Education: As If She Were a Governess

Led by a stern and energetic old lady, a file of young girls dressed in blue jumpers and white blouses, their arms laden with daffodils, trooped across Manhattan’s fashionable upper East Side. The girls marched into Central Park, gathered at the statue of William Shakespeare, knelt, and sang Hark, Hark the Lark in homage to the Bard.

It was the kind of educational outing that Caroline Danella Hewitt liked best: cheerful, wholesome and just a bit theatrical. And it was the kind of expedition that endeared Miss Hewitt to the students of Miss Hewitt’s Classes, the stylish girls’ school that last week mourned the death of “Misshew” at 89. “She had a strictly personal approach,” recalled one alumna, “as if she were a governess and we were her little children.” Added Actress Julie Harris, a member of the Grosse Pointe, Mich, smart set. who lived with Miss Hewitt for more than a year after graduation while she tried to crack Broadway: “Something has gone out of my life.”

Single & Happy. Perhaps influenced by the fact that she was born only seven miles from Stratford-on-Avon, Miss Hewitt was stage-struck all her life, but considered herself too plain-looking for acting. “She looked like Churchill,” said an old friend, “and when she got mad, like Queen Mary.” Quitting the theatrical fringe of London in 1892, Miss Hewitt sailed for America to tutor the children of a Tuxedo Park family and then to teach small groups of children who met in socialite New York apartments. She started Miss Hewitt’s Classes in 1920, backed by loans (soon repaid, with interest) from the parents of blue-chip pupils: Astors, Biddies, Vanderbilts. Whitneys, Harrimans, Pulitzers.

A spinster who unapologetically “traded on my love for children,” Miss Hewitt prospered. Her love of the theater encouraged such later stars as Julie Harris and Lee Remick (class of ’53), while her firm stage manager’s hand gave it the reputation as a “good solid school for girls,” which attracted Oveta Gulp Hobby’s daughter Jessica, Edsel Ford’s daughter Dodie, and 489 other graduates whose fathers paid fees up to $1,300 a year for day sessions and $3,000 for boarding.

Proper & English. An American by residence, Miss Hewitt came to dote on Wild West sagas, Civil War exploits. But by citizenship and temperament she remained forever England. She drank Scotch whisky, disguised modesty with a tart tongue, concealed generosity by demanding high standards. She was also properly foresighted. Anticipating her death. Miss Hewitt had mailed her own obituary to Mrs. Ogden Reid, onetime publisher of the New York Herald Tribune.