Katharine Hepburn

by Anne Edwards

  None of this bothered Dr. Hepburn. He believed that if a man spent all his time on surgery, he would become better at it and survive economically by a good reputation that would lead to referrals. His theory proved correct, and when their second child, a girl, named (on Kit’s insistence) Katharine Houghton Hepburn, was born on November 8, 1907, the Hepburns moved to the slightly more affluent address of 133 Hawthorne Street.*

  The story goes that right after her daughter’s birth, Kit—who had hoped for a red-haired child (young Tom had been a brunet)—asked the nurse to “hold her up to the window” so she could see, and then exclaimed, “Yes, it’s red!” Her father called her “Redtop,” the rest of the family, “Kathy.”

  The house on Hawthorne Street was the former home of Charles Dudley Warner,† publisher of The Hartford Courant, who had collaborated with Mark Twain on The Gilded Age. Mrs. Charles Dudley Warner‡ was a fine pianist and a famous hostess, and, to Kit Hepburn’s delight, the house on Hawthorne Street had once been a meeting place for such authors and artists as Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and such performers as Madame Modjeska, the Polish tragedienne, and her famous compatriot—pianist Ignace Paderewski. Warner had written a critically well-received book of essays, My Summer in a Garden, which included descriptions of the two acres that backed 133 Hawthorne Street, a wild, natural garden, “thick with rambler roses, vines and shrubs.” Shaded by one of the eight giant cedars on the property, small Kathy played by the brook that ran through her parents’ land. Because of the peace and sanctity of that tiny part of nature that then formed her world, the child was always to feel most secure with a garden—indeed—a world of her own.

  In the early 1900s, Hartford was a small city served by the New Haven Railroad, two New York steamers and a number of trolley lines. The city had established itself on the solid foundation of three insurance companies, Aetna, Phoenix and Travelers, and was guided by the conservative tradition of the men who ran these companies as well as those who ran Royal and Underwood (typewriters), Pratt & Whitney (machine parts) and Colt (guns). The wives of these businessmen struggled to bring beauty and culture to Hartford. But it could not escape the label of being an industrial city.

  Just south of the Hepburn house on Hawthorne Street were two factories—Hart & Hegeman and the Arrow Electric Company.* Workers brought their lunches in tin boxes or in paper bags. No such thing as a union existed in those days to ensure cafeterias or lunch rooms to factory employees, so the workers sat out on the sidewalks or on the fences to eat. “Mother was outraged,” Katharine Hepburn later recalled. “One day she walked over and told them they were welcome to use our place—the lawns or the porches or anything they wanted . . . you can imagine what happened. They tore the place up—left all their garbage around—broke things, ruined the lawn. Dad said to her, ‘Well, my dear, now you’ve learned something about the difference between having principles and acting on them.’ ”

  The Hepburns at this time were not considered rich by Hartford’s standards. Still, they owned their home, had servants, and were one of the first families in their new neighborhood (which had fallen from its glittering past into middle-classdom) to possess a car. Since young Dr. Hepburn could not have earned enough as a new doctor in private practice to support his current style of living, family money was correctly suspected to be responsible, though something about “Dr. Tom’s” authoritative manner gave the false impression of a Hepburn, rather than a Houghton, inheritance.

  By nature and tradition, the native New Englander of this period was frequently suspicious of strangers and inclined toward clannishness. Yet, along with these characteristics came a great respect for individual opinion. All of these marks of her New England background were inherent in Kit Hepburn’s personality. But, also, as a young girl in Boston, she had viewed daily the relics of the American Revolution that had changed the trend of history. Since she was a rebel at heart, a believer in change, and a woman dedicated to her own emancipation, the role of wife and mother would soon prove too limiting to her.

  Shortly after Kathy’s birth, she attended a suffrage lecture given by Emmeline Pankhurst.* That Dr. Hepburn, seeing his wife bored and restless, had persuaded her to go, gives a good picture of the respect these two people had for each other and the extent of their common interest. Dr. Hepburn was fond of saying that “perhaps all young women should have their children when they’re twelve or thirteen, and then when they’d be rid of them still be young enough to get an education and live their own lives.”

