The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (189 page)

After that, she made
How to Steal a Million
(66, Wyler) and had a hit in
Two for the Road
(67, Donen), playing the wife of Albert Finney—a match of very different styles. She was very well cast as the blind girl in
Wait Until Dark
(67, Terence Young). Her marriage to Mel Ferrer ended a year later and she went into semiretirement: lovely still, and nostalgic, in
Robin and Marian
(76, Richard Lester) and in the awful
Bloodline
(79, Young).

In middle age, Hepburn gave far more time to charitable work than to movies, though she took modest roles in
They All Laughed
(81, Peter Bogdanovich);
Love Among Thieves
(87, Roger Young) on TV; and in
Always
(89, Steven Spielberg). The feeling of public loss at her death spoke to how fondly her look and her benevolence were remembered. Retrospectives had standing room only, and Audrey—in eyes, voice, and purity—rang as true as a small silver bell. The great women of the fifties had a character that is in short supply now.

Katharine Hepburn
, (1907–2003), b. Hartford, Connecticut
Survival alone might have enshrined Hepburn as one of the cinema’s greatest actresses, or characters. Add to that twelve Academy Award nominations and four Oscars, three of them when she was past sixty. She is so remarkable, she may have given the misleading impression that Hollywood is interested in old people. There was also the sentimental appeal of her long friendship offscreen (and the affectionate bantering on it) with Spencer Tracy.

She is no longer quite here (her health has been bad for several years), but it’s no wonder she is regarded with reverence. She has become an institution, claiming to be mystified that so many millions of strangers adore her. But she has avoided scandal and those eccentric flights of folly that beset so many elderly stars. When she came to do her autobiography, she took it for granted that we would know who
Me
was. The book was as brisk as a swim before breakfast, full of omissions and commissions, blissfully egocentric, and glowingly proud of her tomboy fondness for “strong” men like Tracy, George Stevens, John Ford, Howard Hughes, John Huston, and Louis B. Mayer (who never had a better champion). The book was bought by just about anyone who had two hours to read it. But maybe it changed Hepburn a little in our eyes. The vanity was breathtaking—from another age.

Hepburn was long regarded by Hollywood as an outsider, partly because she could not conceal her disdain or her healthy superiority. She did not work that much: after seventeen films in her first ten years, she made only twenty-one in the next thirty years. That sounds like discrimination, yet she made plenty of clinkers. It is likely that in the 1940s and 1950s she was hurt and perplexed that her best work so often confirmed her reputation as boxoffice poison. She smacked of class; her very voice rose above the mainstream, like a lace hem being lifted above mud. But there is something else: she had character, wit, intelligence, and moral being, and those things can seem cold and sexless on camera. She was most romantic when busy, doing things; not for her the passionate stillness of close-ups, rapt kissing, or worse. There are many women who like her just because she refused such “nonsense.” But the neglect had to do with her coldness, too. She is a true loner, someone who concentrates on herself.

The young Hepburn was a creature of enormous imaginative potency and showy breeding. It was said that she was not beautiful. Nonsense: she was ravishing despite thoroughbred features, a skinny body, and a deliberately, if not aggressively, emphasized Bryn Mawr accent. Her beauty grew out of her own belief in herself and from the viewer’s sense that she was living dangerously, exposing her own nerves and vulnerability along with her intelligence and sensibility. Like Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, she was a moral being, sometimes at odds with herself, deluded or mistaken, but able to correct herself out of a grave and resilient honesty. Nobody on the screen could be so funny and so moving in making a fool of herself, or so touching in reclaiming her dignity. That is why screwball comedy seemed in her hands one of Hollywood’s most civilized forms and it is why
Bringing Up Baby
is so serious a film—without ever losing the status of being one of the funniest.

