Post by guesttoo on Jul 24, 2005 8:01:35 GMT -5
Review of the Barbara Leaming KH biography
By Larry Swindell (author of Spencer Tracy, a biography, 1969)
Dallas – Fort Worth Telegram
This latest of many Kate Hepburn biographies, a corpulence at 500 pages, is getting a big push it probably doesn't deserve. And it may be a dangerous book: dusk jacket referrals by such as Shana Alexander and Liz Smith can easily be taken in by reportage that may just be irresponsible.
Let's start with Barbara Leaming's depiction of Spencer Tracy. Because I was Tracy's first biographer a few years after his death, I cannot be “objective” about Leaming's hatcheting of that complicated man who also may have been the finest actor American movies have known. Any review is subjective anyway, but Leaming's Tracy will be inadmissible to many other than myself.
During my own biographical research I had access to many of Tracy's colleagues, friends and adversaries no longer with us. I believe they would be surprised and shocked by Leaming's one-dimensional presentation of a brutal whoremongering drunkard with no redeeming qualities.
However, the book in question is not about Spencer Tracy, but his frequent co-star and long time regular lady, great Katharine of the Hartford Hepburns, who has experienced the most honorable career in the annals of movie stardom and is the only four time Oscar winner.
In her litany of acknowledgments, Leaming cites direct contact with Kate and other Hepburns, yet the extended narrative has the abhorrent aroma of an end-run “unauthorized” biography. One also suspects inflation, particularly in Leaming's presentation of director John Ford as the great unrequited love of Hepburn's life.
Leaming appears to have come upon a cache of Hepburn-Ford love letters while investigating Ford's papers in the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Ind. She exploits this brief affair that other Hepburn chroniclers – Anne Edwards and Garson Kanin among them – knew of but kept in proper focus.
Romance between the divorced young actress and the older married director erupted in 1936 when Ford directed Hepburn for the only time, in RKO's Mary of Scotland. In 1968 the great Frederic March – who was Bothwell to Kate's Mary Stuart – told me the Ford-Hepburn affair was “just on of those passing things” but that it disrupted the picture-making. At about the same time George Cukor, a Hepburn intimate, assured me that Kate's romantic adventures with Leland Hayward and Howard Hughes were more serious than the Ford fling.
The great love of Katharine Hepburn's life was Spencer Tracy, for 25 years' duration; and perhaps only Barbara Leaming chooses to believe otherwise.
So much for subjectivity. Perhaps I can be objective about Leaming's writing, which here shows considerable improvement over her almost unreadable biography of Orson Welles.
Excepting the John Ford material, Leaming's text is a warming over of much that has been revealed previously, if not with such excruciating detail.
Leaming begins with an exhaustive investigation of both Kate's paternal and maternal (Houghton) lines, showing a penchant for suicide inhabited in several generations. This leads almost inevitably into the jungle of psycho biography, with Leaming implying that Kate's inability to rescue her older brother Tom from suicide was the pivotal event in shaping her character.
Despite it's length, Barbara Leaming's Katharine Hepburn has negligible value as film criticism. Katharine Hepburn who turns 88 next week, certainly has been a great star and often has been a great actor as well. But somehow, she eludes this biographer as she has others. I doubt that any reader of this book will attain a better or deeper understanding of its subject, whose own Me remains the choice reference.
Here and there platitudinously, Barbara Leaming expresses admiration for Hepburn, etching her as a heroine. But Kate will hate all of this book.
By Larry Swindell (author of Spencer Tracy, a biography, 1969)
Dallas – Fort Worth Telegram
This latest of many Kate Hepburn biographies, a corpulence at 500 pages, is getting a big push it probably doesn't deserve. And it may be a dangerous book: dusk jacket referrals by such as Shana Alexander and Liz Smith can easily be taken in by reportage that may just be irresponsible.
Let's start with Barbara Leaming's depiction of Spencer Tracy. Because I was Tracy's first biographer a few years after his death, I cannot be “objective” about Leaming's hatcheting of that complicated man who also may have been the finest actor American movies have known. Any review is subjective anyway, but Leaming's Tracy will be inadmissible to many other than myself.
During my own biographical research I had access to many of Tracy's colleagues, friends and adversaries no longer with us. I believe they would be surprised and shocked by Leaming's one-dimensional presentation of a brutal whoremongering drunkard with no redeeming qualities.
However, the book in question is not about Spencer Tracy, but his frequent co-star and long time regular lady, great Katharine of the Hartford Hepburns, who has experienced the most honorable career in the annals of movie stardom and is the only four time Oscar winner.
In her litany of acknowledgments, Leaming cites direct contact with Kate and other Hepburns, yet the extended narrative has the abhorrent aroma of an end-run “unauthorized” biography. One also suspects inflation, particularly in Leaming's presentation of director John Ford as the great unrequited love of Hepburn's life.
Leaming appears to have come upon a cache of Hepburn-Ford love letters while investigating Ford's papers in the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Ind. She exploits this brief affair that other Hepburn chroniclers – Anne Edwards and Garson Kanin among them – knew of but kept in proper focus.
Romance between the divorced young actress and the older married director erupted in 1936 when Ford directed Hepburn for the only time, in RKO's Mary of Scotland. In 1968 the great Frederic March – who was Bothwell to Kate's Mary Stuart – told me the Ford-Hepburn affair was “just on of those passing things” but that it disrupted the picture-making. At about the same time George Cukor, a Hepburn intimate, assured me that Kate's romantic adventures with Leland Hayward and Howard Hughes were more serious than the Ford fling.
The great love of Katharine Hepburn's life was Spencer Tracy, for 25 years' duration; and perhaps only Barbara Leaming chooses to believe otherwise.
So much for subjectivity. Perhaps I can be objective about Leaming's writing, which here shows considerable improvement over her almost unreadable biography of Orson Welles.
Excepting the John Ford material, Leaming's text is a warming over of much that has been revealed previously, if not with such excruciating detail.
Leaming begins with an exhaustive investigation of both Kate's paternal and maternal (Houghton) lines, showing a penchant for suicide inhabited in several generations. This leads almost inevitably into the jungle of psycho biography, with Leaming implying that Kate's inability to rescue her older brother Tom from suicide was the pivotal event in shaping her character.
Despite it's length, Barbara Leaming's Katharine Hepburn has negligible value as film criticism. Katharine Hepburn who turns 88 next week, certainly has been a great star and often has been a great actor as well. But somehow, she eludes this biographer as she has others. I doubt that any reader of this book will attain a better or deeper understanding of its subject, whose own Me remains the choice reference.
Here and there platitudinously, Barbara Leaming expresses admiration for Hepburn, etching her as a heroine. But Kate will hate all of this book.