Post by guesttoo on Jul 23, 2005 19:44:49 GMT -5
David Thomson's review of the Barbara Leaming Katharine Hepburn biography
Sight and Sound, August, 1995
Suppose that writing is your work, and film your expertise. Let us also imagine that you want to stay alive and do your best to sustain the health, happiness and Power Ranger collection of the few people known as your dependants. You may do some journalism, some critical writing, some teaching; you may help subtitle pictures; you may even have a shady corner in the publicity field. Still, if you can contrive it, somehow there is nothing like getting a life. No, I don't mean abandoning the dark and and its dreams and taking orphans on long country walks. I am referring to the agreement that may be made with a publisher – preferably publishers on both sides of the Atlantic – whereby you are contracted to write the biography of some luminous figure from the movies.
How do publishers measure this luminosity? Well, suppose that over the decades you have explored the movies of, say , Carl Dreyer, Ann Dvorak and Arthur Braithwaite, and reached remarkable and eloquent depth of insight. To propose 200,000 word books on any of those three, even with “astonishing new material”, is unlikely to move publishers. In fact, the moguls of the book business are much like their counterparts in Hollywood – they favour name recognition and subjects that have worked before. So you may have to shift from Dreyer and Braithwaite and take your selection from Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brando. The last year has seen two more Taylor books (by Donald Spoto and C. David Heymann), a Brando autobiography and a biography by Peter Manso. All are depressing; the lives of actors lack the rapture of their work.
What I mean to say is this; the proper place for a dazzling evocation of the vexed stillness of Gertrud, the sub-textualised drama (that noir ballading) in Sinatra's singing, or the codification of the Taylor close-up is not in these pages, or pages like them. But if you can link Mr. Sinatra to known gangsters (especially those with a snappy line in tough talk), or indeed to Miss Taylor, you may swing a deal. It will come as no surprise to readers and publishers if candour and research compel you to reveal the lives of Taylor, Sinatra and Brando as chaotic, sordid and deluded. Indeed, readers will turn moody if you omit such things, or if you lack “terrific anecdotes”. Anecdotes are invaluable, for your publisher will extract and circulate them to magazine writers, talk show hosts and gossips who will “cover” your book. Do not be astonished if you have to extract these “nuggets” yourself in advance, for your publisher. Again, like movies, publishing is a rich, exciting business, leaving little time for reading.
Such thoughts ran through my mind as I read Katharine Hepburn by Barbara Leaming. Now I like Ms. Hepburn on screen. Not always, perhaps, she has plenty of films that even a friend would have to put down to her impulsiveness. She even got Oscars for some of them. I even find the fabled romance of Tracy and Hepburn rather less stimulating than her precarious alliance with Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, Holiday and The Philadelphia Story. When she was good, she was so good that you can see those films forever, marveling at her trembling mixture of vulnerability and assurance (long before illness, there was an artistic tremor).
But Hepburn is an oddity. In the 30s when she did her great work, she was not truly popular. The pairing with Tracy was crucial in taming her for audiences. Garson Kanin's 1971 book, Tracy and Hepburn – a novelistic memoir, shall we say? -- certainly helped make her accessible. She grew bolder with age and made several big, distinguished pictures where she was no longer put to the test of being 'sexy': The African Queen, Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Lion in Winter. And she survived. She will be 89 next May, if she lives, and everyone wants her to. She has fought age, her illness, undue fuss and phoneys everywhere. She espouses honourable causes. She is a real heroine, and as sane and down to earthy as most other eccentric New England ladies.
Now, this paragon did have one of the great successes of her life – and easily the most lucrative (old ladies have to look after themselves) – with a view of her life flew like a jazzy kite in a high wind, called Me: Stories of My Life. Me is not quite as dry and self-effacing as New England is; it is more Madonna-ish. But why shouldn't stars do their own lives? Me by K.H. Hepburn is very much more saleable than Katharine Hepburn by . . .me. Somehow the gullible public takes it for granted that autobiographies are testaments, closer to the truth than other writers might come (no matter that in Hollywood the “me” of interviews and fan magazines was often a voice written by strangers).
Me was authentic, and that's why it sold. Hepburn wrote it, and in a way that encouraged the reader's trust (or fondness). But the “life” was much shorter than the life. A great deal was omitted and much else glossed over with the author's vigorous no nonsense attitude. Why not? We most of us have tricky old ladies in our real families, and we more or less live with the way their version of history has smother the facts. Come to think of it, this self-serving affects the younger women too, and the men. It is human and lifelike; better yet, it is the dangerous way Tracy Lord floats through life in The Philadelphia Story.
