Eleven unknown facts about Katharine Hepburn and what they say about us

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born May 12, 1907, and died June 29, 2003, eleven years ago. Up until shortly before her death. she acknowledged that she had been using her late brother's birthdate - November 8 - as her own for all of her career (see #3).

So, for the 11 years Hepburn has been asleep - as she deliciously described death: "No more leaves to rake," she once relished to a reporter - I have listed eleven not-widely-known factoids about the famous actress.

Basically, en total, the reason these are not talked about is that we live in a fantasy world constructed by Hollywood and a PR machine under the watchful eye of the Christian church. Hepburn herself took part in this charade and, like many celebrities, is guilty of sometimes confusing fact with fiction. Our heroes cannot have be villains, so anything that is in the record is simply ignored - viz., Churchill using chemical warfare against Arab tribes in the early 1900's, a rather Hitlerian response before Hitler was even thought of.

For example, number 11 I read myself from a New York Times news story on microfiche - who remembers microfiche and the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature!? - of Kit Hepburn's testimony to Congress in the 1930's. It has changed forever my view of Planned Parenthood but not about women's rights.

So here's my eleven facts you may not have known:

11. Hepburn's mother, Kit*, cofounded Planned Parenthood with Margaret Sanger. She testified in a congressional hearing that [poor] Blacks and Asians needed to be sterilized as a remedy to poverty.

10. Hepburn's younger sister, Marion**, was a cofounder of the URBAN LEAGUE in Hartford, CT, and earlier a labor organizer for the radical union federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations [CIO].

9. Hepburn's mother, Kit, was a Marxist and when she predeceased her husband in 1951, he burned all of her papers and letters and remarried a few months later while Hepburn was in Africa filming "The African Queen". When she began as a suffragette, she abandoned one women's party for a Marxist, radical one.

8. Hepburn wrote an article for the Univ of Virginia law review journal on the Right of Privacy in 1965 on the occasion of the US Supreme Court's Griswold decision.

7. The first political candidate Hepburn openly supported was author Upton Sinclair, a socialist, who ran for governor of California with an EPIC [End Poverty in California] Program. The last presidential candidate Hepburn openly supported and campaigned for was Henry Wallace, who was also backed by the Communist Party USA. Wallace ran against Truman.

6. Hepburn's secret spot to go read scripts, books, and take naps was a gay cruising area of Central Park in NYC [see photo]. She once took a film writer friend for a picnic there, and he says she seemed either oblivious or indifferent to these gay men coming out and going in bushes around her.

5. One author writes that Hepburn not only liked Nixon but defended him saying he was "misunderstood." No context if this was said before or after Watergate, but no matter since Nixon had to have been known to her as a Red baiter since the 1950's.

4. During the "communist" witch hunts, Hepburn was subpoenaed to testify by the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused. Attempts to hold her in contempt were stopped by someone yet to be named.

3. When she was 14, Hepburn's oldest brother, Tom, 16, committed suicide by hanging himself, and Kate found the body and held it aloft until help arrived. In later years she speculated that he might have been gay. Until the 1980's, she used Tom's birthdate as her own.

2. Hepburn put herself in self-imposed exile from the US in the 1950's and lived mainly in the UK and Australia. The man reported to be her "lover" Spencer Tracy was not there. The woman reported to be her lover, Laura Harding, was. Harding came to Hollywood with Hepburn in 1932, where press rumors swelled in print; and when the morality police started tightening down on the whole film colony, Harding was sent back to the East Coast, and Hepburn started to be "paired" in the press with different men.***

1. In today's parlance, Hepburn would be considered a lesbian, though in her day this was not only unacceptable but considered a slur even to upper class same-gender loving women. Hepburn's godparents, Bryn Mawr friends of her mother's, were lesbians. Biographer Anne Edwards wanted to document this in her book, but the publishers nixed it. Not until Michael Mann and Scott Bowers (who procured women for her) was the extent of her relationships with women revealed.

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* Kit was Katharine Martha Houghton-Hepburn. I only use Kit here as it was what she went by and to distinguish her from her actress daughter.

** Marion Houghton Hepburn-Grant was also the mother of Katharine Houghton, the actress who played Joey in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"

*** Anyone who hasn't read a history of the Hay's Office, predecessor to the movie rating system, ought to. The Hay's Office asserted itself in the 1930's guided by the Christian Church and dictated what could and could not be in movies, even how they had to end. This spilled over into the film colony itself where actors, like Hepburn, were made to seem to lead exemplary STRAIGHT Christian lives.

Brief Obit on Ruby Dee and a Lot about our Real Missing Militants

Ruby Dee (October 27, 1922 – June 11, 2014) was an actress. She was a GREAT actress, stage and screen. That she was a supporter of various civil rights activities of her time and has had her name associated with some of the icons we have come now to revere - but we did not always, mind you[!] - should not revise her biography. To now mourn her as if she had been some kind of Black Panther or Communist Party activist is false. Worse, to inflate her role also underplays Dee's peers, African, Indigenous, and European, who committed their lives to radical, revolutionary work. Women we do not talk much about: instead we talk about actors who say interesting things ... when sometimes saying interesting things is quite powerful.

