David O. Selznick and George Cukor disagreed about casting Katharine Hepburn. Cukor had seen Hepburn's screen test and was impressed by the 24-year-old, but Selznick did not like the way she looked and was afraid she would not be well received by audiences. Cukor cast her anyway (beginning what would be a lifelong professional and personal relationship between the two)
In an inter-office memorandum to various RKO executives, David O. Selznick wrote that this was "one of the best pictures, and possibly the most adult and intelligent picture, ever made." He then admonished his executives that "even if it is correct that the picture is 'too good for our audiences' (and I, personally, don't think there is such a thing), I do not think we should arrive at this conclusion in advance of its presentation to the public."
When Katharine Hepburn was interviewed at length by Dick Cavett, she told a story.
Most of her life, her favourite off-camera outfit was dungarees and whatever sort of comfortable top seemed appropriate.
When she was working on this first film, the studio PR department kept trying to get her to wear the elegant costumes from the film off the set, instead of her dungarees and sweaters. (This was a fairly common practise, since photos of the actors at nightclubs and fancy restaurants in the gowns and clothing they would wear in the film made good PR when they appeared in newspapers and screen magazines.)
She refused.
They said that they'd hide her dungarees while she was on the set, so that she'd have to wear the fancy duds.
She said that she said "Oh, I REALLY wouldn't do that." But they did.
When Cavett asked "So what did you do?", she said "What else could I do? I walked across the lot to the car waiting for me at the front gate in my underpants."
Her dungarees were returned the next day.
Billie Burke's husband, Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., died during the film's production. Burke resumed filming shortly after his funeral.