funny and politically reviled episodes in American movies, Hepburn cooks Tracy breakfast in order to win him back. She’s scheduled to launch a battleship that morning, but it can wait. In a nearly silent sequence that parallels the opening of “The Philadelphia Story,” she sets to work: fielding squares of toast as they sail through the air, gingerly tapping down an obscenely drooling waffle-maker, hitching up a shoulder strap with a colander—she’s part Pavlova and part Stan Laurel. Weeping, she tells him she wants to quit her job (“What are ya gonna do, run for President?” he snarls) and be a proper wife. The screenwriters were only the first of many to be outraged by this ending—feminist film criticism hardly has a sorer point—which was tacked on after the film’s completion, apparently when women in the preview audience found the star’s perfections threatening. (Originally, she ended up outcheering Tracy at a baseball game.) Hepburn, who maintained practical control of the story, of the director, and pretty much of L. B. Mayer, took personal credit for the decision to make the change. But the rub is not that she was willing to compromise her principles for the sake of success. If she hadn’t, she would have stopped making movies right along with Mae West. More disturbing is the possibility that Tess Harding’s crazed capitulation didn’t seem to her to be a compromise at all: that it was love.
At thirty-four, Hepburn was back at the top through her own formidable efforts, and she had also finally “discovered what ‘I love you’ really means.” Her definition of the phrase veers from the unexpected to the alarming. “It means I put you and your interests and your comfort ahead of my own,” she wrote. It means “total devotion.” In practice, it meant that if “he didn’t like this or that I changed this and that. They might be qualities which I personally valued. It did not matter. I changed them.” The man she loved, as much of the world is aware, was Spencer Tracy. The life she described after more than two decades of celebrated devotion sounds relatively simple. “Food—we ate what he liked. We did what he liked. We lived a life which he liked. This gave me great pleasure. The thought that this was pleasing him.”
The great, secret affair was not much of a secret at the start. While “Woman of the Year” was playing at Radio City, in February, 1942, Sheilah Graham informed readers of her Hollywood column that the two stars “got on like a house afire” and that “the love scenes in the picture are extremely convincing!” There seemed little reason to keep things quiet, since Hepburn was divorced and Tracy’s affairs with his co-stars were notorious; by the time they met, he was known to be living more at the Beverly Hills Hotel than with his wife and children. Later legend often portrays Louise Tracy as a Catholic who would not hear of divorce. In fact, Louise was Episcopalian—it was Spencer who was Catholic, if limited in observance to playing priests and racking up guilt. Louise was, however, something of a saint. Although the modest wife and the glamorous movie star may seem polar opposites, they were all too alike in their unremitting ideals of love and the sheer blind strength they offered in its service. Louise was someone Hepburn might have played, if Hepburn had ever been able to convince as a mother: when the Tracys’ first child, John, was born deaf, in 1924, Louise devoted herself to teaching him to speak and live normally. She succeeded against all odds, and went on to establish the John Tracy Clinic in a small bungalow in Los Angeles, in 1942, just a few months after the Sheilah Graham tidbit appeared. Over the years, the clinic grew into one of the country’s largest centers for the education of deaf children, and Louise earned one humanitarian award after another; it was remarked that she even looked a little like Eleanor Roosevelt. She and her husband continued to pose together for pictures, for the clinic, as late as 1962, which was the next time that any significant publicity appeared about Tracy and Hepburn.
For those who know the partnership as a series of sophisticated comedies of sparring, loving equals (in which he got top billing, every time), it may come as a surprise that the next movie to fit the bill—“Adam’s Rib”—did not get made for seven years. In between, the pair stumbled together through a number of misfits in various genres. Alone, Tracy had some success in a couple of war movies (he was the only big male star at M-G-M who didn’t enlist). Hepburn pushed hard to get the studio to risk making O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra”—even for her, though, Mayer stopped at incest—and then settled into the likes of Pearl Buck’s “Dragon Seed,” a film all too accurately described as a “Not-So-Good Earth.” In any case, her criterion for an acceptable part soon came down to whatever wouldn’t keep her away from Tracy for long.
The studio found this a reasonable use of her time, since Tracy, one of the most infamous drinkers in Hollywood, needed constant supervision in order to stay sober. Garson Kanin, scriptwriter and courtier to the royal pair, tells many admiring anecdotes of Hepburn’s loyal devotion: Kate kneeling at Spence’s feet and leaping up to make fresh coffee when the old was still hot but he said it was cold, Kate scrubbing the floor of Spence’s dressing room, Kate sleeping outside his locked hotel-room door as Spence drank himself sick over a period of days, waiting for the chance to get inside to clean him off. And he observes with official, glitter-eyed cheeriness how Kate “never felt bereft or sidetracked” when Spence went off to spend time with his wife at their home, The Hill, since Kate herself so appreciated the value of family, as demonstrated by her own frequent visits to her mother and dad.
Her brother Bob tried to make sense of her behavior by suggesting that Tracy “was sort of a younger edition of her father, in her mind.” It’s true that she spoke of her father, adoringly, as an “over-male” male—for all his liberal philosophy, Dr. Hepburn was an authoritarian in his domestic demands and in his harsh (some in the family said overharsh) corporal punishment of the children. And she spoke of Tracy, just as adoringly, as “a throwback to an age of rugged heroism.” This was, of course, Tracy’s stock-in-trade onscreen, part of his image as the all-American, not too threateningly handsome, gruff but decent man. Yet Tracy’s actual “small life”—as he himself described it—was anything but rugged, bounded by the studios and The Hill and various Hollywood bars and restaurants. Even his highly cinematic acting style seems to depend on expending the least effort possible. By the time Hepburn published her autobiography, in 1991, she had come to see Tracy in a very different light, but she sustained herself for decades on what appears to have been a set of furiously willed illusions: that fiction could be transformed into fact by the intensity of belief, that her lover’s frequent cruelties were a sign of heroic masculinity, and that she could save him.
In the late forties, Tracy was drinking heavily and rumored to be chasing other women. Hepburn was hemmed in and worn out when “Adam’s Rib” finally established the intimate, home-movie interplay and beloved status of the partnership—in 1949, the year that Ingrid Bergman was run out of American movies for being an adulteress. The “Tracy and Hepburn” routine was already pat in its mixture of feistiness and comfort, and the pair exemplified what later feminists would gratefully view as “an ideal relationship celebrating the most happily integrated emancipated woman of the era.” At the time, however, the woman was in need of emancipation from nothing so much as the relationship itself.
For the next few years, Hepburn took on every job she could. Real life resembled the old movies played backward: the hero disappeared from the frame and the heroine was suddenly brash and striving again. She spent months coaching her voice in order to play Rosalind in the New York Theatre Guild’s “As You Like It,” in 1950. The reviews were not encouraging, but it pleased her greatly that her mother got to see her perform Shakespeare (Katharine Houghton Hepburn died a short while after). Her fame secured a four-month Broadway run, and then, after a summer break in California with Tracy, a national tour took her away for another half year—nearly up to the moment she set sail for England and Africa, in April, 1951, on a new adventure.
Rosie Sayer, the “psalm-singing skinny old maid” of “The African Queen,” is probably the heroine most responsible for carving Hepburn’s chin-up, indomitable image into our cinematic equivalent of Mt. Rushmore. In a breezy little book she wrote years later—“The Making of ‘The African Queen’ or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind”—Hepburn tells how after the first few scenes John Huston walked into her hut to say she was approaching the part all wrong, and to offer a suggestion. Play it like Mrs. Roosevelt, he told her: she felt she was ugly, and she always put on a smile to cover the ugliness or the worry about the ugliness, and to keep herself going. Hepburn calls this the most brilliant bit of direction she ever received.
The effect isn’t much apparent in her early prim and bothered scenes, which any number of actresses could have played. But when Rosie is freed from her inhibitions by the hazarding of dangers and lets out a hell-for-leather Jo March baritonal “Hip hip hooray!” accompanied by snorts of laughter, then her smile becomes a face-splitting dissolution into radiance, and something in Hepburn (at her most irremediably Hepburn) does evoke Mrs. Roosevelt—something that is clearly not a feint but a great compensatory gift for self-forgetting, for hands-on-the-world exuberance, which the actress in all her first-time Technicolor beauty would seem to bear no right to, and which makes her appear the happiest woman alive.
The movie took five exciting, exhausting, self-forgetful months to complete. When she returned home, she found that her father had remarried and that the entire record of her mother’s lifework in the suffrage and birth-control movements had been destroyed. No point in looking back. As for Tracy, he’d been making his softest pictures yet; at fifty, with “Father of the Bride,” he’d begun to move into papa-bear roles. Back in Hollywood, Hepburn fulfilled her last M-G-M commitment with him in “Pat and Mike,” a sports-division trifle off the old team rack—Cukor directing, Kanin and Ruth Gordon writing—and did not renew her contract. Instead, as Tracy settled down to “The Plymouth Adventure,” she went off to prepare for Shaw’s “The Millionairess” onstage in London. In the summer of 1952, she was playing there to rave reviews when Tracy arrived for a visit, accompanied by his new costar and latest paramour, the thirty-one-year-old Gene Tierney.
