Seeing the Whole Katharine Hepburn

December 2, 2006

Emily and I have been reading through this biography of Katharine Hepburn. We have enjoyed a number of her films, but our decision to read about her was driven more by the strong reviews of this biography than by a long-standing fascination with Hepburn.

There is much about Hepburn that I find off-putting— especially coming after our biography of Woody Guthrie, who was born just five years later. Hepburn grew up privileged, and although it may have taken her father a few years to really establish himself in his medical practice, there seems to have been a steady upward climb in regards to their financial position. In college and afterwards, she was able to land among a group of leisured and extraordinarily wealthy peers. In the chapter we just read, the stock market crash of 1930 arrives, but these are people who will hardly be hitting any hard travelin'.

The biography reveals just how well contemporary thinking about gender and sexuality can translate into a perceptive account of life. The author of this biography, William Mann, approaches his subject with a deep and seemingly intuitive grasp of the multiple shades of human sexuality and attachment. Instead of forcing Hepburn into the standardized boxes of relationships, he constructs a complex portrait. Information about Hepburn's life is augmented by what we might call an archeology of sexuality. As we learn to see the categories of relationships that existed among her elite group of peers, we better understand the patterns of her relationships.

The relationship with her husband is a case in point. I remember watching the documentary All About Me and learning about her early marriage. There was nothing too notable about any of that and it was easy to settle her into the common position of someone who married early and then drifted apart as her career opened up. That is to say, I plugged her experience into a common social template. But how much richer it all appears once Mann is done describing the situation!

Her husband, Ludlow Ogden Smith, was likely gay, and marriage was convenient for him in that it satisfied his family's expectations. In their marriage both lived separate lives, spending time with close companions of both sexes. During this time Hepburn began a close relationship with the wealthy and young Laura Harding, and the following is what Mann has to say about this relationship:

If not "out" in the modern sense, the theatrical lesbians of the period lived within the fluid borders of the "open secret." Hepburn told the writer Helen Sheehy that she knew Le Gallienne (with whom she'd later share Constance Collier as a mentor) was "queer" but never thought "it queer that she was." Sophisticated circles knew and understood such things, but the rest of the world was oblivious, due to the fact that many of these women had husbands who, like Luddy, provided a degree of social currency while intersecting only occasionally in their lives. Yet for all intents and purposes, these women did not see themselves as creatures apart from the culture; private sexual behavior was not yet a determinant of one's identity. [156]

That is an example of what I mean by an archeology of sexuality. The drama in Hepburn's life becomes visible as one gets to understand the unspoken values of her surrounding world. It was not a secret life, but it was often motivated by drives that were not directly stated, even if they were understood implicitly by many.

Needless to say this kind of archeology has not generally been the way to write a popular biography of a film star. It is incomprehensible to imagine this subtle treatment of sexuality and gender just 20 or 30 years ago. But it is heartening to see how much about an individual life can be fleshed out with some care for the details of human sexuality. More than public opinion polls or political commentary, this book points to the inevitable triumph of those working to establish the rights and dignity of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered persons in our culture. I simply observe that the other side of this argument does not have the ability to make sense of a life such as Hepburn's. By the time a James Dobson got done telling this story, it would have lost its richness.. it would be flat.. and that goes some ways toward showing the bankruptcy of those arguments.