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