Hepburn began in the theatre, without special success. But she attracted attention in 1932 in an updating of
Lysistrata
and went to RKO to play John Barrymore’s daughter in
A Bill of Divorcement
(32, George Cukor). Cukor had urged the studio to use her and he was to prove her most sympathetic director. She had fine notices, and followed it with the silly
Christopher Strong
(33, Dorothy Arzner); with
Morning Glory
(33, Lowell Sherman), and her first Oscar; and with Jo in
Little Women
(33, Cukor). Two poor films came next:
Spitfire
(34, John Cromwell) and
The Little Minister
(34, Richard Wallace). But she was brilliant in
Alice Adams
(35, George Stevens) and in
Sylvia Scarlett
(35, Cukor) masqueraded as a boy—the androgyny of Hepburn is still only a hint, and it got short shrift in
Me
. She drooped again with
Break of Hearts
(35, Philip Moeller);
Mary of Scotland
(36, John Ford); and
A Woman Rebels
(36, Mark Sandrich). Then came four classics in a row:
Quality Street
(37, Stevens);
Stage Door
(37, Gregory La Cava);
Bringing Up Baby
(38, Howard Hawks); and
Holiday
(38, Cukor). It is worth noting that in two of these four her costar was Cary Grant, an actor who stimulated her on screen rather more fruitfully than Tracy.

Bringing Up Baby
was her last film at RKO, chiefly because the studio was at a loss as to how to make her popular. Hepburn herself urged that the play
Holiday
(by Philip Barry), which she had understudied onstage, be sold, complete with Cukor, to Columbia. When Selznick made up his mind not to use her as Scarlett O’Hara (because she couldn’t convey the sex, he said), Hepburn commissioned a new play from Barry (using money from Howard Hughes), played in it on Broadway, and then wrapped it up for MGM with herself and Cukor. The studio wisely added Grant and James Stewart and made
The Philadelphia Story
(40). For all the success of that film, MGM were unwilling to sign her up, and only in 1942, after
Woman of the Year
(42, Stevens), did they put her under contract. No wonder, for her edge, beauty, and intimacy in that film are still breathtaking.

That was her first film with Tracy. From the start, it was clear that despite the surface snap between them, they had a mellowing effect on one another. Whatever went on between them offscreen, onscreen they had an unspoken agreement about being grownup, above and beyond it. She aged, perhaps to match him, and became a shade motherly where once she had been as emotionally aflame as Rosalind. Most of the comedies with Tracy are marvelous, tender, and warm, but those with Grant had been more penetrating and dangerous. In addition, she made fewer films:
Keeper of the Flame
(43, Cukor), with Tracy again;
Stage Door Canteen
(43, Frank Borzage);
Dragon Seed
(44, Jack Conway and Harold S. Bucquet), a piece of Oriental nonsense;
Without Love
(45, Bucquet), another Barry comedy with Tracy;
Undercurrent
(46, Vincente Minnelli), an odd, psychological drama with Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum, striking but not convincing;
Song of Love
(47, Clarence Brown) as Clara Schumann; and
The Sea of Grass
(47, Elia Kazan) with Tracy.

It was now that her films came at longer intervals. She made
State of the Union
(48, Frank Capra) and
Adam’s Rib
(49, Cukor), with Tracy, the latter written for them by Garson Kanin. She tried Rosalind (too late) in New York and came back to play in
The African Queen
(52, John Huston), essentially a character part, easy for her and unrevealing, but a great hit. Indeed, her films edged closer to soft, comfortable answers.
Pat and Mike
(52, Cukor) was good, but
Summertime
(55, David Lean) was a women’s picture of a cautious sentimentality that would not have fooled the girl of the 1930s. Crazily, she was with Bob Hope in the awful
The Iron Petticoat
(56, Ralph Thomas) and played a caricature spinster in
The Rainmaker
(56, Joseph Anthony).
Desk Set
(57, Walter Lang), with Tracy, was very poor and suggested that Hepburn was more interested in the several classical theatrical roles she took on during the 1950s. She played the devouring mother in
Suddenly, Last Summer
(59, Joseph L. Mankiewicz), and it was clear that she now acted where once she had existed. In 1962 she played the mother in
Long Day’s Journey into Night
(62, Sidney Lumet), the best of her late performances, histrionic and tragic but not as moving as many of the earlier ones.

