Preface
Catch Her If You Can
In the first light of dawn, wearing wrinkled khakis and a floppy hat, Katharine Hepburn
charged up the hill from her bungalow. Without knocking, she rushed into the mansion of
her friend and favored director George Cukor and began invading his kitchen cabinets.
Alerted by pans crashing, Cukor’s assistant Charles Williamson hurried in to discover
what he took at first to be a bag lady: a small, sixtyish woman, arms loaded with flour,
unsweetened chocolate, and sugar. For a moment they regarded each other silently.
“I’m baking brownies,” Hepburn finally said, staring him down—Tracy Lord, Tess
Harding, Eleanor of Aquitaine, all defying him to scold. But Williamson expressed only
surprise that she was there at all. No one, not even Cukor, had known she was in town.
“Go ahead,” she said, shaking her finger, a smile crossing her face. “Try to figure me out.
You’ll never get it right. No one ever does.”
“She liked to keep people guessing,” said Williamson, remembering that day in the early
1970s as Hepburn scampered back down the hill, skirting Cukor’s famous pool and his
elaborate terraced gardens. With its imposing ivy-covered walls, the Cukor estate, high in
the Hollywood hills, offered the impregnability of a medieval castle. “Out in the world,
Hepburn was one thing,” said Williamson, “but at George’s, she was quite another. And
she liked people wondering which one was real.”
Whether baking brownies at six in the morning or cooking up publicity for a movie,
Katharine Hepburn always knew how to walk a fine line between reality and image.
Though she’d insist hype and hoopla had no place in her world, she was an expert at the
game she was playing. “Katharine Hepburn, public, private,” she mused, her eyes
twinkling on cue in All About Me, the 1993 documentary based on her life. “Can you tell
which is which? Sometimes I wonder myself.” She seemed to be daring us to find out,
throwing down the gauntlet, wondering if anyone was ever really going to give her a
chase.
For all her vaunted aversion to the trappings of movie stardom, Hepburn reveled in the
sport of celebrity. “I used to duck the press all the time, just for fun,” she said in 1992. “I
think it was sort of a game.” Indeed, “the more insulting the press was,” she admitted
elsewhere, “the more it stimulated me.” As early as 1933, one reporter observed that
Hepburn’s “whole attitude expressed one thing: ‘Try to find out anything about me.’” For
more than sixty years, that challenge never changed. “Catch me if you can,” she once
called out to a gang of newshounds—just the sort of competition that fired her spirit.
As I write these words in 2006, nearly four years after her death, the Hepburn legend
remains largely as she left it, as sacrosanct as Lady Liberty and perhaps as durable. It has
seemed enough to just stand back and admire, and certainly there is much that is
admirable about Katharine Hepburn. She was an exemplar of achievement, an American
cultural icon. Her very name conjures up indomitability, independence, Yankee common
sense, Emersonian self-reliance. Of all Hollywood’s female legends, only Marilyn
Monroe trumps her in terms of worldwide recognition. Yet Monroe’s name invokes
Victim; Hepburn’s, by contrast, stands for Survivor. Maverick. Champion.
Her passing on June 29, 2003, at the age of ninety-six, proved an unexpected media
sensation. A year later, the auction of her personal effects at Sotheby’s generated a whole
new cycle of publicity, with eleven thousand of the Hepburn faithful passing through in
five days. As the myth was merchandised, however, the more interesting woman behind
it risked being lost to history—without us even knowing it was happening. That’s
because, for decades, we had taken the myth at face value. The depth of our admiration
had convinced us that we knew the real Kate, that public and private were one and the
same.
“She starred in seven jillion movies,” the critic Mary McNamara wrote, “won all those
Oscars, but in the end, Katharine Hepburn was loved for her self, for being who she was.”
Who she was. The public really thought it knew. And therein lay her secret. The historian
Daniel Boorstin has written that the “most important question of our lives” is “what we
believe to be real.” Indeed, Hepburn’s herculean endurance depended upon our faith that
she was 100 percent authentic. We understood that other great stars might live behind a
manufactured public image. But Hepburn—Kate—was seen as thoroughly real. Her
defiantly iconoclastic persona was predicated on the belief that there was no image, that
she was beyond all that claptrap.
But how much of it was really true?
“She was very shrewd, very aware of everything when it came to her career and her
image,” said her friend the screenwriter James Prideaux. “There wasn’t much that Kate
wasn’t aware of. But then she was apt to turn around and declare she didn’t care what her
public image was.” Only “half of the time,” Prideaux said, would he take her at her word.
