Bringing Up Biographer (original) (raw)
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- Aug. 17, 2003
KATE REMEMBERED
By A. Scott Berg.
Illustrated. 370 pp. New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons. $25.95.
What is one to make of this odd and unsettling book? It's a complicated question for me, since I had professional relationships with both its author and its subject, and was very close to a third powerful presence in the book, Irene Mayer Selznick. And yet, reading ''Kate Remembered,'' I felt I was in uncharted waters, despite an occasional familiar landmark. Oh, yes, that sounds like Irene. . . . There's the Scott Berg we like to admire. . . . Typical Hepburn chutzpah or charm.
The problem is that two different stories are being told here. One is Katharine Hepburn's. The other is A. Scott Berg's. ''She more than merits a full-scale biography,'' Berg says at the start of his author's note (as if she hadn't already been the subject of a dozen or so). ''Alas, I am not the one to write such a book.'' And he hasn't. Instead, he has made himself the vehicle for her posthumous version of her life story. He is the ghost to her ghost. They had been talking for 20 years or so, he tells us, with the understanding that one day a book like this would emerge, though only after her death -- only 12 days after, as it turned out: ''Kate Remembered'' had been buried, like a land mine, in its publisher's vault, waiting for the moment of opportunity.
In 1991 Hepburn pieced together and published ''Me,'' her ''stories of my life.'' It was a mess of a book -- strident, evasive, patchy, willful -- but it had its virtues: it was direct, unfiltered; clearly in its subject's own voice. Whereas ''Kate Remembered'' is a peculiar mix of her voice as mediated by Berg -- for whatever reason, he didn't tape their conversations -- and the voice of his own narrative. You see the difference between the two books when you compare stories that turn up in both of them. Take the account of how Hepburn snatched the lead in ''Morning Glory'' from Constance Bennett, for whom it had been written. One day, she just happened to see the script on the desk of the producer Pandro Berman and made off with it. Berg: '' 'I usually don't look through people's desks,' Hepburn told me one afternoon -- somewhat disingenuously, I thought. . . . She spent the next several days meeting everybody connected to this production, talking up this 'thrilling' screenplay . . . until she convinced them that she was 'born to play this part.' '' Here's how Hepburn put it in ''Me'': ''Went to Pandro and said I must do it. He said no. It was for Connie Bennett. I said No -- ME. I won.'' There's the difference between Kate alive and Kate remembered.
The new book contains few revelations. In ''Me,'' Hepburn refers to her selfishness in regard to her complaisant husband, ''Luddy,'' as ''piggishness.'' When Berg asks her ''why she had bothered to marry Luddy . . . she looked me right in the eye and, without thinking twice, said, 'Because I was a pig.' '' Give her A-plus for consistency, but barely a passing grade for further illumination. Not that we should be surprised at her telling the old stories in more or less the same way. We all do it; our memories become set pieces in the retelling, and this is particularly understandable in people used to the spotlight, who have to repeat things over and over. As Berg takes us through Hepburn's life, we encounter all the central events we've encountered in her own book and in other accounts of her life: the tragic death (presumably by suicide, in a family that seemed to have had a genetic disposition to suicide) of her beloved 16-year-old brother, Tom, whom she found hanged in his bedroom; the lucky break of George Cukor casting her, practically a nobody, opposite the great John Barrymore in her first movie, ''A Bill of Divorcement''; her rapid ascent to stardom; her relationships with Leland Hayward, Howard Hughes and several of her famous directors; her fall from grace as ''box-office poison''; her comeback through her canny acquisition of the film rights to her hit play ''The Philadelphia Story''; the adventure of ''The African Queen'' -- she wrote an entire book about it (which, as it happens, I edited); and of course the 27-year relationship with Spencer Tracy, which was the cornerstone of her emotional life and has become the cornerstone of her myth.
She is slightly more open about Tracy here than she has been elsewhere, though nowhere near so prodigal with insights as Berg, who gives her (and us) the benefit of his psychological diagnosis of why Tracy behaved so badly to her: ''And then you came along, and you were the best and most beautiful creature he had ever seen. You got high on life. And he couldn't quite believe that somebody like you could be interested in somebody like him; and he figured he could never keep up with the likes of you. And so he often tried to tear you down, squash your good nature.'' And on and on in this vein, I'm afraid. Her response? ''You should write all that down.''
KATHARINE HEPBURN was many things -- accomplished, driven, high-handed, hard-working, stylish, demanding, generous -- but she could hardly be called reflective. She didn't believe in it. She believed in never looking back, not wasting emotion, getting on with things. She also needed to exert control, and never more so than in the calculated way she presented herself to the world -- classy, even haughty, a touch hard, but never dangerous. Bette Davis was dangerous -- she went all the way, and imploded. Joan Crawford was an artifact that lasted until it wore out. Barbara Stanwyck was too much an actress to be a Personality. Garbo was . . . Garbo, whatever and whoever that was. Because we thought we understood Hepburn's ''aristocratic'' background; because she gamely kept working on the stage, in Shakespeare and Shaw as well as in shows like ''Coco''; because she ostentatiously shunned Hollywood and publicity; because she was so vital and independent and apparently straight-shooting, she became a Figure as well as a star, closer in our minds to a Mrs. Roosevelt than to a Davis or a Crawford. And she never stopped working on her image. Of course, that's what people in her position do or they don't hold on to that position, but few have done it with her relish. She always knew what she wanted -- fame -- and she demanded, and obtained, it from the world.
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