Iconic actress Katharine Hepburn, who would have been 100 this year, is best known for her work in Hollywood, where she won a record four Best Actress Oscars and nine nominations.
But Hepburn’s first love was the stage, and she continued acting before live audiences for more than 50 years. The screen legend stored a voluminous record of her theater work in the attic of the Turtle Bay townhouse where she lived from 1928 until a few years before her death in 2003.
Now, hundreds of photographs and thousands of pages of journals, scrapbooks, curtain speeches and letters – some offering a rare glimpse into her sometimes diva-like behavior – have been donated to the New York Public Library, which will begin making them available to scholars and fans alike early next year.
“We think of her as someone who was fiercely protective of her privacy,” says Bob Taylor, curator of the library’s Billy Rose Theater division at Lincoln Center, which is announcing the acquisition today.
“But she instructed her executors to make this available to the public, not just to scholars. And she really saved everything.”
The contents of boxes covering 30 linear feet are still being catalogued.
One of the earliest items is a photo of an androgynous-looking Hepburn in a 1926 student production at Bryn Mawr College. One of the latest is the curtain speech she delivered at the final performance of her penultimate Broadway appearance, in “A Matter of Gravity” in 1976.
One of the more entertaining items is a typed journal she kept of a national tour of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” in 1950-51, in which her flinty, sometimes snobbish, off-stage personality comes through.
She complains about the smelly bathroom at a Philadelphia theater and gripes that the manager of her hotel there “took great care not to reply to my telephone calls as to ‘What the hell happened to my room on the twenty-first floor which had been reserved for me?’ ”
A ghostly presence in Hepburn’s papers is her longtime companion, Spencer Tracy, with whom she made nine movies.
Archivists believe that at least some of the unsigned congratulatory telegrams Hepburn saved are from him, and an ornate leather binder containing vocal exercises she used to prepare for her singing debut in “Coco” has the large initials “S.T.” on the cover.