Rating: 
Summary: Complete drivel
Review:
Why are most of the reviewers on this panel so uncritical of this book ? Could it be shock horror that they have some connection to the author? Why do we have those involved in working with the manuscript writing glowing reviews, talking about delayed honeymoons and posting the same reviews on different sites under different names . It distorts the whole review process .
I laughed out loud at the most recent review - everything in the book is a lie including the "the" and the 'a" . How true .
I have read hundreds of Hollywood biographies and I don't think I have ever read a more inaccurate or poorly written book.
Fortunately for the readers it is now known that Katharine kept thousands of letters and they are now being made available to reputable researchers .
A pity that Darwin Porter didn't do the proper research before he put out this lame excuse for a book . But then I noticed that he has borrowed a lot of his material from other books and doesn't even have the decency to do a proper bibliography .
Rating: 
Summary: Hepburn Did Take Laura Harding on Honeymoon
Review: An erroneous and misguided report is being posted that Katharine Hepburn did not take Laura Harding, The American Express Heiress with her on her honeymoon. This is complete misinformation. I am writing a social history of Bermuda, and in my research I discovered a picture of Laura Harding, Katharine Hepburn, and her Husband, Ludlow Ogden Smith, along with a male friend, taken on her DELAYED honeymoon. Many people do not go on a honeymoon immediately after their wedding. In my case, my husband and I waited for one year before going on our honeymoon. Sometimes a little information is a dangerous thing, especially when posted a gospel truth. In fact, I intend to include an entire chapter in my book on Hepburn's honeymoon in Bermuda with Laura Harding and her husband. Darwin Porter got it right! In spite of moronic attacks on his research, Porter has done an amazing job of revealing the life of a closeted star. He also got to speak to many of the people who knew the details of Hepburn's life in his work in Hollywood in the 60s and 70s when they were still alive. He also had contact with people who knew the star diva in the 20s and 30s. I applaud this achievement, and found Katharine the Great the single greatest movie star bio I've ever encountered.
Rating:
Summary: A Remarkable Portrait of a Remarkable Woman
Review: As a young actress, the remarkable Katharine Hepburn flaunted Hollywood tradition in a world controlled by men. She demanded to be accepted as an equal--and so whe was. This well-researched biography traces her remarkable life from her early years, born into an unconventional family in Hartford, Connecticut, to her conquering of Hollywood after many failures and some very unusual successes.
Because of KATHARINE THE GREAT, I feel I have--for the first time--an understanding of this sometimes obsessively opinionated and forthright woman. Darwin Porter paints an unflinchingly honest, warts-and-all portrait that should be placed within the canon of historical texts about Hollywood during its Golden Age.
The very arrogant Katharine Hepburn, as described by colleagues long before Porter ever penned his biography, was not entirely loveable (or even, in many cases, particularly polite), and if a fan came up to her for an autograph, he or she might get smashed in the face. In 1934, Hepburn stated publicly, (quote) I am paying a terrible price for fame. It's almost impossible to enjoy life after you achieve success in pictures.(unquote)
Like many of the statements she made about herself, that was probably not completely true. But from the highly revealing pages of this biography, I think she did enjoy much of her life and her achievement. Of course, she made a lot of bad choices in lovers: Notably Howard Hughes and John Ford, and most definitely, she made a terrible choice in Spencer Tracy, to whom she became a virtual caretaker as he struggled with his acute alchoholism and abusive behavior toward her.
And yes, she was definitely an eccentric, breaking into other people's home for her (voyeuristic) enjoyment, regularly dosing her tea with strawberry jam, taking five very cold baths or showers a day, and pursuing a liberated agenda that did not preclude a sexual dalliance with whomever, basically, she liked. She would quickly admit that she wasn't an easy person to work with. Often, with absolutely no tact at all, and in a way that sometimes provoked their undying rage, she directed (or should I say dominated?) her directors, and some of them, including Elia Kazan, had extremely negative things to say about her in the years that followed.
But despite her autocratic ways, she was one of the most talented originals ever to appear on a Broadway stage or on a Hollywood screen. And in this brilliant, and very unusual biography, KATHARINE THE GREAT, she lives again!
Rating:
Summary: NPR (National Public Radio) was right--It's WONDERFUL!
Review: I was almost asleep at the wheel when the car radio began an interview on NPR about this title with its author, Darwin Porter, praising it majestically as the book that "re-defines the art of the celebrity biography." When I got a copy, I was mesmerized by a flow of words and ideas and insights that will NEVER leave me feeling the same about "Katharine the Hepburn" ever again. I read a chapter a night every night, religiously, till I finished it. Brilliant and wonderful, and very charming and funny, too. If anything, I like Hepburn more than I did before, and I adore the way Darwin Porter has put it all into words.
