Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [270]
Her activism dated from a 1908 talk she attended on the struggle to gain voting rights for women, and was further galvanized by the great English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, who came to Hartford the following year and was a guest in the Hepburn home. After Mrs. Pankhurst’s visit, she formed local and statewide organizations to press for the right to vote and lauded the subsequent ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment for raising the legal status of women from “children, idiots, and criminals” to “self-respecting adults.” Her interest in legalized birth control dated from 1921, when she became a familiar figure around the state capital, urging repeal of a restrictive 1869 law, declaring, with typical directness, that a woman “ought to have some say in the number of children she has.” She became a close friend of the pioneering social activist Margaret Sanger, and if she ever feared ostracism for her and her husband’s activities, she never said so, and she encouraged an unconventional spirit in each of her six children.
Kathy, the second eldest, was born in May 1907. She was a well-balanced child, quick-witted and creative, with the intensity of her mother, the good looks of her father, and the boundless energy of both. She grew into a spirited competitor, mastering golf, tennis, and swimming, and learned early on to go after whatever she wanted, which, as she grew into puberty, included men who interested or otherwise attracted her. It became family lore, later recounted in her autobiography, that she pursued the poet H. Phelps Putnam with such fervor that her father took Putnam aside and, likening his daughter to “a young bull about to charge,” threatened to shoot him if he laid hands on her. She posed nude for the camera while still a student at Bryn Mawr, married at twenty-one, and went determinedly her own way at twenty-five, having taken Ludlow Ogden Smith as her husband and then cast him aside when he was no longer of value in her drive to become a star. “Kate,” said George Stevens, “didn’t absolutely have to have a husband as most women do. She could get things done without turning her problem over to a man to succeed with or fail with.”
In love with herself (as she readily admitted), Hepburn took a succession of beaux, graduating to some of the most accomplished and best-known men in America. “I’ve never discovered any evidence whatsoever that she was a lesbian,” said her niece, actress-playwright Katharine Houghton. “She had many more affairs with men than people know about, always rich and/or powerful men that could benefit her career in some way. I do think she really loved Spencer as much as she was capable of loving anyone besides herself. But for her the great aphrodisiac was POWER, not sex, and I believe if she were asked, she would concur.”
Agent Leland Hayward and industrialist Howard Hughes were two of her more serious involvements, but she generally seemed to approach the opposite sex as if roaming the aisles of a fancy toy store, initially delighting in the gyrations of a clever mechanism, then tearing it apart to see how it worked. “Leland and Howard were both sweet and fun,” she said, “but I cared more about me than I cared about them.” Hayward memorably described her on his deathbed as “The best. God, yes.” And Hughes stayed in touch long after he had disappeared from public sight.
Press reports not long after Hepburn’s arrival in Los Angeles had her marrying actor Joel McCrea, and John Ford became a particular favorite in the mid-thirties, when he directed her in Mary of Scotland. Although linked superficially to Garson Kanin at the time she met Tracy, she was living for the summer with sculptor Robert McKnight, whom she had known since the age of fifteen. “Why in the world don’t I marry him?” she wondered. “I know him … I like him … we both like tennis.” She was attracted to strong, decisive men with outsize personalities, ofttimes married, frequently alcoholic. “I always liked bad eggs, always,