Kate Remembered (28 page)

Hepburn's performance would have done her mother proud. Critics in London (and later in New York, when the Theatre Guild brought the production to Broadway) agreed that
The Millionairess
was second-rate Shaw and that Hepburn often worked too hard playing to the second balcony. But nobody denied that it was an entertaining, often thrilling, tour de force. Audiences raved.

Spencer Tracy brooded. Not only was he in one of the few sloughs in his career—slogging through several forgettable pictures—but, once again, he felt abandoned. George Cukor told me that “whenever Kate was gone, he was like a sulky little boy.” During Hepburn's run in
The Millionairess
and his filming
The Plymouth Adventure,
a lugubrious look at the Pilgrims coming over on
The Mayflower,
he indulged in an affair with his leading lady, Gene Tierney, the haunting star of
Laura
and one of the most stunning faces ever to appear onscreen.

Kate never mentioned the Gene Tierney affair to me, though others did. It obviously coincided with this new era in Hepburn's career, the start of their second decade together, when she seemed to be making up for lost time and lost parts. Hepburn was still prepared to sacrifice almost anything for Spencer Tracy; but she was not willing to throw in the towel on her career. She worked tirelessly, for example, with Preston Sturges—“truly brilliant man, unfortunately a terrible drinker”—trying to transcribe
The Millionairess
into a film. “I think he wrote one of the funniest scripts I have ever read,” Kate said, “a real gem.” But even after agreeing to work for nothing and to pay Sturges out of her own pocket to direct, she couldn't find anybody to underwrite the project. “Here was a man who had directed a half dozen of the cleverest comedies ever made, and in his mid-fifties, nobody would hire him,” Kate said. “And let's face it,” she added, “this was another rough patch in my career. People liked me enough when I had a picture out there, but studios were courting a new generation of stars”—Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn (who was not a relation), to name a few. At the same time, Joan Crawford was scrambling for parts in a few anemic melodramas; and after
All About Eve
in 1950, Bette Davis found herself in but nine pictures for the rest of the decade, her former output for a typical year or two in her heyday.
The Millionairess
would not become a film until 1960, when Sophia Loren would play the lead opposite Peter Sellers, in a bastardization that bore virtually no resemblance to anything Shaw ever wrote.

Tracy revived his career by going to Arizona for what would become an Oscar-nominated performance in a provocative film called
Bad Day at Black Rock.
Around that same time, Hepburn realized that there was a way to bring balance to her life by remaining true to Tracy and being choosy about her work, selecting only important roles. In the summer of 1954, she went abroad again, this time to etch one of her most unforgettable performances.

David Lean, a former film editor who had graduated to directing
Brief Encounter, Great Expectations,
and
Oliver Twist,
was in Venice making a contemporary drama, largely his own adaptation of Arthur Laurents's play
The Time of the Cuckoo
. Retitled
Summertime
(
Summer Madness
in Great Britain), it tells the story of Jane Hudson, a middle-aged spinster from the Midwest, who has packed all her romantic hopes up for a holiday in Venice. There she falls in love with a shopkeeper, only to learn that he is married and has several children. He leads her past her inhibitions, enough to spend a few days of passion together on the nearby isle of Burano. In time, she realizes their relationship is finite, that she must return home; but she is a changed woman.

Much of the film is David Lean's valentine to Venice, stunning shots of canals and bridges and the glories of the Piazza di San Marco. But the city never outshines its star. Weaving through the most gorgeous movie set in the world, Lean also photographed Katharine Hepburn—lonely at first, later in love—in ways nobody had before. Almost fifty, there were times she looked her age—still beautiful, but not glamorized—with lines on her face, her hair unfashionably pulled back, with scarcely a touch of makeup. Because Lean was a perfectionist about the composition of every frame of his pictures, Hepburn had never felt more challenged by a director, often having only a moment, in which a cloud was about to blow over or the sun would be ducking between buildings, in which to reach some acting crescendo.

