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.
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