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Privacy
Jun 29, 2005 6:25:20 GMT -5
Post by smith on Jun 29, 2005 6:25:20 GMT -5
Back in 1965 Katharine Hepburn, the Academy Award-winning actress who died June 29, was asked to write down her views on personal privacy. She is one of the very few performing artists to have published an article in a legal publication. Her essay appeared in Virginia Law Weekly DICTA, Vol. XVII, Nov. 25 (1965). That was before the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Code of Fair Information Practice, People magazine, National Enquirer, and the Internet. Part of her article was reprinted in the sixth monthly issue of Privacy Journal, in August 1975. Here is part of what she wrote:
In the beginning of my career - 1932 - I had a right to consider privacy my right - and so I fought for it - a wild and vigorous battle - Quite successful - I thought - the few people I knew could keep their mouths shut
Today it is extremely difficult to control one's privacy - even if one is not a public figure - Who are you - How old are you - Who are your father - mother - sisters - brothers - grandparents - Of what did they die - what were they when they lived - What diseases have you had - What is your religion -have you ever been a communist - What is your income - whom do you support - how much did your house cost - the furnishings - Your wife's clothes - her jewels - fur coats - how much do you spend on your children's schools - Travel - Entertaining - Books - Liquor - Flowers - Teeth - Do you wear glasses - Do you still menstruate - Are your periods regular - your bowels - What operations have you had - do you sleep in the room with your wife - and how long has that been going on - Have you ever been involved with the law - do you drink - Let's just have a fingerprint now - How much - These are among the questions which must be answered - if - you are insured by your employer - (an actor is) - drive a car - pay an income tax - get Social Security - etc.
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The greatest "bugaboo" against privacy is insurance - You can be protected against anything, but for it you must sacrifice your privacy - If a friend is injured in your house, let the company pay - If you can't save enough money to live on in your old age - if you are ill - if you are hospitalized - if an actor is ill
Now all this is progress - these things are necessary - The Government or the Company must step in and bear the burden - but with the loss of responsibility we have also lost our privacy - Privacy in the sense that it was used 30 years ago has almost ceased to exist - the individual has become a pretty well documented punch card - "There can be no privacy in that which is already public."
Now let us take a public figure - an actor - We are worse off than the politicians - the politician is selling his brain - supposedly - whereas - the actor is selling his body - and/or his own peculiar personality and this does not command high esteem - Both public and press feel that they have an absolute right of access to the most intimate details of your life - and by life you must read largely sex life - for this is the department of an actor's life which is most titillating to press and public
At the appropriate age for this sort of thing - I used to go through the most elaborate schemes to avoid the press - I felt that nothing of my private life was any of their business - By the same token I did not feel that I could then appear in a public place - or in their territory so to speak - railroad stations - airports - restaurants - bars - theaters - games - These places were their territory - My territory was my own home - a friend's house - a private club - But then you have the public place on a private matter - the hospital - the church - the cemetery - where a public character is forced by illness or death to use a public facility - It would seem that in such a case he or she should have a right to be protected from the peering eye of the outsider.
I do not know how you can relate privacy to this world - they would seem to contradict each other.
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Privacy
Jun 29, 2005 10:39:30 GMT -5
Post by Judy on Jun 29, 2005 10:39:30 GMT -5
So many of today's 15-minute celebrities - who spend their time sending the public their come-to-me-go-from-me mixed messages - ought to take a lesson.
I wish them luck, but even if the Tom and Katie romance is one for the ages (anyone wanna take bets?), how will they ever be able to regain that right of privacy after the displays of the past month?
How smart Kate was about all of this.
