Kate Remembered Page 5

  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.

  As regularly as possible, he came home from work at teatime, so that he could spend time with his children—discussing adult matters with them, playing with them, challenging them to support unpopular causes. More than once, the Hepburns had rocks thrown through their windows.

  Four and then six years after Kate was born, the Hepburns had two more children, both boys, named Richard and Robert. Five and seven years after that came two girls, Marion and Margaret (known as Peg). Each pair was born in a different house in Hartford, each house a little bigger than the last. There “Jimmy”—pairing off with her older brother, Tom—used to race the trolley cars down Farmington Avenue on her bicycle. She said there was not a single tree in town she could not climb, not even an especially dangerous one on Hawthorn Street. She delighted in telling of the neighbor who called Kate’s mother and said, “Mrs. Hepburn, Kathy is on the top of the hemlock tree . . .” and how Mrs. Hepburn replied, “I know, Mrs. Porritt, please don’t frighten her or she might fall out.”

  Kate and I rode in the golf cart to the western side of Fenwick, beyond the tennis courts, to a few gridded streets with pleasant-looking houses. “You must meet Marion,” she said. “Hey,” Kate yelled, as we walked unannounced into a handsome place, then undergoing renovation. Marion appeared, obviously a Hepburn. While very pretty, she was less glamorous than Kate, her face rounder and her features less pronounced. Then came her handsome, white-haired husband, Ellsworth Grant, whom Kate had warned me was very rich. They were the parents of the actress Katharine Houghton, who had played Kate’s daughter in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Kate introduced me, saying, “This is Scott Berg, my biographer.”

  “Whoa,” I said, shaking hands with our hosts, who were somewhat taken aback themselves, knowing there had been a lifelong interdiction against giving writers personal access to the family. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “Well,” said Kate, “I mean he’s learning everything there is to learn about me . . . because now he’s writing a piece about me for a magazine. Think of him as ‘the man from Spy,’ ” a reference to the magazine for which the Jimmy Stewart character worked in The Philadelphia Story. “Now this is Marion and Ellsworth Grant,” she said. “They’ve been married forever, they’ve been in love with each other forever, and they’ve been sleeping with each other since they were fifteen.”

  “Katty!” said Marion. “Kate!” said I. And Ellsworth stood silent, grinning.

  “Well, it’s true,” said Kate, “and you should be proud of it, because you’re still a damn good-looking couple. Now what are you doing to this place?” We trooped through the house, upstairs to the master bedroom, where Kate decided the bed was terribly positioned. “Now look,” she said, “you’ve absolutely got to move this bed. I mean, it’s crazy. You’ve got one of the most beautiful views in the world, and you’re not even waking up to it. Move it over here and you’ll wake up to glorious sunrises, looking out onto the water. It’s insane otherwise.”

  “Well,” said Ellsworth, “we like it here.”

  “But what’s the point?” said Kate, now exasperated. “I mean what’s the point of living in one of the most beautiful spots in the world, with one of the most beautiful views right out your window, and you’re refusing to look at it? You’re hopeless. The both of you, I mean, just hopeless. It’s a waste, this whole house is utterly wasted on the likes of you two. . . .” And we were off.

  Back at Kate’s house we went into the kitchen to scare up lunch. Phyllis was already at work, preparing chicken salad. “Don’t forget to slice the grapes,” Kate told her, obviously for the thousandth time. “Vertically, not horizontally,” she added, turning to me to explain that they tasted different if they were cut across their equators. At the far end of the kitchen, between the second refrigerator, the cabinets, and a stove filled with boiling and steaming pots of all sizes, their lids clacking, hurtled a big man—tall and stocky—in a red sweatsuit and wearing a rooster cap, complete with cockscomb. Kate introduced me to her brother Dick. He offered a huge, hamlike hand.

  “Welcome,” he said, holding a big spoon to my mouth. “Now taste this.” It was turkey soup, very hot, filled with vegetables. “Now, what would be good in that?” he aske
d, as he made his way to the cabinet in search of spices. He returned to the stove with cayenne pepper, then he removed a macaroni-and-cheese casserole from the oven and stirred a saucepan full of candied grapefruit rinds. “Now try one of these,” he said, handing me one of the cooled candies.