“So I’ve had control,” Hepburn admitted late in life, sitting in an old black leather swivel
chair in her New York house, her tennis-shoed feet up on a hassock. “And anyone who
has control is a fool if they don’t make the best of it.”
Most accounts of Hepburn’s life—books and articles—have been written by friends, fans,
or journalists who took the trip up the steep, narrow stairs of her town house in New
York’s Turtle Bay or drove out to her summer home in Fenwick, Connecticut. All her
biographers, accurately or not, have implied some kind of “cooperation” from the star.
After she died, it was the impression of some that A. Scott Berg, her most recent
chronicler, was putting the final polish on the legend as Hepburn wanted it told. Yet
Berg, admitting his lack of objectivity upfront, acknowledged in the introduction to Kate
Remembered (published immediately upon her death and offering a warm, witty, loving
account of their friendship) that the four-time Oscar winner merited a more thorough,
full-scale biography.
As a reporter and cultural historian, I have attempted to supply the book Berg describes. I
am a great admirer of Hepburn’s, but I was not a friend nor would I consider myself a
fan. Unlike other biographers, I do not begin my account with an in-person meeting with
the star. Instead of the living legend, I start with the relics she left behind.
On the day of her estate sale at Sotheby’s, I watched and listened as the bidding grew
frenzied. Auctioneers’ voices ratcheted higher; phones rang nonstop; Internet bidding
nearly shut down the servers. Some of the items being sold were exquisite. The diamond
and sapphire jardiniere brooch from Howard Hughes was estimated at $15,000, while the
true value of other artifacts was priceless: the purchase agreement for The Philadelphia
Story, telegrams between Hepburn and Hughes, the star’s first contract with RKO. But
many of the other lots on the block bordered on the absurd: rolled-up newspaper that she
used as hair curlers; a no trespassing sign; her (unsigned) Bloomingdale’s credit card.
“Look at Lot 647,” Scott Berg groaned to the press. “Her tennis shorts! That is crossing
the line.”
The faithful didn’t agree. “I’d love to bid on her wedding dress,” a New Yorker gushed.
“Can you imagine owning Katharine Hepburn’s wedding dress?”
It was, to look at it, nothing special: crushed velvet, cream colored, with gold embroidery
around the neck and a diamond pattern on the chest. Hepburn had worn it in 1928, when
she married Ludlow Ogden Smith, always a shadowy figure in previous accounts of her
life. Looking at the wedding dress, I couldn’t help but wonder about this young man
named Smith and his bride. The starting bid was $2,500, but the gown ended up selling
for more than ten times that amount.
Overall, $5.9 million was taken in. Sotheby’s would register more new clients with this
auction than any other. What was most surprising was the degree of devotion to someone
so long out of the limelight. “You would think,” observed one of Hepburn’s friends as we
passed the faithful clutching photographs from Bringing Up Baby and Adam’s Rib, “she
had been Princess Diana.”
Give or take Liz Taylor, Katharine Hepburn was the only great star of Hollywood’s
golden age to live into the twenty-first century. While she survived, no truly authentic
biography could be written. Few intimates would consent to interviews; those who did
were guided by the outlines of the myth she helped create. For as long as she lived, her
legend, with its wonderful tales of grit and ambition and luck and love—as well as its
omissions, obfuscations, and outright inventions—was scrupulously maintained.
But it’s time to take a second look at the legend. Katharine Hepburn was a critical figure
of the twentieth century, significant enough to truly understand and fully appreciate.
Many of her friends, family, and associates, previously committed to silence, have come
around to believing that a deeper portrait of Hepburn is both valuable and fitting. Here, in
these pages, for the first time, they tell their stories.
In addition, previously unavailable letters and private papers have been uncovered,
allowing me to consider the private Hepburn in a new light. A vast amount of new
reporting, new sources, and new ideas has gone into my attempt to bring to life a woman
whose truth lived behind the artifice of her seeming naturalness.
That is key. “Kate,” the figure the world thought it knew so well, was in fact a construct
hewn by the publicists, the media, and most especially by Katharine Houghton Hepburn
herself. In real life, she never thought of herself as “Kate,” but as “Kathy” or “Kath,” the
name she’d been called as a girl. “Kate” was for the public. Her public self was a
“creature,” she said, “this terrible character, Kate Hepburn, whom I’ve invented.” To a
Bryn Mawr class in the 1980s, she admitted, “I’m very different from the one everyone
seems to know. She’s a legend . . . I really don’t know her. I’m sort of like the man who
cleans the furnace. I just keep her going.”
