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TL;DR:

  • Bob Dylan and Katharine Hepburn were neighbors in New York City.
  • Bob Dylan’s dog was a problem for Katharine Hepburn.
  • The musician mentions dogs in a song.
A black and white picture of Bob Dylan standing near a window. Katharine Hepburn sits on a couch.
Bob Dylan and Katharine Hepburn | Express Newspapers/Getty Images; Clarence Sinclair Bull/Underwood Archives/Getty Images

Bob Dylan and Katharine Hepburn were neighbors in New York. The two celebrities rose to fame in different eras but got along. Hepburn spent many summer afternoons in her garden, which Dylan inadvertently threatened. He had a large dog who often went to the bathroom in her garden. Dylan’s tour manager said he often had to deal with the mess that Dylan’s dog left behind. 

Bob Dylan and Katharine Hepburn lived in New York

Dylan was born in Minnesota and, according to him, consistently tried to escape the state. He ran away from home seven times as a child.

“I kept running because I wasn’t free,” he told The New Yorker in 1964. “I was constantly on guard. Somehow, way back then, I already knew that parents do what they do because they’re up tight. 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.”

Eventually, Dylan left his home state for good and moved to New York. Hepburn also spent much of her adult life in Manhattan, living in the Turtle Bay neighborhood for decades.

Bob Dylan walked his dog past Katharine Hepburn’s home

Dylan and Hepburn were neighbors for a time. While Dylan wasn’t a bad neighbor to her, she had a bit of a problem with his dog. 

“Katharine Hepburn lived next door, and Bob’s dog Brutus would s*** in her flowerbed all the time,” Dylan’s tour manager Victor Maymudes wrote in the 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.”

Maymudes said that while Hepburn loved the dog, she always made it clear when he had made a mess of her garden.

“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 wrote. “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.”

The American singer has written about dogs

Dylan was a pet owner, and he wrote a song about dogs in 1970 called “If Dogs Run Free.”

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“If dogs run free, then what must be/Must be, and that is all/True love can make a blade of grass/Stand up straight and tall/In harmony with the cosmic sea,” he sings.

In 2013, Dylan released an illustrated children’s book of the same name in an interpretation of the song.

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