Katharine Hepburn’s frosty first meeting with George Cukor: “He was really fat”
In 1932, Katharine Hepburn was a four-year stage veteran who had yet to make her movie debut. However, that changed when she was cast in A Bill of Divorcement, her first motion picture, opposite John Barrymore.
The movie marked Hepburn as a new star on the rise, but it could all have been very different without the help of the director, who fought against RKO Pictures’ studio head, David O Selznick, to cast her in the film.
Naturally, because Hepburn went on to become one of the most acclaimed stars in Hollywood history, racking up Oscar nominations like they were going out of fashion, it sounds insane that any decision-maker wouldn’t want her in their film. Selznick, though, took an immediate dislike to her because he didn’t feel she had sex appeal, and was adamant that audiences wouldn’t take to her for that reason.
Amazingly, Selznick still felt that way seven years later when casting Gone with the Wind, as he turned her down for the part of Scarlett O’Hara. Even worse, he reportedly told the star, “I can’t see Rhett Butler chasing you for 12 years”.
At the time Selznick was casting A Bill of Divorcement, though, Hepburn had a staunch supporter in director George Cukor. He saw something in her that could be moulded into stardom, even though he wasn’t exactly convinced by her audition for RKO. It featured her reading a scene from a play entitled Holiday, which she had understudied for.
“She struck me as being slightly stagey,” Cukor once said of her performance. However, during her scene, she reached down and picked up a drink, and this simple movement leapt out to Cukor. “She did that with such deep feeling and such power that I was very impressed by that,” he said of the most life-changing lifting of a prop in world history, noting, “I thought, ‘This girl has possibilities’.”
Cukor subsequently argued for Hepburn to star in A Bill of Divorcement, but when she showed up for the first day on-set, even he was worried about how she dressed. He quickly spirited her away from Selznick, taking her to his office to show her the costume designs she’d be wearing in the film, and to let her know that her current attire wasn’t up to snuff. Of course, Hepburn was shocked, telling Cukor, “I thought these clothes were pretty fancy. I paid a great deal for them”. When he replied, “Well, they’re terrible. You look ghastly,” it was so caustic that a painful silence fell over the room.
“I think any woman who would wear such an outfit outside a bathroom wouldn’t know what clothes are,” Cukor continued, twisting the proverbial knife even further. “Now, what do you think of that?” Somehow, the 25-year-old Hepburn didn’t hit back by hurling an insult at the director, despite later noting, “He was really fat. About five feet eight inches and over 220 pounds”.
Instead, she took a few moments, reasoned that Cukor seemed a bit older, wiser, and savvier than her, and responded, “You win. Pick out the clothes you want”.
Astonishingly, this frosty moment, which could have ended in disaster, wound up being the making of Hepburn. She and Cukor struck up a working relationship that lasted for 26 years and nine movies, including Little Women, Holiday, and The Philadelphia Story. She believed this bond resulted from how easily she and Cukor sized each other up at that first meeting, because it revealed that they understood each other implicitly.
“He was very energetic, full of laughter and vitality,” Hepburn recalled, “He summed me up very accurately for what I was: a lady, so-called a sort of snob, and totally insecure. I summed him up too. Very bright, sharp as a tack, and a good sense of humour.”
