Kate Remembered (25 page)

At the same time, Tracy complained that he had never known a woman who kept so many of her old flames ignited—aflicker if not in full blaze—as Hepburn. Leland Hayward periodically checked in with career advice; and after divorcing Margaret Sullavan, he said his losing Kate was the great regret in his life. George Stevens remained friendly with her; and almost until the end of his life, John Ford spoke of retiring to Ireland, taking Kate with him. Howard Hughes told Irene Selznick that he considered his inability to persuade Kate to marry him “the biggest mistake” in his life.

Hughes maintained contact with Hepburn up to the very last years of his life. Until then, he continued to telephone her. At first the calls were ostensibly about
The Philadelphia Story;
but he kept ringing long after there was no business to conduct. A decade later, for example, Kate suddenly found herself looking for temporary lodging in Los Angeles; and during one of their calls, Hughes recommended the former Charles Boyer house, which RKO had bought from the actor a few years earlier as part of the settlement in terminating his contract. It was sitting empty; and, because Hughes owned RKO at that time, technically, he owned the house. He also offered Kate free run of the RKO prop and furniture departments.

Early one evening in 1951, after most people at the studio had gone home, she showed up at the RKO warehouse. She was wandering down a long aisle, looking over some lamps and vases, she said, when she heard a familiar voice call her name. “Howard? Is that you?” she replied, as a hatted figure in khakis and a white shirt approached her, a figure who might easily have passed for a propman—looking ordinary in every way, except for the handkerchief he held close to his mouth in the dusty hall. They hugged and made small talk, then sat for a moment—she on a plain, wooden chair, he (Kate insisted this was true) on a gold-painted throne. “Howard,” she laughed, “I see you haven't lost your flair for the dramatic.”

Hughes asked if “everything was right” with her; and Hepburn said it was. She made it clear that both her career and her relationship with Tracy were on track. “There was nothing terribly dramatic about the meeting,” Kate recalled, “except that it happened at all, and that by then he was clearly becoming this eccentric figure. He was going around the bend, politically speaking, and, I suppose, in other ways as well. Very anti-Communist.”

Hepburn said they were happy to see each other; but, she added, “he seemed sad to me. I remember thinking there was something pathetic about the meeting, that he seemed so . . . detached,” she said, at last, reaching for the word. “Howard said I should just tell the warehouse supervisor what I wanted and that it would be delivered in the morning.” She thanked him, he left, and, said Kate, “That was the last time I saw him face to face.” They did continue to talk, with decreasing frequency; and she got reports of his increasing eccentricity through his doctor, Lawrence Chaffin. During one of Hughes's last calls, he asked Kate what time it was. “Four o'clock,” she said, drowsily looking at her clock. “Day or night?” he asked.

And why, “for Pete's sake,” Tracy kept asking Kate, was Luddy still in the picture? Like Hughes before him, Tracy didn't understand why this ex-husband still had the license to pop in on them in Fenwick and why Kate had never divorced him properly in a United States courthouse. “I didn't realize until then,” Kate later admitted, that “Luddy was a kind of a security blanket for me. And Spence made me see that keeping him in my life like that, I was leading him on. I was still being horribly selfish to him. Not letting him get on with his life.” In September 1942, Dr. Hepburn appeared in Superior Court in Hartford on behalf of his daughter, as a judge granted a divorce to Katharine and Ludlow Ogden Smith. Within months, Luddy had taken a second wife.

Only when the Theatre Guild applied its heaviest pressure—which included the threat of a lawsuit—did Hepburn agree to honor her vow to take
Without Love
to Broadway. Neither the play nor the critical response was especially good, but she played sixteen sold-out weeks to thunderous ovations. Increasingly, during those four months, Hepburn realized that the adulation of thousands of people did not mean as much to her as the adoration she sought from one man. Because of her growing devotion to Spencer Tracy, she did not set foot on a legitimate stage for the rest of the decade.

At one point, she thought she might retest the waters, by getting Tracy back to the theater. She arranged for him to meet playwright Robert Sherwood and accompanied him to the East Coast as he agreed to appear in a play at the war's end called
The Rugged Path.
But this overwrought and underthought drama about a newspaperman who goes into battle proved to be an unsatisfactory vehicle, despite Tracy's powerful central performance. He never appeared on stage again.

