Katharine Hepburn: Queen of the Screen

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You're about to listen to a brand new series of History's Heroes.

New episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes a week early, first on BBC Sounds.

September 1914.

In the oppressive heat of the afternoon sun, an unlikely pair sailed down a river in German, East Africa.

The dark waters were filled with dangerous animals.

And particularly the crocodiles, who are terrifyingly close to the boat but sort of oozing out of the water at various points.

The woman, a British Methodist missionary, seemed prim but had a taste for adventure.

She was arguing with the man, a rough-edged Canadian machinist.

And she's wearing this high-necked sort of cotton shirt waist type dress.

This outfit is soon mucky and sweat-ridden and damp and torn.

The two were attempting to reach a large lake where a German gunboat was patrolling.

There,

they hoped to turn their steamboat into a makeshift torpedo and use it to sink the gunboat.

They'd already survived storms, rapids, rocks, and a barrage of shooting from a German fortress.

But now, stuck in the mud and reeds in the burning sun, it looked like they were finished.

The woman began to pray.

Suddenly, somebody shouted, Cut!

This wasn't the First World War at all, but 1951, a Hollywood film crew on location in what was then the Belgian Congo.

The steamboat captain was Humphrey Bogart, and the missionary on the steamboat with him was Catherine Hepburn.

She's on the water, surrounded by wild animals, with a very boisterous masculine star in front of her, and an even more boisterous masculine director, living in probably the worst discomfort of her life.

They'd be trying to bat insects off themselves and there'd be makeup and hair people coming in to make them look clean but not too clean, sweaty but not too sweaty.

Trying to stay hydrated, Hepburn constantly drank water.

Mostly bottled water, but not always.

And sadly, she got dysentery, which resulted in her being terribly, terribly sick.

But she really needed this shoot for the African queen to go well.

The phone hadn't rung much recently.

She didn't want want her superstar career to be the thing getting torpedoed by Hollywood's refusal to accept women who didn't conform to their idea of a starlet.

For BBC Radio 4, this is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

I'm Alex von Tunselmann.

I'm a historian and today's episode is about Catherine Hepburn.

Obviously she was a successful Hollywood actress, but for me she's a hero despite that.

The Hollywood system was designed to mass produce female stars along rigid lines of age, appearance, opinions and behaviour, and she had to fight to be completely herself.

1932, Hollywood.

Senior RKO studio executives were furious with their new star, Catherine Hepburn's on-set behaviour.

She wore trousers.

She wore trousers every single day that she could.

And she didn't really understand why she couldn't wear dungarees to the set.

Eventually they did take the dungarees away and rather than fetching a skirt, Catherine Hepburn walked around in just her shirt and no trousers for the rest of the day in processed underwear, underwear visible, we might say.

Film historian and critic Pamela Hutchinson has a soft spot for the unconventional Catherine Hepburn.

RKO Studios was one of the five major studios that dominated film production.

At the time, actors were often signed up by studios for lengthy contracts and Catherine Hepburn was a rising star in the theatre.

She was tallish, she was five foot seven, she was perhaps a little bit too tall for some of her leading men and she couldn't really look small if she tried.

She looked like the kind of woman who strode into a room rather than walked in.

Even in real life, Hepburn acted like the characters she played.

tough and spicy, with a masculine edge to her style.

It might sound ridiculous, but if you're talking about Catherine Hepburn, you cannot underestimate the importance of the trousers that she wore.

When she talked about the trousers, she described them sometimes as a middle ground, which we can only imagine is like a middle ground between the masculine persona she wanted to embody, or at least the masculine style that she wanted to embody,

and society's conventional expectations of what a woman would wear.

But her fame came at a cost.

Hepburn rolled her eyes when she was reminded of the strict terms of her Hollywood contract.

She had to turn up when she was told, do as she was told, talk to the press only when she was told.

It didn't sit well with her.

Born in 1907 into a wealthy non-conformist family, even as a child, she dressed as a boy and called herself Jimmy.

She'd always been fiercely independent.

Her father was a doctor and her mother was an activist, a feminist.

She campaigned for women's suffrage, she campaigned for what we call reproductive rights and she was encouraged from an early age to be opinionated, to speak her mind, to act on principle.

She was the second of six children and was particularly close to her older brother, Tom.

But when she was a teenager, tragedy struck.

While visiting a family friend, she went to the room Tom was staying in and found his body.

It looked like he'd taken his own life, though her family maintained it must have been an accident.

It was a devastating loss.

Afterwards, Hepburn was determined never to lose again.

She wanted to play to win, so once she got into acting, she always wanted to do well.

And the early part of her career, you can see that her ambition and her charisma and her confidence and even her star power outstripps her talent.