So Me left room for a good biography, and here – Weidenfeld and Nicolson proclaim – it is: “At last, the definitive biography of Katharine Hepburn.. . The story that she herself never told ... the story that she herself never knew.” That does beg a few questions, even for a blurb. But blurbs ache for the new, the hitherto unrevealed, and nowadays apparently they're ready to spring surprises on their own subjects. For while it's easy and beguiling to imagine things that 88-year-olds have left unsaid, it's a stretch to get excited over stuff they never knew.
Of course, Leaming's book is subtler than the blurb leads you to expect. One of her guiding missions in this book is to get to the back of the Hepburn family mystery – to track down matters of disturbance, secrecy and even suicide that Hepburn herself may not have understood (which is not the same as not knowing). Few of us properly understand our parents, but we surely know the puzzles and the problems exist. Leaming makes a case for saying that Hepburn's rare person, her odd mixture of directness and formality, grew out of a large, highly educated, very talkative family which only managed to leave the large, personal issues unuttered. She makes a good case and great read out of it. Indeed, for well over 100 pages, we get a thoroughly researched and felt psychological mystery about a New England family at the turn of the century.
That means that Katharine Houghton Hepburn is born on 12 May 1907, on page 128. She makes her first movie, A Bill of Divorcement, in 1932, on page 272. Spencer Tracy is buried in 1967, on page 495. And the narrative concludes on page 512.
Do you begin to see the question marks that attend “definitive”? There is a lopsidedness in so much back story before the life itself, and the works. On Golden Pond is summed up, Oscar included, in a four-line paragraph. Her prolonged and heartfelt attempt to film Travels With My Aunt with George Cukor (one of the best projects they ever attempted) gets ten lines, most of which is devoted to the law suit that followed. Love Affair, her most recent work, where she is very touching, is not even mentioned. And, apart from one reference in the elusive sources, Me is not dealt with. A biographer may be forgiven for being suspicious about Me, but no one doubts that Hepburn wrote it and decided on its omissions, its white lies, its serene egotism and its ebullient title. Me surely needs to be talked about in a biography, let alone a definitive work.
Do we want to know – and I mean the “we” who read Sight and Sound – about Katharine Hepburn as an actress, a screen personality and a star, or as a celebrity, a “legend in her own time”, to whom all rumours and possibilities may cling? Suppose that Katharine Hepburn had simply suffered her own muddled family history and had a difficult unresolved love affair with a married drunk from Milwaukee (call him Spencer), who must have had his own lengthy, troubled back story. Would that woman have or deserve a biography – much less the dozen plus already dropped on Ms. Hepburn? Doesn't the interest in Hepburn depend upon the work and the moments in which that brave face seems to think and feel? Or is it hopelessly purist and humanly stupid to insist on separating that bright work from all the dark clouds of life that surrounded it?
I don't know the answers, but I know I wanted more about Bringing Up Baby which, for me, is the best film Hepburn ever made, as well as a disconcerting portrait of a woman whose appeal, energy and sense of life do not conceal the chance that she is demented and dangerous. I wanted to know more about the art and the craft of that, even what that role meant to Hepburn in her own life. Barbara Leaming's Baby gets three pages on its making, and there is a nice detail about veteran comic Walter Catlett telling Hepburn to play the role straight and let the audience laugh. I've always liked that story ever since I read it in Joseph McBride's Hawks on Hawks. But I've never just believed it, because I've learned to trust very little about what Howard Hawks ever said. Trust the pictures (and wait for Todd McCarthy's life of Hawks.)
Leaming makes one other point about Baby: Cary Grant, she says, was doing John Ford – his glasses were Fordian, and Grant's David reacted to Susan as Ford did with Hepburn. It is Leaming's largest and determining contention that there was a deep love between John Ford and Katharine Hepburn. You can read the book to judge. I will only add that Ford and Hepburn family members have complained at what they see as Leaming's inflation of a few letters. Ford's grandson has called Leaming's book “a Gothic novel that pretends to be a biography.”
So this “definitive” biography does wonders with its exploration of background and then turns increasingly sketchy but misguided in its interpretation. A full life of Hepburn remains to be done – though I suspect it should wait for Selden West's life of Tracy which should be ready in a couple of years. The man from Milwaukee has never yet been centre page, but his story could alter the way we see Hepburn.
