Kate Remembered (12 page)

Waiting for Hollywood's latest arrivals were two men who had become Kate's West Coast agents, Leland Hayward and Myron Selznick, David's brother. Laura Harding immediately recognized the former, one of the most urbane men in show business, a handsome swain she had known from her debutante days in Manhattan. The other was long considered one of Hollywood's liveliest characters, not the handsomest man in town but certainly one of the most amusing. Kate delighted in retelling what she later heard he had said when she stepped off the train: “Jesus, they're paying fifteen hundred dollars a week for that!”

Before Kate could explain her swollen red eye enough for them to see the urgency in getting her to a doctor, they whisked her away in a Rolls-Royce to the RKO studios.
A Bill of Divorcement
was to start shooting in five days, and there was not a moment to lose, what with costume fittings, makeup tests, and rehearsals. She was immediately introduced to George Cukor, an excitable dynamo, who wasted no time in bringing out sketches of her wardrobe, which was already being run up. Determined to take on Hollywood on her own strict terms, the untried ingenue sniffed at the drawings and said, “No well-bred English girl would wear these clothes.” Without missing a beat, Cukor asked, “What do you think of what you're wearing?” Hepburn knew her outfit was “pretty goddamn queer-looking,” but said, “I think it's very smart.” Cukor said, “Well, I think it's ludicrous.” Touché. She liked him already.

As hairdressers and assistants and makeup artists popped in and out of the director's office, Kate kept trying to ask for a doctor. Then arrived “The Great Profile” himself—at that point in his career, as famous for his alcoholism and lechery as he was for his acting—to pay his respects and look over his young leading lady. With so many people milling about, Barrymore asked Miss Hepburn if they might speak privately. In the hall, he took her hands and spoke of her screen test. “My dear,” he enounced in his most actorly tones, “you're going to be a big star.” Then staring into her bloodshot eye and reaching into his coat pocket, he handed her a small vial and said, “I have the same problem. Take this. Two drops in each eye.” Kate protested that she was not hungover and insisted that she had something in her eye. With a wink and a smile, Barrymore said, “Yes, of course you do, my dear . . . that's two drops in each eye.”

Not until the end of the day was Kate able to get medical attention. A doctor pulled three steel filings from her eye, prescribed some painkillers, and gave her an eyepatch. When she dutifully appeared at the studio the next morning, still in pain and wearing her patch, Cukor took one look at her and asked, “What do you think we're making here? A pirate picture?”

The filming of
A Bill of Divorcement
began on July 9, 1932, and Kate took to the process immediately. “From the very beginning,” she said, “I found it a fascinating, romantic medium.” By the time she appeared before the cameras, her eye had healed. Other than trimming her hair and streamlining her eyebrows, the studio bosses ordered no changes in her appearance, though they suggested she tone down her voice to soften its metallic quality. The most drastic adjustment she made was one small but painful cosmetic operation she performed on herself. Two nights before shooting, she plucked all the hairs from her nose.

While Hepburn argued every possible reading of every line with George Cukor, she realized that she and her director were, in fact, generally of the same mind. When they were not, she saw that film allowed them the possibility of performing a different interpretation in each take. Stage actors who made films and talked about their “craft” and the difficulties adjusting their gestures and voices to the more intimate sets on soundstages would forever bore Hepburn. “It's pretty obvious you don't have to project if there's a camera three feet away and a microphone over your head.”

Strangely, she felt that John Barrymore, a twenty-year veteran of motion pictures, was not making any such adjustments. She had enough respect for the head of the American theater's royal family not to say anything; but she felt he knew he was overacting and that she was underreacting to his performance. He often asked Cukor if he could redo a scene; and, Hepburn later reflected, she thought a lot of those retakes were because “he somehow didn't want to disappoint me.”

