The death of her brother and lover -- that Great Love of her Life -- changed 13-year-old Kate forever. She had been brought up in a family of free spirits and individualists, her mother being a birth-control advocate at a time when such stances were radical in the extreme. Tom's death filled Kate with guilt; her love for him she would always hold proudly in her heart; that their violation of incest conventions had left her happy and fulfilled but left him so bedeviled by guilt and depression that he killed himself, left her feeling responsible, sorrowful, guilt-ridden.
     From the death of the Beloved One can be traced all of the individualistic Hepburn traits, professionally and personally, that made her, over the decades one of the Great Originals of her century:
Her scorn of Marriage and its rituals, for which husband Ludlow Smith paid heavily; her secret desire for essential independence, which kept her happy enough in a loose relationship with Spencer Tracy that was more one of loving friendship than passionate sensuality (and his inability to marry her kept it going for 25 years, for with him, this ingrown, independent soul could have it both ways); her lesbian flings with a number of women, beginning with Laura Harding, which resulted in rival Margaret Sullavan's scornful remarks about "Krazy Kate and Her Giddy Girlfriends;" her imperfect, often tempestuous relationships with such eccentric men as producer Jed Harris (who liked to greet business associates in the nude) and agent Leland Hayward (who never seemed to find happiness with any one woman though a veteran of multiple marriages). When Margaret Sullavan married him in 1936, Hepburn, who had been involved with him also, affected great grief, but was secretly relieved. Then there was her buddy-buddy pal-ship with tormented Howard Hughes, who steered a bisexual course, alternating between screen lovelies like Jean Peters and handsome airline mechanics. Wearing pants and dressed up "butch", Kate would take long hikes with Howard, arguing politics over campfires, even wrestle with him. But a romantic relationship -- as that term is generally accepted -- it was not.
     Forthright and individualistic and feisty and power-driven, she enjoyed testing the mettle of other powerful tycoons like Louis B. Mayer, who liked her despite her hard-driving deals (she had not only sold The Philadelphia Story to him in 1940 on terms highly favorable to herself but landed another story with him in 1941, her first hit with Tracy, Woman of the Year.) "Her hard Yankee mind understood Mayer," an associate later said, "and Mayer enjoyed talking and maneuvering with her man-to-man." As for Tracy, he aroused her masochistic, contrary, testing-to-see-how-far-she-could-go self,and she took a perverse joy in being put down by a man, for once in her life, when she took a crack at his height by saying: "On-screen I am afraid I'll be too tall for you, Mr. Tracy," and got a lift out of his snappy reply: "Don't worry, Miss Hepburn, I'll cut you down to size."
     Full of contradictions and assorted forms of denial, she always claimed she knew nothing of homosexuality and its manners-and-mores while all the time conducting intensely intimate relationships with a series of women, fraternizing and camping-it-up with the many gay actors she worked with through the years, and enjoying a close friendship with her director on many films, the flamboyant George Cukor, whose gay affairs and promiscuous life style were the talk of Hollywood insiders.
     Approaching age 96, she spoke of Death with serenity and, oddly, a kind of anticipation. "It will "be just like going to sleep," she  said. "A nice, long sleep -- think of how wonderful it will be -- no more pain, no more bodily aches and discomforts, no more tensions -- just a nice, blissful sleep." She was buried, by her express wish, in Hartford with her parents -- and with Tom. Those who know her well and intimately are sure that if she were conscious at the point of eternity, her last word was undoubtedly: TOM. "She has loved him for so long, missed him for so long -- this boy, her first lover," George Cukor has said. "I, for one, hope he is there for her, holding out his arms, ready to bring her the peace and rest she has never really known...."
     For this long life, these years of acclaim and travel and friendships and "romantic" involvements and awards and major success on several continents, all the sturm und drang of one of the most successful acting careers ever, have been, after all, at once a compensatory flight from the memory of Tom and, oddly, a journey toward him. Now they are together, side by side, in a Hartford, Connecticut, cemetery.  And, to paraphrase the closing phrase of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, will they be "unquiet sleepers in that quiet earth?"
                            HEPBURN'S LIFE

                         THE BRIGHT BEGINNINGS
Katharine Hepburn was born on May 12, 1907 to an upper class family of Scottish-English heritage, tracing her lineage to Mary Queen of Scots' James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Her father, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, was a urologist and also pioneered many social reforms. Her mother, Katharine Houghton Hepburn, also a free spirit ahead of her time like her husband, was a suffragette and an early, and highly militant, advocate of birth control. She had an older brother, Tom, a year and a half her senior, with whom she spent many close and intimate days and nights until age 13, when he committed suicide (he was 15.) Later on, much later, in fact, were to come siblings Dick, Bob, Marian and Peggy. For many years, as she later put it, "My Tom and I were all alone in the world together... " Hard work, self-discipline, an absence of sentiment and wasted feelings and motions, characterized the family life. As she recalled it, cold showers were de rigueur every morning, for all. Everyone was expected to do his-her share, and no crying or complaining was tolerated. In 1967 Hepburn told an interviewer, "Father put up with no nonsense. He had no patience for self-pity. When any of us would start mooning about, bidding for attention with "I'm not feeling very well, he'd say, 'Take an aspirin, go up to your room, and lie down. Don't inflict the way you feel on the rest of us."
     Seeking to get as close to Tom as she could, Kate adopted many tomboyish ways, so as not to separate herself from him in any way. 
Tom was brilliant but shy. Though a handsome, masculine boy, he had a slight speech defect, and did not match Kate's social skills. They were so close in childhood they even slept together -- "we were like buddies," as Hepburn put it. But with the onset of adolescence for both, pal-ship turned to passionate love. For Kate it meant liberation, fulfillment; for Tom, guilt- a guilt so powerful and pervasive in time that despite the fact he fully reciprocated Kate's love, he hanged himself while they were visiting New York, in a relative's town house at 24 Charlton Street in the Village. Tom had been under other pressures, also. His father had planned to send him to Yale, make a doctor of him. Tom was not sure what he wanted to do with his life. After the suicide (Kate had found him) the life of the Hepburns -- and Kate's -- was never again the same.
                          “WHEN LOVE IS DONE”
    For Kate, after Tom's death, "the light of the whole world dies when love is done,” to quote Francis Bourdillon. Theirs had been so total, so intimate, so loving and close a relationship that she felt completely alone. The aloneness became so profound and pervasive that her parents took her out of school and placed her with a private tutor. For the next two years she led a relatively solitary life. Guilt played no role in her crushing sense of loss --- guilt had been his portion. Over and over she had asked herself "Why did he do it?" They had truly loved each other, and in Kate's view, even at 13, expression of their love had been natural and right -- for them. Why hadn't he seen it that way? Hadn't their parents taught them the life of the individualist? Hadn't they, often enough, quoted to Tom and her Thoreau's injunction about courageously and unashamedly stepping to the tune of a different drummer?
      After a year the depression began to lift. So she was to go it alone, without her Love. Her parents always refused to visit the cemetery -- there had been so much newspaper publicity about the suicide, and their approach was one of grieving stoicism -- but Kate went twice a week, and when she felt there was no one around, she would throw herself upon the grave. They had cremated her Tom, and that she resented. How much better it would be to feel that he was corporeally there, just six feet below her ... Gradually she resumed her outward life, but inwardly, alone now, her individualism, that courageous, let-chips-fall-where-they-might individualism that her Tom had (fatally) hesitated to share with her, became her guiding star.
     She finished her courses with tutors and at the Hartford School for Girls,and in 1924, three years after Tom's death, she entered Bryn Mawr college at 17. At first she had thought of emulating her father and pursuing a career in medicine, the career he had wanted for Tom, but it seemed so clinical, so prosaic, and besides, her grades in subjects like physics and chemistry were poor. But under the stoicism, the tough outer defiance, lay a tortured soul driven into the dark reaches of introspection, and in time, knowing that these deep feelings of loss and aloneness needed an outlet sufficiently purgative and cathartic - she decided to become an actress.
 

      THE UNTOLD WANT
     She had had few friends at Bryn Mawr, had kept essentially to herself. Her "friends" were her younger siblings, whom she considered her own children. Her father and mother, stoical yet supportive, were sterling standbys. She would help raise Bob and Dick, Marian and Peggy -- those children who had come so long after her and Tom's pristine childhood of aloneness -- the way Tom would have wanted them raised. She had two albums of Tom's pictures –- from babyhood to 15. She looked at them often. Bryn Mawr's drama teachers had told her she had promise. So the life-Voyage would begin there, she decided -- and on her terms. Walt Whitman's "untold want by life nor land ne'er granted" would express itself in her performances -- they would prove a release for those pent-up feelings, that agonized loss. She who had started out the most consummate of individualists, loving unashamedly a brother who fully returned her love, would show them what she was made of. She was an Individual, and they could all like it or lump it. Tomboyish still, defiant, hiding her deeper hurts under a brittle, playful, often cynical exterior, Kate took her B.A. degree in 1928 and, at 21, struck out immediately for summer stock. Her parents expressed some initial demurrals - acting didn't seem terribly practical to them - but she shut them up by playing back to them their often-expressed tenets of individualism. "You always said, 'be yourself," she told them. "And by golly, that's what I'll be, always -- myself."
