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Title: Katharine Hepburn by Barbara Leaming ISBN: 0-87910-293-4 Publisher: Proscenium Pub Pub. Date: May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.4 (10 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Katharine Hepburn's Family History
Comment: 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.
Rating: 4
Summary: Insightful and Well-Written
Comment: 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.
Rating: 1
Summary: A Gothic novel
Comment: 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."
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Title: Me : Stories of My Life by KATHARINE HEPBURN ISBN: 0345410092 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 29 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Katharine Hepburn by Anne Edwards ISBN: 0312206569 Publisher: Griffin Trade Paperback List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg ISBN: 0399151648 Publisher: Putnam Pub Group Pub. Date: 11 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: The Private World of Katharine Hepburn by John Bryson ISBN: 0316113336 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: 02 September, 1992 List Price(USD): $24.45 |
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Title: Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir. by Garson, Kanin ISBN: 0670722936 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: November, 1971 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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