Barrymore was out to make a good impression on everybody—especially the ingenue. “He was,” remembered Kate, “utterly incapable of letting a girl walk by without grabbing some part of her anatomy.” A simple slap on the wrist was generally enough to get his mind back to business. On one occasion, however, he would not settle down, and the novice became extremely distracted. “I'll never play another scene with you!” she screamed at him. To which the great Barrymore replied, “But, my dear, you never have.” A few days later, he asked if she might come to discuss another scene in his dressing room, a swank bachelor's apartment he had been given on the lot. She knocked on the door and upon entering discovered John Barrymore lying on the couch—which was made up with sheets and a blanket—his head propped on the armrest. He was stark naked.

By the end of the picture, Hepburn felt the pathos of Barrymore's performance in the film matched that of his life. She thought he was as brilliant and charming an actor as she would ever meet, and just as tortured—a sad, lonely man. She found his portrayal of Hillary Fairfield, a shell shock victim who escapes from an insane asylum only to find his wife about to remarry, “really touching.”

Alongside his melodramatic school of acting, Hepburn's more naturalistic performance as his engaged daughter—who, fearing future insane children of her own, dismisses her fiance so that she might care for her father—has a quality that is at once both green and evergreen. George Cukor said she was like “a colt finding her legs” during the first weeks of the movie. By the end, he said, she had proved that she was “a thoroughbred.”

Hepburn's determination to succeed kept her focused on her work; and, at first, she eschewed any kind of social life in Hollywood. “I felt I had my own thing to do,” she said, “and I didn't want to compromise that.” She and Laura Harding rented a comfortable house up in Franklin Canyon that one of Laura's society friends had found for them. Another of his friends, a conservatively dressed Mrs. Fairbanks, called on them one day, inviting the two young women to dinner. Kate begged off, insisting that she never went out to dinner while she was in the middle of production. After Mrs. Fairbanks left, an appalled Laura Harding said, “Don't you know who you just snubbed?”

“Mrs. Fairbanks,” said Kate. “She didn't look very interesting to me. We're well out of it.”

“Maybe
you
are,” said Laura. “But that was Mary Pickford, and I would love to have dinner with her and Mr. Fairbanks!”

Fortunately, a second invitation to Pickfair arrived, which the Hollywood newcomers accepted. Kate got to sit next to Douglas Fairbanks and found him “completely charming”; Pickford proved to be even more interesting, downright shrewd, with “a real nose for business”; and dinner was every bit as grand as she imagined dinner with royalty was. The hosts ran a film afterward, and Kate was already looking forward to a return visit to the town's most prestigious address. “Oh, I thought I was absolutely fascinating that night,” Kate recalled, “chattering about this and that, and full of opinions on every subject.” Mrs. Fairbanks, evidently, didn't find Miss Hepburn remotely interesting. She never called again.

“For some reason or other,” Kate also remembered, “I was asked to visit the Hearst ranch—which would have been fascinating—and I said, ‘No.' Can you imagine anyone as dumb as that?”

Upon completion of photography of
A Bill of Divorcement,
Kate returned to New York. Then she and her husband embarked on a second honeymoon to Europe. “We traveled well together,” she recalled, in a way that suggested there was more politeness in the marriage than passion.
A Bill of Divorcement
was released little more than two months after shooting began—while Mr. and Mrs. Ludlow were in Austria—and it proved to be a great success for everybody involved. Many critics commented on the strangeness of both Hepburn's voice and appearance, but in the end most found her extremely appealing, different but attractive. For that, Hepburn credited one man.

“George Cukor
presented
me,” she said, practically every time the subject of her first movie came up. “He knew I was an odd creature to most audiences and that I would take some getting used to. And so, he
presented
me.” After her character first appears in the film—making a showy entrance, skittering down a set of stairs and dancing off in a man's arms—Cukor inserted a few shots that did nothing whatever to advance the story nor to deepen character. They were simply lingering shots of Hepburn, moments in which the audience could adjust to her and get acquainted with her. “So few modern directors have any theatrical background,” Hepburn said, “and so they have no sense of entrance, the importance of introducing somebody to the audience. Thank God George did. I don't think I'd've had a career without those few shots, just those few extra seconds of screen time.”

