Hepburn and Cukor: Muse and Filmmaker

By Walter Donohue

The history of cinema is studded with intense relationships between directors and actresses where the women act as a kind of muse to the filmmaker.

It's impossible to think of the films of Godard without Anna Karina's face swimming into view – similarly, Antonioni's urban landscapes are inconceivable without Monica Vitti wandering through them. What would Bergman be without Liv Ullman or Bibi Andersson, Buñuel without Catherine Deneuve or – more recently – Almodóvar without Penelope Cruz.

Fellini captured this in 8 1/2, using Claudia Cardinale as the ever-attentive muse to Marcello Mastroianni's tormented director.

But this kind of phenomenon is not limited to European art films. It was born in the seminal moments of American movies in the relationship between D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish. The birth of American cinema, The Birth of a Nation, begins with Gish's serene gaze. Hitchcock's blondes changed over the years, but found its perfect incarnation in Grace Kelly. Frank Capra found his identity as a filmmaker through the films he made in the early 30s with Barbara Stanwyck – a process which enabled her in turn to discover the fierce persona that turned her into a star. William Wyler's brooding melodramas are unthinkable without the coiled hysteria of Bette Davis.

And with Katharine Hepburn, it is with George Cukor that she did some of her most enduring work. Their sexual ambiguity – and the masks they had to wear because of it – gave them an affinity that suffused their work together over nine films from 1932 to 1979.

A Bill of Divorcement was their first film, and Hepburn's debut in Hollywood. Hepburn traveled to Los Angeles by train, leaving Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal on the Twentieth Century Limited – aptly named, since her life and career pretty much spanned that century.

Her arrival in Hollywood is described by her biographer William J. Mann:

'Nearing the end of her journey, Kath wrapped a Pullman towel soaked in ice water around her head and strode out onto the observation platform. There, a steel filing flew into her eye – a filing that has grown bigger and bigger in every retelling. The story of Hepburn's arrival in Hollywood always begins with the tragicomic anecdote of the young actress stepping off the train with her eye swollen and teary. Myron Selznick, partner with Leland Howard in the agency that represented Kath, supposedly took one look at her and griped to Leland. "The studio is paying $1,500 a week for that?"

And if it wasn't her swollen eye, it was her bony figure; her director, George Cukor, too, was said to recoil when he first met her.

"A boa constrictor on a fast," he allegedly moaned to David O. Selznick, Myron's brother and the new head of production at RKO.

In fact, most Hollywood legends start this way: a nearsighted Hollywood exec fails to spy the swan behind the ugly duckling. Bette Davis' story always begins with Universal chief Carl Laemmle tearing up her contract because he thinks she's got "as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville," the gangly comedian. Various versions of Joan Crawford's origins have her stepping off the bus onto the MGM lot as a chubby, frizzy-haired girl, only to be told to turn around and go back home to Kansas City.

Of course, if Kath's eye had really been as bad as all that, there's no way that Leland Hayward – so cunning, so protective of his clients – would have brought her to the studio. With the sun dropping lower in the sky, Leland hustled Kath into his yellow Rolls-Royce and informed her that he was taking her directly to the studio, bags and all.

Hollywood was in transition. Every week, hundreds of young stage actors from the East were disembarking from trains and buses, eager to enunciate their vowels roundly into the microphone and thereby prove themselves indispensable to the new medium. But these young Turks were eyed suspiciously by many in the old guard: would the Spencer Tracys and Margaret Sullavans prove to have the endurance of a John Gilbert or Gloria Swanson.

Yet the smell of change was in the air, as definite as the fragrance of orange blossoms. It wasn't just sound that made the movies in the early 30s so different. A new art form, one that pushed at the edges of form and content, was emerging. A stone's throw from RKO, Paramount was turning out Hollywood's most sophisticated pictures, from the swell comedies of Ernst Lubitsch to the madcap antics of the Marx Brothers. At Warners, gritty gangster pictures exposed the raw underbelly of American life during the Great Depression. There was a sense of something new taking shape. And it required a new kind of actor, modern and independent.

At that precarious moment, Katharine Hepburn was exactly the kind of East Coast, well-bred, theatre actress producers insisted they wanted. Looking into his rearview mirror, Leland saw not a plain, angular woman in a funny hat but a movie star. He was definitely a believer – Kath's first and perhaps most important. If Hepburn owed her career to anyone other than her indomitable self, it was this man. Stepping on the gas, Leland steered the yellow Rolls-Royce along scenic Arroya Boulevard. Before this workday was over, he'd deliver his client to the destiny he fervently believed was hers.'”

Extract from Kate: The Woman Who Was Katharine Hepburn by William J. Mann (Faber & Faber, 2006).

Essential Viewing: Little Women [Buy], Alice Adams [Buy], Silvia Scarlett [Buy], Stage Door [Buy], Bringing Up Baby [Buy], Holiday [Buy], The Philadelphia Story [Buy], Woman of the Year [Buy], Adam's Rib [Buy], The African Queen [Buy], Pat and Mike [Buy], Summertime [Buy], Suddenly Last Summer [Buy], Long Day's Journey Into Night [Buy], The Lion in Winter [Buy], On Golden Pond [Buy].