For five years she was in virtual retirement, but in 1967 she made
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
(Stanley Kramer), a drab movie, Tracy’s last, for which she received an Oscar—as if a maudlin computer had gone wrong. Another Oscar next year for
The Lion in Winter
(Anthony Harvey), an implausible piece of medievalism. After that, as well as playing
Coco
on stage she was in two more prestigious but irrelevant films:
The Madwoman of Chaillot
(69, Bryan Forbes) and
The Trojan Women
(71, Michael Cacoyannis). Sadly, in 1972, she stepped out of George Cukor’s
Travels with My Aunt
, and was replaced by Maggie Smith. Graham Greene’s aunt might have been made for her, from the family that produced those late 1930s heroines who dragged appalled men through disaster. In 1975 she appeared in the film of Edward Albee’s
A Delicate Balance
(Tony Richardson), and with John Wayne in
Rooster Cogburn
.

It was a pleasure to see her on TV with Laurence Olivier in
Love Among the Ruins
(75, Cukor); far less than pleasure to watch her in Cukor’s TV version of
The Corn Is Green;
and bewildering that she could be tempted by
Olly, Olly, Oxen Free
(78, Richard A. Colla).

She rallied for
On Golden Pond
(81, Mark Rydell), winning her twelfth nomination and her fourth Oscar—both records. In later years, her enormously vigorous constitution and her even more robust attitude were somewhat reduced by illness. But she worked from time to time—in the bizarre
The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley
(85, Harvey); in
Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry
(86, George Schaefer); and in
Laura Lansing Slept Here
. Her best work has not dated a fraction of an inch: from 1932 to 1945, she had it in her to be the most interesting, difficult, challenging woman in American pictures. Why? I’d guess it has to do with her confusion, for she loved movies while disapproving of them.

Bernard Herrmann
(1911–75), b. New York
The author pleads guilty to any charge that “subsidiary” arts have been poorly treated in this book. I have yielded here and there to pressures from the best organized lobby, that of screenwriters, even if I know how bitter so many writers feel, not just at their treatment in movies, but at the medium as a whole. Yes, scripts and writers are hugely important—and yet, beyond that, writers are feeble bystanders (and many of them know it). I willingly agree that some photographers are masters. Yet I stand by the notion that photography itself is more the miracle than what individuals do with it. And the best cameramen know how many millions can take good pictures. So, as it happens, I feel rather guiltier about having omitted designers and composers—above all, composers.

It is in the nature of movies to be melodramatic. They need just you and the night and the music, and there was music long before there were sound tracks. There is an extraordinary skill or trick in writing snatches of music that enhance the mood and life of a film. And there is art in making music a raft on which the whole movie may sail away. If I begin to examine my memory of movies, I am amazed at how far sound is the key. And great movie music always harmonizes with the voices and the sound effects: was the sound of arrows at Agincourt in
Henry V
Olivier and/or William Walton, and when did feathers in the air become music?

Nearly every great composer is left out of this book. There is no Erich Wolfgang Korngold, with transcendent flourishes as men ride through the forest in
The Adventures of Robin Hood
(38, Michael Curtiz and William Keighley). I cannot detail the joy in following Max Steiner, and hearing chords of alarm carried over from
King Kong
(33, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack) to
The Big Sleep
(46, Howard Hawks). I would need pages to recount the mock grandeur of Dimitri Tiomkin in
Duel in the Sun
(47, King Vidor) and the true grandeur in
Red River
(48, Hawks)—both exactly right for the films in question. How could
Rebecca, Sunset Boulevard
, or
Rear Window
be what they are without Franz Waxman, or have that same level of secret menace? For years I have listened to Michel Legrand’s score for
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
(63, Jacques Demy), and I know that Demy would not be as great a director without Legrand. I could and should add Maurice Jaubert (for Vigo) and Miklos Rozsa (for
Spellbound
and
Lust for Life
).

One should add all those composers whose music comes by the yard and the mile, illustrious names with a hundred credits each, and so plain that they prove how nearly
any
music works in the dark with any film. I will not mention that army of the night by name, except to say that (apart from Walt Disney) the person who has won the most Oscars in the history of the Academy is composer Alfred Newman (1901–70). He won for these films:
Alexander’s Ragtime Band; Tin Pan Alley; The Song of Bernadette; Mother Wore Tights; With a Song in My Heart; Call Me Madam; Love Is a Many Splendored Thing; The King and I;
and
Camelot
.