Kate Remembered (6 page)

The master apartment was actually two rooms, with a picture-lined little hallway leading past a small bedroom suite into Kate's huge room, practically as large as the living room directly beneath. The south- and east-facing windows allowed morning light to pour in. A fire crackled in the small fireplace. Unlike the other rooms I had seen, this one had red brick walls and was only trimmed in wood. It was a scene of orderly clutter, slithering books and scripts here, smooth stones and marble objects there. A rack held a dozen (mostly straw) hats; and cut flowers and her own paintings (by then, her representational though slightly fanciful style had become recognizable to me) were everywhere. Propped high in her bed on a mound of pillows, Kate—in white pajamas and a thin and faded red robe—sat reading the newspaper. Her hair was combed up and she was glowing; she wore spectacles low on her nose. A rattan chair and ottoman sat by the fire, which she instructed me to push closer to her bed, so that I could use the footrest as a table and face her while I ate. “Did you sleep all right and did you find everything you need?” she asked. I assured her I did and asked how late she had slept. “I'm usually up with the sun,” she said, “or just before.” At that hour, she explained, when the world was hers alone, she went down to the water—summer or winter, snow or shine—and swam.

She looked at my tray and said, “That looks pretty meager. Don't you even take coffee?” No, I said, just water and juice, which I mix with psyllium husk.

“Psyllium husk?” she asked, in a shocked tone. “You take psyllium husk?” As I prepared to discuss this fiber's gastric benefits, she added, “I thought I was the only one who knew about that. You know, Howard turned me on to psyllium husk forty-five years ago. I've taken it every day since.” I was surprised—not that she too was a regular user but that she had dropped so casually the name of Howard Hughes, her most reclusive alleged paramour.

She had worked through her own breakfast of grapefruit and toast and dry cereal—having recently given up shredded wheat, which she would crumble, she told me, for granola with dried fruit—and was pouring the last cup of what had been an entire pot of coffee. “Are you sure you don't drink coffee in the morning? What do you use to turn on the motor?” Actually, I explained, I meditate each morning as well as at the end of each day, and that charged me up. “Christ,” she said, rolling her eyes, “how much is there to think about?!!”

Over the next half hour we discussed the news—she kept current in all sections of the paper, except the business pages—and talked about our options for spending the day. The agenda was so full, I kept forgetting that she was still recovering from a car accident.

I removed the breakfast trays to the kitchen, showered, and we met in the foyer, where Kate was suiting up for a chilly morning. She was wearing some old khaki pants, a black turtleneck, and an overshirt, and was putting on a ratty, torn jacket. “What is that made of?” I asked. “Dog hair?”

She was only partially amused. “You don't approve of my jacket?” she asked. I said it was not a question of approving; I just wondered what it was. It turned out to be a removable lining from an old coat, one that had not belonged to her in the first place, which she somehow had walked off with twenty-five years earlier. From a barrel in the front hall, which was filled with old golf clubs and walking sticks, she grabbed a proper cane and handed me a long, narrow piece of driftwood that she thought became me.

We went out the front drive and headed over the lawn toward the beach to the east of the house. Once we hit this rocky part of the shore, I suggested that perhaps this was not the best place to walk on an ankle that had recently been shattered. But she insisted this was the best way to strengthen it. I asked if that was a medical opinion, and she said no, “a sensible one.” We walked at a good clip, toward a far jetty of huge granite blocks which, she said, had once served as ballast on America-bound ships. We climbed atop this rugged walkway of unevenly cut boulders and began to walk out to the far lighthouse in the Sound—one built in the 1860s, she said, as a companion to the lighthouse of one century earlier several hundred yards up the river. We were about a quarter of the way out when we reached a point that was going to require a good leap from one boulder to the next. Noticing her sizing up the challenge, I said, “Why don't we head back?” No, she insisted. She could not press on, but it was important that I get all the way out to the lighthouse, that I must go to the far side of the tower so that I could get the view looking out to the sea and then looking back to the house. She waited for me, sitting on one of the rocks, while I ran all the way out and took in the spectacular view, a strong wind slapping my face on the run back.

