Post by dreamer on Nov 30, 2007 16:40:07 GMT -5
Hepburn's Oscar display reminds of star's quirky ways
It’s ironic that Katharine Hepburn’s four Best Actress Oscars (the most ever won by a performer) are featured so prominently in the new Smithsonian exhibit “Kate: A Centennial Celebration” at the National Portrait Gallery since she never showed up at the Academy Awards to accept them and didn’t display them at either of her homes.
Kate’s relationship with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a curious one and reviewing her interaction with it over the years reveals a lot of the quirks of her personality.
She won the first time she was nominated. The film was “Morning Glory,” only her third picture. Kate was en route to Paris on that fateful day in March 1934 when she won her first Oscar.
Biographical accounts vary as to why she showed little interest in the ceremony, even early on. Some say she figured she had little chance of winning against such heady competition as May Robson (“Lady For a Day”) and Diana Wynward (“Calvacade”) (there were only three nominees in those early years of the awards). Funny how, today, they’re largely forgotten by all but screen historians.
In his book "Katharine Hepburn: A Hollywood Yankee," biographer Gary Carey says Kate considered refusing that first Oscar and wrote a telegram to the Academy saying she didn't believe in acting contests and thus felt it was her duty to decline the accolade. Producer and Hepburn pal Leland Hayward somehow managed to intercept it, Carey notes, and sent a thank-you on Kate's behalf instead.
Years later, Kate said she was glad he did. "I was being childish," she said.
Hepburn laughed at her early pretentiousness in a 1973 TV interview with Dick Cavett and said back then she didn’t believe in competition “or some fool thing.” The young Kate must not have been too opposed to the awards as she could have withdrawn her name from consideration, but didn’t. Perhaps RKO, her home studio at the time, pressured her to participate, who knows? An Oscar win typically helps box office.
Kate was nominated again for “Alice Adams” (1935), “The Philadelphia Story” (1940), “Woman of the Year” (1942), “The African Queen” (1952), “Summertime” (1955), “The Rainmaker” (1956), “Suddenly Last Summer” (1960) and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962) but it would be 34 before she again won with “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967) her last pairing with frequent co-star Spencer Tracy. None of these nominations convinced her to attend.
The “Dinner” award was a sentimental vote. The role was not demanding — a breeze, in fact, compared to her “Journey” effort which is widely considered Kate’s best screen performance — though the final scene in which she tears up while listening to Spencer deliver the climactic speech is poignant. Even Kate figured she won because she nursed Spence, in rapidly declining health, through filming.
Only one year later Kate again won in a history-making tie: she for “Lion in Winter”; Barbra Steisand for “Funny Girl.” Kate’s “Lion” role, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was significantly more demanding than her “Dinner” part (Christina Drayton) and most agree Kate won this time for her performance.
The 1968 Oscar was historic in another way as it represented the first time an actor or actress won a third Oscar (industry pros like Edith Head and Walt Disney took home many more awards than their in-front-of-the-screen counterparts). Kate and Bette Davis, who’d won twice in the 1930s, were neck and neck for the bragging rights and, over the years, many thought Bette would become the first triple winner among actors. Bette openly lusted for the 1962 award (she was up for “Baby Jane”), but both Davis and Hepburn lost that year to Anne Bancroft for “The Miracle Worker” with Joan Crawford providing memorable stand-in duty to accept on Bancroft’s behalf (that’s another story; I’ve always wondered if Joan called Kate, with whom she was friendly if not particularly close, to accept should Kate have won that year. She knew, as did everyone, that Kate never attended).
Since Bette had two Oscars decades longer than Kate, it was a shock to many that Kate trumped her by winning two years in a row (they were pretty much tied much of the ’40s and ’50s in terms of nominations). While Kate never commented on the matter — she only gave interviews later in life — Bette, years later, scoffed at the 1968 Best Actress outcome by saying, “If they ever tried to give me half an Oscar, I’d throw it back in their face.” Kate may have been more competitive with Bette, though, than she let on. In the 1980s, Life wanted to pair the two for a cover photo. Davis was game but Hepburn declined. ****
The 1968 awards were the closest Kate ever came to attending any of the years she was up. Gregory Peck was the Academy president at the time and personally implored each of the nominated actors to attend. Kate, moved by her win the previous year, almost relented, but eventually stayed home watching on TV instead.
