Seventy years later, Hepburn remained non-committal and unwilling to criticize her family’s response or even admit that Tom died by suicide. The family rarely if ever spoke of him again. Her father wrote to the papers, claiming his son had simply been doing a rope trick. The Hepburn family’s response to Tom’s apparant suicide is shocking to modern sensibilities. In a state of numb shock, I cut him down and laid him on the bed.” There he was-next to the bed-his knees bent-hanged by a torn piece of sheeting. “Next morning, I went upstairs to wake him up. In muddled, removed prose, Hepburn describes the “facts” as she recalls them. “As I later told the story,” Hepburn writes, “I said that Tom had looked at me and said, ’You’re my girl, aren’t you? You’re my favorite girl in the whole world.’ Why did I say this? Was it true? I mean, did Tom really say it? I don’t know any longer.” One night, they went to see A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court on Broadway. In April 1921, the two siblings were on an adventure in New York City, staying with a family friend. There was certainly trouble brewing in her older brother Tom, a sensitive, athletic boy who was the 14-year-old Hepburn’s constant companion. While Hepburn herself is honest that her family’s activism made them outcasts in proper society, she is mum about how her parents’ emphasis on principled perfectionism may have negatively affected her and her siblings.
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