Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turtle Bay neighbourhood on the east side of Midtown Manhattan was a ‘riverside back yard’ for the city of New York. Imposing brownstones and squalid tenement housing butted up against the breweries, gasworks, and slaughterhouses which lined the waterfront.

Eventually the waterfront would be reshaped by the United Nations headquarters, with dozens of diplomatic missions cropping up in its wake. But by 1930, the economic boom of the twenties had already begun to transform the neighbourhood, with the Tudor City complex and the Beaux-Arts Apartments offering fresh perspectives on modern city living, while the Chrysler Building towards Grand Central Station stood as the tallest building in the world, if only for eleven months.

The area was home to the Daily News Building, another pioneering Art Deco construct, and the headquarters of the rival New York Daily Mirror by William Randolph Hearst. Music schools, antique shops, and cultural venues began to line the streets in the northern part of the district. Modern sanitation had managed to rid Turtle Bay of much of the old stench.

East 48th Street and East 49th Street would soon welcome some of the first modernist dwellings in New York City, in the form of the combined studios and apartments of the architects William Lescaze, Michael Hare, and Morris B. Sanders. Yet the area already boasted an architectural gem by way of the Turtle Bay Gardens, a collection of twenty rowhouses which were purchased by Charlotte Hunnewell Sorchan in 1918 and renovated by the architects Edward C. Dean and William L. Bottomley.

Stretching four stories high, the architects replaced the old facades of the brownstones with pastel stucco, and reoriented the houses so that the service areas faced the street while the living quarters looked out onto a communal back garden. In a Mediterranean style, set between flowers and shrubbery, the garden featured two old willow trees, wrought iron benches, and a fountain inspired by the Borghese gardens and the Villa Medici in Rome.

Each individual courtyard was separated from the shared garden and esplanade by brick walls of no more than several feet. When the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Turtle Bay Gardens Historic District in 1966, the garden was described as an ‘oasis’ amid the bustle of the city.

In 1931, a promising young actress by the name of Katharine Hepburn moved into one of the Turtle Bay Gardens townhouses. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College with a degree in history and philosophy, she had received mixed notices while bounding between Broadway and stock theatre companies in Baltimore, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

In December of 1928, while serving as the lead understudy for the Philip Barry play Holiday on Broadway, Hepburn had married her college acquaintance Ludlow Ogden Smith, a businessman from Philadelphia who was eight years her senior. While the couple would remain lifelong friends, Hepburn admitted that she was never fully committed to the marriage, and in 1934 she travelled to Mexico to secure a swift divorce. By that time she had embarked on a successful career in Hollywood, earning a long-term contract with RKO while films like Morning Glory and Little Women won popular acclaim and Academy Awards.

Hepburn kept the Turtle Bay Gardens house after her divorce from Ogden Ludlow, eager to still prove herself on the Broadway stage. The townhouse would remain her home for the next sixty years, as she became the outright owner in 1937 and lived there off and on all the way through to the mid-nineties. In 1997, the Katharine Hepburn Garden was dedicated in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, and after her death in 2003, the intersection of Second Avenue and East 49th Street was renamed Katharine Hepburn Place.

Early neighbours in Turtle Bay Gardens included Maria Bowen Chapin, the founder of the all-girl independent Chapin School. In the forties, one of the most famous residents of the neighbourhood was the writer E. B. White, who authored the popular children’s books Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web.

For many years, Hepburn lived next door to Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, the actors and playwrights who wrote the classic comedy films Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike for Hepburn and her longtime partner Spencer Tracy, two of their close friends. Then in 1960, Hepburn gained another next-door neighbour, as Stephen Sondheim moved across from her in Turtle Bay Gardens, piano and all.

Sondheim had been persuaded to write the lyrics for the musical Gypsy, a Broadway smash when the production had opened the previous May. With the proceeds he would make a permanent home in Turtle Bay Gardens, surviving a fire in 1995 and continuing to live there with his two black poodles and Baldwin piano on into old age.

