The Private Life of Katharine Hepburn
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Barbara Leaming David Canfield Kate Andersen Brower Joe Hagan Kase Wickman Condé Nast
An excerpt from Barbara Leaming's biography on Katharine Hepburn.
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Vanity Fair
On-screen, Katharine Hepburn played a feisty beauty who always walked off with the leading man. But her real-life romances never ended so neatly. In this moving excerpt from her new biography, Barbara Leaming traces the arc of Hepburn’s life; from the trauma of a family suicide to her final days with Spence.

Katharine Hepburn was 13 in the spring of 1921, when her brother Tom’s marked nervousness led Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn to attempt to “divert” him with a five-day trip to New York City in the company of Kathy and his godmother, Mary Towle. Two days after Easter, Aunty, as Towle was known to the family, went with Tom and Kathy on the train from Hartford to New York.

Photographs of Tom in this period show a broad-shouldered, strikingly handsome 15-year-old on the brink of young manhood. He assumed responsibility for his sister at the outset of their Greenwich Village holiday. In New York, he purchased two parlor-car tickets for the return trip.

Downtown at Aunty’s little red brick house at 26 Charlton Street, Tom carried his suitcase up three flights to an attic storeroom. Beneath a sloping roof, a freshly made cot filled a tiny alcove. Kathy slept in a room on a lower floor with Aunty.

On Friday evening, Tom seemed to be in high spirits when Aunty took the young people uptown for a screening of a new silent film based on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In the dark of the movie theater, however, Tom’s mood shifted violently when the image of a hanging flashed on-screen. Deeply shaken, Tom confided to Kathy that the scene had given him “the horrors,” and she understood perfectly. The year before, she and Dr. Hepburn had discovered Tom hanging by the neck from a noose at home. The boy had insisted he was only trying a mock-hanging stunt Dr. Hepburn had often described from his own youth. Any parent would likely be appalled by the sight of a child playing with nooses—especially a child of Tom’s nervous temperament. In a family with a history of three suicides (Dr. Hepburn’s brother had jumped from a window to his death, and Mrs. Hepburn’s father and uncle had shot themselves), the incident should have set off alarm bells. But the Hepburns tended to avoid speaking of their most troubling thoughts and emotions. Eager to accept Tom’s explanation, Dr. Hepburn instructed the boy not to try the stunt again.

After Tom, Kathy, and Aunty left the cinema, Tom struggled to regain his composure. On Saturday night, he played his banjo and sang with Aunty and Kathy in the living room. To Mary Towle’s relief, “the horrors” appeared to have evaporated. They all went to their rooms at 10 o’clock.

The next morning, Kathy enjoyed a leisurely breakfast with Aunty. At nine, Aunty sent Kathy to see what was keeping Tom. When he failed to respond, Kathy tried the doorknob, but the garret was locked. Alarmed, she forced the door. She brushed against something, turned, and screamed. Tom was hanging by the neck from a rafter. Evidently he had ripped up a bedsheet and braided the strips of cloth to improvise a rope. He tied one end to a large metal bedspring lying on the floor. He fashioned a noose, tossed the rope over a rafter, and fitted the noose to his neck. He climbed up on a packing case and jumped. The rope was too long; his feet hit ground. Bending his knees and pitching his weight forward, Tom applied all his strength to pull at the metal bedspring and tighten the noose. He died of slow strangulation. Since his feet always touched ground, there was nothing to prevent his stopping at any time—except the determination to destroy himself.

Alerted by Kathy’s scream, Aunty raced up the three flights. Hysterical, she sent Kathy to fetch a neighbor, who told Mary Towle to notify the police.

Finally the Hepburns arrived. Dr. Hepburn staunchly denied that Tom could have committed suicide. On Tuesday morning, April 5, his statement appeared in The New York Times under the headline SAYS SON’S HANGING WAS BOYISH “STUNT.”

In the year that followed, it seemed to Bob Hepburn, eight, that his sister Kathy was acting strangely. Now 14, she went to bed early each night and rose at 5:30 A.M. Whenever Bob got out of bed, he knew he would find Kathy bent over her desk, “furiously attacking her studies” with a “great seriousness” she had never before shown for schoolwork. Bob wondered about Kathy’s relationship with their parents. Whatever had happened in New York had created a mysterious bond that seemed to exclude the other children.

The Hepburns had produced their family in carefully spaced pairs: Tom and Kathy, Dick and Bob, Marion and Peg. In Tom’s absence, the dynamics shifted drastically as Kathy formed a new grouping with Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn; they spent time together in ways that set them apart from the rest of the household. Kathy seemed to crave solitude. The gaunt, unreachable, suspicious girl forced most people to keep their distance. Watching his sister, Bob sensed that somehow she was trying to become Tom.

Eventually, there was talk that Kathy planned to become a doctor, as Tom would have had he lived. Lest there remain any doubt about her intentions, Kathy abandoned her May 12 date of birth, appropriating Tom’s November 8 birthday for her own. In the aftermath of Tom’s death, Kathy became her father’s clear favorite.

Kate Hepburn, as she came to be known at Bryn Mawr, gradually emerged from the solitude in which she had enveloped herself after Tom’s suicide. The inability to master a basic chemistry course, coupled with poor grades, led her to abandon her plans to be a doctor in favor of a stage career. At school Kate became a much-talked-about talent in dramatic productions. Getting started in the New York theater, however, seemed agonizingly slow at times. In 1928 she was understudying a socialite named Hope Williams in Philip Barry’s play Holiday. “How are you feeling tonight?” Kate would ask whenever Williams peered out of her dressing-room door. Kate’s eagerness only strengthened the resolve of Hope and her friends to keep the understudy from ever going on.

Perhaps sensing that nothing would give Kate greater pleasure than to walk out of the show, Ludlow Ogden Smith, her rich, handsome beau of the moment, pressed her to marry him. And Kate shocked Arthur Hopkins, the play’s producer, with the sudden announcement that she was giving up acting to marry Smith.

Tall, with rosy cheeks and thinning black hair doused in tonic and brushed straight back, Luddy, as the well-connected young Philadelphian was known, had been madly pursuing Kate since Bryn Mawr. She appeared to enjoy bossing him about. It seemed to Bob Hepburn that Luddy, so sweet and eager to please, was no match for his sister, who was a “natural boss” like Dr. Hepburn. To get Kate to marry him, Luddy had even agreed to change his name when she balked at the prospect of being known as Mrs. Smith. He rechristened himself Ogden Ludlow. Mrs. Hepburn worried that Kate, indeed the entire family, would “run roughshod” over the poor besotted fellow.