Alongside her doppelgänger, the real woman lived 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.”
For such a creature, conventional biographies hold limited value. Accordingly, you will
not find here detailed plot synopses of films, descriptions of how scenes were shot, or
comparisons of the directing styles of Howard Hawks and George Stevens. All that’s
been done. (The films are all here, however, considered for the ways they shaped and
propelled the legend.) Neither should you expect a strict, linear chronology to progress
through these pages, nor anecdotes retold merely for form’s sake. No one needs another
biography that tells, yet again, how Spencer Tracy—or Joe Mankiewicz—or
somebody—promised to cut Hepburn down to size. I don’t want to rehash the familiar.
Rather, I think it’s time to move the camera in for a more intimate look at a woman who
beautifully sustained her singular grace notes for nearly seventy years. Possessed of an
unshakable faith in herself, her morality, and her worldview, she was venerated by a
public starved for heroes. In 1971, her friend and frequent screenwriter Garson Kanin
credited Hepburn’s endurance to the fact that “people know (magically, intuitively) that
she stands for something”—even if they had no clear idea just what that something was.
We forget that she wasn’t always so beloved. If anyone had predicted in 1939 that
Katharine Hepburn would one day be named by the American Film Institute as the
greatest movie star of all time, the laughter would have echoed through the heartland. In
the 1930s, Hepburn had alienated much of the public with her eccentric approach to
gender, sexuality, and stardom. She dressed in old clothes, wore no makeup, and drove
around in a truck. After a first halfhearted attempt, she refused subsequent efforts by
studio publicists to link her romantically with men. Instead, she spent her time with Laura
Harding, a Philadelphia heiress with whom she shared a house. Even worse, she spoke
out about politics, something never done by actors of the era, throwing her support to—of
all candidates—the socialist Upton Sinclair. All of this brought reams of bad press. By
the end of the decade, Hepburn was one of the most unpopular actresses in America.
What’s fascinating is that this figure, once reviled, could morph into such a heroine. After
all, she was never “one of us.” Born into the upper class (less “upper” than was
suggested), she had decidedly patrician tastes (“I’m a bit of a crêpe suzette”), was left of
center politically, and defied cherished norms such as marriage and a woman’s place in
society. Despite the insistence of her rapturous fans, she was never as beautiful as Greta
Garbo or Grace Kelly. Nor was there the sex appeal of Ava Gardner or Lana Turner. She
didn’t make headlines like Liz Taylor, didn’t bare her soul like Judy Garland. As an
actress, she didn’t have the power or range of Bette Davis.
Yet she survived them all—not only in years but in the public imagination. She became
“ingrained into the culture” in a way none of the others managed. “The Great Kate,” the
columnist Liz Smith wrote after Hepburn’s death, “was one star whose effect outstripped
even her acting career. Her influence for free-thinking, independence, woman’s rights,
common sense will reverberate for ages. We all owe her an all-American debt!”
The figure once called a snob, rumored to be a lesbian, and suspected of communism
became a symbol of true-blue, red-blooded Americana. The New York Times claimed in
1991 that Hepburn had a “face for Mount Rushmore.” At Hepburn’s death, the writer
Maureen Dowd linked her with Ronald Reagan as a symbol of the American character:
“They emanated a sense that they were royalty, even as they displayed a frontier ethic.”
The creation of this mythic Hepburn can be used as a mirror on how public identity is
constructed and maintained—“image craft,” as it has come to be called. Decades before
Hollywood publicists built reputations on their mastery of image craft, Hepburn had
extraordinary success with it all on her own. Within a couple of years after being labeled
box-office poison, she had engineered a triumphant comeback in The Philadelphia
Story—and from then on, she remained in firm control of her career and public image.
Nearly everything that would be written about her after that point would contain elements
of hagiography. Even when reviews for a film or play were not exactly glowing, most
critics found a way to remark on her admirable “real-life” qualities. The columnist Anna
Quindlen articulated the position Hepburn had come to occupy in the culture by the
1980s, when she called the actress not only “woman of the year” but “woman of a
lifetime.”