Catherine Hepburn walked walked into Hollywood and she knew that there was a way to win at this game.

And she knew she had value.

Money wasn't really a difficulty for her.

Freedom was the issue for Catherine Hepburn and so with the right opportunities, an actor could create something in this system.

It did not ever occur to Catherine Hepburn that she shouldn't have creative control.

And it worked.

In Hepburn's third film, Morning Glory, she played a young actress on the road to stardom opposite Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

She won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

But Hepburn only made a handful of films before Hollywood changed beyond recognition.

It had been a place of creativity and free expression.

In the early 1930s, though, there was a growing moral panic about movies corrupting American values.

Studios introduced the Motion Picture Production Code, known as the Hayes Code after the man who oversaw it.

This was a strict regime of self-censorship to regulate the moral content of films.

Everything from being disrespectful to authority figures to more intimate matters like how much sexuality could be shown on screen, and certainly there could be no hint of gay life on screen.

As well as homosexuality, the code banned miscegenation, sexual relationships between between black and white people.

Criminal activity of any kind had to be punished.

What's more, studio contracts often included morality clauses, which actors and actresses were expected to uphold, even in their off-screen lives.

These could be especially hard on women.

You really were meant to display a sort of compliant wife and mother.

That wasn't Hepburn's style at all.

In fact, she'd already divorced her first husband and didn't want children.

Rumours abounded that she was lesbian or bisexual.

In spite of it all, she reinvented herself as one of the great comic actresses of the decade in screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby and the Philadelphia Story.

She sometimes had a say in choosing her co-stars, usually Kerry Grant or Spencer Tracy.

For Woman of the Year, she even chose her director and brokered brokered the script, demanding an enormous $250,000 fee to be shared with the writers.

On screen and off, Catherine Hepburn showed other actors and her fans that you didn't have to conform to expectations to be a success, but the Conservative assaults on Hollywood were by no means over.

When the censorship became even tougher and more politically driven, could she survive?

In May 1947, Hepburn attended a rally for Henry A.

Wallace.

Wallace, who'd been Franklin D.

Roosevelt's vice president, was warming up for a presidential run with the new Progressive Party.

After the Second World War, the morality of Hollywood films and filmmakers was under attack again.

The Hays Code was fully enforced and the atmosphere in Hollywood was tense.

Though the United States had been allied with the Soviet Union during the war, there were long-standing fears that communism would infiltrate and take over American life.

The campaign against communism was led in the Senate by Joseph McCarthy and became known after him as McCarthyism.

In Congress, it was pursued by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated anyone accused of disloyalty or subversive activities.

There is this sort of fear, whether it's slightly concocted or not, that Hollywood is full of left-wing activists who may actually secretly be communists and therefore be some kind of threat to national security.

Catherine Hepburn was raised to believe in moral and constitutional rights for all.

Wealthy and well-connected, she had no hesitation in putting her head over the parapet.

So when Catherine Hepburn was speaking at a political rally at Gilmore Stadium, and fortunately wearing a beautiful red dress, she gave a speech which she thought probably was quite reasonable, defending free speech and attacking censorship.

We will fight not only to prevent the abridgment of freedom, but to broaden the freedoms that already exist.

We will fight not only for what we have and hold dear,

but for what we hope to have and deserve to have and can have.

And that is why we are here tonight.

Like many others in Hollywood who took a stand against McCarthyism, Hepburn believed that speaking out was the right thing to do.

Free speech had to be defended, but it made her a target.

She perhaps misjudged the moment or misjudged the strength of her opposition because

she was sort of castigated as a communist or a communist sympathiser.

Rumours ran wild that she attended communist meetings and raised money for communist causes.

All of her previous left-wing or liberal or progressive statements were used against her.

In the political climate of the time, prominent people who challenged the investigations could find that their lives were made very difficult.

One of the things that defines this period is the climate of fear that it had and the idea of blacklisting people from the industry, of forcing people to testify, you know, testify against their colleagues, of digging into people's past, of realising that the FBI might have a file on you just because of something you said once to a newspaper.

You know, this is a really scary time for people and it's a situation that threatens people's career, but it also pits them against the people that they're working beside day by day.

While some Hollywood filmmakers were under attack for their political beliefs, the studio system was being investigated for its business practices.

The United States government brought a case against Paramount Pictures, which resulted in the Paramount decrees, aiming to break up the power of the five main studios.

These meant film studios could no longer own movie theatres or dictate which theatres would show their movies.

All of this this made studio executives wary about politically active filmmakers like Catherine Hepburn.

Hollywood gives the impression of being an open book, but it suggests that it's quite open, that there are no secrets, that everybody knows how the system works.

But really, when you find yourself caught in it, it can be a little more complicated than it seems to be.

