The 1940s: Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year
Within three years of making “Sylvia Scarlett,” Kate became labeled box office poison. Returning to the east coast, she asked her friend, Philip Barry, to write a Broadway play for her based on her own family. Barry wrote “The Philadelphia Story,” a story about a Philadelphia Main Line family’s daughter, Tracy Lord, who is caught in a love triangle between her ex-husband, a reporter, and her fiancé. The problem is that everyone believes she is an “imperious virgin goddess” without a heart (Piermont 174-175). Kate and the play were a smash hit on Broadway, and she bought the film rights to ensure she would retain control over casting herself and the director (George Cukor). MGM backed Hepburn’s come back and Kate came back with an agenda that would last the rest of her cinematic life. She would carefully construct a public persona that negotiated a balance between masculinity and her “independent woman” type that appealed to audiences. She also wanted to establish that, despite her boyish figure, she had a “sexual quality.”
The time to make up your mind about people is never.” With these very poignant, personal words in “The Philadelphia Story” (Cukor 1940), Tracy Lord helps transform Katharine Hepburn’s image of a box office poison into a box office success. Understanding that her image had to change to save her career; Hepburn used Tracy Lord as a vehicle for her transformation. This romantic comedy focused on the very character traits that audiences disliked the most about Hepburn—her arrogance, intolerance, and refusal to conform, and let them see a new side of her. It also incorporated traits fans loved about her: the high society life of the elite, an opening iconic image of Kate in slacks, and a woman’s attempt to find some middle ground between independence and being an overly aggressive, assertive women who does not need or want male approval.
Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942).
"The Philadelphia Story" was one of the biggest box office hits of the year and earned Hepburn her third Oscar, giving Hepburn back the power she needed to negotiate a long-term contract with MGM that included director and screenwriting control. Her next project was “Woman of the Year,” a film that showed a sexier, “independent” woman who is tamed in the end by her husband. The film was released when the nation was on the brink of war and gender roles were radically transforming as women prepared to temporarily move into traditional male roles. The film addresses the inherent tensions created by independent and strong females in the workforce who also desired marital life and children.
Contradictions abound in “Woman of the Year.” The appeal of this film is that these contradictions are not just plot devices but recognize the off-screen problems of women. As expected in a Hepburn film, Tess is cosmopolitan, upper-class political columnist. Sam (Spencer Tracy) is an unsophisticated working class sportswriter. The two use words (columns) to feud, but eventually their animosity turns to love . They marry and move into Tess’s high-end luxury apartment, and a gender reversal occurs for most of the film.
In the opening scene, the first thing Sam sees is Tess’s leg and her smoothing her hose, reinforcing the attractive woman as the object of the male gaze (desirability which brings men and women great pleasure (Heavenly Bodies 39). In fact, “Woman of the Year” is the first film to try and create a sexy, more feminine Katharine Hepburn. And, as the May 1942 American Cinematographer noted, cameraman Joe Ruttenberg does “more to glamorize Katherine Hepburn that we’d have thought possible.” The film then immediately undermines this stereotype by constructing Tess in the role of bread winner and source of power in the home—an unsettling idea for most men in 1942 but likely a tantalizing (at least temporarily) ideal for women at that time. Because Tess’s conduct clashes with a patriarchal social order, she is portrayed negatively, as someone not fit to be mother and certainly not a ‘Woman of the Year.’
Without talking to Sam, Tess brings home a young Greek immigrant boy for publicity purposes, but then abandons him immediately to go to her awards dinner. Furious, Sam is convinced Tess is self-centered and incapable of fulfilling her basic, biological function of being a mother. Unfortunately, the clip is not available but the dialogue is wonderful. "Sam: It’s too bad I’m not covering this dinner of yours tonight, because I’ve got an angle that would really be sensation. The outstanding woman of the year isn’t a woman at all.”
At the end, Tess (and the women in the audience) finish their “play” at independence, and return to the kitchen and home. This film does give us some hope, though, that a new relationship that is a bit more balanced, will be negotiated between the couple. Here is the clip:
