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• 1 media/Scarlet3.jpg 2018-03-04T05:36:03-08:00 Sylvia Scarlett (George Cukor, 1936) 10 plain 2018-03-09T20:53:51-08:00 With Little Women and an Oscar to her credit, Hepburn had become an accomplished actress that was adored by fans and critics alike.  Exuding charm and vitality, she gave such an inspired performance as Jo that the audience seemed to go along with whatever she did. She received a second Oscar nomination in 1935 for her performance in Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935). Suddenly, Hepburn discovered she could write her own ticket. The ticket she chose was a series of gender-bending films, including George Cukor’s film, Sylvia Scarlett (1935), a quirky British tale of a con artist and his daughter (Hepburn), a cross-dressing teen who chops her locks to accompany her dad on his escape from France. Along the way, they meet a bigger con, Monkley (Cary Grant), a daffy maid Maude who funds their traveling “Pink Pierrot” show, Michael Fane, an artist Sylvia falls in love with, and Lily, a rather self-centered wealthy Russian woman who supports Fane.
   
  The role was perfect for Hepburn. She gets to don men’s pants, dance around the countryside as a teenage boy, drink, and have all the freedoms of a man. Unfortunately, the film has been called one of the queerest films ever made in Hollywood, and the role and film were not perfect for a 1935 audience (Doty 35). Most critics of the era panned it, and it was a complete box office disaster.
  This was a clear example of when contradictions between a star’s image and other intertextual images and norms were so fundamental, the star image completely broke down.  There are a myriad of contradictions but the most irreconcilable are: (1) Sylvia disregards all codes of femininity and never manages or fully resolves them at the end; and (2) Hepburn’s on-screen performance of a goodhearted, vulnerable, but independent young woman could not be reconciled with her public persona of her “real” self as one of an unsociable, unlikable shrew, who scorned her fans and the press.
  
  While Hepburn’s androgynous look is highly sexy, Sylvia disregarded all codes of femininity. Cross-dressing has transformed Hepburn’s persona into a young teenage boy. The romantic lead, Michael Fane, ponders what attracts him to Sylvester and he says “I know what it is that gives me a queer feeling when I look at you!” The audience knows too, and it is bothersome that he is attracted to someone who is a young pretty boy. We have hope for Sylvia when she falls in love with Michael and steals the dress to transform into an attractive young woman. Fane professes relief that Sylvia is a woman—explaining his attraction. But, he also calls her “a freak of nature,” (again a homophobic word), when Sylvia cannot walk ladylike, talk ladylike or even sit ladylike as she did in the beginning of the film. Eventually, when Sylvia must put back on her boys’ clothes, the two fall in love. But, when they escape the train at the end and kiss, you still feel as if you just watched an older man seduce a young teen boy.
  
  
  Even more significantly, Sylvia’s violation of feminine codes essentially declares to the audience that women no longer needed to be attractive to men. Whether this is true because men are attracted to other men (Fane’s attraction to Sylvester), or simply because women no longer want to be the object of the male gaze, neither contradiction is managed or reconciled by Hepburn in the film or off-screen.  To the contrary, as Dyer explains in his Marilyn Monroe analysis, men and women both find pleasure from being seen as desirable by others, and to suggest otherwise is not something most fans would choose to identify with. This contradiction is irreconcilable.
  
  Sylvia Scarlett would eventually lead to Hepburn being labeled box office poison in 1938, and her temporary return to the east coast. The core problem: Hepburn did not understand the intertextual nature of her star image as an aristocratic “independent woman” or its relationship to social norms and acceptable transgressions of feminine boundaries.   She suffered from hubris at a time when her star image already included words like “too masculine,” “too aggressive,” and “too rough” (Britton).  Yet, Hepburn did nothing to make herself more acceptable to the feminine codes of the 1930s or more accessible to the fans so they could embrace her eccentricities.
   
