Read Online Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg - Free Book Online Page B

with a sense of humor.”
    I told her about the play I had recently seen, K 2 , 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.
    So there was a catch-22. Kate always felt she benefited enormously from the strong family structure provided by the presence of two parents. And yet she always harbored some resentment toward her father for imposing his will, for standing in his wife’s way. At an early age, she became determined not to let men tell her what she could or could not do.
    Kate’s siblings were as important to her as her parents, providing compassion and companionship in the world she had created for herself, one from which most people would be shut out. While her brothers and sisters obviously delighted in her extraordinary success and her exciting presence, she knew they all had paid a certain price.
    Each of the Hepburn siblings developed large personalities as well, in reaction to their dynamic parents as much as to Kate. She had become an international celebrity by the time they were teenagers; and so, her two sisters sometimes seemed more like her own children. Marion, she felt, was the most intellectual of the lot, passionate about history, and active in local historical societies; but Kate often remarked that she tended to be “very social”—perhaps in reaction to being ostracized because of her parents’ extreme views—a tendency she didn’t really understand. Marion, she said, “always wanted to belong.” Peg, who had graduated from Bennington College, proved to be the most opinionated of the clan, strong and articulate. She lived a hard physical life, independent, a divorcee running a cow farm upstate.
    The Hepburn boys were equally disparate from one another. Bob, the most passive of the children, found happiness in order. He became