I don’t necessarily disagree. But hagiography has never been useful as a genre. In truth,
the real woman was every bit as fascinating as the legend. Far more sophisticated than
Kate made herself out to be—more worldy, more honest—the real Hepburn utilized a
shrewd understanding of the shifting zeitgeist to keep herself on top. Generations of
willing journalists provided able assistance, but the Hepburn legend was chiefly
maintained by none other than the lady herself. And so pervasive does this image of her
remain that, during interviews, I’d occasionally have to stop some of Kate’s closest
intimates and ask if they weren’t merely rattling the legend. They’d often stop, think, and
admit, red-faced, they were.
Indeed, some of these people were witnesses to that legend actually taking shape.
Michael Pearman, a friend of George Cukor’s and a canny observer of the celebrities of
his day, took me back in time to a night in December 1935. Across the high-gloss
parquetry floors of Cukor’s oval sitting room, Hepburn was anxiously pacing back and
forth, telling the director they needed to find some way to “cook it up.” They’d all just
come from the disastrous premiere of their infamous flop Sylvia Scarlett, in which Kate
spent most of the time masquerading as a boy. Pearman remembered how determined she
was to find a way out of the fiasco.
“Oh, George,” she said—pronouncing his name “Jo-udge”—“we’ve got to cook it up for
ourselves, really cook it up.”
“What she was saying,” Pearman said, remembering her pacing like a lioness, her red
hair flying, “was that they had an image problem and they had to fix it. They had to make
it up to the public somehow.”
Ever alert to such problems, Hepburn always knew how to “cook it up.” When the public
grew too suspicious of the sexual subversion of her early pictures, she came back in the
guise of the brittle Tracy Lord for an official upbraiding in The Philadelphia Story. That
much has been pointed out before. But this sort of reinvention became a recurring pattern.
No one ever seemed to notice, because Hepburn’s modus operandi was hidden in plain
sight, protected by the perception that she was free of spin, that she had no ulterior
motives, that stardom to her was a bore—“a bo-ah!”
Yet look closely and the various wanderings of her career take on new meaning. The
African Queen becomes not just a chance great script but a deliberate stab at
rehabilitation by Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and John Huston, all of whom had been
painted Red by Communist witch-hunters just a year before. Hepburn the Traitor was
supplanted by Hepburn the Patriot, who sails down a muddy river enduring hardships for
the glory of her country.
From iconic films like this, the public took images and melded them with ones from “real
life.” We saw Kate shoveling snow off the roof of her house in New York, swimming in
Long Island Sound in January, chopping firewood at the age of seventy-five. All this kept
up the fiction that the “reel life” and the “real life” Hepburn were one and the same.
Indeed, shortly before her death, a small book called Katharine Hepburn Once Said
offered “great lines to live by,” mixing quotes from interviews with lines from her films,
as if all were equally hers.
This conflation of public and private personae guaranteed that Hepburn was enshrined
like no other female movie star. While her contemporaries faded into obscurity, Kate
made the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. In 1996 she was named one of the one hundred
most influential women of all time, up there with Eleanor Roosevelt, Marie Curie, Joan
of Arc, and (I do not jest) the Virgin Mary. In a Reuters poll in 1999, Hepburn was
named the “greatest” film actress of the twentieth century, paired, fittingly, with that
other all-American, John Wayne.
“Cook it up” she certainly had.
Such durability, however, demands considerable flexibility. It’s striking just how many
reinventions of Kate there were. In the 1930s, she was the pants-wearing tomboy. In the
1940s, she became the career woman tamed by the love of a man (usually Spencer
Tracy). In the 1950s, after being savagely attacked by the anti-Communist smear
campaign, she became the upstanding (but lonesome) spinster. By the 1960s and 1970s,
gracefully sidestepping the grotesqueries of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Tallulah
Bankhead, she was rewarded with her final role: the wise grandmother, doling out sage
advice to the public.
The press—usually cast as her adversaries—were in fact eager accomplices in her
mythmaking. After a rough start, Kate learned how to tango with the fourth estate. She
might be photographed running from reporters, covering her face, but such coverage
always seemed to spike just when she needed it most, when a love affair with Leland
Hayward might distract from declining box office, or an airplane flight with Howard
Hughes might help promote a picture. Perhaps the most fascinating of Hepburn’s
relationships to chart—and all of them are uniquely compelling—was the one she had
with the press.
In fact, for all her talk about privacy, by the 1980s she was inviting practically any
reporter who knocked on her door inside to chat. Yet no matter how often she appeared in
magazines, television specials, and publicity for her memoirs, the fiction that Hepburn
was “notoriously private” retained currency, dutifully reiterated in nearly every profile.
