Kate Remembered

It was an early Sunday afternoon in April 1983—cold, windy, and rainy—and I had to return to New York City for a dinner engagement with a woman who over the preceding years had become one of my closest friends, Irene Mayer Selznick. Only a few hours earlier, Kate’s brother Bob had arrived from Hartford with his wife, Sue; and in the few seconds it had taken them to get from their car to the front door, they had gotten drenched.

While I had been enjoying myself with the charming doctor—“the sweetest man alive,” Kate often gushed, “an angel!”—and his well-read wife, I announced that I had to hit the road. After unsuccessfully arguing how “idiotic” it was for me to make the trip under such conditions, Kate said I should at least have the brains to take off my pants, then dash to the end of the driveway where my car was parked, and move the car to the garage . . . which I could then re-enter through the house after I had put on the pair of trousers that had been kept dry.

Of course, in the moment when I sprinted from the door to the car, the rain came down in sheets . . . and I could hear Kate howling with laughter. She met me at the back door to the garage with towels and said, “Now you’ve got to take off your pants, because you can’t drive for two hours in them.”

I sheepishly explained that this was the only pair of pants I had brought up for the weekend. Kate kindly said that would be no problem. She sent Phyllis on a mission to find a dry pair. “Go to Dick,” she said. “Or go to my closet. And if you can’t find anything there, bring him one of your dresses.”

Phyllis returned with a pair of faded yellow sweatpants that belonged to Dick, far more conservative than anything I imagined Dick owning, which I gratefully accepted. As I started to go upstairs to change, Kate said, “Oh Christ, just take off your pants right here.” Before I could even protest, she assured me, “Dad used to walk around the house without any clothes at all!”

“But he was your fa—” I started to sputter, when I suddenly realized that was even worse. When in Rome, I figured . . . and so I turned my back to my hostess and changed pants. “And you should probably change your shirt,” she added. I didn’t even argue, pulling a dry one from my bag.

“Now,” she said with a big smile, “you’re ready to go. Dinner tomorrow? Drinks at six.” She leaned over for a hug and my hearty thanks for the weekend. While I was saying goodbye to Phyllis and Bob and Sue, she called out for Dick, who descended from upstairs, wearing a pair of long underwear and a red nightcap. His ethereal friend Virginia Harrington followed.

“Because that’s what we do here,” she replied, as though I had asked the stupidest question in the world. Then she explained it was a ritual for coming and going, a code that she and Howard had devised years earlier. I said my farewells and drove off. And as I turned left out of the driveway, I beeped the old “one, two, one-two-three,” and looked to the front of the house. Through the rain I saw them all standing in the doorway, waving goodbye, Kate’s hands reaching out wide, reminding me of the last shot of her in Summertime.

The drive into the city took longer than usual because of the weather, but I used the time to replay in my mind the many scenes from the weekend, moments that seemed to come right out of You Can’t Take It with You, Hay Fever, and, on occasion, Long Day’s Journey into Night. I returned my rental car, and went to the Upper West Side brownstone of my former editor Thomas Congdon, and his wife, Connie, friends who had become a second family to me. Tom handed me a batch of phone messages—Myrna Loy, Sylvia Sidney, Joan Bennett, all of whom were consenting to interviews about Goldwyn. “And a Mrs. Lieberson,” he said. “You’re slipping,” he added. “I haven’t heard of her.”

“No,” I said, “but she’d interest you the most, because you love ballet, and Mrs. Lieberson is none other than Vera Zorina,” the former star of the New York City Ballet and a former wife of George Balanchine. “And not only that,” I said, “Sam Goldwyn was madly in love with her.”

“Don’t ask. I’ll tell you later.” I showered and changed and ran off to dinner. “And don’t wait up,” I suggested, “because I know I’ll be late.” I took a cab to the Hotel Pierre on Fifth Avenue at Sixty-first Street. The elevator operator brought me to the tenth floor, and at exactly seven, I walked to the door at the end of the corridor on the left, apartment 1007-10, and rang the doorbell.

Although nobody embodied as much Hollywood history as she, Irene Mayer Selznick was not too grand to answer her own door. The daughter of legendary film mogul Louis B. Mayer—the former junk dealer who soon parlayed his New England distributorship of films into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the mightiest film studio in history—and the wife of David O. Seiznick—the son of one of Mayer’s archrivals in the early movie business, a young studio mogul himself who quickly became the most celebrated producer of his day, forever remembered for Gone With the Wind—was a longtime resident of the hotel. Some years earlier, she had bought up several suites and combined them into one luxurious apartment overlooking Central Park. I don’t think she was more than five feet tall—with short dark hair in bangs and the shrewdest pair of eyes I have ever seen; and I know she was one of the most powerful presences I have ever beheld.

As if her lineage were not impressive enough, upon divorcing Selznick, Irene moved to New York and hung out her shingle as a theatrical producer. Her first effort was the landmark production of A Streetcar Named Desire, for which she harnessed the talents of Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, and a young Marlon Brando. She subsequently produced such hits as The Chalk Garden and Bell, Book and Candle. It would be less than precise to call Mrs. Selznick an extremely difficult person, but she was easily the most challenging I have ever met. One never let down one’s guard with Irene, unless looking to be knocked out or thrown out. Emotional, volatile, and analytical, she took nothing at face value, probing layers beneath layers in even the simplest matters.

I had by this evening known Irene Mayer Selznick for about five years. At the start of my research on Goldwyn, Sam Goldwyn, Jr., had said the most perceptive person I could possibly speak to about his father would be Irene Selznick; and, he added, she probably wouldn’t speak to me. So warned, I didn’t approach her until I had been researching for more than a year and could ask questions in an informed manner. Then I sent her a letter outlining my goals and included a copy of Max Perkins. A second letter announced that I would be coming to New York in the near future and if she could spare a few minutes it would be helpful to meet her. Several weeks passed before she called me in Los Angeles one night, after ten.

She was working on her memoirs, she said, and she had a few technical questions about “the merger” in 1924 of the Metro and Goldwyn companies. Could I possibly straighten out some of the dates for her and direct her to any documentation? We talked for more than an hour; and the next day I sent by overnight mail Xeroxes of a few relevant documents—providing answers I believed she already knew. The following night, at eleven, she telephoned again, inviting me to call upon her the next time I was in New York. Many long calls over the next few months ensued, during which time she had been diagnosed with cancer of the nose.