The studio publicity department certainly did its part to help promote her. But, as Hepburn later noted, “I bucked all that publicity stuff. I came back and started to read all these stories about myself, with quotations of things I never said, and, well, frankly, I just didn't give a damn. Since then I've never really taken any interest in what anybody writes about me.” From the start, she entered a false birthdate for herself into the public record—November eighth, her brother Tom's birthday; and she shaved two years off her age.

Kate returned to Hollywood alone, with RKO lining up one project after another for her to star in. The first was a film, based on a novel, called
Christopher Strong
. The material was extremely melodramatic, but several elements of the project appealed to her. She would play a fiercely independent aviatrix—not unlike Amelia Earhart, who was one of Hepburn's heroes, not just for her accomplishments but also for her style and attitude. The lady flyer falls in love with a married man, becomes pregnant, and then—according to the social dictates of the day—meets her death trying to break a world altitude record.

Another reason to appear in the film was the director—Dorothy Arzner, for all intents and purposes, the only female director in the business. Hepburn never completely understood why there were so few women directing; there were, after all, many women writing scenarios and editing film. For that, she did not blame the men who ran the studios so much as the women who chose not to challenge them. “It never occurred to me that I was a second-class citizen in Hollywood,” Hepburn later recounted, “—nor that women had to be.”

While
Christopher Strong
rather quickly crashed and burned, Hepburn garnered wonderful notices, securing her position as a headliner. That, the new star just as quickly realized, carried certain responsibilities. With even the smaller studios cranking out movies every month, some as many as two a week, Hepburn realized that if she wanted to remain at the head of the pack of actors, she would have to take charge of her career—to the extent of scouting and securing the best possible material for herself.

“I usually don't look through people's desks,” Hepburn told me one afternoon—somewhat disingenuously, I thought—“but one day I saw this thing on Pan Berman's desk.” The thing was a script called
Morning Glory,
which was based on a play by a popular writer named Zoë Akins, and Pandro S. Berman was a twenty-seven-year-old assistant to David Selznick, then starting his own prestigious career as a motion-picture producer. Hepburn had taken an immediate shine to him and simply walked off with the script, telling Berman's secretary that she would be back for her appointment with the producer.

“This must have been written for me,” she said to Berman when she returned to his office not two hours later. Few could deny her appropriateness for the part—that of a stagestruck girl from New England who comes to New York in quest of an acting career, stringing along a lover or two, then becoming an overnight sensation when she takes over for the star of a play who has walked out on opening night. No, Berman told her, it had been written, in fact, for Constance Bennett, a silent-screen actress who had just made a “comeback” at the age of twenty-seven in
What Price Hollywood?
(which George Cukor had directed just before
A Bill of Divorcement
). This film was to be directed by her costar, Lowell Sherman (who had successfully appeared as an actor in another work by Zoë Akins). “Hollywood was an even smaller town than Broadway,” Miss Hepburn realized. She spent the next several days meeting everybody connected to this production, talking up this “thrilling” screenplay . . . until she convinced them that she was “born to play this part.”

The company rehearsed for a week, then shot the entire film in seventeen days. And, Hepburn recalled, director Lowell Sherman never appeared on the set before nine-fifteen or after five-thirty. Although he was alcoholic and dying of cancer of the throat, Sherman put everything he had into this picture, keeping the entire cast (which included such veterans as C. Aubrey Smith and Adolphe Menjou) constantly engaged and amused. Hepburn's young romantic interest in the film was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., with whom she became close friends. Although it was ultimately cut from the picture, Hepburn and Fairbanks, Jr., performed the balcony scene from
Romeo and Juliet,
filming it before a small audience that included Doug's father and stepmother, the Fairbankses. Kate confessed it was one of the few times in her life that she had stage fright.