To many in the media, the idea had become a joke, but it was reported nonetheless; the
legend was just too entrenched to go away. In truth, Hepburn was merchandising her
myth long before Sotheby’s ever put her hair curlers on the block.
Yet her story remained incomplete. Isolde needed her Tristram.
In 1986, almost eighty, her eye on history, Hepburn agreed to speak at a testimonial for
her longtime costar and reputed paramour Spencer Tracy. “I’ve decided to tell the world
Spence and I were lovers,” she told her astonished confidant, the costume designer Noel
Taylor. On several sheets of lined yellow paper, she’d written a letter to the deceased
Tracy in her famous scrawl, her letters as angular as she was, her words separated by
impatient dashes. (Garson Kanin once said he was giving her a box of commas,
semicolons, and periods for Christmas.) “Dear Spence,” Hepburn wrote. “Is it a nice long
rest you’re having? You know, I never believed you when you said you just couldn’t get
to sleep. That night when—oh, I don’t know, you felt so disturbed. And I said, Well, go
on in—go to bed. And I’ll lie on the floor and I’ll talk you to sleep. I’ll just talk and talk
and you’ll be so bored, you’re bound to drift off.”
So much left unsaid in that letter, yet so very much more implied. When she finished
reading, she asked Taylor what he thought. Remembering the moment, Hepburn’s old
friend laughed. “What do you say to Katharine Hepburn?” he asked. “You just say, ‘It’s
wonderful, Kate. Wonderful.’”
Another friend, James Prideaux, was also treated to a recitation of the letter. Prideaux
found himself shedding a tear even as he doubted the veracity of her words. “Never
underestimate Kate’s sense of drama,” he said. “She knew what to play up or play down,
and it was time to play Tracy up.”
Though Hepburn had at first been outraged by Kanin’s 1971 memoir Tracy and
Hepburn—which had filled the world in on all the supposedly true details of her starcrossed love affair with Spence—she would ultimately use it as a blueprint for her own
mythmaking. Before her appearance at the testimonial, her only mention of Tracy had
been as costar and friend. The public had respected her taste and silence, but had
embraced the romantic myth as spun by Kanin and others. By agreeing to speak at the
Tracy testimonial (which ended with Hepburn reading her letter to Spence in a filmed
tribute), she seemed finally prepared to give the public what it wanted: her verification
that the stories were true.
To her legend’s tough self-reliance she could now add another, more human, trait. She
had loved and lost. Hepburn the Indomitable now wanted us to believe that, around
Tracy, she’d been just another woman who had suffered the heartaches of romance. How
we loved learning that this old lioness in winter hadn’t been some stiff-collared cold fish.
In many ways, Kanin’s book had been a publicity godsend. As the screenwriter who
helped shape the Tracy-Hepburn team, who put the wisecracking dialogue into their
mouths for three classic films, Kanin had convinced the public that “Spence” and “Kate”
talked the same, lived the same, were the same in real life as we saw them in the movies.
With Kanin as her bible, Hepburn moved through the last two decades of her life
burnishing the legend.
Once again, she succeeded, brilliantly. At the Sotheby’s auction, a three-inch bronze
sculpture of Tracy’s head, made by Hepburn herself, brought about the fiercest bidding
war, selling for a whopping $316,000. (Toulouse-Lautrecs had gone for considerably
less.) No mere piece of amateur sculpture, the bust of Tracy was in fact a talisman of one
of the great love stories of the twentieth century. “Hollywood’s longest-running
extramarital affair,” wrote Frank Rich of the New York Times, “somehow transcended its
provenance in tabloid gossip to become the stuff of legendary romantic Americana.”
Hepburn’s promulgation of the Romance of Spence and Kate broke the ice that had
always surrounded her, and turned their relationship into a love fable for the ages. But
there was an unintended result, too. One more image was layered onto our perception of
Hepburn. Her supposed indulgence of Tracy’s alcoholism—a conclusion that couldn’t be
avoided as more stories emerged—led some columnists to question if Kate the Great had
actually been Kate the Great Enabler.
Yet by making Tracy so central to her story, Hepburn had created this dilemma for
herself. The image of a victimized Katharine Hepburn, wounded by Tracy’s alcoholism
and womanizing, threatened the integrity of the rest of her story. How could she still be
strong and independent if she was taking all this abuse? The solution she found was
simple. In her memoir and especially in the film All About Me, her eyes misty and her
chin quivering, she assured us that it had never been a sacrifice to bend her will to
Tracy’s, to put up with his faults. When you’re in love, that’s what you do. That’s how
she cooked it up, anyway.