JS
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Privacy
Jun 29, 2005 13:23:23 GMT -5
Post by Sherry on Jun 29, 2005 13:23:23 GMT -5
Kate knew the art of seduction and the root of desire and the allure of mystery. She understood from the beginning of her career that in order to fascinate, there needs to be mystery and magic. Standing naked in the town square has neither mystery nor magic and that is basically what performers do today when they lay their private lives open for inspection by the media. Kate knew that by maintaining her privacy, she could retain the most important moments in her life for herself and the people she loved. She also understood that by maintaining control of her private life, it would help her professional life to flourish because to put it in showbiz terminology -- she always left the audience wanting more. We always wanted more but we admired that even in her autobiography, she kept her most private, cherished moments -- private. She was smart and wise and totally her own person. Sherry
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Privacy
Jun 29, 2005 18:19:46 GMT -5
Post by smith on Jun 29, 2005 18:19:46 GMT -5
All of what you say is true but Katharine also believed that publicity about a person's private life was vulgar . Those who are interested should read the Saturday Evening Post series of articles - especially Part 3, 1941 which has been posted on the main website .
Some tabloid books have interpreted Katharine's comments to mean she must have something to hide about her personal life but she was actually paraphrasing Dorothy Parker when she said, I don't care what's written about me as long as it isn't true .
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Privacy
Jun 29, 2005 18:34:12 GMT -5
Post by Cate on Jun 29, 2005 18:34:12 GMT -5
Thanks Smith Kate did know the art of seduction... allure of mystery... as you said. Unfortunately, those who are mysterious are the ones the press are more apt to follow and fabricate stories because there is no way to prove the tabloids wrong unless the victim decides to make a public statement which, in Katharine's case, was highly unlikely being a private person. I have to admit I pick up an US Weekly every now and then. It is a guilty pleasure. But rarely do I believe everything I read. I guess I don't feel that guilty either because most celebrities now welcome the intrusion because they think it will increase their popularity. It might increase it for 15 minutes but in the long-run they'll end up being sell-outs and will have no respect. OK I'm done...
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Privacy
Jun 29, 2005 18:50:36 GMT -5
Post by smith on Jun 29, 2005 18:50:36 GMT -5
It was Katharine's policy not to comment publicly on the various biographies written on her although she made her feelings known in other ways . She apparently was particularly furious at the Leaming biography - there was a heap of stuff written about it in the New York Times . Katharine used to joke that Phyllis read all the biographies but that she never had the time .
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Post by Cate on Jul 1, 2005 1:54:31 GMT -5
What did she hate about the Leaming biography?
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Post by smith on Jul 1, 2005 2:17:40 GMT -5
Well for a start she hated the way Spencer was portrayed in the book - every person who knew Spencer who was still alive in 1995 said that it wasn't an accurate portrait - not just his family . The romance with Jack Ford was also exaggerated - there was a short term relationship but Leaming based her whole book on a short term relationship . A good example of the inaccuracy of the book is the story of venereal disease . It has been known for some time that Spencer's son suffers from a genetic illness which caused his deafness and there is absolutely no evidence that Spencer suffered from venereal disease .
I really hate the portrait of Dr Hepburn as well but my main gripe with the book is that it turns Katharine into a victim which she definitely was not . Selden West who has been writing a book on Spencer for some time also said the book was a distortion.
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Post by smith on Jul 1, 2005 7:29:14 GMT -5
The battle over a new biography of Katharine Hepburn. Article by Selden West - the official Spencer Tracy biographer
Because I am writing the authorized biography of Spencer Tracy, I was eagerly anticipating Barbara Leaming's biography of Katharine Hepburn -- hoping not only to read it for pleasure but also to learn from it. And I found the early part of her book as interesting as your reviewer, Janet Maslin, did -- that is, those portions of the story that precede Ms. Hepburn's birth and therefore fall outside my own area of research. But as I followed Ms. Leaming into familiar territory, I grew first confused, then distressed, then angry. Ms. Leaming, having done her research thoroughly, has consistently perverted it -- no doubt to promote the psychological and romantic drama she is clearly determined to make of Ms. Hepburn's story.
It is never hard to tell with whom Ms. Leaming's sympathies lie. She cues us to cheer and hiss.
John Ford, "a brilliant romantic Irish rebel" with a "strong, sweet, melodious voice," is our hero. His wife, Mary Ford, with her "harsh roughneck's voice" and "shrieking fits," is less lucky. At one point, she is described as "cackling with malicious delight."
But Ms. Leaming is only sharpening her steel for her real villain, Spencer Tracy. Tracy is, we discover, "deeply suspicious," "very manipulative," "devious," "neurotic" and "constantly frantic." He beats up prostitutes and believes his son's deafness is due to his own "venereal infections." He is "a drunk . . . and a malefactor" who is obsessed with "his own loathsomeness." He deliberately degrades Ms. Hepburn, visiting her only in the evening and leaving "when he was finished." "The arrangement," Ms. Leaming says, "seemed to turn him on." According to Ms. Leaming, it is a "fact" that Spencer Tracy saw Katharine Hepburn "as a whore." "Full of self-loathing as he was," she declares, "he seemed to enjoy humiliating Kate by bringing her down to his level; turning a woman of that caliber into his mistress, Tracy reminded himself and others of the moral depths to which he had sunk."
No wonder Janet Maslin found Tracy to be "a cruel, erratic figure." Faced with 17 pages of source notes, Ms. Maslin may also be forgiven her references to Ms. Leaming's "prodigious" and "enterprising" research.
However, I have been immersed in the same sources as Ms. Leaming. In four years of reading Tracy's diaries, interviewing surviving friends and conducting research in letters, memoirs, studio papers and oral histories in almost two dozen libraries across the United States and England, I have not found any evidence to suggest that Tracy ever suffered from venereal disease. Certainly his medical records fail to note any such condition.
Moreover, these same sources show that Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn spent days together playing tennis with friends, flying kites, reading, painting and walking the beaches, so Ms. Leaming's tale of his visiting only in the evening -- and leaving when "finished" -- is an utter falsehood. And Ms. Leaming's only source for her "fact" that Tracy saw Ms. Hepburn as a whore is the story that he once envisioned her cast as the prostitute in his movie "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Finally, Ms. Leaming's statement that Tracy's living arrangement "seemed to turn him on" contradicts the impressions of all his closest friends, who thought it tore him apart.
In this book Tracy is not allowed a single redeeming quality. Ms. Leaming never mentions his humor -- by all accounts one of his defining characteristics -- much less his kindness or integrity. Ms. Leaming warps Tracy into a figure so unrelievedly loathsome that Katharine Hepburn, by her very devotion, appears to be staggering under a crippling psychological burden.
Ideally, a biographer's notes allow an interested reader to follow in the author's footsteps, to find and read the same sources and see how he reached his conclusions. By this standard, Ms. Leaming's notes are, at the very least, grossly inadequate. Eight hours of uninterrupted searching in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, with the help of two reference librarians, failed to turn up many of the letters and documents Ms. Leaming implies she found there. Even more troubling, when one does locate a source, to look at it side by side with Ms. Leaming's use of it is to see that in almost every case aspects of the truth have been extracted -- and distorted. Here are only two of countless such examples:
1. Ms. Leaming states repeatedly (at least five times) that Ms. Hepburn wrote to John Ford that no one else had ever understood her as he did. Actually, the letter that comes closest to expressing this sentiment, dated March 1, 1937, says simply, "I know that you do understand me -- please do always." (Tellingly, while exaggerating the Ford relationship, Ms. Leaming fails to report that in her autobiography Katharine Hepburn describes Spencer Tracy as "the only one who ever knew me.")
2. 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 backbone 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 ever 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 Lilly 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 rereading the same letters over and over or she is misrepresenting the Lilly's 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 had 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 1940's -- at the Lilly Library or, to my knowledge, anywhere else. In the Lilly collection there is no Hepburn-Ford correspondence at all dated between 1939 and 1954 -- and both these 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 facts to establish a romantic triangle that simply never existed.
In the light of her questionable methods, even the early sections of Ms. Leaming's book, on the family history, become suspect. What is certain, finally, is that she misrepresents her sources so pervasively that her book is useless as biog raphy. SELDEN WEST Alexandria, Va.
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