Hepburner
Full Member
'Enemies are so stimulating'
Posts: 180
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Post by Hepburner on Oct 12, 2006 20:26:13 GMT -5
Exactly! I agree with everything you said Catherine. I guess its just that what I would call "little empathy" is not what Mann, or others, call "little empathy". I also think its unfair to label Kate in any way. As you said, none of us knew her, so who are we to judge.
To be perfectly honest, Kate's personal life is of little interest to me. I like hearing about what she was like as a person, and some of the many stories that highlight that, but her actual personal affairs are of little interest to me. I dont care if she was a lesbian. I dont care to see her Will. I dont care to go and see the houses she lived in. Or her grave. I might, if I happened to pass any of those things, notice, and take a moment. But I wouldn't hunt them down either. I think there is a fine fine line between like, and admiration for her, her art etc, and prying into her private life or making wild assumptions. Privately, sure. We'll all assume things. But publicly, I think its wrong. I dunno. I just dont think its fair for so many authors to make such allegations about her and her life when they really dont know and are basing it so little.
The only things I'm interested in are anecdotes, her work and that which she chose to tell the public.
She's still interesting though and an amazing artist.
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Post by dreamer on Oct 21, 2006 17:48:06 GMT -5
Wish I was as good as you to express my thoughts in English - Shane I totally agree with you - could have been from me - hmm if I could You have my respect - you made a very good point
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Post by HollywoodHepcat on Oct 22, 2006 3:05:30 GMT -5
What pisses me off the most is that the authors of these horrid bio-- I almost called them biographies -- trashy piles o' mixed worn-out facts and the same old lies, think that REAL Kate fans won't notice or care or maybe believe their crap. They're just passing this bunk out as truth and expecting people to bow at their feet for being such good investigators. Do they think at all? People are so fickle and gullable that they make money anyway, regardless of the sincerity that they have or haven't put into the book. Asses.
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Post by dreamer on Oct 22, 2006 8:05:15 GMT -5
the link from smith:
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Post by Sherry on Oct 22, 2006 21:51:24 GMT -5
I put the link to the review up there because of the comments of the guy who knew both Katharine and Spencer But I wonder how closely he read the book - Mann never claimed that Katharine had any type of sexual relationship with Phyllis or Hope Williams In regard to how closely he read the book, I am convinced that he, like most of the people who have reviewed Mann's book, cannot read because if they were discerning readers, they would be able to see the repeated use of anonymous sources to say some of the most damaging things about Kate. And they would recognize the cherry-picking that he did of comments in Kanin's book about Tracy and Hepburn. He chooses to quote comments that support his negative theory about them, but he ignores anything that doesn't support his thesis. The book is a crock but most of the reviewers are so willing to buy into his negative view of Kate that they ignore the most obvious fabrications and speculations of Mann and treat them as fact.
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Post by smith on Oct 27, 2006 19:12:39 GMT -5
Excerpt from Newsday
Imagine if Katharine Hepburn had died in 1963. It would have been a calamity - "Lion in Winter," for instance, might have starred Anne Bancroft. And given that Hepburn had made only one movie in the previous four years, the lament for the famously pants-wearing, wise-cracking Kate would have been both faint in its praise and faltering in its appraisal. Ms. Hepburn, after all, was not into pillbox hats.
Twenty years later, in 1983? She would have been declared the personification of a then commonplace feminism, an actress who had provided role models by which the modern woman could tailor her life. Some might have posthumously smeared her as a Commie, or fellow traveler, but there would have been little question that, as much as her roles defined her, she had also defined (however grandiosely) the potential of women in the American 20th century.
When Hepburn did pass away in 2003, the floodgates of cultural observation blew open, of course. But the explosive had grown a bit soggy.
What we got - and still get - were/are revisionist postmortems of something that had never been clearly articulated in the first place. Yes, the critics said, Hepburn had played super-athletes ("Pat and Mike"), world-class newspaper correspondents ("Woman of the Year") and impassioned litigators ("Adam's Rib"), thus raising the bar for women and possibly even upping their chances for achievement. But, said the critics, Hepburn had played characters who folded under the withering gaze of male appraisal ("Pat and Mike"), had to demonstrate their inferiority by burning the coffee ("Woman of the Year") and ultimately decided that marriage was more important than legal principle ("Adam's Rib").