There were separate hotels and gossip and near-brushes at dinner. Tierney told people that Tracy was in love with her; Tierney’s mother told people that he was the most tormented man she’d ever met. Night after night, Hepburn’s performances were so overwrought and ranting that close observers worried for her health, while the Times admired “her ability to be violent in about twenty-five different ways.” The play was scheduled to move to New York, and she wrote to the head of the Theatre Guild, her old friend Lawrence Langner, that she thought she might be “cracking up.” It is apparent that by August a full-scale nervous breakdown was passing as a tour de force.
In September, Tracy went back to Hollywood and Hepburn spent several weeks recovering at Fenwick, but severe vocal problems—which she described as a sense of being strangled when she spoke—persisted through the play’s disastrous New York run that fall. At her lowest point, she checked into Presbyterian Hospital, whether to regain her voice or her emotional control isn’t clear, and the distinction may not be necessary.
After this, she cut a wider arc than ever around Hollywood, although she and Tracy were never out of touch. It was three years—and a different era—before she made another movie. The glorious strength of Rosie Sayer had survived a trip down a crocodile-infested river and a German gunboat attack, but no amount of pluck could see Hepburn through the American fifties with her dignity intact. The lush and rudely punishing “Summertime,” made in Venice in 1954, inaugurated a series of films that might be called Hepburn’s Spinster Cycle, in all of which an intelligent, middle-aged, and previously independent woman is reduced to desperation by her lack of a man; the old tacked-on endings were now the main event. The domestic reëngineering project of postwar America, shifting millions of women out of factories and offices and back to the kitchen, was still making full use of movies as propaganda. For all the wistfully Jamesian aura of “Summertime,” Hepburn’s new persona is a coup in the counter-revolution, a clear depiction of what flouting the rules would get you now: loneliness, a boring job, a few stolen moments with someone else’s husband, public humiliation, and a hairdo with little bows. It is a mark of how fine Hepburn’s performance is in “Summertime” that one can hardly bear to watch her.
From Venice she moved on to Australia, where she toured Shakespeare with the Old Vic. She was playing her first real Kate the Shrew when she got word that Tracy had become so drunk and unreasonable on his latest picture that he’d been fired. Clearly, he was unable to manage without her. And so, in late 1955, she returned to his side in Hollywood, and they took up much where they had left off; some say they were never closer. His career was soon flourishing again, and she took on films when his schedule allowed. Approaching fifty, she played two more plaintive spinsters, in “The Rainmaker” (1956) and “Desk Set” (1957)—the latter a near-complete inversion of “Woman of the Year”—and one all-devouring mother (“Suddenly, Last Summer,” 1959), after which she reputedly spat in the producer’s eye and shut down her movie career. She kept on with Shakespeare at three hundred and fifty dollars a week in Stratford, Connecticut, drawing large crowds and mixed reviews, living alone on the river and hoping Tracy would join her—she cooed to the press over what a great Macbeth he would be, since he was, after all, America’s presiding actor of genius. By 1960, her public activities were confined to sitting in on Tracy’s sets, calling out his praises and knitting.
She made a single exception when she was offered the role of Mary Tyrone, O’Neill’s magnificently tormented portrait of his mother, in Sidney Lumet’s film of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” (She tried to persuade Tracy to play opposite her, as the brilliant wreck of a drunken actor James Tyrone, but he said the fee was too small.) In the fall of 1961, she came to New York for three weeks of rehearsal and thirty-seven days of shooting, to make what many consider to be the crowning achievement of her career, and a few dissenting voices call a travesty.
Lumet’s film is choppy and strained and the actors rarely mesh, but in the circa-1912, hair-piled-high style of Mary, Hepburn is almost painfully ravishing—she really did become more beautiful as she aged, and her looks and her history here take on a kind of allegorical force. The elegant bones that were once the latest in chic now appear a Gothic cage, a reliquary for the martyred spirit staring out. The overfamiliar voice is harder to accept, but even her most actressy intonations may be taken for Mary’s attempt to hide her secrets behind girlish affectation. While it may justly be complained—as always—that Hepburn is too much Hepburn, by now that very fact adds to our emotion. When the sickled curve of her mouth or the lift of her head brings Jo March or Rosie Sayer or Alice Adams flashingly before our eyes, we register with fresh surprise the way that movies capture time. For we can actually see, in a person we have only just met—Mary Tyrone, a trusting girl who fell in love one spring and became a wraith of a wife—shades of bloom and loss not present even in the lines of O’Neill’s endlessly encompassing text.
Nothing was important enough to draw her to the screen again for five more years. Both her father and Tracy became ill during the filming of “Long Day’s Journey,” and when her father died, in November, 1962, she devoted herself to Tracy as a full-time aide, nurse, friend, lover, and nearly a wife—but for the presence of Louise. A tell-all Look feature in early 1962 seems not to have altered the situation. When Tracy suffered a pulmonary crisis in 1963, the two women took shifts at his hospital bedside, and Louise told reporters gathered out front that she expected her husband to be coming home any day. What bothered Hepburn most was that she seemed to believe it.
