Customer Reviews

Katharine Hepburn

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I found Barbara Leaming's biography of Katharine Hepburn to be unique in that it does not begin immediately with Hepburn's birth. Instead, it starts with her mother and grandmother, and her father and uncles. In doing so, Leaming allows the reader, throughout the course of the book, to come to a better understanding of Hepburn psychologically, as opposed to just presenting facts related to career and private life. The bulk of the biography is devoted to Hepburn's relationships, including those with Howard Hughes, John Ford, Leland Hayward, and, of course, Spencer Tracy. For one more interested in details of Hepburn's historic career, this is not the most insightful book. But for those wanting a peek into the mystique that is the Great Kate, Leaming's biography is tantalizing and absorbing.

In light of the fact that Ms. Hepburn has now been revealed as a lesbian whose affair with the gay Spencer Tracy was a big beard for the public, I find all these reviews objecting to any love relationship with John Ford because Spencer was her great love fascinating.

Barbara Leaming is a brilliant biographer. She somehow missed what William Mann et al. picked up on once Ms. Hepburn died - that is, that she, like everyone else in Hollywood's golden age was gay. If Hepburn was a lesbian, then Tracy was definitely gay. Gee, I wonder how Barbara missed that. Tsk tsk all that research, all that work and somehow that just never came up. She must not have talked to the right anonymous and inside sources. She probably depended on things like interviews with people who knew Hepburn, her private papers, studio documents, etc. She didn't know that in order to get info on Spencer Tracy, for instance, you have to go to secret gay flop houses.

As for John Ford - in a recent documentary about John Ford, we hear a tape recording between Ford and Katharine Hepburn made while he was very ill in which he tells her he loves her. Dan Ford was taping an encounter with them, went to get something in his car, and left the recorder running. The documentary states that Ford worshipped her (of course, you have to realize that Ford has now been outed as well). Since I head the tape recording, why should I believe any of you that there was no relationship? Was it love on Hepburn's part? I don't know. There was something, though.

Why people find all this endlessly fascinating, I have no idea, especially when one book contradicts the other. I'm supposed to believe that she and Spencer were gay, that Spencer was the only love of her life, that she was a big fat phony. Frankly, it's hard to believe anything.

I do, however, believe that Barbara Leaming is a wonderful writer and biographer. Her bios of Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles were excellent. I have no respect for James Robert Parrish, who is third rate, or people like William Mann who push forward their own agenda - as long, of course, that the person is dead. Wouldn't want a lawsuit now, would we.

Being a big fan of Katharine Hepburn, I was really looking forward to reading this book. Although it was very interesting to read about her family history, which was hardly mentioned in Ms. Hepburn's autobiography "Me", I was hoping to get more information about Ms. Hepburn, her career and social life. The author, Ms. Leaming, apparently had enough diligence to research as far back as 1892 that researching information from the 1920's through the present on Ms. Hepburn should not have been so difficult. The material on Ms. Hepburn's past did give new insight on her personality. Now it is easy to see why she did not mention this information in her autobiography--she was raised never to speak about such things. It was also amazing to read how such a powerfully independent personality could submit herself to such degredation and humilation as she did with Spencer Tracy. This book does shed new light on Katharine Hepburn but, most of that new light is focused on other members of her family.

To create an accurate, comprehensive, and revealing life story of Katharine Hepburn, biographer Barbara Leaming drew upon years of painstaking research that included her private correspondence and letters of her family and associates who knew her best. Her childhood was marked by the discovery of her brother Tom's suicide by hanging when she was 13 years old. But she was able to emerge from a troubled family background (her maternal grandfather also died a suicide in 1892), because of support from the strong women of her family, especially her mother who helped lead the women's suffrage movement of the time. This outstanding biography delves deeply into Hepburn's acting career from Broadway to Hollywood, her long affair with Spencer Tracy, and her relationships with John Ford, H. Phelps Putnam, and others. Katherine Hepburn is enthusiastically recommended reading for Hepburn fans and students of theatrical history and cinematic studies.

Barbara Leaming has written on the lives of some of the most luminous Hollywood personalities there are, including Orson Welles and Rita Heyworth. Her biography of Katharine Hepburn once again shows her ability to reveal the motivations and drives behind her subject while remaining a sympathetic observer. She treats Hepburn's childhood, her adult years and her involvements with famous, powerful men (John Ford and Spencer Tracy, to name two of the better-known lovers), that independent spirit, and her quixotic but huge theatrical and film talent and the very unordinary family life she enjoyed while growing up fairly and with great detail. Leaming gives us a portrait of a complex and brilliant artist of stage and screen who is larger than life, yet down to it as well, a glamourous Yankee with sensibility, common sense and charm to match. Very readable and very entertaining, Leaming's biography of Ms. Hepburn ranks against that of writer Anne Edwards - all fans of Ms. K. would do well to turn its pages.

