The day after Hepburn died I went to the video store in search of Howard Hawks’s 1938 “Bringing Up Baby,” perhaps the screwiest and most sublime of all screw-ball comedies. As great as she is in “Alice Adams,” “Little Women,” “Holiday,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “Woman of the Year,” “Adam’s Rib” and “Pat and Mike”–not to mention her lacerating, tragic performance as Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”–this was the Hepburn whose company I most craved. She was 31, and from the moment we first glimpse her taking that lanky swing on the golf course, then striding briskly across the green, she emits a radiance so absurdly self-confident it takes your breath away. Playing the beautiful, willful Connecticut heiress Susan Vance, she is blithely, exuberantly at home in her body, a rarefied force of patrician nature, a tornado of noblesse oblige who reduces Cary Grant’s orderly life to chaos. She’s headstrong, she’s insufferable, she’s nothing but trouble. But when she’s not around, where’s the fun in life, where’s the magic? Like Grant, we have no choice but to fall in love with her.
Or so it seems now. In 1938 “Bringing Up Baby” was a flop, confirming Hollywood’s judgment that she was the kiss of death at the box office. (Two years later she made her smashing comeback, once more teamed with Grant, in “The Philadelphia Story.”) Hepburn was never everybody’s cup of tea. She was too singular, too cool, too independent, too astringent. She was, as all the obituaries have noted, the “classiest” of stars, and that may have been the problem. The patrician style–indeed, the very notion that America has a patrician class–evokes a complex reaction in our supposedly classless society, and Hepburn was both idolized and resented for that breezy Bryn Mawr accent, that effortless assurance that didn’t stoop to curry our favor.
Hollywood, whose job it is to please the masses, shares the public’s ambivalence about social class, and in the symbolism of its competing icons you can hear an argument about America. If, in the ’30s, the airy Hepburn was the epitome of upper-crust Yankee savoir-vivre, the earthy Jean Harlow was her proletarian counterpart. In the 1950s the other Hepburn, Audrey–no relation–carried the escutcheon of good breeding. Her alter ego was Marilyn Monroe; taken together, they constituted an allegory of fire and ice, high and low, the curvaceous flesh vs. the ascetic spirit, a dialectic briefly echoed by Grace Kelly and Jayne Mansfield. Katharine Hepburn’s current avatar, the small-breasted, quasi-aristocratic Gwyneth Paltrow, elicits the same passions and resentments as Hepburn did in her youth.
The studios recognized the challenge implicit in the Hepburn persona, which is why her great comedies are, in the end, about cutting her down to size. That brash, often wrongheaded confidence has to be tempered, even brought low, by her romantic partners. And who could be more democratic than the gruff, stocky, street-smart Spencer Tracy, who, more than any of her other costars, brought out Hepburn’s warmth? She was sexier with Grant, but there was a depth to her rapport with Tracy–a reflection, of course, of their 27-year off-screen relationship–that established them as rare Hollywood icons of mature, enduring love.
Hepburn, despite her aura of impervious self-containment, was, in fact, one of the great romantic screen partners. There’s that shimmering moment in “Bringing Up Baby” when she’s down on the floor with a disheveled, flustered Cary Grant, leaning toward him on hands and knees as she awaits a declaration of affection he’s not yet ready to give. The look of avid expectation in her lovestruck eyes is both hilariously gaga and heartbreakingly undefended. Only someone so totally sure of who she was could be free to give herself so totally away.