Even writing those words, I’m resistant to the cynicism they project. Surely love does
have a place in Hepburn’s narrative, and I don’t doubt for a second that she really did
love Tracy. But I do question just how physical, and how constant, that love was.
Challenged on the authenticity of his portrait, Kanin later snapped, “I never said they
made love, did I?” He didn’t need to. The public filled in the blanks, and Hepburn didn’t
seem to mind.
In truth, she only started speaking out about Tracy after most of those who’d known them
together in their prime were dead: Cukor, Ruth Gordon, Chester Erskine, Joe Mankiewicz
(who had urged one Tracy biographer, “Don’t let Kate take the ball!”), Irene Selznick
(who, after watching Hepburn’s onstage tribute to Tracy in 1986, whispered, “What has
happened to Sister Kate?”), and, of course, Tracy’s wife, Louise. Only Kanin was still
alive, and he’d already said all he intended to say. Early on in my research, one of
Tracy’s old friends said to me, “If Spencer had lived longer than he did, and could see
what his relationship with Hepburn was made into, he wouldn’t have recognized it.”
Indeed, as I have documented in these pages, Hepburn and Tracy never lived together.
The “twenty-six years together” Hepburn often referred to were mostly spent apart,
separated by thousands of miles. For large segments of that time, they did not view
themselves as a couple, and neither—as letters document—did their close friends. No
matter the stories she told of “our house,” Hepburn did not make her home with Tracy
but rather within a community of women. Laura Harding, Emily Perkins, Constance
Collier, Eve March, Frances Rich, Phyllis Wilbourn, and finally Cynthia McFadden were
the ones to provide anchor, solace, and family.
Here is another of the minefields I have attempted to navigate. The women with whom
Hepburn associated were never conventionally married wives and mothers. Many were,
in fact, lesbian. Given the fact that Hepburn’s sexuality has been speculated about from
the beginning, any biographer who does not thoroughly consider the question is not doing
his or her job. Indeed, the impression of lesbianism that has always swirled around
Hepburn is encouraged by the fact that the men who populated her inner circle were
nearly all homosexual, from the 1930s to the 1990s. Striking, too, is the fact that, except
for Leland Hayward, all of the men with whom Hepburn was seriously romantically
linked left behind rumors of sexual ambiguity themselves.
For many of the people I spoke with, the question of Hepburn’s sexuality was the
elephant in the room that they tripped over, time and time again, picking themselves up
and dusting themselves off without ever admitting that they’d fallen. By avoiding the
subject or becoming anxious, they made the issue far more central than it needed to be,
though some, including Hepburn’s brother Bob, received the question with thoughtful
equanimity. Sexuality, of course, needs to be understood in context with the times. In
decades past, especially in Hepburn’s worldly circles, sexuality was far more fluid than it
is in today’s more rigidly defined, politically charged atmosphere. In such a context,
contemporary terminology is meaningless. There will be no labeling in this book. Rather,
I attempt to understand Hepburn’s sexuality the way I attempt to understand everything
else about her, as part of the larger narrative of her life and legend.
Yet it’s also time to take off the blinders. That Hepburn loved other women, that she
made her life with women, is a defining aspect of her story. It is, in fact, one of the most
important things one needs to understand about her. To ignore such a reality, either
through a determined act of will or through unconscious cultural myopia, is to squash
complexity and smooth over contradictions—not to mention fail to grasp the truth of both
Kate and Katharine Hepburn.
Taking her at her own word is far more useful than attempting to pin her with a modernday label. “When you come right down to it,” she said, “I haven’t lived life as a woman
at all. I’ve lived life as a man.” She said this, or variants thereof, numerous times.
Significantly, she saw herself as “the man who cleaned the furnace,” not the “woman,”
not the “person.” The automatic reaction is to agree: yes, she did live as a man. The sort
of fame and power that, in her day, came much more commonly to men than to women
made it possible for her to make her own choices and do as she pleased. Yet there’s
possibly more meaning in her words. Katharine Hepburn, who shaved her head and
renamed herself “Jimmy” at the age of ten, lived life as a man—a heterosexual man—not
just in terms of a man’s privilege but in the way a man sees, perceives, and interacts with
his world. She often spoke of herself as distinct from other women, as a completely
different sort of creature.
