Essay · Arts & Lives
A House That Made Her Possible
Katharine Hepburn did not invent herself. She was manufactured — lovingly, rigorously, sometimes mercilessly — by two of the most unusual parents that Progressive Era New England ever produced, and she spent the rest of her life living out the experiment they designed.
There is a temptation, when writing about Katharine Hepburn, to begin with the cheekbones. They are, after all, one of the great faces of the twentieth century — angular, imperious, worn into distinction the way New England granite is worn by weather, acquiring character precisely through exposure and resistance. But the cheekbones are, in this as in most things, a distraction. The more interesting architecture was interior, and it was built not by the actress herself but by the remarkable household into which she was born, on May 12, 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut: a household run on argument, exercise, cold water, radical politics, and the steady, unironic conviction that women were the equals of men in every particular that mattered.
To understand Katharine Hepburn is to understand first that she did not arrive at her famous self-sufficiency through any special effort of will. She was raised into it, the way one is raised into a religion. The faith, in the Hepburn household, was progressive, secular, and absolute, and it was administered with the confidence of people who had no doubt that they were right.
The Doctor and the Radical
Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn was, by any reasonable measure, an extraordinary man. A Johns Hopkins-trained urologist who would go on to pioneer the clinical treatment of venereal disease in the United States, he was possessed of an intelligence that was equally at home in the operating theatre and the public square. He was physically imposing — tall, athletic, a former football player who believed in the disciplining virtues of cold showers and vigorous outdoor exercise — and he imposed his physicality on his household with a cheerful despotism that his children, by all accounts, adored. He read voraciously. He argued constantly. He believed, with the unquestioning certainty of a man who had spent his career looking unflinchingly at the human body and its miseries, that ignorance was the root of most preventable suffering, and that the antidote to ignorance was frank, unapologetic speech.
This conviction put him, in the first decades of the twentieth century, considerably ahead of polite society. His lectures on syphilis and gonorrhoea to Hartford’s civic organisations were not universally welcomed. His advocacy for sex education in schools was considered, by a substantial portion of respectable Connecticut, dangerously close to obscenity. He did not particularly care. The Hepburn children grew up at a dinner table where venereal disease, contraception, women’s suffrage, and eugenics were subjects as natural as the weather, and the effect of this on the eldest daughter was something close to permanent inoculation against embarrassment.
“My mother and father were extremely radical and free-thinking people who had a tremendous effect on all their children.”
Katharine Hepburn, Me: Stories of My Life, 1991
If the father was a force of nature, the mother was a force of history. Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn — she insisted on the full name, and on the hyphen when she married, decades before such things were fashionable — came from the Houghton family of Corning, New York, manufacturers of glass and, on her mother’s side, of reformers. She had attended Radcliffe College and Bryn Mawr, where she had absorbed the particular combination of intellectual seriousness and social conscience that characterised the best women’s education of the era. By the time her eldest daughter was old enough to understand what a march was, Mrs. Hepburn was already one of the most prominent suffragists in New England, a close ally and frequent companion of Margaret Sanger, and the founder of what would become the Connecticut Birth Control League.
She took her daughter to suffragist rallies. She brought her along when she went to call on state legislators. The girl sat in the back of rooms where women argued, in careful, passionate language, for the right to control their own bodies, and absorbed it all with the attention of someone who understands, even without being told, that she is witnessing something that will matter. Hepburn would later say that her mother was the single most important person in her life. The evidence is everywhere in the life she led.
The Hepburn household at 352 Laurel Avenue in Hartford was not a typical bourgeois interior. The children — there were eventually six, with Katharine second-born — were expected to swim, run, play tennis, climb trees, and engage at dinner in arguments they were required to substantiate with evidence. Dr. Hepburn had no patience for vague assertions. If you made a claim, you had better be able to defend it. His daughter learned this early and applied it for the rest of her life, to the considerable discomfort of studio executives, directors, and co-stars who had not been warned.
Tom
And then there was Tom. Thomas Hepburn Jr., the eldest child, two years his sister’s senior — the brother she worshipped, the companion of her childhood, the loss that reordered everything.
In April 1921, the family was visiting New York, staying at the home of a family friend. Katharine was thirteen. On the morning of April 3rd, she went to Tom’s room to wake him and found him hanging from a rafter. He was fifteen years old. The family maintained, for the rest of their lives, that it was an accident — a parlour trick, an experiment with a technique Tom had seen in a play about the French Revolution, gone catastrophically wrong. Katharine herself repeated this account consistently and with a composure that may itself tell us something. Others, over the years, have been less certain. The historical record does not resolve the question, and it is not the business of this essay to try.
