Bob Dylan’s dog terrorised Katharine Hepburn by pooping on her lawn
We’ve all had bad neighbours – it’s one of the inescapable aspects of modern life. But if you think money and fame can save you from the torment of living next to somebody determined to make your daily existence a living nightmare, think again. Even Hollywood icon Katharine Hepburn couldn’t stop Bob Dylan’s dog from crapping in her yard.
Dylan didn’t have the troubled home life of many of his contemporaries, but he certainly wasn’t happy with life in a small midwestern mining town. By the time he made that final break for New York in the winter of 1961, Dylan had already tried to escape Hibbing, Minnesota, seven times. Knowingly cultivating his image, Dylan told the New Yorker in 1964: “I kept running because I wasn’t free. I was constantly on guard. Somehow, way back then, I already knew that parents do what they do because they’re uptight. They’re concerned with their kids in relation to themselves. I mean, they want their kids to please them, not to embarrass them — so they can be proud of them. They want you to be what they want you to be. So I started running when I was ten. But always I’d get picked up and sent home.”
When he finally made it to New York, Dylan wound up in the bohemian district of Greenwich village. He would later relocate to the more upmarket Turtle Bay neighbourhood, where he lived next to a rather famous actress called Katharine Hepburn, who was well into her autumn years by the time young Dylan came along, having spent most of her adult life in Manhattan.
“Katharine Hepburn lived next door, and Bob’s dog Brutus would shit in her flowerbed all the time,” Victor Maymudes, Dylan’s tour manager, writes in his book Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and Off the Tracks. “Katharine, however, loved Brutus. Brutus never lay down in her flowerbed, which was her fear since he was a 160-pound dog, and he covered a big area. She would spend her time out gardening every day in the summertime. Brutus seemed to love taking a crap there, and I think it was due to the fertilizer that she was using. Maybe, he wanted to help out or just thought that the flowerbed was the spot for his poop since there was already poop there. He was actually a very conscientious dog.”
He may have been conscientious, but Brutus was still a Bullmastiff and could easily have been saddled up and ridden into Times Square had the need arisen. Hepburn was patient but would occasionally approach Maymudes to ask for his help picking up the dog’s debris. “Katharine would come over, looking very well put together, and say, ‘Victor?’ in a sweet voice, and I would instantly know to grab a plastic bag, because Brutus probably left a five-pound turd in her flowers,” he recalled. “The dog could really lay some logs. I think if it was a small dog, she wouldn’t have cared. But with Brutus it was truly a landmine.”
Now, if that doesn’t make you think twice about the title of Dylan’s ‘If Dogs Run Free’, then I don’t know what will.
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