Before I arrived in New York, I heard from a mutual acquaintance that Mrs. Selznick was seeing nobody, having just undergone an operation in which half her nose was removed, as was some skin from her forehead to fashion a new one. I called her anyway, to wish her well, and she apologized for her inability to receive visitors. Five minutes later, she called back to say she had not seen anybody in ages, and as I didn’t know what she had looked like previously, I would not be shocked by any disfigurement. She clearly wanted company; and I seemed the perfect visitor—a friendly stranger. Could I see her after dinner that night? I packed a notepad in my jacket breast pocket.

Upon arriving at her apartment, she ushered me into a small library, where the lights had been turned down. I could still see fine, raw red marks between her eyebrows and down the bridge of her nose. She asked how I was getting along with the Goldwyn family, then slowly—and in a voice so low I had to strain to hear—she spewed details of the feud between her father and Sam Goldwyn. I sat there spellbound, too mesmerized to take notes. Once or twice I instinctively reached for my pen, but I hesitated before drawing it. A little after one in the morning, I said, “Mrs. Selznick, I feel you should be getting some rest.” She showed me to the door and said, “It’s a good thing you didn’t write anything down. If you come back for dinner tomorrow, I’ll let you take that pad out of your pocket.”

Over the next decade, we spent countless hours together—in person, when I was in New York, and on the telephone, when I was in Los Angeles, usually after her city had gone to sleep. Her insights about Goldwyn and Hollywood and even the world were invaluable; but she came to exert an even greater influence on me, leading me to dig constantly for deeper meanings. Her years undergoing professional analysis—to say nothing of her own insightful mind—and living with two of the most compulsive men in a community of severe personality disorders had taught her to look for the truths that lay beneath all the falsities of Hollywood. Everything had a subtext, Irene believed, an inner truth more interesting than anything the naked eye could see. She was always more interested in that which was unspoken, in all that was not said. For her, little was ever stated directly; every sentence was fraught with cryptic messages.

As a result, conversations were like chess matches—in which Irene was always thinking two moves ahead. During one of our midnight phone conversations, for example, her second phone rang. She said she had to take the call and would call me back. When she did call—a little after three in the morning in New York—she started by saying, “No, your name didn’t come up.” I was immediately meant to deduce that she had only one friend who called her at that hour—William S. Paley, whom I had recently interviewed. Another time, when I was in the midst of writing, she asked how the book was going. As I prepared to describe the “delicate stage” I was at, she simply asked, “Fenestration?” I didn’t quite grasp what she was saying, so I proceeded to explain how I had finished laying down the entire story, and had gone through it a second time, stuffing in as many facts as possible, and that I was about to go through it again, this time taking things out, letting in air, opening up windows. “Ah,” she said after my two-minute description, “fenestration.”

In the middle of one extremely intense late-night conversation in apartment 1007, a siren outside sounded, and she saw my eyes move toward the window and hold there one beat too long. “Well,” she said, “I just lost you. You were gone. We’ll pick up this story next time.”

“So, how did you get on with that brother?” Irene asked that wet Sunday night, not four hours after I had left Fenwick. We went into the cozy library, where we ritually sat for drinks. I went to the rear closet, next to an exquisite picture of a little girl by Mary Cassatt, and fetched a canister of thin wheat crackers, while she pulled from the refrigerator a crockery jar of herring and a chilled bottle. “Cary’s aquavit,” she always called it, a rare brand her longtime friend Mr. Grant had introduced to Irene years earlier. Because it apparently could not be obtained outside Sweden, he always kept her stocked with a case of it. “Oh, the chemistry,” she never failed to say in response to the initial reaction in our mouths of the herring with the wheat and the aquavit. After a few gentle moans of ecstasy, and a toast to Cary, she said, “You never told me you knew my friend Kate.”

I explained that until a week prior I had not known Katharine Hepburn but that over the last few days a friendship had instantly unfolded. I also told Irene that I knew that people in her position were often approached by writers in their efforts to get to more famous people; and though I knew of the close relationship between the two women, I never wanted Irene to think for a minute that that was why I had been spending so much time with her. (She had, for example, recently befriended a man whom she unmasked as someone who really wanted to meet Kitty Carlisle, the widow of Moss Hart.) Similarly, it had not been until my second day at Fenwick that I had told Kate of my friendship with Irene. This information had clearly prompted a call upon my departure, one that came after fifty years of ups and downs between them, a complex relationship in which each clearly admired the other despite diametrically opposed approaches to life.

After talking about Kate all through dinner and into the early morning, I realized I was about to become a Ping-Pong ball in a game of two experts who played hard and fast. Toward two, Irene got up from her chair, clasped my shoulder (rather melodramatically, I thought at first), and said, “You must go to her.”

“Kate has nobody,” Irene said, with a touch of pity in her voice, “nobody she can really talk to. She has spent so many years keeping people away, now nobody really comes around.” I said that sounded a little extreme, that she seemed to have an active social life, with people calling and knocking on her door all the time. “But nobody she can talk to,” said Irene, “certainly not that insane brother. Who’s still alive who knew George Cukor? Who knows who Grady Sutton is? Lowell Sherman? Dorothy Arzner? Everyone’s either dead or doesn’t know who they were when they were alive.”

In a low voice, she said that she loved Kate—“Sister Kate,” she signed her letters to Irene, referring to more than a popular song from their youths—and that the greatest favor she could now do for her friend was to present me to her. I said that I did not see the need for taking sides, that we were all friends here. But Irene said that Kate was quickly going to become even more insistent about her friendship with me, and that I must not fail her, that on those occasions when both would be calling, and I could respond to but one of them, I must “always be there for Kate.” Boy, I thought, sitting in her vast living room—with a stunning Matisse (looking all too much, I thought, like Jennifer Jones, David Selznick’s second wife)—there’s a lot written between these lines. As Irene showed me to the front door, she repeated, “Go to her.”

I did—the next night, for dinner . . . and the next few nights after that. The drill was generally the same, with Phyllis sitting with us through the meal, occasionally chiming in with some funny observation, then discreetly disappearing so that Kate and I could talk alone. The only part of the dinner routine at Hepburn’s that I didn’t enjoy was that she ate so fast. Sometimes I’d just be finishing my soup while she was impatiently waiting to move on to dessert. In an aside, I once quietly commented to Phyllis that I had heard that many people didn’t like dining at Schönbrunn Palace with the Emperor Franz Josef because he ate so fast, and the half-eaten servings of the guests were cleared as soon as the emperor had finished each course. “What are you two muttering over there?” Kate asked, never wanting to be excluded from any conversation. “Oh,” Phyllis explained, “Mr. Berg was just saying that he thinks of us as royalty.” To this day, I’m not sure how clever Phyllis was.

