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Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn
By William J. Mann
Henry Holt, $30
There have been some 35 books written about Katharine Hepburn, but they don't capture the screen legend's essence if we're to believe William J. Mann, the author of "Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn."
Not in the least a reverential biographer, Mann ("Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood") focuses on unmasking Hepburn's intimate life and peeling away her mystique.
Hepburn was born into an upper-class family in Hartford, Conn., in 1907 (not her declared birth date of 1909, as Mann's research uncovered) and had a job on the stage before she graduated from Bryn Mawr.
From the very beginning her career benefited from luck rather than talent, which she always acknowledged. She could afford not to work, she had the right social connections and she had an ambitious and aggressive agent, Leland Hayward. A burning ambition to be famous didn't hurt, either.
For nearly 70 years she endured and emerged an American institution: From the infamous soubriquet "box office poison" in the 1930s to her triumphant
Hollywood comeback in "The Philadelphia Story" in 1940, from her nine films with Spencer Tracy to her four Academy Awards, from Shakespeare to an improbable turn as Coco Chanel in a Broadway musical.
But Mann is not so much interested in Hepburn's career -- there isn't even a listing of her film performances and stage appearances -- as he is parsing her sex life.
Hepburn's ambiguous sexuality -- her wearing pants, her close friendships with women, her numerous homosexual friends -- was one of her hallmarks. Over the course of her lifetime it evolved from suspect behavior to becoming part of her iconography.
Mann makes it his mission to investigate every rumor, deconstruct every event and chase down every anecdote regarding her supposed lesbianism.
The Hepburn-Tracy love affair comes under particularly harsh examination, as well. Mann goes to great lengths to show that it was not quite the celebrated romance it came to be recalled by chroniclers, friends and Hepburn herself.
The author examines Hepburn's often overlooked left-wing political stands in the 1940s and her support of liberal politicians such as Vice President Henry Wallace. He demonstrates how, unlike other Hollywood actresses of her era who sometimes seemed at the mercy of the studio system, Hepburn took a strong guiding hand in her own career.
But Mann admires Hepburn at arm's length. He criticizes her for promoting her relationship with Tracy, believing her own publicity (hardly a sin in Hollywood) and particularly for her increasingly high-handed and difficult behavior as she grew older.
For all of Mann's scrupulous research to find the "real" Hepburn, "Kate" comes off as an uncharitable effort. Certainly a biographer should keep his approbation, not to mention biases, in check. But Mann's relentless analysis of
Hepburn's sexuality grows wearisome over 600 pages, as does his disapproving judgment of her behavior, particularly in her later years.
While Mann makes a strong case that Katharine Hepburn, if not a lesbian at least played both sides of the aisle, he doesn't make a convincing case for why this matters.
Not being quite the person she pretended to be and the public imagined her to be does not lessen her achievements. That she refused to be boxed into someone else's idea of how to define herself does not make her self-deluding.
She captured our imaginations, and her performances gave millions of people pleasure -- in the end that's what film buffs will remember.
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(Paula Hunt covers health and fitness for the San Antonio Express-News. E-mail: phunt@express-news.net)
c.2006 San Antonio Express-News