Once again, there was a push for stars to uphold a certain type of morality and American values.

Once again, again, Hepburn appeared to be on the wrong side of this.

Her reputation took a sort of perilous nosedive.

All that people are talking about is why isn't she making films and might she be in trouble with the committee?

And so that begins to be the conversation about Catherine Hepburn, not, you know, when's her next film coming out.

The same year, Hepburn played opposite Spencer Tracy in Frank Capra's political drama, State of the Union.

The film was a critical success, and there was a story that it persuaded the president, Harry S.

Truman, to run for office again.

But Spencer Tracy was not much more popular with the authorities than Catherine Hepburn.

The FBI had a file on her, and he was referenced in it.

And there was another secret that the public didn't know.

Up to this point in 1959, while making five films together, Tracy and Hepburn had fallen in love and were having an affair.

Spencer Tracy was married to a woman who wouldn't divorce him.

He was Catholic, he didn't want to.

He also had a certain amount of guilt about the fact that his son was born deaf and he was a terrible alcoholic as well.

They concealed their relationship from the public.

It was an open secret in Hollywood, but it was also being played out very publicly on screen.

Hepburn's career was on rocky ground.

After the Paramount decrees, studios were more conservative.

And in an industry that was notoriously judgmental about its female stars, she was now in her 40s.

She was aware that even if appearances weren't everything to her, she knew that they were everything to the industries.

The odds were stacked against her.

How was Catherine Hepburn going to remain a star?

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1950.

In the Hepburn family home, Connecticut.

Catherine Hepburn looked in the mirror and sighed.

All actors must know what it's like for the phone not to ring or to not get the good roles.

Hepburn was still able to choose good roles.

She'd just played a nearly sold-out run of As You Like It on stage, something few female stars of her generation would take on.

But in the film industry, she was struggling.

Hepburn brushed her long red hair and examined her high cheekbones.

She said she had an angular face and an angular personality.

She didn't go in for the carefully curated beauty routines of many Hollywood stars.

In fact, she did pretty much the minimum required.

Before her debut, she plucked all of her nose hairs out one by one by herself.

That was her concession to beauty standards.

Hepburn leant into the glass and applied some lipstick.

She needed a new role that let her be a star.

So she wasn't going to fill in the time by playing secondary parts, you know, the sort of mother roles that a lot of women of her age would be filling in time with.

But she'd been intrigued by a recent approach from a producer wanting to make a film adaptation of a 1935 novel by C.S.

Forrester, The African Queen.

Hepburn picked up the copy he'd sent.

It was set during the First World War, and she liked the story.

But if she did it, she insisted many of the scenes would have to be shot on location in Africa.

She wouldn't compromise on authenticity.

And there were other problems.

The lead male role had already gone to Humphrey Bogart.

She'd never worked with him.

What if they didn't have chemistry?

Bogart was also in trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

So was the film's director John Houston.

The three of them were all considered suspect by the McCarthyites.

But Hepburn knew she didn't have many options.

It was time for action.

May 1951.

On the edge of a waterfall in Uganda's National Park.

With a large hat over her face, Catherine Hepburn took a nap.

She was exhausted.

Her mother had died just before she left, and Hepburn was feeling adrift.

She hadn't been sent a final script before flying.

Had she been foolish to want to film somewhere so far from home.

There is a reason why Hollywood is in Hollywood, right?

There's a reason why Hollywood is in California where you have an amazing range of natural landscapes and weather conditions of all kinds.

Hepburn was nervous but didn't want to complain.

Next to her, her co-star Humphrey Bogart snoozed in a hammock.

She didn't have a way out of this one, Lola.

The African Queen was a real gift for her.

It came along at a time when she really, really needed to be seen to be playing a patriot.

That she is a patriot, that she is a safe person, that her heroism, her principles and her ideals actually do align with theirs.

America, the nation, freedom, whatever you might call it, the fight against fascism and hate, they are all on the same side.

It was incredibly expensive to film on location in Uganda and the Belgian Congo.

So the African Queen had to be a hit.

The shoot was grueling.

And they did have an infestation of soldier ants, which is much worse than it sounds.

Hepburn had demanded one creature comfort on set.

She requested her own personal private loo, which had to be towed down the river along with everything else.

At one point, navigating a tricky bend in the river, it did get detached, it got caught in some undergrowth on the riverbank, and bye-bye to Catherine Hepburn's private loo, and she had to

use the bush facilities that everyone else did.

The long days took a toll.

Catherine Hepburn didn't want to appear weak.

The high-necked costume she had to wear for her role as a First World War missionary was sweaty.

It clung to her thin frame.

Not the most flattering or glamorous thing that Catherine Hepburn had been put in.

