Me: Stories of my life, by Katharine Hepburn.
I love the old, classic movies. I have to admit that I am only a novice in terms of seeing a lot of them, but I'm working on it. You can snoop out my movie blog if you want to know more about that - I won't publicize it here. My absolute favorites are the musicals, and therefore Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. After that, though, I'm all about Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. If you haven't seen Bringing up Baby or The Philadelphia Story, I highly recommend them. Comedy genius.
As such, I've been meaning to read Ms. Hepburn's memoirs for several years, and just haven't gotten around to it until now. Having read them, I can't make up my mind as to whether or not I am disappointed. I suppose I was expecting a straightforward "biography," you know, ghost-written by someone else, just with the details filled in by the famous person. This book is not such a work. It's really basically Ms. Hepburn remembering things about her life. What this means is a bunch of random snippets about Connecticut and showbusiness and plays and mostly people, many of whom were apparently a big deal in their time but are not well-remembered today (at least I don't know who they were), provided in sentence fragments with lots of (apparently well-remembered) descriptions of buildings and places and conversations, all through the lens of what you'd expect, I suppose, of Hepburn's personality: blunt, matter-of-fact, and actually a little bit ditzy at times.
I would have wished for more trivia about Hollywood and the movies that Hepburn made, but it was still interesting to read about George Cukor's house and what kind of person Louis B. Mayer was. Hepburn's ruminations on the system of show business as it was in her day is also pretty interesting; it was apparently a lot less of a series of hoops to jump through than I would have thought. People had scripts and things written for them, people were seen in one play and immediately cast in another, and it was apparently no big thing to be seen in something on the East Coast and then immediately whisked off to the West Coast for a screen test. I've read bios of Garland and Kelly that seem to corroborate this, although both of them had more difficulty in some things than Hepburn admits to having had.
There is also, of course, plenty of time given to Hepburn's personal relationships: S. Ogden Ludlow and Howard Hughes and Spencer Tracy. She actually saves Tracy for the last, teasing the reader with it, as though she knows that's what we really wanted to read about. She doesn't shed a whole lot of light on the relationship, either. What I actually came away with was that Hepburn really kind of bought into the faux-romance of Hollywood, despite having come from forward-thinking parents who seem to have had a solid, realistic relationship. Her position on the relationship is one that I would have agreed with, say, 5-10 years ago ... she describes it as very one-sided, her being there and giving her all to Tracy without really knowing if he liked having her around. For 27 years? I'd hope he did. I think probably she just didn't want to share that much, or she didn't feel that giving "his side" of things was her place.
I guess I don't have much more to say about this book ... how does one analyze an autobiography, particularly one not by a literary figure? If you're interested in Hepburn, you ought to read it, otherwise I don't know why you would. It was fun to read, even if the structure left a little to be desired. I now feel the need to add to my Hepburn/Tracy repertoire. Maybe I'll go watch Hepburn's Little Women, currently sitting on my coffee table.
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