Katharine Hepburn

I don't quite know what to make of this book. Though it purports to be a biography of Katharine Hepburn the famous actress - which on one level it most definitely is, of course - it frequently reads like a biography of some of the other people in her life, a biography in which Hepburn herself appears as little more than a secondary character. The first third of the book deals almost exclusively with her mother (also called Katharine, which can lead to some confusion), with her father running a strong second, and Katharine fille herself hardly appearing at all.Later episodes of the book deal with her husband Luddy, Howard Hughes, John Ford and, most of all, Spencer Tracy, to whom she was disastrously and unshakeably loyal.Poor Luddy was devoted to Katharine to an almost mystical degree, which is a shame since she left him not long after their marriage. Despite this he remained dog-like in his devotion to her even after their divorce some years after their separation, and reappeared many years later, still besotted with her, after the death of Tracy. He was the only decent man in her life and she treated him like dirt.Howard Hughes set his cap at her but didn't last long, as already he was exhibiting the schizoid behaviour for which he later became famous. This led to his alienating himself from her family and thus, by extension, from her. She and her family were close-knit all her life, united by the suppressed memories of the many suicides in the family past, and by the domination of her powerful but emotionally inaccesible father. John Ford almost-but-never-quite left his wife for her, and Spencer Tracy also nearly-but-never-quite left his wife for her too.The central theme of her life was that she was drawn to men who, like her father, were dominant to all around them but emotionally unavailable, so that the only decent man - Luddy - that she ever spent any time with was discarded in favour of selfish, egotistical scoundrels such as Ford and Tracy. I read with disbelief, bordering on fury, how she curled up and slept like a dog in the corridor outside Tracy's hotel room, so she could attend to him like a handmaiden if he endangered himself with his uncontrollable dispsomania.There is hardly any coverage of her film-work. We find out what films she made but very little about the films themselves. What happened during the shooting, how she got on with her co-actors, all the sorts of things that a cineaste wishes to find out about, are all ignored or skipped over in the lightest and most unsatisfying manner.And there is one glaring error that makes one wonder about the accuracy of the rest of the book. Leaming states that Ford, during his time as a film-maker for the US Navy during the war, was aboard one of the bombers of the famous Doolittle raid on Japan.This is totally untrue. Ford was not on this mission. He was famous for being economical with the actualite of his life, but even HE never claimed to have been on this raid, so where this story comes from is a mystery. Still, whatever else one can say about Ford, he wasn't a coward. He risked his life and was wounded filming the Japanese attack on Midway, and put himself in harm's way many times throughout the war - unlike Tracy, who was a coward as well as an abusive drunk, happy (like John Wayne, another draft-dodging coward) to portray heroes in the safety of Hollywood, but sedulous in avoiding actual service.But if the Doolittle story has found its way into the book, how many other falsehoods have too? How accurate is it really? How much of it can we trust?At the end, I felt I still knew very little about who and what Katharine Hepburn really was. I knew a lot more about the other people in her life and discovered some astonishing things about life in a vanished America, but about Hepburn herself?... Quien sabe?