Though she'd filled her suitcase with chocolate bars and tea biscuits from Fortnum and Mason, she hadn't eaten much.

She prided herself on having a cast-iron stomach, but she must have picked up some kind of bug.

There's a famous scene towards the beginning of the film where Catherine Hepburn is playing the organ

quite brutally, actually.

She was vomiting in between takes.

In fact, she was so ill while she was making the film that she lost lots of weight and her already angular face became even more drawn.

There were rumours among the crew that the shoot was such a nightmare it couldn't possibly produce a hit.

The possibility of a flop was horrifying for Hepburn.

She had to make it work.

Her role as missionary turned war hero Rose Sayer positioned her to appeal to American audiences.

Her distinctive accent helped.

She had a sort of East Coast very refined accent.

She doesn't really change it for the African Queen to play an English woman.

It is a sort of transatlantic tone.

Director John Houston instructed her to channel the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady, diplomat and activist.

So even though she's playing an English woman, she's embodying a certain kind of American patriotism which just allows anyone who had liked her before to like her again and to realize that, you know, she wasn't a dangerous radical.

Like Hepburn, Rose Sayer was an unmarried woman with no children who had extraordinary inner strength and wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty.

There's one sort of like almost like gender reversal moment in the African Queen when Humphrey Bogart emerges from the water covered in leeches and he's obviously horrified and who wouldn't be horrified.

But Rosaya, Catherine Hepburn, leaps straight into action with the salt and she's the one saving him.

The role allowed Hepburn to be herself

and to have an ending that would reassure conservative viewers.

On screen at least, she did get married.

And when she lifts that union flag at the end, that hand-painted union flag at the end of the African Queen, that's really considered to be quite a great moment for the American audiences.

They know that it could just as well be the Stars and Stripes, and that she is expressing that pure ideal of patriotism that they all share.

And we all go to the cinema to feel more connected with each other in many ways.

So, you know, this is a powerful image of true love before everything.

As John Houston shouted, Cut, that's a wrap.

Hepburn had no idea if she'd done enough.

The 21st of February, 1952.

Manhattan.

Catherine Hepburn took a deep breath and picked up her copy of the New York Times.

She twiddled the witch doctor's good luck charm from her time filming in Uganda as she read the review of The African Queen.

It was praise.

The writer said she had a crisp flair for comedy, playing a caricature of a prissy female.

A smile spread across her face at the words, Miss Hepburn and Mr.

Bogart are entirely up to their jobs, outside of their lack of resemblance to the nationals they're said to be.

Two middle-aged people with the right ideas, with the right principles, can fall in love and save the world.

Hepburn had played the crumbling studio system and won.

The African Queen was a hit.

Both she and Bogart were nominated for Oscars, but she didn't attend the ceremony.

She never placed much importance on awards or media attention.

Bogart won, but that time she lost to Vivian Lee in a streetcar named Desire.

It hardly mattered.

Catherine Hepburn was nominated 12 times in total for the Academy Award for Best Actress, making her the most nominated actress of all time until she was surpassed by Meryl Streep.

She went on to win three more Oscars to add to her first statuette.

It was an extraordinary career in an industry that wasn't kind to women.

Hollywood is a sexist industry in a sexist world and there's a lot of stories from Hollywood that will make your blood boil, absolutely.

Her love affair with Spencer Tracy was more fraught.

In the early 1960s, his health began to fail.

Hepburn moved in with him, but their relationship remained out of the public eye.

Tracy died in 1967 at their home in Beverly Hills.

So as not to embarrass his family, Hepburn did not attend his funeral.

Only after Tracy's widow died in the 1980s did she finally confirm that they had been together for 27 years of what she described as absolute bliss.

As always, she'd done it on her own terms.

After more than six decades in Hollywood, Hepburn still wore the trousers.

She continued to be an activist for progressive political causes, campaigning for planned parenthood.

I think anyone can be inspired by her work ethic, by her persistence, by her integrity, and by her core values and how well she stuck to them.

she seemed to think, quite rightly, that being Catherine Hepburn was enough.

She continued to appear on screen until her late 80s, losing none of that fiery confidence that had made her a star.

I think she's someone who you can call to mind, you can channel her energy sometimes.

You know, when you remember that you really want to draw yourself up to your full height, when you want to take a ball space that you need to take up, you know, that you don't have to stoop for anyone.

You know, she's a woman who walked tall and she walked in her own shoes.

And I

know that you can summon that energy if you really want to.

Be a little bit more Catherine Hepburn means to step forward and be yourself

all day.

Next time on History's Heroes,

a new musical production holds up a mirror to the racial prejudices of American society.

Rogers and Hammerstein in the South Pacific.

This is Dr.

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