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and an extra $1,000 “for telephone calls and things.” The entire package—Hepburn, original story, screenplay—was valued at $211,000, and she stuck to her guns, rejecting an initial offer from Sam Katz of $175,000 “for the whole business.” Mike Kanin remembered that he and his partner were astonished: “We would have been lucky to get $10,000 for the script under our own names. As it was she got $100,000 plus agent’s fee of ten percent—for herself. I couldn’t say it was all a big conspiracy against Metro, but we were quite breathless with the speed of it. We had nine days in which to finish the script. We holed up, and with the aid of a lot of Benzedrine managed to do it.” It instantly became the costliest original ever purchased for the screen; it was only after the deal had been set that Hepburn revealed its authors as two novice screenwriters whose earnings had previously amounted to no more than $200 a week.2

With two-thirds of the screenplay drafted, Hepburn took it to George Stevens, who had directed one of her better films at RKO, Alice Adams. “My great buddy George Cukor had to be offered things first,” she said, “but he didn’t know a baseball game from a swimming match, so I thought this picture had to be directed by a very male man, and that’s George Stevens.”

With a deal at Columbia, Stevens thought Hepburn was bringing him something that could be made there.

Kate called on me and gave me this script to read. I said, “Kate, this is the only time in my life that I’ve read a motion picture script that I think is ready to go.” [A script] that was excellent in every way. She said, “Well, why don’t we make it?” I said, “What about the last part?” She said, “Well, the boys are working on it.” And it didn’t seem very difficult to finish it. I said, “That’s a good idea. Bring it over to Columbia and we’ll make it.” She said, “I can’t.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Because I promised it to Louis B. Mayer. I thought you’d leave here and make a deal at Metro.” I said, “Things are so pleasant for me I really shouldn’t do it.” So I don’t know what happened, but I agreed to go to Metro and make the picture. And we hadn’t had the last act written.

According to Lardner, the script was written initially with Clark Gable in mind. (“Because of M-G-M we thought Gable was more likely.”) Hepburn, however, saw an opening when the postponement of The Yearling gave her a shot at Spencer Tracy. She had asked for him when making the deal for Philadelphia Story—Gable and Tracy both—and both, she was told, had turned the picture down. “I knew he was a brilliant actor,” she wrote of Tracy. “And he represented just the sort of American male of that era. That’s why I was anxious to have him do it.” She had first laid eyes on him at the Harris Theatre during a performance of The Last Mile (“a remarkable show”) and had been captivated by him ever since Captains Courageous, a performance she described as “shattering.”

“I don’t think Spencer had any idea who I was. I don’t think he was that much of a movie fan.” Actually, they already had appeared together in other media, so Tracy was certainly well aware of her. In 1933 they shared a two-page pictorial spread (“Screenland’s Double Honor Page”), Tracy posed with Colleen Moore, Hepburn opposite with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. In 1938 Walt Disney put them on screen together in Mother Goose Goes Hollywood, a seven-minute cartoon which had Tracy fishing Freddie Bartholomew from the ocean while Hepburn, all jaw and cheekbones, circled them with an outboard motor, dressed as Bo-Peep and looking for her sheep.

Tracy was on vacation when Joe Mankiewicz put the idea to him. Based on what little he had seen of Hepburn, he didn’t think it would work. She could play screwball, as she had opposite Cary Grant, and she could play earnest parts like Terry Randall in Stage Door, but Woman of the Year—Joe’s title—was the sort of comedy at which Carole Lombard and Rosalind Russell excelled. Hepburn, he had heard, was difficult and wore pants all the time. (He thought she was a lesbian, Hepburn would later note with