  Mrs. Hepburn was much impressed with the diminutive, dynamic Mrs. Pankhurst (they were later to become good friends). A few days after her attendance at the suffragist meeting, Mrs. Hepburn came to the decision that there had to be more to life than pushing a baby carriage. That evening she told her husband that she wanted to go into the suffragist movement and asked him if he thought it would be a handicap to him. His reply was in the affirmative, but he added, “If I haven’t enough brains to succeed in spite of it, why, we’ll take the penalty.”

  Kit Hepburn went at her new cause with an astounding dedication and ferocity. She marched and carried banners on which Dr. Hepburn had painted for her: EQUALITY FOR WOMEN. She mounted the lectern after Mrs. Pankhurst had moved on to other arenas and carried on the suffragist battle with flaming oratory and fiery enthusiasm. So shocked were Dr. Hepburn’s associates that they spoke to him only in the line of duty. Editorial criticism in The Hartford Courant was vociferous enough that a friend urged Mrs. Hepburn to sue for libel. Kit Houghton Hepburn was unconcerned. “Silly, isn’t it? They must have needed something to print,” she replied.

  Katharine Hepburn was to remember that if, when she was a child, she and her mother met a neighbor, her mother would say good morning and the neighbor “would look right through us as if nobody was there. My mother didn’t mind. She kept on saying good morning the next time and the next. Sooner or later the neighbor could no longer sustain her rudeness. Faced with my mother’s good manners, she’d feel compelled to return my mother’s greeting.”

  Until she was four years old, Kathy was the baby of the family. Following Mrs. Pankhurst’s example, Mrs. Hepburn took Kathy to suffragist meetings and lectures. Seated either on the platform or in the front row, the child listened with awe to her mother’s booming voice as she rallied audiences to her cause, unaware that Mrs. Hepburn’s public appearances at the time of an advanced pregnancy were scandalizing conservative Hartford. The third Hepburn offspring, Richard Houghton Hepburn (he, and all future Hepburns, were to carry their mother’s maiden name), was born in 1911, in the midst of a new campaign his mother was spearheading for the practice of birth control. Six weeks after Richard’s birth, and accompanied by a nurse who held him for her, she took him to her meetings, excusing herself to nurse him at the appropriate times in a fairly private anteroom.

  The growing business of prostitution and the plight of its female victims now occupied Kit Hepburn’s attention, and she became one of the most outspoken women in the campaign to rid Hartford of this vice.

  When Tom junior was six, he developed St. Vitus’s dance, a form of rheumatic fever in which frequent and involuntary movement is accompanied by high temperatures and bouts of confusion and depression. He suffered a noticeable facial tic about which the neighborhood children taunted him. More and more, Kathy and Tom played together, almost to the exclusion of other children. A tutor was brought in to help Tom with his schoolwork and Kathy studied with him as well. The two elder Hepburn children were conspirators in childhood adventures, but Kathy led the way. Because Dr. Hepburn firmly believed that exercise was the sure road to health, Tom junior attempted valiantly to overcome his illness with a rigorous athletic regime. Any small achievement in this area brought him instant approval from his father. But Kathy remained the natural athlete and by the age of eight was an expert wrestler, tumbler, and trapeze performer.

  Athletic equipment littered the house and yard. Dr. Hepb
urn’s obsession with sports extended to his daughter as well as to her older brother. Every day he led them in calisthenics, taught them wrestling holds (Kathy complained her long hair was a disadvantage) and had them join his male friends in team matches of touch football. Winning was important to Kathy, for it brought the highest praise from her father.

  Mrs. Hepburn, who did not share her husband’s enthusiasm for sports, never joined in these activities. Her objective was to get her children to exercise their minds. Meals became a time for lively debate. The children were expected to discuss the day’s happenings intelligently. Young, eager minds excited Kit Hepburn. She had no patience for slovenly habits or lazy thinking. Not demonstrative outwardly, she bestowed her affection in a manner of pride or approval of what Tom or Kathy did. Being clean won points with her, as did knowing some bit of information that could add to the general interest of a conversation.

