by Anne Edwards
Kathy was enrolled in the co-educational Oxford School the next year, 1918, when she was not quite eleven. The school, a gray-shingled house at 232 Oxford Street, was the home of the founder, Miss Mary Martin. By 1918, the small house was crowded with about ninety pupils. The kitchen was used for sewing and cooking classes. Sitting-up exercises were conducted on the porch, the girls wearing skirts to their ankles. Kathy was in awe of Miss Martin, a neat, tightly corseted and full-bosomed woman, with her hair “à la concierge,” but Catherine Watson, the gym teacher, had the greater effect upon her. “Oh she was so very, very pretty,” Katharine Hepburn recalled six decades later, “a soft and gentle face—soft sandy hair—it was long and she did it in a knot and a velvet ribbon she wore about her head. She was medium sized and I literally adored and worshipped her.
“Why—why Cathy Watson—I don’t know—I just remember that I thought about her and watched her and waited for her and brought her presents. Just love it was—first crush.”
“I was never a member of the club,” she later confessed. “I never knew what other girls were talking about.” She made few attempts at Oxford School to become part of the social scheme. For companionship, she depended upon Tom and upon the hours she spent in athletic endeavors with her father. With four younger children and the growing importance in her life of her work, Kit Hepburn devoted less time to her oldest daughter. The girl possessed an independent nature and an inquiring mind, which Dr. Hepburn encouraged. The spanking stopped as soon as Kathy had begun to look like a young woman. Still, Dr. Hepburn treated her like one of the boys and she seemed content with this arrangement.
She bicycled to school: “Niles to Woodland to Asylum to Scarborough then left on Oxford Street.” The next year the school moved to the elegant old Ensworth House on Farmington Avenue, and her bike route changed and she went “straight out Farmington.” She had at last made a few friends, Elsie and Louise Field and Lucy Goodwin, but her relationship with her peers remained unsatisfying and her sense of competition was keen. One Oxford schoolmate, a tall girl, Oisey Taylor, always beat her in the high jump. “I still remember,” she said years later, “yes she beat me—oh my dreams of floating over that bar—but no, she beat me—she just did.” She never could bear losing.
Behind Ensworth House was a big garage where a Mrs. Godfrey taught a class called “aesthetic dancing,” which Kathy hated. She merely existed from one summer to the next to run barefoot along the waterfront at Fenwick, dive off the pier, and dig for clams. A strong swimmer, she would lead Tom junior two to three miles down the channel from the house. One rough day they were saved from being swept out into the ocean by fisherman William Ingham,* whose shed was nearby. From that day, Ingham’s fish shed became Kathy’s hideaway. Ingham taught her not only how to fish and fillet her catch but also how to row a boat. She talked her father into buying her a small craft, swiftly christened Tiger, which was wrecked that same season in a storm. So determined had Kathy been to save the boat, that she had hung on to the board with the boat’s name painted on it as she gasped her way to shore.
Theater and films interested her, and she idolized the cowboy star William S. Hart. In order to go to his movies and purchase fan magazines with his photographs in it, she cut lawns and shoveled snow. At eight years of age, she dramatized Uncle Tom’s Cabin, cast it with neighborhood children and presented it in the tiny theater Dr. Hepburn had had built for her in the backyard of the Laurel Street house. “I wouldn’t play Eva because Eva was too good,” she later recalled. “I played Topsy—and as there was a little girl in the neighborhood who I wanted to get even with—I chose her for Eva—as Topsy played all the mean tricks on her.” Another time she said, “I never was willing to watch any other girl being wonderful.”
At Fenwick with Tom, their friend Robinson Smith (who later became a theater producer), and her two younger brothers, she established a repertory company in the dining room. Fruit boxes, pillows, and miscellaneous furniture were used for props. The group’s prime achievement was their fund-raising presentation of Beauty and the Beast. The plight of the Navaho Indians in New Mexico had long been an object of Mrs. Hepburn’s compassion and she was responsible for bringing Bishop Howden of New Mexico as a guest speaker to a local church in Old Saybrook. The bishop’s description of poverty among the Navahos was so moving that Kathy decided her group should stage a benefit performance. A box-office top of fifty cents was fixed. Kathy played the beast and wore a blue Fauntleroy suit with silver stripes and a donkey’s head. The benefit was a huge success, sixty dollars being collected. To Kathy’s disappointment the Navahos bought themselves a phonograph that had a horn and was the envy of all New Mexico.
Another effort of the Fenwick Repertory Company was Blue Beard, with Kathy as Blue Beard and Robinson Smith dressed in female attire as the leading lady.
Tom junior joined Kathy in all her theatrical adventures. He played the banjo, loved to sing, and wrote some songs of his own. A good athlete, by the time he was fifteen he had won his letter on Kingswood School’s football team. Since he was a senior and an honor student with fine scholastic potential, his father was making plans for him to enter Yale as a medical student that next autumn. But in the spring of 1921, with the need to decide his future a pressing issue, Tom junior was not at all sure he wanted a career in medicine, and, despite the combative, freethinking, crusading tradition of the Hepburn household, Dr. Hepburn was not an easy man to sway from a decision.
On Tuesday, March 29, two days after Easter Sunday, Mrs. Hepburn boarded a train to New York with Tom junior and Kathy. The two older children still had a week left of their Easter school holiday. The three of them were to visit for a few days at the home of Mary Towle, an old Bryn Mawr friend of Kit’s and a successful lawyer. Tom and Kathy (now thirteen) immediately took to the dynamic Miss Towle and loved New York, the theater, the films, the people—so much that they implored Mrs. Hepburn to let them stay on until Sunday morning, although she was returning to Hartford on Thursday. She agreed.
Brother and sister saw Pavlova dance and explored the Village, Fifth Avenue and Central Park together. Friday night, April 1, they attended a movie at the Selwyn Theater, William Fox’s presentation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, billed as a “faithful picturization of [Mark] Twain’s most popular story. All the laughs, satire—contrast—humor—comedy have been heightened,” the advertisements promised.* On Saturday evening, Tom played his banjo for Mary Towle, Kathy and some of “Aunt Mary’s” young friends, who, without malice, teased the young man about his romanticism. He remained somewhat removed the rest of the evening. The small gathering in Mary Towle’s living room broke up at around ten P.M. Kathy and Tom went directly to their rooms, Kathy’s on the first floor, Tom’s on the floor above. The Hepburn brother and sister were scheduled to leave the next morning, Sunday, April 3, on the train for Hartford. Their bags were packed and Tom had purchased two parlor-car seats.
The Towle maid had left for church early on Sunday morning. Kathy and her mother’s friend ate breakfast alone. When the dining-room clock struck half past eight, Mary Towle suggested Kathy go up and fetch Tom or they would have a problem making the ten-twenty train from Grand Central to Hartford. Kathy ran up the stairs calling out, “Tom!” No reply was forthcoming and the door to his room was closed.
“Tom!” Still no reply. She knocked and then pushed the door open. The bed had been slept in, but the room—which was under a pitched part of the roof—appeared to be unoccupied. One curtain was hanging askew, the cotton tieback missing from it. Tom’s good trousers were stretched out flat on a table, but she could not immediately see his suitcase. Where could her brother be? She had passed the one bathroom in the house on her way upstairs and its door had been open. An elongated shadow caught her eye. “Tom?” she called again. She entered to explore further and her shoulder brushed against something heavy hanging in the dark angle between the doorway and the corner of the room. She screamed for help even as she turned
to see her brother’s body suspended from a noose made of the curtain tie, which had been placed around a beam in the ceiling. The room was not high and though he had obviously mounted his suitcase, which was on the floor just behind the hanging body, the boy’s knees were drawn up. Yet, his feet almost touched the floor.
Mary Towle arrived in a matter of moments. Frantically, the woman and girl tried to undo the noose. When this was unsuccessful, Mary Towle ran to call help while Kathy, knowing that her brother was dead, nonetheless grabbed the lower part of his cold, stiff, pajama-clad body and lifted the dead boy as high as she could so that the noose would not pull at his neck. According to the police report, Kathy was still holding him clear of the floor when Dr. Condy of nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital arrived fifteen minutes later. Tom, he said, had been dead about five hours.
