Katharine Hepburn

by Barbara Leaming

Book Overview

"Not often is a book about a film star more gripping than anything the star has played on the screen, but Barbara Leaming's biography has that distinction...Katharine Hepburn is Ms. Leaming's penetrating look beyond Ms. Hepburn's acting career and into the forces that shaped such an emblematic figure...Prodigious research has yielded a family history that is both revealing on its own terms and a necessary backdrop to any consideration of Ms. Hepburn's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879102934
• ISBN13: 9780879102937
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Limelight
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 2.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Aren't all these reviews absolutely fascinating

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.

Interesting and Enjoyable to Read

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

A thoroughly well researched, document and insightful 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.

Enthusiastically recommended reading for Hepburn fans

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.

Thew life and times of Katharine Hepburn.

KATHARINE HEPBURN By Barbara Leaming Avon Books, ISBN 0-380-72717-X, US $7.50 Katharine Hepburn - Grand Dame of the movie industry for the better part of this century, admired by millions, yet also at the root of some controversy over the decades. Her life reads like a novel, spiced with mysteries and secrets. Hardly any other woman in this century has triggered the imagination of admirers and enemies as much as she. I have to confess to being a big fan of Ms. Hepburn. Ever since I saw The Philadelphia Story on TV as a small child in Germany, I admired her courageousness, her elegance, her beauty and strength, not to mention her outstanding talent, which is why I was looking forward to reading Barbara Leaming's account of Ms. Hepburn's life. I was in for a very pleasant surprise indeed. Starting years before "Katie" was born, Ms. Leaming narrates the life of the family which would become Ms. Hepburn's. The reader accompanies her maternal grandparents and her mother through difficult years. Left an orphan at an early age, Katharine Houghton was responsible not only to fulfill her mother's dream of an education for her own daughters, but also to fight the overbearing powers of Uncle Amory, a stern miser with a mind as to what proper girls were to do and not to do. Some time after finishing college at Bryn Mawr, Katharine married a young doctor, trying to unite her fight for equal rights for women and openmindedness about the facts of life with the somewhat surprising conservative demands of husband Tom Hepburn. It was she who gave her daughter the strength to stand up for her own, but also she who was role model for her daughter's later devoted relationships with men. Hardly a book to be put down lightly, KATHARINE HEPBURN is a rather complete account of my favourite actress' life. There is only one thing that disturbed me a bit, and that was the fact that her later years, from the late 60s onwards, were hardly mentioned. Ms. Hepburn has been very active since Spencer Tracy's death - and still is - and I would have liked to read what she did with her life outside of theatre, movie and TV studios since. I would have liked to read what she herself has to say about modern America, about were women stand now, about her view of life as seen from old age. But maybe, just maybe, there might be a sequel someday? If there is, I will make sure to get my hands on it the moment it comes off the press. ---Reviewed by Sylvia Lau-McDonald