The Books: “Katharine Hepburn” (Barbara Leaming)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Katharine Hepburn, by Barbara Leaming

Barbara Leaming churns them out, man! This biography of Katharine Hepburn is so detailed it practically begins with the pilgrims in the Mayflower. Leaming saw (apparently) that one of the keys to Hepburn’s great success is the family from which she sprung – so the first, God, 8 chapters, focus on Hepburn’s grandparents and parents – mainly Hepburn’s extraordinary mother. It’s no secret that Hepburn was born into old-school New England stock – and Leaming goes into great detail with the characters of her parents – their personalities, their activism, their parenting skills (there’s a great story about Hepburn’s mother. There was an enormous hemlock tree in the front yard of the Hepburn home in Hartford. Kate loved to climb high up into the branches, and hang out up there. Peacefully. She loved it. Apparently, a neighbor in the next yard saw Kate perched up high, and called over to Kate’s mother: “Kate is up way too high!” Kate Hepburn’s mother replied, “Sh. Don’t scare Kate. She doesn’t know it’s dangerous.”

Her parents were unconventional and yet not at all Bohemian – an interesting mix at that time. Her mother was a suffragette, and a campaigner for birth control. The Hepburn children grew up in a busy affluent household, with lots of chatter, and lots of focus on accomplishments. The Hepburn girls were thoroughbreds, all of them. Katharine Hepburn’s brother Tom, however, was a tortured person – who killed himself. Katharine discovered his body, hanging in the garret. The family did not deal with it at all, according to Leaming (and many other sources). The pain was so great that they did whatever they could to block the whole thing out, especially Hepburn – who could not forget seeing him hanging there. I don’t know what Tom’s issue was – and Hepburn seems to have realized that something might have been “off” – but Hepburn’s parents created a wall of plausible deniability around them (a totally understandable reaction) – insisting that they did not see it coming. It really shattered the family.

Hepburn was not one of those starlets who seem to come from nowhere. She was not Marilyn Monroe, an orphan waif who needed to become a star – in order to make up for what she lacked in family. Hepburn’s family was dominant, and their house – Fenwick – in Connecticut – was an escape for her. The damn house literally floated away during the hurricane of 1938 … but they rebuilt in the same spot, only making it a little bit higher, to escape a hurricane in the future. When Hepburn was an old woman, she did maintain an apartment in New York, but she mainly lived out at Fenwick. This woman (unlike so many others in Hollywood) had ROOTS. That was part of her vaguely blueblood appeal.

Leaming’s style is slapdash, in my opinion. Paragraphs are sometimes one sentence long. She reports conversations word for word – as though they are fact (something that always is a red flag for me in biographies … how do you know they said that? Were you there??) The book was a NY Times bestseller – and there is much here to satisfy the more salacious crowd … but it’s mainly a portrait of a woman making her own way, making her own choices, and a woman to whom work was always paramount. I have my own theories about her relationship with Spencer Tracy – which I can’t base on anything except all the reading I’ve done and a gut feeling (which is, after all, worthless – because what do I know?) – but there is a part of Leaming that seems to take certain things at face value, and I’m not sure if that’s the correct approach here. There was so much publicity and management surrounding the Tracy-Hepburn romance … and it is difficult to separate the truth from the lie (or the elaboration). Especially because neither of them really talked about it. Tracy was notoriously silent on the matter (he had all this other stuff going on, being married, being an alcoholic, what a tortured man) … and Hepburn was, too. Even in her own autobiography, Tracy (as her lover) gets only a paragraph or two. She talked quite a bit about working with him, and the movies they did … but their love affair? The mouth is zipped. My theory (which, again, is worthless – so take it for what it’s worth, which is nothing) is that the love affair between them was mainly a platonic one … a sort of kindred spirit type thing … and that Hepburn saw the torture in Tracy and made it her business to shield him from the harsher realities of life, and to be his punching bag. Not literally, but emotionally. The stories of how he treated her are legendary – and enough people seem to corroborate it … and Hepburn took it. She writes in her book Me: “I have always known how to deal with cranky men.” Tracy was the crank to end all cranks … and I believe it gave Hepburn joy to make him laugh, let him be happy – if only for a moment … and she also protected him (until her death). Whatever he was, whatever he went through – she wouldn’t reveal it. But I never got a sex vibe from the two. More of a deep and enduring love – that can’t be explained or even talked about. And maybe it lasted so long because it had to be intermittent, because he had other obligations. After Tracy’s death, Tracy’s family reached out to Hepburn – and long-lasting friendships formed – with Tracy’s kids, his wife … (their affair had been an open secret – when Tracy died at Hepburn’s cottage, it was Hepburn who called Tracy’s wife to inform her) So it was obviously a complicated situation – but I believe that Hepburn was such a workaholic, and so damn ambitious – that any kind of conventional 24-hour relationship would not suit her. I mean, she dated Howard Hughes, for God’s sake. A man who would suddenly vanish for months on end without a word. No skin off Hepburn’s nose – she was BUSY. She couldn’t have a man who needed too much from her. On the flip side, Hepburn turned down work so that she could be with Spencer Tracy when he needed her. So who knows. None of us can know. One theory out there is that Hepburn was gay (perhaps Tracy was, too) – and the entire thing was a performance to shield them from the dreaded rumors of being “queer”. I think the evidence does point to Hepburn being, at least, bisexual … and I do think she loved Tracy … and it fed something in her, a wellspring, a part of her that needed to be nurturing and maternal … but it was always part-time, and that suited her, too. I don’t know. I’m just running my mouth off. I find the two of them fascinating – and the most interesting thing about them is NOT what was going on off-screen – but the chemistry they had on onscreen. I never EVER get sick of watching the two of them spar onscreen. Wonderful.

