Flashback, December 1941: Wartime Film Short Marks Ford-Hepburn Affair

A little more than two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Hollywood swung into action behind the war effort with Women in Defense, a short documentary directed by John Ford and narrated by Katharine Hepburn (pictured). Their relationship had led Ford, then Hollywood’s hottest director (two consecutive Best Director Oscars), to a painful moral dilemma and, more recently, a surprising resolution.

Hollywood’s gung-ho attitude toward the war might seem hard to believe nowadays, but there was surprisingly little anti-war dissent in the film community, for these reasons:

* The U.S. had suffered a surprise attack by the Japanese, so there was no question who was the aggressor;

* As the children of immigrants--or even immigrants themselves--Hollywood’s studio moguls, a heavily Jewish group, were understandably anxious to demonstrate patriotism to a public that still evinced all too much anti-Semitism;

* The moguls also wanted to defeat Hitler, whose mistreatment of Jews in both his country and lands conquered by his forces was already manifest (even if the Holocaust was only barely beginning);

* The most leftist elements in Hollywood--Communists and fellow-travelers--switched from opposition to support of the war following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

As my friend, fellow blogger Dennis Brady, noted in a recent post about the 8^th Army Air Force, a number of Hollywood stars, notably including Clark Gable and James Stewart, served with distinction in the war.

Writers and directors presented special cases. Their talents consisted of presenting stories and crafting images were deemed crucially important in creating films for a mass audience. Over the next four years, Ford, Frank Capra, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler would cooperate with the War Department, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Army Pictorial Services, the Army Educational Program, the American Armed Forces First Motion Picture Unit, and other units in explaining, both to servicemen and their worried families, “Why We Fight” (to use the title of Capra’s seven-film series). They would counter the black art of propaganda, as practiced by Josef Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl, with a more benign variety.

Women in Defense, released on Christmas Eve, was a good case in point.  The 10-minute film, with a script by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, depicted women as instrumental in preparing for the coming war, working in scientific, industrial, and voluntary-services activities such as sewing parachutes in silk, testing chemicals on mice as part of health programs, shaping bullets and other munitions, and giving out blood that might be used later with wounded soldiers.

Viewers caught up in aspects of the film that would seem familiar to them—Hepburn’s upper-crust diction, Ford’s homey images of communities coming together—would not know at the time that the relationship between the star and her onetime director contained its own love, longing, and pain, tried by circumstance and the passage of time.

Five years before, shortly after filming concluded of their flop Mary of Scotland, Hepburn and Ford seemed on the brink of marriage, particularly following their idyllic trip to her family home, Fenwick. But the devoutly Catholic Ford interpreted the death of his father immediately afterward as a divine judgment on their illicit relationship, and Hepburn’s offer to his wife Mary--$150,000, in return for ending the marriage and granting him access to his beloved daughter Barbara—only hardened Mary’s opposition to their union. “Jack is very religious, he’ll never divorce me,” Mary predicted confidently. “He’ll never have grounds to divorce me. I’m going to be Mrs. John Ford until I die.”

That is how it turned out, but for the next five years, the Ford-Hepburn affair had a curious half-life. They never spoke of marriage again, and by 1938 Hepburn had decamped for the East Coast while Ford stayed in Hollywood. But they remained fond of each other, and, even as the actress was pursued by billionaire aviator Howard Hughes, the possibility of a permanent union between the two seemed out of the question so long as Ford figured in the background.

Then, in 1941, several developments changed the nature of the relationship between Ford and Hepburn for good:

* Ford’s sense of betrayal over Hepburn’s affair with Spencer Tracy. Ford gave Spencer Tracy his first break in Hollywood with Up the River (1930), but relations between the two cooled after the actor rejected the lead in Ford’s adaptation of The Plough and the Stars. Within a week of the start of production of Hepburn’s first film with Tracy, Woman of the Year, as industry insiders began to gossip about the possibility of an affair between the two MGM stars, Ford traveled cross-country to Washington, D.C., where he would begin serving as part of what later became the Field Photographic Unit under William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services. Cast and crew members on his films, long given to interpreting what his sometimes mysterious actions (or even lack of them) betokened, had no doubt that this was his way of registering disapproval.

* The death of Mary’s first husband. Though Ford and Mary had married in 1920, it had not been a Catholic ceremony, because the bride was divorced and Protestant. By 1941, Mary’s ex-husband had died. Her conversion to Catholicism removed the only obstacle to the religious ceremony that Ford had long wanted.

* Pearl Harbor. Mary, complaining of loneliness, had traveled to DC to see her husband off to his new naval job when the Japanese attack on December 7 occurred. Perhaps the prospect of death in a war now at hand decided John. Before the month was out, the couple was at last married by a Catholic priest in the National Cathedral in Washington.

Ford, who would be promoted to Captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve by war’s end, continued to create films of distinction while n the armed forces. He won two more Oscars, this time for Best Documentary, with The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7^th (1943). (At Midway, where he was wounded in the shoulder and elbow so badly that he was temporarily knocked unconscious, he is said, while filming in an exposed watertower at the height of the battle, to have yelled “at the attacking Zeroes to swing left or right--and curs[ed] them out when they disobeyed directions.”)

Ford’s World War II works, concluding with the fictional full-length feature They Were Expendable (1945), depict the conflict less as a matter of glory than as sacrifice for an ideal. That might also characterize his relationship with Hepburn. Given his devotion to Catholicism, marriage to the star, at least while his wife was alive, was out of the question.

But the great director, crusty to cast and crew to the point of abusiveness, still carried a noticeable soft spot for the actress. His rollicking 1952 valentine to Ireland, The Quiet Man, featured a chief female character named Mary Kate Dannaher. It’s impossible not to read those the first and middle names without thinking of the two most important women in his life. When Hepburn came to visit, as he was dying in March 1973, he threw her off-balance first by telling her she was beautiful, then by asking if she knew that he loved her.

It is one of the curiosities of Hollywood biography that unconventional, freethinking Connecticut Yankee Kate Hepburn gave her heart to two Irish-American Catholics unwilling to divorce their wives and bent on self-destruction: Ford and Tracy. The only way that I can begin to understand this is by thinking that each relationship began with admiration for two film professionals who had virtually no equals at their craft, then passed into an understanding and love for the sensitivity that these men hid as much from themselves as from the world.

Quote of the Day (“The Lion in Winter,” on “How Peace Begins”)

Prince John: “A knife! He's got a knife!”
Eleanor of Aquitaine: “Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians! How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little - that's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.”--James Goldman, The Lion in Winter (1966)

Yes, that’s Katharine Hepburn in the accompanying image as Eleanor of Aquitaine, in the role that netted her a second Oscar trophy. But two years before it became a vehicle for her, on this date in 1966, The Lion in Winter premiered at Broadway’s Ambassador Theatre, with an actress two decades the junior of Kate the Great--the luminous Rosemary Harris--as the estranged spouse of King Henry II of England. (Robert Preston played the latter role onstage; Peter O’Toole would handle it onscreen, repeating the role that had earned him a nomination four years previously in Becket.)

I was fortunate enough to see Harris onstage in Edward Albee’s All Fall Down several years ago, in a production presented by the Roundabout Theatre Co. That same troupe mounted, in the winter of 1999, a revival of The Lion in Winter starring Stockard Channing and Laurence Fishburne.

Both the play and film (adapted by Goldman himself) feature a war of wills, wit and words between Eleanor and Henry, who has decided to let his wife out of prison for the Christmas season as he ponders an heir to the throne among their children. As the quote above indicates, there’s much in the script that actors would virtually kill for.

But even actors of enormous skill can’t hide the fact that this otherwise literate script is more than a little anachronistic. As the sons of Henry and Eleanor scheme against each other and their father for the throne, the tone becomes more than a little like one of those 20th-century Thanksgiving and Christmas family get-togethers. You know--the kind that usually climaxes with, “Mom (or Dad) always loved you best!”

Quote of the Day (Katharine Hepburn, on Character)

“To keep your character intact, you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time.”—Katharine Hepburn, quoted in Reader’s Digest, September 2009

Movie Quote of the Day (Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, On “The Old Juice,” in “Adam’s Rib”)

Amanda Bonner (played by Katharine Hepburn): “You haven't tried to see my point of view. You haven't even any respect for my, my, my…”

Adam Bonner (played by Spencer Tracy): “There we go, there we go, there we go - Oh, oh, here we go again. The old juice.” (She begins to cry because he refuses to understand her strong feelings and point of view.) “Ah, guaranteed heart-melter. A few female tears...”

Amanda: (sobbing) “I can't help it.”

Adam: "...stronger than any acid. But this time they won't work...”

Amanda: “I didn't...”

Adam: “You can cry from now until the time the jury comes in and it won't make you right and it won't win you that silly case.”

Amanda: “Adam! Please...”

Adam: “Nothing doing...” (He leaves the room, upset about their argument)

Amanda: “...please try to understand.”

Adam: (He returns) “Ah, don't you want your rubdown? You want a drink?”

Amanda: “No.”

Adam: “Do you want anything? What, honey?” (She kicks him in the shin) “Ow!”

Amanda: “Let's all be manly!” (She marches offscreen)—Adam’s Rib (1949), screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, directed by George Cukor

Perhaps the greatest entry in the greatest man-woman screen team in the history of movies, Adam’s Rib premiered 60 years this past Wednesday. This tale of lawyers working opposite sides of the same case was, believe it or not, based on real-life attorneys William Dwight Whitney and wife Dorothy, who represented actor Raymond Massey and his wife, then divorced each other and married their clients in one big, happy, amicable pair of marriages, sort of like if Noel Coward had written a real-life American comedy about lawyers.

One reason why I find this movie superior to all the other Tracy-Hepburn films is that the leads receive not just solid, but brilliant support from the likes of David Wayne, Tom Ewell, Jean Hagen, and especially Judy Holliday. Hepburn and Tracy stumped for Holliday when Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn didn’t want her. Holliday’s brilliant performance gave her irresistible momentum in landing her Oscar-winning role as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday the following year.

Maybe the reason why Tracy and Hepburn were so gracious about promoting Holliday was that they were confident enough in their own abilities to know they wouldn’t suffer by comparison. The scene I just quoted demonstrates why.

Now, my favorite scene from the film is the “licorice” one involving Adam, Amanda and flirtatious neighbor Kip. But the above quote is better at demonstrating the interplay between the two leads. The Gordon-Kanin script gives them some great dialogue, but half the fun lies in watching what Tracy and Hepburn let you infer between the lines.

Hepburn’s Amanda, though highly intelligent, is so competitive that she resorts to other means besides the mind—her emotions and her feet—to prove a point. And Adam, for all his stodginess and scorn for “the old juice,” returns abashed when he thinks he’s hurt her feelings.

Better than the script can show, Tracy and Hepburn let you see that Adam and Amanda enjoy a marriage of equally matched human beings—certainly equally foolish, but, despite their powerful feelings about their case, equally warm and loving, too.

Quote of the Day (Ralph Richardson to Co-Star Katharine Hepburn)

“I say, you’re a very attractive woman!”—Ralph Richardson, star of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, after dancing with co-star Katharine Hepburn at the film’s wrap party, quoted in A. Scott Berg, Kate Remembered (2003)

Richardson made his comment in 1962, but you can get an idea what he was talking about 20 years before, in this iconic image from Woman of the Year—the first film Katharine Hepburn (whose centennial is today) made with her most frequent co-star (and offscreen lover), Spencer Tracy. The latter film’s director, George Stevens, was a former beau, and you get a sense, in this truly masterful still, of what he—and Ralph, and Spencer—saw in her.

This is the first shot Tracy’s everyman sportswriter has of globetrotting columnist Tess Harding, and he’s impressed. There she is, drawn up to her full height, almost feline in her chic attire, but also almost ferocious with that imperious gaze, as if to say, “Can you handle me? Are you sure?” And the angle of her arms demonstrates, despite the film’s final bow in the direction of male chauvinist contemporary mores, that any relationship between the two would be on her terms.

This shot is a heady mix of intelligence and glamour. What it doesn’t convey is playfulness—a side of the actress that came out best in her prior work with Cary Grant as well as other scenes in her nine films with Tracy.

Tess Harding was reportedly based on columnist Dorothy Thompson, but with her chic allure, Hepburn transformed what was on the written page into the archetype of a new professional woman that would not appear full force in America’s workplaces until three decades later. Even so, there was nobody like Kate the Great before; there has been nobody like her since.

Quote of the Day (Katharine Hepburn, on Aspiring Celebrities)

"People who want to be famous are really loners. Or they should be."—Katharine Hepburn, Me (1991)

This Day in Theater History (“The Philadelphia Story” premieres)

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.