Hepburn was either the savior of female humanity, or had single-handedly relegated girls to a life of voluntary servitude.
Somewhere in between lies a truth, and you get a kind of truth in William J. Mann's "Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn," a dishy, needy book somewhat unworthy of its subject. Mann's style - a slightly elevated version of the journalism-as-salespitch practiced by the likes of Entertainment Weekly - abets his smarmy search for facts to support his claims about: (1) Hepburn's sexuality (she may have had lesbian affairs with, among others, longtime companion Laura Harding); (2) what gnarled complexes really lay behind the alliance with Spencer Tracy; and (3) how much of Hepburn's image was founded in fact.
But Mann's desperation to prove such points - none of which is as crucial to Hepburn's ultimate cultural importance as any one of a dozen film performances - makes the experience of "Kate" rather tiresome. So does Mann's persistent one-upmanship, his constant claims of research superior to other biographies and a catalog of "facts" perpetrated by writers dating back to Adele Rogers St. Johns (in 1934!). All of this has the ironic effect of giving his book a second-class status, because he doesn't write with authority or with a confidence that simply assumes his Hepburn bio will trump all others.
That Hepburn would turn out to be both more and less than what she and Hollywood wanted us to believe is almost too obvious. "In my relationships," she is quoted by Mann as having said in a 1975 Ladies Home Journal interview, "I know something has to give. I never think the man is going to give - so I do. I just deliberately change, I just shut up - when every atom in me wants to speak up."
Not exactly La Pasionaria at the battlements, but Hepburn was, as Mann too gleefully tells us, a burnisher of her own image. And a one-woman warren of dead-ends and entanglements. The idea that she had referred to herself as "Jimmy" as a short-haired kid; that she had a withholding father and a libertine mother; that the Hepburn family's liberal lip service and bourgeois lifestyle reeked of hypocrisy; that her brother Tom committed suicide and no one wanted to face it: All these alcoves and apses of Hepburn's life are explored breathlessly by Mann, who fails to convince us very much why any of it matters, except as the kind of gossip-for-gossip's sake with which the culture is already highly saturated.
"She didn't grow up to be her mother's kind of woman," Mann writes. "Rather, Katharine Hepburn grew up to be her father's kind of man." Its sounds like the kind of line calculated to get its author a shot on "Oprah." Oh yes, and Spencer Tracy was bisexual.
What does it mean to us? Maybe nothing. What Hepburn made revolutionary would seem to young women today to be either their due, or their curse. That Hepburn lived it boldly is the best thing one gets, or could get, from William Mann's "Kate."
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Post by dreamer on Oct 28, 2006 10:18:30 GMT -5
Have started reading it by surfing around – don’t know if I ever want to read it in full length from A to Z. Bought it out of pure curiosity – mainly because of the many post’s on the board.
One thing is for sure – don’t know if any of the so called biographers know – for fans of Kate, Kath or Kathy it matter not what they reveal – the secret behind, the real or the woman who was Hepburn as the press announces some books, are nothing more than moneymaking on an icon or a legend – a person who now can not defend her self. Who are they to know?
Mann does not even hesitate to reveal unspoken things – as to explore the inner circle and to make a picture of family and friends. Missing the dignity towards and in between the human race. What is the truth, nobody will ever know. And that is all right that way – to William Mann, let us, the world have our memory and imagination, without intruding and guessing?
And as for mentioning the board in his book and 2 of the members, I’m simply not flattered but very disappointed – again a use of a (I suppose an offered) help believing in a honest and sincere work - as he entered the board. We use usernames to protect our selves against the like of William Mann and he has no hesitation to use some of us against the request not to do so.
For me and I think many of her fan’s Kate was still Kate, and that’s all that matters. It’s unfair to label her in any way.
None of us knew her, so who are we to judge. We weren’t there.
I adore her none the less.
She had that certain magic, which we couldn’t point out where it came from – it was just there – that’s what counts - what she gave and showed us.
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Post by Shaun on Oct 29, 2006 14:29:56 GMT -5
Finally an article that doesn't praise Mann's book or believe every tidbit he throws out. But where her Oscars are concerned, why does everyone say she's the first WOMAN to have four? She's the only ACTOR, male or female to have four. Period. The other way seems patronizing to me.
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Post by dreamer on Oct 29, 2006 14:46:21 GMT -5
Yes Shaun - finally ;D Patronizing it was - big
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Post by Cate on Oct 29, 2006 15:20:22 GMT -5
Good point Shaun! I guess I never realized no other actor had ever won four Oscars -- mostly because everytime they mention this fact about Kate, they say "woman." Hmm... thanks for pointing that out.
I liked the author's point of view in that article.
The acknowledgment of this site is sort of disrespectful in that people may think that we share the same views as Mann... he actually names names and that's rather distasteful especially since Judy already said she didn't want to be put in the book. He never asked permission? Meh. I wonder if he even used any of the information he got from this site and its members or if he twisted it around like a lot of the other things in his book (which I have yet to read if I ever do).
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Post by HollywoodHepcat on Oct 29, 2006 15:45:07 GMT -5
Yah Shaun, the Kate being the "first woman with 4 Oscars" burns my goat, as well. Besides the fact that he more or less patronizes the crap out of the female sex, it really shows he knows so very litle about film fistory. Um hi, Edith Head anybody? She has about 10 of those bad boys, I believe. Jackass.
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Post by dreamer on Oct 31, 2006 18:19:06 GMT -5
Have moved this to a new thread about oscars
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Post by Sherry on Nov 2, 2006 12:25:29 GMT -5
Don't know if you are aware of it but Mann has a blog on the Amazon site so that he can push the book and pat himself on the back. There are at least 7 gushy reviews on the site in favor of the book. Those of us who loathe the book and see it for the dung heap that it is notice that when we write an unfavorable review, it doesn't get posted. Guess Amazon's new policy is that only "attaboys" deserve to be posted. However, some of us are undaunted so we have critiqued the book via the "comments" area beneah each reader review. In some instances, Mann has even taken to answering back the criticisms. Of course, his attitude is that Kate's long time admirers are just upset because they can't let go of the "myth" of Kate or Kate and Spencer. That's the kind of rebuttal that people use when they can't actually defend what they've said with indisputable facts and instead have savaged someone with innuendo, anonymous "friends of" quotes, and outright twisting of conversations by taking them from one context and placing them in another so that they fit the agenda of the writer. Anyway, just wanted you to know that it's not a case of no one writing a negative review and trying to place it on the Amazon site, it's a case of Amazon not allowing a negative word to be said about a book they are trying to sell. It's all about the money. It's also dishonest of them to "pretend" that they allow actual opinions on their site. I can understand censoring for name-calling or cursing but not for honest difference of opinion.
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Post by dreamer on Nov 2, 2006 13:02:39 GMT -5
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Post by dreamer on Nov 2, 2006 13:09:10 GMT -5
Don't know if you are aware of it but Mann has a blog on the Amazon site so that he can push the book and pat himself on the back. There are at least 7 gushy reviews on the site in favor of the book. Those of us who loathe the book and see it for the dung heap that it is notice that when we write an unfavorable review, it doesn't get posted. Guess Amazon's new policy is that only "attaboys" deserve to be posted. However, some of us are undaunted so we have critiqued the book via the "comments" area beneah each reader review. In some instances, Mann has even taken to answering back the criticisms. Of course, his attitude is that Kate's long time admirers are just upset because they can't let go of the "myth" of Kate or Kate and Spencer. That's the kind of rebuttal that people use when they can't actually defend what they've said with indisputable facts and instead have savaged someone with innuendo, anonymous "friends of" quotes, and outright twisting of conversations by taking them from one context and placing them in another so that they fit the agenda of the writer. Anyway, just wanted you to know that it's not a case of no one writing a negative review and trying to place it on the Amazon site, it's a case of Amazon not allowing a negative word to be said about a book they are trying to sell. It's all about the money. It's also dishonest of them to "pretend" that they allow actual opinions on their site. I can understand censoring for name-calling or cursing but not for honest difference of opinion. Thanks Sherry for sharing that - read it - was upset - Mr. Mann is ignorant Don't believe someone who quotes friends without naming their names. Read there will be a file on Kate by FIOA at FBI (fioa.fbi.gov) that we can read on line - will be interesting to compare with Mann's book - Spencer's is there already
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