Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [259]
Ring Lardner and Michael Kanin began working out the story from the sportswriter’s perspective, which Lardner then wrote up in the form of a first-person narrative for submission to Hepburn. “Garson,” said Lardner, “probably sent it to her; he was the one who knew her personally. And she responded very well to it. And then we got up this plan of her taking it herself to Louis B. Mayer and talking to him about it.”
It was a sweet position for Katharine Hepburn, who had come to prominence in the early thirties but whose later pictures weren’t calculated to sustain a brand image. She won the Academy Award for Morning Glory, her third movie, and her version of Little Women was an astounding commercial hit. Yet she played character parts and oddballs, and where it once had seemed that audiences couldn’t get enough of her, by 1938 she was part of Harry Brandt’s infamous ad in the Hollywood Reporter in which the president of the Independent Theatre Owners Association labeled her, along with Mae West, Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich, “box office poison.”
“They made a mistake with me at RKO and renewed my contract,” Hepburn later said. “They shouldn’t have done that. I was washed up. If I had gone on making pictures that year I would have been not only washed up, but enshrouded and buried. So I bought out my contract.”
She left the movies and returned to the stage, where Philip Barry and his Philadelphia Story awaited her. Sensing the quality of Barry’s play and its profound commercial potential, she paid $30,000 for the film rights, then passed those rights to Howard Hughes—with whom she had been linked romantically—with the understanding that any deal he made for them would include the proviso that she play the self-centered Tracy Lord, a part that Barry had written with her in mind. It was, of course, the property that had value at the time, not Hepburn, whose participation would otherwise have been a shaky proposition.
Under Joe Mankiewicz’s careful supervision—he had the entire stage production recorded and then clocked for laughs—The Philadelphia Story was a startling success. Hepburn walked away with an Oscar nomination as well as new currency with the moviegoing public. Said Mankiewicz, “Having had a very good time and a very successful time with Kate on Philadelphia Story, in her typical fashion she brought me a screenplay. An untitled screenplay, unauthored as far as the title page was concerned, because she wouldn’t tell me who wrote it. She said, ‘Read this.’ I read it.” Mankiewicz thought it “absolutely marvelous” but wasn’t empowered to make a deal. “And she hadn’t said what she wanted for it, and I said, ‘Kate, I have nothing to do with that. That’s up to the higher levels of L. B. Mayer, but I would love to do it.’ ”
Since Philadelphia Story had generated more than $3 million in worldwide billings for M-G-M, Mayer was only too happy to consider the new eighty-nine-page property, which carried the gold-plated title The New Philadelphia Story. Mankiewicz had already passed the material to Kenneth MacKenna, Metro’s West Coast story editor, and MacKenna, in turn, had handed it over to Sam Katz, one of the rare members of the executive team who actually read the things given him. Having built enthusiasm all around, Hepburn caught a Stratoliner for the coast and took a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. A meeting was scheduled between her, Mankiewicz, Mayer, and Benny Thau for the next morning. “I was terrified,” she said. “Mr. Mayer is a charming man, and I was afraid he’d talk me into promising something I had no intention of doing. He began by saying a lot of nice things to me—still not knowing who wrote the story or how much I’d ask. And I said a lot of nice things to him—the usual preliminaries to hitting each other over the head.”
Once she had them snared, Hepburn outlined her terms: $40,000 for the story and another $60,000 for the shooting script. She asked $100,000 for herself as star (the same fee she had commanded for Philadelphia Story), $10,000 commission on the deal,