March 28, 1939—Relegated to the slag heap by Hollywood, Katharine Hepburn took Broadway by storm in The Philadelphia Story, a comedy of manners written especially for her by Philip Barry, which premiered on this night at the Schubert Theatre.
I have written about Barry, one of the premiere playwrights of America’s version of Restoration comedy, for The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society (“The ‘Fox’s Eye’: The Celtic Sensibility of Philip Barry,” Fall 2002). Today I’d like to focus on Hepburn—which is entirely appropriate, given that this comeback vehicle certainly did.
In the summer of 1938, Hepburn was licking her wounds from her recent Hollywood experiences. A change-of-pace role in Sylvia Scarlett (1935), where she played a woman disguised as a boy, had unnerved audiences with its hints of sexual ambiguity (and added fuel to the Tinseltown rumors of a lesbian relationship with Laura Harding, who had given up her own New York theater career to accompany her friend out to California).
So stark was the fall from grace for this star who had already won an Oscar for Modern Glory that even better roles in more conventional films, such as the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby and the screen adaptation of Barry’s Holiday, did not succeed in erasing the damaging assessment of a film distributor who placed her high on a list of actors considered “Box Office Poison.”
Missing out on the role she so badly coveted—Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind—and offered increasingly insulting fare, Hepburn left Hollywood for Fenwick, the family compound on Long Island Sound.
Two major events occurred over the next few months. The first, on September 21, was the Hurricane of 1938, which tore the house apart and forced her and her family to rebuild the structure, more durably this time with brick. The second was a summer afternoon tea with Barry, from which she rebuilt her career on more solid foundations.
The two major accounts of this afternoon interlude that I have come across are contained in Anne Edwards’ A Remarkable Woman: A Biography of Katharine Hepburn (2000) and A. Scott Berg’s Kate Remembered (2003). The second of these—sort of like Edmund Morris’ Dutch, about Ronald Reagan—is an account by a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who inexplicably went mad. Morris invented a fictional character—himself!—as a foil for Reagan; Berg’s intimate account of his friendship with Hepburn appears to have been so rushed into print after the legend’s death that it did not even have an index. (Some free advice, Scott, as you work on your long-awaited Woodrow Wilson project: the President’s been dead for over 80 years, so there’s no excuse for not having an index now. Do yourself –and us—a favor: include one this time.)
To say that Hepburn was surprised by Barry’s overture would be an understatement. Though she had done a superb job with the screen version of Holiday, their crucial working experience remained eight years before in the play The Animal Kingdom, when Barry had helped engineer her firing as understudy. His explanation for the personnel change on the eve of that play’s opening did not feature his usual elegant dialogue: she was “simply no good.”
But now the playwright needed a comeback as badly as Hepburn. A master of high comedy, he had written in the 1930s seven plays that, while often ambitious in subject and stagecraft, had left audiences cold because of their interest in mythology and allegory. So, when he phoned from Maine and invited himself down for tea, the two were in almost equal positions.
The playwright, every bit as dapper in person as the characters in his drawing-room comedies, spelled out for the actress two of his projects. Significantly, both featured a judgmental daughter who can’t understand her father. (Barry’s own infant daughter had died four years before, leaving the playwright devastated.)
The first scenario, about a father suffering from despair, would be left unfinished at his death 11 years later, completed by longtime friend Robert E. Sherwood, and performed posthumously: Second Threshold. The second dispensed with drama and focused on a rich young divorcee on the eve of her remarriage, which ends up being disrupted by the ex who has never really left her life.
Kate thought the second idea “more fun,” and well she might—in attitudes, intonations and even life experiences (the first-husband hanger-on suggested Hepburn’s ex, Ludlow Ogden “Luddy” Smith), the heroine Tracy Lord unmistakably echoed herself. This was a part she could own because she lived it.
Proving she was as shrewd a businessperson as she was talented at acting, Hepburn, with help from past beau Howard Hughes, snapped up the movie rights—a decision that before long paid enormous dividends.
Over the next several months, the comedy went through the fits and starts that shows often make before opening, with many of the problems caused by Barry’s traditional difficulty in writing a satisfactory last act. In the end, however, he pulled it together, and the cast—including up-and-comers Joseph Cotton, Van Heflin and Shirley Booth—meshed perfectly. The Philadelphia Story was a critical smash.
More important, it was a financial one for Hepburn, whose windfall from more than 400 performances on Broadway and another 250 in the road company came to close to half a million dollars. And that was not even counting that movie deal, which also empowered her to get the casting (good friend Cary Grant and throw-in James Stewart, who earned his only Oscar in the role) and director (George Cukor) she wanted in the bargain.
The film’s witty dialogue highlighted her flair with comedy, and the romantic situation—three men in love with her—erased any lingering audience memories of Sylvia Scarlett. (Hepburn’s glamour would be heightened further when she was lovingly photographed two years later by another former beau, George Stevens, in Woman of the Year—her first collaboration with Spencer Tracy.) Hepburn’s Hollywood image—the willful goddess humanized—had taken root, and though she might stumble once or twice again, she would never suffer another losing streak.
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