Customer Reviews

Katharine the Great: A Lifetime of Secrets Revealed... (1907-1950)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Just ew. In addition to being truly painfully written, this is gross. Nothing is sourced, all the dialogue (no matter who allegedly spoke it) uses exactly the same vocabulary, intonation, etc., and overall the book seems to be more about the author (whom I now believe is in desperate need of psychiatric help) than about Katharine Hepburn. Interesting, also, that all the so-called "scandalous" material seems to come from only a few people, none of whom have ever been anything but remotely associated with Hepburn. The author seems to be in constant need to drive home the shock value of his assertions: Hepburn was bisexual! She was promiscuous! and etc. Even if she was (which he definitely has not managed to prove), so what? She still stands as one of the greatest and most talented actors of all time, and people still get enormous enjoyment out of her movies. In addition to this, she was a far better and more interesting writer than the author of this fictional book.
The existence of this book makes a sweeping negative statement about us as a society--that a sick, pathetic individual like this author could publish anything, and that he would be able to continue publishing trash. After reading 100 pages I feel as though I need a shower--I am incredibly ashamed of myself for reading even one page.
Besides the disgustingness and nonexistent research of this book, it was incredibly boring. It exists mostly as a laundry list of supposed affairs and dissipations, all written in ungrammatical boring prose. This is probably this book's greatest sin--no matter how unconventional Katharine Hepburn's life was, I don't think anyone would argue that it was boring.

[...]

Don't be fooled. There is nothing well written or insightful about this awful book. You can't libel the dead, so Porter goes to town on just about everyone, with pages and pages of supposed "notes" that are nothing but a list of names with no attributable quotes.

There are also those who claim that the book's detractors (and trust me, they outnumbered these paid hacks by a large margin at one time) just can't believe that there were gay golden age Hollywood starts who slept around. As a gay man I find this the most insulting aspect of this whole enterprise. Darwin Porter seems almost pathological in his need to validate his own orientation by asserting that EVERYONE in old Hollywood was gay. It seems silly and more than a little pathetic that anyone would need to work this hard to quiet his own demons, but this book says a lot more about the author than it does about Katharine Hepburn.

On a final note, take a look at the other "reviews" by the people on this page. You'll find more than a few of them who only seem to review Darwin Porter books. Curious, very curious.

Still, Amazon has chosen to leave these while removing the honest reviews from real people. Even more curious.

The book gets 3 stars because of sloppy editing and proofreading (i.e.p.148: "He housed Kate and Laura and the Hays-Adams Hotel" and clearly wrong information: p. 138 "In the late 1930s, when she was a struggling actress, Katharine Hepburn had waited for an interview...in Harris's offices above the Moresco Theatre." ; p. 141 "In 1933, several years after her stint as Harris's driver, ...Kate arrived, fresh from California, at Harris's offices above the Moresco Theatre." Hepburn was a struggling actress in the late 1920s, not the late 1930s.

At times, pages read as if they had been written by assistants who did not keep up with what had preceded their contribution. Information is needlessly repeated. And, the writing is inconsistent. veering from good to sophomoric to good to bad to good again.

Hepburn deserved better.

I could barely finish this book because I found myself rolling my eyes and saying "Oh please" as I was reading it. There were more stories about the alleged gay trysts of Hollywood actors than about Katharine Hepburn herself. Where does this author get his information? This book is full of untruths and gossip. This book basically says that all men in Hollywood were either gay or bisexual. Everyone from Desi Arnaz to Jimmy Stewart to Gary Cooper were all into men and sleeping with one another. Sheesh. Wishful thinking on the authors part? If the male actors were friends they were also lovers according to this author. Amazingly, all the handsome actors in Hollywood were gay or bisexual. The less attractive male celebrities were never mentioned as being anything but straight. This book is supposed to be about Katharine Hepburn not the supposed same sex flings of Hollywood actors.
In the book, Ms. Hepburn comes off as a gossipy, jealous, nympho who is either sleeping with everyone(male or female) who comes in her path or stabbing them in the back. I'm not saying Katharine Hepburn was a saint but the lies and misinformation in this book are just too hard to take. For instance, the book says Jimmy Stewart was born in the state of Indiana but he in fact was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania. The author can never seem to get his facts together. This book is more like the National Enquirer or the Star magazine than an actual biography.
If you like trashy, sleazy, mostly fictional books that try and masquerade as biographies then this book is for you.
If you want to read a real biography on this legendary actress' life, look elsewhere.

Remember the "I Love Lucy" episode when she thinks a publisher has accepted her roman a clef but it turns out he only wanted to use it as a template for what not to write? This book should be taught in school as how not to write a biography. Here are just a few of the many, many things wrong with this book: 1) The author is obsessed with homosexuality. I'm a gay man, but I don't see gay men and lesbians under every duvet. Porter does. What's so irritating about it is: 2) he provides no evidence. Don't bother looking for a page-by-page index of where information came from. He can't provide it, because it probably doesn't exist, certainly not: 3) made-up quotes and conversations. The dialogue here is so laughably fake. People are constantly using anachronisms like "homophobic" or "get down." Hepburn probably was bisexual, but likely more on the level of many post-adolescent young women at a Seven Sisters school. As for Lew Ayres, her husband, Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Howard Hughes or the dozens of other people here, you'll have to take the author's word for it. I don't.

So this is the way myths are made...through page after page of misinformation? There might be some truth in this screed, but it would take the patience of Job to extricate it from the fantasy plots. This book is about the spinning of little kernels of truth and dialogue into a money making pastime for the author.

A particularly laughable bloated fantasy instance, was that Kate was on the set of "Swing Time" with Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, and George Stevens. Her purpose? To interfere with the making of the film, and the budding romance between Rogers and Stevens. Yeah sure! In those days...she would have been kicked out on her ear. Fred alone, would have gone ballistic. It never happened.

This book has no other value other than to prompt musings at the length some authors will travel to avoid the hard work of research...and to indulge the public in their fantasies...for money. It's trash-for-cash writing.

This book isn't worth the paper it's written on. Sorry that I started reading it and I certainly won't finish it. I'm stopping right now on page 116 and I wish I'd quit sooner.

I remember the first day I read this. It was recommended to me as a book that "tips the bucket on Hepburn." My initial thought (without looking at the book) was that it was going to tell us more about Hepburn's well known arrogance, egotism etc. Boy was I in for a shock. That was the very same day I was introduced to David Bret and his equally bad book on Rock Hudson.

To accept this book as factual, you must believe that no one was heterosexual in Hollywood. And we all know that that is impossible.

This book gives new meaning to the term junky. This book was, of course, inevitable, but only after Katharine Hepburn's death when she could not refute any of its dubious content and, to put it kindly, guesswork of its author. Whether Hepburn was bisexual or not -- and does it matter? -- the "evidence" in support of this book's many assertions is scant at best. Heresay, rumor, and wild guesses are, for this author, apparently the equivalent of research and hard evidence.
As other reviewers have previously noted, this book is poorly edited and the writing is sloppy and uninteresting, perhaps the saddest statement of all since there was nothing about Katharine Hepburn that was uninteresting. She deserves much better than this exploitive garbage.

[...]There are so many great books written about Miss Hepburn's life and this is not one of them.