“The biggest egomaniac” Katharine Hepburn ever worked with
Not all Hollywood actors have had the most plain-sailing careers, even if they have several Oscars and plenty of stardom to show for their work. Katharine Hepburn could attest to this, the poor woman labelled ‘box office poison’ for years, which has got to hurt.
Despite this period of low ratings in the late 1930s, Hepburn was able to come back even stronger, and she soon made people forget all about that period of commercial failure. When you have a career spanning decades, it’s only normal to have some moments of utter failure. Who gets it perfect every time?
Hepburn did, however, make one of the biggest blunders of her career in 1956 when she already had several Oscars to her name. If you think that perhaps makes her decision to star in The Iron Petticoat a little less tragic, then no, there really was no excuse for the film, which saw her work alongside an actor she came to consider “the biggest egomaniac” she’d ever met, and that’s really saying something when Hepburn surely came into contact with some of the most egotistical and self-centred people in the industry. I mean, she even worked with John Wayne.
It was the comedian and actor Bob Hope who ruffled her feathers the most, and yet they were somehow chosen to play love interests in The Iron Petticoat; they’re not very convincing in it. The film was directed by Ralph Thomas and penned by Ben Hecht, but Hope got his dirty little mitts all over it with a producer role on the movie. As a result, he chopped 12 minutes of the film, including scenes predominantly featuring Hepburn, so that he could have a bigger part.
Hecht was not happy about the final cut of the film, and he even wrote a public apology to Hepburn for the movie, which had considerably lessened her screen time.
The actor was similarly unimpressed by the film, and in Andrew Scott Berg’s Kate Remembered, he quoted Hepburn as calling Hope “the biggest egomaniac with whom I have worked in my entire life”. She expressed her dissatisfaction with Hope turning the film “into his cheap vaudeville act with me as his stooge”.
The actor was so enraged by what the film had turned into that she refused to watch the whole thing, while Hecht tried to disown the movie. “I was told that this was not going to be a typical Bob Hope movie, that he wanted to appear in a contemporary comedy. That proved not to be the case,” Hepburn said.
The Iron Petticoat, which saw her play a Soviet captain named Vinka Kovalenko while Hope was Chuck Lockwood, an American captain with a fiancée, was a critical flop. It might’ve made $1,385,000 against its $509,000 budget, yet no one seemed to think it was that good. Sure, there were some comic blunders as the pair fell for each other, but this wasn’t enough to save it.
To be honest, the behind-the-scenes disputes between Hope and Hecht, and Hope and Hepburn, are much more entertaining than the film. It’s good that she never held back on her opinions of others.
