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Hartford's more orthodox citizens looked somewhat askance at the perpetual ferment seething in the Hepburn house, and this attitude was sometimes reflected in the brutal behavior of the neighbors' pitiless young. Kate took to shaving her head every summer so as to give her playmates less of a hand-hold when they locked in combat. One day, a cattily candid friend remarked to Mrs. Hepburn that it was a pity Kate was such a frail child. Kate, seeing through the pity to the insult, charged across the lawn and hurled herself headlong against a tree. If that wasn't a sufficient answer, Kate figured it should have been.
Kate was largely educated by private tutors. When she arrived at Bryn Mawr as a freshman, she knew neither what to do nor what to expect. To nerve herself for her first appearance in the dining room, she put on a flame-colored dress and made a queenly, solo entrance. In the stunned silence, an upperclassman said clearly: "Ah, conscious beauty!" It was months before Kate could bring herself to return to the dining room.
Bryn Mawr has high scholastic standards, and Kate very nearly flunked out. Then she discovered that, to act in the college plays, she had to get high grades. She got them. She also alternated between living like a hermit and making a public show of herself. Sometimes she would wait until the rest of the dormitory was asleep before she would take a bath. But once, she took a bath in the library fountain and rolled herself dry on the grass. She got away with that one. But when she was caught smoking a cigarette (her first), she was suspended, briefly.
Two-Room Walkup. Graduated from Bryn Mawr and determined to be a great actress, Kate pursued the theater with such intensity and such conviction as her fellow actors had seldom seen and generally resented. One screamed at her: "You're a freak of nature—you'll never last!" She played stock in Baltimore, studied dramatics in New York under Frances Robinson-Duff, landed a bit part in These Days, a Broadway flop. For six months she understudied Hope Williams in Holiday. Sculptor Robert McKnight, who wanted to marry her, took her to the country for an afternoon. She talked so continuously of love, life, art and Katharine Hepburn that he never had a chance to interrupt with his proposal.
But somebody did manage to get a persuasive word in edgewise. In 1928 she married a Philadelphia socialite named Ludlow Ogden Smith. Realizing the impossibility of asking Kate to take on a commonplace name like Smith, he changed his name to Ogden Ludlow.
Temporarily dazzled, Kate said goodbye to the theater, honeymooned in Bermuda and even went to look at houses on Philadelphia's Main Line. Then she came to and asked herself: "What am I doing? I couldn't live here." The bridegroom gave everything up, quietly. They left the Main Line for Manhattan, the theater, and a two-room walkup apartment that was short on furniture and long on classical records.