A telegram was dispatched to the Hepburns in Hartford. That night Mrs. Hepburn returned to New York with her husband. Newspaper reporters waited for a statement on Mary Towle’s front steps. “My son was normal in mind and body,” Dr. Hepburn insisted. “The taking of his own life can be accounted for only from a medical point, that he was suddenly afflicted with adolescent insanity.”
The next day Dr. Hepburn returned to Hartford. Mrs. Hepburn and Kathy stayed behind to take care of the grim details. The body would not be released until a coroner’s report had been filed. Monday morning The New York Times ran the story on page six with the lead: MYSTERY IN SUICIDE OF SURGEON’S SON. The Hartford Courant featured the tragedy on the front page—DR. HEPBURN’S SON, 15, HANGS HIMSELF WHILE VISITING IN NEW YORK—DEAD BODY SWINGING FROM CURTAIN. FOUND BY SISTER IN HOME OF AUNT—DESPONDENCY SUSPECTED. The Hepburns’ united war against the press had begun.
Kathy became obsessed with the need to absolve her brother from the taint of suicide. Perhaps, too, the questions that remained if Tom had taken his own life were too painful for her to probe. Grasping for an explanation that could label his death an accident, she reminded Dr. Hepburn of a story he had once told her brother and herself.
During Dr. Hepburn’s undergraduate days at Randolph-Macon, his school was scheduled to compete on home ground against a northern college’s football team. The northern visitors asked if lynchings still occurred. As a prank, some of Dr. Hepburn’s classmates hired a black man who was famous in the area for being able to constrict the muscles of his neck so that he could not be choked. Tom had been intrigued by this story and had experimented with the tightening of his neck muscles, but he gave it up in a few days.
On Tuesday, after frantic calls back and forth between Kathy, Mrs. Hepburn and Dr. Hepburn, the latter gave the newspapers a new statement: “I am now convinced that the boy was the victim of an accident as the result of a foolish stunt,” he told The New York Times. “I had entirely forgotten that he considered himself an expert in hanging by the neck in such a way as to look as if he were dying, to the entertainment of his brothers and sisters. . . . Friday night he saw a moving picture [a reference to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court] in which I am told there is the picture [scene] of a hanging. That must have recalled his old stunt, and when he arose next morning he decided to rehearse it for a performance when he got home. This accident theory would explain all the findings. Tom’s sister [Kathy] called me up today to recall to my mind his hanging stunt of a year ago and volunteered the same explanation at which I had arrived. In view that I have given the world my opinion that the boy committed suicide, and have thereby cast a blot upon his memory, I feel anxious to repair this damage insofar as I am able.”
That Tom would have awakened somewhere between three and three-thirty in the morning (the approximate time the coroner set for his death) to practice a rope trick seems improbable. But whatever the true reasons behind Tom’s premature death, the tragedy had severe and long-lasting aftereffects on Kathy. A depression set in, her schoolwork suffered and she found the company of her peers even more difficult. Her parents seldom left her alone. “Whenever I needed them they were there,” she later recalled. “They weren’t out, they didn’t have other dates—they were there. They showed a deep interest in anything I did. They were a source of infinite strength. And I needed that strength.” Then she adds that her brother’s death “threw my mother and father and me very close together. Very close.”
At the time of the tragedy, Kathy was still attending the Oxford School. By June, with her grades off and her nerves on edge, the Hepburns decided to return their children, including Kathy, to the tutorial system. The Hepburns were now a self-contained unit with Kathy, the eldest, taking much of the responsibility for her two brothers and two sisters. Mrs. Hepburn was actively working with Margaret Sanger, crusading for liberalization of birth-control legislation, while Dr. Hepburn prospered in his profession. Like her parents, Kathy was scornful of pretense and reactionary attitudes, and like her father, she was a lover of the outdoors. She became an ardent golfer, for golf was Dr. Hepburn’s favorite recreation. Knowing how much Tom’s athletic prowess had meant to him, she worked hard to compensate; at fifteen she entered the Connecticut Women’s Open to take second place and then went on to win a junior ice-skating championship. Nothing pleased her more than to walk beside Dr. Hepburn on a wintry day, battling the elements to keep up with his brisk stride, both father and daughter dressed in casual clothes and wrapped in mufflers, wearing gloves but disdaining all other outside garments. And with her even closer attachment to her father, the pain of Tom’s death began to ease.
