Katharine Hepburn By Gilbert Adair Published July 1, 2003 It was Dorothy Parker who, referring to one of Katharine Hepburn's stage performances, made the notorious witticism about her running "the gamut of emotions from A to B". What on earth was she talking about? Certainly, if one confines the evidence to Hepburn's screen work - which is all that most of us are likely to be familiar with - the remark, though amusing, seems wholly libellous. Even if her tomboyishly athletic physique, her fine high-boned features and the patrician whinny of her voice made her an instantly recognisable (and parodiable) icon, Hepburn was one of the most versatile of actresses - versatile, on occasion, within the space of a single sequence. Consider one of her earliest films, the 1935 George Stevens adaptation of Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams, a tenderly ironic account of a young woman of modest origins and her pathetic aspirations towards the country-club set in small-town America of the1920s. Invited to a ball given by a socialite chum, wearing last year's faded party dress ("Organdy?" bitches one of the more fashionable guests to an equally incredulous companion. "Perhaps we're wrong"), poor Alice struggles desperately to convey the impression that it is from choice rather than circumstance that she is not dancing. With the permanently glazed smile of the lonely and unloved, she gamely greets complete strangers as old friends, girlishly flutters her bedraggled nosegay and feigns exhaustion as though from a surfeit of foxtrots. Because of the subtle, sometimes almost imperceptible, modulations in Hepburn's performance, this five-minute vignette becomes a little masterpiece of observation, acutely capturing the terrible poetry of humiliation. The achievement was all the more striking, in a sense, when one recalls the actress's own uncompromisingly honeyed and moneyed background. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and educated at Bryn Mawr. Her father was a distinguished surgeon, her mother a noted suffragette and a pioneering crusader for birth control. She made her first stage appearance, apparently as to the manner born, at the age of 21 and her first film appearance - a starring role in George Cukor's A Bill of Divorcement (1932) opposite John Barrymore - only four years later. Self-willed and opinionated even as a tiro, contemptuous of Hollywood frivolity, unwilling to humour inquisitive gossip hounds and systematically refusing invitations to Academy Award ceremonies (despite being the recipient of a record four Oscars: Meryl Streep only outstripped her dozen nominations last year), Hepburn succeeded with remarkable swiftness in forcing the industry to accept her on her own terms or not at all. She came, in consequence, to represent a model for more than one younger actress - and, indeed, actor. Christopher Reeve, who in 1976 was cast opposite her in the Broadway play A Matter of Gravity, said: "What I learned from her was simplicity. She's a living example that stardom doesn't have to be synonymous with affectation or ego." On screen she simply radiated - the word, if trite, is for once apposite. This was not merely a matter of forging a direct, causal relationship between the cool composure engendered by wealth and "breeding" and the charismatic gloss peculiar to movie stars. In her aggressive, more overtly "feminist" persona she was outstanding as an aviatrix in Dorothy Arzner's Christopher Strong (1933), as Mary, Queen of Scots in John Ford's 1936 adaptation of a turgid verse drama by Maxwell Anderson, Mary of Scotland, and as a Victorian suffragette in Mark Sandrich's aptly titled A Woman Rebels (also 1936). Furthermore, in Cukor's strange and haunting Sylvia Scarlett (1935), for much of whose running time she is disguised as a boy, Hepburn revealed herself to be a quintessential "Rosalind" in what could be interpreted as an updated Shakespearean comedy. As far as public taste was concerned, however, she was infinitely more acceptable in such smooth and shiny comedies of (bad) manners as Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938), Cukor's Holiday of the same year, from the Philip Barry play, and the same director's (and author's) The Philadelphia Story (1940), in all three of which she was enchantingly teamed with Cary Grant. Her most enduring partnership, both on and off screen, was of course with Spencer Tracy, whose 27-year affair with her (a Catholic, he never divorced his wife) was one of the most universally respected open secrets in Hollywood. It was George Stevens who first partnered them in Woman of the Year (1942), where their behavioural interaction was movingly enhanced by the perfectly visible fact that they were falling in love. Subsequently, they made eight films together, the most memorable of which were Cukor's Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952). And also, for all its obvious flaws, Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), which proved to be their swan-song. Aware that Tracy was close to death (he died only 10 days after the completion of shooting), Hepburn invested their exchanges with a depth of emotion rare in a mainstream commercial comedy. On paper, the film may have appeared to be about marriage: it was, in fact, about love. Hepburn was always at her best when a complicity could be established between her own strong personality and that of some no less irresistible leading man. Thus, from among her latter roles, when she began to specialise in portraying well-scrubbed, slightly whiny spinsters, one would wish to single out John Huston's The African Queen (1951), in which her desiccated missionary was brutally confronted with "life" in the shape of Humphrey Bogart's boozy reprobate. (A similar casting coup was attempted, much less successfully, in Rooster Cogburn, 1976, where she was cast opposite a grizzled John Wayne.) Katharine Hepburn was one of the glories of the American cinema. Even if, in her final performances, her taut skin and famously high cheekbones had started to lend her facial features the appearance of a death's-head (she would have made a wonderfully convincing Karen Blixen), and the Parkinson's-like tremors with which she was afflicted had become increasingly visible, there remained about her presence what one can only describe as a "sheen". No one who saw her in her heyday will ever forget that potent fusion of droll, spoilt-child petulance with incomparably glamorous pose and self-assurance. - Gilbert Adair Adam's Rib was the sixth of nine films that Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made together, writes Adrian Turner. It was directed by George Cukor, who brought Hepburn to Hollywood in 1931, and it was co-written