The Original, page 11
Laura shows none of this to Kate who would only feel trapped and not sympathetic. To Kate, if you want to be in the center, you had better be damned well interesting enough to hold on to your place. Instead, Laura asks Ragnhild to make extra food for friends who might come by. Kate is delighted by Laura’s thoughtfulness and Laura moves to the center again.
Los Angeles
August 1932
Changes are coming. The six decide to meet at Cocoanut Grove. Neutral ground. There’s a private room and the staff are discreet. Each studio head takes a turn to speak, equality is important in this room. They must present a united front and have to fall into line before the state congressional hearings.
Louis B. Mayer is irritated. They are here to talk about the censorship problem and he wants to get on with it. His son-in-law David is talking now: about the Hays Office, ratings and autonomy. A stricter Production Code of Ethics could mean more regulation. Undue exposure. Sex hygiene. Perversion. Louis B. stops listening. As if MGM would ever make a film that crossed these lines. David Selznick is still talking, now about their common goals and shared endeavor, their artistic freedom. His elbows are on the table; his phrases are reduced to bursts of hot breath. No substance. No character. Louis B. is angry. He knows his son-in-law owes money all over town.
Irene and the baby come home from the hospital today and Louis B. wants to be there with his wife when she arrives. Someone should be there. David has hardly mentioned the baby. He just keeps talking about Irene’s recovery, as if she has been ill rather than pregnant.
Louis B. watches his son-in-law. He likes David’s work. The man makes excellent pictures, brings them in on time and on budget and he respects that. He wants David back at MGM where he can get a better view of things, keep an eye on the finances. Louis B. believes family should work together, sail under one flag. And if David is back at MGM, Louis B. can make sure Irene gets what she needs. He and his wife speak about how to give money to Irene. Edie accepts it, builds a beautiful home and is grateful, but Irene? No. His wife has told him that Irene is worried about the cost of the private room at the hospital. Louis B. blames David.
Kate
RKO Studios
“Again!” George calls and the actors reset.
It has been going well, Barrymore is remembering his lines. The mood is relaxed and George is happy that David Selznick is not on the lot today. There is a note clipped to his script: a reminder to send Irene camellias and messenger his gift, a custom carriage robe, over to the house on Rexford. The cast also prefer it when David is not there. David has already sent a dozen memos today. George is ignoring them. Marcella Rabwin opens the soundstage door and leaves the memos with the prop man who drops them into an unlabeled box. No one can keep up with Selznick’s memos. They have grown worse since the baby. The prop man has heard a rumor that when Mrs. Selznick wants to teach her husband a lesson, she makes him read his memos out loud. It’s probably not true; it doesn’t sound like Mrs. Selznick. The prop man sits on a lighting crate and returns to his crime novel. Miss Hepburn has been through the scene three times and has not got it right yet. They won’t need him for a while.
Kate is strung tight with tension. She tries the line the way she practiced this morning in the bathroom mirror, the way she and George spoke about before. The same goddamn heartbreak line. It falls flat, she can see it in George’s expression. The words are worn out, they’ve lost their properties and are reduced to wet clicks of tongue against teeth. Kate hates the line and wants to cut it.
“Kate,” George says, taking her to one side. “I can’t ask the writer to cut it. It’s the whole point of the film.” He stops, worried that if he highlights the drama, she will try to do the next take dramatically. New stars can be so literal. He does not want her to wear the pain of the scene on the outside. The audience must just catch a quick glimpse of how it lives inside her. It’s what will make them feel they know her; if they think they can see something in her that others cannot see. It will make her theirs.
“Kate, you are acting the words. Think. Imagine this moment; imagine you are right now realizing that you cannot marry the man you love, cannot have the children you crave.”
Does she crave children? She has always assumed they will arrive, on time and neatly packaged so as to not upend her life, the way they never upended her mother’s. Crave? That is a strong word.
“Kate, imagine that you will never have any other family but this one, the one you were born with and so will be alone for always. Say it as if you feel it but do not want to show it, as if it’s something you dread.”
Feel it. Alone for always. He wants her to open the door and invite that time back in. Kate considers the words. It is a skeletal line with nowhere to hide. Feeling it means finding it, letting it find her; as if that feeling does not know where she lives. Kate stops, steadies. She needs to be good at this. Fine. How does heartbreak sound? Not like this, not the way she has been trying it, with the emotion bald and front-loaded. Real heartbreak is noiseless. It is named. The names you never speak aloud.
She tries it again.
* * *
—
“We can’t push the scene Kate,” George says, sounding genuinely sorry. “We have to get it tonight. We’ll photograph the other close-ups now. Go home for an hour, stop thinking, have dinner with Laura and we can start again.”
“I’m getting worse, that’s what you mean,” Kate says, sitting down so that Nancy can wrap her hair in a net. Nancy knows that she will most likely have to start from scratch with Kate’s hair when she comes back from dinner but the net may help some. Kate doesn’t bother to ask if they can soften the words. George is fanatical about staying true to the text. “Don’t lie to me, Gor-udge. I know when I’m goddamn awful.”
“You are not awful,” George says carefully, “but you are getting farther from it. You’re getting impersonal. Haven’t you had your heart broken?” George’s question is seamed with wonder. An undamaged heart is something that George cannot fathom; his own bulges with scar tissue. “Kate, find something, do something, anything that will bring you closer, help you connect to the words. The line has to be yours.”
Laura, standing in the door of the makeup room, waits for them to finish and then drives Kate home.
Laura
Coldwater Canyon
They eat in the kitchen, at the pine table. Over cold cheese sandwiches and milk, Laura brings up the family: Mrs. Hepburn’s uncle and Dr. Hepburn’s brothers. Laura says she has heard a rumor. Really, she heard about Kate’s family from Leland. He takes care to research his clients. Laura hears Kate’s blurry hot rush of defense, but Laura is not attacking but waiting, surrendering and open-faced and Kate cannot respond in anger to a question asked with such unrelenting tenderness.
Kate
Coldwater Canyon
Kate speaks about her family’s dead in small, oval phrases. But not about Tom, never about Tom—she keeps him safe, cocooned in his white attic room. Kate’s voice is tight but level and the stories, metallic and hard won, shudder from disuse. The Hepburns do not speak of these people; Kate says she no longer remembers why.
Laura is patient and waits to catch the words with gentle arms.
“So many,” Laura says, when Kate has finished. “On both sides.” Laura is dissolved, her edges ragged. She had not expected so much self-inflicted death.
“Yes. So many,” Kate repeats, her voice sounding like her voice again.
“How?” Laura asks.
How. People always want to know how they did it. What does it matter? Is one way better than another? Easier? Is automobile exhaust less messy than a gun? Choking better than a slug of bullet? Drowning better than jumping? Either way, the end is the same. People just decide a thing and get on with it. Once the decision is made, they are gone already. How only matters to the people who have to clean up.
George
RKO Studios
“Once more,” George says, his voice low.
The scene resets. The grips and prop people move quietly, tilting a light, replacing a handkerchief, understanding that something important is happening.
Kate has got it and George does not want to crack the dense air around her. She has done it, he thinks. She has found a way to be someone else. The cameras roll forward. Kate and David Manners begin the scene again.
She will make it. George knows it when he sees it.
Los Angeles
August 1932
Selznick still says she is ugly. He tells Irving Thalberg at MGM that she has an ugly mouth. Irving has seen her screen test and tells him he’s wrong. Irene tells him that on film, Kate reads differently. Her steep reef of cheek, ledge of jaw? She will be beautiful, Irene says. Just wait. Irene knows, Kate is something new. Not pretty, not trying to please you, there is no softness, no give. She is utterly herself. Don’t look too closely. Kate’s face can unravel, especially when she is concentrating and her lips press straight. Bogart will eventually call it her schoolmistress look, but that is not until they shoot a film on a river in Africa.
She has it. Not all the time, but most. We see that it can be easy now, the equilibrium, the loose-jointed fluency. Something has broken open, some road unblocked. She can shove her hands into the dirt and pull up the roots of the thing. She’d missed it before, had it wrong. She doesn’t need to play someone else. It’s an easy mistake; the language can trip you up, make you look for another you, but there is no one else. It’s a magic trick, a hoax. The woman is not sawn in half. The white rabbit was already in the top hat. She only needs to play herself—more of herself than she would willingly give away.
There used to be another her.
Kate remembers the conversations they used to have; his idea that it was better to be the words than the mouth; her idea that fame would protect her. But then, she had not understood the cost, the self-invasion. We never want them to know the price up front.
Kate
RKO Studios
Kate wants to move fast. She comes in early, reads off-camera lines for the other actors during their close ups, stays to finish the scene, even when the camera is not on her. Selznick lets one of the stand-ins go. Why pay another person when Kate is willing to do the off-camera lines? The stand-in gets a job at MGM and tells stories in the commissary about this new up-and-coming star. The cast and crew say Kate is generous, professional, a real team player, but that’s not it. Kate is just anxious to catch and keep this clicked-into-place feeling. She tries to describe the feeling to her family, to Laura, but can’t. They are not on the inside. Magic is not built from parts of speech.
* * *
• • •
The big scene, the break up scene. The one where she tells David Manners she will not live her life with him. George has held back from shooting it until now. He must think she is ready. She knows how to do it this time, where to find it. She lands it in three takes.
Later, at home, Laura asks her about Tom. It’s different from when Kate offered up her other family, invited Laura in. Kate tells her some, not all. There are small things that Laura seems to guess; the stiff door, the heat. But then, it was an attic, Kate said that, of course it would be hot. Did she mention the door? She does not remember.
