She wasn’t really our aunt, but we’d always called her ‘Auntie.’ Whenever we visited her, it meant seeing many plays, seeing all the wondrous sights of New York City, and eating in lovely restaurants. After we celebrated Easter with our family, we went to New York to stay with Aunt Mary Towle, who was a lawyer and had her own lovely little house in Greenwich Village. For the Easter school vacation, Tom and I were given a trip to visit a dear friend of Mother’s who had been at Bryn Mawr with her. “He had not yet had his sixteenth birthday. I wanted to run fast into life, not just to walk, and I wanted to run toward life with Tom. I wanted so to keep up with his long-legged strides. When I was just barely walking, he was running with me. At two, two and a half, I remember him holding my hand and showing me the ropes and how to swing on them, how to get along in life. He never regarded me as the little sister he had to drag along. “Tom was my best friend from the first moment I can remember. It was a nightmare that was real, and I was never going to wake up from it. I thought we were like twins, even though he was two years older. We were so close, how could I not have shared his pain? I couldn’t bear it. “If something had made him so unhappy that he no longer wanted to live, why hadn’t he shared his trouble with me? I could have helped him. And then, suddenly, he wasn’t there for me. I felt it so deeply that he would be there for me, that I could always count on him. “I had a wonderfully warm feeling in my soul. I believed it because I couldn’t bear to believe otherwise.
“I was almost fourteen when Tom, my absolute hero-whom I loved and worshipped-had, what I call in my head, his ‘accident.’ I was the only one who believed it was an accident. “What I meant by it was that I wanted to be independent, to separate myself from all the others and never again to care so much about another person, so I would never feel the pain I felt when Tom left me. “It’s a word I made up for myself when my teenage brother hanged himself. “‘Onliness’ is my word for what I call my philosophy of life,” Katharine Hepburn told me.
She is a member of the board of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and lives in New York City. Charlotte Chandler is the author of several biographies of actors and directors, including Groucho Marx, Federico Fellini, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Crawford, and Mae West, all of whom she interviewed extensively.
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