Hepburn had been prompted to speak that night by actor Keir Dullea, who was then on Broadway in Butterflies Are Free. The telegram Dullea sent Hepburn on May 7 and the handwritten speech she delivered the following evening are part of Hepburn’s theatre-related papers, which were donated by her estate to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in fall 2007, four years after her death. (Hepburn’s film-related papers were sent to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, Calif.)
To celebrate the acquisition of the Hepburn papers, the library is presenting a series of programs at which the star’s friends and colleagues will reminisce and read from items in the collection. The series began Feb. 19 with an evening featuring Zoe Caldwell and Sam Waterston (at which the Kent State speech was read). The remaining evenings include appearances by director Anthony Harvey (March 31), Hepburn’s niece Katharine Houghton and good friend Charlotte Moore (April 12), and Dick Cavett and Marian Seldes (April 28).
Hepburn’s papers include letters, congratulatory telegrams, and fan mail. Alan Pally, the library’s manager of public programs, noted that Hepburn was a diligent correspondent and that her treasure trove arrived at the library in relatively good condition. “Normally when you get somebody’s collection,” he said, “you don’t get the letters they wrote. Those are in somebody else’s collection. But Kate sometimes scrawled the response on the bottom of a letter that she’d got, so that Phyllis [Wilbourn], her assistant, could then type the letter and send it off. So sometimes we do have her side of the story.”
Long an admirer of Hepburn’s work, Pally gained a greater appreciation for her while preparing the series. He was especially impressed with the depth of her political convictions, as evidenced in her Kent State speech, and believes that her progressive politics were due in part to her parents’ example. “Her father was a physician who believed the truth will always make everything all right,” he said. “Her mother was a pretty active suffragette.”

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