What is certain is the weight of what followed. Hepburn rarely spoke of Tom in public, but when she did, the language was unguarded in a way that little else was. She took on his birthday as her own — she told people, for decades, that she had been born on November 8th, Tom’s birthday, rather than May 12th, her actual one. This is a strange and tender fact: a woman of famously steely independence choosing to dissolve the boundary between herself and the dead boy she had loved best. She carried him forward with the only instrument available to her, which was her own life, lived as fully as she could manage.
“I think of death as a great gift — when you’ve done everything you needed to do.”
Katharine Hepburn, in interview, 1985
Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn responded to Tom’s death in the manner one might have predicted from people of their temperament: they did not collapse, they did not retreat, and they did not permit their children to believe that the appropriate response to catastrophe was withdrawal from life. The father became, if anything, more committed to his work. The mother channelled her grief into activism. The daughter, who had lost her closest companion and her innocence in the same morning, enrolled at Bryn Mawr — her mother’s college — and threw herself into performance, as though the stage were a place where identity could be tried on and discarded and tried on again until something useful was found.
What Bryn Mawr Made
Hepburn at Bryn Mawr was not, by all accounts, an immediately distinguished student. She was athletic, conspicuous, somewhat aloof, and already in possession of a voice and bearing that made rooms rearrange themselves around her. She acted in college productions with a commitment that bordered on the obsessive, and she graduated in 1928 with a degree in philosophy and history and the certainty — unprecedented in its steadiness — that she was going to become an actress. Her parents, characteristically, did not attempt to dissuade her. Mrs. Hepburn had spent years arguing for women’s right to determine their own lives. She was not about to undermine the principle at home.
The early career was turbulent, as early careers in the theatre tend to be — firings, replacements, a reputation for being “difficult” that trailed her from the beginning and that she wore, after a certain point, as a kind of armour. She was married briefly, in 1928, to Ludlow Ogden Smith, a Philadelphia socialite who adored her and whom she left, with characteristic decisiveness, when she concluded that marriage was incompatible with the life she intended to lead. Her father, who had spent years treating the consequences of social hypocrisy, understood. He had raised her to be honest. He should not have been surprised when she was.
The Parents’ Longest Influence
What is most striking, surveying the whole arc of Hepburn’s life and career, is the fidelity with which she lived out the values her parents had instilled. She was, like her father, physically vigorous and constitutionally uninterested in pretence. Like her mother, she was drawn to causes that positioned themselves ahead of the consensus — privacy, independence, the right of women to choose how they lived — and she pursued them without the kind of public grandstanding that might have brought easier approval. She did not march, as her mother had. She did not lecture. She simply lived according to the principles the household on Laurel Avenue had established, and left it to observers to draw conclusions.
The parents themselves lived long. Dr. Thomas Hepburn died in 1962, at the age of eighty-two, having practised medicine and argued for sex education and swum in the Long Island Sound well into his final years. Mrs. Katharine Hepburn, her mother’s precise replica in name and in conviction, outlived him by only a few months. Their daughter was fifty-five at the time of their deaths and had already won two Academy Awards. She had thirty-nine more years ahead of her.
Late in her life, Hepburn returned whenever she could to Fenwick — the family’s summer cottage on the Connecticut shore, a place of salt air and simplicity, of cold-water swims and lobster and the particular ease of people who have no need to perform for one another. The house had been destroyed by the hurricane of 1938 and rebuilt on the same plot, a fact that seemed, to those who knew her, entirely characteristic: you rebuilt. You stayed. You did not make a drama of the storm.
The Inheritance
It is one of the curiosities of Katharine Hepburn’s legacy that she is most often remembered for qualities — independence, directness, a refusal to be diminished — that were not, strictly speaking, her invention. They were her parents’ invention, road-tested over decades of medical practice and political activism and applied, with great thoroughness, to the raising of six children in early twentieth-century Connecticut. The eldest daughter happened to have a face that cameras loved and a voice that no one who heard it ever entirely forgot. But the character behind the face was a collaborative production, built in a household where argument was the currency and weakness was not accommodated and women were expected to have opinions and defend them.
Thomas and Katharine Hepburn Sr. were, in the fullest sense, progressive idealists — people who believed that the world could be changed by applying intelligence and will to its most intractable problems, who put their own lives in evidence of the proposition, and who raised their children to carry the experiment forward. Their daughter did exactly that, for ninety-six years, and was mourned when she died in June 2003 as one of the great Americans of the century. The eulogies were mostly about her independence, her wit, her extraordinary career. They should also have mentioned Hartford, and the dinner table, and the two people who decided, before she was old enough to have any say in the matter, what kind of person she was going to be.
They were, on the evidence, correct.
This essay draws on Katharine Hepburn’s memoir Me: Stories of My Life (1991), William J. Mann’s biography Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn (2006), and A. Scott Berg’s Kate Remembered (2003). Family history and biographical details are drawn from the historical record.
My World of Interiors 