Indeed, Phyllis Wilbourn was born in England shortly after the turn of the century and trained as a nurse. Sometime in the twenties, the English actress Constance Collier, who was diabetic, decided to settle in America, and she wanted to take a full-time nurse to provide her daily injections of insulin. Phyllis took the job; and through Miss Collier got to know the entire British movie colony in Hollywood—including Ronald Colman, Noel Coward, and, most especially, Charlie Chaplin. Miss Collier—as Phyllis always referred to her—died in 1955. She left Phyllis some pieces of jewelry and furniture and some money, but not enough to insure the future of a middle-aged woman. “Miss Garbo wanted me to look after her,” Phyllis cheerily told me one night, “but then Miss Hepburn stepped in and swept me away, thank goodness.” I asked Phyllis what would have been wrong with looking after Greta Garbo, and Kate interrupted to say, “Oh Christ, I’m much more fun than Garbo.”

In time, I came to regard my dinners with Kate and Phyllis as my own personal production of Arsenic and Old Lace. These “two old spinsters”—Kate’s phrase, not mine—constantly bickered and amused each other, each looking out for the other in a way that was most touching. I can hardly recall an evening in which Kate did not comment—often in Phyllis’s presence—on how indispensable “Miss Phyllis” was to her existence, how she was a “blessing,” an “angel,” a “Godsend.” Periodically Kate reminded me to “speak up—because Phyllis is turning as deaf as a post.” Just as often, if Phyllis found me alone, she would tactfully suggest that I talk a little louder, as “Miss Hepburn is losing her hearing.” In truth, I didn’t really find it to be the case with either of them.

Despite their employer-employee relationship—“Phyllis is richer than all of us!” Kate would often say. “God knows what she does with her money!”—Kate and Phyllis were like an old married couple, completely onto each other’s foibles and idiosyncrasies, and always mindful of each other’s needs. Although many people over the years have made certain assumptions about Miss Hepburn and her “companion,” there was nothing even vaguely sexual about their alliance. They simply cared for each other, even loved each other . . . and every night, Phyllis hopped onto a bus or (entering her eighties) popped into a cab and went to her own nicely furnished apartment uptown.

In some ways, however, their relationship hardly differed from Kate’s marriage to Luddy. It was all in service of Kate. For the Ludlow Ogden Smiths, the honeymoon was over within two weeks, when she realized she was happier standing by in the wings of a full house on Broadway than sitting in an empty manor house in Pennsylvania. At her urging, they moved into a small apartment Luddy kept at 146 East Thirty-ninth Street. There she insisted he change his name to S. Ogden Ludlow—just so that she would not be Kate Smith. The name was simply too plain, she insisted, to say nothing of its being that of a popular, overweight singer. Mr. Smith obliged; and once settled in Manhattan, Katharine Hepburn Ludlow went hat in hand to Arthur Hopkins. He said he had been expecting her and that her old job awaited.

One night, and one night only, the understudy did get to go on for Hope Williams in Holiday. That performance made her realize just how wonderful the star was. While Kate had previously enjoyed what Miss Williams had done with the role of Linda Seton (the unconventional daughter in an upper-class family who falls in love with her sister’s unconventional suitor), those two hours onstage made her positively worshipful. While she felt she had performed the part well enough, she now realized that Williams had played it “brilliantly,” always making the aggressive character extremely attractive.

Hepburn liked Williams’s portrayal enough to start imitating aspects of it and incorporating them into her own persona—nuances that softened some of her youthful stridency. Where Hepburn had a pushy, overeager walk, for example, Hope Williams had a sophisticated, arm-swinging stride . . . and always a light touch instead of a heavy hand, insouciance instead of arrogance, a sense of fun. A genuine New York socialite who wore her hair bobbed and parted on one side, she was, Hepburn described, “half boy, half woman.” No performer had a greater influence on the young actress; and Kate stayed in touch with her for the rest of her life, into Williams’s nineties. “Without Hope Williams,” Kate said many times, “Katharine Hepburn would not have gone very far.”

Hepburn’s theatrical career over the next two years made that very point. Choosing not to have an agent, she would sit in producers’ offices and get parts for herself—giving charming interviews and readings. More than once the jobs were as understudies to the female leads, and more than once she got fired. She was clearly a powerful presence—a different look and sound—one to which people reacted strongly, favorably or otherwise. She had all the makings of a star; the mixture just hadn’t yet come to a full boil.

Even after several more plays, including a season of summer stock at the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and another with the Ivoryton Players (in a charming theater in Ivoryton, Connecticut, a short drive from Fenwick), Katharine Hepburn was still getting fired almost as often as she was hired. The problem was not, as was often suspected, her know-it-all attitude and troublesome stubbornness. It was rather, as playwright Philip Barry told her when he suggested she be replaced before opening in the lead role in his play The Animal Kingdom, because she was “simply no good.”

Undaunted, Kate continued to make the rounds, acquiring contacts and becoming known. She made fast friends with a fellow student of Miss Robinson-Duff named Laura Harding, with whom she costarred in Stockbridge. Laura was the perky daughter of a financier and later an heiress to the American Express fortune. Living in a Fifth Avenue mansion, Laura had the kind of wealth the public later ascribed to Hepburn. In truth, Kate credited Laura for introducing her to such grandeur. “Laura thought I was fascinating, as fascinating as I thought she was,” Kate recalled, “and I think we brought out the best in each other.” After playing together in the summer of 1930, they carried their friendship into the city, where they staked out producers’ offices together.

One day they heard about a theatrical troupe being formed that was holding an organizational meeting that very night—The Group Theatre. Kate and Laura went to hear Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford talk about this exciting new venture. The two novices were fired up by all the enthusiasm in the room, until Strasberg said, “And we will do all kinds of plays and play all kinds of parts. And everybody will be equal. One week you’ll be the star, and in the next play you’ll carry a spear.” That was all Kate needed to hear. She stood up, said, “Not me,” and walked out of the hall.

In early 1932 a leading role fell from the skies into her lap, in a play called The Warrior’s Husband. The author, Julian Thompson, had already written a one-act version of the love affair between Theseus and Antiope, the sister of the Queen of the Amazons; and after a successful production at The Comedy Club in New York, he expanded the work into a full-length play. Hope Williams had originally starred as Antiope, and the playwright hoped she would reprise the role. By the time the new play was finished, however, she had a prior commitment she would not break. The producers naturally turned to her recent understudy, the athletic Miss Hepburn, who would be required to make her entrance bounding down stairs, three at a time, carrying a stag over her shoulder. A few anxious weeks for Hepburn passed while the producers sought bigger names for the part. In the end they settled on her.

