Years ago, I had made the editor at The Greatest Newspaper in the Northwest™ promise me that I could do the weekly rotating column when Kate died. That happened on a Sunday, and I only heard about it Monday morning, the day it was to run, so I had to put this out fast. If ever a column wrote itself, this one did. Just because I don't think I can do better today, here it is:
Katharina: "They call me Katharina that do talk of me. "
Petrucchio: "You lie, in faith; for you are call'd plain Kate,
"And bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst;
"But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom..."
(The Taming of the Shrew, Act II, Scene I)
When I heard this morning that Katharine Hepburn had died, I found myself once again wondering if Shakespeare had written his play with her in mind. It's irrelevant that Shakespeare was dust in his grave centuries before the great actress was born. Women like Kate Hepburn are above such chronological technicalities.
She was everything Shakespeare's Katharina was: fiery, quick-witted, with a spirit underneath that could be gentled but never tamed.
She had style. No, more than that, she embodied style.
Almost the last of the generation that created the movie industry, Kate Hepburn is still regarded as one of the greatest actresses in history. She was personally responsible for remaking the image of women in film, simply by being herself. When she first appeared in Hollywood in 1932, women were little more than decorations for the male lead or prizes to be won by dashing heroes. The only roles written for actresses were either for chaste, demure Snow-White types or sex kittens like Jean Harlow (and later, Marilyn Monroe). Kate would have none of that. Here was a woman who would not be tied to a railroad track and scream for a man to rescue her. The daughter of a prominent suffragette, she exuded a strength that left men in awe, infatuated with her even while they revered her. Now, as she makes her final exit, women are as likely to be the hero as men, and nobody would dream of telling them to take a back seat and not upstage the leading man.
"Plain Kate?" Never that. There was nothing plain about her. When she walked into a room, it immediately centered itself around her. When she spoke, it was with a confidence and assurance that made it impossible to argue with her. By the standards of the time, she was no great beauty. She was skinny in a time when women were supposed to be curvy, with chiseled features and a face some thought masculine. Yet when she was on screen, nobody could look anywhere else. Even Spencer Tracy, her co-star and longtime lover, sometimes complained that he was background scenery beside her.
She dressed to suit herself, almost always wearing slacks in preference to a dress (unheard-of in her early days!) and with her hair in a topknot. She didn't try to make her looks the center of her career. This, I think, is why she's remembered as an actress and not merely a movie star.
"Bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the Curst" spent her younger years in one affair after another, usually with powerful figures like Howard Hughes and director John Ford. (In fact, when Ford made "The Quiet Man" in 1950, he made no secret that the redheaded shrew played by Maureen O'Hara was a portrait of Kate. ) She was married in 1928 to an obscure playwright named Ogden Ludlow, who quietly tolerated her affairs and loved her in the background. She divorced him six years later, but the pair stayed on friendly terms and spent much of the 70s together until he died in 1979. But the great love of her life was Spencer Tracy.
He was everything she was not. He was a rough-hewn Irish Catholic from Milwaukee; she was a patrician New Englander with little use for religion. He was a self-destructive alcoholic; she a near-teetotaller. They met on the set of "Woman of the Year," where she played a strong career woman who finds her new husband even stronger than she. This proved to be the pattern for both their life and their film careers.
The two made eight films together, and their names became synonymous with romantic comedy. But the twenty-year love affair between them exceeded even the standards of Hollywood. It was kept quiet to avoid hurting Tracy's wife, Louise, and his children. When he died in 1967, Kate followed the funeral procession but turned away before arriving at the church, out of respect for Louise. Even the Hollywood news media kept their secret until she went public with it after his death. Who can imagine that happening today?
Tracy died on the set of their final film, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." His final monologue was about love and commitment, and both her eyes and his are shining as he delivers it on screen. Although nobody outside of Hollywood knew it at the time, he was thanking her for love beyond that given to most men in their lives. In a way, he was expressing the love we all felt for Kate, or a woman like her; she was the spine that made him stand up straight.
So good-bye, "the prettiest Kate in all Christendom." There was never an actress like her before, and though she's the pattern today's actresses often don't even know they're following, there will never be another like her. It's hard even to write this around the lump in my throat. She was an icon, the yardstick beside which actresses are measured. She made movies what they were and are, and moved our culture in step with her.
Good-bye, Kate. And thanks. For everything.
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