  Kathy collected stuffed animals and dolls and privately made up little plays in which they and she were the characters. Dr. Hepburn thought the toys a waste of time and money—a foolish, entertainment. But in this, Kathy refused to submit. Her animals and dolls became her charges, and she protected them fiercely.

  In the next eight years, there were to be three more Houghton Hepburns: Robert (Bob), Marion and Margaret (Peggy). The growing size of her family did not deter Mrs. Hepburn from the militancy of her causes, nor did she recognize anything inconsistent about fighting for birth control while raising a large family. Limited families were obviously meant for the poor or for those women lacking a sense of personal independence. Kathy continued to attend meetings with her mother and to pass out pamphlets at the neighboring factory gates on everything from planned parenthood to venereal disease.

  Freethinkers though they were, both Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn believed naughty or thoughtless children should be spanked. Katharine Hepburn, the woman, was later to recall Kathy, the child, “being cuffed around a good deal” by her father. By nine, she had learned enough about her parents’ reactions not to cry. The spanking stopped, but not Kathy’s outlandish behavior and general bullheadedness. Once when a friend of her mother’s remarked on Kathy’s “frailness,” the child, running at full speed, butted her head into the trunk of a tree to exhibit her strength. Miraculously, she was unhurt.

  Her mother was courageous and dedicated, but her father was an intellectual: “I mean a real intellectual—a thinker—not just a memorizer,” Dr. Hepburn’s “Redtop” later declared. “He was mad about [George] Bernard Shaw—most people in Hartford hadn’t even heard of Shaw—must have been because Dad was such a fan of Shaw’s that he got to read that play by [Eugène] Brieux, Damaged Goods—you know, the one about syphilis that caused such a scandal—and because Dad was a urologist,* the play had a special appeal for him—and he wrote to the Shaws—Mrs. Shaw had translated the play [from the French] and George Bernard Shaw had done the introduction. Dad thought it superb—a great way to get this notion of what to do about it [venereal disease] into the open.”

  Dr. Hepburn requested permission from the Shaws to reprint and distribute the play through the Connecticut Social Hygiene Association, which he had founded. When the Shaws agreed, he drove to Boston to speak with Dr. Charles Eliot, president emeritus of Harvard,† and convinced him to help form the American Social Hygiene Association to fight venereal disease. He brought mounds of statistics and a sheaf of photographs, X rays and personal statements of victims to prove to Dr. Eliot the severity of the problem in America. So eloquent had been his plea, that Dr. Eliot turned down an ambassadorship to Great Britain to become the new association’s president.

  “There are men of action,” Katharine Hepburn said, “and men of thought, and if you ever get a combination of the two—well—that’s the top—you’ve got someone like Dad.”

  Despite Mrs. Hepburn’s work for women’s equality, her rebellious nature, and her dominant personality, the Hepburn household was a classic patriarchy. Dr. Hepburn believed in cold baths, the colder the better, and all the children had to get used to them. Cold baths stimulated the brain and the body and they kept you from getting soft. With a cry of “Here I go!” Kathy, at five, would jump into the filled bathtub of icy water with a splash, laughing and shrieking as she darted up and down in it before she bounced out, streaking nude to the fireplace where her mother would wrap her in a big red Navaho blanket. (“That gave me the impression that the bitterer the medicine, the better it was for you,” Katharine Hepburn later said.)

  Kathy read books that her father recommended, joined in the wrestling and boxing matches he initiated for Tom and the neighbors’ boys, and damn well held her own. Dr. Hepburn’s license plates for his Maxwell were 3405. On snowy days the call would go up from one end of Hawthorne Street to the other, “Here comes 3405!” While the factory workers cheered them on, the neighborhood children (mostly boys) would throw their sled ropes over the Maxwell’s bumper to hook a ride. Dr. Hepburn never slowed the car even when Kathy hooked on for a spin. If a sled was whip-snapped into a ditch or drift, Dr. Hepburn kept right on going.

  One morning when Kathy was about seven, her father opened the door to a policeman. “Sir,” the officer reported, “your little girl is in the top of that tallest cedar. I can see her red hair sticking out above the green.”

