Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg

Author:A. Scott Berg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

VIII

Guess Who Game to Dinner

After she had worked twenty-five years as an actor—an astronomical twenty of them as a movie star—the next decade and a half proved to be the most intense in Katharine Hepburn’s life and career. Spencer Tracy remained the focus of her attention and the locus of her activity, but she did not spend the fifties shackled to him. She continued to meet his demands, usually serving him before he had to request; she anxiously continued to guard against his drinking and clean up after him when she had not been vigilant; and she did admit to falling asleep one night in the hallway outside the Beverly Hills Hotel room in which he had passed out and from which he had thrown her out. That much, she felt, her love demanded she render. But there she drew the line.

During the next decade Katharine Hepburn also traveled farther—geographically and artistically—than she had at any other time in her life, extending herself physically and emotionally. If anything, the strength of her then decade-long union with Tracy only emboldened her to meet new professional challenges. Practically every role she undertook during this period held greater significance for her than its predecessor.

Maybe I’ve seen Born Yesterday too many times—in which bully Harry Brock slaps his dizzy mistress, Billie Dawn, thereby knocking sense into her; but I got a feeling that Hepburn saw the light the night Tracy struck her. Between 1950 and 1962, as most of the female movie stars of Hepburn’s age were being put out to pasture, her choices grew increasingly purposeful; and her work in that period remains at the heart of her vast legacy. Ironically, the years in which she was most “married” proved to be the period in which she truly came into her own.

As You Like It closed for the summer of 1950, giving its star some time off before an autumn tour. She returned to Los Angeles and moved, at George Cukor’s suggestion, into Irene Selznick’s house in Beverly Hills, a beautiful estate complete with swimming pool, tennis court, projection room, and staff. Around that time, Hepburn also thought Cukor might play landlord himself, by allowing Spencer Tracy to move into his vacant guest cottage at the foot of his property, fronting on St. Ives Drive. The little house was completely without pretense, which she knew Tracy would appreciate. Kate cozied it up, though Tracy kept warning her, “Nothing fancy.” Because it was to be his place, she obeyed.

While living at Irene’s in true luxury, Hepburn received a call from a producer she had never met, a Polish-born “impresario” named Sam Spiegel. He had a few films to his credit; and Hollywood was full of his type—“Big talk. Big dreams. Big belly,” said Kate. He asked if she had read a novel by C. S. Forester (author of the Horatio Hornblower series) called The African Queen. The book was, by then, fifteen years old; and she had not. Spiegel said that he was working with John Huston in transporting it to the screen and that the female lead was ideal for her.

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