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Photo Michael Childers
Bill Mann, author of the provocative new biography, “Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn.”
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Photo courtesy Bill Mann
“If Kate had a great love other than herself, it was Laura Harding,” said one friend. Laura (here on the set of “The Little Minister”) was the guiding force of Hepburn’s early career. |
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Below the surface of a legend
Mann’s Hepburn biography is sensational while sidestepping sensationalism
By Loren King
Banner Correspondent
William Mann’s first two books about Hollywood, “Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines” and “Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910-1969,” excavated gay subcultures and heralded obscure players. Movie stars - never mind one of the icons of the 20th century - would not appear to be Mann’s journalistic forté. But his ambitious and meticulously researched “Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn” isn’t a traditional movie star biography.
“I knew there was more to the story,” says Mann, who has lived for nearly 10 years in the Provincetown house he owns with his partner, Timothy Huber, a psychologist. “When I started, the book was going to be an exploration of stardom that focused more on the Hepburn legend. But when I dug up so many primary sources who’d never been used before, I knew it was a bigger book.”
Mann, like Hepburn, a native of Hartford, Conn., knew there was more to the Hepburn persona long before he put pen to page. He had already interviewed some of her colleagues - including the inner circle of famed director and close Hepburn friend George Cukor - while doing research for his other Hollywood books. Originally titled “Creating Kate,” Mann set out to examine how carefully Hepburn herself crafted her own image as a Hollywood maverick. But as he dug deeper into his research, seeking out many in Hepburn’s orbit who had never before been interviewed and discovering previously unpublished letters, diaries and documents, another level of invention began to emerge.
Mann, who never met Hepburn, used information only if it came from a primary source. Some refused to talk with him, but others, including surviving members of the Hepburn clan, were enthusiastic. One of the star’s younger sisters even urged Mann to “write something new.”
“So many sources were willing to go places I was hesitant to go,” he says. “They were willing to talk about the woman and not the legend.”
“Kate” doesn’t tarnish the Hepburn legend. By revealing an even more complicated woman, the book, in fact, breathes new life into her legacy. “Kate,” recently cited by The New York Times as a notable book of 2006, does nothing short of pry off layer after layer of myth - and uncovers an even more complex, contradictory woman who shrewdly, boldly and sometimes quite deceptively controlled her own public image, even early in her career.
Rumors of lesbianism or bisexuality have always swirled around Hepburn - after all, she famously sported trousers back in the 1930s and married only briefly in her youth. Mann’s heavily annotated research shows that although Hepburn was often comfortable being “one of the boys,” she surrounded herself from girlhood with women, including open lesbians. Socialite Laura Harding, who once described herself as “Miss Hepburn’s husband,” was, according to Mann, “the great love” of Hepburn’s life. Yet Harding was banished from Hepburn’s company - with the star’s compliance, of course - as her career took off.
Hepburn, says Mann, “never saw herself as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Certainly she never identified with [the gay community]. She came from a privileged background; it was always she who defined herself - she titled her autobiography ‘Me.’ She was narcissistic in many ways.”
More than her intimate relationships, Mann became fascinated by Hepburn’s relationship to her own gender. Beginning with her childhood self-created incarnation as a short-haired boy she called “Jimmy,” to her gender-bending roles on stage and screen, to her relationships with “he-men” who were themselves sexually complicated, Mann eschews labels throughout his book. Modern labels like gay and transgender are useless with historical figures anyway, but he makes a solid case for Hepburn’s unconventionality in both sexual and gender identification.
“I read everything. I watched everything. And during an interview she did with Barbara Walters, I had to stop the tape,” he says. “It was amazing. [Hepburn] says, ‘Thirty years ago, I put on pants and walked a middle road.’ She told us!”
There’s even a shocking revelation that Mann doesn’t claim as his own. Actress Maureen O’Hara, he notes, wrote in her autobiography that she believed legendary director John Ford, once romantically linked to Hepburn, was a closeted homosexual.
“I said, ‘’Oh, now does every man in her life have to be gay?’” laughs Mann. “But there is a clear pattern that she was drawn to sexually conflicted men.” The list includes, besides Ford, Howard Hughes and, perhaps most sensationally, Spencer Tracy. Mann writes that the mythic Hepburn-Tracy secret love affair was embellished and carefully cultivated by Hepburn herself after Garson Kanin first wrote about it.
And in the years since, that mythology has been recycled time and again. Much of it is from Hepburn’s own memoir and famous talk show appearances; often it’s just been given what Mann calls a “different airing,” such as Kate Mulgrew’s one-woman stage show “ Dinner at Eight” and in popular films such as “The Aviator,” for which Cate Blanchett won an Oscar for her portrayal of Hepburn. “'The Aviator’ was a good film but it played again on her image and legend,” says Mann. “She would never have spoken openly like that with Howard Hughes. They were [perpetuating] mythological characters.”
Mann is a fiction writer as well as a Hollywood biographer, and the third in his trilogy of gay novels “Men Who Love Men” will be published in the spring. “I love to write fiction. I always will,” he says. “A biography takes up so much emotional energy.” But then he will return to the subject of Hollywood stardom for his next big project: about Elizabeth Taylor, the last of the great studio stars.
Meanwhile, among the many rave reviews for “Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn,” one stands out for the author, from film historian David Thomson. “He knew Hepburn,” says Mann, “and he wrote that she knew that one day she’d get a thorough biographical treatment. And she would have agreed with my work and admired it.”
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In the Arts
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Jan 4th, 2007