“I knew it was a great role for me,” Kate told me one night after dinner, “—very showy.” She got to wear a dazzling costume—a metallic tunic with a spiraled cone over each breast, an ornate helmet, and silver leather shin guards “that would make anybody’s legs look good.” And her entrance, which concluded with her throwing the stag to the ground then collapsing to one knee, brought the house down every night. The play received mixed notices, but Hepburn received raves and became the talk of the town. It was only a matter of time before Hollywood would knock on her door.

“Here’s the moment I really got lucky,” Hepburn would later pinpoint, “—right place at the right time.” At that moment, she explained, David O. Selznick, then head of production for RKO in Hollywood, was preparing a film version of a Clemence Dane play called A Bill of Divorcement for John Barrymore, the greatest actor of the day. Selznick and the director, George Cukor, were consciously looking to create a new movie star by casting a first-time film actress in the ingenue role, Barrymore’s daughter—a part that had made a star of Katharine Cornell a decade earlier.

Hepburn’s timing was more exquisite than that. Hollywood was just coming out of the tailspin it had entered five years earlier when The Jazz Singer opened and introduced talking pictures. The careers of most of the great silent stars had dissipated, some overnight, and the producers had become desperate to fill the vacuum. They combed legitimate theaters across the country for promising new directors, playwrights, and, most especially, actors. It was no longer enough for actors to have faces the public liked. They also needed good voices.

Although most of the silent-screen stars with foreign accents were the first to plummet to oblivion—Vilma Banky, Pola Negri, Nazimova, to name but a handful—the mysterious young actress from Sweden became one of the last to subject her voice to public scrutiny and was greeted with even greater applause. In becoming the greatest of the silent-screen stars to make the leap to talking film stardom, Greta Garbo also changed the public’s attitudes toward beauty. Before Garbo, most leading ladies were rounder of face and fleshier of body, more curves than angles. As Irene Selznick had reminded me that first night we talked about Hepburn, “Producers were desperate to find an American Garbo—somebody with her looks but an all-American attitude.”

From a friend in New York, Selznick’s executive assistant Merian Cooper had received a photograph of the young actress in The Warrior’s Husband. “What legs!” Irene Selznick gasped to her husband when she saw the publicity still; and he ordered his East Coast staff to make a screen test. Hepburn welcomed the opportunity, but when it came time to shoot the test, she refused to play the scene they handed her. She said she preferred to perform a scene from Holiday, a part she had honed and which would show her off to better advantage, rather than one she was stepping into cold. She asked her friend Alan Campbell, a handsome actor who would later marry Dorothy Parker, to play in the scene with her.

The test did not bowl over either George Cukor (a recent transplant from a theater company in Rochester, New York) or David Selznick. There was something jerky about Hepburn’s movements and jarring about her voice. But Cukor liked one particular moment, when she lowered a glass and set it on the floor, a moment he found real and theatrical and graceful at the same time. “Original,” weighed in Irene Selznick upon seeing the test.

David Selznick offered the twenty-five-year-old untried film actress a respectable $500-a-week contract, which Hepburn refused. He kept returning in $250 increments, until he had climbed to three times his starting offer. (Actually, he offered her $1,250 with a four-week guarantee; but Hepburn said she preferred three weeks at $1,500, thus setting her rate higher than she had any right to.) The producer agreed. Luddy was prepared to go west with his wife and stay throughout the filming; but Kate asked him to remain in New York. On July i, 1932, she boarded the Twentieth Century with her friend Laura Harding instead. They changed trains in Chicago, catching the Super Chief to Los Angeles.

Excited about the journey, Kate found the journey passing quickly until the first night on the Super Chief, when she went back to the observation car for some fresh air and a glimpse of the moon. As she opened the rear door of the last car and walked onto the platform, something flew into her left eye. Each blink made it feel worse. Rushing to a mirror, she saw the sclera turning crimson. She suffered through the rest of the trip, hoping to see an eye doctor upon her arrival. Her eyelids began to swell.

Attached to their train was the private railway car of Florenz Ziegfeld, then fatally ill, traveling with his wife, Billie Burke. Unbeknownst to Kate, Miss Burke—who would later become best known for her role as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, in The Wizard of Oz—was coming to Hollywood as well, to play Hepburn’s mother in A Bill of Divorcement. (The job, Kate would soon learn, was just another example of George Cukor’s legendary generosity toward his friends.) Before pulling into the Pasadena station, Kate—then in considerable pain to say nothing of dismay over her appearance—changed into the special outfit she had bought for her July Fourth arrival, the latest design from Elizabeth Hawes, the most expensive couturier in New York.

“Anybody who went to Elizabeth Hawes,” Irene Selznick later remarked, “was out to make a statement.” What a statement this was! Hepburn wore a gray silk suit, an extremely tailored, collarless tailcoat and almost ankle-length skirt with a ruffled turtleneck blouse; her gloves, pumps, and purse were navy blue. The crowning touch was a straw toque hat, one she later remarked that “made me look like I was wearing a beanbag on my head.” Said Mrs. Selznick, “This was an outfit that cried out, ‘I’m different. I’m special. Watch out!’ ”

Waiting for Hollywood’s latest arrivals were two men who had become Kate’s West Coast agents, Leland Hayward and Myron Selznick, David’s brother. Laura Harding immediately recognized the former, one of the most urbane men in show business, a handsome swain she had known from her debutante days in Manhattan. The other was long considered one of Hollywood’s liveliest characters, not the handsomest man in town but certainly one of the most amusing. Kate delighted in retelling what she later heard he had said when she stepped off the train: “Jesus, they’re paying fifteen hundred dollars a week for that!”

Before Kate could explain her swollen red eye enough for them to see the urgency in getting her to a doctor, they whisked her away in a Rolls-Royce to the RKO studios. A Bill of Divorcement was to start shooting in five days, and there was not a moment to lose, what with costume fittings, makeup tests, and rehearsals. She was immediately introduced to George Cukor, an excitable dynamo, who wasted no time in bringing out sketches of her wardrobe, which was already being run up. Determined to take on Hollywood on her own strict terms, the untried ingenue sniffed at the drawings and said, “No well-bred English girl would wear these clothes.” Without missing a beat, Cukor asked, “What do you think of what you’re wearing?” Hepburn knew her outfit was “pretty goddamn queer-looking,” but said, “I think it’s very smart.” Cukor said, “Well, I think it’s ludicrous.” Touché. She liked him already.

As hairdressers and assistants and makeup artists popped in and out of the director’s office, Kate kept trying to ask for a doctor. Then arrived “The Great Profile” himself—at that point in his career, as famous for his alcoholism and lechery as he was for his acting—to pay his respects and look over his young leading lady. With so many people milling about, Barrymore asked Miss Hepburn if they might speak privately. In the hall, he took her hands and spoke of her screen test. “My dear,” he enounced in his most actorly tones, “you’re going to be a big star.” Then staring into her bloodshot eye and reaching into his coat pocket, he handed her a small vial and said, “I have the same problem. Take this. Two drops in each eye.” Kate protested that she was not hungover and insisted that she had something in her eye. With a wink and a smile, Barrymore said, “Yes, of course you do, my dear . . . that’s two drops in each eye.”

Not until the end of the day was Kate able to get medical attention. A doctor pulled three steel filings from her eye, prescribed some painkillers, and gave her an eyepatch. When she dutifully appeared at the studio the next morning, still in pain and wearing her patch, Cukor took one look at her and asked, “What do you think we’re making here? A pirate picture?”

The filming of A Bill of Divorcement began on July 9, 1932, and Kate took to the process immediately. “From the very beginning,” she said, “I found it a fascinating, romantic medium.” By the time she appeared before the cameras, her eye had healed. Other than trimming her hair and streamlining her eyebrows, the studio bosses ordered no changes in her appearance, though they suggested she tone down her voice to soften its metallic quality. The most drastic adjustment she made was one small but painful cosmetic operation she performed on herself. Two nights before shooting, she plucked all the hairs from her nose.

While Hepburn argued every possible reading of every line with George Cukor, she realized that she and her director were, in fact, generally of the same mind. When they were not, she saw that film allowed them the possibility of performing a different interpretation in each take. Stage actors who made films and talked about their “craft” and the difficulties adjusting their gestures and voices to the more intimate sets on soundstages would forever bore Hepburn. “It’s pretty obvious you don’t have to project if there’s a camera three feet away and a microphone over your head.”

Strangely, she felt that John Barrymore, a twenty-year veteran of motion pictures, was not making any such adjustments. She had enough respect for the head of the American theater’s royal family not to say anything; but she felt he knew he was overacting and that she was underreacting to his performance. He often asked Cukor if he could redo a scene; and, Hepburn later reflected, she thought a lot of those retakes were because “he somehow didn’t want to disappoint me.”

Barrymore was out to make a good impression on everybody—especially the ingenue. “He was,” remembered Kate, “utterly incapable of letting a girl walk by without grabbing some part of her anatomy.” A simple slap on the wrist was generally enough to get his mind back to business. On one occasion, however, he would not settle down, and the novice became extremely distracted. “I’ll never play another scene with you!” she screamed at him. To which the great Barrymore replied, “But, my dear, you never have.” A few days later, he asked if she might come to discuss another scene in his dressing room, a swank bachelor’s apartment he had been given on the lot. She knocked on the door and upon entering discovered John Barrymore lying on the couch—which was made up with sheets and a blanket—his head propped on the armrest. He was stark naked.

By the end of the picture, Hepburn felt the pathos of Barrymore’s performance in the film matched that of his life. She thought he was as brilliant and charming an actor as she would ever meet, and just as tortured—a sad, lonely man. She found his portrayal of Hillary Fairfield, a shell shock victim who escapes from an insane asylum only to find his wife about to remarry, “really touching.”

Alongside his melodramatic school of acting, Hepburn’s more naturalistic performance as his engaged daughter—who, fearing future insane children of her own, dismisses her fiance so that she might care for her father—has a quality that is at once both green and evergreen. George Cukor said she was like “a colt finding her legs” during the first weeks of the movie. By the end, he said, she had proved that she was “a thoroughbred.”

Hepburn’s determination to succeed kept her focused on her work; and, at first, she eschewed any kind of social life in Hollywood. “I felt I had my own thing to do,” she said, “and I didn’t want to compromise that.” She and Laura Harding rented a comfortable house up in Franklin Canyon that one of Laura’s society friends had found for them. Another of his friends, a conservatively dressed Mrs. Fairbanks, called on them one day, inviting the two young women to dinner. Kate begged off, insisting that she never went out to dinner while she was in the middle of production. After Mrs. Fairbanks left, an appalled Laura Harding said, “Don’t you know who you just snubbed?”

Fortunately, a second invitation to Pickfair arrived, which the Hollywood newcomers accepted. Kate got to sit next to Douglas Fairbanks and found him “completely charming”; Pickford proved to be even more interesting, downright shrewd, with “a real nose for business”; and dinner was every bit as grand as she imagined dinner with royalty was. The hosts ran a film afterward, and Kate was already looking forward to a return visit to the town’s most prestigious address. “Oh, I thought I was absolutely fascinating that night,” Kate recalled, “chattering about this and that, and full of opinions on every subject.” Mrs. Fairbanks, evidently, didn’t find Miss Hepburn remotely interesting. She never called again.

Upon completion of photography of A Bill of Divorcement, Kate returned to New York. Then she and her husband embarked on a second honeymoon to Europe. “We traveled well together,” she recalled, in a way that suggested there was more politeness in the marriage than passion. A Bill of Divorcement was released little more than two months after shooting began—while Mr. and Mrs. Ludlow were in Austria—and it proved to be a great success for everybody involved. Many critics commented on the strangeness of both Hepburn’s voice and appearance, but in the end most found her extremely appealing, different but attractive. For that, Hepburn credited one man.

“George Cukor presented me,” she said, practically every time the subject of her first movie came up. “He knew I was an odd creature to most audiences and that I would take some getting used to. And so, he presented me.” After her character first appears in the film—making a showy entrance, skittering down a set of stairs and dancing off in a man’s arms—Cukor inserted a few shots that did nothing whatever to advance the story nor to deepen character. They were simply lingering shots of Hepburn, moments in which the audience could adjust to her and get acquainted with her. “So few modern directors have any theatrical background,” Hepburn said, “and so they have no sense of entrance, the importance of introducing somebody to the audience. Thank God George did. I don’t think I’d’ve had a career without those few shots, just those few extra seconds of screen time.”

The studio publicity department certainly did its part to help promote her. But, as Hepburn later noted, “I bucked all that publicity stuff. I came back and started to read all these stories about myself, with quotations of things I never said, and, well, frankly, I just didn’t give a damn. Since then I’ve never really taken any interest in what anybody writes about me.” From the start, she entered a false birthdate for herself into the public record—November eighth, her brother Tom’s birthday; and she shaved two years off her age.