When the couple returned from their honeymoon in Bermuda, they looked at stone farmhouses along the rural fantasy of Philadelphia’s Main Line. Suddenly, Kate was stricken. “What am I doing?” she asked herself. “I couldn’t live here!” The house hunt was abruptly canceled, and Kate told Luddy that she needed to return to New York at once. Instead of offering a protest, Luddy cheerfully agreed to follow. Kate went directly to Arthur Hopkins’s office. “Yes, of course,” said Hopkins. “ I expected you.”

Kate was clearly of two minds about Luddy’s readiness to give in. Strong-willed like her father, she expected to get her way. Perhaps only her family could see that even as Kate gleefully bossed Luddy around there was part of her that longed for him to react “strongly.”

By any standard, the newlyweds led an unusual life in New York, where Kate went back to work as Hope Williams’s understudy. Hardly would Luddy have returned from his job at a Vanderbilt Avenue insurance-brokerage house when Kate would sweep out of their East 39th Street brownstone apartment and jog crosstown to the Plymouth Theatre. In his wife’s absence, Luddy tinkered with an elaborate miniature railroad he had spent years constructing. The music of Debussy, Stravinsky, Wagner, and the other composers in Luddy’s vast record collection blasted on the Victrola. Many of Kate’s colleagues in the theater never even knew she was married.

In 1932, after playing only three notable Broadway roles, Hepburn went to Hollywood to make her first picture, A Bill of Divorcement, directed by George Cukor and co-starring John Barrymore. This tearjerker was a great success, and the following year she began an affair with the dazzling Hollywood agent Leland Hayward. That relationship spelled an end to life with Luddy, who, even after Kate divorced him in 1934, would remain for years like a member of the family. Kate would never marry again. Instead, she would devote much of the remainder of her life to two of Hollywood’s most difficult and self-destructive geniuses.

Many years later, Hepburn realized that close as she had been to John Ford and Spencer Tracy, both redheaded Irishmen, she had never really understood either one. She was drawn to the identical quality in both men, which she called an oversensitivity to life. Like her brother Tom, Ford and Tracy were capable of being devastated by the world. This raw sensitivity was part of what made them such powerful artists, but it also wreaked havoc with their lives.

Several years before Hepburn knew either man, Ford and Tracy had met in New York. It was the spring of 1930. John Ford, then 36, was already one of the most revered directors in Hollywood. A tall, pensive, intimidating figure who walked with surprising grace, he wore a battered felt hat pulled down over his forehead and small round glasses. He wore Irish-tweed jackets and yellow or white flannel trousers—always of the finest quality—until they were ready to rot. Often he rolled his trousers up to the ankles and looped a necktie around his waist instead of a belt.

Ford went to New York in search of an actor for Up the River, a prison picture then in preparation at the Fox Film Corporation. On his first night in town, he saw the death-row drama The Last Mile, starring Spencer Tracy as a condemned man who stages a bloody prison mutiny. One look at Tracy’s high-pressure performance and Ford decided.

“I’m not handsome and I can prove it,” Tracy joked when Ford visited him backstage. The actor’s laugh had a wounded quality that Ford found beautiful. Although “Spence” was only 30, lines webbed his forehead. An insomniac, Tracy liked to stay out all night, belting the brew and visiting brothels; among madams he was known as a mean drunk who had beaten up a prostitute in a bordello called Lu’s. His friends would often have to carry him home at dawn to the apartment he shared with his wife, Louise, and their deaf six-year-old son, Johnny.

Offered $800 a week to appear in a single film, Tracy brooded about whether he deserved the big break Ford was giving him. His nature was deeply pessimistic. In Hollywood, Ford became Tracy’s mentor and father figure. Ford knew how to handle Tracy’s bouts of raging insecurity. When Fox nearly canceled Up the River on account of a rival prison picture, MGM’s The Big House, starring Wallace Beery and Chester Morris, Tracy went wild. Ford laughed and told him not to worry.

Ford deftly turned his story into a comedy, launching the apprehensive Tracy as a film comic. Spencer was a natural, Ford declared. Tracy may not have been comfortable in his own skin, but he certainly appeared relaxed in front of a camera. Ford admired Tracy’s technique because it was barely perceptible. The successful completion of Up the River did little to assuage Tracy’s self-doubt. Ford, for his part, did everything to put Tracy at ease.

Ford’s overtures to Tracy included frequent invitations to bring Mrs. Tracy and their son, Johnny, to the Santa Monica beach house Ford rented for his wife, Mary, and children, Patrick and Barbara. Mrs. Ford was a dark, formidable figure with heavy eyebrows and a large aquiline nose. Her thick black hair was knotted in a huge bun at the nape of the neck. She wore a slash of crimson lipstick. To Ford’s friends and associates, Mary was known as “the lion tamer.” Shrill and argumentative, she relished cutting this larger-than-life figure down to size. Ford always seemed a little frightened of Mary. Rough-and-tumble fellows such as John Wayne tiptoed around her.

Although Mary had grown up a poor relation shuffled between family members in New Jersey, she made much ado of her aristocratic North Carolina background. She accused her husband of being weak and unmanly. She mocked his “shanty Irish” background. Ford, in turn, brooded about the fact that Mary, a Scots-Irish Presbyterian, was a divorcée whose first husband was still alive. That had made it problematic for them to marry in the Roman Catholic Church, which, to a devout Catholic such as Ford, meant that they were not really married at all. At times, Ford regarded this as a shame and disgrace to them both; at other times, the lack of a Catholic ceremony offered a ray of hope that someday he might escape the unhappy marriage once and for all.

In the spring of 1932, Ford met Kate Hepburn, then appearing on Broadway in The Warrior’s Husband, which Fox was interested in filming. Two years after he had discovered Spencer Tracy on Broadway, Ford was back in New York, shooting a screen test of Hepburn. She selected a scene from Philip Barry’s The Animal Kingdom. She appeared with a touch of lipstick, her hair parted on the side and pulled straight back off her face. Ford marveled at her ability to seem sophisticated one moment, like a child of 8 or 10 the next. He described her as “a split personality, half pagan, half Puritan.”

