Anyway, he was an angel after that one feeble whatever you want to call it. And there he was, lying on his couch in-what shall I say?-comparative disarray. He asked me to come to his dressing room on the lot one day. Things didn’t get better until her equally “odd,” but “generous” co-star John Barrymore took the unconventional, headstrong novice under his wing after an unsuccessful attempt at seduction: When she arrived in Hollywood in 1932 to star in her first movie, A Bill of Divorcement, an admittedly haughty Hepburn stepped off the train in a ridiculously expensive high-necked ruffled riding coat, a bizarre hat perched on her head, and one eye swollen shut in 90-degree heat.Īccording to Hepburn, the studio executives there to meet her were dismayed, exclaiming their new find looked like a cadaver. “I was just full of the joy of life and opportunity and a wild desire to be absolutely fascinating.” “It was all or nothing for me me me,” she recalls. I knew something that the girls did not know: tragedy.” Katharine of ArroganceĪfter graduating from Bryn Mawr, Hepburn knew what she wanted-to be a sensation. “This incident seemed to sort of separate me from the world as I’d known it,” she writes. But she is honest about the effect Tom’s death had on her. Seventy years later, Hepburn remained non-committal and unwilling to criticize her family’s response or even admit that Tom died by suicide. The family rarely if ever spoke of him again. Her father wrote to the papers, claiming his son had simply been doing a rope trick. The Hepburn family’s response to Tom’s apparant suicide is shocking to modern sensibilities. In a state of numb shock, I cut him down and laid him on the bed.” There he was-next to the bed-his knees bent-hanged by a torn piece of sheeting. “Next morning, I went upstairs to wake him up. In muddled, removed prose, Hepburn describes the “facts” as she recalls them. “As I later told the story,” Hepburn writes, “I said that Tom had looked at me and said, ’You’re my girl, aren’t you? You’re my favorite girl in the whole world.’ Why did I say this? Was it true? I mean, did Tom really say it? I don’t know any longer.” One night, they went to see A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court on Broadway. In April 1921, the two siblings were on an adventure in New York City, staying with a family friend.

There was certainly trouble brewing in her older brother Tom, a sensitive, athletic boy who was the 14-year-old Hepburn’s constant companion. While Hepburn herself is honest that her family’s activism made them outcasts in proper society, she is mum about how her parents’ emphasis on principled perfectionism may have negatively affected her and her siblings.

Me by Katharine Hepburn