Free Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg

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!”
    â€œI’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