  Kate was hungry, so we retreated to her side of the kitchen, where Phyllis was finishing the trays of chicken salad and green salad and toast and milk and zucchini soup. Each of us picked up a tray, though Kate paused at the counter to grab a dark chocolate turtle out of a two-pound box before entering the dining room. After cleaning our plates, Kate asked Phyllis to see if any of the pots on Dick’s stove contained hot fudge. One did; and we made huge sundaes.

  “Now we can rest,” Kate said. “Just read the papers or take a nap, or, no, better that you see the town, and then we can come back and swim before dinner.” Although her young driver from New York was there at the house, she suggested that we let him rest. So I took the two of us across the causeway in the white town car she leased from Hertz—“That’s the telegraph pole I drove into, nearly killed Phyllis, nearly killed me too”—then turned left into the village of Old Saybrook.

  We stopped first at Walt’s, a small grocery that Kate claimed had the best meat anywhere. She picked up steaks for dinner and a slab of unsliced bacon; and she grabbed a bag of bagel chips, which she proceeded to consume as we walked through the market. By the time we reached the checkout stand, she had to tell the checker who weighed what remained in her bag of chips to double it. She signed for the groceries. Then she took me through Patrick’s Country Store, a charming shop with a lot of plaid, woolen goods. She couldn’t find anything she wanted, but she insisted I meet the proprietor. We made a final stop at James Gallery and Soda Fountain, to pick up a few items, some newspapers and—so long as we were there—didn’t I want an ice-cream cone? I felt I had already eaten enough for two days, but she insisted that James had the best ice-cream cones anywhere. So she ordered maple walnut in a honey cone, and I went with chocolate in a plain cone. “You can’t order a plain cone,” she said. “They’re so boring. It’s like eating cardboard. They always taste stale.”

  “Well, this one is rather good,” I insisted, “crisp, crunchy, and it doesn’t fight the flavor of the ice cream the way your honey cone does.” She simply shook her head as though she could not comprehend anything so outrageous. “Get me out of here,” she said, muttering, “I never heard of anyone eating a plain cone.”

  We returned to the house; and though it was getting cloudy and cold, Kate was ready for a swim. I joined her and found my tolerance for the cold water had increased in just one day. Or maybe it was being in the water together and not being willing to get out until she had. After a few minutes, we both headed for the outdoor shower. By the time we met downstairs again, it was starting to rain. Kate suggested I start a fire while she rustled up a game of Parcheesi. “You do know how to play Parcheesi, don’t you?” she said.

  “Oh sure,” I said, remembering Parcheesi from my childhood—you throw some dice and you move some green plastic pieces toward home. “Well, you couldn’t be worse than Phyllis,” said Kate with a competitive edge in her voice that I had not heard before, “so she’ll play with Dick, and you’ll be my teammate.” Dick—without his rooster hat, revealing a completely shaved head—entered the living room with a tray of mocha-flavored candy he had just cooked up. (Overcooked, actually, so these thin squares that were meant to be chewed had become hard candies of sugar, chocolate, and very strong coffee.) Everybody grabbed one while we set up the gameboard and chose our colors. “I have to be blue,” insisted Kate.

  It became apparent after my first couple of throws of the dice that the game was not exactly the one I remembered and that I had stepped onto a no-nonsense playing field. Kate looked at me with utter disgust, now stuck with me as her partner. Then I made the mistake of saying, “How hard can it be to pick up? I mean, it’s sort of like Chutes and Ladders. Seven-year-olds play this.”

  “Well, clearly you don’t have the brains of a seven-year-old!” she asserted, suggesting that I was missing all the subtleties of this ancient Hindu game. As she took to moving my green men strategically around the board, Dick leaned over and slapped her hand. “You can’t do that,” Dick shrieked. “He has to move his own men. It’s simply not fair otherwise.”

  “But my partner is a complete idiot,” she countered. “He doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing, and it’s simply not fair for me to be penalized like this.”

  Dick held his ground. “You chose him,” he insisted. “You could have chosen Phyllis. But you took a chance on somebody new.

  “But I didn’t know he was a complete idiot.”