Lean's direction made Hepburn feel safe enough to plumb previously unexplored depths. Her performance as Jane Hudson is the most neurasthenic but naturalistic she ever gave. Before a setting sun, when she speaks of love with her inamorato—suavely played by Rossano Brazzi—her voice displays a vulnerability and raw sexuality never heard before. In our conversations, Hepburn always seemed slightly uncomfortable talking about this picture, self-conscious; she got embarrassed whenever I noted that her performance stood apart from the rest of her work. Upon my suggesting that of all her roles, this one might have been the most self-revealing, Kate quickly diverted the conversation, crediting her director for her characterization. “I've never worked with anybody in my entire career who understood film, really understood it, the feel of it, better than David,” Kate said. “I honestly think film editors, whose senses are so alive to the impact of the images, make the best directors.”

Or Kate would retell the most famous chestnut about the making of
Summertime,
the story of the scene in which Jane Hudson, taking a home movie, falls backwards into a canal. The Venetian waterways were, of course, famously polluted; and Hepburn took every precaution before shooting the scene, putting lotion all over her body and even antiseptic unguents on a small cut on one of her fingers. As soon as Lean got his shot, she immediately bathed and gargled with disinfectant. But it never occurred to her to wash out her eyes; and the next morning the whites had turned crimson. A staph infection plagued her for the rest of her life, causing her to tear. “But it's a cute moment,” Kate said, “—fun,” as though that made it all worthwhile. Hepburn's performance earned her sixth Academy Award nomination, but that year's Oscar went to Anna Magnani, in
The Rose Tattoo,
who was a few years Kate's junior. The other nominees that year—Susan Hayward, Jennifer Jones, and Eleanor Parker—were all ten to fifteen years younger.

During Hepburn's absence, Tracy's behavior reverted to its most self-destructive. In preparing to work on a picture that would later be called
Tribute to a Bad Man,
he had a brief but not-so-private affair with his intended costar, Grace Kelly. Instead of running back to him, Hepburn kept pursuing her career. She spent the summer of 1955 in Australia with her friend Robert Helpmann and the Old Vic Company performing
Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew,
and
The Merchant of Venice
—earning serious plaudits. Shortly after shooting began on
Tribute to a Bad Man,
Tracy went missing in action. While he was still off on a drunken tear, the studio replaced him with James Cagney.

After her Australian tour—which theatergoers there remembered with enormous fondness a half century later—Hepburn felt ready to come home. “I suppose I had to prove something—to myself,” Kate later reflected. “I felt I had reached out as an actress and felt more fulfilled. And so I wanted to reach out to Spence. I knew that he had to help himself, but I also knew that I could help him too—once I had fortified myself.” Having been more apart than together in the last few years, Hepburn privately vowed from then on to share their lives as much as the vagaries of show business would allow. Having climbed her own personal summit, she went on location with Tracy to the French Alps, where he filmed
The Mountain
with Robert Wagner. When the film was being completed on the Paramount backlot, Hepburn again felt it was safe to accept what became another of her trademark roles, in a Paramount picture shooting on a neighboring stage.

Not unlike her part in
Summertime,
Lizzie Curry in N. Richard Nash's hit play
The Rainmaker
is a spinster. She lives with her father and two brothers on a drought-plagued farm in the South-west. Enter Starbuck, a conman who promises to make rain for the vast sum of $100. Although Lizzie resists Starbuck's charms at first, and discourages her father from buying into the scheme, she gradually succumbs to him, becoming a more fulfilled woman for it.

Starbuck was played by Burt Lancaster, then the hottest actor in town. He had recently taken Hollywood by storm in
Come Back, Little Sheba, From Here to Eternity, The Rose Tattoo
, and
Trapeze.
His own independent production company had produced the Best Picture of 1955,
Marty.
Kate found him “a most peculiar man, full of unexpected rushes of energy” and felt she never connected with him. But that blind acceptance fit right into her role. She received another Oscar nomination, clearly finding a place in the hearts of Academy members, critics, and the public in playing love-starved spinsters.

“Did you have a maiden aunt in mind when you took on these roles?” I asked Kate one day during a walk in Fenwick.

“Well, of course, there was my aunt Edith,” she said, “but I wasn't playing her. With Lizzie Curry and Jane Hudson and Rosie Sayer—I was playing me. It was never difficult for me to play those women . . . because I'm the maiden aunt.”

