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53 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Really rather boring as well as pointless, December 18, 2006
Unless the purpose of the book was only to "out" Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and, apparently, everyone else Kate knew, in which it tries very hard to achieve its objective.
I found the book to be difficult to read, and often difficult to believe. So many things didn't add up, and I often found myself thinking "now, how did the author know that?" Mann uses a lot of innuendo, and in order to actually KNOW the things he claims, he would have had to have been in the bedrooms of the people involved.
I read a lot of good reviews before purchasing the book, and can only say I was disappointed. After the first chapter I GOT the idea - Kate was gay or bisexual, at least in the author's opinion - so much paper could have been saved without the rest of the book.
When I was about 10, I was a tomboy. I wanted to be a boy. I buy and wear men's jeans because they fit better. I played with my brothers and their friends, not my sister or "dumb dolls". God only knows where the author could go with that information. When I was older, I had close female friends, and close male friends - with that information, the author could write a similar book about me, I think. Except I've never been sexually attracted to other women, and I'm happily married.
My real problem with the book, aside from the fact that it was not interesting reading, is that I couldn't understand why someone would write a book trying to prove a person was gay or bisexual. It just got tedious after a while.
One can always find "someone" who said "something", and the author did have an agenda. Whether or not Kate was bisexual or gay does not a book make. Speculation about it makes even less of a book.
This was not the definitive bio of Kate that people claimed it was. The author started with a thesis, or opinion, and set out to prove it - to me, not very successfully. Perhaps one day there will be a definitive biography of Hepburn. Possibly her sexuality will be part of it - the small part that it should be when one writes about a life. I look forward to that book.
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44 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not Very Credible, March 24, 2007
Hi, the account-holder's daughter here. I do not reflect the opinion of the person who has this account.
I will not talk about Hepburn's sexuality, because the only person who knew for sure is dead. Instead, I will point out that this book makes many factual errors. It claims that Hepburn had a hysterectomy, ignoring the fact that Hepburn mentions having her period in 1951, eighteen years after the supposed surgery. It gets Spencer Tracy's drinking habits entirely wrong- he was a binge drinker, not a regular drinker. The author uses a witness, Scotty, who has said before that he has lied to biographers. Mann also takes comments out of context and manipulates them to suit his own purposes. An example here:
Mann told an interviewer that Hepburn told Dick Cavett she was a "missing link" between the genders, to support his theory that Hepburn was transgender. Wrong! Though she did say "missing link", it was to refer to her position in the family (her younger siblings were all much younger than she- thus a "missing link" between children and parents), not her gender at all.
Maybe Hepburn was bisexual, or lesbian. Maybe her relationship with Spencer Tracy was exaggerated. And perhaps she was, in fact, transgender. There's no problem in that. However, I personally would need a more credible source than what Mann has provided.
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beautifully written with a few flaws, December 16, 2008
I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Kate." I went into this biography with very little previous knowledge of Katherine Hepburn. I found it interesting that Mann took the approach of debunking all previous accounts of Hepburn's life and portraying how the legend was built. Mann does a great job of showing Hepburn's ability to recreate her career many times and stay relevant in order to sustain a permanent presence in American culture. While many actresses of her generation settled for unfulfilling roles, Kate somehow did things on her terms with her career and personal life until close to her death.
However, there were parts of the book that became increasingly redundant. For all Mann's talent and obvious research, when it came to proving a point that I felt was his agenda, he used some unreliable sources and pure speculation. I could accept the fact that Katherine Hepburn and everyone around her was gay or bisexual with sufficient evidence. When Mann found research to prove his point he considered it valid. However, when anyone was quoted suggesting otherwise from his point, he completely discounted the source. For such a well versed writer, he could have been more objective. Many times he goes off about things such as gay hollywood or the lack of physicality in Hepburn's relationships so much so that his agenda comes across very clear. In trying to prove that Hepburn is a unique and uncatagorical person, he does just the opposite and puts her in a box. He is unable to think that she could simply have close friendships with women or a physical relationship with anyone. In trying to prove his point on Hepburn's sexuality, he sinks to using what comes across as unreliable sources such as "Scotty, the hustler." He often times speculates about what things in Hepburn's life really meant to her or what her motives were without giving anything concrete to back it up. He assumes that every action Hepburn took has a motive behind it or is not representative of her true self.
Overall, despite Mann's flaws in proving his agenda, the book only makes Katherine Hepburn more facsinating. By the end of the book, it seems that Mann is even amazed by how sucessfully she built her legend. He does a great job with his writing and keeping the reader interested, but because of his specualtion in so many areas I had to take the book with a grain of salt.
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