To everyone’s shock, Kate did make a jaw-dropping surprise appearance at the 1974 awards to present the Thalberg to producer Lawrence Weingarten, who’d brought the Hepburn/Tracy films “Adam’s Rib” and “Pat and Mike” to the screen.
The sight of Kate on the Oscar stage (much like Woody Allen’s appearance in 2002) incited first a gasp then an immediate standing ovation. It was a heartwarming moment, almost Kate’s way of saying, “I didn’t mean to snub you”; the ovation, a rare audience chance to applaud Kate outside of her theater work.
She made light of the moment, saying “I’m very happy I didn’t hear anyone call out, ‘It’s about time’ … I’m living proof that someone can wait 41 years to be unselfish.”
The moment was classic Hepburn — she wore her trademark turtleneck, slacks and work smock instead of a gown. Stagehands wondered why she was waiting so long to change only gradually realizing she had no intention of changing. And she didn’t hang around. As soon as she was done with Weingarten, she went home.
Kate won again in 1981 for “On Golden Pond” and, in keeping with tradition, she was a no-show. She had a good excuse this time, though: she was appearing on Broadway in "West Side Waltz." Others, such as Ingrid Bergman, had won three Oscars by then (albeit one supporting), so Kate’s “Pond” win secured her dominance, ironic since she showed so little interest in the prizes.
So why did Kate only make that sole appearance at the Oscars? To understand that, you have to know a few things about the actress. I believe similarly quirky behavior in other areas of her life are indicative of why she shunned the ceremony and telecast but accepted the awards.
Kate was an odd duck in many ways, and she didn’t mind admitting it. She often zigged when Hollywood zagged. It’s widely known that Kate always wore pants unless she was required to wear a dress for a part. This, of course, was in an era when most women never wore anything but dresses or skirts in public. Kate had other quirks: she didn’t give interviews, didn’t go to Hollywood parties (except for small gatherings at George Cukor’s house), didn’t pose for photos with fans or sign autographs, didn’t go to restaurants and didn’t answer fan mail. She softened as she got older. The Cavett interview started a spate of sit-downs that got more common as the years went by and everyone who wrote to tell her they enjoyed her 1991 memoir “Me” got brief, signed thank-you notes on her personal stationary (“Just paste this in the book,” she’d write).
Kate initially brushed off Cavett’s question of why she didn’t go to the Oscars (“I should’ve gone to pick ’em up, just never did — didn’t have a dress”), but then elaborated saying she was competitive and didn’t want to go and not win. She admitted if she were honest about the matter, she’d refuse to compete, but couldn’t bring herself to do that. She dismissed Brando’s refusal of his “Godfather” Oscar as “just dumb; why not just withdraw your name?”
When Kate’s “Lion” Oscar was presented to her privately after being engraved, it arrived in a brown paper bag, was put in a cabinet still in the bag and forgotten about. Visitors to her New York City brownstone or Fenwick, the Hepburn family home in Connecticut, never saw the Oscars on display. Kate much preferred a rustic décor — wood-carved birds, walking sticks and fireplaces, as unpretentious as she was. There were no signs that this was the house of a film legend. It was, as was Kate herself, the antithesis of Norma Desmond’s decadent mansion, a shrine to herself. Kate was much prouder of having Martina Navratilova’s Wimbledon tennis racket on display than her own Oscars.
Hepburn pal Scott Berg's posthumous memoir "Kate Remembered" sheds the most light on Kate's Oscar approach.
"The Academy Awards conflicted Hepburn from the very outset of her career, beginning with her believing that somebody so young and new to the game couldn't possibly win. There was more to it than that ... she later admitted, 'mine was really bogus humility because I was genuinely thrilled to win.'"
Berg says early on Hepburn had vowed never to attend but wasn't particularly proud of her decision in retrospect. "I think it is very noble for the people who go and lose and I think it is very ignoble of me to be unwilling to go and lose," he quotes her as saying. "My father said that his children were so shy because they were afraid they were going to a party and they were not going to be either the bride or the corpse. And he may be right. I can't think of a single, logical defense of someone who occupies a position in the industry that they refuse to go to the biggest celebration that that industry has to offer. I think it's unpardonable, but I do it ... I have no defense."