Seeing her from this vantage point explains so much: why, in the 1970s, such dissonance
existed between Hepburn and the women’s movement, the groundwork for which her
mother had so diligently laid six decades earlier. Why was Katharine the Younger so
lukewarm in her support? Why did she make statements insisting a woman could never
really have both a family and a career? “Don’t do them both,” she warned women on
Dick Cavett’s show in 1973, “because you just get split in half . . . You cannot have it
all.” Her words baffled and annoyed many feminists. In fact, the view she was
articulating was the perspective of a man—which is, fundamentally, how she saw herself.
Never simply a “liberated” woman who’d lived by her own rules, Hepburn was a figure
quite apart from the norm. “I’m a missing link,” she admitted to Cavett. “I don’t belong
anywhere.” Considered from this vantage point, her relationships with women might also
be better understood.
“Biography,” wrote Garson Kanin in Tracy and Hepburn, “is a field that requires delicate
expertise. How does one go about finding the needle of truth in the haystack of facts?” So
delicate did Kanin find the task that he didn’t even bother to try, giving himself the same
out Scott Berg took thirty years later, admitting to being “biased” and therefore incapable
of writing a “comprehensive biography” of Hepburn. Raising the flag of Rashomon,
Kanin even suggested that the pursuit of truth, at least as far as Hepburn was concerned,
was an impossibly confounding task. There might, he suggested, exist many equally valid
versions of her story.
In her later years, Hepburn tried to narrow it down to just one, lending her imprimatur to
two memoirs, three biographical documentaries, and all those interviews. She was “smart
and romantic enough,” the film historian and critic David Thomson said, “to do her own
stone tablets.” But in private (and fortunately tape-recorded) conversations, she admitted
she was much too “secretive” (in her peculiar pronunciation, she placed the accent on the
second syllable) to ever really tell the truth. “The interesting things which have happened
to me, which have made me go down this path . . . or take this turn,” she said, “I would
never tell anybody what those were. I really would never tell anybody.”
So she gave them a legend instead. To Dick Cavett she admitted she tended to
“embroider” the accounts she told of her life. Even as early as 1939, the mythology
surrounding her was plain. The New York Times observed that the stories about Hepburn
had grown to “proportions that would make didactic Aesop turn over in his Delphic
grave.” It’s why, in writing this book, if I could not find a primary source for a story, I
did not use it, no matter how many times it had been written before.
In fact, I was able to trace back many stories to a handful of seminal pieces that distilled
the legend in the public mind over the course of six decades. In all of these articles,
Hepburn had a hand. For example: Every account of her life has drawn extensively on a
five-part piece by Lupton Wilkinson that ran in late 1941 in the Saturday Evening Post. A
little digging, however, revealed that Hepburn steered the writer in the execution of the
final product. To use Wilkinson as bedrock, therefore, as so many Hepburn biographers
have done, becomes problematic. Wilkinson’s true usefulness is not in his “facts” but in
understanding the way he, and others like him, helped shape Hepburn’s legend.
Making the funhouse effect even funnier, it wasn’t just Hepburn’s chroniclers who
recycled the legend. The star could be found doing it herself. Though she claimed never
to read anything written about her, close friends said she always made sure to find out
what was being said. Sometimes the inventions of others found their way into her own
“memories.” Consider the nonsense tale of Hepburn insisting that Ludlow Ogden Smith
change his name to Ogden Ludlow so she wouldn’t be confused with the singer Kate
Smith. It originated in the gossip columns of the 1930s. But sixty years later, enough
writers had repeated it that Hepburn actually told the anecdote herself in the documentary
All About Me—as if it were true and she was divulging it for the first time.
Indeed, by the time of her death, a hodgepodge of anecdotes and myths had emerged that
passed for absolute truth. They were retold in her obituaries, acted out onstage,
showcased even on the Hollywood screen, making the circle complete. Cate Blanchett
was widely hailed for her portrayal of Hepburn in the film The Aviator for nailing Kate
“just right”—but what she really captured so flawlessly was the legend. Not without
reason did I ask myself at the outset of this project if it was even still possible, this late in
the game, to find my way back through the maze to where it all began.
The announcement that Hepburn’s papers had been given to the Margaret Herrick Library
at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences offered some hope, but the
continued delays in making them available eventually led me to proceed without them.
It’s possible the papers will be opened by the time this sees print, in which case they will
be incorporated into a second edition. However, I believe that this book can stand on its
own, secured by the ample new research I have conducted and the contributions of many
of Hepburn’s intimates. What the Hepburn papers contain is unknown; there may be
some wonderfully revelatory material, and there may not. To wait for the papers meant in
some ways waiting on Hepburn, as her estate was still determining the timetable. After
seventy years, I thought it was finally time to tell the story outside the star’s control.
