Master’s thesis sparks Katharine Hepburn Film Retrospective

Bonnie Moxey Maxwell of Greenville, a student in UD’s Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, has written her master’s thesis on the larger-than-life career of actress Katharine Hepburn.

11:33 a.m., Feb. 2, 2005--Katharine Hepburn, the feminist icon, brought all of her Hollywood boyfriends home to meet her family in Connecticut.

Ms. Hepburn sent her paychecks home to her father, who controlled her money until his death. Then, his secretary handled the paychecks.

Bonnie Moxey Maxwell of Greenville, a student in UD’s Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) Program, interviewed the actress’ surviving siblings, read stacks of books about Ms. Hepburn and visited the places where the actress lived, for her MALS thesis. Maxwell’s research will be the centerpiece for a Katharine Hepburn Film Retrospective scheduled Feb. 11-13 in Rehoboth Beach.

“Hepburn Redux: Rethinking the Myth,” Maxwell’s MALS thesis, is based on information she gleaned from hours of interviews with family members, visiting the actress’ family home on Long Island Sound, talking her way into Ms. Hepburn’s old townhouse in New York City and touring her home in Hartford, Conn.

Maxwell attended the Sotheby’s auction of Ms. Hepburn’s memorabilia where she didn’t see anything sell for less than $1,000, even small lots of Ms. Hepburn’s credit cards.

She listened to Robert Hepburn and Peggy Hepburn Perry recount their sister’s place in a family history that included Harvard graduates, a first-born brother who committed suicide and a maternal uncle who founded Corning Glass.

She talked with Ms. Hepburn’s brother-in-law, Ellsworth S. Grant, and with Katharine Houghton Grant, the niece who co-starred with Ms. Hepburn in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Maxwell, a retired private school executive who lives at Methodist Country House, will discuss her extensive research as the main speaker at the film fest sponsored by the Rehoboth Beach Film Society.

Other speakers include Anne M. Boylan, UD professor of history and women’s studies; Kathleen D. Turkel, UD assistant professor of women’s studies; and Paul Stacy, professor emeritus of English and film studies at the University of Hartford, where one of the Hepburn family homes is now part of the campus.

Maxwell, who hopes to turn her thesis into a book, said she views Ms. Hepburn as a “force of nature,” a term Ms. Hepburn borrowed from George Bernard Shaw to describe herself.

“She was really larger than life in the things she took on,’’ Maxwell said. “The public perception was she just went from one success to another. The reality of it is she was battling all the time. She spent so much time trying to create her own icon status.”

Maxwell’s personal interviews and readings turned up dozens of interesting facts for Ms. Hepburn fans:

The Hepburn auction at Sotheby’s included her clothing, passports, credit cards, her black rotary telephones, old scripts with hand notations, artwork by the actress, including watercolors, acrylics and a small bronze bust of Spencer Tracy. The crowd, with about 500 people spilling into the standing-room-only section and others bidding by phone and Internet, bid prices up in increments as high as $5,000. Maxwell said two black rotary telephones sold for $1,700 at the auction’s beginning, and two identical telephones sold for $5,500 later in the day. The three-inch-high bust of Mr. Tracy, which Maxwell said Ms. Hepburn sometimes carried around with her, was listed in the auction catalog at $3,000-$5,000, but it sold for $316,000.
Ms. Hepburn never owned property in California, although she rented several spots, including the aviary on the John Barrymore estate.
Ms. Hepburn was very close to her older brother, Tom, who hanged himself when she was 13. Although her parents talked about abortion, venereal disease and birth control at the dinner table, they did not discuss the suicide.
At one point, the Hepburn family had a staff of five servants, but Ms. Hepburn’s physician father saw his income drop from $45,000 before the Depression to about $10,000 at the Depression’s end.
One biographer said Ms. Hepburn quoted her parents’ opinions as if they were Supreme Court rulings.
Ms. Hepburn’s parents never came to Hollywood and didn’t value that part of her life.
Little Women was the movie that Ms. Hepburn’s brother Robert said most accurately portrayed the way the actress saw herself and the way she wanted her public to perceive her.
Ms. Hepburn’s siblings were largely unaware that she took a large hand in editing her own scripts, particularly The Philadelphia Story. Maxwell said Ms. Hepburn shaped her own material by being involved in the writing process on her scripts.
All Ms. Hepburn’s siblings had their mother’s maiden name--Houghton--as their middle names, and Ms. Hepburn’s personal stationery always included the Houghton name.
Maxwell said Ms. Hepburn made 15 movies during the 1930s, and only four were box office and critical successes. She said when Ms. Hepburn went home to her parents in 1938 she had been labeled box-office poison in a full-page ad in a trade paper. Ms. Hepburn had turned down a last-ditch offer from RKO to play one of four daughters in a B movie, and she was without a studio. She revived her career by engineering the success of The Philadelphia Story, first on stage and then on film. "The kind of courage it took to battle back from being destroyed professionally, I think is underestimated," Maxwell said.
Before Ms. Hepburn’s successful appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1973, unedited tapes show that Ms. Hepburn arrived ostensibly to look over the television studio and began reorganizing the furniture and criticizing the carpet to gauge Cavett’s reaction. When she estimated Cavett was a host she could handle, she told him she would do the show but wanted to tape it on the spot. “She just sits there and talks,’’ Maxwell says. “It was the beginning of the thawing of her relationship with the press. This is a gal who just worked very, very hard at implanting her persona in American consciousness to a greater degree than any other actress of her era.”
In 1986, Ms. Hepburn organized a television tribute to Spencer Tracy. Maxwell said the show ended with Ms. Hepburn reading an open letter to the late actor beginning with, "Dear Spence...." The letter cast Mr. Tracy as a troubled man who tossed and turned in his sleep. It cast her as his comforter. It also cast him as the greatest American actor of his time. "She’s putting him forward as a very troubled, disturbed person, and this enhances her role as caretaker, it empowers her as the caretaker for the best American film actor. This was a part of a serious campaign to shape America’s consciousness," Maxwell said.

Asked to sum up Ms. Hepburn in one word, Maxwell said she would use the word that Ms. Hepburn used--horsepower.

“Horsepower is a measure of force, and I think the thing that comes across to me of Hepburn is the sheer force of her personality, the force with which she propelled herself through life. That’s the revelation to me — how hard Hepburn worked at being Hepburn.”

Maxwell recently narrated a show on Hepburn’s homes for the Home and Garden Television Network. No date has been set for airing.

Maxwell handpicked the films for the Rehoboth festival. Among them are the film that started Ms. Hepburn’s downward slide, Sylvia Scarlett; the film that saved her career, The Philadelphia Story; the film that Ms. Hepburn thought portrayed her as she was, Little Women; and a film that had two endings but Louis B. Mayer insisted on using the ending that made Ms. Hepburn’s character less assertive, Woman of the Year.

The festival runs from 6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 11, to 3:30 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 13. Tickets to the festival cost $125 and are available from Sue Early at the Rehoboth Beach Film Society at (302) 645-9095. Festival-plus-lodging packages are available at Boardwalk Plaza Hotel, starting at $449. For information, call 1-800-332-3224.

Article by Kathy Canavan
Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson

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