Kate Remembered (8 page)

Kate's love and respect for her mother was frayed with frustration as well. While Kit Houghton Hepburn was a genuine feminist pioneer, largely at her husband's instigation, Kate came to develop a filial impatience that her mother didn't blaze trails farther into the frontier. She appreciated the strides Kit had made for herself and other women; but she suggested to me more than once that had her mother stood up to her husband, she might have become a national figure, like Margaret Sanger. But Dr. Hepburn was not about to let her abandon him and their children.

So there was a catch-22. Kate always felt she benefited enormously from the strong family structure provided by the presence of two parents. And yet she always harbored some resentment toward her father for imposing his will, for standing in his wife's way. At an early age, she became determined not to let men tell her what she could or could not do.

Kate's siblings were as important to her as her parents, providing compassion and companionship in the world she had created for herself, one from which most people would be shut out. While her brothers and sisters obviously delighted in her extraordinary success and her exciting presence, she knew they all had paid a certain price.

Each of the Hepburn siblings developed large personalities as well, in reaction to their dynamic parents as much as to Kate. She had become an international celebrity by the time they were teenagers; and so, her two sisters sometimes seemed more like her own children. Marion, she felt, was the most intellectual of the lot, passionate about history, and active in local historical societies; but Kate often remarked that she tended to be “very social”—perhaps in reaction to being ostracized because of her parents' extreme views—a tendency she didn't really understand. Marion, she said, “always wanted to belong.” Peg, who had graduated from Bennington College, proved to be the most opinionated of the clan, strong and articulate. She lived a hard physical life, independent, a divorcee running a cow farm upstate.

The Hepburn boys were equally disparate from one another. Bob, the most passive of the children, found happiness in order. He became a Harvard-educated doctor, and was mild, thoughtful, and highly congenial. Dick, on the other hand, next in line after Kate, was voluble and theatrical, with a booming voice. Kate believed he suffered most from her success. For Dick was highly intelligent and artistic, a Harvard graduate himself, who long yearned for a life in the theater. A fine musician, an amusing raconteur, and a skillful playwright with wicked powers of observation, he could never escape being identified as Katharine Hepburn's brother. He wore his resentment like a badge. Without his ever quite making a name for himself in the world, Kate made him her responsibility, allowing him to become a kind of ward of the castle.

By the time I had played my first game of Parcheesi at Fenwick, Dick's first marriage had dissolved and his four children had grown, leaving him to move into the west wing of Kate's house. In some ways, he was a case of arrested development, a big kid. But he was extremely knowledgeable, well-read, and wise about people. So much so, Kate said, that he ultimately opted not to compete. Kate took full responsibility for his predicament and became his sole support. In the past he had sometimes provoked her to rage; but by the time of my first visit, I realized that he could only irritate her. “What can I do?” Kate would say about him over the years. “He's my brother.” And so, they forged their own version of domestic tranquillity, sharing the house in Fenwick though sometimes going entire weekends without seeing each other as they maintained separate sides of the same kitchen.

All of Kate's siblings had children, and she spoke lovingly of her nieces and nephews. She was always happy to see them, and just as happy, she said, to see them go. Her closest and most complicated relationship was with the actress Katharine Houghton, who called her “Aunt [ont] Kat” and who, between career moves, often lived upstairs on the fourth floor in Turtle Bay.

That night, as rain pelted against the windows at Fenwick, I asked Miss Hepburn if she regretted not having children of her own. “I would have been a terrible mother,” she said point-blank, “because I'm basically a very selfish human being. Not that that has stopped most people from going off and having children.”

She proceeded to illustrate her main point. “Let's say I have a little child,” she explained, “and it's seven o'clock at night and Baby Johnny or Baby Janey suddenly comes down with a one-hundred-and-three-degree fever. And I've got twelve hundred people waiting to see me that night at the St. James Theatre. Now some of those people, I'm thinking, have waited months for their tickets, and some of them have scraped together money they can't really afford and arranged baby-sitters so that they can have their special night that year. And now little Johnny or little Janey is in pain and screaming and yelling. And there's no question what I have to do. I would walk into that baby's room, and take a pillow, and smother that adorable child!”

