On Katharine Hepuburn

Back then, studio heads were allowed to have wit. So it was that when Katharine Hepburn was lobbying for the part of Scarlett O'Hara, in the story that was destined to become the biggest movie of all time even when it was still merely the biggest book of all time, David O. Selznick brought plenty of wit to his response.: "I can't see Rhett Butler chasing you for twelve years."

Selznick was someone to listen to--he'd been the one to give Hepburn her first real break in pictures. It was George Cukor who had cast her in A Bill of Divorcement, but it was Selznick whose cash-money was on the line. This was 1932, when she was basically a figure of the stage, and already she had a reputation for being moody, clumsy, and arrogant. And her voice--what was with that voice? There had been trauma in her life early: a younger brother's suicide. You can't dismiss a thing like that in how it shapes a person.

Cukor would take plenty of other chances on Hepburn--they would make ten films together--and some of them paid off as handsomely as Divorcement, while others....Onet thing to call it is inconsistency, although it certainly deserves a better name than that. Bringing Up Baby, directed by Howard Hawks (another career-long favorite), is an acknowledged masterpiece today, but that wasn't the consensus among its initial audience, the few who comprised that audience.

The boom-and-bust cycles of Hepburn's career were weird and severe and constant. One reason why this deserves our respect is that her flops and triumphs were both typically a product of her propensity to take great chances. One of the many great comebacks that her great failures necessitated came with The Philadelphia Story (1940). She believed in the story so much, and in her ability to shine as its female lead, that she risked everything. First she had to buy her way out of her contract at RKO, then she had to buy the rights to the film, and then she put her foot down and insisted that she be the star when it got made. Cukor directed, and that didn't hurt, but it was going to take more than that to save her if the film proved to be another Hepburn bust. She'd staked her old job, her money, and her credibility, as both an actress who can pick her own roles and an actress who can actually act. The gamble paid off, and she lived to fail and succeed another day.

Shrewd enough to understand that a lot of filmgoers wanted to see her knocked on her ass, she let Cary Grant do precisely and literally that, when she made her very first appearance in The Philadelphia Story. That shrewdness was not a finite resource, or something that existed in its own compartmentalized spaces. It permeated every aspect of her life. She knew enough to keep her private life genuinely private, but she also knew enough to understand that she really did like some of the perks of fame, and wouldn't prefer that they just disappear. But she didn't go out just to be seen, and she avoided superficial social engagements. Her manner of dress was casual beyond casual, often tomboyish, and did nothing to stifle the rumors that she was a lesbian.

It wasn't just her voice and her clothes and her manner that inspired those rumors. She also refused to have kids--a terrible crime in America. She was honest and self-aware enough to acknowledge, late in life, that "I would have been a terrible mother, because basically I am a very selfish human being." If only more mothers and fathers, in Holllywood and elsewhere, were capable of making the same realization about themselves. She also never married, although she did have one true love, at least: Spencer Tracy, who stayed married to someone else, if only nominally. His and Hepburn's was a 26-year relationship, terminated only by Tracy's death.

No actor or actress ever worked harder--she had earned the right to a certain presumptuousness, through rigorous rehearsal and the quest for perfectionism in take after take, memorizing her own lines and everyone else's, even knowing what the tech guys should be up to in a given scene; that was how thoroughly she prepared for all her roles. "She can work till everyone drops," said Stanley Kramer, who directed her in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

That movie won her an Oscar, her second, in 1968. Her first had been won 34 years earlier. That gap is longer than many of her more celebrated colleagues managed to stay alive. And she wasn't done, either. After winning best actress again the next year, she stuck around long enough to win yet again, in 1982, another 13 years on. So what we're talking about is a half-century between her first and final best-actress Oscars. This isn't the only way to measure success, but it's one of the ways, and these movies all succeeded by other means of measurement, too. So this kind of track record deserves a name different from inconsistency, even if inconsistency is partly what it is. Pull back a bit and look at it in the aggregate and some of the failures move out of sight or reveal themselves as successes, while the unqualified successes burn a little brighter. This was in Hepburn's design all along: "It's better to try something difficult and flop than play it safe all the time."

After that, inconsistency begins to look a lot like excellence, and the sheer longevity an excellence of its own.