Cary
Santa Monica
He sees it in Screen Time. Right beside a column on the “Six Best Money Stars.” That sounds like the six stars who best handle their finances rather than the six stars who bring in the most money. Screen Time should hire better writers. But there it is, spelled out in a small, black outlined box. “Mr. Orry Kelly to be the new chief costume designer at Warner Bros.” The article says Mr. Kelly is coming straight from Australia but the article is wrong. Orry Kelly is coming right from a damp one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. Cary should know. He left him there when he moved out.
Los Angeles
August 1932
We knew she could do it. She just gets better. Her scenes are clean: Barrymore is experienced, generous, we have not seen him so engaged in years. He is not even drinking now. He concedes the spotlight and Kate is fresh and glorious and each phrase is new. George watches her, relieved. He bet the farm on her. Leland watches her, bewitched. Laura Harding’s hand covers her red mouth. This whole town, this whole country, is going to fall in love with the woman she loves. The photographer rolls past cut, he cannot lose a frame of this.
Laura
Coldwater Canyon
Since Kate learned to act, the sex has mostly drained off the love, but for Laura, the love is enough. And it’s only temporary. It will all go back to how it was when the picture finishes. This is the nearest to real life Laura has ever been; the life she wants and the life she lives are running so close they nearly touch. Kate has not been coming to Laura’s room but Laura hopes. Of course she does. Being alive has an addictive quality. But what if this life in Hollywood goes away? The wrong words to the wrong people and this life could vanish for Kate. Would that be so bad?
There are good days to hold on to, important days. The day she filmed the break-up scene and Kate spoke about her brother. That day, when Kate came home, she told Laura everything, the unspeakable history of her family. The railroad tracks and the running engine. Laura knew most of it already. When Leland first told her, she had her lawyers in New York pull the police report. It is public information, she reasoned. She read about the hot attic room, the door, the beams, the way his feet touched the floor. What she read and what Kate told her blend together. Eventually, Laura doesn’t remember asking for the police report. Absolution comes easily to her.
Knowing these private Hepburn tragedies makes Laura feel important, their relationship scrubbed clean and newly baptized in intimacy. The day Kate told her about her family, they returned to the set together, and Kate landed her scenes as Laura knew she would. George had drunk three cups of coffee by then, thinking the shoot would take all night. It was over in seven minutes. One take and he had it. Two more for good measure but he didn’t need them. Laura felt essential, responsible. You have to earn your keep with Kate.
Laura knows so much that these movie people do not. Things they will never know. It makes Laura feel safer.
Kate
Coldwater Canyon
And then the cameras stop. They are done for the night. The film is tucked into its canisters and the lids are snapped shut. Actors change their shoes, root in their bags for their glasses. George wipes his face with a blue handkerchief. John Barrymore lights a cigarette. Everyone turns back into themselves. Kate feels that tugging loss, the kind you feel after a dinner party where you have said too much. It’s uncomfortable. But she is tough. She sets her teeth and un-grips her hands. The camera has to want you. It’s transactional. That’s the only way this works. The camera will never want you unless you offer up your secrets. They are the price of doing business. Kate is proud she is able to do it but feels split open and raw.
She wishes she had something to sell besides herself.
Part Three
Recasting
Howard
Pasadena
September 1932
In September, the most eligible bachelor in America disappears. He has done it before. His business partner, Noah Dietrich, calls all the usual places: the Muirfield Road house in Los Angeles, the golf course, the airfield, the Hughes Film production office in Culver City, the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire, even the Yoakum Boulevard house in Houston, but cannot find him. Howard had been at the Ambassador Hotel that morning but only for a haircut. The long, sexy hair he wore while directing Hell’s Angels is shorn off. A regular job needs regular hair.
He pays for the train ticket in cash, stooping down to slide the money under the window. Usually, he charges everything to the Hughes Tool Company in Houston but Noah has made him promise not to until the company finances are back in the black. It is 1932, and like the rest of America, Howard Hughes is going broke.
Howard does not mind the third-class carriage. It’s a little dirty, but he is careful not to let his sleeve touch the armrest. It’s an adventure. No one recognizes him, but then no one expects the richest man in America to be traveling to Texas in a third-class carriage. He is wearing a shirt he bought that morning from Sears. The label is itchy. He wishes he could tell someone where he is. He wishes he could tell Billie.
He arrives in Fort Worth in time for the interview and presents a Texas driver’s license in the name of Charles Howard. He had it run up on Olvera Street last week. He is waved through to the line of applicants.
* * *
—
The other applicants are all about twenty, twenty-two at the most. Howard feels too old at twenty-six. And too tall, at six foot four, but he hunches, collapsing his long, thin frame. Yesterday, his uncut brown hair would have fallen into his eyes but not today.
“Baggage handler, sixty dollars a month,” the crisp American Airways man says, offering him the job.
Deaf in one ear, Howard leans forward, struggling to hear. Half lip reading, half guessing, “Yes.” Whatever the American Airways man has said, the answer is yes.
The man looks down at Howard’s application. “Pilot’s license? Do you want to sign up for the commercial pilot training program?”