And, as tricky as the maze has been, I think I found my way, re-creating Hepburn’s world
as a tool for understanding her. I didn’t so much need to re-create movie sets and
proscenium arches, the realm of previous biographies, but rather the private, inner circle
of Hepburn’s life and work. Famous friends and costars like Cary Grant and Lauren
Bacall, I quickly discovered, did not unlock her secrets. To penetrate such an elaborately
veiled life, I had to identify the people who truly mattered to her, and find in their less
carefully cloaked lives glimpses of Hepburn’s own truths. In this regard, the stories of
Alice Palache, Phelps Putnam, Jack Clarke, Ludlow Ogden Smith, Laura Harding,
Suzanne Steell, Eve March, Jane Loring, Frances Rich, Constance Collier, Irene
Selznick, Nancy Hamilton, David Eichler, Robert Helpmann, Michael Benthall, and
many others, as revealed through letters, wills, and the memories of their friends and
families, tell us much more about Hepburn than any of her more famous associates
could—with the notable exception of George Cukor, whose lifelong friendship and
mentorship are at the heart of this book.
Many have lamented that so many of Hepburn’s supporting cast is dead. It’s as if,
determined to make sure no one spoke out of turn, Hepburn waited until most of her
friends were gone before passing away herself. A few, like Fran Rich and Noel Taylor,
held on, and I am enormously grateful for their insights. I am also fortunate that, in
research for previous projects, I spoke with many who had some connection to Hepburn.
Some had worked with her; others, like Max Showalter, were personal friends. While at
the time their mentions of Hepburn seemed just a footnote to my studies, their
recollections proved invaluable when I turned to telling her life story. So many have
since died; their stories came just in time.
There may be a segment of the public, Kate’s loyal following, who will believe I am
attempting to tear down the legend. That is certainly not my intent. Much of what we’ve
believed about Hepburn is, in fact, true. She was independent, generous, frank, loyal,
committed to excellence. She could also be terribly narcissistic and obsessed with
fame—but she was also the little girl yearning for her father’s affection, the idealistic
child still hurt by being shunned for her family’s radical politics. No aspect of her
personality is less than fascinating. She lived according to the dictates of her times but
also as she chose, creating a private world and a public life in an environment where
almost no one manages either.
Indeed, understanding the fullness and complexity of Hepburn’s story should not detract
from what she has meant to people’s lives. Rather, it should do just the opposite. “We are
all interested in watching a skillful feat of magic,” Boorstin observed. “We are still more
interested in looking behind the scenes and seeing precisely how it was made to seem that
the lady was sawed in half.”
If this book helps us understand Hepburn better, to comprehend the place she has come to
occupy in the American mind—indeed, in the world’s—it will do so not by tearing down
and discarding the images of her we have come to treasure, but by gathering and
reassembling them into a new, more variegated, and, I hope, even more beautiful recreation. In this meeting and melding of perspectives from the past and the present, a
more satisfying and relevant understanding of Katharine Hepburn might be found for
these times.
I’m left recalling a story told to me by James Prideaux. He and Hepburn were leaving a
theater when he spied a group of photographers. Assuming Kate would want to duck
them, Prideaux gestured toward a rear exit. But Hepburn, despite being in her eighties
and no longer so spry, winked at him. Rubbing her hands together, she announced, “Let’s
go!”
In that moment Prideaux saw not an old lady but a young girl. After all these years, she
was still the daredevil. Out into the waiting photographers she charged, elbowing them
aside with lots of commands to “Move it, buster!” Prideaux laughed. “She was giving
them her very best impression of Katharine Hepburn, and she was loving every minute of
it.”
Catch me if you can, she always seemed to be saying. I don’t think she would have
minded one more round of the chase. Perhaps she might have even relished it. One final
story: As a young reporter for a now-defunct magazine in Hepburn’s hometown of
Hartford, I was assigned to write an article about her early years. She declined an
interview, but I pushed on, discovering in the old Hartford city directories her true birth
date, May 12, 1907, two years and several months earlier than the date she’d always
claimed. At this point, her memoir—which would finally admit the true date—had not
yet been published. So it was with some awkwardness that I wrote my story. When the
article appeared, I sent her a copy, along with a note hoping she didn’t mind my
revelation. Back came a typewritten note with just one line of response. “Dear William
Mann,” she wrote. “Good sleuthing.”
My hope is she would see this book the same way.