Hepburn's elephant
William J. Mann, the respected author of "Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn" (Holt & Co.), describes Katharine Hepburn's "lifelong affection for women," as Janet Maslin puts it in her N.Y. Times book review, as "the elephant in the room."
I for one could never really imagine Hepburn making love with a man...not Spencer Tracy, not Charlie Allnut, not Rossano Brazzi. Whatever and whomever she let into her life and heart, hetero mambo never seemed part of the deep-down picture. And you can always sense these things, to some extent. Not everyone was readable, but many were. You could always detect on some level the inclinations of Montgomery Clift, James Dean, et. al. And there was never any missing the fact that Frank Sinatra was straight.
Maslin writes that "from [Hepburn's] early friend Laura Harding, who described herself as 'Miss Hepburn's husband,' to Phyllis Wilbourn, a companion of 40 years about whom Hepburn said, 'Phyllis and I are one,' women figure prominently in Mr. Mann's thinking. [But] his goal here is less to detect lesbian relationships than to reiterate how greatly Hepburn's public and private identities diverged."
Posted by Jeffrey Wells on October 2, 2006 at 1:56 PM
comment #1
TheLongshot
says ...
It probably wouldn't be earthshattering if it was true. In fact, it plays into the stereotype, since Hepburn was always a "strong" woman, therefore assumed to have masculine properties.
Course, she's one who was very good at keeping her private life private, so we will never really know, and that's just as well.
Posted by TheLongshot
at October 2, 2006 2:37 PM
comment #2
Dixon Steele
says ...
It's not a leap to believe that Kate H. was bi-sexual. There was always something slightly mannish about her persona.
But the recent simultaneous outing of Spencer Tracy...whoa!
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Posted by Dixon Steele
at October 2, 2006 3:43 PM
comment #3
austin111
says ...
That could also explain Kate's relationship with Howard Hughes, a guy who supposedly was at least bisexual if not homosexual. They lived together for a time but did they ever sexually consumate the relationship?
Posted by austin111
at October 2, 2006 6:36 PM
comment #4
le corbeau
says ...
Not to comment on the specific validity of the above, but it's worth remembering that there's a whole class of sleazy biographers peddling tell-all biographers which are simply made up. Cary Grant used the law to intimidate people who tried to talk about him being gay-- he even sued Chevy Chase for making a joke about it on Tom Snyder's show-- and yet there's a guy whose book contains a whole long interview with him about it. Of course, by the time it was published, Grant-- and everybody else "interviewed" in the book-- was conveniently dead. So don't assume that just because somebody's selling a book about some star's life, it has any validity at all.
Posted by le corbeau
at October 2, 2006 9:13 PM