Rating:
Summary: GREATEST BIOGRAPHY OF A GAY STAR EVER WRITTEN
Review: If you believe the billions of words written during the 20th century in every newspaper and magazine and spoken on every television and radio show, there were NO gay or lesbian or bisexual stars in Hollywood. Because it was IMPOSSIBLE to reveal gay celebrities lives in the media, almost all gay history was passed around and passed down to us verbally, or recorded in diaries and journals. Movie stars were CONSTANTLY SURROUNDED by gay hairdressers, designers, set decorators, journalist, servants, directors (read one of the deeply researched biographies of George Cukor, Hepburns best friend). All these gay people talked to each other and about each other, about who was gay and about who was having a relationship with whom. Author Darwin Porter's biography has TWENTYTWO pages of sources listed. The sources are not old magazine articles, but actual people who were there at the time in Hollywood and New York and who are first hand sources for what Kate and Tracy and all the others said and did. The author has taken these thousands of pieces of information and written them down to make them read like a fictional story, and in many cases, invented dialogue and placed it in quotes to give the true flavour of how these people spoke and what they said to each other - but it is all based on what actual people overheard or were told directly. There are dozens of other biographies of Hepburn you can read, all of which read like the fabricated "press releases" they actually are, so if you are heterosexual and disapprove of gays, or if you are gay and self hating, read one of these and be comforted by illusion that everyone who has ever achieved greatness is heterosexual.
Rating:
Summary: Katharine the Great is not for Sissies
Review: In Darwin Porter's carefully crafted biography, KATHARINE THE GREAT, the reigning screen diva of the 20th century is let out to walk, breathe, make love, create lifelong enemies (she was often far from tactful), and form lasting relationships at the hip. In the process, a charming and remarkable portrait emerges.
Katharine Hepburn never wanted anything about her private life revealed, even to many of her associates, but thanks to her strong will and her compulsive domination of whatever scene she entered, she was just too fascinating to ignore. Here, culled from the recollections and remembrances of hundreds of witnesses, (co-workers, friends, and sometimes detractors) we learn much about what Kate was like when the doors were shut and the curtains were drawn. A harsh yet sympathetic portrait of her alcoholic and sometimes abusive lover, Spencer Tracy, also emerges.
We're exposed, in this biography, to Hepburn's other lovers as well, many of which have never been analyzed (or even named) in printed form. They included both Howard Hughes (a very strange man); French-born diva Claudette Colbert, and a surprisingly prominent bevy of others.
Regrettably, Kate had a worthwhile opportunity to share some of her tribulations and pain in her own somewhat self-serving autobiography, ME. But her own version of her life is that it revealed virtually nothing of interest: Just another publicity puff that's permeated with a belief in her own historical role as a diva. (NO ONE was that wonderful and chaste, even Kate Hepburn.)
But KATHARINE THE GREAT paints a luminous, sensitive, and unapologetic portrait of the REAL Ms. Hepburn. Those of her fans who are "in denial" about some aspects of her private life are likely to be driven crazy by this biography. It really does run against the grain of Hepburn's meticulously cultivated public image. But in this age of revelations and disclosures, I'm glad I read it. Thanks to Darwin Porter for the courage it took to write it.
Public perceptions about American legends such as Hepburn are changing, and changing fast. But as an old-fashioned proverb says, "The Dogs Bark, but The Caravan moves on."
Rating:
Summary: A lifetime of secrets revealed
Review: In the spring of 1958 I was driving north with some college buddies from New Haven to Hartford, Connecticut. We caught up with a classic 1948 Lincoln Continental bearing the custom license plate KATE. It had to be someone special and we were not disappointed. As we cruised past we immediately recognized the unmistakable patrician profile of Katharine Hepburn, driving herself, alone in the camel-colored convertible.
Her mouth held the hint of a smile; an aura of superiority and mystery surrounded her. We tried not to stare. (OK, we were gawking.) She wore that mantle of mystery all her life, thanks to her skill in keeping the press at bay, until her passing in 2003 at age 96.
Author Darwin Porter, following his remarkable 2003 book on the private life of Humphrey Bogart, has surpassed himself with this incredibly detailed biography of one of the 20th century's premier stage and movie stars. "Write anything about me you like," she told Porter, "just don't ever tell the truth."
Sorry, Kate. Here comes the truth.
Even as a child Katharine Hepburn was a self-centered, headstrong, tomboy. After graduating from Bryn Mawr she launched her acting career on the East Coast, just as Humphrey Bogart did, with the help of friends in the theater business. Her agent (and later, lover) Leland Hayward, encouraged her to head to Hollywood, where the big money was. The studios didn't know what to make of her, demanding (and receiving!) ten times what first-time movie actresses were being paid. When her train pulled into Los Angeles' Union Station in July 1932, she had a $6,000 RKO one-picture contract under her arm and an attitude that preceded her like a snowplow. She never looked back.
Although Katharine the Great catalogs her work on 25 films up until 1950, including how close she came to landing the role of Scarlett O'Hara (opposite Errol Flynn?) in Gone With the Wind, the author focuses on what happened behind the movie camera-on the set and off. There is not room here to discuss her hapless husband or list the 30-year diary of Hepburn's intimacies, from Jimmy Stewart, Howard Hues and Spencer Tracy to Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert and Judy Garland, meticulously chronicled by Porter. The key question is how did he do it? Half a century and more after the fact?