If after Katharine Hepburn's death, someone like me - who adores her and has read every biography - had cast her as a civil rights activist I'd be looked at with a lot of justified skepticism: and yet, one can glean from the Hepburn biography a continuum of far leftist politics, causes she herself supported, and her name was associated with a few militants. But Hepburn was an actress. Like Dee, she was a GREAT actress of stage and screen. Like Dee, Hepburn paid a price sometimes for her politics.

But to call Hepburn an activist because she supported and campaigned for a Communist Party-backed presidential candidate does not, in the totality, make her a political activist. This grade inflation revisionism of calling either Dee or Hepburn "activists" really undercuts the people who do put their necks out for radical change. They rarely come from Hollywood, though you wouldn't know this if the center of your universe is in Hollywood. The political associations of each woman say a lot about who they were but that they chose the road they'd hoe - film, theater - says a lot about them too.

Recently a low-income elder home for the veterans of the Stonewall riots was opened in Philadelphia. We don't think about these fighters, but they paid a great deal as out lesbians and gays and drag queens in their employment. Now that they enter the senior years they lack hefty 401K's to sustain them. They chose a path, often a militant path, and we must honor their path as we queers stand on their shoulders. Because they aren't fixtures of Hollywood, they and their plight is ignored.

I honor Ruby Dee as a great actress, and that much greater that she succeeded in a racist, post-Dred Scott United States She was a working and prolific actress, performing Shakespeare and O'Neill, Hansberry and Tennessee Williams. I would love to have seen her perform Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession."

But she's not Assata or Angela or Winnie Mandela. Let's not get it twisted. If we are hungry for militants - and we should be if we had any sense - they're here, and they were here.

The Abdication of another Spanish King

The First and Second Spanish Republics were born out of insurgent radicals who forced the king to either abdicate or flee for his life and limb. In the view we are not supposed to take, Spain has been trying since the 1870's to build a vibrant civil society, democratically run, and imbued with egalitarian principles. This, thanks to those radicals, anarchists, and republican anti-monarchists who've never gone away in more than 100 years and are reappearing and reimposing themselves in the streets of Madrid and Barcelona right now demanding a Third Republic.

On the other hand, the view of history we are supposed to digest is a fluke of history forced one 19th century king to abdicate only to have the military install "order and stability" a short time after. Then, in April 1931, another fluke caused the Bourbon king to flee until Franco emerged to set things right by 1939.

There is fact, and there is fiction.

The fluke, if you will, is the radicals; and here they come again stubbornly sprouting through the concrete.

We are supposed to believe - because we are told as much - that Juan Carlos is abdicating because of ill health. Granted, like the end of the First Republic, this king was carried back in not on the shoulders of revolutionaries but rather the French- and UK-backed military of Franco. Just like, not far from Spain, we are told to believe Egyptians want the "order and stability" of a new dictatorship over democratic free elections.

But there is fact, and there is fiction.

If four out of five dentists surveyed recommend saccarine-laced, cancer-causing chewing gum for their patients who chew gum, what are we to make of those dentists?!

Tyrants and constitutional monarchs have always suffered ill health, and we are never told much about it, and they go on and on useless in their own faculties but not useless to the state which needs them. Mental illness and inbreeding plagued many a European monarch but interestingly as long as the elites got their wealth, "order and stability" was declared. No one cared much about these genetic defects that were constantly replenished with marriages to first and second cousins.

And this is the point. As the late Tony Benn observed about the abdication of Edward VIII in the UK, 1936, it was less about a marriage to a divorced woman and more about the possible erosion of the office of the monarch and, therefore, the powers exercised by a handful of bureaucrats. Especially a prime minister. Without the king and the powers invested in that office, the raison d'etre of a prime minister "exercising" these powers disappears.

Benn noted that any president with the powers of the prime minister under a "constitutional" monarch - such a president would be considered a dictator.

This is probably why not 24 hours after the Spanish abdication the UK Buckingham Palace Press Office released a photo of their 88-year old queen carefully astride a pony on what we are told is among her daily rides. Vigor? "Continuity," is the word barked at us over and over again by the royalists. "The 'A-word' is not in her vocabulary."

Juan Carlos's health is as relevant to this story as his estranged wife Sofia's avowed homo-hatred, her espousal against gays and gay rights, or the state of their marriage.

What is relevant?

Spain is in a toilet, like many other Mediterranean nations. The banks tell us the European economies are turning around, but this is belied by the truth of widespread unemployment and misery, especially among young Spaniards. European workers are becoming refugees. Austerity continues to slash at the gains of the last 50 years. "Turn around" must be understood here to indicate that the financial world has found new ways to make profits, and nothing more.

So, thankfully, the insurgents of the 1870's have never died. They were brilliant in 1931, and they are ever-present today. In the recent European Union elections, more green sprouts emerged. Not believing the hype that things have turned around, pro-Republic, anti-monarchy parties, like PODEMOS, gained seats in Brussels.

Now, PODEMOS, United Left, Equo, and Republican Catalan Left Parties are all demanding a referendum on what Spain is to become, a republic or a monarchy. Elites are worried, and they seemed to ask Juan Carlos "Por que no te callas?".

Nixon advises the old Bourbon from his grave. Let the Republic inspire the masses.

No pasaran. Pasaremos! Campesinos, la tierra es vuestra.