Sight and Sound, August, 1995
Suppose that writing is your work, and film your expertise. Let us also imagine that you want to stay alive and do your best to sustain the health, happiness and Power Ranger collection of the few people known as your dependants. You may do some journalism, some critical writing, some teaching; you may help subtitle pictures; you may even have a shady corner in the publicity field. Still, if you can contrive it, somehow there is nothing like getting a life. No, I don't mean abandoning the dark and and its dreams and taking orphans on long country walks. I am referring to the agreement that may be made with a publisher – preferably publishers on both sides of the Atlantic – whereby you are contracted to write the biography of some luminous figure from the movies.
How do publishers measure this luminosity? Well, suppose that over the decades you have explored the movies of, say , Carl Dreyer, Ann Dvorak and Arthur Braithwaite, and reached remarkable and eloquent depth of insight. To propose 200,000 word books on any of those three, even with “astonishing new material”, is unlikely to move publishers. In fact, the moguls of the book business are much like their counterparts in Hollywood – they favour name recognition and subjects that have worked before. So you may have to shift from Dreyer and Braithwaite and take your selection from Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brando. The last year has seen two more Taylor books (by Donald Spoto and C. David Heymann), a Brando autobiography and a biography by Peter Manso. All are depressing; the lives of actors lack the rapture of their work.
What I mean to say is this; the proper place for a dazzling evocation of the vexed stillness of Gertrud, the sub-textualised drama (that noir ballading) in Sinatra's singing, or the codification of the Taylor close-up is not in these pages, or pages like them. But if you can link Mr. Sinatra to known gangsters (especially those with a snappy line in tough talk), or indeed to Miss Taylor, you may swing a deal. It will come as no surprise to readers and publishers if candour and research compel you to reveal the lives of Taylor, Sinatra and Brando as chaotic, sordid and deluded. Indeed, readers will turn moody if you omit such things, or if you lack “terrific anecdotes”. Anecdotes are invaluable, for your publisher will extract and circulate them to magazine writers, talk show hosts and gossips who will “cover” your book. Do not be astonished if you have to extract these “nuggets” yourself in advance, for your publisher. Again, like movies, publishing is a rich, exciting business, leaving little time for reading.
Such thoughts ran through my mind as I read Katharine Hepburn by Barbara Leaming. Now I like Ms. Hepburn on screen. Not always, perhaps, she has plenty of films that even a friend would have to put down to her impulsiveness. She even got Oscars for some of them. I even find the fabled romance of Tracy and Hepburn rather less stimulating than her precarious alliance with Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, Holiday and The Philadelphia Story. When she was good, she was so good that you can see those films forever, marveling at her trembling mixture of vulnerability and assurance (long before illness, there was an artistic tremor).
But Hepburn is an oddity. In the 30s when she did her great work, she was not truly popular. The pairing with Tracy was crucial in taming her for audiences. Garson Kanin's 1971 book, Tracy and Hepburn – a novelistic memoir, shall we say? -- certainly helped make her accessible. She grew bolder with age and made several big, distinguished pictures where she was no longer put to the test of being 'sexy': The African Queen, Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Lion in Winter. And she survived. She will be 89 next May, if she lives, and everyone wants her to. She has fought age, her illness, undue fuss and phoneys everywhere. She espouses honourable causes. She is a real heroine, and as sane and down to earthy as most other eccentric New England ladies.
Now, this paragon did have one of the great successes of her life – and easily the most lucrative (old ladies have to look after themselves) – with a view of her life flew like a jazzy kite in a high wind, called Me: Stories of My Life. Me is not quite as dry and self-effacing as New England is; it is more Madonna-ish. But why shouldn't stars do their own lives? Me by K.H. Hepburn is very much more saleable than Katharine Hepburn by . . .me. Somehow the gullible public takes it for granted that autobiographies are testaments, closer to the truth than other writers might come (no matter that in Hollywood the “me” of interviews and fan magazines was often a voice written by strangers).
Me was authentic, and that's why it sold. Hepburn wrote it, and in a way that encouraged the reader's trust (or fondness). But the “life” was much shorter than the life. A great deal was omitted and much else glossed over with the author's vigorous no nonsense attitude. Why not? We most of us have tricky old ladies in our real families, and we more or less live with the way their version of history has smother the facts. Come to think of it, this self-serving affects the younger women too, and the men. It is human and lifelike; better yet, it is the dangerous way Tracy Lord floats through life in The Philadelphia Story.