by the husband-and-wife team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. One could not wish for a more urbane team to make a movie. It is undoubtedly a highlight of Hepburn's long career. It begins in a parody of film noir - as distraught wife Judy Holliday stalks her two-timing husband Tom Ewell on the streets of New York, finally cornering him and Jean Hagen in an apartment where she pops him with a few .32 calibres. Then the movie moves uptown, to the bedroom of Kate and Spence as Adam and Amanda Bonner, legal eagles both, breakfasting in bed. The shooting is in all the papers and you know that before the next scene is finished Spence will prosecute Holliday and that Hepburn will defend her, striking a blow for sexual equality. You know also that once the case is over - Hepburn wins - their own marriage will fall apart. Hollywood then rushes up with a contrived happy ending. After this opening, Cukor retreats to the comfort of the studio. Although the script is an original, written directly for the screen, you would swear it was based on a play. Each section, or act, concludes with a drawing of a theatre curtain and Cukor revels in the proscenium archness of the piece. More than any of the Tracy-Hepburn films, Adam's Rib is about performance, about real people and movie stars, about role-playing and sexual identity. It is a strikingly modern movie. The strange thing about it is that Hepburn and Tracy's on-screen relationship, as man and wife, is totally sexless and not only because of censorship codes prevalent at the time. Tracy and Hepburn were an odd couple. She is bonily handsome and histrionic, constantly on a pedestal of principle, the epitome of the energised "New Woman". Tracy, by contrast, is swarthy, lethargic and a bit mumbly. He was 49 years old when he made Adam's Rib but he looks 60. For a decade, Tracy and Hepburn were portrayed as the ideal middle-class, career-minded movie couple - Mr and Mrs America: roles that Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke would inherit for the television audience. The odd thing was that Tracy and Hepburn, in real life, were living in sin. The fan magazines, in awe of both of them, respected their privacy. "You sound cute when you get causy," Tracy says to her early in the movie, whose title refers not only to the Bible but also to Adam's teasing of his wife's feminism - a banned word in their household. There is little doubt that the makers of Adam's Rib drew on their intimate friendship with the stars. In private Hepburn was besotted by Tracy and in her 1991 autobiography she admitted that his interests and demands came first. "This was not easy for me because I was definitely a me, me, me person." (Her book is called Me.) But it is Hepburn's public face that Adam's Rib reveals so wittily, so affectionately and ever so slightly satirically (Tracy even mumbles an ad-lib about her Bryn Mawr accent). She brandished her independence and her womanhood with a rare vigour and her defence of the hapless Holliday (who wants to plead guilty) provides her with a sort of manifesto. "Not only one woman is on trial here," she says to the court, "but all women. For years women have been ridiculed, pampered, chucked under the chin. I ask you, be fair with the fair sex." Inevitably, with such a star, she brings to her role a lot of baggage from earlier films. She wears several black suits in court and in one surreal moment, when she asks the jury to imagine that Holliday is a man and that Ewell is a woman, Cukor shows us just that - a surreal invasion of transvestism and androgyny for which Hepburn herself was famous, most notably on screen in Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett and off screen for her liking of male apparel. In all her major films she succeeds in a male world and appeals to men because of her intelligence rather than any sexual allure which distinguishes her from her contemporaries. The only time in Adam's Rib that Hepburn is given a "womanly" job to do - i.e., cook dinner - Tracy joins her in the kitchen and mixes a salad. They have, it seems, achieved sexual equality, at home and at work, but at the expense of any on-screen sexuality. This denial of sexuality - to prove the argument of equality - is maintained with the other characters. The songwriter played by David Wayne might seem to be courting Hepburn, though he is quite clearly a closet homosexual and probably Cukor's alter ego in the movie - the close friend who offers advice and a shoulder to cry on. Similarly, the two-timing husband is no Lothario but a sour-faced bore who is both a wife-beater and a victim of husband-beating. Holliday, meanwhile, has all her sexual appeal deliberately drained from her by Hepburn so that she might look the devoted mother in court (Hepburn gives her the flippant, flowery hat that Tracy has bought her). Jean Hagen, on the other hand, is reduced by Hepburn to the level of a cheap tart, aggressively sexual, and the one chink in the film's argument. All are playing roles and the circle of deceit is completed when Tracy lures Hepburn back to him by using what he had earlier disparaged as "a few female tears, stronger than any acid". By this time, after humiliating Tracy in court, Hepburn has become the male of the partnership. However, both their egos and dignity (i.e., their screen images) remain intact. There is also, finally, a striking sequence when Hepburn interviews Holliday in prison. The scene consists of one long take - about seven minutes - with both actresses seated at a table. Hepburn, on the left of the frame, has her face turned away from the camera so that we are forced to watch Holliday for the entire scene. The sequence reveals Hepburn as a star who was always prepared to serve the movie rather than highlight herself (another actress might have insisted she move showily and scene-hoggingly around the room). She did this in her role as a sponsor of new talent. Holliday had starred in Born Yesterday on Broadway and Hepburn felt strongly that Holliday should also star in the film version. Since Columbia wanted an established name, Hepburn persuaded Holliday to take the small but pivotal part in Adam's Rib in order to convince Columbia that she was star material. The result for Holliday was an Oscar. Throughout her life Hepburn would quietly recommend new actors to studios and directors - Peter O'Toole, Anthony Hopkins and Christopher Reeve also benefited from her discreet patronage. That is the mark of not only a great star, but a selfless professional as well. - Adrian Turner Katharine Houghton Hepburn, actress: born Hartford, Connecticut 12 May 1907; married 1928 Ludlow Ogden Smith (marriage dissolved 1934); died Old Saybrook, Connecticut 29 June 2003.