Kate told Berg she wasn't sure where her Oscars were at the time. "I mean if I don't go to the ceremony, I can't very well put them on my mantelpiece, can I? I simply have no right to."
She also told him that while she admitted being self-indulgent in not going, she also thought the importance of the Oscars had become too exaggerated over the years.
Not surprisingly, Kate never considered going to the Emmys (she was nominated for five and won for “Love Among the Ruins”) or the Tonys (for which she was twice nominated but never won). The Emmy, of course, was never seen again. Kate would, however, occasionally point out in career retrospectives that she’d won something for this or that, so awards weren’t a taboo issue.
And she didn’t completely shun all awards shows. She did consent to a Kennedy Center Honor during the presidency of George H.W. Bush (she’d refused to accept it from Reagan but found Bush senior slightly more palatable) and, strangely, showed up on crutches for one of those idiotic “Night of a Hundred Stars” TV specials in 1990. She declined the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award but later was honored as top female star of all time during an AFI TV special (it didn’t require an appearance). It’s almost as if Kate couldn’t stomach the thought of an entire evening in her honor (as the AFI award would have required — this is a woman who didn’t even have a funeral), but showing up with others was OK once every decade or so. In 1988, she did manage to attend a tribute to her and her then-late mother, Kit, hosted by Planned Parenthood, an agency whose cause they both were passionate about.
Good luck finding a photo of Kate with one of her Oscars, or any Oscar for that matter. Since the Thalberg is a bust of the Golden Age producer for which it’s named and not a traditional statuette, there’s no Oscar in the clips and photos of Kate at the ’74 ceremony. There is a brief scene of her with one in “This Must Be Love,” one of Kate’s final films in which she essentially plays herself — an Oscar-winning actress. Jason Bateman’s character is staying over at Hepburn’s and finds an Oscar in a drawer in the spare room. He sets it out. Kate hobbles in saying, “Who put that out,” and grabs it to return it to an out-of-sight place.
But Kate did, obviously, keep her Oscars. Unlike Marlon Brando (who misplaced one, declined another) or Francis Ford Coppola (who threw his away in creative frustration), Kate hung onto hers. For a time they were on display at the Empire State Building. She loaned the “Pond” Oscar to a sick friend as a good luck charm but it was eventually returned.
And they’ve stayed in pretty good shape. The gold plating on the “Dinner” Oscar is slightly chipped on its movie reel base. The “Morning” Oscar, decades older than the other three, has a body the same size as the others, but a much shorter base (the taller bases emerged in 1945). It’s also far more discolored than the newer ones but it may not have been as shiny to begin with — the Academy experimented with different metal combinations over the years, even handing out plaster awards during a WWII metal shortage (winners who won during that period got their plaster awards replaced after the war).
The four Hepburn Oscars were photographed together for the first time in the 1980s by John Bryson, who published the shot in his coffee table book “The Private World of Katharine Hepburn.” Too bad he couldn’t convince Kate to appear with them — what a priceless shot that would have been.
Meryl Streep has since beat Kate on the nomination front — she has 14 to Kate’s 12, though three of Meryl’s noms (and one of her two wins) have been in the supporting category. Meryl is self-deprecating about the situation, often pointing out that she’s “Oscar’s biggest loser.” Kate never even accepted a supporting role until 1994 in “Love Affair,” one of her last performances.
The new exhibit features several other fascinating (one of Kate’s favorite words!) Hepburn artifacts including one-sheets of her classic movies, a stunning portrait by Everett Raymond Kintsler and a self-portrait of the actress as “Coco” (she portrayed Chanel in a 1970 Broadway musical). Hepburn’s theater archives belong to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Many of her belongings (695 lots) were auctioned off at Sotheby’s in 2004, drawing $5.8 million.
The Portrait Gallery is located at the intersection of Eighth and F streets, N.W. and is open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Visit www.npg.si.edu for more information.
www.washblade.com/blog/index.cfm?blog_id=15311
** **Think I read somewhere that Kate did not decline to make the photo shooting for Life with Bette Davis because of Davis but because of an article that had appeared about Planned Parenthood - am I right?