When Tracy returned home, to the cottage on Cukor’s estate where he had lived for years, Hepburn threw all her energies into his recovery. She said that she was completely happy then; she was needed, she was keeping him alive. By 1966, when Stanley Kramer came up with “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” as a vehicle for them both, Tracy’s health was so poor that he couldn’t be insured, and Kramer and Hepburn put their salaries in escrow, to repay costs if Tracy couldn’t finish the picture. A trouper, he lasted for fifteen days after the final shoot. He died in the early morning, in his cottage, and although he did not permit Hepburn to sleep in the room with him—she kept herself tethered nearby, with a cord attached to a bedside buzzer—she heard him walk to the kitchen, and then the crash of a cup, and then a thud. She was through the door in a flash, crouching down to take him in her arms, and there is a sense in her telling of this story in which the forty-six years of life between Tom’s death and this moment seems no more than a brief and troubling passage between Pietàs.
She moved her possessions out and then—annoyed with herself—back in again, before Louise arrived later that day. Face to face at last, the women bickered over which suit he would wear in the casket. The official fairy tale went into production two days after the funeral, when the Los Angeles Times called the Tracy-Hepburn films “a remarkable legacy of an association as beautiful and dignified as any this town has ever known.” Later that year, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” got reviews that excused themselves from being reviews: there was no criticism possible anymore for these two, we were so glad just to be in their presence again. Hepburn won her second Oscar for this film, thirty-four years after her first, and she went on to win two more, the all-time record: for “The Lion in Winter” (1968) and “On Golden Pond” (1981), a final Tracy movie, with Henry Fonda filling in as the old curmudgeon and Hepburn succeeding to the role of the saintly wife.
For the rest of her life, Hepburn spoke of Tracy as reverentially as she did of her mother and father. She frequently recalled their “twenty-seven years together in what was to me absolute bliss.” There was no other great love. Highly disconcerting, though, is her account of a flirtation—some time after Tracy’s death—with the screenwriter of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?,” William Rose, in which she swiftly elevates this handsome but childish and destructive man (to judge by her own transcribed conversations) to the status of a god among writers, a suffering giant of an artist beside whose talent she is a mere mouse, and thus meant to serve. The thoughts are familiar; only the name of the hero has changed. Hepburn herself came to write about Tracy: “One builds one’s own jail.” In looking back—and possibly all along, from the part of her that required someone to save—she recognized Tracy as a soul “in misery with life.” He was such a natural actor, she wrote in 1991, because he couldn’t bear living in himself. And there was “no one able to help him, really.” She concluded that she had never known him; she wasn’t entirely sure there was anyone to know.
The handcrafted jail—any sort of jail—makes an insupportable setting for scenes from the life of Katharine Hepburn. Her movies seem to tell us something not only different or better but truer. After Tracy’s death, she set herself back to work, with the same relentless energy she’d put into keeping him alive. Until well into her seventies, she took on role after role, indefatigable, a pronounced wobble just slipping in among her other fondly noted mannerisms. When movie projects were scarce, there were Broadway shows—she learned to sing, in a manner of speaking, for “Coco”—and gruelling national tours that no other star of her stature would have considered. There is a generation that knows her from a remake of “The Corn Is Green,” or as Warren Beatty’s aunt in a second remake of “Love Affair”—her last screen appearance, in 1994—or simply as a majestic but suspiciously lonely television talk-show guest, addressing her public just a bit more directly than she ever had in what may qualify as her finest late performances, with no story line and no director and no part left even to pretend to play but Katharine Hepburn.
The old question about whether she could act may not only not have an answer; it may not be the right question. “She does not enter into the leading character: she substitutes herself for it,” Shaw wrote of Sarah Bernhardt. And, if Hepburn showed us how Jo March and Eleanor of Aquitaine took their turns at playing Katharine Hepburn, the exchange seemed to involve no loss of scale or interest. Hepburn claimed that she was too content with herself as a person to be among the really great actors, too much the strong and happily unreflective product of her parents. There is some truth in this: the engine of the Hepburn machinery seems to have been a survival instinct in permanent overdrive, which is visible in the almost unhinged force that broke through the mediocrity of her early material, and which carried her through her uniquely Lazarus-like career. She overcame every obstacle—horror, failure, love, the endings of most of her movies—to provide us with a continually renewed image of the strength that such overcoming required. We held her close not because she could act but because of the insistent life that hummed through every taut and peremptory inch of her, and that we imagined to be as natural as breathing or winning for someone so easily, imperiously free. It was in making us believe in this that she may have been our greatest actress of all. ♦
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