Kate returned to Hollywood alone, with RKO lining up one project after another for her to star in. The first was a film, based on a novel, called Christopher Strong. The material was extremely melodramatic, but several elements of the project appealed to her. She would play a fiercely independent aviatrix—not unlike Amelia Earhart, who was one of Hepburn’s heroes, not just for her accomplishments but also for her style and attitude. The lady flyer falls in love with a married man, becomes pregnant, and then—according to the social dictates of the day—meets her death trying to break a world altitude record.

Another reason to appear in the film was the director—Dorothy Arzner, for all intents and purposes, the only female director in the business. Hepburn never completely understood why there were so few women directing; there were, after all, many women writing scenarios and editing film. For that, she did not blame the men who ran the studios so much as the women who chose not to challenge them. “It never occurred to me that I was a second-class citizen in Hollywood,” Hepburn later recounted, “—nor that women had to be.”

While Christopher Strong rather quickly crashed and burned, Hepburn garnered wonderful notices, securing her position as a headliner. That, the new star just as quickly realized, carried certain responsibilities. With even the smaller studios cranking out movies every month, some as many as two a week, Hepburn realized that if she wanted to remain at the head of the pack of actors, she would have to take charge of her career—to the extent of scouting and securing the best possible material for herself.

“I usually don’t look through people’s desks,” Hepburn told me one afternoon—somewhat disingenuously, I thought—“but one day I saw this thing on Pan Berman’s desk.” The thing was a script called Morning Glory, which was based on a play by a popular writer named Zoë Akins, and Pandro S. Berman was a twenty-seven-year-old assistant to David Selznick, then starting his own prestigious career as a motion-picture producer. Hepburn had taken an immediate shine to him and simply walked off with the script, telling Berman’s secretary that she would be back for her appointment with the producer.

“This must have been written for me,” she said to Berman when she returned to his office not two hours later. Few could deny her appropriateness for the part—that of a stagestruck girl from New England who comes to New York in quest of an acting career, stringing along a lover or two, then becoming an overnight sensation when she takes over for the star of a play who has walked out on opening night. No, Berman told her, it had been written, in fact, for Constance Bennett, a silent-screen actress who had just made a “comeback” at the age of twenty-seven in What Price Hollywood? (which George Cukor had directed just before A Bill of Divorcement). This film was to be directed by her costar, Lowell Sherman (who had successfully appeared as an actor in another work by Zoë Akins). “Hollywood was an even smaller town than Broadway,” Miss Hepburn realized. She spent the next several days meeting everybody connected to this production, talking up this “thrilling” screenplay . . . until she convinced them that she was “born to play this part.”

The company rehearsed for a week, then shot the entire film in seventeen days. And, Hepburn recalled, director Lowell Sherman never appeared on the set before nine-fifteen or after five-thirty. Although he was alcoholic and dying of cancer of the throat, Sherman put everything he had into this picture, keeping the entire cast (which included such veterans as C. Aubrey Smith and Adolphe Menjou) constantly engaged and amused. Hepburn’s young romantic interest in the film was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., with whom she became close friends. Although it was ultimately cut from the picture, Hepburn and Fairbanks, Jr., performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, filming it before a small audience that included Doug’s father and stepmother, the Fairbankses. Kate confessed it was one of the few times in her life that she had stage fright.

Hepburn gave a remarkable performance in Morning Glory, one praised for revealing new dimensions as an actress and for bringing originality to potentially trite material. In truth, Hepburn would confess, she had borrowed heavily from another actor in delineating her role. Ruth Gordon had appeared in a play called A Church Mouse, in which she spoke in a monotone at a fast clip, conveying both eagerness and nervousness. Hepburn “copied her totally” in playing this heroine, Eva Lovelace—who was determined to become “the finest actress in the world.” Stolen acting tricks or not, Hepburn proved completely winning and became one of the studio’s prime assets.

Meantime, David Selznick—who had a penchant for translating classic works of literature into motion pictures—had been developing a pet project, one featuring another Yankee with artistic yearnings, Little Women. He had been through several bad versions of the Louisa May Alcott novel about the four March sisters growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, before he assigned a husband-and-wife team to tackle it anew. In four weeks Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman wrote a shooting script, one with a role that seemed to be written for the new queen of the RKO lot.

“I would defy anyone to be as good as I was in Little Women,” Kate Hepburn would say of her portrayal of Jo March. “They just couldn’t be, they really couldn’t be, because I came from the same general atmosphere, enjoyed the same things. And I’m sure Louisa May Alcott was writing about herself and that kind of behavior that was encouraged in a New England girl; and I understood those things. I was enough of a tomboy myself; and my personality was like hers. I could say, ‘Christopher Columbus! What richness!’ and believe it totally. I have enough of that old-fashioned personality in myself. Coming from a big family, in which I had always been very dramatic, this part suited my exaggerated sense of things.” David Selznick agreed, and he recruited George Cukor to direct Hepburn a second time.

Based on the earlier scripts, Cukor had resisted the project, thinking the material was frilly and sentimental. Selznick insisted that he read the Alcott novel, with all its hardships of the Civil War era playing in the background of the lives of the March women. Cukor later told me, as I reported to Kate during one of our dinners, that reading the source material had completely turned him around. “Oh, that’s such bunk!” she said. “I’m telling you that man never read that book.” I replied that he told me she would say exactly that; and she said, “So, he didn’t deny it. I’m telling you George Cukor never read that book. But that didn’t matter. We had a wonderful script to work with, one that was really true to the spirit of the novel.”

Director and star bickered throughout the production—never about personal matters, only the material—in a collegial manner that brought them closer together. More often than not, Kate would get her way by either throwing her own New England background in his face or by reminding him, “You haven’t read the book.” The only time Cukor genuinely got mad at her on the set was the day she had to run up a flight of stairs carrying some ice cream while wearing a costume for which they had no duplicate. He repeatedly urged her to be careful not to spill on the dress, and finally said, “I’ll kill you if you do.” As though preordained, she did—and Kate burst into laughter. Cukor slapped her across the face and screamed, “You amateur!” running her off the set. She spent the rest of the day vomiting.

Hepburn enjoyed playing with her entire cast—which included Spring Byington as “Marmee” and the great character actress Edna May Oliver as Aunt March. Kate’s “sisters” included Frances Dee as Meg, Jean Parker as Beth, and Joan Bennett as Amy, her costumes having to be redesigned to conceal her pregnancy. But from that luminous cast, it was Hepburn’s portrayal as Jo that shone in the public eye. In less than a year she had become more than a Hollywood leading lady. She was a star.

