Luddy

[Kerrie]

Am I the only person who has a soft spot for Luddy ? He has been very much underestimated in the Katharine lore .

I know they got divorced quite early on but I love the stories that his family told last year . About how Katharine and Ludlow remained friends for life and used to sneak around in New York and secretly see each other after Spencer died . How they were caught holding hands by their relatives in the 1970's . Love comes in many guises, romantic love, friendship and companionship . I am glad they remained friends .

[Judy]

Hi, Kerrie: No you are NOT the only one. I've always thought he was a real mensch. Just a good guy. And as Kate said, a real friend to her. For life.....Also think he was kinda cute - in a gangly, funny looking kind of way. JS

[Kerrie]

Hi

Most contemporary accounts of Luddy that I have read claim that he was pretty good looking or considered to be for that era .

Apparently Luddy's mother was a suffragette - not in the same league as Kit but still involved . I wonder whether that was one of the reasons he never seemed to put any restrictions on Katharine - I am not saying that all men of that era were chauvinists but they seemed to have a pretty liberated relationship even for that time .

[George]

Wassup Kerrie,
I've always liked Luddy. I think a lot of biographers give him a bum rap. Giving the impression that he was "whipped" and what not. But he genuinely loved Katharine and saw the potential and talent that she possesed. He was an enabler, but in the good sense, and Katharine recognized this in later years and thanked him for it. She in turn was able to do the same thing for Spence later..to encourage, support and enable him to be the best that he could be.
Peace
George

[Kerrie]

George

By all accounts Luddy was intelligent - he was university educated, a war veteran and also spoke a number of languages . He also ran his own business and apparently had numerous talents . So he wasn't the sap that he has been made out to be .

You can't really blame him for not wanting to end the relationship - on top of everything else he was also generous .

He was probably also the first person to see how photogenic Katharine was - if you count all those photographs and film he took of Katharine

[maddie]

kate and luddy always look happy together. she openly admits that she used him, but did not realize she was doing it, but she never says they didn't remain friends. I think had she not been so dead set on her career (nothing wrong with it) she and luddy may have remained married their whole lives, but her ambition drove her from him, and he was happy as long as she was. I think it is wonderful that they remained friends, and she has said she tried to give back to him what he gave to her towards the end of his life, whatever she meant by that, be it more than friends or what not. I think he is quite handsome myself.

[Kerrie]

Welcome to the forum . I love the early pictures, it was the last life in her life that Katharine had what you call a normal life and they show her as she was - not the famous actress but the young woman .

If you get a chance to get hold of the video All about Me there is some film footage that Luddy took . Fantastic

[Catherine]

Poor Luddy. Unrequited love is a bummer. But chasing after a free spirit is pointless. It's happened to me! You give and they take... but when you love someone like that you don't realize it because you're blinded.
I don't think Kate would have remained married to him if she hadn't been dead-set on her career though. She was too self-centered for marriage. If it wasn't her career it would have been something else.

[smith]

mmm its a hard question whether Katharine would have stayed married cos I have discussed this with my friends before . Last year Luddy's relatives wrote an article and they said that Katharine and Luddy came from similar backgrounds and were actually pretty compatible in the sense that they complemented each other - personality wise . Its hard to say . My idea has always been that Katharine was very ambivalent about marriage in the first place - as an institution . That probably didn't help the marriage .

[dreamer]

The Scotsman, Aug. 16, 2003:

Kate's secret Philadelphia story
Susan Mansfield

Few stars shone like Katharine Hepburn. The First Lady of Cinema enjoyed a movie career that spanned seven decades, and she remains the only person to hold four Best Actress Oscars. From screen goddess to grande dame, she remained glamorous and strong minded, carrying with her a charm and dignity wrought in Hollywood’s golden years.

Her life was everything a biographer could dream of. In 1942, she fell in love with co-star Spencer Tracy on the set of Woman of the Year. The unofficial First Couple of Hollywood, they were together for 25 years, until Tracy’s death in 1967.

However, there was another great love story in Hepburn’s life, a story that is only beginning to be told. This is her lifelong relationship with Ludlow Ogden Smith, the "boy next door" she married when she was 21. Most of her biographers have glossed over her marriage as an impulsive mistake that quickly ended. In fact, her relationship with Ludlow was one of the most enduring of her life.

Following her death in June, Ludlow’s family decided to set the record straight about the couple they had known as Luddy and Kate. Although they divorced in the early 1930s, and for many years Katharine denied the marriage had even taken place, they never lost touch, and after Tracy’s death and that of Ludlow’s second wife, they resumed their relationship, remaining close until Ludlow’s death.

Eleanor Smith Morris, Ludlow’s niece and goddaughter, a professor in urban design and environmental planning at the University of Edinburgh, says: "I want to dispel some of the myths that have grown up about Kate and Ludlow. He was a decent, successful, proper Philadephian who remained devoted to Kate all his life. He was, in a way, like Denis Thatcher, the steadfast rock of her life. It was one of the most important relationships she had."

Sitting in a shaft of sunlight in her New Town home, Morris explains that in the 1920s in Philadelphia, Katharine and Ludlow were part of the same social circle of affluent young people, Katharine the daughter of a prominent doctor, Ludlow the son of a leading barrister. Kate had lodged with Ludlow’s aunt, Helen Smith Brinton, in her early years at the Ivy League ladies college Bryn Mawr.

They enjoyed the kind of social life one might read about in an FScott Fitzgerald novel, as the grandeur of the Edwardian age met the comparative freedom of the 20th century. "They look like something straight out of The Great Gatsby," says Morris, lifting a photograph of Ludlow and her father, Lawrence Meredith Clemson Smith, in their twenties, sitting on a pair of matching motorcycles. "My father still has his dancing pumps on.

"Both Ludlow and my father were very good looking, very tall. Luddy had enormous self-confidence, he was a very funny man."

In Hepburn’s autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life, published in 1991, she describes Ludlow as "tall and skinny and fascinating-looking ... He was an odd-looking man - dark hair, dark eyes far apart. He was foreign looking. Pink cheeks. An odd nose, long with a hump in it … He was a fine musician, and could pick up any language in a few days."

In Me, Hepburn also describes, rather offhandedly, how she lost her virginity to Ludlow in a friend’s apartment. "Luddy and I were alone in the apartment and there was a bed and there didn’t seem to be any reason not to … And that was the end of my virtue. He was my beau from then on. But - and that’s the biggest but you’ve ever heard - he was my friend!"

There, says Morris, lies the heart of the relationship between Hepburn and Ludlow, the close companionship of people who understood each other. "It was a comfortable relationship. If you marry the boy next door, there are a lot of things you don’t have to explain. People say there was no passion in it, but it was an enduring relationship, it lasted for 50 years."

Their personalities completed one another perfectly. "She was very hyper-kinetic, always on the move. It all washed over him. Emotionally, they were a perfect match. It was what she needed."

‘Ogden Smith provided all the financial backing for The Philadelphia Story - the stage version of which was written for her’
In December 1928, Hepburn quit her job as an understudy on Broadway to marry Ludlow at her family home in Hartford, Connecticut. She wore a dress of crushed white velvet with antique gold embroidery. She was 21. Ludlow was 29 and working as a stockbroker. They honeymooned in Bermuda.

Afterwards, they began to look for a house in Strafford, Pennsylvania. It seems that for a brief time, Hepburn considered becoming what her society expected of her - an upper-class wife and mother. However, this lasted, by her own admission, "about two weeks". Soon, she had her old job back, and the couple were beginning their life together at Ludlow’s apartment in New York - he later bought the townhouse on East 49th Street which she kept most of her life.

"So," she writes, "it was December 1928, I was married. I quit. I went to live in Pennsylvania. I came back to New York and got my job back. Poor Luddy. A proper wife for two weeks. Oh, Luddy! Look out."

Ludlow, she says, was "an angel of understanding". Certainly, when Hepburn decided that the surname Smith was not glamorous enough for a showbusiness career and wanted to be known as Katharine Ludlow, he simply changed his own name to Ludlow Ogden Ludlow, which he kept all his life. His mother, powerful society hostess Gertrude Gouverneur Clemson Smith, was less understanding. "She was furious," says Morris.

In Me, Hepburn makes another important admission: "I guess that I knew that Luddy was in love with me," she writes. "But you see, my hitch was that I was in love with myself. I wanted to be a big star."

In 1931, she finally broke through in a play called The Warrior’s Husband. She was offered a screen test by David Selznick and George Cukor for a film titled - ironically - A Bill of Divorcement. She got the part.

Now she had what she’d dreamed of, a ticket to Hollywood, but there was as yet no stock exchange in Los Angeles and Ludlow could not go with her. She had to make a decision, and there seems to have been little doubt in her mind what she wanted to do. She took the train to LA, filing for a "quickie divorce" from Mexico, and began an affair with her agent, Leland Hayward.

Ludlow did not stand in her way. "He didn’t want the divorce," says Morris, "but he wanted a family and she wouldn’t have children. I think he realised he had to divorce if he wanted children."

Gertrude Gouverneur Clemson Smith was less easily pacified. She demanded that Hepburn write a lengthy letter taking the full blame for the breakdown of the marriage. It is now held, with the rest of the Smith family papers, at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

Nevertheless, Hepburn held no grudge against her former mother-in-law. She seemed to have recognised in her a strong woman like herself whom she loved and respected.

"When my grandmother died," says Morris, "on the day of her funeral, the phone rang during lunch and it was Kate on the phone to talk to Ludlow about my grandmother, because she adored her so much."

In Hollywood, Hepburn’s career took off quickly, with an Oscar in 1933 for Morning Glory. But she kept in touch with Ludlow in New York. In 1939, after she was labelled "box office poison", he provided the financial backing for the stage play, The Philadelphia Story, written for her by Philip Barry. The character of Tracy Lord is based on a real Philadelphia heiress, one of the circle of friends to which she and Ludlow belonged. In Me, she acknowledged his help with gratitude: "It was really his generosity which sent me on my way."

When they formally divorced in 1941, Ludlow remarried and had the family he had dreamed of, a boy and a girl. "His daughter was called Katharine Ramsay, the family knew her as Ramsay, but we have always suspected that his daughter was named after Kate. How his wife put up with that, I don’t know."

In 1942, Hepburn’s love affair with Spencer Tracy began. He was everything Ludlow was not, a rough-diamond son of a truck salesman who battled throughout his life with alcohol addiction. They spent 25 years together and made nine films. In the last five years of his life, Hepburn quit acting to nurse him.

Throughout the time she lived with Tracy, Hepburn denied that she had ever been married. Morris unwittingly discovered the depth of feeling this had produced in her family when one day - aged 13 - she undertook to visit her uncle’s film-star first wife, who was in Philadephia appearing in Peter Pan.

"My friend Barbara and I went to see the show, and afterwards we went to the stage door and asked to see her. She was very sweet, just wonderful, we thought she was divine [in the show] and we told her. It was all very charming and cordial."

Things were much less cordial the next day when, at Sunday lunch, she told her family about her adventure. "My father’s reaction was pure anger. He had a teutonic temper and let me know that I had done the most terrible deed. I was put on probation for six months, not allowed to go anywhere except to church or to school, and the rest of the family were served notice that no-one but no-one was to have anything to do with Katharine Hepburn."

Ludlow seems not to have shared his brother’s anger. Certainly, in the late 1960s when he was a widower and Tracy had died, he and Katharine started to meet again in New York. They were always scrupulously discreet and the press never discovered their relationship. Morris says: "Once there was a fire in the townhouse when Ludlow was staying, and he had to go out of the front door and Kate out of the back to avoid the press."

After her father’s death, Morris’s mother started to see Hepburn again too. She recalls visiting her mother at the family’s summer home at Wolf’s Neck, Maine, one autumn in the early 1980s. "It was October, and there had been a typical storm causing all the electricity to go off and so I arrived at the big stone mansion with only candles burning in the windows. In the library with my mother were Kate and Ludlow, sitting on the sofa holding hands in front of the big roaring fire which Kate would stoke.

"That night I had the little guest room opposite Kate’s and so we had to share the bathroom. There we stood, outside the bathroom door, discussing her films. She loved working with George Cukor and was thrilled finally to have been able to act with Laurence Olivier in the television play, Life Amongst the Ruins. She also had been offered the role of Daisy in Driving Miss Daisy, but turned it down. She said she regretted the decision afterwards, as it was a popular film.

"The next day my mother thought she would give Kate a tour of the estate and the farm. Ludlow begged off as he was already in his eighties and he could no longer take Kate’s hyper-kinetic energy all the time. We drove off, on a dirt road in the middle of the Maine woods, and my mother ran into the farm tractor. The next thing I knew Kate had jumped over the seat into the back with me - even though she was then 75 years old." When Ludlow fell ill with cancer, Katharine visited him every weekend on her way to her weekend home at Fenwick, and again on the way back. She continued to visit him every weekend when he went into hospital. "One day, he called my mother from the hospital," Morris says. "He said, ‘Kate and I are celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary’."

In 1991, when the family turned their Georgian House at Collen Brook into the Smith-Lewis Local History Museum, Hepburn - though frail by then - lent her prestige to the project. Now a display is planned to mark the lives of the remarkable women of Collen Brook: Helen Smith Brinton, the first American woman to study at Oxford, Gertrude Gouverneur Clemson Smith, chairman of the Women’s Suffragettes for the State of Pennsylvania, Eleanor Houston Smith (Morris’ mother), a great conservationist - and another strong woman of the Smith family, Katharine Houghton Hepburn.

Alongside her in the exhibition will stand Ludlow Ogden Smith, her devoted husband, whose support and security helped launch her career and to whom she returned in her later years. Now both are dead, he will be at last acknowledged as the other great love of her life.

thescotsman.scotsman.com/s2.cfm?id=896112003

So much to the speculations of Mann and others ;D
No selfish person acts like above

[Richard]

I could just cry. The relationship between Katharine and Ludlow was more enduring than what I was lead to believe.

[smith]

Richard,

There are some inaccuracies in the article but I still think its a moving tribute to both Katharine and Luddy and a relationship that endured through absolutely everything - even if the nature of the relationship changed .

Some of the earlier biographies claim that Katharine and Luddy got married and only stayed together for about 3 weeks - this is of course not true . Katharine and Luddy came from similar social backgrounds and Luddy's mother was also a sufragette - both Luddy and Katharine also lot their older brothers at a young age .

I have another article somewhere from the family perspective which I posted here some time ago . See if I can dig it up .

[dreamer]

found it hadn't read that one, thanks smith

smith wrote May 1, 2005 by Sam Smith:

Although a Republican, my grandmother had been an active suffragette. She had three sons. One was my father. Another was lost near Lisbon while serving as an officer aboard Admiral William Halsey's first command.

The third son was Ludlow, who gained early folk hero status for me because of his acquisition of the entire family attic for a large-scale train layout. By the time I found it, the rolling stock was down to an engine and several cars, but Ludlow had made his own rails and switches and had covered all the attic floor with them in the manner of a major freight marshaling yard.

As if this were not honor enough for one uncle, Ludlow had also been married to Katherine Hepburn, a marriage that soon proved incompatible with Hepburn's stage and movie career. They were divorced three years before I was born.

GERTRUDE SMITH,
THE AUTHOR'S GRANDMOTHER

My father always seemed annoyed at the mention of Hepburn, perhaps out of loyalty to his brother, and I felt tension when my mother would speak fondly of her and of the lively dinners at Granny's house when she was present. Granny also liked Hepburn. The three strong women had much to talk about.

Even Ludlow, it would turn out, was still fond of his ex-wife. Ludlow would show up at Hepburn events. In later years, very quietly, the two would see each other and, after the death of Spencer Tracey, spend time together. Once - only once when I was young - I met her. My father reluctantly took his family backstage at a Philadelphia performance. She looked down at us and explained how she really loved Lud but had loved her work more. It sounded reasonable to me.

A cousin of mine recalls as a youth being seated in the front row during a performance and noticing that Hepburn seemed to be playing directly at him. He was flattered, but not completely surprised. After all, Hepburn had lived for a time at his grandmother's house when his mother was young. Afterwards, he was taken backstage to meet the actress. Hepburn remarked that she had noticed him in the audience. My cousin was delighted until she added, "You were the only person in the audience chewing gum."

Over the years my father and Ludlow grew apart. Ludlow seemed disinterested in seeing his brother. My parents finally invited themselves for a visit in Connecticut on the way to Maine. There they found a man struggling with a deeply alcoholic second wife and they understood and the barrier was broken.

By then, however, it was too late for me to get to know this charming and bright man who had been an early expert on computer installations for banks and who, to the end, still had a model railroad layout. I saw him a few times, always with a sense of denied discovery.

So there were many stories I never heard. Like the one Hepburn told in her autobiography of Ludlow and a friend renting a stone hut near the Bryn Mawr campus, where among other things Luddy, as she called him, took nude photos of Kate. Like the time Luddy, before they were married, accidentally set himself ablaze while lighting a fire with kerosene with Hepburn leaping from the tub and directing their housemates, in the nude, as they saved both my uncle and the house.

Hepburn by her own account lost her virginity to my uncle at a friend's apartment;

Things like that weren't meant to happen in my family.

In her autobiography, Hepburn regrets her treatment of Luddy, saying that "the truth has to be that I was a terrible pig." She then describes the uncle I never knew:

I guess that I knew that Luddy was in love me. But you see, my hitch was that I was in love with myself. I wanted to be a star. . .

Luddy could make anything work -- my life -- the car -- the furance -- the this -- the that. Carpenter - mechanic -- plumber. It was great. But mostly--from the beginning-- he was--what shall I say? --he was there...I could ask him anything. He would do anything. You just don't find people like that in life. Unconditional love.

I think I, too, would have liked him very much. Love in my family was always conditional.

My grandmother was furious at the breakup and demanded that Hepburn write a letter taking full blame for the divorce, which she did. Still, when my grandmother died years later, one of my sisters reports that Hepburn called Ludlow to talk about his mother, because she loved her so much.

My father was also angry over what happened, as my sister Eleanor Morris would recall to the Scotsman after Hepburn's death:

One day - aged 13 - [Eleanor] undertook to visit her uncle’s film-star first wife, who was in Philadephia appearing in Peter Pan. "My friend Barbara and I went to see the show, and afterwards we went to the stage door and asked to see her. She was very sweet, just wonderful, we thought she was divine [in the show] and we told her. It was all very charming and cordial."

Things were much less cordial the next day when, at Sunday lunch, she told her family about her adventure. "My father’s reaction was pure anger. He had a teutonic temper and let me know that I had done the most terrible deed. I was put on probation for six months, not allowed to go anywhere except to church or to school, and the rest of the family were served notice that no one but no one was to have anything to do with Katharine Hepburn."

Ironically, the injured party, Ludlow, thought otherwise. After my father died, Ludlow and Kate made several visits to my mother in Maine, usually in the fall after children and visitors had left. On the first, she stopped by the home of an older neighbor to ask for directions. Mrs. Nason, every bit as comfortable in her being as the stranger, said, "Why you're Katherine Hepburn. You must come in and have lunch." Hepburn settled for directions.

Ludlow and Kate traveled with Hepburn's aging secretary and carried a toaster oven so they could avoid eating in public. Visiting my mother, however, had other risks, in 1978 verging on the mortal as my mother, who drove with exuberance on the back roads, sideswiped a truck coming the other way, totaling her car and in the process nearly killing herself, Hepburn, my sister and the aging secretary. Hepburn wrote my mother enthusiastically about the visit and the "adventure to which of course you added by the traumatic incident on the highway of Wolf's Neck. I do hope all is well. And let's face it. If you disliked the car, it was a most direct way of getting rid of it.".

[dreamer]

changed the link for reply #9 - because it didn't work - sorry ladies and guys - works now but ahh why does the time change when one modifies ?

[Shaun]

What's this "appearing in Peter Pan" business? Both articles had this and there were some other paragraphs common to both.