Katharine Hepburn

In October 1991, at eighty-four, the actress Katharine Hepburn told the Ladies' Home Journal that she was an atheist, and that was that. She believed, she said, that there was nothing we could know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we could for other people.¹ That year she published her memoir, Me.² It was the plainest thing she ever said about God, and it was not the last.

This chapter asks where her unbelief came from, since it seems she had no faith to lose, and why, in her last years, she talked about it in softer words.

Two families that left the church

She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on 12 May 1907, the second of six children.³ Her mother's parents, the Houghtons, were, in her own account, freethinkers who went to all the lectures of Robert Ingersoll, "the great agnostic," and had left the established church; a biographer writes that her grandfather Fred Houghton had become under Ingersoll's influence a freethinker, a scoffer and an atheist.⁴⁵ He died in 1892, and no minister prayed at his burial; his wife died two years later.⁶ Their daughter Kathy, the actress's mother, stopped going to church as a girl.⁷

Her father's father was an Episcopal minister who never earned more than six hundred dollars a year.⁸ Her father, Thomas Hepburn, a urologist at Hartford Hospital, rejected his father's religion; by a biographer's account he called Christianity bunk and said he had never believed a word his preacher father said.⁹¹⁰ On the belief timeline, this first mark is an inheritance, not a faith.

The Hartford house

Her parents were reformers. Her father worked against venereal disease; by 1913 he was secretary of the Connecticut Society of Social Hygiene.¹¹ Her mother co-founded the Hartford Equal Franchise League, led the Connecticut suffragists, and later campaigned for birth control as an ally of Margaret Sanger; in January 1934 she led the birth-control advocates at a congressional hearing at which the radio priest Charles Coughlin spoke against them.¹²¹³ At home the children heard medicine, politics and social questions discussed at the table, and were encouraged to argue any subject; guests at tea included Emmeline Pankhurst, Margaret Sanger and Rebecca West; on Sundays the family walked in the hills and hunted wildflowers. No source mentions church.¹⁴ She called herself the product of two very remarkable parents.¹⁵

The Catholic Church gave the formal answer to her mother's cause in 1930, when Pope Pius XI declared in the encyclical Casti Connubii that any deliberate frustration of the act of marriage's power to generate life was an offence against the law of God and of nature, and a grave sin.¹⁶ No reasoned religious criticism aimed at Hepburn herself has been found.

Tom

On 30 March 1921 her elder brother Tom, fifteen, was found dead in New York, at the house of their aunt Mary Towle, during the Easter school holiday; she was thirteen, though she wrote fourteen. The papers first reported suicide; the family held that it was an accident, and accounts still differ.¹⁷¹⁸ Tom was cremated and buried at Cedar Hill in Hartford with a short prayer from his grandfather; their mother never spoke of him afterwards.¹⁹ One biographer writes that after seeing Tom dead she no longer believed in a benign destiny or in a life after death; that is his inference, not her statement.²⁰ For years she gave Tom's birthday, 8 November, as her own.²¹ The timeline places her loss here, but what was lost was not a creed; it was a test of an unbelief she already had.

Bryn Mawr and the stage

She went to Bryn Mawr, her mother's college, in 1924.²² Once, she wrote in her memoir, in the years when she was close to the agent Leland Hayward, a doctor at a dinner asked her about God, and she answered that of course she believed in God, but what she meant by God might not be what he meant; he froze with horror, she wrote, left, and was never seen again.²³ Her friend the writer Garson Kanin described her in 1971 as an atheist, an agnostic or a freethinker, depending on one's understanding of the labels, and as practising Albert Schweitzer's reverence for life; yet when Spencer Tracy, her companion of many years and a devout Catholic, died in 1967, she placed in his coffin a St Christopher, a piece of marble and his rosary.²⁴²⁵ By Wikipedia's account, she stayed away from his funeral for his family's sake.²⁵ In 1985, Wikipedia says, the American Humanist Association gave her its arts award.²⁶

Declaration and second thoughts

Her one plain declaration came in 1991: she was an atheist, and she believed in kindness.¹ That is where the timeline places her declaration. But in talks with her biographer A. Scott Berg, over the last two decades of her life, she spoke differently. Looking at a flower, she asked how anyone could not believe in God, or in some higher power at work in the universe greater than man; she said she did not believe man was the supreme being; she thought Jesus had lived and been an exemplary human being, but could not honestly say he was the son of God; and she did not really believe in heaven and hell, only in the here and now. Berg wrote that she was always more at home with the physical than the metaphysical, and uncomfortable with religion.²⁷ On the timeline, this is her revision: the label softens, but the substance hardly moves. In her eighties, by Wikipedia's account, she said she had no fear of death, which must be like a long sleep.²⁸

She died at the family's summer house at Fenwick, Connecticut, on 29 June 2003, and at her request there was no memorial service; she was buried at Cedar Hill in Hartford.²⁹

Did her unbelief change shape?

She inherited it. Her grandparents left the church for Ingersoll, her father dismissed his own father's religion, and her mother stopped going to church as a girl; in the Hartford house there was no faith to lose. Her brother's death at thirteen tested it, and it held. She was vague for most of her life, then plain once, at eighty-four, and vague again at the end, when a flower could make her speak of a higher power. Through all of it the creed she named was the one she had learned at home: kindness, and doing what one could for other people.

Robert G. Ingersoll, whose lectures her grandparents went to and whose freethinking came down to her through her mother, has his own chapter in this book.