For all of Ford’s excitement, the test did not result in a movie offer. Years later, Ford and George Cukor would often joke about which director had really discovered Hepburn. Ford may have seen her first, but it had been Cukor who, on the basis of his screen test, persuaded David Selznick to bring Hepburn to Hollywood to make A Bill of Divorcement. By the time she worked with Ford, on Mary of Scotland in 1936, she had made eight other pictures and was a major star who had already won her first Academy Award, for Morning Glory in 1933.

With actresses, Ford tended to be courtly. If a man used vulgar language in front of a woman, Ford would instantly banish him from the set. Yet at times he could hardly conceal his lack of pleasure in directing women. He was a man’s director and proud of it. For all that, to those who had worked often with Ford and knew him best, he seemed a different man in Hepburn’s presence. Ordinarily at lunchtime he would disappear to a portable dressing room, where he took off his shirt and snoozed for 45 minutes. But on Mary of Scotland, Ford regularly presided over a big, noisy table in the RKO commissary. Hepburn, in jodhpurs, sat at his side. They joked, sang, told stories, baited, teased, and insulted each other mercilessly. Ford’s cronies treated Hepburn like one of the boys, and she appeared to love it.

“You’re a hell of a fine girl,” Ford assured her. “If you’d just learn to shut up and knuckle under, you’d probably make somebody a nice wife.” Her fearlessness enchanted him. He loved that she was irreverent and violently opinionated. He respected her intelligence and thirst for knowledge about every aspect of filmmaking.

One day during the shooting, Hepburn and Cukor went sailing with Ford and some of his friends on the Araner, the double-masted 110-foot ketch named after the Aran Islands, birthplace of Ford’s mother. The Araner was very special to Ford; he had grown up around ships in Maine and loved the sea. For his wife, the $30,000 yacht was a treasured status symbol. But for Ford, the Araner was a place to relax, to feel “loose as a goose.” And it provided a means of escape.

When a film was done, Ford sometimes stocked the Araner with cases of Irish whiskey and sailed to Mexico. He hired a mariachi band to follow as he made the rounds of whorehouses, where he drank and soaked in the atmosphere. Eventually, when he was too drunk and sick to go ashore, he would order the band to play continuously on deck or in the mahogany-paneled main saloon. For days on end, he lay alone in a tiny, cramped cabin, preferring that to the master suite, whose ornate fourposter marriage bed he usually assigned to John Wayne or some other pal.

Cukor was well aware of Hepburn’s feelings for Ford and what that must mean for her ongoing relationship with her agent lover. When Cukor signed the Araner guest register on April 12, he wrote in the remarks column, “Poor Leland!”

That day, Hepburn wore a white T-shirt under a navy cardigan sweater and brief navy shorts with a white stripe down each side. Except for a trace of lipstick, she wore no makeup. Chin-length hair blew back off her face as she sat cross-legged on the polished deck. Ford perched in a chair as Hepburn vigorously massaged his feet.

Hepburn’s background as a tomboy in a house full of brothers made it easy to fit into Ford’s masculine world. Life with Dr. Hepburn had also taught another lesson; watching her mother, Kate had learned to defer to the male. Ford was a profoundly unhappy man—and stubbornly self-destructive. In 1934 his doctor had diagnosed an enlarged liver and other symptoms attributable to alcohol. Ford drank in search of oblivion. He was a periodic alcoholic who exercised control over when he hit the bottle: never during a picture, always after.

Ford religiously went on a binge when he finished a movie. But Mary of Scotland would be different. By the time the day trip on the Araner ended, Hepburn and Ford had discovered another shared passion, the sea. Hepburn wanted Ford to experience the Fenwick, Connecticut, waterfront where she had spent her summers growing up. Vowing not to disappear to Mexico with the boys, he promised to accompany her. John Ford was in love.

When Ford completed work on Mary of Scotland on April 23, he and Hepburn headed to New York, where she met with the Theatre Guild to discuss appearing in a stage version of Jane Eyre in the 1936–37 season. When Hepburn signed a contract, she anticipated that after a Broadway run Ford might do a film of the play with her in the starring role.

They went to see Hepburn’s family at Fenwick—always an indispensable stop in her relationships—and Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn were charmed by the dashing director. In New York, Ford visited Hepburn’s East 49th Street town house, where she had moved before her divorce. But he did not sleep with her. From the first, he made clear that he was not interested in an affair. He wanted marriage and a life together.

Before he returned to California, Ford wanted to stop in Portland, Maine, to see his ailing 82-year-old father, a retired saloonkeeper. From Maine, Ford would go straight to Los Angeles to tell Mary everything. Although they had two “pups,” as he called them, the fact that he and Mary had never been married in the Roman Catholic Church made it seem easier to ask for a divorce.

“Jack is very religious; he’ll never divorce me,” Mary once vowed. “I’m going to be Mrs. John Ford until I die.”

Mary called her husband Jack, Daddy, or Pa, but never Sean, the Irish name Kate called him in private. Kate valued everything Mary rejected: she adored the poetry and romanticism of Ford’s Irish roots; Mary was ashamed of his humble family. Kate revered Ford as a filmmaker; Mary never gave up hope that he would find a manlier occupation. Kate loved Ford precisely because he was the sort of man capable of being devastated by the world; Mary used her husband’s Catholic guilt against him.

By the time Hepburn returned to Los Angeles to begin her next film, A Woman Rebels, on July 1, 1936, Mary Ford was geared up and ready for battle. Of the two Ford children, 13-year-old Barbara was the apple of Jack’s eye. Mrs. Ford responded to the threat of divorce with a threat of her own. Jack could take Patrick, 15, but Barbara must remain with her.

Ford and Hepburn saw each other nearly every day at the studio, and he spent many happy evenings with her at her home on Angelo Drive. Yet Ford, veering wildly between euphoria and despair, showed no sign of moving out of the house he shared with Mary and the children. Hepburn, for her part, appeared certain that the postponement was only temporary. According to Ford’s niece Cecile De Prita, Mary said that Hepburn offered her $150,000 to give Ford his freedom along with the daughter he cherished. Mary turned her down.

Ford had always seemed most at peace when he was working, but his next picture at RKO, The Plough and the Stars, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Barry Fitzgerald, was a profoundly unhappy experience. Ford did something he had never done while he was working: he went on a bender. Mary and the children were away when Cliff Reid, the producer, discovered Ford in a drunken stupor at home.

