Kate's secret Philadelphia story

Few stars shone like Katharine Hepburn. The First Lady of Cinema enjoyed a movie career that spanned seven decades, and she remains the only person to hold four Best Actress Oscars. From screen goddess to grande dame, she remained glamorous and strong minded, carrying with her a charm and dignity wrought in Hollywood’s golden years.

Her life was everything a biographer could dream of. In 1942, she fell in love with co-star Spencer Tracy on the set of Woman of the Year. The unofficial First Couple of Hollywood, they were together for 25 years, until Tracy’s death in 1967.

However, there was another great love story in Hepburn’s life, a story that is only beginning to be told. This is her lifelong relationship with Ludlow Ogden Smith, the "boy next door" she married when she was 21. Most of her biographers have glossed over her marriage as an impulsive mistake that quickly ended. In fact, her relationship with Ludlow was one of the most enduring of her life.

Following her death in June, Ludlow’s family decided to set the record straight about the couple they had known as Luddy and Kate. Although they divorced in the early 1930s, and for many years Katharine denied the marriage had even taken place, they never lost touch, and after Tracy’s death and that of Ludlow’s second wife, they resumed their relationship, remaining close until Ludlow’s death.

Eleanor Smith Morris, Ludlow’s niece and goddaughter, a professor in urban design and environmental planning at the University of Edinburgh, says: "I want to dispel some of the myths that have grown up about Kate and Ludlow. He was a decent, successful, proper Philadephian who remained devoted to Kate all his life. He was, in a way, like Denis Thatcher, the steadfast rock of her life. It was one of the most important relationships she had."

Sitting in a shaft of sunlight in her New Town home, Morris explains that in the 1920s in Philadelphia, Katharine and Ludlow were part of the same social circle of affluent young people, Katharine the daughter of a prominent doctor, Ludlow the son of a leading barrister. Kate had lodged with Ludlow’s aunt, Helen Smith Brinton, in her early years at the Ivy League ladies college Bryn Mawr.

They enjoyed the kind of social life one might read about in an FScott Fitzgerald novel, as the grandeur of the Edwardian age met the comparative freedom of the 20th century. "They look like something straight out of The Great Gatsby," says Morris, lifting a photograph of Ludlow and her father, Lawrence Meredith Clemson Smith, in their twenties, sitting on a pair of matching motorcycles. "My father still has his dancing pumps on.

"Both Ludlow and my father were very good looking, very tall. Luddy had enormous self-confidence, he was a very funny man."

In Hepburn’s autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life, published in 1991, she describes Ludlow as "tall and skinny and fascinating-looking ... He was an odd-looking man - dark hair, dark eyes far apart. He was foreign looking. Pink cheeks. An odd nose, long with a hump in it … He was a fine musician, and could pick up any language in a few days."

In Me, Hepburn also describes, rather offhandedly, how she lost her virginity to Ludlow in a friend’s apartment. "Luddy and I were alone in the apartment and there was a bed and there didn’t seem to be any reason not to … And that was the end of my virtue. He was my beau from then on. But - and that’s the biggest but you’ve ever heard - he was my friend!"

There, says Morris, lies the heart of the relationship between Hepburn and Ludlow, the close companionship of people who understood each other. "It was a comfortable relationship. If you marry the boy next door, there are a lot of things you don’t have to explain. People say there was no passion in it, but it was an enduring relationship, it lasted for 50 years."

Their personalities completed one another perfectly. "She was very hyper-kinetic, always on the move. It all washed over him. Emotionally, they were a perfect match. It was what she needed."

In December 1928, Hepburn quit her job as an understudy on Broadway to marry Ludlow at her family home in Hartford, Connecticut. She wore a dress of crushed white velvet with antique gold embroidery. She was 21. Ludlow was 29 and working as a stockbroker. They honeymooned in Bermuda.

Afterwards, they began to look for a house in Strafford, Pennsylvania. It seems that for a brief time, Hepburn considered becoming what her society expected of her - an upper-class wife and mother. However, this lasted, by her own admission, "about two weeks". Soon, she had her old job back, and the couple were beginning their life together at Ludlow’s apartment in New York - he later bought the townhouse on East 49th Street which she kept most of her life.

"So," she writes, "it was December 1928, I was married. I quit. I went to live in Pennsylvania. I came back to New York and got my job back. Poor Luddy. A proper wife for two weeks. Oh, Luddy! Look out."

Ludlow, she says, was "an angel of understanding". Certainly, when Hepburn decided that the surname Smith was not glamorous enough for a showbusiness career and wanted to be known as Katharine Ludlow, he simply changed his own name to Ludlow Ogden Ludlow, which he kept all his life. His mother, powerful society hostess Gertrude Gouverneur Clemson Smith, was less understanding. "She was furious," says Morris.

In Me, Hepburn makes another important admission: "I guess that I knew that Luddy was in love with me," she writes. "But you see, my hitch was that I was in love with myself. I wanted to be a big star."

In 1931, she finally broke through in a play called The Warrior’s Husband. She was offered a screen test by David Selznick and George Cukor for a film titled - ironically - A Bill of Divorcement. She got the part.