Returning to the house, Kate gave me some of the history of Fenwick. It had once been a great farm but, by the early 1900s, had been subdivided, becoming a private summer enclave principally for Hartford insurance executives. Kate's father, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, who practiced in Hartford, bought a big, Victorian-style house at the end of a cluster of summer homes, and sent his family down there for the season, joining them as often as possible. The houses surrounded what was then a private golf course and tennis courts. Everybody there knew everybody there. It was an ideal place for boating and fishing and swimming and diving, all of which Kate mastered early on. “Paradise!” Kate said, whenever she talked about Fenwick. She told me then how, as a child, she developed not only into a superb all-around athlete but also a tomboy—calling herself “Jimmy.” She pointed out the pier from which she learned to dive—swandives, backflips, halfgainers, you name it.

“I was fearless,” she said, “. . . and lawless.” Time and again, Kate told me over the next twenty years that she and her siblings were raised with “no rules—except the golden one.” The Hepburns lived largely by their own code, which often meant pushing limits and beyond, forcing them to develop their own moral compasses. She told me how she and a friend also used to break into houses, for example, just to create mischief. When damage had been done, her father would generally take care of it, letting Kate's own shame stand as her punishment. Her conscience was enough to inform her that she would have to make any necessary financial adjustments. For major infractions, he believed in spankings. In fact, Kate often spoke of how most “modern parents” had become afraid of their children. “Children need boundaries,” she said, in one of her few psychological observations, “so they can know how far they have to go to get beyond them.”

Freedom fostered creativity. When the Bishop of New Mexico preached in Connecticut one Sunday about the plight of the Navajos and their need for a new Victrola, young Kate and some friends produced a stage version of
Beauty and the Beast.
Kate grabbed the choicest role for herself—the Beast; and the children raised seventy-five dollars for the Native Americans.

Kate wanted to show me the rest of Fenwick on that cool but clear day. Normally, she explained, we would go on bicycle; but her foot was clearly hurting. In the large garage sat a golf cart, which I backed out and which she “backseat drove” as I tooled along some curvy roads through some high grass to the northeast corner of Fenwick, right along the river. We passed a few old houses, which she adored, and a number of large “monstrosities” that were being built in what was fast becoming an all-too-fashionable locale. Kate was not averse to the newcomers—for people pretty much stuck to themselves there, treating her like any other neighbor—nor even the building of new houses. It was the lack of good taste and common sense, building houses beyond the proportions their land dictated. She introduced me to an elderly man coming out to his mailbox, one Charlie Brainard, whom Kate had known from Hartford and Fenwick for close to seventy years. “Charlie and I remember when all this was our playground,” Kate said affectionately.

“We're still pretty lucky to be living here,” he said. “It's still fun.”

“Charlie,” she said with a toss of the head, “we're pretty lucky to be living anywhere.” Knowing a good exit line when she heard one, she rapped her cane on the steering wheel of the golf cart, and we were off again, to see the inner lighthouse—which required our walking across other people's property. Whether the owners were home or not did not matter. Fenwick was still her playground, and she always seemed to draw strength just watching the flow of the Connecticut River. She told me that her family's original house in Fenwick was completely destroyed by the hurricane of 1938, and that she had built the present house—larger and stronger.

Heading back toward the Hepburn house, and then beyond, she reminded me that the river connected Fenwick to Hartford in the north. (I told her I was no stranger to the Connecticut River, as I had spent a great deal of time along its banks even farther north, in Windsor, Vermont, which had been Max Perkins's summer and ancestral home. She seemed a little surprised—not that I knew her river, but that it extended beyond her territory.) “Republican,” she said as we drove around, “all very Republican.” She was speaking of the Hartford insurance families, her neighbors and summer friends.

“We were always left of center,” Kate said of her family, thinking how the Hepburn brood must have appeared to the rest of the upper—middle class in Hartford. “I'm sure they considered us extremely eccentric, a tribe of wild Indians.” And with good reason:

Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn and his wife, Katharine Houghton Hepburn, were unlike any of their peers, and they prided themselves on the differences. While both were active members of their community, they—and their six children—had always stood slightly apart.