By then, Tracy considered himself a movie actor and nothing more. Benefiting from the number of stars in military service—Gable, Stewart, Fonda, and Tyrone Power, to name a few—he became one of the major attractions of the decade. He took the lead in at least one picture every year into the 1950s and maintained his following with such wartime efforts as
A Guy Named Joe, The Seventh Cross,
and
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.
Hepburn's output during the same period was a mere fraction of that, as she put her personal life—supporting the man she loved—ahead of her career, turning down many good roles along the way.

Her only appearance in all of 1943, for example, was a cameo in
Stage Door Canteen,
a fable of sorts about the sacrifices everybody was making for the war effort. It featured dozens of walk-ons, including Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Harpo Marx, and Ed Wynn. Hepburn was asked to deliver the morale-building moral of the film, a pep talk meant to inspire the junior hostesses at the canteen, to say nothing of the largely female audiences across the country. Her only film the next year was in
Dragon Seed,
based on Pearl S. Buck's bestselling novel. As Jade, a Chinese farmer's wife, her high cheekbones allowed her to look only slightly more Asiatic than her costars Walter Huston, Hurd Hatfield, Agnes Moorehead, and Aline MacMahon. In 1946 she appeared in a minor contemporary melodrama—directed by Vincente Minnelli and featuring Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum—called
Undercurrent.
And the next year she portrayed Clara Wieck Schumann opposite Paul Henreid and Robert Walker, as Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, in
Song of Love
—another of her lesser pictures. It is one of the few times Hepburn appeared as a mother in the movies, tending to a noisy brood of seven. In the film, she did, however, display genuine virtuosity at the piano, the result of months of practice at a keyboard.

Such was the baloney she sandwiched between her pictures with Spencer Tracy that decade. Even those pictures were mixed in quality. In an effort to recapture the magic that had brought them together in the first place, Hepburn got Tracy to appear in a film version of
Without Love.
Don Stewart, who had successfully translated two other Barry works to the screen for Hepburn, punched up the badinage of the script, knowing he had Hollywood's most skilful sparring partners delivering the lines. This rendition was diverting at best, rather silly and a little slow.

The next Tracy and Hepburn picture digressed even farther from the career path they had set for themselves.
The Sea of Grass,
based on a novel by Conrad Richter, was an intense domestic drama set against the plains of the New Mexico Territory. In the film, Hepburn leaves her rough-hewn cattle baron of a husband to have an affair in Denver with his rival, a lawyer played by Melvyn Douglas. “Nobody ever sets out to make a bad picture,” Kate later said of the experience. “We really believed in this. Or, at least, we believed we believed in it.” The project came, unfortunately, at a time when Tracy was drinking heavily, spending night after night wending his way from one Hollywood watering hole to another—The Trocadero, Ciro's, The Mocambo, The Players—until he'd pass out, somehow awakening in a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Kate felt working together might get him back on the straight and narrow. She was so eager for the opportunity—which would allow her to monitor his behavior at work as well as at home—she overlooked the fact that “the script just wasn't very good.”

Knowing a strong director can occasionally mask a weak script with a lot of style and scenery, producer Pan Berman hired the most promising young director on either coast, Elia Kazan—the enfant terrible from the Group Theatre who had recently triumphed in Hollywood with his film version of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Unfortunately, upon his arrival at MGM, “Gadg” (short for “Gadget,” a nickname he acquired in his youth because he had always been handy and useful, a fixer) Kazan learned that the gritty realism he had hoped to bring to this picture was being overruled. The studio had already decided on Walter Plunkett's fancy costumes and process-screen shots on a soundstage instead of playing scenes on location.