In the midst of this third flowering in her career, Hepburn got snookered into what she would always consider the worst film on her resume. Spencer Tracy discreetly accompanied her to London, where Bobby Helpmann had induced her into costarring with him in a film called
The Iron Petticoat.
It was a knockoff of “Ninotchka,” with Hepburn playing a coldhearted captain in the Russian Air Force who spars with an American pilot about communism, only to warm up to the comforts of capitalism. Her leading man was to be Bob Hope!

Hepburn knew that going in; but with a script by Ben Hecht that was witty enough, she felt safe. She did not know that Bob Hope was, as she later recounted, “the biggest egomaniac with whom I have worked in my entire life.” Nor did she know that he would immediately turn the picture “into his cheap vaudeville act with me as his stooge.” Hope brought in his own team of writers to punch up his lines, and he shamelessly ad-libbed. “I had been sold a false bill of goods,” Kate explained. “I was told that this was not going to be a typical Bob Hope movie, that he wanted to appear in a contemporary comedy. That proved not to be the case.” Kate claimed never to have seen the finished product.

She atoned for her sin by accompanying Tracy to Cuba, where he was to film
The Old Man and the Sea
for director Fred Zinnemann. Before the production team was summoned home to Hollywood, under the helm of a different director, John Sturges, Hepburn and Tracy were able to squeeze in some pleasant vacation time together. Although she never cared much for restaurants, gambling, or clubs, she allowed herself to go out on the town with Tracy and sample Havana's nightlife. By day, they both painted a lot, with Kate taking up watercolors. For all the sincerity of Tracy's performance in the film, it proved to be a sluggish exercise, taking almost as long to watch as to read the book.

So upon its completion, it came as something of a relief when Twentieth Century—Fox asked Tracy and Hepburn to reteam. The vehicle they had in mind was a tepid reworking by Henry and Phoebe Ephron of a play called
The Desk Set,
to be directed by one of Fox's contract directors. It meant the stars could work together again for the first time in five years in their most public-pleasing genre—romantic comedy.

Desk Set
was the story of Bunny Watson, the know-it-all head of the reference department of a large television network who comes up against Richard Sumner, the inventor of a huge electronic brain, which is about to render Bunny and her colleagues obsolete. In the end, humanity prevails, and Bunny winds up in Sumner's arms. It was a hybrid of the early Tracy-Hepburn films and the later Hepburn-as-spinster films—appearing, as she does once again, with her hair pulled back and pinned up tight. As such, Desk Set is little more than an amiable one hundred minutes of romantic comedy, with a moral that addressed a new fear of its time, that of machines taking the jobs of people. Hepburn was grateful for the opportunity to work with Tracy in an eighth film.

Most actors worry that each job will be their last. Spencer Tracy's deteriorating health offered good reason for him to believe as much. In his mid-fifties, he increasingly spoke of retirement, repeatedly saying, “I really don't need this anymore.” Intent upon looking after him, Hepburn knew such idleness would surely hasten his deterioration. She believed more than ever that work—the harder the better—was the essence of life. She kept an ear open for new projects for him; and she could not resist an invitation for herself. The Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, asked her to appear in
The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing
that summer. The great Yiddish actor Morris Carnovsky played Shylock to her Portia, and Alfred Drake played Benedick to her Beatrice. Even more than her deservedly good reviews, Katharine Hepburn continued to be the only Hollywood headliner of her day willing to risk her reputation by tackling Shakespeare.

Although Stratford was a short drive from Fenwick, Hepburn chose to live that summer in a red fishing shanty right on the Housatonic River. She remembered it as “the happiest summer of my life”—waking up at dawn to see the local fishermen, swimming in the river and biking through the country, performing Shakespeare to packed houses every night. During our weekend jaunts through Connecticut, we'd periodically drive by the site of the old shack and she would stare longingly at other little houses built on other rivers throughout the state. I knew she was remembering that summer of 1957. I realized that while she enjoyed the perquisites of fame and having more money than she ever needed, her supreme ambition was to be an actress, a player who took her work seriously and was appreciated.