Preface Catch Her If You Can - CBS News

Preface

Catch Her If You Can

In the first light of dawn, wearing wrinkled khakis and a floppy hat, Katharine Hepburn charged up the hill from her bungalow. Without knocking, she rushed into the mansion of her friend and favored director George Cukor 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, Eleanor of Aquitaine, 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 Hollywood 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 Marilyn

Monroe 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, Connecticut. 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 biography.

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 Howard Hughes 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 Bringing Up Baby 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 doppelg?nger, 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 Howard Hawks and George Stevens. 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 Spencer Tracy--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 Garson Kanin 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 American Film Institute as the greatest movie star of all time, the laughter would have echoed through the heartland. In the 1930s, 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 cr?pe 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 Greta Garbo or Grace Kelly. Nor was there the sex appeal of Ava Gardner or Lana Turner. She didn't make headlines like Liz Taylor, didn't bare her soul like Judy Garland. As an actress, she didn't have the power or range of Bette Davis.

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 Liz Smith wrote after Hepburn's death, "was one star whose effect outstripped even her acting career. Her influence for free-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 lesbian, and suspected of communism became a symbol of true-blue, red-blooded Americana. The New York Times 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 the actress not only "woman of the year" 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 Sylvia Scarlett, 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."

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