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Katharine Hepburn, who lived nearly a century, liked to say she was as familiar as the Statue of Liberty.
Certainly there would seem to be little we don't know about the Great Kate. Her life has been recounted in numerous biographies and in her own 1991 best-selling memoir, Me.
Biographer William J. Mann wants to deconstruct the myth, to strip away the layers of reinvention that made Hepburn the Madonna of her time.
"Who was she?" Mann asks in the preface to Kate, his fascinating and provocative new look at the legend who died at age 96 in 2003.
The answers aren't going to please everybody, and despite the book's extensive research and interviews, may be met with skepticism.
But Mann has made Kate a page-turner and a revelation.
Mann, a gay novelist and film historian (Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood), opens the closet door on Hepburn and two men she loved, Spencer Tracy and director John Ford.
His Hepburn is a bisexual who didn't much enjoy sex. Quoting sources such as the screenwriter James Prideaux, Mann states unequivocally that Hepburn and the socialite Laura Harding were lovers. (Hepburn dismissively addressed the lesbian rumors in Me.)
And Mann notes that Hepburn had many lesbian friends throughout her life, and she turned to female companions for comfort after unhappy relationships with men -- some of which seemed concocted merely to promote her latest movie.
What of her epic love for Tracy? According to Mann's research, the couple never lived together. But she did love him, even though her devotion was motivated by her need to be a caregiver.
Hepburn was a contradiction. A feminist icon who wasn't a feminist. An independent, pants-wearing woman who was drawn to masculine "real men" who put women in their place.
Mann's portrait of Hepburn's sexuality is complex. Called mannish by critics early in her career, the actress learned the hard way that gender-bending films such as Sylvia Scarlett weren't going to win her fans. And so in the 1940s she reinvented herself as the feminine Tracy Lord of The Philadelphia Story and the woman paired with Tracy's he-man in Woman of the Year.
Most of all she wanted to be famous, whatever character revisions it took.
In Mann's eye, Hepburn was at heart "Jimmy," the carefree persona she called herself as a tomboy growing up in Hartford, Conn. Her point of view was decidedly masculine, not a bad option for a freethinking woman born in 1907.
Mann's Kate may not be the old familiar one we remember from On Golden Pond. But this Hepburn feels like the real -- not the reel -- thing.
Kate: The Woman
Who Was Hepburn
By William J. Mann
Henry Holt, 532 pp., $30
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