Rather than challenge authority—or quit—Kazan chose to settle into luxurious Malibu surroundings with his family. Before he even began shooting, he threw in the artistic towel and passively directed the piece, giving the studio exactly what it wanted and nothing more. He would return to New York ashamed of the job, only to proceed directly to the works for which he would become justly famous, such Broadway milestones as
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
Death of a Salesman
. Several years later, he would return to Hollywood with more artistic integrity, directing such bold films as
Gentleman's Agreement, Pinky, Viva Zapata!,
and
On the Water-front
. At the time, Hepburn was grateful just to be working with Tracy on a project that went so smoothly. But in retrospect, she said, “I wish Gadg had put up more of a fight. I argued with him plenty as it was, but he never really engaged . . . and for me that's part of the process of moviemaking. If he had, we'd have had a better picture.”

Kate was a lifelong liberal who publicly spoke out against the Communist witch-hunts in the late forties and early fifties; and one day, I had to ask how she felt about Elia Kazan's role as one of the most famous show-business personalities to “name names” during that period. “Look, I can't blame anyone for saying things so that he can keep working,” she said. “But when somebody says things that keep other people from working, he has crossed a line. Gadg did just that; and I always felt he could have found a way to move on with his career without hurting others. I felt he was a man of enormous talent but very little character. I felt that during
Sea of Grass,
and I was reminded of that experience during the Mc-Carthy period.”

The year after
The Sea of Grass,
Tracy and Hepburn reunited onscreen for more standard fare,
State of the Union.
Ironically, the project had not been intended for either of them. The picture, based on the Pulitzer Prize—winning play by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, was made by Liberty Films, a production company owned in part by the movie's director, Frank Capra. In fact, Capra had envisioned reteaming his award-winning leads from his groundbreaking comedy
It Happened One Night.
Clark Gable was meant to play Grant Matthews, a Republican running for President; and Claudette Colbert was meant to play his estranged wife, Mary, who agrees to stand by his side to boost his chances. When she feels she has lost her husband altogether to a scheming newspaper heiress—masterfully played by Angela Lansbury—Mary blows her top at a dinner, haranguing the politicians present for surrendering their values. Nobody is more affected by her words than Grant. Upon realizing that he has forsaken everything he ever cared about, he withdraws from the race.

MGM would not make Gable available, but they eventually invested in Liberty Films and offered Spencer Tracy instead. Colbert was never thrilled with the material, and up until a few days before shooting was to begin, she threw several deal-breaking conditions at them—including her refusal ever to work after five in the afternoon.

At the eleventh hour, Hepburn stepped in. She announced that she was completely familiar with the script and was prepared to play the role at a moment's notice. “I thought it would be wonderful to work with Capra,” she said, “and I'd get to work with Spence again.” More to the point, she had seen Tracy preparing himself psychologically for the part, and she feared his disappointment if it were scrapped. Sensing his anxiety, Hepburn felt the downtime would send him around the bend. Hepburn called Colbert, whom she liked on- and off-screen, and said, “Look, Claudette, you should know that they're about to replace you in this picture.” Colbert said, “Kate, you're welcome to it.”

The film plays to this day—with Hepburn's first name misspelled as “Katherine” in the credits—as a hybrid. The style of sentimental and patriotic “Capra-corn” never completely meshed with the more sophisticated Tracy-Hepburn banter. While the film won no prizes, it reminded audiences then that no two movie actors performed better in tandem than Tracy and Hepburn. The public came to consider it an event whenever they partnered; and
State of the Union
reminded the stars that romantic comedy was their long suit.

With that in mind, Hepburn and Tracy sprang to new heights the next year, in their sixth picture together, again under the direction of George Cukor.
Adam's Rib
is the story of a feminist attorney defending a dumb blonde who has shot her philandering husband. She finds herself coming up against her husband, a bright assistant district attorney who has been assigned to prosecute the case. The script—by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon—crackled with repartee in both the bedroom and the courtroom and included some feminist arguments that sound progressive fifty years later. Hepburn, in her early forties, and Tracy, almost fifty, continued to “look good together,” as Kate said. Because every line they uttered had been perfectly pitched to their key, they seemed to be providing glimpses of their off-camera life. Occasional unscripted improvisational moments—nicknames, swats on the backside, funny looks at each other—did exactly that. In so doing, Tracy and Hepburn became iconic as a twosome—smart, successful, supportive, and still sexy.