Footnotes
* Fenwick was named after Colonel George Fenwick, whose wife, Lady Anne Butler, was the daughter of an English nobleman. In 1639, during the perils of Indian warfare and the privations of the wilderness, Lady Anne left behind the comforts of the English upper class to join her husband in the New World, where he was to act as governor of the town of Saybrook. Nine years later, she died and was buried in the village cemetery beneath a rudely carved red sandstone monument bearing no inscription. This section of Saybrook became known as Fenwick, and a large summer hotel built nearby in 1871 was called Fenwick Hall.
† Kingswood School was founded in 1916. According to drama critic and author Brendan Gill, who attended Kingswood School in the 1920s, “To the middle-class Hartford families who had furnished the money with which to establish the school, Kingswood gave off just the right aristocratic ring.”
* William Ingham’s family owned the riparian rights to the waters near Fenwick. The summer cojony was later to unite to revoke these rights. Ingham lost the case but received a cash settlement. He soon went into the ice business. When Fenwick was being rebuilt after the 1938 hurricane, Katharine Hepburn insisted an old-fashioned ice box be repurchased instead of an electric refrigerator. Not until Ingham retired years later did she allow a modern machine to be brought into the house.
* Appearing live on Broadway at the same time were Marilyn Miller in Sally, and Laurette Taylor in Peg O’ My Heart.
CHAPTER
4
The Hepburns moved from North Laurel Street into an impressive twenty-two-room house at 201 Bloomfield Avenue, West Hartford, in the autumn of 1921. Over the fireplace was hung a plaque engraved with the words “Listen to the song of life.” Built at the turn of the century, the rambling rooms were filled with bright flower chintzes, rich earth tones and fine early American antiques—cherry-wood chests and gleaming brass fireplace screens, candlesticks, and drawer pulls. Chairs were large and sturdy, cushions abounded and books crammed shelves and were filed high on tables and bureau tops. Their neighbors thought the Hepburns were a curious lot, inbred, aloof, obviously rich. People knew that Kit Hepburn was a Bigelow Houghton of the Corning Glass Houghtons. This made the Hepburns’ flamboyant life-style even more incomprehensible. With the appointment of Kit’s cousin, Alanson B. Houghton, as the first ambassador to Germany since before the war, newspaper society columns printed with much frequency Alanson and his wife Adelaide’s social achievements.
“Reddy,” as Dr. Hepburn now called his te
enage daughter, had become a beauty of uncommon looks and somewhat unfemnine characteristics. Her wispy brick-red hair framed a haughty, sharp-boned face. Tall and lanky, with a loping gait and broomstick posture, she also possessed an overgenerous mouth, widely spaced, piercing gray-blue eyes, flaring nostrils, high cheekbones, and a strange voice—nasal, part Bostonian (learned from her mother), part affectation, part Virginia belle (learned from her father). Yet, these curious characteristics came together with startling effect.
By her fifteenth birthday, young men were queuing at the Hepburn door, and the doctor would glare down reprovingly at each from the top of the wide, curving staircase in the house on Bloomfield Avenue. About this time, Kathy brought a Catholic boy home. “Oh, with what chill politeness my father made him welcome,” she later recalled. “Some days I’d go with him to mass—not that I’d go inside his church—I wasn’t that brave. I’d sit on the steps outside and wait for him. Somehow my father would just happen to drive by every time I was sitting on those Catholic steps waiting and he’d smile at me and keep on driving. Pretty soon that boy and I just seemed to drift apart.”
“Your beaux are the dullest I have ever known!” he informed his daughter, avoiding a direct reply after she had accused him backhandedly of possible prejudice toward Catholicism. And to his wife, he added, “If she marries any of them, it’s going to be hell!”
Marriage was the farthest thing from Kathy’s mind. She still felt much the little girl. With no female school friends with whom to associate, she spent the majority of her time either in the company of her younger siblings, tending to their needs and arranging games for them, or with her parents as an active participant in their running political battles (the usually dignified Mrs. Hepburn once hurled a full coffeepot at Dr. Hepburn when he adamantly disagreed with her political opinion).