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When she divorced Ogden in 1934, he was promptly enrolled as a good friend of Kate and the Hepburn family. This was the fate of many another Hepburn admirer. Some of them found it galling. Because Kate dislikes nightclubs, and lives a fairly cloistered life, only two of her romances have figured in the gossip columns. One was with Producer Leland Hayward (see PRESS), whose reading and tennis Kate tried hard to improve. The other was Howard Hughes, who was richer, taller, and better at golf than she was. But neither lasted.
Prop Deer. Hepburn's early assaults on Broadway were easily repulsed. She was fired from the casts of Death Takes a Holiday and The Animal Kingdom. Critics then, as now, disagreed about her talent. Kate says: "One lot said I was a lovely, graceful young creature. Another lot said I was gawky, hoydenish, gaunt, like something escaped from a tomb." In The Warrior's Husband, she was fired and rehired before the show reached Broadway. The play was a hit and so was Kate. As Antiope, an Amazon queen, Kate came hurtling down a ramp, lugging a prop deer; she wrestled with Actor Colin Keith-Johnston; she made prodigious leaps across stage; she wore a short tunic that showed her long and lovely legs. She caught Hollywood's eye.
RKO gave her a screen test. She was making $79.50 a week in The Warrior's Husband, but she demanded $1,500 a week from Hollywood, and meant it. Nevertheless, when RKO actually met her stiff price, Kate phoned her close friend Laura Harding and said: "They must be insane out there. You'd better come to the Coast with me."
Director George Cukor describes Kate's early attitude toward Hollywood as "sub-collegiate idiotic." She went out of her way to insult everyone in sight, at sight. She told reporters that she couldn't remember whether she was married or not, but that she did have five children—"three of them colored." She wore a baggy sweater and patched blue dungaree pants (now a national fad but in 1932 a scandal), and read her mail sitting on the curb outside the studio.
In Kate's first movie, A Bill of Divorcement, she played John Barrymore's daughter. Barrymore soon took some of the starch out of her by inviting Kate to his dressing room and trying to seduce her. Kate retreated across the room, quavering: "There must be some mistake!" Barrymore grimly agreed and showed her the door. That nonsense over, they became friends. Kate remembers him warmly: "He never criticized me. He just shoved me into what I ought to do before the camera. He taught me all that could be poured into one greenhorn in that short time."
Divorcement was an unexpected success. The nation's moviegoers took to the nasal voice, the angular face, the Bryn Mawr accent. Kate's second film, Christopher Strong, was a flop. But then she won an Oscar for her acting of the stagestruck girl in Morning Glory. As Jo in Little Women, her performance was so moving that Tallulah Bankhead knelt to congratulate her.