When Katharine Hepburn’s worst movie earned her a full-page apology
No actor had the career ups and downs of Katharine Hepburn. She still holds the record for winning the most Oscars of any actor, male or female, and yet, for a chunk of her time in Hollywood, she was labelled ‘box office poison’ and condemned as un-hireable. Decades after her death, she is still considered to be one of the greatest actors of all time, but her track record was spotty, to say the least.
The lowest point in her career came in the late 1930s. She had already won an Oscar and been nominated for a second, and for a handful of years, she was one of the most revered stars in Hollywood. But all of that came to a screeching halt with a few box office bombs.
It’s hard to believe now, but Bringing Up Baby, that poster child of screwball comedy greatness, was the death knell. A group of cinema owners put out an ad in The Hollywood Reporter begging producers to stop casting Hepburn and a handful of other actors in their movies, saying that they were ‘poison at the box office.’
As the failure of Bringing Up Baby hints, many of the flops that Hepburn suffered during this period were not actually that bad. In fact, some of them are all-time classics. It would take another two decades for her to reach her lowest professional point as far as quality goes. The Iron Petticoat was released in 1956 and starred comedian Bob Hope as an American captain stationed in London and Katharine Hepburn as a Soviet captain fleeing from gender discrimination. Somehow, they fall in love, though neither the script nor the performances do much to convince us that their attraction makes any sense.
Hope was a producer on the film and decided to cut 12 minutes of the supposed final cut, nearly axing Hepburn’s role and making his character more central. Writer Ben Hecht, who had penned the screenplay, took out a full-page ad in The Hollywood Reporter condemning Hope for ‘blowtorching’ the film and apologising to Hepburn. In an interview two years later, he claimed that her part had been cut by 50% and that he insisted on having his name removed.
In response, Hope humorously ‘apologised’ to Hecht in an open letter for having a hit on his hands (it wasn’t) and quipped that he hoped they would stay in touch via public correspondence. The joke was on him, though. The Iron Petticoat was panned by critics from nearly every angle, and if Hope had known what was good for him, he would have cut 12 minutes of his own scenes instead of Hepburn’s to transfer the bulk of the ire to her.
The reviews were so cutting that they were significantly funnier than the film or Hope’s public attacks on his collaborators. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the comedian’s attempt at humour in the movie to be ‘downright sad’ and dismissed the idea of his character and Hepburn’s character falling in love as ‘virtually revolting.’ Unlike Hope, Hepburn didn’t pretend to like the film, remarking later that it was the very worst of her career.
