Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [531]
A. Scott Berg’s Kate Remembered appeared within days of Hepburn’s death in 2003 and provides the best summary overview of Hepburn’s life and work, framed as it is in the form of a memoir of the author’s friendship with the actress. There followed three more biographies, all part of a curious subgenre pandering to an audience that apparently wants to be told that practically everyone in Old Hollywood was secretly gay. Katharine the Great by Darwin Porter came first in 2004, followed by James Robert Parish’s Katharine Hepburn: The Untold Story in 2005 and William J. Mann’s Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn in 2006.
While the unsourced Porter book is impossible to take seriously and the Parish is merely insinuative, the Mann book offers fifty-six pages of notes and sources, which encouraged readers and reviewers alike to embrace its wildest assertions with a minimum of skepticism. Standing almost alone in their dissents were Richard Schickel (“In the end, the book is just gossip-mongering with high-end aspirations”) and John Anderson of Newsday, who called it “a dishy, needy book” unworthy of its subject. “Mann’s style—a slightly elevated version of the journalism-as-salespitch practiced by the likes of Entertainment Weekly—abets his smarmy search for facts to support his claims about (1) Hepburn’s sexuality (she may have had lesbian affairs with, among others, longtime companion Laura Harding); (2) what gnarled complexes really lay behind the alliance with Spencer Tracy; and (3) how much of Hepburn’s image was founded in fact. But Mann’s desperation to prove such points—none of which is as critical to Hepburn’s ultimate cultural importance as any one of a dozen film performances—makes the experience of Kate rather tiresome.”
Rumors accusing the pants-wearing actress of lesbianism date to the early thirties and are as venerable as the oft-whispered suspicion that Mae West was really a transvestite. To put across his thesis, Mann at the outset seeks to establish that Tracy and Hepburn never lived together, that Hepburn surrounded herself with known lesbians (making the old guilt-by-association case), and that Garson Kanin’s 1971 book Tracy and Hepburn was a conscious and well-meaning exercise in mythology. “After seventy years,” the author states in a self-aggrandizing preface, “I thought it was finally time to tell the story outside the star’s control.”
In having at the legend, Mann not only seeks to show that Hepburn herself was bisexual, but that, in a sort of revisionist scorched-earth policy, almost everyone around her was equally ambiguous, including Spencer Tracy. To pull that off, he must establish that Tim Durant was gay—no easy task—and that Tracy himself had assignations that could, in some form, be documented. He lards his notes with claims of thoroughness, but in Tracy’s case he doesn’t start off well. He cites Selden West, Larry Swindell’s 1969 Tracy biography, Bill Davidson’s ubiquitous hatchet job, the Wisconsin Historical Society, U.S. Census records, Milwaukee city directories, and World War I draft registrations in documenting Tracy’s early life and still manages to get most of it wrong. John Tracy, for instance, was never a truck driver, and the story of his going from tavern to tavern on the night of Spencer’s birth is yet another fanciful invention from Davidson. He misses the Freeport connection entirely, has Tracy slipping into a soldier’s uniform in 1917, training at Norfolk rather than Great Lakes, graduating from Northwestern in 1921, and entering Ripon at the same time as Kenny Edgers.