The Original
Enigmatic film star Katharine Hepburn was a figure of fascination in her own time: tall, patrician, redheaded, and androgynous, she played fierce, outspoken women at a time when the feminine ideal was soft, pale, modest, and petite. Rumors abounded that she carried on affairs with women and men, and Parmar focuses on her (alleged) bisexuality in this novelized attempt to get inside the minds of Hepburn and her many friends and lovers during the early years of her stardom.
Readers will need to be open to frequent shifts in perspective, with some chapters narrated by a “we” that seems to represent 1930s Hollywood itself. The point-of-view characters include Katharine’s husband, Luddy Smith, her friends Cary Grant and Irene Selznick, and lovers Howard Hughes and Leland Hayward. The novel ends just before her first meeting with Spencer Tracy and the resurgence of her career after several years of being considered “box office poison” during the 1940s.
Parmar nicely captures the dry, patrician tone that readers can find in Hepburn’s autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life. But Parmar admits in her author’s note that Hepburn’s entire public persona was carefully designed to protect her private life, and therefore her version of thoughts and interactions are pure conjecture. The greatest liberty she takes is putting Hepburn through a harrowing hysterectomy early in the novel – an experience that explains a lot about her independence but has questionable historical evidence.
The depictions of Hepburn’s perfectionism on the soundstage, her commitment to excellence in the craft of acting, and her fierce intelligence are all well-documented and fascinating. The friendship with Grant and their shared negotiation of the notorious Hollywood closet is the most emotionally affecting part of a novel that does an overall splendid job of bringing this small Hollywood community to life.