“I'm terrifying,” Kate said, after a dramatic pause. “But I'm smart enough to know I'm terrifying. And that's why I didn't have children.”

Without provocation, Kate went on to talk about the defining moment of her own childhood, a story that all but determined a life of coolness and compassion. In 1920, at Eastertime, Mrs. Hepburn sent Kate, almost fourteen, and the older brother she adored, Tom, to New York City, for a holiday. They stayed in a charming brick house in Greenwich Village with one of Kit's friends from Bryn Mawr, an attorney named Mary Towle. For several days, they went sight-seeing with “Auntie,” taking in a stage production of
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,
based, of course, on the work by Hartford's foremost citizen, Mark Twain. The selection of that play resonated especially for Tom, then fifteen and a half, who attended the Kingswood School in West Hartford, the campus of which had been one of Twain's former homes.

Tom was growing up to be tall and handsome, but he had been a diffident boy—in many ways not his father's son. He lacked the swagger. As a young boy he developed facial tics and later suffered from St. Vitus's dance, an ailment then attributed to stress. Dr. Hepburn expressed no great concern, noting simply that his father had walked through life with a shaking head. Mrs. Hepburn came to believe that perhaps the pressures of so dominant a father, one who seldom parceled out praise, might have been difficult for Tom. In time, however, Tom outgrew the condition, becoming confident at school—popular, athletic, and a very good student. As many of the neighborhood kids still considered the Hepburns outsiders, a colony unto themselves, Kate felt unusually close to her older brother. “Jimmy” even wore his clothes.

On the Saturday of their spring break in New York, the children went to bed around ten, after Tom had entertained Kate and his godmother, playing banjo for them. The next morning he did not come down from his attic bedroom for breakfast. At nine, Kate went to inquire. When he did not answer her calls, she went into the unfinished studio—only to find him, next to the bed, hanging from some torn sheeting that had been tied to a rafter. Kate ripped down the sheet and felt her brother's skin. It was cold.

The thirteen-year-old was in too much shock to remember precisely what happened next. In her memory, she ran to a doctor across the street, shouting that her brother was dead. A woman at the doctor's house said that if he was dead, he didn't really need a doctor. In time, adults wandered onto the scene; Kate's parents came down to New York. She sailed with them on a ferry to New Jersey, where they had her brother's body cremated. During the crossing she saw, for the first time, her mother cry. She never saw as much from her father.

For days, people grasped at explanations. Kate recalled that there had been a hanging incident in
A Connecticut Yankee
that had intrigued Tom; and Dr. Hepburn recalled that Tom had been fascinated with a story the doctor had told of being able to fake a hanging, by tightening up one's neck. But the more she thought about the theories, the less likely they seemed. The truth was this family had already been plagued with three suicides. And even considering Tom's eventual success at school, Kate suggested, “He was never really charged up quite like the rest of us. I had heard that maybe a girl had rejected him—who knows, maybe a boy. Whatever it was, he simply could not cope.”

Whatever it was, nobody in the family talked about the incident for years. Whether it was accidental or intentional, over lost love or newfound feelings, young Tom Hepburn was dead and not all the deliberating in the world could bring him back. Nor, I was to see, would he ever be completely laid to rest. His ashes were buried in the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, but there were no family visits. Tom would haunt Kate for the rest of her life, and she argued one scenario then another in search of an explanation. While she simply could not understand why he would take his own life, she was willing to accept that he had. “There's just so much about people,” she concluded, “that we can ever really know.”

Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn refused to allow gloom to permeate their lives. Previous generations on both sides of the family had treated disappointments and depression, indeed, mental illness, simply by forcing themselves above it or swiftly succumbing. Moaning and complaining had never played in their house; and now it was simply not tolerated. All the Hepburns were encouraged to move on with their lives with even greater intensity. Over and over, I would see that this incident affected Kate more than she realized—keeping her from ever delving into the past or even dwelling in the present. Like the rest of her family, she listened to the Song of Life—the refrain of which was always, “Get on with it.”

The tragedy hit Kate hard. (She would be loath to say it hit her the hardest, because that would suggest complaining.) A sensitive teenager going through her awkward years—a strong freckle-raced tomboy becoming an unusual-looking young woman—she entered her own private crucible. In a town where the Hepburns had been considered odd, the suicide, veiled in mystery, stigmatized them even further. Kate dealt with her renewed feelings of isolation by role-playing-becoming stronger, prouder, even haughtier. She learned to mask her feelings, to create one persona that would greet the world while she hid another that she would fight to keep private. She would cloak her loneliness and insecurities with a personality that could entrance. She was becoming an actress.

For the second night in a row, Kate and I stayed up past midnight. Before retiring, we put the fire to bed, extinguished the lights, and checked on the kitchen, where Dick often left a gas burner lit or something cooking in the oven. We found that his “lady friend,” Virginia Harrington, had baked a gigantic chocolate layer cake. Kate insisted I take a slice, from which she scraped off a mouthful of icing with her index finger. Walking upstairs, I thought about all the personal stories Kate had imparted in the last few days and the urgency with which she shared them.

It occurred to me that most of the people in the professional stories she had told me were either dead or dying; and while she had scores of good acquaintances and millions of fans, she had few intimate friends outside her family with whom she could share things. I also believed that because of her injured foot, Kate was slowing down for the first time in her life, and all the time and energy that she formerly had to run around was being directed inward, forcing her to remember and to ruminate. “You and I see the world the same way,” she said as we were turning down my bed.

And then she looked me soberly in the eye and said, “You are me.” (Just like that, the way Emily Brontë's Cathy said, “I am Heathcliff.”) I took it as a compliment, thinking she meant we both approached life with optimism . . . or, at least, that we laughed at the same things. With a kiss on my cheek and a “Night, night,” she was gone.

By the next morning we had developed our routine. She had already enjoyed her swim, newspaper, and breakfast before I joined her. A pink grapefruit, prepared by the Lady of the House herself, always sat on my tray in the kitchen, and a discussion of the news awaited upstairs. Then Phyllis would magically appear, with a clipboard and pad, to make notes on our day's agenda and menus. This particular Sunday was drizzly, with heavy storms forecast well into the night. I asked Kate if she had slept all right, in light of the tenderness of our conversation the night before. She said she always slept well, though we would have to stop staying up that late.

Far from embarrassed by our conversation, Kate was eager to complete it. After her brother's death, she said, she had stopped attending the Oxford School, the sister school of Kingswood, and was tutored at home. She succeeded in being admitted to Bryn Mawr College, though during her first year she stuck mostly to herself. She occasionally ate with the other young women; but one day, as she approached a table, she heard one of her schoolmates say, “Self-conscious beauty.” Kate easily accepted the “self-conscious” part but puzzled over the rest. She never returned to the dining room again, eating her meals in town.

Over the next three years, Katie Hepburn gradually came out of her shell, appearing in a succession of plays on campus. She had no reservations about taking the male leads, as she blossomed into a strong, striking-looking woman. Making little effort to find intramural friends, she cultivated a social life for herself off campus. While most of the students cloistered themselves within Bryn Mawr's neo-Gothic walls, Kate made friends with several men on the outside. The young woman who seemed to stride through town living by her own rules had become like catnip. At a dance she met a graduate art student named Bob McKnight and went so far as to pose nude for him. (The figurines on the mantelpiece in New York!) Both were smitten but too consumed with their respective budding artistic aspirations for much more of a relationship.