13 Times Katharine Hepburn Was Queer Perfection

From: NewNowNext

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The Ladies

Hepburn was linked early on to socialite Laura Harding, though the American Express heiress was often referred to as her “friend” or “secretary.” It was the first of many intimate relationships with other women, including Nancy Hamilton, her understudy in The Warrior’s Husband; artist Frances Rich, who sculpted a bust of Hepburn, and Phyllis Wilbourn, her “companion,” of more than 30 years. (Hepburn even jokingly referred to Wilbourn as “My Alice B. Toklas.”

Whether these were lesbian relationships as we understand today is hard to pin down: “’Lesbian’ was, for Hepburn, a specific term to describe a very butch woman, not her type at all,” wrote Catherine Shroad in Telegraph.

Hepburn just wasn’t a huge fan of sex, with men or women. “The chasteness of almost all her relationships meant she didn’t have to lie too much about them,” adds Shroad.

She was only married once, at age 21 to businessman Ludlow Ogden Smith, but split when she went to Hollywood four years later. Hepburn never remarried—insisting “I liked the idea of being my own single self”—and never had any children. “I would have been a terrible mother,” she told biographer A. Scott Berg, “because I’m basically a very selfish human being.”