July 6, 2003

It wasn’t beauty and it wasn’t spunk, though she had plenty of that. It wasn’t brains, it wasn’t grace, it wasn’t twinkle, or sparkle or radiance. Lord knows it wasn’t vanity or narcissism or putting on airs. It was that the camera looked and saw a real person. There was truth in everything she did.

The sublime Katharine Hepburn, who died last Sunday at 96, had the rare quality of almost transcendent humanity. You could say, after a popular song, she was woman. And she was woman in most of her pictures, strong or headstrong, tough or tender, loving or commanding, maternal or courageous. But at the same time, she was man. There was something universally appealing in her. She was every damn body, or at least everybody’s idealized version of him or herself, for her immense presence transcended gender. That is why millions today, who never knew her, will feel diminished in her absence.

Death finally came for her, after nearly a century of being put off, but you can just guess she made him wait in the foyer until she was good and ready. She brooked no nonsense, suffered no fools, and was always dignified and would do things her own way, which she knew to be the right way, the way she was raised.

That upbringing took place under New England elms, in arty-progressive family soil where everyone was encouraged to develop interesting lives. Her father was a surgeon, her mother a suffragette. In that household, in Hartford, Conn., everybody talked. Everybody had opinions and duties and was instructed in the value of hard work, forthrightness and the resilience of the spirit. And unlike so many stars of that generation who came from broken families and used their careers as a means of escape and transformation, Hepburn stayed close to the family.

 

She wasn’t interested in films, considering them vulgar after the higher artistic concerns of the stage, where, after some travail, she’d become a star by 1932. When she was offered a film contract, she amused herself by demanding the most absurd salary she could think of. That would drive them away. Instead, it drove them to her. What the camera saw, the camera loved
 

 
She went to Bryn Mawr College and got into professional theatre the way well-bred women of the day did: none of this stage-struck kid stuff, the annoying ritual of the audition, the hunt for the agent, the waiting for a phone to ring in a Greenwich Village rooming house. No sir: Her entry to the profession came off a letter of introduction to a roadshow producer in Baltimore. Once she started working, she never stopped, unless she was A) fired (it happened a lot in the early days, because she insisted on expressing herself to her directors) or B) grew disgusted, or C) took time off to help Spencer Tracy die, a five-year ordeal from which she never flinched and about which she never complained, another example of rare character in the ego-freak hothouse of Hollywood star vanity. She was one of those people about whom it could be said, “Duty mattered.”

The story is often told about her entrance into films. She wasn’t interested, considering them vulgar after the higher artistic concerns of the Broadway stage, where, after some travail, she’d become a star by 1932. When RKO offered her a contract, she amused herself by demanding the most absurd salary she could think of. That would drive them away. Instead it drove them to her. What the camera saw, the camera loved. She was all angles and planes, like a geometry problem with freckles and a thatch of reddish hair. But the angles of her face couldn’t have been designed better by computer graphics: She looked fabulous from every vantage point, and her eyes beamed with radiant intelligence and confidence, so that she expressed totally what she was: a high-bred young woman of imperious self-confidence, crisp, determined, almost remorseless.

Yet, beneath it somehow, there was something adorable: Men wanted to hang out with her. She could crack wise with the best of them, and if she lacked the curvy figure of the screen idol, she had fabulous legs, broad, square shoulders that wore clothes beautifully, and a greyhound’s predatory stride. And she had that thing that commands: Only the strongest of male stars could stand up to it, and when she found someone her equal, the results were almost always delicious magic.

Her first film, A Bill of Divorcement (1932), was a hit, and soon enough she had another the next year in Little Women. Hollywood quickly typecast her as the standoffish Eastern Seven Sisters grad: There was nothing vulgar or wanton about her; she stood for class and conservative values and could play queens but never courtesans, teachers but never chorines. You couldn’t imagine her serving a cocktail, scurrying for a tip or breaking out into song or dance.

Behind the scenes, she didn’t seem to be having much fun. She had quickly married a Philadelphia socialite, then divorced him, and kept her social life secret. Dalliances were reported with powerful men; she clearly wasn’t playing dating games for the tabloids. Meanwhile, no one really knew how to handle her: She wore pants in public and wouldn’t do interviews with fan magazines in the ‘30s. Why the nerve of the woman! She was acting just like a man!