Tom Hepburn came from two Virginia families—the Hepburns and the Powells—both of which had suffered economically during the Civil War. His father was a poor Episcopalian minister, his mother a proper lady who believed women did not get a fair deal in life and that they should obtain proper educations. “He was very good-looking,” Kate said of her father, “and he adored women.” He had been a great athlete at Randolph-Macon College and studied medicine at Johns Hopkins.

Katharine “Kit” Hepburn was almost two years his senior, the daughter of Caroline Garlinghouse and Alfred Augustus Houghton (pronounced HO-ten, not HOW-ten). She was, in many ways, the woman Tom's mother might have become, had she been born a generation later. Alfred Houghton grew up in the shadow of his dynamic brother Amory (pronounced AM-ree, with a short “a”), who built the Corning Glass Company. Alfred suffered from depression; and one day, after visiting his brother, without explanation, he put a bullet through his brain—leaving a young wife and three daughters.

Not long after that, Caroline Houghton, Kit's mother, learned that she had stomach cancer and that her days were numbered. She knew her wealthy in-laws would see that her girls would never starve, but she did not want them to be subjected to their very reactionary ways. (“
Very
Republican,” said Kate.) Their only life-insurance policy, Caroline Houghton hammered into her children's heads, would be a college education.

She moved her family to Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where there was a new college, with a wonderful reputation, for Kit and a preparatory school next door for the younger girls. When Caroline Garlinghouse Houghton died at thirty-four, her three children were farmed out to one relative, then another. Although rich Uncle Amory oversaw their finances, Kit stood up to his conservatism and insisted on his paying for her college education—something he considered a worthless enterprise for women. Katharine Houghton graduated from Bryn Mawr College, and her two sisters followed.

One of the sisters, Edith, went on to Johns Hopkins to study medicine, where she met Tom Hepburn. They became friends and fencing partners. Then he met her older sister, who quickly fell for him and found a teaching job in Baltimore, just to be near him. Without much money between them, they soon married, confident of opportunities for a bright young doctor and his college-educated wife. Over several offers from hospitals in New York, they chose the small, prosperous city of Hartford and moved into a house across the street from the Hartford Hospital. They promptly had two children, a boy named for him and a girl—born May 12, 1907—named for her. Kate.

“Venereal disease was being discussed by my parents as long as I can remember,” Kate told me that day. In fact, I later learned, it had been a topic of conversation among Houghtons and Hepburns before that. Edith Houghton never became a doctor (ultimately marrying a classmate, Donald Hooker, instead); but she did travel to Germany to study the hottest medical topic of the day. And she came home sufficiently informed and inflamed to incite several around her. Venereal disease was, of course, directly related to prostitution, which had all sorts of sociopolitical ramifications, including the white-slave trade and teenage pregnancy. Thus, venereal disease was directly linked to issues relating to the oppression of women, a connection that was not lost on either Dr. or Mrs. Hepburn.

Kate would never forget the regard her mother held for
her
mother, how the young Caroline Garlinghouse Houghton had died so young, full of expectations for her girls—envisioning something more than traditional homemaking, pleasing a husband, and raising children. “And there was Mother,” Kate said of those early years of marriage, “thrilled to be Mrs. Hepburn. But she was also a woman with a really good mind and an advanced degree. She was a wonderful speaker and an attractive woman. And she felt she should do more with her life. She became restless—a real rebel without a cause.”

One day Dr. Hepburn noticed in the newspaper that Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the English suffragist leader, was speaking in town that very night. He insisted they attend, and an activist was born. Mrs. Hepburn became the head of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association and later a friend and colleague of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. She worked at the grassroots level—trotting young Kate out in parades and having her pass out pamphlets—and took on all opponents up to and including local newspaper editors and the mayor. “But Mother's secret,” Kate would tell me repeatedly—and this was true of the most effective early feminists—“was in remaining extremely feminine. She dressed beautifully, she tended to her husband, she showed off her well-groomed children. And then, while she was pouring the mayor a second cup of tea, she would discuss with great intelligence some great injustice being heaped upon his female constituents. And then she'd smile and say, ‘More sugar?'” Dr. Hepburn supported his wife in all her campaigns.