At a time when the Depression was hardening Hollywood’s edge—with movies about gangsters and tap-dancing gold-diggers—RKO suddenly had a big hit on its hands with this modest piece of counter-programming, a family drama full of family values. The film had its share of pain and reality, but its success sprang from the lives of characters the audience cared about. When the six-year-old Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its best pictures of the year, Little Women was among the ten nominations. Katharine Hepburn was nominated as Best Actress—though not for the same picture. She got shortlisted for Morning Glory.

Hepburn forever believed she was nominated for the wrong movie, that her work in Morning Glory was “very good” but that it was “tricked up, charming, mugging.” In Little Women, however, she said, “I gave what I call the main-course performance, not a dessert.” After much consideration, Hepburn chose not to attend the award ceremony, in the Fiesta Room of the Ambassador Hotel on the night of March 16, 1934. That night Will Rogers presented all the golden statuettes, whose new nickname of Oscar was starting to spread beyond the industry. After announcing that Cavalcade was the Best Picture and Charles Laughton was Best Actor, Rogers pronounced Katharine Hepburn that year’s Best Actress.

The Academy Awards conflicted Hepburn from the very outset of her career, beginning with her believing that somebody so young and new to the game couldn’t possibly win. There was more to it than that. Indeed, even after she was told she had won, Hepburn said she wanted to release a statement saying she did not believe in awards—“or some asinine answer like that.” In truth, she later admitted, “mine was really bogus humility, because I was genuinely thrilled to win.”

From that first nomination, Hepburn vowed never to attend the Academy Awards ceremony, a vow she was not proud of. “I think it is very noble for the people who go and lose, and I think it is very ignoble of me to be unwilling to go and lose,” she confessed. “My father said that his children were so shy because they were afraid they were going to a party and they were not going to be either the bride or the corpse. And he may be right. I can’t think of a single, logical defense of someone who occupies a position in the industry that they refuse to go to the biggest celebration that that industry has to offer. I think it’s unpardonable, but I do it. . . . I have no defense.”

At the same time, Hepburn added, she believed the industry and the public at large exaggerated the importance of the prize. A lot of it, she insisted, is luck and timing. “If you have a very good part,” she said, “you have a very good opportunity . . . and sometimes you can shine in a dull year. But honestly,” she added, “if you give an award-worthy performance, you know it. And I do think I’m terribly self-indulgent in refusing to appear.” When I asked Kate in 1982 where her Oscars were, she could not say, other than that she had given them to a museum in the Empire State Building. “I mean, if I don’t go to the ceremony,” she explained, “I can’t very well put them on my mantelpiece, can I? I simply have no right to.”

Having risen to the top of her new profession in little more than a year, Hepburn still felt she had plenty to prove. Triumphant on the West Coast, she told her studio bosses that she wanted to return to New York, to the theater. She thought she could take Manhattan by storm by appearing in a new play called The Lake. RKO would not release her, unless she agreed to make one more picture before leaving. Star and studio found themselves stalemated, until Kate had the nerve to say she would appear in a movie called Spitfire. Feeling capable of anything, she said she would star as the heroine—an uneducated, barefooted tomboy, an Ozarks faith healer named Trigger Hicks. She demanded $50,000 for four weeks of work plus $ 10,000 for each day beyond that. Hepburn gave it her all (and collected $60,000 for her efforts) and had banked enough good will with the critics to escape virtually unscathed.

The few who ever saw Spitfire rank it among the worst movies Katharine Hepburn ever made. The star felt the same, later chastising herself by saying, “The few times I did something for the money, it was mediocre material, and I did mediocre work.” While Kate kept few photographs of herself on display around any of her homes, a picture of her as Trigger Hicks remained for years in a place of prominence just outside her bedroom at Fenwick. “A reminder,” she told me with an arch of an eyebrow. “Trigger keeps me humble.”

Besides the theater, Hepburn had another reason for returning east. Her marriage. Few in Hollywood even realized that Katharine Hepburn had a husband back in New York, in the business world. It appeared that Kate herself had forgotten all about him. Although she continued to live quietly in the hills with Laura Harding (fueling speculation of a lesbian relationship), Kate was occasionally seen in the company of attractive men.

She went on a few dates with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., but the nights always ended earlier than he would have liked. She spent her sunniest days off work that year with a young actor raised in Southern California, Joel McCrea—“so good-looking, so charming.” They would drive up the coast, then picnic and swim at Zuma Beach; their friendship also remained platonic. Increasingly, she was secretly spending her nights at the Franklin Canyon house with her agent, the urbane Leland Hayward. Like her, he was married; and their friendship became something more than that.

Hayward was virtually a singular presence in show business— as handsome and debonair as many actors, extremely tasteful, and intelligent in matters of business. He had already created a presence for himself in Hollywood and on Broadway. He was known at the time as Hollywood’s only “Princeton man,” which was accurate if one counted his single year there. His passion was women—the more challenging the better. In his aloof new star, suddenly considered the most sophisticated presence in movies, he had met his match.

While Hepburn was outdoorsy, athletic, and liked to be in bed early, Hayward’s most active sport was late-night club-hopping. Despite their conflicting clocks and calendars, Kate said, “We were really mad for each other”; and they constantly scrambled to make time to be together. They enjoyed a sexually charged affair, in which it was difficult to ascertain who had the upper hand. Equally infatuated with one another, he suggested that he would divorce his wife, an adventurous Texas beauty named Lola Gibbs, if Kate would divorce Luddy. Returning to New York would keep Hayward in mad pursuit.

There was yet another reason lurking behind Hepburn’s leaving Los Angeles—a man she would later call “hands-down the most diabolical person I have ever met.” His name was Jed Harris; and in the colorful theater world of the 1920s and ’30s, nobody was as revered and reviled (at the same time) as much as he. The brilliant producer and director, largely responsible for such highly regarded hits as The Royal Family, The Front Page, and, later, Our Town (also the man on whom Laurence Olivier would later model his performance of Richard III, evil incarnate), Harris had fallen into a slump in his career. He was trying to climb out by mounting a production called The Lake.

Sinister in looks and satanic in ambition, Harris was extremely seductive—especially to actresses, who found themselves vulnerable to his promises of artistic success. He had already captivated Ruth Gordon, fathering and abandoning a child with her; and he had lured Margaret Sullavan away from her husband, a budding actor, Henry Fonda. In this case, however, it was not the fox who went after another hen, but Hepburn who approached Harris. Flush with success, the young Hollywood star dared to pick up a telephone and call him directly.

