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At golf, tennis, figure skating and swimming, she is a passionate amateur. She can pilot a plane, drive a car and paint a passable landscape. But at acting she is a passionate pro. She does more than merely act in a movie: she somehow gives the impression that she has had a hand in writing, directing and cutting the film. She is never satisfied with a scene and will exhaust herself and everyone around her to get it right.
Peculiar Jab. Her personality is a mixture of puritanism and passion: the two qualities are powerful partners. Though she sometimes swears like a trooper, she does not like to hear others swear. She sips at a drink occasionally to be sociable, but she is eloquent on the evils of hard liquor. She seldom understands a double-meaning joke, and if she does, she is annoyed. While on location for The African Queen, Director John Huston and Humphrey Bogart would often tease Kate by telling off-color stories or pretending to an excessive thirst for alcohol. Finally Kate told them airily: "You boys think you're awfully wicked, don't you? Why, you don't know what the word 'wicked' means." That settled their hash. Says Bogart, still brooding over it: "Now what the hell she meant by that, I don't know."
Kate often leaves them wondering. "I strike people as peculiar in some way, although I don't quite understand why," she says. "Of course, I have an angular face, an angular body, and, I suppose, an angular personality which jabs into people."
Whacked Children. The angularity of mind and body was hers by inheritance. She was born 42 years ago in Hartford, Conn., the second of the six children of Katharine Houghton and Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, a noted urologist and surgeon. Her father, a transplanted Virginian, was so moved by Brieux's crusading play about syphilis, Damaged Goods (and by the preface written to it by Bernard Shaw), that he risked ostracism by his campaign to bring the facts about venereal disease into the open. With Harvard's Dr. Charles Eliot, he founded the American Social Hygiene Association. Kate's family-proud mother gave each of her children the same middle name, Houghton, and worked energetically at her own pet crusades: women's suffrage and birth control. She picketed the White House and delivered speeches on street corners. Young Kate was often beside her, handing out pamphlets.
In the rapt and rambling Hepburn household, no one ever changed the subject when young Kate came into the room: she heard all there was to hear. But freedom had its limits. When his children's squabbles got beyond the control of reason, Dr. Hepburn whacked them all impartially. Kate was spanked until she was nine, when she figured out how to stop the spankings: by taking them without crying.