  “For heaven’s sake don’t call to her,” Dr. Hepburn scowled. “You might make her fall.” He then shut the door and returned to his reading.

  Footnotes

  *Katharine Martha Houghton’s two younger sisters were Edith Houghton (Mrs. Stevens Mason) and the youngest, a half-sister, Mary Houghton,

  † Alanson Bigelow Houghton (1863–1941), vice-president of Corning Glass in 1903, president from 1910 to 1918. He was a member of the House of Representatives from 1919 to 1922; appointed ambassador to Germany on February 10, 1922: and ambassador to Britain from 1925 to 1928.

  * For years Katharine Hepburn’s birthdate was given as November 8, 1909. No birth certificate survives to support this. However, her brother Thomas was born in 1905, and she was listed as two years his junior in all statistics. Therefore, November 8, 1907, would be correct.

  † Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900) also edited the American Men of Letters series and wrote a life of Washington Irving.

  ‡ Susan Lee Warner (?– 1921) gave frequent local piano recitals and one well-received concert at Carnegie Hall in February, 1911.

  * These companies merged c. 1920–1928 to form Arrow-Hart, an electrical company. This factory still stands close to the location of the Hepburn house.

  * Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst (1858–1928), British woman suffragist, founded her own movement, the Woman’s Social and Political Union, in 1903. Arrested many times for the militant means by which she furthered her cause, she turned her powers of leadership from the suffragist movement to the war effort in 1914. After the war she moved to Canada, returning to England in 1926. She died there two years later while standing for election to Parliament as a Conservative candidate.

  * Dr. Hepburn became a specialist in urological surgery early in his career.

  † Dr. Charles W. Eliot (1834–1924) was also known as an author and wrote numerous books on subjects varying from Educational Reform (1900) to Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect (1903). He was a member of the International Health Board from 1913 to 1917.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The Hepburn children were never asked to leave a room no matter what the topic of conversation. Kathy sat in the parlor and listened to Mrs. Pankhurst, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman—women of radical ideas—in ardent discussions on venereal disease, prostitution and the use of contraceptives, as well as heated political debates and medical specifics of Dr. Hepburn’s cases. Mrs. Hepburn, now president of the Connecticut Women’s Suffrage Association, believed that if you weren’t forthright with your children about sex, they would not confide in you. When Kathy asked her mother about her own birth, Mrs. Hepburn explained it to her “scientifically and speci
fically.”

  “Oh, then I can have a baby without getting married,” Kathy replied. “That’s what I shall do!”

  Nudism and fake modesty were among the topics the Hepburns discussed often and openly. Their oldest daughter listened to these conversations and thought, “Some day nobody is going to wear any clothes.” What bothered her most was her overabundance of freckles that covered her from head to toe. Fearing that because of them no one would want her, she confessed this worry to her father. “I want to tell you something, Kathy, and you must never forget it,” he replied. “Jesus Christ, Alexander the Great and Leonardo da Vinci all had red hair and freckles, and they did all right.”

  On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. The Hepburns were only indirectly affected. They contributed to various committees working for the war effort, bought Liberty Bonds and War Savings Stamps, and Dr. Hepburn gave free time and treatment to returning Hartford war veterans. But Tom was only twelve at the outbreak of war, and it was over long before there would be any chance that he could enlist or be drafted.

  Having long outgrown the house on Hawthorne Street, in 1917, the Hepburn family moved to a larger home at 352 North Laurel Street. Dr. Hepburn had prospered greatly. The Hepburns now had five servants and, in the same year that they moved to Laurel Street, built Fenwick, their rambling wooden summer cottage on the waterfront in Old Saybrook.* At Fenwick, Mrs. Hepburn took a respite from the demands of her various campaigns and her contributions to the war effort and concentrated on her children. The Hepburn house soon became a gathering place for the youth of Old Saybrook. By the end of the first summer at the cottage, Tom junior’s health had improved greatly, and upon his return to West Hartford he was entered into the Kingswood School, which occupied the old Mark Twain House and had been founded by a Mr. Bissell “in the English tradition.”† Dr. Hepburn already spoke of the boy following in his oversized footsteps in medicine.