Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,68

few distinctions between his sons and daughters. All of them played touch football, learned to wrestle, swim and sail and were encouraged in the idea that intellect and action are two sides of the same coin, for either sex. Her father was the kind of man Hepburn most admired: “There are men of action and men of thought, and if you ever get a combination of the two, well, that’s the top—you’ve got someone like Dad.” Born in 1907, two years after her parents’ first child, Tom, Hepburn grew up as a very jolly, tree-climbing, trouser-wearing, straight-talking tomboy, devoted to her older brother and awkward with people outside her family circle. When she was twelve a tragedy occured, one that changed her life and seems to have gone some way to forming the actress she became. During a trip to New York, Katharine and Tom went to see the play A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in which there is a scene of a hanging. The next morning, when Katharine went into her brother’s room to wake him, she found him hanging from the rafters by a bedsheet, already dead five hours. He was fifteen. There was a history of suicide on both sides of the family, but her father always believed it a stunt gone wrong. Either way, Hepburn was deeply affected by it. She began to attempt to take on many of her brother’s traits, and in some way to replace him; she spoke of taking up medical studies at Yale, as he had intended to, and became involved in the sports he liked—golf and tennis and diving. Having no real academic ability, she never took that Yale place, but scraped through her exams sufficiently to follow her mother to Bryn Mawr. This college, often ridiculed for its supposed snobbery and bluestocking atmosphere, was where Hepburn began to act, and also—or so her later critics complained—where she picked up that unbelievable accent, that “Bryn Mawr twang,” with its Anglified vowels that combine oddly with the sense that one is being spoken to from a pinnacle of high-Yankee condescension. Her class and ambivalent femininity were to become central to Hepburn’s screen persona and were also the qualities that made her “box office poison” for the best part of a decade. Selznick’s reluctance to let her play Scarlett referred pretty obviously to her body, and we should begin with that. Her great love, Spencer Tracy, put it this way: “There ain’t much meat on her, but what there is, is choice.” And so it was. Slender without being remotely skinny, Hepburn was pretty much one long muscle, devoid of bust, but surprisingly shapely if seen from the back. She could work a dress like any Hollywood starlet, but your heart stopped to see her in a pair of wide slacks and crisp, white shirt. Her face was feline without being flirty, her cheekbones sepulchral but her lips full and generous. Her eyes—and there isn’t a movie star who doesn’t come down to the eyes in the end—had that knack of looking intelligently and passionately into the middle distance, a gaze that presidents strive for and occasionally attain. Her nose was more problematic. It struck some people as noble and full of sprightly character, but for a great deal of others it was too refined, hoydenish and superior. There are certain of her early films where a good 70 percent of the acting is coming from the nose down, and the average 1930s Depression-era moviegoer was not in the mood to be looked down upon through quite so straight and severe an instrument. They didn’t like her much as an aristocratic aviatrix in Christopher Strong (1933), and they liked her even less as an illiterate mountain girl in Spitfire (1934). But to really make them hate you, you might try spending an entire movie dressed as a boy and making Brian Aherne fall in love with you—while you are still dressed as a boy—and then have him say things like, “I don’t know what it is that gives me a queer feeling when I look at you,” as Hepburn did in the transvestite comedy flop Sylvia Scarlett (1935). The Shakespearean references were pretty much lost on her Depression-era American audience, who had other worries and were unwilling to allow much brain space to the homoerotic possibilities of Katharine Hepburn dressed in green suede. Time magazine took the opportunity to point out, “Sylvia Scarlett reveals the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn