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Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Alan: The Man Who Was Hunt
This is a review I wrote back in July of last year for William J. Mann's biography of Kate Hepburn 'Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn'. For some reason, I only wanted to post it on Facebook, but it retrospect, that's kind of stupid, because I have this blog just sitting here. I'm thinking I might start posting again on some ridiculously random and infrequent schedule because when I go back and reread stuff I don't hate everything I've written, so maybe I could start writing some more stuff I don't hate too much.
I removed the style sheets from the blog because there started to get more and more screwed up for some reason, and the page looks totally unreadable to me as a result, especially in Opera, which is my browser of choice, where every I and apostrophe is turning into and exclamation point in a black triangle. As I recently heard, the universe is heading for a state of greater and greater extropy, so I guess black triangles appearing on web pages for no apparent reason is part of the galactic scheme of things (perhaps showing evidence of a black hole some where in our vicinity)
Also, my site has been suspended every three months or so for about the last two years. Due to our, ahem, financial situation in recent years, paying for hosting has been about the bottom of a list of 100 higher priorities. But (I say this very cautiously and invoking any superstitious guard against evil that I can) I've made a deal with a highly respectable criminal organization that has hopefully put our financial problems behind us
Here is the review. If you don't like Kate I understand, but read it anyway:
When I was a kid, CBC used to play classic movies on Sunday mornings that I would watch with my Dad. The Katherine Hepburn films were always some of my favourites; when I was nine "On Golden Pond" came out, and I loved her in that too. It's pretty much impossible to think of another female star from the thirties who was still actively working, and still a box office draw, in 1981. According to this biographer, it wasn't by accident: The author dramatizes Hepburn's life as a conflict between the 'real' unpredictable, tomboyish, complex, liberal, attention seeking Katharine Hepburn (Jimmy as she like to be called as a kid) and 'Kate' a smoothed-down version that she reinvented every decade for public consumption.
The book makes a really interesting case about her sexuality (which is the main reason I wanted to read it). The author doesn't dispute that she had love affairs with men(she even married one before she was a star) but despite all the stuff in the press about Hepburn and Hughes, Hepburn and Tracy, and others she could never bring her self to actually live with one- Not Tracey, not Hughes, not her husband, none of them. In contrast there was hardly a day in her life when she wasn't living with a woman. Mann does an excellent job of setting this argument up... Kate came of age in the 1920s; her mother was a major leader in the suffragette movement; her father Doctor and a vocal pro-choice supporter, her early films (most especially Sylvia Scarlet, a movie cooked up by her and George Cukor and a big flop) betray a very liberal agenda, where sexuality and gender are fluid. As a child, she went by the name 'Jimmy'; she came of age in the roaring twenties, in a community where homosexuality was more or less accepted, as long as you didn't draw too much attention to it (getting married helped).
I'm sure the main argument that will be thrown at Mann for this book is the he sees everything as a possible indication of suppressed homosexual urges, and almost ever male icon as a closet homosexual (Spencer Tracy and Howard Hughes among others), but it's nothing that seems outside of the realm of possibility.
Kate was famous for wearing pants, for a kid who grew up in the 70s and 80s; this wasn't anything new to me. Nor was the fact that she never acted in a pandering way to men, and didn't seem to radiate sexuality (unlike the woman in the Pink Panther and James Bond movies that I also loved). But throughout the thirties gossip about Kate's sexual preferences cropped up pretty regularly- early on they paid particular attention to how much time Kate devoted to Laura Harding, an upper class heiress and aspiring actress, who accompanied Kate to the sound stage almost every day, shared homes with her in New York and Hollywood, and took cruises with her to Europe. Kate did nothing to refute the rumours; her private life was her private life. According to William Mann, it's the crisis of her first major flop, 'The Lake' that almost drove Kate give up Hollywood altogether, and it's this crisis that starts the book and gives its focus. Like something out of that movie 'Elizabeth', she decides that in order to rule, she'll have to give up the real Katharine in favour of an archetype, an archetype that was so effective that everyone, the public, biographers, interviews, took it for reality: The straight, down-to-earth, romantic, patriotic, un-celebrity celebrity that was Kate.
Really fun book to read. Labels: books, hepburn, review
posted by Alan
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9:23 AM
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