The Lake was the story of a woman desperate to marry; on her wedding day, she skids the car in which she is driving her husband into the lake, killing him. Hepburn later confessed that she was simply so consumed with the notion of working with Harris that she did not know whether the play was even any good or not. Her motivation, she claimed, was “to help restore him to his throne . . . and I felt powerful enough to do that. Crazy! What was I thinking?”

Only years later did she realize that she wasn’t thinking at all, that it was sheer hubris that drove her to believe her sudden status as a movie star was enough to meet the challenge. Helen Hayes, whom Hepburn barely knew, sent her a note out of the blue, warning her not to work with Harris. But after “conquering Hollywood,” Hepburn was vain enough not even to consider this enterprise a contest. Alas, she didn’t realize that Harris was sociopathic, and her munificent gesture of riding to his rescue (if that’s what it was) only angered him even more, making him hell-bent on doing her harm.

She showed her vulnerability at the start, agreeing to a much smaller salary than a star, to say nothing of a movie star, was entitled to. Then, at the first rehearsal, Harris set about breaking her. He stopped her every few moments, correcting every move, generally insisting she do the exact opposite. At last, in a scene that required her to play the piano—or at least fake playing the piano—she could not position her hands to match the music that was being piped in and say her lines at the same time. He made her play the scene again and again, delighting in her failure to improve. When she finally protested, he said, “Helen Hayes learned to play the piano for me!” That knocked whatever confidence she retained out from under her. As a result of this relentless torture, she felt her performance becoming robotic.

The Lake previewed in Washington, D.C., where there was a huge advance sale. The crowd was enthusiastic. “There really is nothing as generous as an American audience,” Hepburn long maintained, “especially for a movie star trying to stretch. I’m always amazed that more movie stars, especially those actresses who hit their forties and fifties and complain that Hollywood isn’t writing any parts for them anymore, don’t take to the stage. If Broadway is too scary, there are hundreds of wonderful theaters all over the country who would be thrilled to have them. Actors should act.” But Hepburn herself was not pleased with her performance. Feeling she was “a bore” in these preview performances, she looked forward to some new direction from Harris and a chance to rehearse further.

After seeing the advance ticket sales in New York, however, Harris chose not to give the play another thought. He simply brought the company into town and opened it. “I felt as though I were sleepwalking through a nightmare,” Hepburn said of the experience, “and I kept hoping I would wake up.” She claimed never to read reviews, but after this play opened, she knew perfectly well that the critics had a field day with her. Very proudly, she recited to me Dorothy Parker’s famous review of sixty years earlier, one of the legendary wit’s most famous quips: “Go to the Martin Beck and see Katharine Hepburn run the gamut of emotion from A to B.” Kate pronounced the word “gam-MUTT,” saying, “That’s what I was—a great big mutt.” After a few weeks, the crowds dwindled, but not quickly enough for the star, who was locked into a run-of-the-play contract. She just wanted out.

But Jed Harris was not done with her. Even though neither the play nor the star was very good, he realized Hepburn’s name on a marquee was enough to draw people in for a few weeks in any city in which they opened. With Hepburn preparing to jump ship the moment the show closed in New York, where it had made its investment back, Harris announced they were moving to Chicago and then onward across the country. At last, she put her foot down, asking why he would continue with this play in which neither he nor the public had much interest. “My dear,” he said, “the only interest I have in you is the money I can make out of you.”

She respected the honesty of the answer and came right back to him, asking how much she would have to pay to see the show close. “How much have you got?” he replied. She grabbed her bankbook and read him the balance, some thirteen thousand dollars. He said, “I’ll take it.” The check arrived in the morning, and the show closed in New York after a few more performances. Except for a chance meeting of no consequence in a theater years later, by which time Harris had become a broken man, Hepburn never saw him again.

Leland Hayward encountered Harris years later. “You know,” said the producer, by then completely washed-up, reflecting on The Lake, “I tried to destroy Katharine Hepburn.” Hayward was dumbfounded by the revelation. At last, he mustered wits enough to say, “You failed, didn’t you?”

By the start of 1934, however, Jed Harris had come close to getting his wish. For one of the few times in her life, Katharine Hepburn’s confidence in herself was terribly shaken. Spitfire opened and raised doubts about her future in Hollywood; and her marriage, at last, was no longer proving to be even one of convenience. For $100 a month, the “Ludlows” had moved into the Turtle Bay house on East Forty-ninth Street; and Luddy had relocated his business—a corporate payroll system for big companies, which Kate never completely understood—to New York. At the same time, she knew that she had better hurry back to Hollywood, to continue her climb up the career ladder, and that Luddy was excess baggage. He was willing to move to Hollywood, even to stay in New York and keep the home fires burning. But by then, Hepburn was feeling more romantic toward Leland Hayward than toward her own husband, and she couldn’t bear the thought of “using” him more than she already had. Though Luddy moved out of the Turtle Bay house, he was content to remain in marital limbo. At last, however, Kate decided, “I should perform one act of generosity for my husband—divorce him.” In April 1934, she flew to Mérida, in the Yucatán, accompanied by Laura Harding, and filed for a Mexican divorce.

Some fifty years later, while she and I were tidying up the kitchen before going up to bed, I asked why she had bothered to marry Luddy—whom I never met—in the first place. After giving the counter a final swipe of the sponge, she looked me right in the eye and, without thinking twice, said, “Because I was a pig.”

After having practically every dinner with Hepburn that week after my first visit to Fenwick, I had to return to Los Angeles. The bulk of my Goldwyn research was there, and I had to pull together the interview with her that I was preparing for Esquire. As she walked down the stairs to send me off that Thursday night, she took me into the kitchen, where she pulled a key out of the table drawer. “Now, look,” she said, pressing it into my hand, “you’re obviously coming back to New York, and you’ll need a place to stay; and hotels are so damned expensive, and they’re so cold and impersonal. And, well, you know the way here now. So, dinner is always at seven, drinks at six, and if you’re eating with us, let us know by three. There’s always a bed upstairs.”

She opened the door and followed me to the little black iron gate at the sidewalk, looking up and down Forty-ninth Street. I wondered if she wanted to be seen or not. “Let us know when you’re coming back,” she yelled, when I was a few doors away; and I turned back to see that several passersby, recognizing the voice, had, in fact, stopped and stared at her.