A Thought on Katherine Hepburn

Take it from me: the more you know about alcoholism and codependence, the more you see it around you, and the more willfully perverse our culture's blind eye to it appears. My Spidey-sense tingled constantly throughout Claudia Roth Pierpont's measured appreciation of Katherine Hepburn in the July 21st issue of The New Yorker. I say "measured" because the author seems, well, resentful that Hepburn wasn't the person modern feminists might want her to be. (The idea that sex roles are nothing if not fluid, and that current feminist imperatives might someday appear as dated and restrictive as the mores of the Thirties is never considered; but hell, there's no need for The New Yorker to give its writers a dash of historical perspective, if the rest of the culture doesn't have any, either.)



Putting down her axe to grind and picking up my own: after reading the article, my suspicion is that Hepburn was the product of an alcoholic family. Her lineage was dotted with suicides; Roth Pierpont writes: "The family was so immoderately strong and fearless and happy that there was never any need to mention the suicide of Mrs. Hepburn's father or of her father's brother or even of Dr. Hepburn's own oldest brother.." Or, at 15, Katherine's older brother Tom. Happy, huh? When Hepburn is quoted as saying, "They simply did not believe in moaning about anything," I hear "There was simply nothing they couldn't deny."



Suicide is a terrible (and terrifying) thing for the survivors, and in that era it would've been the most natural thing to find comfort--to try to regulate mood swings apparently strong enough to send some of them to the morgue--via alcohol. Which came first? God knows, and it doesn't matter. But the kicker for me was Hepburn's relationship with Spencer Tracy, who, if the article is any guide, was a terrible, committed, life-long alcoholic. Certainly the life he offered Hepburn was less than any partner deserves, a mock-marriage to a demanding philanderer, the opportunity to care for a perpetual infant. Why would Hepburn choose that? Family patterns?



The author says that Hepburn's brother Bob thought Tracy "was sort of a younger edition of her father, in her mind." Pierpont Roth says that "Dr. Hepburn was an authoritarian in his domestic demands and in his harsh (some in the family said overharsh) corporal punishment of his children." It all sounds codependent as hell to me, screwed-up family patterns being set up and played out ad infinitum, bequeathing misery to generation after generation.



The author's annoyance with Hepburn's dissonances--the feminist heroine who was never happier than when she was subordinate to a (messed-up) man, the movies that always had Hepburn's coltish character slipping her head into the mare's yoke at the end--give the article a nice spice, and are worth thinking about. But having finished the piece, I thought it was a shame, not that Kate Hepburn wasn't the super-strong, utterly self-directed, me-first icon that feminists could revere without reservation, but somebody with unresolved family stuff that made her life kind of a drag. If the root cause--depression? codependence?--had been addressed, it seems certain that Hepburn could've been less thwarted in her personal life, and maybe even more of what the author wanted her to be.



I believe that in this difficult place, we each deserve the happiest lives we can create for ourselves. I'm sure Hepburn did her best, and perhaps she thought of her life as a perfect triumph. She'd have a right, and her opinion's the only one that really counted, anyway. it's just interesting to think about. I have a lot of opinions about the lives of celebrities, all available upon request!