     Her performances in summer stock were often awkward and unorthodox. An associate remembers, "Her talent, yes at 20, was obvious, but she was egoistic, strong-minded -- hated taking direction, wanted things her own way." This caused her difficulties with directors of such stock plays as "The Czarina" (Baltimore) and The "Big Pond” in Great Neck, New York.
   The year she graduated from college she entered marriage with socialite Ludlow Ogden Smith. When she met him he was a direction-less young aristocrat. In love with her inordinately, young Smith failed to see their areas of incompatibility. Later Hepburn was to say that she married "Luddy", as she called him, because she felt he was easily managed, because marital status protected her from male "wolves," and because his ready supportiveness and devotion offered her protection in a brutal, competitive, sexually-predatory show business environment. "It was still a man's world in those days," she said years later. "I took what protective measures I could.” In old age, racked with remorse over her essentially cold treatment of her one and only husband, she said, "I was a pig. He gave. I took. Unconditional love. That's what he offered." George Cukor many years later was asked how much Kate had loved Luddy, Tracy, Hughes, Leland Hayward and the rest. "She was good buddies with them, had a kind of affection for them, felt true devotion for Tracy -- but Love? The only guy she ever loved, in my view -- ever really, truly loved -- and for all her life -- was that kid in the Hepburn cemetery lot in Hartford."
     Among Kate's performances in the 1928-1932 period were those in “Night Hostess” (a forgettable Broadway debut in a nothing role; it ran only 15 performances). Later came a more substantial role in “These Days” and an understudy stint with Hope Williams in “Holiday.” (She was to play the Linda Seton role in the film 10 years later.) In 1929 she found herself touring as Grazia in “Death Takes a Holiday” -- one of her favorite roles in what was understandably her favorite play of the time (later a 1934 film with Fredric March.) The plot? A handsome young man comes to an aristocratic house party in Italy for a few days. He is Death, come to see why mortals fear him so. In her role of Grazia to which she so lovingly addressed herself, she is the girl who longs for Death as the Ultimate Peace and Ecstasy -- and recognizing her longing and need, Death takes her off with him.....
     The year 1930 (she was 23 by then) saw her playing Katia in “A Month in the Country” and Judy Bottle in the Jane Cowl starrer, “Art and Mrs. Bottle.” Often she would get fired -- her headstrong, individualistic stances were a trial to directors and producers -- but
her talent was evident and it eventually paid big dividends. In 1932, age 25, she finally made a big success on Broadway in “The Warrior's Husband,” in which she excelled in a role tailored to her exact measure, Antiope, the Amazon warrior who lives by her own rules and not only meets male warriors on their own terms but keeps them in their place. All the compensatory, individualistic, forthright aspects of her personality shone forth from this role and brought her major acclaim. This led her directly to Hollywood.
                             A HOLLYWOOD OUTSIDER
     Hollywood didn't know what to make of Hepburn. Producer David 0. Selznick and director George Cukor had originally wanted Jill Esmond, (first wife of Laurence Olivier) for the role of a girl who realizes she has inherited insanity from an unstable father (A Bill of Divorcement), played touchingly by John Barrymore. But as Cukor later recalled, "As soon as I tested her, I knew she was unusual, distinctive -- no one like her, no one at all!" She was cast in the role and made a critical sensation, even upstaging the great Barrymore at times. Again the role was right for her -- an individualist who meets life head-on, and sacrifices her true love (David Manners) to care for her father.
     Off to a flying start, Hepburn in 1933-34 specialized in roles tailored by prescient RKO directors and writers to her measure: Christopher Strong,in which she played an aviatrix; Morning Glory, in which she played an aspiring young actress (she won the 1933 Oscar for this, her first of four); and Little Women, in which she won much critical praise as Louisa May Alcott's Jo March, forthright and individualistic, who wants to be a writer. Spitfire (1934) showcased her as a fiery mountain girl, and in The Little Minister she was a Scottish aristocrat posing as a gypsy. Critics commented on her freshness, vitality, force of personality and strong individualism.  Kate showed she could be as romantic as Shearer or Crawford or Garbo in Break of Hearts (1935) in which she was a concert pianist in love with conductor Charles Boyer. She garnered a second academy award nomination for Alice Adams, in which she was touching and true as a small-town girl seeking to rise socially, and in Sylvia Scarlett, she sashayed about in male attire in an offbeat film that has always been admired in some circles but that failed commercially in its day (it is now a cult film).
