The Golden Age icon Katharine Hepburn hated working with: “She was never on my side”
Across the 96 years she was on this Earth, Katharine Hepburn was the embodiment of Hollywood.
A star of one of the most fascinating and romanticised eras of filmmaking of all time, Hepburn was a record-breaking four-time Oscar winner and helmed some of the most acclaimed films of all time, wherein her legacy has only increased since her death in 2003; however, she was also really, really horrible.
For every story of her excellence on screen, there are about a dozen more of her being a total nightmare. She had an almost non-existent tolerance for other people, jumping down their throats for the slightest inconvenience, where everyone from Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda to John Huston fell foul of her acrid tongue and brutal disposition, making her as feared behind the scenes as she was revered by the public.
One such victim was also Ginger Rogers, a starlet who came up at around the same time as Hepburn, and while the latter earned fame for her acting abilities, the former dazzled with her enthralling dance abilities. They were even up for ‘Best Actress’ at the same Oscars ceremony, with Rogers leaving victorious, making them rivals of the highest order, and thus, never holding back when describing each other.
“She is snippy, you know, which is a shame,” Rogers said of her contemporary to Comet Over Hollywood, “She was never on my side”, after Hepburn infamously passed judgment on her adversary’s well-known partnership with Fred Astaire, spitting, “Astaire gave her class, Rogers gave him sex”.
This must have made things awkward when the pair worked together on 1937’s Stage Door, which cast the pair as two aspiring actors sharing a boarding house as they try to make it big. Certain observers say that their shared animosity drove each woman to give their best performance to date, but that would have been little comfort to them at the time. They might have kept things professional on set, but it’s interesting to note, while Rogers reprised her role for a radio version of the film two years later, Hepburn did not.
The world of Golden Age Hollywood was cutthroat, especially for women: studios had no problem axing performers if they didn’t like something they were saying or doing, and with only a limited pool of places to work, you had to do whatever you could to stay at the top. Hepburn developed her monstrous personality as a survival technique, knowing she had to be barbarous in order to protect the bottom line, which is what brought her into conflict with Rogers and so many others. However, while that doesn’t excuse her being an a-hole, it does explain it.
As nice as it would have been for two of the era’s most emblematic stars to have best friends, Hepburn and Rogers both knew what was at stake and pulled no stops in putting each other down. It might not be in line with modern values, but this stuff is absolutely brilliant to look back on: somebody grab the popcorn!
