Hepburn: A more complete, compelling figure

Hepburn: A more complete, compelling figure

Katharine Hepburn
By Barbara Leaming
549 pp
Crown Publishers, Inc.
Rp 110,000 (US$27.50)

JAKARTA (JP): Hollywood's spin doctors could learn a lesson or
two in image maintenance from Katharine Hepburn. Now 89, Hepburn
is generally regarded as America's greatest living actress and is
a perennial member of polls of the most admired women.

The irony is that this fierce individualist has conducted her
professional and personal life by her own idiosyncratic rules.
Despite her unconventional behavior and opinions, Hepburn
survived the hypocritical codes of morality which waylaid many
other personalities during the 1940s and 1950s.

In Hollywood's suffocating studio system, in which the
publicity departments churned out saccharine profiles of the
stars, Hepburn refused to relinquish control. She crafted her own
public image through balking at most media exposure and became
the architect of the "Hepburn persona," the opinionated eccentric
who did not suffer fools gladly.

A supreme example of her need for absolute control over her
image was her autobiography Me: Stories of My Life. Hepburn
nimbly danced around the sensitive subjects of her life, such as
her family history and her relationships with Howard Hughes and
Spencer Tracy, by either ignoring them completely or divulging
scant details. Instead, she proffered her musings on assisting
motorists in distress and her usual weekend schedule at her
country home. A frustrating read for anyone with a knowledge of
Hepburn's life, Me is nevertheless distinguished as a brilliant
work of evasiveness.

Hepburn is no doubt none too pleased about Barbara Leaming's
Katharine Hepburn, which lays bare many of the secrets she spent
her life trying to conceal. In this copiously researched work,
Leaming uses interviews and a wealth of Hepburn family letters to
explore the life forces which shaped this complex and extremely
driven woman. Yet Leaming's book is levels above the shoddy
celebrity biographies which stoop to innuendo, hearsay and the
revelation of embarrassing facts to metaphorically flay their
subjects. Her voice is detached and non-judgmental, allowing the
reader to form his own perspective on Hepburn, the ideal traits
of a biographer. By the end of the work, the reader has more
respect for Hepburn and a greater understanding of the decisions
she made during her life.

Leaming begins the biography by relating the suicide of
Hepburn's maternal grandfather, an event which she positions as
pivotal in the history of the actress and her family. His wife
had tried in vain to bring him out of his depression. Shortly
after his death she was diagnosed with stomach cancer but she
spent her final days ensuring that her three daughters would
attend Bryn Mawr, then the most prestigious women's university in
America.

This scenario of the strong woman of the family picking up the
pieces for the emotionally vulnerable man would be repeated time
and again, albeit in varying permutations, over the years. The
male members of both sides of Hepburn's family were
euphemistically described as suffering from "melancholia" in an
era when depression was little understood and more often than not
ascribed to sinister forces.

The list of suicides of men in the families is startling. In
addition to her maternal grandfather, Hepburn's maternal great
uncle, two paternal uncles and her oldest brother also took their
own lives. Hepburn was closest to her brother Tom, only two years
her senior, and she had been asked to accompany him to New York
to help him overcome his depression. She was as brave and
outgoing as he was nervous and introverted; the distinct
definition of personalities among the male and female members was
crystallized in Katharine and Tom.

The most harrowing passage in the book is the description of
Hepburn, then 14, discovering her brother hanging in a bedroom.
The aftermath also took its emotional toll. Hepburn's father,
terrified of the implications of the suicide and the widespread
belief that it indicated a strain of insanity, pressured her into
stating that Tom's death was a childish prank gone horribly
wrong. Hepburn, by subjugating her feelings to those of her
father's, had become caught in the entrenched pattern of female-
male relationships in the family, Leaming says. Not surprisingly,
Hepburn's sexual relationships during her Hollywood career were a
mirror of her family life, particularly her efforts to help her
brother with his emotional turmoil.

Hepburn was drawn to disturbed, self-destructive men (Leaming
describes them as having an oversensitivity to life) and she puts
aside her own feelings in a vain quest to bring them back from
the brink. She fell in love with director John Ford, who was both
married and an alcoholic, but could not pry him away from is
domineering wife. Hepburn also embarked on a doomed affair with
Howard Hughes, and persisted in pursuing the relationship with
this strange and boorish man until he cut off all communication
with her.

Hepburn's most famous relationship was with Spencer Tracy, who
refused to divorce his wife because of his Catholic faith.
Following his death in 1967, the 26-year relationship was
romanticized in the media as one of two romantics meeting at the
wrong place and time.

The truth was very different, Leaming says. Tracy treated
Hepburn with summary contempt, constantly belittling her in
public or ignoring her completely. Like Ford, Tracy was a
hopeless alcoholic who sought to escape his profound guilt about
his life by drowning himself in whisky (he believed his son's
deafness was divine retribution for his philandering and
unfaithfulness to his wife). When he went on one of his frequent
benders, Tracy would throw Hepburn out of his apartment at the
Beverly Hills Hotel in a stream of verbal abuse. Hepburn, content
to play the long-suffering martyr in real life, would curl up to
sleep outside the room, eventually getting a hotel employee to
let her in to clean up after the comatose Tracy.

Katharine Hepburn is not a chronology of the actress's work,
which is mentioned incidentally in the grander scheme of the
personal events in her life. It is an absorbing biography which
helps to answer many of the questions about the actress and the
influences in shaping her unique personality. It is at once
revealing, sympathetic and fair, with Hepburn emerging as a more
complete and compelling figure under Leaming's skilled treatment.

-- Bruce Emond