Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,67

proper and decent human harmony.

SEEING

Ten

HEPBURN AND GARBO

1. THE NATURAL

Katharine Hepburn was the star of my favorite film, The Philadelphia Story. And she appeared in a large proportion of the other movies I can stand to watch without throwing something at the screen or falling asleep. The sheer scarcity, in cinema, of women who in any way resemble those unusual creatures we meet every day (our mothers, sisters, wives, lovers, daughters) has only intensified in the twenty years since Katharine Hepburn ceased making movies, and this has served to make her legacy more precious as time has passed.

From the earliest age I was devoted to her. My teenage bedroom, a shrine to the Golden Age of Hollywood, reserved a whole half wall for her alone. Amid the pictures of Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Donald O’Connor, Ava Gardner and the rest, Ms. Hepburn—imperious, regal and redheaded (although this last was often disguised in the publicity shots)—sat high up by the cornice of the ceiling, like a Madonna looking over the lesser saints. I spent too much time worrying over her health and wanting assurance from my father (also a fan and only eighteen years her junior) that she would outlive us all. When she sailed through her late eighties without incident, I became partially convinced of her immortality. Possibly because she got to me so young, her effect is out of proportion with what any movie star should mean to anyone, but I am grateful for it. The kind of woman she played, the kind of woman she was, is still the kind of woman I should like to be, and an incidental line of hers, from the aforementioned The Philadelphia Story, remains my lodestar every time I pick up a pen to write anything all: “The time to make your mind up about people is never!”

In that film the question is class; Hepburn’s Tracy Lord is trying to convince a class-conscious Jimmy Stewart that virtue is not restricted to the work ingmen of the world, any more than honor rests solely with the rich. Similarly, it was Hepburn’s unique real-life position in Hollywood to chip away at some of America’s more banal and oppressive received ideas. Whenever Hollywood thought it knew what a woman was, or what a black man was, or what an intellectual might be, or what “sexiness” amounted to, Hepburn made a movie to turn the common thinking on its head, offering always something irreducibly singular. Sometimes they liked it, but more often than not—especially in the early days—they didn’t. It was another trait of Hepburn’s never to give an inch. When David O. Selznick told her she couldn’t have the role of Scarlett O’Hara because he “couldn’t see Rhett Butler chasing you for ten years,” she told him snootily that “some people’s idea of sex appeal is different from yours” and stormed out of his office. It was never a question of Hepburn changing to suit Hollywood; Hollywood had to change to suit Hepburn.

Her bullheadedness can be traced to her East Coast upbringing: Protestant, hardworking, sporty, intellectual, liberal, but severe. Cold showers were a staple of her childhood. Hepburn said that her family “gave [her] the impression that the bitterer the medicine, the better it was for you,” and this strikes us as absolutely commensurate with her image on the big screen; never indulgent, always somehow utilitarian; only doing and using what was necessary. Ava Gardner you see in a big tub of bubbles, Hepburn in the Connecticut cold, standing in a bucket of ice water. Attributing to her childhood all her positive virtues, Hepburn always looked to her parents’ lives and relationship as the model for her own. Her mother, Katharine Martha Houghton, known as Kit, was a committed feminist and an early graduate of Bryn Mawr College, one of the first institutions to offer women a PhD. She was good friends with Mrs. Pankhurst, became the president of the Connecticut Women’s Suffrage Association and, in later years, was a vocal supporter of Planned Parenthood, despite giving birth to three boys and three girls. Her husband, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, could trace his ancestry back to James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell and third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots (whom Hepburn played in 1936, rather lumpenly. Later she recognized that fiery Elizabeth would have been more her bag). From him, Hepburn got her hair and her family nickname, Redtop, a great enthusiasm for all things physical and absolutely no understanding of feminine restriction. Dr. Hepburn made