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Talent Graveyard. After the three hits and one flop, she played in half a dozen bad films, and Hollywood rumor said that Kate was through. When RKO asked her to play in a feeble B picture called Mother Carey's Chickens, Kate saw that she was headed for the talent graveyard, and she paid RKO $220,000 to be released from her contract. She begged David Selznick to let her play the lead in Gone With the Wind: "The part was practically written for me. I am Scarlett O'Hara." Selznick shook his head: "I just can't imagine Clark Gable chasing you for ten years."
Broadway was as cold of heart as Hollywood. Kate had failed dismally in The Lake, and, after several weeks of out-of-town tryouts, refused to come to New York with the Theatre Guild's Jane Eyre. She retreated to Hartford to lick her wounds.
Cut to Size. Then Playwright Philip Barry came to see her at Fenwick, the Hepburn summer house on Long Island Sound. Sitting on an old pier, he outlined for her the plot of The Philadelphia Story. Kate liked the sound of it. She agreed to invest in the play as well as act in it, and foresightedly bought up the movie rights. At first glance, it looked like a marriage of failures: five of Kate's last six movies had flopped; so had all three of Barry's last plays. The night they opened in Manhattan, Kate stood trembling in the wings, terrified at the prospect of again facing a New York audience and the roughshod New York critics. She tried to mesmerize herself by repeating over & over: "This is Indianapolis!" The play was a smash Broadway hit, ran for 417 performances, and as a movie broke all records at the Radio City Music Hall.
Kate has a true Yankee respect for money and for the sanctity of contracts. She once collected $10,000 overtime from RKO for a little more than an hour's work, and then lectured the studio's lawyers: "You make other people live up to the conditions you write into contracts. It's time you learned to do so, too." Her neatest business coup was accomplished with Woman of the Year, written by Michael Kanin and Ring Lardner Jr., neither of whom had ever got more than $3,000 for a movie script. Kate removed the first page of the script, which listed the authors' names, and sold the story for them to M-G-M for $100,000, plus an extra $10,000 commission for herself. Part of the deal, of course, was that she was to play the lead.
By her own estimate, Kate has earned more than $3,000,000 in movies and the theater. Most of the money goes straight to Hartford, where her father takes time off from his medical practice to manage her investments.