Now she had what she’d dreamed of, a ticket to Hollywood, but there was as yet no stock exchange in Los Angeles and Ludlow could not go with her. She had to make a decision, and there seems to have been little doubt in her mind what she wanted to do. She took the train to LA, filing for a "quickie divorce" from Mexico, and began an affair with her agent, Leland Hayward.

Ludlow did not stand in her way. "He didn’t want the divorce," says Morris, "but he wanted a family and she wouldn’t have children. I think he realised he had to divorce if he wanted children."

Gertrude Gouverneur Clemson Smith was less easily pacified. She demanded that Hepburn write a lengthy letter taking the full blame for the breakdown of the marriage. It is now held, with the rest of the Smith family papers, at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

Nevertheless, Hepburn held no grudge against her former mother-in-law. She seemed to have recognised in her a strong woman like herself whom she loved and respected.

"When my grandmother died," says Morris, "on the day of her funeral, the phone rang during lunch and it was Kate on the phone to talk to Ludlow about my grandmother, because she adored her so much."

In Hollywood, Hepburn’s career took off quickly, with an Oscar in 1933 for Morning Glory. But she kept in touch with Ludlow in New York. In 1939, after she was labelled "box office poison", he provided the financial backing for the stage play, The Philadelphia Story, written for her by Philip Barry. The character of Tracy Lord is based on a real Philadelphia heiress, one of the circle of friends to which she and Ludlow belonged. In Me, she acknowledged his help with gratitude: "It was really his generosity which sent me on my way."

When they formally divorced in 1941, Ludlow remarried and had the family he had dreamed of, a boy and a girl. "His daughter was called Katharine Ramsay, the family knew her as Ramsay, but we have always suspected that his daughter was named after Kate. How his wife put up with that, I don’t know."

In 1942, Hepburn’s love affair with Spencer Tracy began. He was everything Ludlow was not, a rough-diamond son of a truck salesman who battled throughout his life with alcohol addiction. They spent 25 years together and made nine films. In the last five years of his life, Hepburn quit acting to nurse him.

Throughout the time she lived with Tracy, Hepburn denied that she had ever been married. Morris unwittingly discovered the depth of feeling this had produced in her family when one day - aged 13 - she undertook to visit her uncle’s film-star first wife, who was in Philadephia appearing in Peter Pan.

"My friend Barbara and I went to see the show, and afterwards we went to the stage door and asked to see her. She was very sweet, just wonderful, we thought she was divine [in the show] and we told her. It was all very charming and cordial."

Things were much less cordial the next day when, at Sunday lunch, she told her family about her adventure. "My father’s reaction was pure anger. He had a teutonic temper and let me know that I had done the most terrible deed. I was put on probation for six months, not allowed to go anywhere except to church or to school, and the rest of the family were served notice that no-one but no-one was to have anything to do with Katharine Hepburn."

Ludlow seems not to have shared his brother’s anger. Certainly, in the late 1960s when he was a widower and Tracy had died, he and Katharine started to meet again in New York. They were always scrupulously discreet and the press never discovered their relationship. Morris says: "Once there was a fire in the townhouse when Ludlow was staying, and he had to go out of the front door and Kate out of the back to avoid the press."

After her father’s death, Morris’s mother started to see Hepburn again too. She recalls visiting her mother at the family’s summer home at Wolf’s Neck, Maine, one autumn in the early 1980s. "It was October, and there had been a typical storm causing all the electricity to go off and so I arrived at the big stone mansion with only candles burning in the windows. In the library with my mother were Kate and Ludlow, sitting on the sofa holding hands in front of the big roaring fire which Kate would stoke.

"That night I had the little guest room opposite Kate’s and so we had to share the bathroom. There we stood, outside the bathroom door, discussing her films. She loved working with George Cukor and was thrilled finally to have been able to act with Laurence Olivier in the television play, Life Amongst the Ruins. She also had been offered the role of Daisy in Driving Miss Daisy, but turned it down. She said she regretted the decision afterwards, as it was a popular film.

"The next day my mother thought she would give Kate a tour of the estate and the farm. Ludlow begged off as he was already in his eighties and he could no longer take Kate’s hyper-kinetic energy all the time. We drove off, on a dirt road in the middle of the Maine woods, and my mother ran into the farm tractor. The next thing I knew Kate had jumped over the seat into the back with me - even though she was then 75 years old." When Ludlow fell ill with cancer, Katharine visited him every weekend on her way to her weekend home at Fenwick, and again on the way back. She continued to visit him every weekend when he went into hospital. "One day, he called my mother from the hospital," Morris says. "He said, ‘Kate and I are celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary’."

In 1991, when the family turned their Georgian House at Collen Brook into the Smith-Lewis Local History Museum, Hepburn - though frail by then - lent her prestige to the project. Now a display is planned to mark the lives of the remarkable women of Collen Brook: Helen Smith Brinton, the first American woman to study at Oxford, Gertrude Gouverneur Clemson Smith, chairman of the Women’s Suffragettes for the State of Pennsylvania, Eleanor Houston Smith (Morris’ mother), a great conservationist - and another strong woman of the Smith family, Katharine Houghton Hepburn.

Alongside her in the exhibition will stand Ludlow Ogden Smith, her devoted husband, whose support and security helped launch her career and to whom she returned in her later years. Now both are dead, he will be at last acknowledged as the other great love of her life.