Another romance that Hepburn had was with famously crotchety director John Ford, he of the eyepatch, who directed her in Mary of Scotland. Hepburn, as she said, did very well with cranky men. She did not take the crankiness personally, she did not cower, she strolled right into the thick of it – and tried to make the crank laugh, or lighten up. More often than not, they did. She was irresistible that way. Ford was another tortured married Catholic … and an interesting thing about it is: Dudley Nichols, who wrote Bringing Up Baby, also wrote Mary of Scotland and had witnessed the Ford/Hepburn dynamic. John Ford would rage at her, and she would laugh in his face, until Ford broke down and he would laugh. Or Ford would stomp off in a temper tantrum, and Hepburn would breezily make a joke that would lighten the mood. It inspired Nichols. He based the dynamic of Susan and David in Bringing Up Baby – she with the careless breezy certainty of herself – and he with the cranky muttering – on John Ford and Katharine Hepburn.

The excerpt I chose today from this sprawling book has to do with John Ford and the filming of Mary of Scotland.

Don’t get me wrong – I did like the book … but it seemed rather, let’s see, lightweight to me – she also says the same thing 20 times in a row, using different words … It’s a characteristic of her writing that gets rather tiresome … Like: ONCE IS ENOUGH, LEAMING!! I say this as someone who does that as well in her writing – so I am prone to noticing it. She also seems to have an aversion to the word “said” – and tries to be creative – Kate “crows” and “barks” and “insists” and “roars” … To me, as a writer, I think you should not be afraid of just writing “she said”. Clean, simple, and not editorial. She just SAID it, she didn’t CROW it!!

I love the story about Ford telling Hepburn to direct one of the scenes in the film. Hepburn tells it too, in her book … it’s a great story.

Here’s the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Katharine Hepburn, by Barbara Leaming

Kate called John Ford wayward and odd, and loved him for those very qualities. He was the sort of man – she said – who played a joke on someone but didn’t wait for the outcome. Most people would stick around to watch the victim trip over the rope, but not Ford. Kate laughed that this characteristic, which seemed very Irish, had driven her absolutely mad.

In letter and private conversations, when they knew no one was listening, she called him Sean, the Irish version of his name. Kate always knew that no matter what she did, she would remain close to Sean’s heart. Yet she could never predict with certainty his reaction to anything.

She learned that their first day on the set of Mary of Scotland, February 25, 1936. Kate had a 9 a.m. call on Stage 9, but Ford had asked the company to assemble an hour before.

It was not Ford’s way to appear on a set and tell actors exactly what he wanted. Instead, he would gather cast members for coffee and conversation. After looking over the set for a few minutes, he might ask one of the actors to read a few lines informally. At this point, Ford never asked the actor to move here or there – just to read and get a feel for the material. Then he might ask another player to chime in; and then, when there was (in the words of John Wayne) “a good feeling about the scene,” Ford would summon the cameraman.

“What do you think about this?” Ford would say gently. “Run through it again, fellows.”

With only a work light, the actors would read the lines again. After consultation with the cameraman, Ford might make a few suggestions. Asked whether he could do something, an actor’s natural response was to say, “Sure.”

Working in this manner, Ford – who tended to throw out lines from the screenplay, and invent terse dialogue of his own – usually took about an hour to set up a scene.

Ford’s acute sensitivity notwithstanding, actors were terrified of him, and with good reason. He had a stiletto tongue. He was known to single out an actor and pick on him throughout a production. He was famous for reducing tough guys like Victor McLaglen and John Wayne to tears. In a flat voice, he would attack, mock, and humiliate actors until they groveled: “D’ya know, McLaglen, that Fox are paying you $1200 a week to do things that I can get any child off the street to do better?” Or he would roar through a megaphone: “When does your contract come up for renewal?” This appeared to be malice, but close friends saw it as painful insecurity; Ford had a need to test people.

Ford’s unwillingness to give specific instructions forced actors to hang on his every word and gesture. The dark glasses made him especially difficult to reaad. For all the camaraderie and good feeling, an undercurrent of fear permeated his sets. Actors waited for Ford to jump on them; not even a close personal friend was exempt from being designated his patsy. Actors who worshipped Ford – and most did – dreaded being “put on ice”; the slightest infraction on or off the set might cause him to ignore a man for years without explaining why.

Quite often, no one but Ford seemed to recognize the offense that caused a fellow to be banished. And no one could anticipate when Ford might acknowledge his presence again. Even a close friend like John Wayne once suffered that fate for reasons Wayne claimed not to comprehend. Ford, asked why he had put this or that man on ice, was likely to insist nothing of the sort had occurred. He enjoyed making people wonder.

With actresses he tended to be courtly and courteous; he affected a rare old-world formality. If a man used vulgar language in front of a woman, Ford, supersititous about such things, would instantly banish him from the set. Yet at times he could hardly conceal his own lack of pleasure in directing women. He was a man’s director and proud of it. He always seemed more comfortable with the boys.

Paradoxically, while actresses raved about Ford’s ability to practice a kind of thought transference, they found him hard to communicate with. His cutting, sarcastic manner frightened and intimidated even those against whom it was not overtly directly.

Kate Hepburn’s brash behavior that day was unprecedented on a Ford set. When the director arrived to prepare a scene in Mary of Scotland’s chambers, Kate, in a white neck ruff, was sitting with her feet up on a table, smoking an Irish clay pipe. She seemed to imitate Ford’s nervous manner of chewing on a pipe stem. All about her, the actresses who played the other Marys in the film – Mary Seton, Mary Livingston, Mary Beaton, and Mary Fleming – puffed on clay pipes of their own.

Ford appeared not to notice. To Kate’s perplexity and fascination, he pointedly ignored the little tableau she had arranged. Pipe smoke wafted through the set, but he said not a word about it.

Yet it did throw him.

“Now, I tell you what I want you to do in this first scene,” he began, most uncharacteristically. Anyone who had made a film with Ford before – and that excluded Kate – would have known he would never open a day’s work like that. Somehow Kate’s presence had altered his work rhythm. Accustomed to inspiring fear and awe in his actors, he seemed grimly intent on showing no response to her playful insurrection.

Eventually the pungent smoke made one actress sick, and she dashed off the set. Even then, Ford refused to mention it. Determined to provoke some reaction, Kate blithely pulled on her clay pipe long after the others had stopped. But by 6:05 p.m., when the day’s fifth scene was completed, not once had the director acknowledged the pipe-smoking Mary.

For all that, to those who had worked often with Ford and knew him best, he seemed a different man in Kate’s presence. Ordinarily, at lunchtime, he would disappear to a portable dressing room, where he took off his shirt, undid his belt, and snoozed for about forty-five minutes. Then a prop man would bring him a large dish of ice cream. But on Mary of Scotland, Ford regularly presided over a big noisy table in the RKO commissary. Kate, in jodhpurs, sat at his side.

