Nearly all of the biographies written about Katharine Houghton Hepburn ( 1907–2003 ) have verged upon hagiography. ( 'Hagiography' is a three-dollar word that means presenting a subject in an overly idealistic manner or, in Hepburn's case, content to regurgitate the Legend of Kate. ) What more could be said about this acclaimed actress, who spent decades in the limelight and won an unprecedented four Academy Awards?
Quite a bit, as it turns out.
Gay author–scholar William J. Mann previously explored gay Hollywood in Wisecracker and Behind the Screen. Mann wasn't interested in toeing the line with Hepburn like so many others before him had done. Three years of painstaking research yielded a much more subtle and nuanced portrait of the actress.
She emerges fully human from the obscuring patinas of legend, which smoothed over her rough edges, quick temper and sharp tongue. In addition to exploring the revered persona of Kate, Mann gives readers a judicious yet compassionate view of Kath, the real woman who existed behind the legend—a being whom she sometimes called 'The Creature.'
As Mann chronicles, Hepburn had a famously prickly relationship with the press in her early days. But over time, she learned to play the publicity game masterfully—and by her own rules. She made sure that the slightly romanticized portions of her life were what the public saw and heard, and they couldn't get enough of it.
Unlike most of her cinematic peers, Hepburn remained in the public eye for most of her life. By happy coincidence, her subversive earlier works like Sylvia Scarlett ( for which she was once branded 'box-office poison' ) resonated with later generations' sensibilities. Similarly, her participation in 1967's Guess Who's Coming To Dinner made her seem even more hip and 'with it' than most actors her age.
Then the 1971 publication of Tracy and Hepburn by the actors' mutual friend Garson Kanin gave audiences details of the stars' fairytale romance—which, it turns out, was mostly just that: a fairy tale. And readers eagerly lapped it up.
From that point on, people couldn't get enough of Kate ( i.e., the persona Hepburn wanted them to believe in ) .
'She's a legend…I really don't know her,' she told a Bryn Mawr class in 1980. 'I'm sort of like the man who cleans the furnace. I just keep her going.'
In that quote, Hepburn's likening herself to a man seems like an innocent enough metaphor. However, as Mann ably demonstrates, there she tells us more about herself than one might realize.
A tomboy who craved the attention and approval of her demanding father, 'she didn't grow up to be her mother's kind of woman. Rather, Katharine Hepburn grew up to be her father's kind of man,' writes Mann.
He never uses the word 'transgender' to describe Hepburn; Mann dismisses it as 'too modern a concept' to apply to her. But transgender would certainly explain a lot about Kate's psyche, her ways of relating to men and women, and her general outlook on life.
One controversial aspect of 'Kate' is the book's exploration of Hepburn's sexuality and numerous relationships with lovers of both genders. While never shying away from the subject, the author approaches it with tact. It never comes across as salacious gossip.
According to Mann's sources, Hepburn never much cared for the physical aspects of love, instead preferring its emotional/romantic elements. Although she often drew emotional sustenance from a network of close female relationships, and enjoyed the company of gay men like director George Cukor, she revered rugged, masculine men. Nevertheless, she had a checkered history of being with, and ultimately taking care of, sexually conflicted and often alcoholic men, including her beloved Spencer Tracy.
Ardent believers in the Tracy–Hepburn legend haven't been happy at Mann's revelations. The biographer reveals that it was mostly a legend spun by Hepburn after Tracy's death.
Theirs was a complex, unconventional relationship that defied easy categorization and occasionally verged upon codependency. Mann also divulges that when particularly drunk, Tracy would seek the services of Scotty, a Hollywood gas station worker who pumped much more than just gas for many of Tinseltown's elite.
Some critics have decried Mann's findings and compared them to desecration. But his efforts are more akin to the act of stripping away modern embellishments to reveal the original beauty of old architecture.
The Katharine Hepburn who emerges from these pages is not the tremulous legend, but a vivacious, frequently narcissistic spitfire. She learned the hard way how Hollywood worked, and how to work it to her advantage.
Although by its very definition a long and involved read, 'Kate' is engagingly written ( Mann even manages to write nearly 100 pages of interesting footnotes and asides! ) , impeccably researched and demonstrates that it is possible to write something new about a subject as overanalyzed as she was. It's truly a class act that raises a high bar by which celebrity biographies ought to be measured.