From the VFArchive: How Katherine Hepburn created the American icon known as 'Kate,' helping bury one of Hollywood's deepest secrets along the way.
wailing behind her, Kath Hepburn stepped from her car onto the West 15th Street pier in Manhattan. As she expected, the reporters were waiting for her. Only hours before, her agent, Leland Hayward, had called from Hollywood to say she'd won the Academy Award forBut if Hayward hoped the news might lift Kath's spirits, he was wrong; the Oscar had come too late. Kath and her friend Susan Steell were getting as far away from showbiz as they could.
In March 1934, Katharine Hepburn was not yet the formidable personage of our collective memory. Just six years out of college, faced with the first real test of her adult life, she was running away. She was still, at that point, too different, too proud, and too uncompromising to sacrifice her freedom to the games of stardom."If there was a moment when her Hollywood career might have ended," reflected her friend the actor Max Showalter,"it was then.
Then there were her movies—edgy and offbeat, glimpses of an alternative world where unmarried women held the upper hand. InHepburn, playing aviator Lady Cynthia Darrington, has an affair with a married man, and the picture's message seems to repudiate the whole idea of marriage. Billie Burke, playing the neglected wife of Hepburn's lover, sums up the movie's attitude:"Marriage and children make almost any woman old-fashioned and intolerant," she says.
Alongside her doppelgänger, the real woman existed uneasily."She couldn't live up to the image, even though she was the one who created it," observed her nephew Kuy Hepburn."She had a whole industry behind her, selling her. There was x amount of it that was her, and x amount that was created." From the start, Laura took charge of Hepburn's career. She designed Kath's wardrobe and negotiated with producers, directors, and—much to his annoyance— Leland Hayward. Not a few reporters wondered just what hold this Miss Harding had over Miss Hepburn. Once, Laura had answered an RKO official's demand to know who she was by declaring curtly,"Oh, tell her it's her husband.
But by 1934, as the political climate in Hollywood changed, Laura's presence was causing a lot of underground scuttlebutt. The arrival of Susan Steell, Hayward insisted, only made things worse. At least Laura was an elegant East Coast blueblood. Susan, the daughter of a scrappy New York journalist, was something else entirely.
Yet if Susan had been eager to traipse through Europe with her pal, she was quickly disappointed. On arrival, Kath immediately sought out Josephine Day Bennett, an old friend of her mother's then living in Paris. Bennett was a colorful figure, part of Ernest Hemingway's Parisian circle. While Kath's conversation with Bennett can only be guessed at, it seems to have offered her some much-needed clarity.
"Did you see trousers on any of the women in Paris?" one reporter asked. Kath smiled and shook her head no."Then did you wear them yourself while you were there?"How different her homecoming was. She posed this way and that for the cameras, and appeared to be in no hurry to get away. It all seemed so impromptu, yet these things never happen totally spontaneously.
Still, as the years passed, the real Katharine Hepburn kept coming back in one way or another to challenge the image. It seemed difficult, especially in the early years, for Hepburn to truly conform, particularly when the stakes were meaningful. It was politics, not sex, that led to her next image crisis.The 29,000 people crammed into Gilmore Stadium that foggy night in Los Angeles in May 1947 were getting restless."Wallace in '48!" they chanted.
She wasn't finished."Today," she continued,"Parnell Thomas... is engaged in a personally conducted smearing campaign. He is aided and abetted in this effort by a group of Hollywood super-patriots who call themselves the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. For myself, I want no part of their ideals or those of Mr. Thomas." The cheering lasted for a full five minutes.
At the time of the Gilmore Stadium speech, Hepburn had just turned 40.
She was never a Communist, though her sympathies certainly leaned leftward. What truly set Kate's blood boiling in the spring and summer of 1947 was the climate of increasing censorship, the attack on artistic freedom."I thought that somebody should make the speech and I thought that somebody should be me" is the way she'd remember explaining herself to Louis B. Mayer."I think the situation is idiotic and out of hand.
Enter Spencer Tracy, with a chance to repay the woman who had helped him get back on top. Tracy had been negotiating with Frank Capra to make a film calledbased on Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse's play about a crooked politician running for president who gets a lesson in values and morality from his estranged wife. Capra wanted Kate to play Spencer's wife, but by April she had opted out, with Claudette Colbert replacing her.
How much she knew about the deals on her behalf is debatable, but she'd already proved more than once before that she was amenable to compromise if it meant saving her career.titled"I'm No Communist"—Kate never offered any official disavowal of her political activity. In many ways,was all the statement she needed to make.
Initially, Hepburn was outraged that Kanin had written the book without her consent, but eventually, according to friends, she came to use the best-seller as a blueprint for her own mythmaking about her years with Tracy. Indeed, a source close to Kanin confirmed that the feud between Kate and Garson had thawed by the time of the Tracy testimonial in 1986. Kanin may even have helped her script her speech, since he was then certainly assisting her with her own memoir.
Kate's friend Robert Shaw, the television writer, saw the documentary on PBS and asked himself,"What is KateOn the one hand, Shaw said,"she was painting this romantic vision that wasn't the way it happened," and on the other"she was implying he was a tormented, pathetic drunk." Nonetheless, part of the image Kanin portrayed—Kate quietly putting up with Spencer's occasional bullying and insults—was quite real. Despite the fact that she continued close associations with women, Hepburn retained her longing for the kind of traditional male-female relationship she had witnessed between her parents. Her mother might have spent her days campaigning for a woman's right to vote, but every evening she made sure the table was set for her husband's dinner.
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