With Great Generosity, Hepburn Touched Us

I just learned of the death of Katharine Hepburn (obituary, June 30). In 1976, I worked with her (I was second-unit director and stunt/crash pilot) on a low-budget feature, “Olly, Olly, Oxen Free,” in which she played a junk lady who rebuilds her late husband’s balloon and flies it, with two young boys, from Napa Valley down to Los Angeles, where she crashes into the Hollywood Bowl during the playing of the 1812 Overture.

During the filming, she wanted to do her own stunts -- even to flying in the balloon during the crash into the orchestra pit. She went out of her way to help the production company beyond what she was contractually obligated to do. (She had every contingency covered -- her contract was larger than the script!)

But what made the greatest impression on me occurred at the wrap party. She surprised us when she gave each and every one of us, down to the lowest member of the crew, a present based on our interests. I received an expensive Swiss-published coffee-table book on ballooning. She had spent her spare time on the set drawing each of us into conversation and finding out our interests, and had picked out what she wanted to give each of us. That never happened on any other film that I ever worked on.

She was a class act and I’m proud to have known her.

Dean S. Engelhardt

Covina

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Katharine Hepburn is, and will continue to be, a role model to any woman who wishes to be feminine yet self-reliant, and willing -- when the right person comes along -- to commit to one great relationship. Millions of women consider her a mentor, and much has been written, and will be written, about Miss Hepburn’s influence on individual lives. However, a comment by Mariel Hemingway some years ago may best encapsulate our feelings: When asked by a reporter why she kept a photo of Hepburn, Hemingway replied, without elaboration, “I love her.”

Like Hepburn, I am an avowed agnostic. All the same, I wish her Godspeed and a joyous reunion with her “Spence.” And who knows? Perhaps their special chemistry is indeed lighting up the heavens, much as it has for more than five decades upon the screen.

Janet Whitcomb

Rancho Santa Margarita