Katharine Hepburn Talks to Lee Israel

The Last of the Honest-to-God Ladies

A profile of Katharine Hepburn, excerpted from "Last of the Honest-to-God Ladies" by Lee Israel from Esquire, November 1, 1967

"My father had two suits. If one was dirty the other could go to the cleaners. He had two pairs of shoes and he said, ‘Don’t clutter your life.’ His father had said before him, you can shave with hand soap—don’t become dependent on shaving soap. Don’t fill your life with a lot of junk. And it’s just so much junk, isn’t it? How you look from day to day? You should be clean, that’s the only quarrel I have with a lot of the kids today. But I don’t think one should tie oneself into getting all gussied up. And especially at my age! Who the hell am I going to get gussied up for? I don’t expect and I don’t want to attract anyone.

"It’s just that these kids don’t really know what they want to do. It’s better to make up your mind and do something—do the wrong thing—than to do nothing. My dad always said—and I understand what he meant, though I don’t necessarily agree with him entirely—‘Answer the letter! Keep your desk clear! Make it definite! If there’s a pause in the conversation, come forth with an answer. What the hell—you might be right, you might be wrong—but don’t just avoid!’

“I think life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around and wondering about yourself. You gotta do something and it opens up new fields. You can’t sit around and look inward. It’s a very very dangerous thing to do.

“All the psychoanalysis, all the different pills you can take—it’s all terribly unhealthy. People talk to a psychoanalyst. I couldn’t talk to anybody, not anybody in the whole bloody world about myself. Would be incapable of it. Wouldn’t want to. Would feel as though I’d cut my soul, cut my privacy, and left it behind. I could not honestly respond. I wouldn’t want anybody to know certain things about me because I wouldn’t even be sure that I knew them myself. This passion for disclosing everything—one wonders how much of it is real or whether people make it up. They all go to psychoanalysts. There isn’t a person in the world whom I respect enough to really go into a deep discussion of my problems.”

"I don’t regret anything. I don’t believe in regretting things. But you can say that I’m sad about a lot of things. I’m sad that I wasn’t a great painter or a great writer, didn’t have a marvelous political career, didn’t follow in my family’s tradition and turn out to be a great reformer. There are a million things that I would like to have done. But you can’t do everything. You should try to do what you do, well. And I’m very realistic, very Scotch. I know and have known all along what my position was. I know what my values are to other people; I also know what my values are to myself. It’s fine to be admired, but it’s much more important to know that you’re worth admiring in certain departments.”