  We were all on our second or third candies by now, and the caffeine was kicking in. The tempo of the game had discernibly picked up, as had our tempers. I was truly getting the hang of the game’s subtleties—such as they were—but after one unfortunate roll of the dice on my part, Kate stood up and said, “I give up. This is hopeless. I mean he’s positively hopeless.” Dick insisted she sit down, that she had to play this game to the bitter end, which I kept praying would come soon. I like to think the slight tremble in my hands was the result of the candy. But now the tables began to turn, and after one of Kate’s moves, Dick offered, “That was a great mistake on your part.” For the next several minutes they argued how Kate should have made her move. On Phyllis’s next turn, Kate criticized her. On mine, my opponent Dick took to offering me advice, with which Kate disagreed. “Now look,” I said, “you’ve all put me in a terrible spot. On one hand I feel I should listen to my partner, but on the other, Dick appears to be the best player and is on the verge of winning the game.”

  “Dick is not the best player,” said Kate. “I’ve been beating him at Parcheesi all his life.” I followed my partner’s strategy.

  “Well, you’re not going to beat him today,” he said, making what everybody had to concede was a brilliant throw of the dice (and let’s remember, we’re throwing dice here!), which took advantage of my vulnerable position. On Kate’s next roll, Dick started in again, pointing out the errors of his older sister’s plays. Meantime, Phyllis slowly and silently kept rolling dice and moving her little red markers, until at last she threw her hands in the air and shouted, “I won! I won!” And sure enough, she and Dick had.

  “I protest this game,” Kate said with great authority, “on account of my having to play with a complete idiot.”

  “I resent being called an idiot,” I said, “just because I didn’t win this idiotic game. It’s mostly luck anyway.” At this, Dick took umbrage, claiming that it’s actually a game requiring great intelligence and a sense of strategy . . . which he suggested Kate was too impulsive ever to master. “Oh, you’re all a bunch of idiots, real idiots,” Kate said, putting the game away.

  “But I won! I won!” said little old Phyllis with great glee.

  “Yes, dear, you won,” said Kate. “Now why don’t you do something important, like get our dinner going.”

  I announced that I was going upstairs for a little peace and quiet. “Yes,” Kate suggested, “you meditate on how you lost us that game.”

  During dinner—warm beet soup and plates heaped high with vegetables, baked potatoes, steaks, and broiled tomatoes (“You must always have the wet of the tomato,” Kate explained, “with the dry of the beef”)—we talked about my current work, how I was attempting to paint a giant mural of Hollywood from its beginnings, through the life of Samuel Goldwyn. Kate loved the idea, insisting that he was the most colorful and compelling of all the movie moguls. “Of all those pirates, and they were all pirates,” Kate asserted, “I think he was the only one with a sense of humor.”

  I told her about the play I had recently seen, K2, and its conclusion of the two mountain-climbers being left to die. Kate insisted the playwright had made a terrible mistake, dramatically and morally. The injured man, who could not go on and who was only jeopardizing the life of the second man,
she said matter-offactly, should have thrown himself off the edge of the mountain. “In offering his life, he would have saved a life. As it is,” she said, “he is responsible for two deaths. That would have made for a much better play. Really satisfying.”

  While Phyllis was off doing the dishes, Kate got to reminiscing about her family. That, she said, was the great advantage she had had in her life and her career, what gave her “a leg up.” Life is “tough,” she said, but one could have no greater support system than a family, people who knew all your weaknesses and loved you anyway. Her parents were obviously great examples of courage, common sense, and nonconformity. Also, I realized, narcissism.

  I never heard Kate speak a single word that did not honor her mother or father. Often she would say how “lucky” she was to grow up in so vital and stimulating an environment. And yet, in that conversation and many thereafter, I often detected annoyance in her voice and traces of ill will between the lines. There was a discernible resentment toward her father’s bluster, a trait that bordered on bullying. All Hepburns were encouraged to exercise their rights of free will; but there never seemed to be a way to win his approval. Simply following meant you were weak; defiance meant disrespect—both of which were frowned upon.

  Kate’s love and respect for her mother was frayed with frustration as well. While Kit Houghton Hepburn was a genuine feminist pioneer, largely at her husband’s instigation, Kate came to develop a filial impatience that her mother didn’t blaze trails farther into the frontier. She appreciated the strides Kit had made for herself and other women; but she suggested to me more than once that had her mother stood up to her husband, she might have become a national figure, like Margaret Sanger. But Dr. Hepburn was not about to let her abandon him and their children.