  Off-screen, the public initially embraced her eccentricities, as evidence by a 1933 Movie Classic Magazine article; “Will It Be Trousers for Women,” with Hepburn listed among the half a dozen women who endorsed trousers. Similarly, a 1934 Hollywood magazine article, “Hollywood Goes Hepburn,” applauds “Katy Hepburn” for making trousers fashionable, noting everyone wants to be “strutting Hepburns.”  But, on-screen, anything that began to look more like “transvestitism,” than fun and games (Jo in Little Women) or need (the beginning of Sylvia Scarlett), were too much of a paradox to the norms of the time. And, as Hepburn became more and more hostile with the press, there was little access to the “real” Hepburn in promotional material, press, or critical reviews. Fans therefore had little reason to modify the negative on-screen Sylvia Scarlett image.
   
  As Dyer explained, audiences can choose to accept or reject star images. When an image is ambiguous or clearly in conflict, we construct meaning and identity based upon our own prior experiences and culture, different spectators will find meaning in different ways in their lives.  Typically, when a clash occurs, fans, studios and stars will try to resolve, manipulate, or mask the contradictions (Dyer 64).   However, occasionally, some stars expose or embody an alternative (contradictory) position which cannot be managed and “threatens to fragment the image” altogether (Stars 64).   This film asks a largely heterosexual 1935 audience to accept gender queerness and bisexuality as the same terms for construction of heterosexual couples. No matter what Kate's intention, this contradiction needed to be resolved in the public eye. It was ignored.
   
   
• 1 2018-03-09T14:14:36-08:00 Androgyny and Negotiating Queerness in Sylvia Scarlett 8 Androgynous Kate plain 2018-03-09T20:05:13-08:00 During the 1930s, Kate had a clear preference for films where her character was more masculine or androgynous.  This preference included short hair but should come as no surprise to anyone who knew her as a child. Kate told biographer Charlotte Chandler that, "she had shaved her head and wore her older brother's clothes as a child,"insisting she be called "Jimmy.  
  
  Despite enjoying this masculine construction of identity,  Hepburn also explained that she never felt like a "Jimmy" inside (I Know where I'm Going: Katharine Hepburn: A Personal Biography).  But, in a 1981 interview with Barbara Walters, Hepburn concede that: “I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man.”
   
  Therefore, while she may have embraced sexual or gender ambiguity, it is ambiguous if she intended for heterosexual audiences to blatantly see her as a bisexual or lesbian character in any of these films.  Moreover, my position for purposes of a star's image and this book is that Hepburn's private self (and Hepburn was very private) is irrelevant. It is the construction of the various texts and cultural norms surrounding the star that determine identity. Here, even if she had bisexual relationships herself, they did not become part of the public texts.
  
  
  However, the cultural norms of a 1935 largely white heterosexual audience likely found this text highly troubling. Moreover, although not known by the public in 1935, Cukor was gay, cast a masculine lead actress in the role,  and the film has become a popular text for Feminist and Queer Film theory studies, makes it highly likely that a 1935 audience would have been equally sensitized the code words and images used in this text. 
  
  Putting aside Sylvia's rapid embrace of the freedoms boys have, her inability when she puts on a dress to return to and part of the "silly girl" we saw at the beginning is telling. There is also the first scene with Michael Fane (the Artist), where he is oddly attracted to the beautiful young boy. And, then later, when he discovers Sylvester's true gender, his hysterical laughter and relief that he was not having queer feelings. Yet, given how much Hepburn looks like a young boy, it is difficult to draw the line. An argument can also be made that the jail scene of Sylvester (Sylvia) and Michael is a metaphor for two characters being imprisoned by their sexuality. Monkley is also problematic when he calls Sylvia a “proper little hot water bottle” when he believes she is a boy and wants to snuggle with him.  I also wonder if this film was Kate's attempt to see if her public would accept her no matter what her sexuality was--something that was more of a concern in the 1930s than at the end of the 20th century. But, as Dyer has stated repeatedly in his text, the "real" Kate we will never know.
  
  
  
  Hepburn's reluctance to be a woman is a critical clash with contemporary cultural norms that cannot be easily resolved for most heterosexual men and women. Hepburn failed to address this question in the construction of her star image, and by not proffering alternative images to the public, this failure led to her  box office downfall in 1938.
  
  Some images of Kate with shorn hair include: