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: NOW PLAYING :: IN NEW YORK :: Great Kate “I’m like some weather-beaten monument,” Katharine Hepburn remarked. “People are beginning to realize they’ll miss me when I’m gone.” With the passing of the legendary actress on June 29, IN New York recalls Manhattan’s memories of a titan of stage and screen She was a smash hit in The Philadelphia Story. She rode The African Queen to cinematic glory. And in an incandescent performing career that spanned the 1920s to the 1990s, she traveled throughout Europe to star in some of her 51 theatrical and TV films. But for more than 60 years, New York was the city that Katharine Hepburn called home. Hepburn, age 96, died at her coastal retreat, in Old Saybrook, CT. Its Fenwick section had been her heart and soul since childhood, and it was there that she retired from public life, in 1996. But New York represented her indomitable, independent spirit. In 1933’s Little Women, her character, Jo March, moved to the city to find her voice as an artist, something Hepburn had herself done five years previously. Upon graduation from Bryn Mawr she debuted on Broadway in 1928, in the flop These Days, but in subsequent years called its stages her own in 10 additional productions. Her filmography tells several New York stories that spotlight her tireless resolve: She and her beloved Spencer Tracy sparred over headlines in Woman of the Year (1942), their first screen pairing, argued the funnier points of the law in Adam’s Rib (1949), and clashed over computerization in Desk Set (1957). Audiences adored her Manhattan moxie. This true grit carried over into her personal life. She got her first and only husband, insurance broker Ludlow Ogden Smith (“Luddy”), to change his name to S. Ogden Ludlow—partly so the budding First Lady of Cinema wouldn’t bear the same name as the First Lady of Radio—and persuaded him to leave his native Philadelphia to further her aspirations. She and Smith (or Ludlow, not that she ever used either name) first lived at 146 E. 39th St., then in 1933 moved 10 blocks north, to a townhouse within the Turtle Bay Gardens Historic District between Second and Third Avenues. Each of this urban enclave’s 20 brownstones, 10 on the north side of East 48th Street and 10 on the south side of East 49th St., were restored in the 1920s, and all have their own gardens leading to a common path. Hepburn described her four-story abode on 244 E. 49th St. in her 1991 autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life: “It was for rent furnished—$100 a month. Finally in about 1937 I bought the house for $27,500…I changed a wall to make a big guest room on the top floor. And I put a john in on the ground floor and then—oh yes—I made a fireplace in the bedroom. Its chimney was already there. And I painted the whole thing white and that’s all that’s ever been done. It’s handy and comfortable—faces south and used to be full of sunshine. Now the skyscrapers on the street cut out a lot of the sun—too bad—but it’s quiet and convenient and it’s mine and I like it.” [It can be yours for a cool $10 million today.] Luddy and Hepburn divorced in 1934, though they remained friends, he helping her fix her plumbing while she tended her garden, which bloomed with wildflowers transplanted from Connecticut. The townhouse was mostly a gathering place for close friends, who observed her Yankee hours (up at 4am and in bed by 7pm in later years) and weren’t awestruck by the Oscars she displayed there. Where the social whirl is concerned you’d have had better luck spotting her at the corner deli on Second Avenue then, say, the Smith & Wollensky steakhouse, which opened up her block on 3rd and 49th in 1977. Hepburn, who lived unpretentiously, was not a Greta Garbo-esque recluse. She indulged in monthly deliveries of sweets from Mondel Chocolates on 114th and Broadway and jogged and biked off the few calories that accrued in Central Park. She loved the theater (A Few Good Men was a favorite) and was as passionate about Michael Crawford in Phantom of the Opera as any fan. Speaking of the stage, there is her knotty relationship with composer and fellow Turtle Bay resident Stephen Sondheim, related here by playwright Matthew Lombardo, whose recent off-Broadway play Tea at Five featured another Kate, Mulgrew, as Hepburn. “He started his day at 10pm, by which time Hepburn had been asleep for three hours,” Lombardo says. “He was working on the score for Company. One February morning, at 3am, she had just had it, and marched across the courtyard in her pajamas and bare feet and stared him down through his window. He never played again after 8pm.” [Other sources report that Sondheim was working on 1973’s A Little Night Music, but substituting the 1970 musical gives the story a capper—that the song he was developing at the time of her “visit” was “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.” Whatever the tune, Hepburn said the smoke from her fireplace, stoked with wood she chopped in Connecticut, drove him crazy.] Hepburn joined the Turtle Bay Association upon its founding in 1957. Its president since 1972, Bill Curtis, recalls that she had an abiding interest in keeping the neighborhood low-key and livable. “I used to pass notes under her door, asking her to write letters or take a public stance about community issues.” She took to the streets, Sondheim-style, when a more personal approach was needed. “When One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza was going up, a metal rope came loose and was ratcheting in the wind, making a whacking sound that echoed through the gardens. The police were called, but she had already figured out where the noise was coming from and, putting on a babushka, she stormed over to the site and made the watchman call the owner. “Can it!” she said into the phone. The noise was gone the next day. That really illustrates how she worked with us,” Curtis chuckles. The Association worked with her in arranging a signal that would keep the distraction of tour buses at a minimum. “She put a bust of herself in the window,” Curtis says. “If the bust was turned outwards, the bus was allowed to slow down so passengers could gawk. But if it was turned inwards, the driver would know not to linger, and he would say something like ‘There lives the legendary Katharine Hepburn’ as the bus zoomed by.” The actress’ contributions to urban conservation have been commemorated by the association in the Katherine Hepburn Garden in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, located on East 47th Street between First and Second Avenues. The half-acre patch of green, in a neighborhood that previously had less parkland than any other in New York City, was dedicated to her on May 12, 1997, her 90th birthday. She had departed Manhattan for Old Saybrook by then but landscape architect George Vellonakis updated her on its progress with photos and films. “The more I learned about her and her love of gardening, the more I knew how appropriate an informal woodland setting, with birch trees and ferns and other plants that grow well in the shade, was for her,” he says. The garden’s meandering walkway includes stepping stones with some of her famous sayings inscribed on them. New Yorkers have added their own remembrances of the performer to a makeshift memorial that took root outside the garden the day she died. They would be pleased to know that Hepburn had a keepsake of her Manhattan years with her in Connecticut. “I had the opportunity to visit her in Old Saybrook as the park was opening,” Vellonakis says. “I brought some of the signage with me, with her name on it. I’m told she kept it in the sunniest room in her house, the one with the most beautiful exposures. And I believe she still had it when she passed away.”