Katharine Hepburn and the Oscars No-Show
Let’s face it, we’ve all fantasised about what we’d say in our Oscar speeches…
I’m going to plagiarise Denzel Washington in mine: “Forty years chasing Glennie, and they give it to her on the same night!”. Of course, they shunt the Honorary Awards to a separate evening now. Not that there’s a problem giving Angela Bassett one on the telecast – oh, shut up! The same will be true of Jamie Lee Curtis if she triumphs. Who really deserves it? Ms. Condon? (Maureen O’Hara finally gets in for The Quiet Man – it took them seventy years to count the votes.) I wouldn’t grudge a hardworking character actress like Hong Chau, even if The Whale: The Mark O’Donovan Story hardly entices. And we’ve had quite enough of the Broadway-chorus-to-Oscar pipeline after last year. Although I’m sure Stephanie Hsu does something more strenuous than wear a yellow dress where Rita Moreno wore purple.
Enough of this nonsense! After my Merle Oberon post did so well, I thought I’d look at another of Oscar’s great heroines. In fact, the all-time champ – Katharine Hepburn. Oh, I’m nearly tempted to spell it with an E to cook up the engagement. Her fans would be on me like billy-o! Nothing annoyed Ms. Hepburn more than receiving a flowery letter only to see it had been addressed to ‘Katherine’. She promptly returned them with the offensive E’s underlined!
“My children are very shy,” Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, the family patriarch, once said “they don’t dare go to parties unless they’re sure they’re going to be the bride or the corpse”. And from her first nomination (and win) in 1933, she gave the awards a wide berth. Sensible! After all, as any Twitter gay decrying capitalism (but never ditching their designer gear) would tell you: the Academy was founded as a union-busting exercise.
Two years later, when Katharine was cited for Alice Adams, screenwriter Dudley Nichols handed his award for The Informer back. John Ford’s story of Irish nationalism, culled from Liam O’Flaherty’s novel, was at odds with his present project: Mary of Scotland, in which Hepburn played an unlikely Mary Stuart (did you ever see the remake, Mary, Queen of Scat, with Inertia?), starting her stint as “box office poison”.
Hollywood was embroiled in one of its writers’ strikes and Nichols, a co-founder and later president of the Screen Writers Guild, couldn’t “turn his back on nearly a thousand members who ventured everything in the long-drawn-out fight for a genuine writers’ organization”. His turn-down was famously repeated by George C. Scott and Marlon Brando. Woody Allen, likewise, only appeared at the ceremony once to present a pre-filmed segment. I always thought Kate Hepburn belonged to their school, but it seems she was more ambivalent on her four (well, three-and-a-half) statues than previously imagined.
Look, we all want to win! I’ve never won more than a tin of biscuits in a raffle, so I don’t know how I’d react if I was up for an Academy Award. I’m not sure I’d even attend! Hepburn was on her way to Europe when the wire came that she’d got it for Morning Glory. The publicity men at RKO hastily sent a flower arrangement proffering thanks.
She’s fascinating. Having more nominations than anyone not named “Meryl Streep” (though none of hers were in Supporting), she ignored ‘em all! She never once was the favourite, either – except in 1940 when rival Ginger Rogers came up trumps for the unwatchable Kitty Foyle, a vehicle she rejected. She was also the beneficiary of the most notorious tie in Oscars history.
Quizzed about her no-shows, she said: “It has to be because I’m afraid I’m going to lose. If I were an honest person, which obviously I’m not, I would refuse to compete! I would make a statement and say: ‘As I do not believe in Academy Awards – and I don’t believe in Academy Awards – I do not wish to compete!’. But I say to myself: I wonder if I’m going to win? It’s all false!”.
If you asked someone in 1960 (the decade Hep saw out as the female record-holder) who the Great American Film Actress was, they would likely say Bette Davis. She had two awards and widespread industry recognition. (“I wanted to be the first to win three Oscars, but Miss Hepburn has done it,” Bette pined “actually it hasn’t been done. Miss Hepburn only won half an Oscar. If they’d given me half an Oscar, I would have thrown it back in their faces! You see, I’m an Aries. I never lose”. Indeed, Davis joined the all-star Death on the Nile in the hopes it would bring her an “Ingrid third” after Ms. Bergman prevailed for her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Murder on the Orient Express.)
Davis was effusive in her praise of Hepburn. The reverse was a curt “I think she’s awfully good” on The Dick Cavett Show. Whereas Davis had her streak of nine (ten if you include her write-in for Of Human Bondage) nominations between 1934 and 1952 and a final one for Baby Jane, a decade later; Hepburn chased Oscar’s whims and peculiarities for half a century. As Dorothy Parker claimed she ran “the gamut of emotions from A to B”, Kate’s wins reflect the Academy’s changing taste. Look at the recent Best Actress champions, and you’ll still – still! – see Hepburn’s archetypes. The ingénue (Morning Glory), the wife (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner), the monarch (The Lion in Winter) and, lastly, geriatric befuddlement (On Golden Pond).
Hepburn’s sole appearance was to present the Thalberg Award to Lawrence Weingarten in 1974. But there were close calls.
Gregory Peck was elected Academy president in 1967 on the issue of delivering more stars – and more audience – to the ceremony. The previous year, only one of the four acting winners was present! While Hepburn wouldn’t be there to accept her Dinner prize (Spencer Tracy’s widow was, but Best Actor went to Rod Steiger), she relented to make a special introduction from the set of Lion in Winter.
Among Peck’s other schemes was diversifying the membership, which included the entry of twenty-five-year old Barbra Streisand – before a frame of Funny Girl was shot. If correct protocol had been followed (and Streisand hadn’t been admitted before making her film debut), Hepburn would’ve won the following year’s award outright. And she’d have done it by a single vote! (You don’t think Barbra didn’t vote for herself, do you?)
Sweeping into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that night in April ‘74 in a General Mao pantsuit, looking as though she was about to dig her garden (and I’m not convinced that wasn’t what she used her gold men for), Kate remarked she was “living proof that a person can wait forty-one years to be unselfish”.
She had an excuse for being selfish when On Golden Pond was in contention, eight years hence. She was appearing on the New York stage. Besides, the frontrunners were Diane Keaton in Reds and Meryl Streep for The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Sentimentality was the order of the day, and Kate got her fourth. “You’ll never catch me now!” she gloated to co-star Jane Fonda, showing that they must have meant something.
As she confessed to Robert Osborne: “Prizes are given. Prizes are won. They are the result of competition. Any way you want to look at it, from birth to death we are competing. How does anyone know which performance? Which picture? It’s an art. It’s our track meet! It’s painful, but it’s thrilling”.
How right she was.