“A Phenomenon Called Katharine Hepburn”: Nostalgia and Aging, Female Stardom on Broadway, 1967-1982

The following post was written by the New York Public Library's 2019-2020 Short-Term Fellow Sara Bakerman, who is a PhD Candidate at the University of Southern California.

“A Phenomenon Called Katharine Hepburn” was the phrase that theater critic Walter Kerr used to describe the central focus of the newest Broadway musical, Alan Jay Lerner’s Coco, in December 1969. He didn’t necessarily intend it as a compliment. The show was built around the star persona of its 62-year-old headliner, who, he argued, was performing as herself, despite ostensibly playing the role of Coco Chanel, French fashion mogul. She was on stage “to be Hepburn,” the actress audiences knew from old movies, because “that is the image we have of her and she wants to assure us that it is absolutely real. It is.” (Walter Kerr, “‘Coco’: About Coco – or Kate?” The New York Times, December 28, 1969, D1.)

I borrowed Kerr’s phrase for the title of this project because it serves as a useful premise for the research that I undertook at The New York Public Library last summer. In the American theatre, the return of older stars—primarily women—in ostensibly “comeback” roles is often criticized as a boon to nostalgia, a phenomenon commonly associated with a decline in the artistic and cultural value of the medium. But, as I argue, the proliferation of Broadway tributes, retrospective festivals, and nostalgic musicals in this era temporarily increased the visibility of aging actresses, and luminaries like Hepburn used these moments in the spotlight to reconstruct their public legacies via the legitimate stage. The lavish musical Coco was shaped around her existing persona, and it became a platform for the actress herself to augment her relationship with the public and, importantly, assert her professional agency in the industry.

The Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is the repository for the stage-related portion of the Katharine Hepburn Papers, the last stop on my dissertation research journey. The problem with researching in stars’ archives, at least in my experience, is that everything becomes context—if you’re interested in the production history of a certain performance, the most useful insights are often found in materials relating to prior works, where you can glean a sense of their mindset leading into this musical debut, for example, or locate where ideas and motivations are coming from. This can lead to the temptation of becoming what I like to call an "archival completist"—I tend to try to read everything. This was not in any way possible in two weeks at NYPL, despite my best efforts.

The Library for the Performing Arts portion of the Hepburn papers is less than two-thirds the size of the film and television portion of her collection, which is housed at the Academy of Motion Pictures’s Herrick Library here in Los Angeles, where I live and study at USC. When I first started working on my dissertation, I knew I needed to eventually get to New York for this other half, admittedly because I wanted more context for my analysis of her film career. But what I didn’t realize going in was that her theater materials are incredibly detailed. And instead of contextualizing her Hollywood career, as I once expected it to (she was, as Kerr reminds us, first and foremost a movie star), the collection represents an entirely different relationship between an actress and an industry, and between the actress and her stardom as a phenomenon. 

Hepburn was known primarily as the pants-wearing, publicity-dodging independent woman of 1930s and 1940s studio pictures. But throughout her Hollywood career—which began at RKO in 1932—she kept one foot firmly planted in the theater, partly as a backup option, but also as a strategy to boost her star image to one of aesthetic legitimacy. As the studio system declined in the 1950s, she divided her time between prestige pictures—mostly runaway productions with British directors, like David Lean’s Venetian melodrama Summertime (1955) and Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter (1968)—and theatrical performances, including a Shakespearean touring company in Australia and a New York stage tenure in George Bernard Shaw’s The Millionairess (1951).

Coco was the first musical undertaking for the decidedly non-musical star. It was also, notably, the most expensive Broadway show to date, with a total production cost of just under $1 million, and it was hugely anticipated by the press and theatergoing public alike. Yet the 1969-70 Broadway season remained an object of scorn for Kerr and most of the critics’ circle, specifically because Hollywood stars were viewed as the nail in the coffin for the artistic integrity of the theatre. By casting Hepburn as the star and generating most of the financing through an arrangement with Paramount Pictures, producer Frederick Brisson had sold out to the gross commercialism of popular culture. When the musical launched to a sold-out house just before Christmas, 1969, reviews were mixed at best, but the nostalgia of Hepburn’s stardom was more than enough to draw crowds, propelling the show to a lengthy run and a successful national tour.

One of my favorite archival finds during my time at the NYPL was the souvenir program from the initial run of the musical. In lieu of the list of credits more common to actors’ profiles, Hepburn was dedicated a multi-page spread, featuring, on one side, a grid of photographs representing her career trajectory, from her childhood in Hartford to her Bryn Mawr days through her Hollywood heyday and beyond. Iconic stills from Bringing Up Baby, Woman of the Year, and The African Queen were organized alongside rarely-seen publicity stills from her theatrical breakthrough role in The Warrior’s Husband (1932) and the Theatre Guild’s production of As You Like It (1949). On the other page, Hepburn offered her own notes alongside her credits, reflecting on the ups and downs of a forty-year career. Notably, some of Hepburn’s self-identified highest highs and lowest lows were on the stage. “Roasted by all… Bottom of the heap in two and a half hours,” she said of The Lake (1933), a notorious flop that she escaped only after buying out her contract with her life’s savings. After her infamous labeling as “box-office poison” in 1938, she returned to triumph with the stage production of The Philadelphia Story (1939): “raves,” she wrote, “on tour, raves.” The play, it’s worth noting, became her ticket to a Hollywood comeback when she sold the motion picture rights to MGM in 1940.

In her later years, Hepburn would recall Coco as a similarly transformative moment in her professional life, not merely because it marked a point of comeback for her Broadway career, but primarily because it proved to her that a closer relationship with the public could be the key to her vitality as an aging star. In the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, she was much more open with the press than she had ever been, and her star continued to rise through roles that she carefully selected herself. In 1976, she performed for three months in New York in Enid Bagnold’s surrealist dramedy A Matter of Gravity before leading the touring company at the age of nearly seventy. She also co-starred in The West Side Waltz for another national tour in 1981-82, a show which very nearly killed her. Each of these productions were, as the archives show, indebted to the phenomenon called Katharine Hepburn, who continued to knowingly command the respect of the press, public, and the industry well into her twilight years.