The Original, page 25
They had a rocky start. He wanted to know where she had been for ten months, what had gone wrong. Came right out and asked her after the table read.
“Why would I tell you that?” she said, too shocked to be angry.
“You’re going to tell someone. Why not me?”
You’re going to tell someone. No. She isn’t. Irene knows, her family know and that is enough.
“You do not know me at all.”
“No. But, I’m going to.”
The ten months. It feels like the whole town wants to know where she was, what happened, why she won’t swim, but he is the only one who asked her straight out. First she hedged and then she dug in and it turned into something else. Now, will to will, they go at it. He yells and she yells. At first the stakes were high but now it’s fun. As long as the camera isn’t rolling. When he is the director and she is the star, they take it seriously. They focus and work hard. But the rest of the time? They trade insults. About anything. The lights, the lines, her hat, her hair, his gut. All of it. They are alive in each other’s company.
Los Angeles
January 1936
Mary of Scotland. Ford would have quit the production but for her. Hard to do a film when everyone knows the ending.
She calls him Sean. It is what his grandmother called him. He was sure it would be an on-set romance—he has one on most pictures—but it’s something else now, something finer. At first, he didn’t think it was fine. He thought it was aggravating. He pouted, he sulked, he refused to watch the dailies. Absurd to see this great bear of a man sulking because his lead actress will not tell him something he wants to know. But, she can manage him. She has experience maneuvering men like him.
Kate
RKO Studios
Mary. The script is riddled with the name. It’s on a sign pinned to her dressing room door, her costume rack, her wig table. It’s in the title, it’s everywhere. The director should be saying it hundreds of times a day. It is also his wife’s name. John Ford calls her character The Queen. Kate calls her Mary, just to see what will happen. It is her safeguard reminding her he belongs to someone else.
George
RKO Studios
February 1936
George comes to the RKO lot to watch the filming. He is surprised by the yelling.
“Is it always like this?”
“No,” Kate says, “sometimes it’s better. Sometimes we throw things.”
* * *
—
George telephones Leland in New York.
“Should I worry about her? It’s not a Kate I know.”
“Worry about her? Why? She can hold her own.”
“But is it healthy? All that shouting?” George asks.
“I think Kate has been wanting to scream for months.”
Kate
RKO Studios
On the last day of filming, the canisters snap shut and then the cast and crew eat together at a long table in the sun. On film sets, Ford usually eats in his private room. Rumor has it that he drinks and naps in there but Kate now knows he never drinks while filming a picture.
“And after filming ends?” she asks him.
“I get some friends together, take out my boat, the Araner, sail down to Mexico, stay drunk for a week. We leave tomorrow.”
He does not ask her to come. He already knows she would refuse.
Irene
Beverly Hills
“He wanted me to tell him,” Kate says. They are sitting in Irene’s sunken living room. John Ford has left on his boat and Kate doesn’t want to be alone.
“Tell him where you were?”
“The ten months. And why I was where I was.”
“He said that?”
“No,” Kate says, “but it would have been the next question.”
“And now? He no longer wants to know?”
“Now, he likes me for not telling him. And I liked him for not asking me again.”
Irene is too subtle a woman to comment on her friend’s choice of tense.
Cary
Santa Monica
“Do we tell her?” Cary asks. It is one a.m. and Cary and Randolph have just come home from the hospital. “He asked if she knew.”
“Tell her that he crashed or that he survived?” Randolph asks.
“Tell her that before he crashed, he broke the world record.”
Kate
RKO Studios
She reads it in the morning papers. Seven passes, cutting the flight path in opposite directions. 352.39 miles per hour in the plane he designed. He did it. He crashed the plane on its belly in a sugar beet field but he did it. While she has been worrying about box office numbers and reviews and playing dress-up with someone else’s husband, Howard Hughes did something no one on this earth has done before.
Los Angeles
April 1936
Mary of Scotland is going to flop. Everyone knows it. The country will not let her have a smash, not anymore. First, they have to punish her. She will do an interview for the Los Angeles Times, a one-on-one, toughest interview in town. She is trying to turn it around. Gutsy. That’s why she’s our girl. The Los Angeles Times sends their harshest critic, Edwin Schallert, who has never liked her. He has already spent the morning collecting unfavorable adjectives to describe her.
Kate spends the morning gathering up her courage, determined to show this reporter everything, all her soft human parts. Cary, Irene and George all agree. If he can know you, he will love you. It’s the right play if she can win him over but it will not win the country. One interview will not turn them, not yet. And this will hurt.
Edwin sits on the sofa in her Spanish style house. He wonders if he should have taken his shoes off.
She is not the same woman he met before. She does it. She tells him of her fear of failing, her drive to be liked, her fear of boring people, all the reddest meat on the bone. And it works, he sees her, he likes her, but we are right too, it is not enough. The country is not ready to forgive her for being a whole human.
Howard
Hancock Park
Howard reads the Schallert interview and feels she is speaking to him alone. Cary told him she will start rehearsals for a play, Jane Eyre, on the East Coast sometime in the summer. It will rehearse and preview in Washington, D.C., open in Boston and tour until early next year. She must be desperate to get away from this town. Howard telephones Noah and tells him to telephone Ode. Howard needs a plane. Now.
He calls Cary.
* * *
—
“Wait,” Cary says.
“Again, wait. Why?” Howard says.
“Who do you want to talk to when you feel like a failure?”
Howard agrees to wait to approach her until her play opens. But he schedules meetings with the Federal Aviation Commission in Washington, D.C., for August. He tells himself that watching from the audience will be enough.
Los Angeles
June 1936
Everyone is happy Kate Hepburn is going East to do a play. No one will hire her here. Nothing else to do. Another classic, another corset.
* * *
• • •
We’ve kept an eye on them, those East Coast Hepburns. Some are in school, some are getting married, getting medical degrees; all predictable. Luddy still comes up to Fenwick for weekends. He is the family photographer, never in the photographs, always behind the lens. It gives him a purpose.
“We were at Fenwick and did not have a chance to see Kate’s last picture.” That is the Hepburn family’s answer when neighbors ask.
“Kate is going into rehearsals for a play. Jane Eyre, beautiful adaptation. We are all going up to Boston for the opening,” Kit Hepburn tells the postman—the postman will tell the rest of the neighborhood.
Kit Hepburn is proud of her daughter. She went, alone, on the only Saturday Sylvia Scarlett played. She had to go to New York to see it, a hard city for her. She was careful to stay uptown. She watched her boy/girl daughter living on the screen. The story did not matter, the man/woman clothes, the dialogue, the nonsense pretending, none of it mattered except her daughter’s vitality. Kit Hepburn never takes it for granted that her children are alive.
Part Eight
Flight
She is more of an actress now than she was then.
—Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times
Kate
Washington, D.C.
July 1936
Why did she think a play would change things? A play will just leave her out there, like rotting fish, stinking in front of people, all the time. In front of people is exactly where she does not want to be. She knows what she was thinking—gravitas, courage, get out in front of all this dislike and face them down. But, it’s the wrong play. Jane Eyre is not powerful. She’s a mess. Rochester has his first mad wife locked up in the attic and holds all the cards. Kate hates him for it. Her skin crawls when they rehearse the scene where she grovels for his love at the end. Meanwhile, the other woman, the one locked upstairs, the one with grit, jumps from the roof. Jane ought to have fired the house, rescued the wife, and pushed Rochester off that roof by the end of Act I.
Rehearsals will end, previews will begin and then the tour, she tells herself. It is hot. Why does no one tell you that the nation’s capital is in the South? Six weeks of rehearsing. Two articles in the Post, both guessing that her Jane will be lukewarm. Amazing what people can write about something they haven’t yet seen. And now they have scheduled a tea with President Roosevelt. It’s not that she doesn’t want to meet him; she does. She thinks he is a marvel. She just does not want to meet him when she’s not on top. But then, Roosevelt knows something about bad press.
She will be a better Kate in a new city. She has to keep moving.
Los Angeles
August 1936
It is a full dress rehearsal and the house lights are down. The posters are up, the work tables have been removed from the stalls and the fight coordinator is going home. The first Mrs. Rochester jumps offstage and so all he had to coordinate was a couple of fainting spells, one stumble and an arm catch. The fight call rehearsal was quick. My god, that Kate Hepburn hates stage fainting, the fight coordinator thinks as he waits for the bus.
The fight coordinator does not see the man watching the rehearsals from the very back of the stalls. An usher lets the man in each day. First preview is tomorrow, what harm can it do, the usher thinks. And, it is Howard Hughes. The usher will go home and tell his mother that he helped Howard Hughes today.
Howard
Washington, D.C.
She is miserable. He can see that. His first wife, Ella, used to tell him he had no emotion, could not understand emotion. Maybe because he had the lawyers tell her about the divorce rather than telling her himself? Maybe because he cheated and never bothered to hide it? Howard doesn’t think much about Ella. She married him for money and money is what she got. Emotion would have cost extra.
He can see that Kate does not want to be there, in those stuffy costumes, under the lights. He can see that she does not want to be anywhere. He knows that feeling. Of wanting to vanish and be seen everywhere, both at once. She is no good in this play, but the tour is long. She’ll get better. He leaves through the side door. He wants this woman to like him, and she won’t if she knows he has seen her do something badly.
