Tom and Katharine, the two eldest, were especially close. “They were both good at athletics, boating, sailing and tree climbing. They both enjoyed theater and were interested in silent movies,” says William J. Mann, author of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn.
Little Katharine, who was a decade older than her sisters, realized one day that boys had more fun. So at 9, she cut off her hair and told her family to call her Jimmy. “I think it was rooted in her mother’s experience of being abused and disrespected,” said Mundy. “Kate took one look and thought, ‘They don’t treat my brothers the way they treat me, so I’ll be Jimmy.'”
On an Easter week visit to her aunt’s home in New York City, Katharine, then 13, went to wake her brother Tom and found him dead. He had hanged himself using a length of torn bedsheet.
In the years that followed, Tom was rarely mentioned within the family. They came from the era of “just deal with it,” explained Munday, who noted his father, playwright Richard Hepburn, witnessed Dr. Hepburn’s private grief only once. “He told me, ‘I remember seeing my father with his head in his hands, crumpled up and saying, ‘Why? Why?””
Tom’s death hit Katharine hard, too. She assumed her brother’s Nov. 8, 1905, birthday as her own – only revealing her true birth date in her 1991 memoir, Me: Stories of My Life. “I think that she began living for Tom,” said Mann. “Much of her rebellion might have come from Tom being denied a chance to live the way he wanted. So she did it for both of them.”