To quote Dan Ford, the grandson and biographer of John Ford, who for not good reason plays a large part in this biography, Leaming's book is a "cheap, exploitive work of fiction that pretends to be a biography; it's a romance novel that uses well-known and therefore marketable names for its characters. . . ." New York Times, May 14, 1995

With regard to the purported thoroughness of the research, the author of an upcoming biography of Spencer Tracy, Selden West, said in part in the same New York Times edition:

"Of the many instances of Ms. Leaming's distortions and omissions, perhaps the most egregious relates to the cache of love letters to Ford that forms the back bone of this book. As Ms. Leaming tells us "it was during the several weeks I spent in Bloomington studying the Ford papers that Katharine Hepburn first came alive for me in a way that made this book possible to write. Day after day, I would arrive at the library as the doors opened and begin to read Kate's letters to Ford -- letters unlike any others of hers I was to see. I read at breakneck speed all the while marking pages to be photocopied, pages I was later to read countless times until the words and phrases were carved in my memory."

These are the facts. The Lily library in Bloomington owns five letters from Ford to Ms. Hepburn and sixteen communications from Ms. Hepburn to Ford. Of these sixteen several are postcards and telegrams and half are dated after 1960 (Their serious involvement was in 1936-37, long before Ms. Hepburn met Tracy.) At most there are two love letters. The day after day regimen that Ms. Leaming describes is only possible if she is the slowest reader alive, she is reading the same letters over and over again or she is misrepresenting the Lily holdings.

The last seems clear when one re-examines Ms. Leaming's story. "In the spring of 1940 when Kate returned to Los Angeles . . . . her relationship with Ford was still somehow unresolved. Their correspondence shows that they never stopped caring for each other. Gradually the lovers became loving friends. Yet there was no demarcation, no definite unambiguous yes or no. To read their letters from that time is to watch them struggle, sometimes uncomfortably to forge a new kind of relationship."

There is no correspondence between Katharine Hepburn and John Ford from the spring of 1940 -- indeed from the entire 1940s - at the Lily library, or to my knowledge, anywhere else. In the Lily library there is no correspondence between Ford and Ms Hepburn at all dated between 1939 and 1954 - both those years are represented by single letters; the first a thank you note, the second a film offer. The next contact is a postcard in 1960. Ms. Leaming has bent the fact to establish a romantic triangle that simple never existed."

I don't read biographies of movie stars. I happened to pick this up and read a few pages and I was absolutely hooked. Barbara Leaming, the author, is obviously a trained scholar and it shows. She has done thorough research and set the research in the context of the time. Please don't think though that this biography is a dreary academic exercise with forests of footnotes and the like. No way. It is vividly written and riveting.

The first section of the book traces Hepburn's family history--a tragic one. And, by examining the lives of Hepburn's mother and aunt, Leaming presents a good overview of the women's rights movement in the early 20th century.

I hope I don't offend any of Hepburn's fans if I express the wish that Leaming use her remarkable talents on a biography of a more significant historical figure

It may be truth or fiction, as other reviewers complained, but the book is written well and makes for a good read.

This is the most fascinating book about Hepburn to read, and I've read most of them stretching back over 20 years. It is exhaustively researched, with sources for each and every fact and assertion made. . .if only other biographers (or todays reporters) were so meticulous. While some might be surprised by the contents of the book, the multi-faceted truth about Hepburn's relationship with Tracey, you still come away in awed wonder of a great and pioneering woman. There was a great deal of trauma in her life and she still perservered, a tremendous testament to how strong she truly was-- a true female role model with human flaws and needs.

For me, Katharine Hepburn was one of the great screen actresses of the 20th century; her work in LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT is harrowing. After an earlier career as a comedienne and leading lady, she began doing extremely difficult character work in motion picture adaptions of Tennesse Williams plays and others. Her later work was brilliant. But the book only alludes to her flowering as a great tragic actress and instead focuses, as all Hepburn bios must, on her romance with Spencer Tracy and other men who were either married or not able to bring Kate to her knees. As a person, I find Hepburn to be unbearable, or, more kindly, bull-headed and aggresive. I guess this makes her a feminist hero. But it's interesting that bios of Hepburn, for all the nods to how proto-feminist she was, still focus on her love life whereas discussions of Bette Davis (her equal in talent and personal strength) focus more on her work and how determined she was, career-wise. Personally, I find Hepburn's work much more inspiring than her relations with a married man and would like to see a critical discussion of her distinguished career.