Reid appealed to Hepburn. There was no one else Ford would listen to. Hepburn rushed to Odin Street. Usually the home behind the white picket fence would have been off-limits, but Mary was gone, so she let herself in. She found Ford in dismal condition. With difficulty she got him up and out of the house. She drove to RKO, where she spirited Ford into her dressing room. There she forced a potentially lethal mixture of whiskey and castor oil down his throat. He became very ill, and said he felt as though he were going to die. Hepburn’s lifelong belief that she nearly killed him seems to have reflected her own guilt at having failed to rescue him from his demons. Had she, with the best will in the world, driven him to a new pitch of self-destructiveness?

Ford was desperate to get away when he Finished The Plough and the Stars. This time there was no suggestion that Hepburn accompany him. Ostensibly the reason was that she owed RKO another film after A Woman Rebels; shooting was set to begin in September. When he sailed the Araner to Hawaii, no doubt he sincerely hoped to reach some decision on what to do about his marriage. Despite the black moods to which he was prone, Hepburn believed that hope was a defining characteristic of Ford’s personality. And there is every evidence that he kept hoping to find a way for them to be together.

Hepburn had serious problems of her own at the studio. Although RKO regarded her as one of its most valuable properties, her career had begun a distinct downward slide. Hepburn provoked powerful responses. In films such as Morning Glory, Little Women, and Alice Adams, she had a strong appeal, but when audiences responded negatively, as they did to Spitfire, The Little Minister, and Break of Hearts, they did so with passion. The studio bosses pondered what to do about the “Hepburn stigma.”

Hepburn’s career crisis had not been helped by her strained relations with Leland Hayward. After learning of the love affair with Ford, Hayward did nothing to push Hepburn for the Edna Ferber play Stage Door. Margaret Sullavan took the stage role Hayward had promised Hepburn. On the rebound, he began an affair with her. When Sullavan became pregnant, Hayward proposed marriage.

Hepburn, even at the height of their relationship, had shown no sustained inclination to marry Hayward. This contrasted markedly with her attitude toward John Ford. She was still waiting for Ford to make up his mind to leave Mary when news of Hayward’s November 1936 wedding plunged her into a fit of agitation. George Cukor said, “Kate, what’s wrong with you? You could have married him if you had wanted to. You didn’t.”

It was true. Still, Leland’s marriage highlighted the uncertainty of her own situation. Since only a few close friends knew about Hepburn’s love affair with John Ford, most people assumed Leland Hayward had dumped her. Hepburn, for her part, was too protective of Ford to suggest otherwise.

In Boston on tour with Jane Eyre in January 1937, Hepburn, out of loneliness, accepted a dinner invitation from Howard Hughes, 31 years old but already a millionaire film producer and daredevil aviator. Hepburn had known Hughes was after her since he landed his airplane on a field near the Sylvia Scarlett location. Cary Grant introduced his friend to Hepburn. But she had encouraged the Casanova neither then nor when he landed on the golf course of the Bel-Air Country Club, where she was playing. Hughes emerged with his golf bag and insisted on finishing the nine with her.

His persistence paid off in Boston, where Jane Eyre played for two weeks. Hepburn dined with Hughes several nights in a row. Tall, stooped, and rawboned, Hughes had dark hair, pale skin, and gleaming white teeth. Hepburn, then 29, joked that he looked rather like John the Baptist. He was as taciturn as Hepburn was talkative. She attributed his shyness to the fact that he was partially deaf. Only when Hughes talked of airplanes did his eyes bum and his language verge on the sensual. He was weeks away from an attempt to break his own transcontinental air record. He called his sleek silver-and-blue racer the Winged Bullet. A low-winged single-seater with an open cockpit, it was reputed to be the world’s fastest airplane.

In Hollywood, Ford was directing Wee Willie Winkie with Shirley Temple at Fox. Ford knew nothing about Hepburn’s dinners with Hughes, and she could not have been certain how he would respond if he did. On January 22, however, the Los Angeles papers were full of stories about Hughes’s plans to marry Hepburn. Knowing how easily wounded Ford was, Hepburn had to have realized that newspaper accounts of her romance with Hughes would provoke a powerful response. Whether Ford would show his feelings was another matter. While touring the play, she wrote many drafts of a letter to him. Finally, on March 1, she found a way to say what was on her mind. Approaching 30, Hepburn was trying to make sense of what the next 30 years of her life would be like. She told Ford of her determination not to become a mess. She told him she would be back in Hollywood in May.

Hepburn spent the rest of the tour in a state of euphoria. Any minute they were going to be together; it was only a question of when. As her tour drew to a close, it seemed as though she had saved Ford from a lifetime of unhappiness. He was finally going to leave Mary. At the last minute, however, he disappointed her with a letter full of the old vacillation.

When Jane Eyre closed in Baltimore, Hepburn wrote Ford to say that she had had enough of his maybes and somedays. She needed clarity—either a yes or a no—and hoped she could still get that from him when she returned to Los Angeles. For now, she was headed to Florida. Howard Hughes had invited her to sail to Nassau and Jamaica on his yacht, the Southern Cross.

When Hepburn sailed to Nassau with Hughes, she wondered whether pride would prevent Ford from seeing her again. But when she returned to Los Angeles in May 1937, Ford had decided nothing. Hepburn responded to Ford’s paralysis by moving in with Hughes. The Hughes house on Muirfield Road in Hancock Park was filled with torn red velvet sofas and smoky-brown paintings in decrepit gilded frames. Hughes and Hepburn needed only to leap over a fence to play golf at the adjoining Wilshire Country Club.

Hepburn loved the theatricality of life with Hughes: the money, the power, the yachts, the airplanes, the crush of reporters and photographers. On July 14, 1938, Hughes set a new round-the-world record of three days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes. The next day there was a ticker-tape parade in Hughes’s honor in New York, and it seemed as though he was the most celebrated man in America. He delivered a speech at city hall, then disappeared with Hepburn to visit her family. On the way to Fenwick, Hughes proposed.

Before Hepburn decided whether to accept his proposal, she wanted Hughes to see the setting she regarded as home. It was important that he love everyone and everything as much as Ford had; one had to see the vast horizon and consider the sense of possibility and openness to experience that it represented to her. Unfortunately for Hughes, he hated Fenwick and clearly could not wait to escape. And the Hepburn family, for its part, found him rude and insulting. In the end, “his nibs,” as Kate called Hughes, returned to the West Coast without her. There was no formal break, but the subject of marriage did not come up again.