So Me left room for a good biography, and here – Weidenfeld and Nicolson proclaim – it is: “At last, the definitive biography of Katharine Hepburn.. . The story that she herself never told ... the story that she herself never knew.” That does beg a few questions, even for a blurb. But blurbs ache for the new, the hitherto unrevealed, and nowadays apparently they're ready to spring surprises on their own subjects. For while it's easy and beguiling to imagine things that 88-year-olds have left unsaid, it's a stretch to get excited over stuff they never knew.
Of course, Leaming's book is subtler than the blurb leads you to expect. One of her guiding missions in this book is to get to the back of the Hepburn family mystery – to track down matters of disturbance, secrecy and even suicide that Hepburn herself may not have understood (which is not the same as not knowing). Few of us properly understand our parents, but we surely know the puzzles and the problems exist. Leaming makes a case for saying that Hepburn's rare person, her odd mixture of directness and formality, grew out of a large, highly educated, very talkative family which only managed to leave the large, personal issues unuttered. She makes a good case and great read out of it. Indeed, for well over 100 pages, we get a thoroughly researched and felt psychological mystery about a New England family at the turn of the century.
That means that Katharine Houghton Hepburn is born on 12 May 1907, on page 128. She makes her first movie, A Bill of Divorcement, in 1932, on page 272. Spencer Tracy is buried in 1967, on page 495. And the narrative concludes on page 512.
Do you begin to see the question marks that attend “definitive”? There is a lopsidedness in so much back story before the life itself, and the works. On Golden Pond is summed up, Oscar included, in a four-line paragraph. Her prolonged and heartfelt attempt to film Travels With My Aunt with George Cukor (one of the best projects they ever attempted) gets ten lines, most of which is devoted to the law suit that followed. Love Affair, her most recent work, where she is very touching, is not even mentioned. And, apart from one reference in the elusive sources, Me is not dealt with. A biographer may be forgiven for being suspicious about Me, but no one doubts that Hepburn wrote it and decided on its omissions, its white lies, its serene egotism and its ebullient title. Me surely needs to be talked about in a biography, let alone a definitive work.
Do we want to know – and I mean the “we” who read Sight and Sound – about Katharine Hepburn as an actress, a screen personality and a star, or as a celebrity, a “legend in her own time”, to whom all rumours and possibilities may cling? Suppose that Katharine Hepburn had simply suffered her own muddled family history and had a difficult unresolved love affair with a married drunk from Milwaukee (call him Spencer), who must have had his own lengthy, troubled back story. Would that woman have or deserve a biography – much less the dozen plus already dropped on Ms. Hepburn? Doesn't the interest in Hepburn depend upon the work and the moments in which that brave face seems to think and feel? Or is it hopelessly purist and humanly stupid to insist on separating that bright work from all the dark clouds of life that surrounded it?
I don't know the answers, but I know I wanted more about Bringing Up Baby which, for me, is the best film Hepburn ever made, as well as a disconcerting portrait of a woman whose appeal, energy and sense of life do not conceal the chance that she is demented and dangerous. I wanted to know more about the art and the craft of that, even what that role meant to Hepburn in her own life. Barbara Leaming's Baby gets three pages on its making, and there is a nice detail about veteran comic Walter Catlett telling Hepburn to play the role straight and let the audience laugh. I've always liked that story ever since I read it in Joseph McBride's Hawks on Hawks. But I've never just believed it, because I've learned to trust very little about what Howard Hawks ever said. Trust the pictures (and wait for Todd McCarthy's life of Hawks.)
Leaming makes one other point about Baby: Cary Grant, she says, was doing John Ford – his glasses were Fordian, and Grant's David reacted to Susan as Ford did with Hepburn. It is Leaming's largest and determining contention that there was a deep love between John Ford and Katharine Hepburn. You can read the book to judge. I will only add that Ford and Hepburn family members have complained at what they see as Leaming's inflation of a few letters. Ford's grandson has called Leaming's book “a Gothic novel that pretends to be a biography.”
So this “definitive” biography does wonders with its exploration of background and then turns increasingly sketchy but misguided in its interpretation. A full life of Hepburn remains to be done – though I suspect it should wait for Selden West's life of Tracy which should be ready in a couple of years. The man from Milwaukee has never yet been centre page, but his story could alter the way we see Hepburn.