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Home , Charged Up, Katharine Hepburn, Ruth Gordon, Sylvia Scarlett, The Actress

Preface

Catch Her If You Can

In the first light of dawn, wearing wrinkled khakis and a floppy hat, charged up the hill from her bungalow. Without knocking, she rushed into the mansion of her friend and favored director 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, , 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 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 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, . 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 .

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 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 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 and . 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 —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 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 as the greatest movie star of all time, the laughter would have echoed through the heartland. In the , 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 or . Nor was there the sex appeal of Ava Gardner or . She didn’t make headlines like Liz Taylor, didn’t bare her soul like . As an actress, she didn’t have the power or range of . 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 wrote after Hepburn’s death, “was one star whose effect outstripped even her acting career. Her influence -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 , and suspected of communism became a symbol of true-blue, red-blooded Americana. 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 not only “” 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 , 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, , and , 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, .

“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 , she became the career woman tamed by the love of a man (usually Spencer Tracy). In the , after being savagely attacked by the anti-Communist smear campaign, she became the upstanding (but lonesome) spinster. By the and 1970s, gracefully sidestepping the grotesqueries of , Bette Davis, and , 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 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 star- crossed 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, , 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, , 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 . 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 modern- day 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 ’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 , 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. 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 and , 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, , David Eichler, , , 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 , 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 re- creation. 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.