Meanwhile, Ford embarked on the richest and most productive period of his career. Over the course of the next three years, during which Hepburn was rarely in California, Ford would turn out his greatest films one after another. After Stagecoach (shot in the fall of 1938 and widely acknowledged as his masterpiece), he would direct Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, and The Grapes of Wrath. Then would come The Long Voyage Home, Tobacco Road, and How Green Was My Valley—this last in 1941.

Ford seemed to react to Hepburn’s prolonged absence from California as a sign that he must finally accept that he had lost his chance at happiness with her.

Many years later, when Katharine Hepburn visited John Ford on his deathbed, he told her he had always loved her, and they talked about his troubled and ambiguous relationship with Spencer Tracy. In the beginning the men had been the best of friends. It was well known in Hollywood that Tracy owed his film career to Ford. At a time when the studios declared Tracy “too ugly,” Ford brought him west, along with Humphrey Bogart, to appear in Up the River. But then, suddenly, Ford put Spencer “ on ice.”

In 1941, Tracy was in the Everglades in Florida filming The Yearling when Hepburn requested him for her new picture. At first it looked as though he would not be able to fit Woman of the Year into his schedule, but The Yearling was eventually canceled, and he was free. Once Hepburn had persuaded George Stevens to direct, all that remained was for her to meet Tracy. There had been much talk about Tracy in the Ford circle, but Hepburn had never actually encountered him. That happened now outside the Thalberg Building at MGM. She was on her way in; Tracy and the producer Joseph Mankiewicz were on their way out to lunch.

To Hepburn, he was the brilliant actor Ford had nurtured, then broken with; to Tracy, she was the only woman Ford had ever really loved.

“Mr. Tracy, I think you’re a little short for me,” said Hepburn.

“Don’t worry,” laughed Mankiewicz. “He’ll cut you down to size.”

Tracy stared disapprovingly at the whipcord trouser suit Hepburn was wearing. That wasn’t his idea of how a woman should dress. “Not me, boy!” Tracy exclaimed to Mankiewicz once the actress was safely out of earshot. “I don’t want to get mixed up in anything like this.”

Tracy prided himself on his liaisons with co-stars, including Loretta Young and Ingrid Bergman. On the one hand, the intensity of Ford’s feelings for Hepburn would have made her seem all the more appealing to Tracy; on the other, her involvement with the father figure made her a kind of forbidden fruit. From the first, Tracy was very edgy with her. In conversation with George Stevens, he pointedly refused to refer to Hepburn by name. Tracy spoke volumes when he called her only “the woman.” On the set, he affected a skeptical attitude, which consisted of a good deal of glowering, particularly at Hepburn. He sucked intently, almost defiantly, on a peppermint.

For all his insecurity, Tracy expected to be kowtowed to. But that, apparently, was not about to happen on Woman of the Year. Hepburn, who had set up the deal and hired everyone, was clearly running the show. “I sure as hell walked into a fine situation,” Tracy groaned to Stevens. “Here I find myself doing a picture with a lady and her director.”

George M. Cohan once said that his friend Tracy could “stare, glare, and finally scare the other actors, without batting an eyelash or making a peep.” That, in essence, was Tracy’s approach as Stevens shot a scene of the two of them in a bar. Hepburn sensed Tracy staring at her dirty fingernails; she accidentally knocked over a glass, presumably ruining the shot. But Stevens kept the camera running. What followed set the tone of their screen relationship. Without a word, Tracy handed her his handkerchief as Dr. Hepburn no doubt would have done with Mrs. Hepburn. When the water started to leak to the floor, Hepburn climbed under the table in an effort to jolt him. But Tracy just kept staring at her, and she could see the beginning of one of his tight-lipped grins.

Before long, the talk at MGM was that Tracy and Hepburn were having an affair, but, as everyone knew, that was hardly unusual for Tracy. Catholic and guilt-ridden, he always crawled back to his wife after a fling.

If Tracy wondered whether, or how, Ford would react to news of the affair with Hepburn, he did not have to wait long to find out. On September 3, 1941, five days after shooting on Woman of the Year began, Ford suddenly left town. Telling Mary that he had to take a short business trip, he traveled cross-country on the Union Pacific Streamliner. By the time he arrived in Washington, D.C., he had exchanged his decrepit Irish-tweed coat and flannel trousers for a military uniform.

With the exception of a few brief visits, Ford would stay away from Hollywood for four years. The period of intense creative activity, from Stagecoach to How Green Was My Valley, that began after Hepburn’s departure for the East in 1938 ended now that she was back for good.

Having proved for all time his worth as a director, now he would show Mary that he could also be the man she wanted him to be. Commander John Ford of the U.S. Naval Reserve swore off drinking and took up residence at the Carlton Hotel in Washington. He reported to Colonel William Donovan in anticipation of activating the Field Photographic unit. Mary Ford did not initially respond as one might have expected to her husband’s military career. After years of begging Ford to abandon Hollywood, she repeatedly telephoned him to complain of loneliness. Her first husband had died that year, and now, with war imminent, she feared for Jack. On December 7, the Fords were dining at the Alexandria, Virginia, home of Admiral and Mrs. William Pickens when news came of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Ford seemed to take the conjunction of events—the death of Mary’s first husband, her arrival in Washington, the U.S. declaration of war—as a sign of what he must do. Not wanting to face death before he had made peace with God, Ford married Mary in a Roman Catholic ceremony at the National Cathedral in Washington.

Ford’s decision to marry in the church redefined Hepburn’s relationship with Tracy. Ford had hovered in the background of the Hughes liaison, almost certainly making it impossible for Hepburn to consider his marriage proposal. Now, however, she was free as she had not been in five years.

As Hepburn’s brother Bob perceived, she was drawn to Tracy precisely because he so desperately needed her. In the early days of his marriage, Louise had nursed him devotedly, but then her attention had been diverted by the demands of raising a deaf, sickly child. When Tracy met Hepburn, he seemed to sense her readiness to focus on him and his problems to the exclusion of all else.

After the critical and box-office success of Woman of the Year, MGM was eager to get Tracy and Hepburn into another film as soon as possible. Also, the studio hoped that Hepburn’s presence might deter the heavy drinking that had begun to interfere with Tracy’s work. No matter what film Tracy was making—good, bad, or indifferent—he would suddenly shoot out of bed one night, convinced it was “a stinker.” He often disappeared for weeks.