In the ‘30s, she had huge successes and a few failures. A return to Broadway was a disaster, but later in the decade, she boldly foreshadowed the style of today’s star-producers by seizing control of the means of production. She acquired the film rights to Philip Barry’s play The Philadelphia Story, which she played on Broadway, then returned to Los Angeles in control of that property. Thus she was influential in casting as well, teaming herself with Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. The film was a fabulous hit in 1940, two years after she starred with Grant in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby.

In fact, as she grew older, we realized that where she really shined was in tandem. For all her independence, she was at her best in a joust with an equally powerful male competitor. The most famous of these, of course, was Spencer Tracy, with whom she made nine movies. And what a team they were. Her high-strung passion, his common-man slow burn. His obdurateness, her intensity. His lumpy beauty, her refined, sleek, almost stylized looks. His Milwaukee accent, as flat as the prairie, her more refined Eastern nasal reediness, bespeaking finishing schools and clambakes. Not all the movies were great: Sea of Grass, for example, is a western potboiler, and the climax to the cycle, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is wooden, if earnest.

But when Tracy and Hepburn were battling for the championship of the boy-girl intramural league in such films as Pat and Mike, Woman of the Year, Adam’s Rib and Desk Set, magic truly happened. It probably helped that they were in love.

During his lifetime, this was never spoken of, but the two of them enjoyed an intimate friendship of over 25 years. Possibly they found freedom in the fact that they could never marry, because his Catholic faith forbade divorce. So they were just, in the vernacular, “together,” and didn’t ever speak of such.

But her magic extended to other roles. She was stunningly brilliant at least three times without Tracy in the ‘50s: In The African Queen, she bonded with a boozy Humphrey Bogart in a mission to sail an old steamer down a river and blow up a German man-o-war in Lake Victoria in the first days of World War I. Her primness, his alcohol-blurred clumsiness and the journey that both made toward love and salvation made this a classic. Then there was Summertime, directed by David Lean in 1955; she’s a spinster on vacation in Venice where she meets a romantic Italian stranger (Rossano Brazzi) and has a taste of love. Her fear of commitment, her mistrust of her emotions, her awkwardness at a man’s touch — brilliantly evoked. Finally, the crazed, crackpot Tennessee Williams loony tune of all time, Suddenly Last Summer, where she plays a rich, vicious harridan insistent on having her daughter in law — Elizabeth Taylor — lobotomized to prevent her from speaking the truth about her late, beloved son, Sebastian. This one is nut-cake city, in which every performer is coached to go for broke by director Joseph Mankiewicz. But it’s Hepburn, who descends in an iron cage in her wheelchair like a dark angel, who dominates.

She never lost her ability to hold an audience. Even in something ridiculous, like that cheesy remake of The African Queen that followed on John Wayne’s triumph in True Grit, called Rooster Cogburn, she’s a game companion for that fat old man. It was a pleasure to see those old pros in the same film; and a pity that it wasn’t worth seeing.

As late as 1981, she was great again winning her fourth Oscar for On Golden Pond. Again, the material is far from great, a somewhat transparent and manipulative weeper meant to showcase old stars, but Hepburn, joined with another great from her generation, Henry Fonda, is splendid, but best of all she’s splendid to Fonda, then seriously ill. One has to think that it was her relationship with him that was so important in squeezing a last great performance from him so he was at last able to win the Oscar that had evaded him in his long career.

In later years, Hepburn became more, rather than less, visible. It was as if she were, in the title of one of her worst films, a keeper of the flame: She represented that great generation of stars that broke through in the ‘30s, dominated the ‘40s and ‘50s, then faded in the ‘60s and ‘70s. She was one of the brightest; she was certainly one of the most persistent and consistent. She’d appear on talk shows or 60 Minutes in an old sweater and pants, her voice and her hands trembling with palsy, but her eyes sharp as lasers and her opinions forthright and vivid. She was still our Kate, to the very end. Now the end has come. And of course, she’ll always be our Kate.—Dawn/The LAT/WP News ervice

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