     By the time she did Mary of Scotland and A Woman Rebels in 1936, Hepburn was regarded by some in Hollywood as a brazen eccentric and by others as a courageous individualist. She lived in rented houses, alternated "romances" with Hughes and Hayward with close involvements with a succession of women, strode about in pants and other varieties of male attire, and gave interviews to the fan mags that were so strong they often went unprinted. She never hesitated to tell off Hollywood for its phoniness and unreality, and went back east to her family in Connecticut whenever her stints were completed, with her father, Dr. Hepburn, paying the bills from her earnings. "I have no money sense," she often said, "and he saves my neck." In 1933 she rented a townhouse on East 49th Street in New York's Turtle Bay section, which she later bought outright (and lived in for 63 years).
     She did come acropper with occasional returns to the stage; in one, “The Lake,” produced by the eccentric Jed Harris, one of her reputed "loves," she gave a performance so awkward and self-conscious (she and Harris quarreled over the interpretation) that it elicited Dorothy Parker's famous comment: "[Hepburn] in 'The Lake' ran the gamut of emotions from A to B." Later she tried out “Jane Eyre,” but it never reached Broadway. "Jane was too simpering and man-dependent for me," she later said, "The Broadway critics would have called it miscasting. I don't know why I ever did it." Circa 1937, age 30, Hepburn's films were palling with a public that found her a shade too individualistic and strange up against the Crawfords, Garbos and Shearers. Refusing to accept roles she felt were wrong for her, she was castigated by RKO executives as an opinionated, pig-headed snob. The press opined that she treated reporters and interviewers as Enemies. She was to tell a reporter years later about that period: “Everyone thought I was bold and fearless and even arrogant, but inside I was always quaking. But I don't care how afraid I may be inside -- I do what I think I should."
     Though she proved her comedic skills eminently in Bringing Up Baby with Cary Grant and had done creditably at Columbia with Holiday in a role she had understudied ten years before, Hepburn bought out her contract with RKO in 1938 and left Hollywood. Her films were losing money,the press had recoiled from her individualistic stances and posturings, and she was regarded at 31 as a Hollywood Hasbeen. In 1938 she was listed, among a number of once-top-drawing stars, as "Box office Poison."
                   COMING BACK WITH A VENGEANCE
     By 1940 Hepburn was back in Hollywood with a hit picture under a new MGM deal, the film version of her successful 1939 play The Philadelphia Story. She had two top stars with her, James Stewart and Cary Grant, and she was scintillating as a spoiled Philadelphia heiress whose estranged bohemian father accuses her of lacking "an understanding heart." She had shrewdly taken over rights to the play while appearing in it,and sold them to MGM at a big profit. This she also did with her next for MGM, Woman of the Year, pocketing picture profits in addition to her salary. Woman of the Year was to be her first of nine pictures with Spencer Tracy over the 25-year-period 1942-1967. They were to become one of the Great Screen Teams of All Time. In Woman of the Year she is an ace reporter humanized and brought down to earth by Tracy.
     There have been many conjectures about just what kept Hepburn and Tracy an off-screen as well as on-screen team for the next quarter-century. Her masochism certainly played a part in it.  Tracy drank, he was a grouch, and often ignored and ridiculed her; but he felt an affection for her tinged with sympathy. She in turn liked him, even felt deep affection for him, because she sensed his tortured nature, his Catholic guilt, his loneliness, his hurt over a failed marriage to a woman he never divorced, his torment over his deaf son, for whose condition he somehow (Catholic guilt transferral again) felt responsible. But for all this, Tracy as life companion was tailor-made for Hepburn. His marital status gave her the freedom she wanted. She could be motherly, feminine, concerned if she felt like it; off on her own when she felt like that; a buddy and good companion (but never drinking companion) when that was in order. Somehow it all worked for her with Tracy -- love that was more affection than sex; freedom (for wasn't he married, after all?); friendship. How much she really loved Tracy is conjectural. George Cukor put it succinctly, if possibly unfairly, when he said of their pairing: "It was a perfect example of love me little, love me long.” And it went on for 25 years, till his death.
     Hepburn's films at MGM after the first two hits were a varied lot, not always successful either with critics or the public. Keeper of the Flame (1942) turned out to be a shade too heavy-handed and political for fans; Dragon Seed (1944) showcased Hepburn inappropriately as a Chinese woman ("She'll be opening a damned laundry next!" Tracy sneered at this effort). Without Love, based on a play Hepburn had done in 1942, failed to go over that well with 1945 audiences. Sea of Grass and State of the Union, both with Tracy, were popular on the strength of their pairing, and in Song Of Love, as Clara Schumann, Hepburn demonstrated, for those who had forgotten, that she could be as tender, wise, womanly, and compassionate as any feminine star as the pianist wife of tormented composer Robert Schumann. There had been Undercurrent in 1946, a rather turgid melodrama with Robert Taylor, but in 1949 she and Tracy had a hit with the broad but trenchant comedy farce, Adam's Rib.