The sight of Tracy and Hepburn at close range made people uneasy. On the set of Keeper of the Flame, George Cukor’s film about blind hero worship, they appeared to exist in a world of their own. Hepburn fussed over him incessantly. She combed his hair. She arranged his collar. She wiped his face. She massaged his temples. She closely monitored every fluctuation of his chronic melancholy. She was warm, effusive, and loving. There could be no doubt that she worshiped the man.

When actors and crew gathered around to hear Tracy tell stories, Hepburn sat at the foot of his chair. She pulled her knees to her chest. She looked up at him with glittering eyes. She hung on Tracy’s every word and laughed loudly in all the right places as though she had never heard anything so marvelous. Tracy, for his part, appeared to take her for granted. At times, he barely responded to her powerful presence. She reacted to his behavior with a tight, tense smile that was enough to break one’s heart.

John Ford wouldn’t have changed a single thing about Hepburn; as far as Spencer Tracy was concerned, she could do nothing right. He was particularly critical of her speech. According to Tracy, she talked too loudly, too quickly, and too much. Hepburn struggled to suppress herself and conform to his wishes. She seemed to have found in Tracy—in the words of her brother Bob—“a reasonable facsimile of Dad.” Tracy shared Dr. Hepburn’s bullish strength, but also his inability to praise and his willingness to hurt others. As with her father, Hepburn was sensitive to the pain beneath Tracy’s bluster. Like Dr. Hepburn, Tracy would always have reason to wonder whether he bore responsibility for a son’s fate.

As a Catholic, Tracy believed that Johnny’s deafness was punishment for a father’s sins. He blamed his visits to brothels and the venereal infections he had contracted there. According to the actor Pat O’Brien, Tracy’s closest friend, when Tracy learned that his 10-month-old son had been deaf since birth, he went on “the first big drunk of his life.” As he would many times through the years, Tracy disappeared to the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn. His only luggage was a case of Irish whiskey. He locked himself in a tiny room and lay in the bathtub for days, struggling to forget.

Yet there was part of him that wanted to remember his loathsomeness. Every woman with whom he betrayed his wife seemed to intensify his guilt. He put the good, gallant Louise on a pedestal; he never tired of pointing out her selfless devotion to Johnny and their younger child, Susie; he treated her as a martyr.

When he returned to his wife after a serious romance with Loretta Young, it must have been clear to everyone in Hollywood but Kate Hepburn that Tracy would never divorce. From the moment Hepburn came into his life, he cast her in the role of the mistress. He lived at the Beverly Hills Hotel, she in John Gilbert’s old house on Tower Drive. He visited in the evening and left when he was finished. The arrangement seemed to turn him on.

Guests at the Beverly Hills Hotel were occasionally treated to a peculiar spectacle. Late at night, one might see Hepburn curled up asleep outside Tracy’s door. Hotel employees knew that meant the actor was on a bender. He locked himself in with a case of Irish whiskey, stripped naked, and drank himself blind. He would permit no one to enter, not even Hepburn.

Still, she lay in the corridor all night in case he needed her. In 1921, she had failed to sense the danger when her brother, having complained of “the horrors,” locked himself in a room at Aunty Towle’s. Kate would never make that mistake again.

When it seemed almost too quiet in Tracy’s suite, she sought a kindly member of the staff who would agree to unlock the door. Often Tracy had barricaded himself in. Sometimes he lay unconscious in his filth. She would clean his body and do what she could to soothe him. She constructed her life around him. She drastically reduced her professional commitments in order to make herself available whenever he needed her. She would appear in as few films as possible, preferably with him. When projects were offered that would take her away from Tracy, Hepburn, at 36, would insist the part called for a young woman.

It was especially difficult to curb Tracy’s drinking in the war years. To the playwright Robert Sherwood, Tracy confessed great shame at having failed to join the military. At MGM he was the top actor left; James Stewart, Robert Montgomery, Robert Taylor, and Clark Gable were all in uniform.

During that time, Hepburn became a fixture in his dressing room, yet her single-minded devotion seemed to have no impact. His black moods and heavy drinking continued. Even at this early stage in their relationship, Tracy did not flinch from embarrassing her in front of others.

During the filming of Fred Zinnemann’s The Seventh Cross, Tracy was having a drink in his dressing room with his co-star Hume Cronyn, who later recalled the scene in his autobiography. Hepburn arrived after a day’s work on Dragon Seed, based on the novel by Pearl S. Buck. Tracy, in foul humor, barely took note of her. Cronyn leapt to his feet and introduced himself.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything—please sit down,” said Hepburn.

As she shook hands with Cronyn, she studied Tracy, gauging his mood. “How are you doing, old man?” she asked.

“On my ass.”

“I think I’ll get myself a drink,” said Hepburn.

“Can I get it for you?” asked Cronyn, rising again.

“She told you to sit down,” Tracy barked.

By the time she rejoined them, Tracy appeared to have drifted off into his own thoughts. He sat in ominous silence until Hepburn took out a cigarette. Cronyn started to light it for her.

That innocent gesture threw Tracy into a rage. “Why don’t you two find a bed somewhere and get it over with?” he roared. Cronyn, absolutely motionless, allowed the flame to singe his fingers. “Sit down, for Christ’s sake!” Tracy said to him. “ You keep bouncing around like corn in a popper!”

Hepburn kept a smile plastered across her face. She took Tracy’s treatment without a word of protest. She had become expert at pretending nothing was wrong.

But something was very wrong. Tracy’s years of insomnia were beginning to take their toll. He slept, at most, two or three hours at a time. Exhausted by day, he drank coffee and swallowed quantities of amphetamines. He was constantly on edge, ready to snap.

After Adam’s Rib, the best Tracy-and-Hepburn film since Woman of the Year, Hepburn decided to seek new projects away from Tracy. She explored Shakespeare with the actress and coach Constance Collier, and the challenge seemed to renew her. She opened in New York as Rosalind in As You Like It on January 26, 1950, and for years to come she would divide her time between movies and theater, between Tracy and loneliness.