Ten years on from the success of Gypsy, as Sondheim would later recall, he heard a loud banging on the French doors of his townhouse, and was greeted by an ‘angry, red-faced lady’ in bare feet. Katharine Hepburn was raging, as she was in the middle of preparations for her sole Broadway musical Coco, and argued that Sondheim’s piano playing had kept her awake all night long. Sondheim said:

‘I remember asking Hepburn why she didn’t just call me, but she claimed not to have my phone number. My guess is that she wanted to stand there in her bare feet, suffering for her art.’

In fact Sondheim was hosting a dinner as he commenced work on his new musical Company, with his guests that night including the director Hal Prince. They had been discussing the withdrawal of Anthony Perkins from rehearsals, with the lead role in Company eventually going to Dean Jones, whose participation would also prove short-lived. As the evening grew livelier, songs from the score cut above the sounds of rainfall and howling winds. The following day, Prince bought Sondheim an electric piano, so that the composer could use earplugs and leave Hepburn in peace.

There were other encounters between the two famous neighbours across the courtyards of Turtle Bay. Several years later, Hepburn could summon a similar anecdote from the time when Sondheim was working on his 1973 musical A Little Night Music. As the composer sat down for another spell by the piano, Hepburn ‘nearly went mad’. She said:

‘One night, in a fury, I walked barefoot through the snow in the backyard, just wearing my pajamas, and pressed my face against the window and looked in. I must have looked like an old witch. He had a friend with him, and they had drinks in their hands. All of a sudden they both looked at me and absolutely froze. I just stood there. Seconds passed. They just stared at me. I stared at them. I disappeared. Afterwards, silence.’

In the early nineties, the producers Joan Kramer and David Heeley had completed the documentary Fonda on Fonda and were ready to turn their attentions towards Katharine Hepburn. Eschewing the idea of Jane Fonda as narrator, Hepburn herself was more than up to the task. She asked that the documentary last longer than one hour, and sent the producers a collection of home movies stretching back to the twenties and thirties, including footage shot by her ex-husband ‘Luddy’ Ogden Smith.

After visiting Hepburn at her other home in Fenwick, an historic district of Connecticut which flows into Long Island Sound, the threat of a storm forced Hepburn and the crew to decamp for New York. At the East 49th Street townhouse, Kramer and Heeley filmed Hepburn in her favourite chair, conversing on the telephone in a series of ad-libs. Then at Hepburn’s suggestion, it was decided that they would reenact the scene which occurred every time the award-winning actress headed to Connecticut for the weekend. Hepburn said:

‘It’s like a circus. We take enough stuff for a month – food, clothes, and all the flowers. I never leave the flowers behind.’

Hepburn’s assistant Phyllis led the way, ambling out of the house with a bottle of Scotch, followed by her housekeeper Norah armed with bundles of clothes, and her driver Jimmy who piled boxes of food into the trunk. Hepburn was last out to the car, hurrying along with a potful of red flowers. She handed them to Phyllis in the back seat, and they went for a short drive round the block before returning for another take. As Hepburn strode back into the house, she turned to Heeley and said:

‘“When you’ve finished this shot, don’t let me forget to return the plant.”

“What plant?” I asked.

“My neighbor’s,” she said. “All the flowers I have are pink and white – and they’d look rather dull on camera. No contrast. So I picked up this pot of red geraniums from next door. Stephen Sondheim lives there. And his assistant came out and said, ‘Why are you stealing our plant?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll give it back. We’re shooting a movie, and I need a bright color.’ So, David, make sure I remember.”’

After three takes, Hepburn returned the plant, but when the party really took off for Connecticut the following week, the same shock of red was needed for the sake of continuity. When Hepburn once more snatched up Sondheim’s plant, his assistant appeared at the front door and said:

‘“Kate, what are you doing now?”

She said, “I’ll bring it back next week. I need it for the film when we unpack the car in Fenwick.” True to her word, she returned it several days later.’