The hidden Hepburn

KATHARINE HEPBURN’S public life breaks down, conveniently enough, into three acts. In the 1930s, on-screen she was pretty much what she was in life: well-bred and high-spirited, a visibly spunky young woman determined to bring fresh air (and airs) to variously musty, generally upper-class, settings. In the latter part of the decade -- we can conveniently date it from the divine “Bringing Up Baby” (1938) -- she began playing either career women or heiresses in serious need of taming by sensible, plain-spoken men generally of a lower, more obviously democratic, caste. “The Philadelphia Story,” a play she commissioned and then packaged for the screen (1940), is possibly the most widely beloved of those films, but the best comedies she made with Spencer Tracy (“Woman of the Year,” “Pat and Mike,” “Adam’s Rib”) surely rank close to it in the public’s affection.

In her very long third act (beginning in 1952 with the success of “The African Queen”), she essentially became the nation’s spinster aunt, still capable for a while of sexual gestures but more admired for other qualities -- her flinty independence, her outspokenness, her ability to keep working in significant projects at a time when most of her peers had declined into Grand Guignol and episodic television. She lived long enough to see feminism take forms more abrasive than the kind she had learned at her mother’s knee, and she was dubious about some of its more modern forms even though she allowed her life story to be conflated with the movement’s aims and even became one of its heroines. But in her final decades she was pretty much a harridan; as early as 1969, the director (an old friend) of her stage musical “Coco” was saying she belonged in “Bellevue Hospital in a straitjacket” -- and she still had 34 years to live.

This career arc is discernible in William J. Mann’s too long, soberly presented biography, “Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn.” But its pursuit is not his principal business. What most concerns him is her hidden life -- in particular, her relationships with men and women. In essence, what he’s saying is: The rumors about her lesbian connections were true, and they were more extensive than anyone may have thought; that her relationships with famous men (Howard Hughes and John Ford prominently among them) were only briefly, if at all, sexual; that her famous love affair with Tracy was of that character and was broken by long separations hidden from the press and public. And, finally, her tearful recollections of what went on between them -- so important to the late-blooming affection in which she was generally held -- were heavily fictionalized.

These revelations -- most but not all of which are quite believable -- will, I suppose, be regarded as bombshells by people who continue to hold the lives of dead movie stars in high and sentimental regard. It is hard for fans to abandon images as carefully nurtured as Hepburn’s. Doubtless many of them will reject the evidence Mann so earnestly sets forth. I am, I think, less susceptible to his revelations than they are: I yield to no one in my love of gossip, but I also think that, in the end, our only legitimate interest in actors must lie in their work and how it catches in our minds over the long haul. In that regard, Hepburn was a unique and original presence during her first two decades on-screen, offering, in high definition, an upper-crust snootiness that could be turned into a nice, slightly tomboyish good nature once someone or something knocked her off her high horse. But she was ever more presence than actress, and I think her latter-day spinster and grande dame impersonations were hooey -- God-awful exercises in self-regarding, sentimentally stated bravery.

Hepburn’s chin might have been up, but it was always atremble. Dorothy Parker’s immortal wisecrack about Hepburn running “the gamut of emotions from A to B” has never been disproved; in the end, her career may belong more to the annals of celebrity than performance.

That point may, however, require an asterisk: Mann argues that Hepburn was averse to “skin-to-skin” sexual contact and was particularly resistant to the “hard, penetrative” attentions of men. But if one searches her filmography in vain for passionate passages, we surely get the impression that love mattered to her and that she could fall into an affectionately bantering version of it with men like Cary Grant and Tracy. Which may mean she was a better actress than we knew.

That said, the lifelong sexual pattern Mann discerns goes something like this: She would toy with upper-class men who Mann believes were bisexual (among them he numbers her only husband, Luddy Smith) but would then retreat to the “gentler, less intrusive” embraces of women, most notably a socialite named Laura Harding, whom Mann persuasively identifies as the great love of Hepburn’s life (although Harding was by no means the only woman Hepburn was attracted to, he writes). This pattern would be broken from time to time by affairs with extremely macho guys -- Ford, George Stevens, John Huston and, of course, Tracy. Mann does not believe she had sex with many of them; when she did, it tended to be a brief and early part of their relationships. She preferred palship.

And discretion, of course. Mann has a lot of trouble discerning what exactly she did or did not do, especially with her early lovers; he’s very reliant on the word of people who knew her much later in life and relate little hints she dropped. Also, she defined the word “lesbian” differently than most of us do. She insisted she was not one because to her and her circle, this meant women visibly -- abhorrently, mannish -- rough in style and decorum. Her crowd was more larkish, in the manner of Bryn Mawr undergraduates. And she -- literally, famously and, in the 1930s, scandalously -- wore the pants in that family. For as Mann puts it, “she didn’t grow up to be her mother’s kind of woman. Rather, [she] grew up to be her father’s kind of man.” She also grew up wanting mainly to be famous, which, as she shrewdly noticed, tends to make people cursed with that obsession lonely and incapable of intimacy.

Which brings her (and us) to that poor, tormented booze-hound, Tracy. He was seemingly her kind of guy: a gifted actor of the no-wheels-visibly-spinning school, macho on the outside but emotionally closed (and rather unpleasant) off-screen, especially when he was into the “black bottle” (an old phrase that deserves revival), which was often. He was racked with all kinds of guilt about his unfaithfulness to his wife, about the deaf son whose affliction he saw as God’s curse on him. He believed he was doomed to fry in Irish Catholic hell. He was take-charge Kate’s perfect victim, and once the sexual charge between them had fizzled, she became -- no other word for it -- his enabler. And her 26-year relationship with him became the chief instrument by which she converted herself from odd duck to saint, an image the press and public eagerly bought.

Mann is justifiably dubious about that. It’s true that she absented herself from the screen for five years, largely to nurse Tracy through a long decline in health. But as the writer points out, the rest of the time they were mainly apart. It was only after Tracy died that she began her quavery-voiced assertions that theirs was one of the world’s great romances. I buy that. What I don’t buy is Mann’s assertion that Tracy’s drunkenness was an expression of not entirely suppressed homosexuality. His sources for this are the street hustlers who often hung around director George Cukor’s pool on a Sunday -- Tracy lived in a little bungalow on his grounds -- and, frankly, they would have their reasons for claiming a famous person, among which would surely be a desire to be inserted into a seemingly sober historical account.

But is it? Tonality aside, you’d think Mann was writing about a figure of genuine world-historical import: “Kate” is, finally, just a star bio. It contains little that’s original or critically insightful about the interaction of her personality and the films she made, his attempts to situate her life in the world around her are superficial, and his attempts to label her and everyone she met (including John Ford!) as homosexual are tiresome. In the end, the book is just gossip-mongering with high-end aspirations. *