In 1950, George Cukor was hatching a plan to build three income-producing cottages in the lower garden of his property, just above Sunset Boulevard. Hepburn seized the opportunity to propose that Tracy take up residence in one of them. Her proposal had numerous advantages, not least of which was placing Tracy under Cukor’s watchful eye. Tracy often went off the wagon, and when he did, Cukor would be nearby to look out for him in her absence. Tracy was to occupy the cottage alone. Indeed, the plan seems to have been Hepburn’s way of coping with Tracy’s refusal to live with her. Though Tracy agreed to move to the cottage, he warned that Cukor must respect his privacy; no one was to enter without his permission, not even Hepburn.

That something had changed between Tracy and Hepburn became clear as Hepburn continued to line up projects away from Los Angeles. Devoted to Tracy as she remained, she made clear that she would not be drawn back into the claustrophobic life he preferred.

The As You Like It tour ended in March 1951. That gave Hepburn several months with Tracy between assignments. As though she dreaded pausing even for that brief interlude, Hepburn signed up with independent producer Sam Spiegel to go on location in John Huston’s The African Queen. It would be one of her greatest successes.

In October 1951, Hepburn began preliminary work on a new Cukor comedy with Tracy, based on a screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin; filming was scheduled to begin on December 1. All the while, however, Tracy was painfully aware that Pat and Mike, the story of a woman athlete and a shady sports promoter, was the last film under her MGM contract; from then on, Hepburn would be free.

For four months, Hepburn reverted to the role she had often played with Tracy. Once again she sat at his feet; once again she hung on his every word and worked hard not to seem his equal in a group. Yet everyone knew she would be leaving as soon as she finished Pat and Mike on February 21, 1952. Tracy, complaining of his ulcer, treated her impending departure as a public humiliation. But she had no intention of backing down.

Due in New York for intensive last-minute work on Shaw’s The Millionairess, Hepburn was frantic that Tracy would go on a bender. But she resolved that in the long run her presence in Los Angeles would not stop Tracy from drinking; he was going to have to do that himself. At least Cukor was nearby; the director would send her regular dispatches on the health and mood of “the old man who lives in the gully,” as they called him.

Cukor tried to keep the tone light and jokey. Writing to Hepburn at the Connaught Hotel in London, he might report that the old man had a cold or that his ulcer was acting up. Cukor did not mention, however, that since beginning a new picture, Plymouth Adventure, on March 24, Tracy had plunged into an affair with his 31-year-old co-star, Gene Tierney.

In the four years after Hepburn left Los Angeles upon completing Pat and Mike, she and Tracy spent a total of no more than six months together. Usually he saw her in New York, sometimes in London or elsewhere in Europe. On her rare visits to Los Angeles, Hepburn tended to stay in the main house at Cukor’s; a private entrance allowed her to slip discreetly out to see Tracy whenever she liked.

She ate most meals with Tracy but was forbidden to spend the night. He could not bear to have anyone present when, in red flannel pajamas, he smoked in bed, sipped endless mugs of coffee, and read murder mysteries until dawn.

By 1956, alcohol and drugs had wreaked havoc with Tracy’s career, and MGM had finally canceled his studio contract. Eager to shore up Tracy’s self-esteem, Kate began to work on John Ford to make him cast Tracy in his next picture, The Last Hurrah. Ford fought, but eventually gave in. On February 24, 1958, Spencer Tracy, 57, and John Ford, 64, prepared to work together for the first time in 28 years.

Tracy, his eyes darting right and left, lumbered onto Stage 8 at Columbia Studios at 8:30 A.M. His hair was a silver thatch. His great ham hands were swollen with edema. Now and then he seemed to panic, gasping for air.

Hepburn did not attend the first week of filming. Since December she had been touring with Much Ado About Nothing; the tour ended on March 1. When she finally appeared on March 3, it seemed to her that Tracy and Ford were stalking around each other like prize bulls in a ring. She threw back her head and laughed out loud at the sight of them together again. Hepburn joined the company for tea. At a moment when Ford dreamed of having her back in his life, it could not have been easy for him to sit there with Hepburn and Tracy, but for love of her he did.

Cukor was Tracy’s witness when he wrote a will, leaving everything to Louise. Plagued with respiratory problems, he feared each breath might be his last. His liver, bladder, and kidneys no longer functioned properly. He had an enlarged prostate. He suffered from high blood pressure. He was terrified that years of drink were destroying his memory. His rapidly deteriorating physical condition offered Mrs. Tracy hope that he might soon come home for good.

Anyone who saw Tracy on subsequent film sets needed only to look around to find Hepburn, his nurse. In her 18 years of looking after him, her devotion had not diminished. She usually chose a spot behind a tangle of equipment so that her presence would not “ throw” the old man while he worked. The knitting needles in her freckled hands moved swiftly, methodically. Off-camera, Tracy slouched in a canvas chair beside her. She gave him his pills. She plied him with milk for his ulcer. Again and again she rushed over to the director to coo, “Boy, he’s really something, isn’t he?”

In June 1963, Hepburn moved Tracy to a rented house on Trancas Beach for the summer. If you passed the simple wooden house, you were likely to see Tracy’s black Thunderbird in the carport. When the couple went out, Tracy waited, head lowered, in the passenger seat while Hepburn loaded the car with his oxygen tank and anything else they might need. If she didn’t move quickly enough, he blew the horn impatiently.

That was the scene on July 21 as they prepared to go off on a Sunday picnic. It was a few minutes past noon. Hepburn had just put the picnic basket in the backseat when Tracy went ashen and flailed for breath. Hepburn ran inside to summon the fire department. While she waited for them, she tried to administer oxygen. The rescue unit arrived at 12:31. “ Be calm and just relax,” Hepburn told Tracy. “ Everything is going to be all right.”

A private ambulance took Tracy to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Los Angeles. As attendants wheeled the stretcher to the emergency entrance, Tracy pulled a sheet over his face to hide from the flashing cameras and reporters’ questions.

Shortly before midnight, reporters were still outside the hospital when Louise Tracy emerged. In appearance and manner, the actor’s wife was said to resemble Eleanor Roosevelt. Louise had rushed to St. Vincent’s the moment she heard what happened. Hepburn had already left. Louise paused to tell reporters, “We hope he will be able to come home in two or three days.”

Once Tracy was home—though in his cottage, not in Benedict Canyon with Louise—Hepburn, who moved in to care for him, began to leave the light on in the kitchen. She would close the maid’s room door, get into bed, and turn out the lamp. Many nights she could not fall asleep until she heard Tracy go to the kitchen for tea.

Tracy’s health improved a bit in the early months of 1964. Hepburn got a stationary bicycle for him. She bought a police dog named Lobo to encourage Spencer to take long walks at the reservoir. According to their friend the director Jean Negulesco, when Hepburn invited Tracy’s cronies in for lunch, she always served Spencer first.

He had a hair-trigger temper. When she expressed an opinion, he would cut her off: “For Christ’s sake, come on!”

“Well, I think that—”

“That’s what you think!”

In 1965, Tracy’s health deteriorated. A prostatectomy left him near death. The doctors soon announced that he was out of danger, but he faced another lengthy recuperation. Worse, this time he and Hepburn could hardly deceive themselves that he would be offered new film roles when he was better.

Stanley Kramer surprised them by offering them the lead roles in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner; they would play a couple whose daughter announces plans to marry a black man. Hepburn loved the idea; Tracy was resistant. “I get tired,” he groaned.

“You won’t get tired,” Kramer promised. “I’ll send you home every day at one.” When Tracy hesitated, Kramer said, “Spence, are you going to sit there in your rocker and wait for oblivion?” Tracy agreed to take the part.

The film provided an opportunity to engineer the screen debut of Hepburn’s niece Katharine Houghton, who was cast as Hepburn and Tracy’s daughter.

One problem remained: Tracy was uninsurable. To get the picture made, both Kramer and Hepburn agreed to put their salaries in escrow. Should Tracy drop out, the money would be used to reshoot with another actor. Less than a month before rehearsals were set to begin, Tracy collapsed at home. He did not require hospitalization, but press reports made the executives at Columbia nervous.

When Tracy and Hepburn appeared for the first day of rehearsals on Monday, March 13, 1967, Kramer had no way of knowing whether Tracy would make it through the picture. He had always been the sort of actor who prefers to play a full scene on-camera; he believed the long take allowed him to capture the arc of a character’s emotions. Emphysema kept him from doing that anymore; he had to keep stopping to catch his breath. One long, complex speech posed special difficulties. In his prime, Tracy would have insisted on shooting it in a day, possibly in one take. On Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the speech took six days.

There were other problems. He had great difficulty remembering lines, and he persistently forgot cues. As usual, his fear and frustration erupted in displays of anger at Hepburn.

“What the hell are you doing, kneeling?” he shouted during rehearsal.

“Spencer, I just thought it would be appropriate,” Hepburn replied.

“‘Spencuh!’” he minced, imitating her accent and brittle voice. “Christ, you talk like you’ve got a feather up your ass all the time! Will you go out and come in like a human being?”

To the end, she permitted him to talk to her in a way that she would accept from no one else. “All right,” she said softly and did as commanded.

In May, there was an uncomfortable sense on the set that Tracy had entered the last days of his life. On May 22, as the production began its final week, Tracy took Kramer aside: “You know, I read the script again last night, and if I die on the way home tonight, you can still release the picture with what you’ve got.”

On Wednesday morning he completed his last shot. Back at the cottage, he called everyone he could think of with the news. “I made it! I made it!” he crowed.

After that, the nights were particularly bad. Tracy swallowed sleeping pills and turned out the light, but still he could not rest. In those last three weeks, Hepburn would slip into his room in the night. She would put her quilt and pillow on the floor beside his bed. Sometimes she brought the sofa cushions from the living room. She said, “I’ll just talk and talk and you’ll be so bored you’re bound to drift off.” She kept her distance. She did not climb into bed with him. As she talked the old man to sleep, she caressed Lobo.

At about three A.M. on Saturday, June 10, she was awakened by Tracy’s footsteps. By the time he entered the kitchen, she had put on her slippers. She was about to leave her room when she heard the crash of his cup, followed by a loud thud as he hit the floor. She threw open the door, knelt, and held him in her arms. Spencer Tracy had died of a heart attack; he was 67.

Hepburn summoned her secretary, Phyllis Wilbourn, from the Aviary, Hepburn’s house. Wilbourn helped move her clothes and other personal possessions to the car so that there would be no sign of her when Louise Tracy arrived. On second thought, Hepburn decided to stand her ground. Now that Tracy was dead, she need have no compunction about claiming the cottage as her home. She and Wilbourn moved everything back inside.

Soon the tiny cottage swarmed with people. George Cukor rushed down the narrow flight of steps cut into the hillside. MGM publicity director Howard Strickling came to control the inevitable press onslaught. Tracy’s family appeared. When Hepburn told the undertaker which suit she wanted Tracy buried in, Louise spoke up. “But he’s my husband. I should pick out the—”

“Oh, Louise, what difference does it make?” Hepburn snapped.

The funeral was a family affair; Hepburn did not attend. But at the last minute she decided to see the old man off at the undertaker’s. Then she and Wilbourn discreetly followed the cortege until Immaculate Heart of Mary Church on Santa Monica Boulevard came into view. Hepburn was gone by the time the hearse arrived at the church, but someone was there to take over for her. The lead pallbearer, with wispy white hair and a black patch over his left eye, walked up to the vehicle’s back door. John Ford gripped Spencer Tracy’s coffin and helped guide it into the service.

A few days after the funeral, Hepburn called Louise Tracy. Hepburn had stepped back and allowed Mrs. Tracy to run the show at the funeral. Newspaper photographs showed Louise on Howard Strickling’s arm as though clinging to the studio-manufactured version of the marriage Strickling had spent many years publicizing. After all that, Hepburn seemed to want Louise to acknowledge her, if only just between the two of them. “You know, Louise, you and I can be friends. You knew him at the beginning, I at the end—”

“Well, yes,” said Louise. “But you see, I thought you were only a rumor.”

No doubt the remark stung, because the word “rumor” perfectly suggested the strangeness of Hepburn’s 26-year relationship with Tracy.

Katharine Hepburn was then 60. George Cukor saw the aftermath of Tracy’s death as a period of healing for Hepburn, a time to make up for the difficult years with Tracy. Alone over three subsequent decades, she rose to undisputed eminence as the fiercely independent grande dame of American stage, screen, and television. She won three more Oscars—for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, and *On Golden Pond—*making her the most honored actress in Academy history. Hepburn, who recently announced her retirement, continues to spend much of her time at Fenwick, where the view of wide-open horizon, of sea and sky and billowy clouds, has not changed since her family first moved there.