"Did anyone else get annoyed with Cathleen's teasing and toying with Stahr, like a cat with a mouse?" - intofilm
That's the attraction for me - and possibly for Stahr too. She is like a goddess - a beautiful but elusive object of desire with the power to tantalise and frustrate an otherwise very influential and dominant studio boss. She's definitely not like the other women he is used to meeting.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's notes apparently said that the one attractive quality Kathleen had was that she did not depend on Stahr and that he seemed to like that.
In a 1977 interview with Charles Silver and Mary Corliss, Elia Kazan stated that he was pleased with Ingrid Boulting's performance and went on to say:
"I always thought of Kathleen as an apparitional figure, not a real person - someone to whom he could attach his romanticism. She's not a human figure. I never meant her to be like an ordinary girl. She's been whipped, and she's full of mysterious pain. He looks at her, and he sees there that same mysterious pain his wife had, and he puts on her a lot of things that are not true. She's not like what he makes her. So, when her real person comes out, he doesn't know what the hell to do. She says: "I don't want to marry you; I don't want to be with you; I don't want your life." That's the real girl coming out, and he can't understand that. He doesn't deal with it because he's built her up into this romantic image. That's what I was trying to get over. That's not likable or unlikable. It's a person; it's a Fitzgerald person. Make sense or not?"
The above extract is taken from
Elia Kazan: Interviews edited by William Baer.
https://books.google.com/books?id=kgCcuBgCPAsC&lpg=PA207&dq=%22last%20tycoon%22%2B%22kazan%22&pg=PA207#v=onepage&q=%22last%20tycoon%22+%22kazan%22&f=false
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