Howard refers to Ella as his first wife because he hopes there will be a second. One who will not start ordering stationery and furniture and automobiles in the name of Mrs. Howard Hughes even before they are married. One who wants to be someone else, a person, rather than just more of him. He met two senators who are hoping Hughes Tool will bid for the military contracts, and he finished his meetings at the Federal Aviation Commission before noon. If he hurries, he can get to the airfield before midnight and be home by morning.
* * *
• • •
Howard reads all three articles in the Post. The third is better than the other two. Noah knows to clip any articles where her name is mentioned. Cary asked him if he thought it was obsessive, his interest in her. Maybe. But what’s the point in things if they’re not obsessive? All the things that matter to Howard obsess him, or why would they matter? His films, his friends, his planes, and now, this woman.
She is going to meet the president. Howard has met him. Good man, good company, strong stomach. Funnier than he has to be. No one expects a president to be truly funny.
Los Angeles
August 1936
A book has come out. The book that everyone will read. Hollywood chews its lip. It is too long for a film, too expensive. How can any studio afford to shoot it? It’s period, everyone says, with a huge cast. The worst combination. And dangerous. The Civil War? Touchy subject. How to do it on film? No one can do it safely, convincingly. And who would insure it?
While Hollywood debates, Irene knows to act. She is a fast reader. Over a thousand pages and it takes her two days. The book gets wet as she keeps on reading while Jeffrey is in the bath. Irene wants to be sure. Yes, she’s right. She tells him to buy it and he trusts her instincts. The film will be huge, consuming. Irene is built of family patterns and this film will keep her in her marriage. She will get stuck. She still thinks her job is to be dependable when needed. And her husband will need her.
Because David Selznick is going to burn Atlanta.
* * *
• • •
Irene calls Cary and she calls George. She sends the novel to them both by courier. She still doubts herself even though she shouldn’t. One day she won’t, and she will follow her own taste all the way to a playwright named for a Southern state. She will take the playwright to Broadway and join the luminaries, but now she still doubts herself. Cary is only on page 600 but agrees, Selznick should buy the rights to it immediately. George has finished it. If the call comes, would he direct? Would he cast Kate? Would Selznick allow it? George hesitates. Irene knew when she told George and Cary that, even on the East Coast, rumors of this book that will become a film would have reached Kate. When Kate calls long distance to ask about the part, Irene hesitates. She knows this is not her comeback picture. The budget for this film will be enormous and no one would stake that much money on Kate.
Howard
Boston
October 1936
He slips the note under her door. He rewrote it six times in his suite before sealing the envelope. And then he called the bellman to come and empty his trash can. Howard cannot bear the disorder of an unemptied trash can. He flew in last night and is checked into the penthouse suite. Noah spoke to the desk clerk on the telephone; Noah would never book him into anything smaller. They have the fruit and linen Howard likes and the staff have been courteous. The room is not overfull with furniture and the bathroom has brand new towels still in their boxes as Noah requested. Howard likes this hotel. He will come back here.
Her room is three floors down.
Kate
Boston
Kate meets him in the lobby. He is where he said he would be, when he said he would be. Points for that. At least it’s a change from dinner on a tray in her room. He is taller than she remembers. Six four at least. Damn. She should have worn heels.
“Ready?” Kate wraps her scarf around her neck.
Howard
Boston
“I’m sorry?” He cannot lip read with the scarf covering her mouth. They are walking toward the restaurant.
“Oh! You’re deaf!” Kate says it without hesitation. “I forgot. Cary mentioned that you were deaf.”
No one has spoken those words aloud to him since he was a child. When he grew up, he learned that adults say things like that quietly, behind a hand or under the breath. She doesn’t.
“Only in one ear,” he says, relieved that he can explain and not hide it.
“Which one?”
“The left.”
“Then I will always walk on your right,” she says, moving to his other side. She pulls the scarf from her mouth, tilts her face up when she speaks and moves her lips deliberately and clearly. How does she know to do that?
* * *
—
They change restaurants. The one she had suggested was too noisy. “Why have the background noise when you can’t hear to begin with?” she says.
He is astonished by her lack of tact. Is she rude? Or is he just used to dishonesty disguised as manners? She’s different from when he met her in California, disarmed. This woman is never the same person twice.
Kate
Boston
They walk the snowy streets until they find somewhere small and empty. Later, both of them will remember the checkered tablecloth, the candles and Chianti bottles. She will remember the way he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. Lay them on the table, or keep them in his lap? And the first time his mouth widened to let out a real laugh. It makes her feel good to make this man laugh. He tells her later that he will always remember the way she asked if she had something in her teeth, the way she asked the manager to turn down the gramophone and the way her foot tapping made him feel less self-conscious about his own bouncing knee, but neither of them will remember the name of the restaurant.