They joked, sang, told stories, baited, teased, and insulted each other mercilessly. Ford and his group employed ridicule to test a man’s character. Cameraman Joe August, screenwriter Dudley Nichols, actor Harry Carey and other of Ford’s cronies treated Kate like one of the boys, and she appeared to love it.

“You’re a hell of a fine girl,” Ford assured her. “If you’d just learn to shut up and knuckle under you’d probably make somebody a nice wife.”

He watched her as though she were a little freckle-faced Irish girl. Kate’s fearlessness, her relish for trading barbs, enchanted him. He marveled that she could take abuse as well as dish it out. He loved that she was irreverent and violently opinionated. He respected her intelligence and thirst for knowledge about every aspect of filmmaking.

His usual formality with women disappeared. He seemed less guarded. He egged her on. He could not get enough of her chatter. He lapped up her perpetual optimism and enthusiasm.

When a woman in a picture hat and white gloves approached the table to shake Kate’s hand, Ford muttered, “So you won’t shake hands with me, eh?”

“I had a clean glove on,” said the visitor, a writer for one of the fan magazines.

Kate roared with delight: “I’ve been trying to think of a crack as mean as that for weeks!”

“Listen, Katharine,” said Ford, who appeared to have slept in his clothes. “I’ll play you a round of golf.”

“For a hundred dollars a hole!” Kate shot back.

“All right, for a hundred dollars a hole. And if you lose, you’ll agree to come to this studio at least one day dressed like a woman.”

“And if I win,” she countered, “will you agree to come to the studio at least one day dressed like a gentleman?”

Ford turned to the screenwriter. “Listen, Dudley, let’s put that unhappy ending back on this picture. Let’s behead the dame after all.”

“Yes, sir,” Nichols replied.

“And let’s do it right now!” said Ford.

Director and actress discovered that they shared a passion for golf. They both played very quickly; and before long, after a day’s filming they were regularly driving his dilapidated two-seater Ford roadster to the California Country Club. Ford detested the ostentation of a fancy car, and kept two sets of golf clubs in the rumble seat amid piles of script pages and eucalyptus leaves.

He adored Kate’s competitiveness. They both made a great game of their fierce rivalry on the golf course. He loved pretending to be furious when she beat him.

One afternoon, Ford was on the green in two and had a three-foot putt.

“You concede this!” he barked.

“Putt it out,” insisted Kate, never one to concede anything.

Ford glared at her – and missed. The ball rolled about a foot and a half beyond the cup. He tried to tap it back and missed again. Instead of a par, he got a double bogey.

The director picked up his putter and hurled it fifty or sixty feet.

“If I were you,” Kate crowed, “I’d use an overlapping grip to get those distances.”

He had enormous faith in her abilities. There was astonishment at RKO when Ford – notorious for his insistence on making every last artistic decision himself – encouraged Kate to direct a scene in Mary of Scotland. If anyone had doubted her impact on the man, Ford’s willingness to turn over the reins provided all the proof necessary.

It happened on Friday, April 10, 1936, when they were shooting the tower scene between Mary of Scotland and her lover, the Earl of Bothwell. Suddenly Ford cursed in exasperation: “This is a goddamn lousy scene!” He hated scenes with too much dialogue, and this had more than most. In such cases, his inclination was to rewrite – or rip out the pages and proceed as though they had never existed.

“Do you want to shoot it or just drop it out of the picture?” he asked Kate.

“It’s the best scene in the picture!” she challenged him.

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do.”

‘Well, if you like it so much, why don’t you shoot it?” he growled. Without another word, he retrieved his filthy old felt hat and marched off.

That had certainly never happened before; and at first, people had no idea how to react.

On the one hand, Kate figured Ford just wanted to call her bluff; on the other, she was very touched that he believed she could do it. In either case, it was vitally important that she direct the scene – and do it well. She turned to Joe August, who had worked with her on Sylvia Scarlett. An impish man who at times seemed almost totally inarticulate, his nickname was Quasimodo. In conversation, he tended to communicate with pantomime and sound effects rather than words. He had the reputation of being one of the best cameramen in the business.

“Joe, will you stay?” Kate implored.

He agreed, as did Fredric March; whereupon Kate directed for the first and last time in her career.