Product Description

"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 career." -Janet Maslin, The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1625102 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 550 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Hollywood biographer Leaming presents a detailed account of the professional and personal life of Hepburn, the only star to ever win four Oscars for best actress.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
One might rightly wonder what there is left to say about actress Hepburn, since she has already been extensively written about and interviewed and has written her autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life (Knopf, 1991). But biographer Leaming (If This Is Happiness, LJ 9/1/89) has managed to add a whole new perspective to what is already known. Leaming starts this biography not with Hepburn's birth and early life but with her mother Kathy (known later as Kate). Kathy's mother, Carrie, was forced to take charge of her three girls after the suicide of her husband, Fred. Carrie's courage, strength, and fervid desire for her daughters to be educated led Kathy to become a leader in the early women's movement. These role models together helped shape the woman we know as Katharine Hepburn. Leaming hypothesizes, however, that Hepburn was also driven by the shadow of suicide, which took her brother Tom as well. This is less a gossipy, glitzy celebrity bio and more an exploration of the New England social mores that shaped this living legend. Highly recommended.?Rosellen Brewer, Monterey Bay Area Cooperative Lib. Sys., Cal.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
TITLR HLeaming, Barbara. Best known for her definitive biography of Orson Welles, Leaming (on a suggestion from Welles) now takes on an equally formidable subject, Katharine Hepburn. The second child of a successful Connecticut physician and his suffragette wife, Hepburn led a remarkably unrestricted life. However, the defining experience of her youth was the death of her older, revered brother, presumably a suicide. Without resorting to pyschobabble, Leaming crafts a careful, psychologically probing portrait of the entire Hepburn clan, stressing the effect of the suicides that ran through Kate's maternal and paternal families. This is, in fact, a family biography, with at least half the book devoted to Hepburn's grandmother and mother, remarkable women both. In many respects, it is also a sharp portrait of an era, one in which women fought valiantly to shape their own destines, a battle in which Mrs. Hepburn and her sister, Edith, were in the forefront.

Customer Reviews

A Gothic novel
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."

The most inaccurate book every written about Hepburn
This is easily the worst biography ever written about Katharine Hepburn. It is full of inaccuracies and wild speculations. The author's central theme is that Ms. Hepburn had a life long, unrequited love for the director John Ford. Anyone who has read any of Katharine Hepburn's own books and her many interviews know that this is simply not true.

Having fabricated the fictional relationship between Katharine Hepburn and John Ford, the author then uses it to denigrate Hepburn's real long time love, Spencer Tracy. Leaming makes incredibly scurrilous and completely undocumented statements about Tracy such as that his supposed veneral disease caused his son's deafness. Ms. Leaming fails to offer even one iota of evidence for this outrageous statement.

Page after page of this book is full of wildly fanceful speculations passed off as fact. What are we to make of the following passage at page 393:

"If Tracy wondered whether, or how Ford would react to news of the affair with Kate, he did not have to wait long to find out. On September 3, five days after shooting on Woman of the Year began, Ford suddenly left town under mysterious circumstances. . . .Ostensibly, Ford's sudden, rather theatrical departure had nothing to do with Kate. Still, there can be no question that it shadowed her relationship with Tracy from the start. A man of Tracy's tormented and deeply suspicious nature could never accept that Ford's timing had been purely coincidental. . . . "

So, according to Ms. Leaming, John Ford left Los Angeles and joined the military because he was upset that Katharine Hepburn had become involved with Spencer Tracy and further she asserts that Spencer Tracy knew this and was 'tormented' by it. How silly can one author get?

What I find passing strange is all the positive reviews that were given to this book by presumably reputable reviewers. I can only assume that the reviewers don't actually read the books they review or that they knew so little about Ms. Hepburn's life that they concluded that the book was accurate even though it has so many obvious inaccuracies.

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.