Independent spirit
Mark Steyn
Ktiharine Hepburn arrived in ollywood in 1932, to appear in A Bill Of Divorcement. She walked in and George Cukor showed her some sketches and she said, 'Well, I really don't think a well-bred English girl would wear anything like that.' Cukor said, 'Well, I think your dress stinks.'
Actors, never mind actresses, didn't do that 70 years ago. They do it too much now: every empty-headed pretty-boy thinks he knows best about motivation and dialogue and costumes. But Hepburn really did know and, at a time when even the biggest stars were content to be whoever their studios wanted them to be, she took charge of her own career and made the best of a not altogether promising hand. If you want to know what Hollywood and Broadway thought of Hepburn in the early days, dig out Stage Door (1937) and listen to Adolphe Menjou as the big producer: 'She's a rank amateur about as emotional as a fish and she's useless in the bargain. She questions everyone — the director, the writer, the actors. I don't see how this play is going to be anything but a flop.'
He's talking about 'Terry Russell', a pretentious society girl slumming in showbusiness, but Terry Russell is as autobiographical a role as Katharine Hepburn ever played. She did question everyone, and she was as emotional as a fish, running the gamut from A to B, as Dorothy Parker said of her. I'm not an emotional person,' says Terry in Stage Door.
'You will be when I get through with you,' says the producer. 'I'll mould you into one.'
'I don't want to be moulded,' says Terry. 'I believe in acting with my brain.'
She won her first Oscar for Morning Glory in 1933, and her Jo in Cukor's Little Women the same year has not been bettered. But the brain-acting pictures were pompous and painful, and her Mary, Queen of Scots in John Ford's Mary Of Scotland is really quite extraordinarily bad, the gamut of emotions not even running to B. The stage star who condescends to motion pictures is a familiar type, but the condescension has rarely been so unwarranted: the Alec Douglas-Home lockjaw, the Bryn Mawr accent transformed into caricature by the monotone delivery, a ponderous, mannered self-regard that seems to drag every scene. In 1935, she and Cukor made Sylvia Scarlett, a comedy nobody laughed at when they previewed it in San Pedro. After the screening, a contrite Cukor and Hepburn decided the way to make amends to their producer, RKO's Pandro Berman, was to offer to do another movie for him but take a big pay cut. He looked at them coolly and said, `So help me, I never want to work with either of you ever again.'
And that might have been that, had Hepburn not had the good sense to figure out what was the problem and how to, at the very least, mitigate it. Stage Door is a fascinating artefact, not just because it's got some very funny lines but because, if you simply pause the DVD in any of the group scenes, you see immediately what Hepburn's problem is. Her character is a stagestruck debutante who moves into theatrical lodgings, and what lodgings they are; the other struggling thesps include Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Eve Arden and a 17-year-old Ann Miller — all splendid archetypes of the Great American Girl in her various manifestations — sexy, funny, tart, spunky. You don't need to hear Hepburn's refined vowels to see she doesn't fit in. She reeks of class, which isn't an advantage in a democratic medium. Yes, she looks fabulous in those trademark pleated pants and, yes, they're great cheekbones, much better than Ginger's. But Ginger's fleshy blonde wisecracker is a viable Hollywood persona. 'Independence' and 'intelligence' are critic's words: to the moviegoer, they too often translate as sexless and detached.
In Stage Door, Hepburn sent up her own pretensions, reprising, for the play-withinthe-play, the lines from her 1933 Broadway flop The Lake: 'The calla lilies are in bloom again.' It's still a favourite speech with campy Hepburn impersonators, but no one ever did a better Hepburn impersonation than she gives here. She learned a big lesson: her Connecticut refinements played a lot better for laughs than they did straight, and they needed others to ameliorate some of the hard edges. Thereafter, she hardly ever put herself in the position of having to carry a movie. 'There's a magnificence in you,' Jimmy Stewart tells her in The Philadelphia Story, a play she commissioned. 'You're lit from within.' But we see it because it's reflected through his laconic charm, or through Spencer Tracy's easygoing bit of Irish rough, or through Humphrey Bogart, or John Wayne, or the various other halves of what become a familiar uptown girl/downtown guy doubleact. She became loved because of the men who loved her. And thus the great paradox: a woman admired for her strength and independence was more dependent on her co-stars than most of her contemporaries.
Who knows what she made of that. The independence was chiefly off-screen and in later life — the game old gal I once saw bundled up like a bag lady and browsing in a Connecticut antique shop. Her autobiography, Me. is hilariously vain, to the point where you begin to see why Pandro Berman thought she was such a hopeless case. Was she cold? I wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of the phone call Mrs Spencer Tracy got the night her husband died at Kate's place: 'I presume you know who I am,' said Hepburn briskly. 'Spencer is dead.' On screen, they were sophisticated and adult. Off-camera, it sounds sadder and make-do — the difference between Hollywood and life.
She made 38 films in 40 years, which is nothing compared to the volume her contemporaries cranked out at RKO and MGM in those days. But the comedies she made in the decade after Bringing Up Baby (1938) are among the best of the golden age. And by the time she won her final Oscar for On Golden Pond half-a-century later, Katharine Hepburn had proved you could have a Hollywood career on your own terms and outlast all the stars who did as they were told.
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