The answer lies in the unlikely confluence of three facts: A) Porter's mother began a scrapbook on Hepburn back in the 1920s, and Porter kept it up; B) Katharine couldn't keep from gossiping about herself to close friends who later recalled all too well the private life she revealed, and C) Porter became an entertainment journalist, interviewing literally hundreds of people over a period of decades who knew and worked with Hepburn during her long career. Every source is annotated in a 21-page afterword, name by name.
He also met Miss Hepburn through his employer, Tennessee Williams, and had the opportunity to interview her.
If you are curious about the four-time Oscar winner once dubbed "Katharine of Arrogance," and would like to peek under her covers and into her closets, this thorough volume will more than satisfy your curiosity. Be warned, Porter's research is not for prudes. If this book were a movie it would carry an R rating, for grownups only.
Stay tuned. Darwin Porter isn't done yet; he promises more on Katharine Hepburn in Volume II.
Rating:
Summary: Worse than Drivel
Review: Ok, I knew I would be ashamed of myself for buying this book, but I did it anyway. I can save other people the trouble..not only Katharine Hepburn, but EVERY major Hollywood star at the time was either homosexual or bisexual - including Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn, and of course every single female star. There were so many names dropped that there is no way I can remember them all. That pretty much sums up the book - they are all having affairs with each other, men & men, men & women, women & women - one DOES wonder where anyone found time to make movies.Amazingly enough, the author appears to have been present, and recorded, literally hundreds of conversations between all these people as he "quotes" them freely. I could not find anywhere on the book whether it was supposed to be a work of fiction or non-fiction, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and guessing it is classified as fiction,to save them the countless lawsuits for slander that should follow the printing of a book like this. I can't even put into words how very ridiculous the book is. Interspersed with his catty tales,and the catty quotes from Ms. Hepburn (who apparently had NO class whatsoever, despite all those other biographies), and many other actors, is a paragraph or two from another biography, easily recognizable if you'd read them, and quoted verbatim. That, I am afraid is the only truth you are going to find in this book. In my opinion, the author of this book is obsessed with homesexuality and bisexuality - in his world there is nothing else. He freely drops names and "quotes" from people that he couldn't possibly have been alive for. The wording itself is even ridiculous. I think his time would have been better spent seeing a psychiatrist, and, as I said - I AM ashamed of myself for buying this garbage - it was tossed into the garbage where it belongs. Save yourself the trouble...
Rating:
Summary: The most honest and least apologetic biography
Review: The life of the indomitable grande dame of American actresses, Katharine Hepburn, covering the years between her birth in 1907 and the debut of her role in The African Queen in 1950 is extensively revealed for the first time in Darwin Porter's groundbreaking biography: Katharine the Great.
At long last, the secretive, closeted world of the 20th century's most acclaimed female film star is exposed. The New Englander screen legend died in June 2003 at the age of 96 in her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
Biographer Darwin Porter began gathering material for his book on Hepburn in 1960 when he first became a Hollywood reporter. He knew that it could never be published during Hepburn's lifetime. "At one point I was afraid she might outlive me," Porter said.
Porter reflects, "I first met Hepburn at her Manhattan Turtle Bay residence, introduced to me by Tennessee Williams where he was trying to persuade Hepburn to appear on the stage opposite Bette Davis in The Night of the Iguana. She turned him down."
"Although Miss Hepburn gave me insights into many subjects, including what she thought about depicting 'perversion' on the screen, she provided not one clue about her own life and when she learned from friends that I was compiling extensive documentation on her," she said, "Write whatever you want about me-but never the truth. No, not that!"
Porter chose not to obey Hepburn's demand. With the imminent publication of Katharine the great, the door to Hepburn's closet is about to be thrown wide open.
Laura Harding (1902-1994) and Spencer Tracy, Hepburn's two greatest loves, could hardly abide each other, Porter says. "But they maintained an uneasy truce with each other for the sake of mutual love, Hepburn."
Porter maintains that in some respects Ms. Harding was even more vital in her role as Hepburn's love than Tracy. The Hepburn/Harding romance begain in 1928, and their affair continued throughout both of their lives. Hepburn visited Harding often during her years of infirm health, and at her deathbed.
"I maintain the greatest respect for Katharine Hepburn," Porter said, "but she was never truthful about her own life. Of course, given the homophobia that still exists in Hollywood today, that's completely understandable. Even in her later years when her career was out of harm's way, this great screen diva never made even a small gesture of support to the struggling gay and lesbian movement in America,"
Page by page, chapter by chapter the carefully researched and documented Katharine the Great sheds light on America's icon of feminist strength, with her chiseled beauty and patrician bearing. The lights of Broadway dimmed to honor Hepburn's death but the bulbs turned on again in this startling book.
"Everybody, it seemed, had a story or stories) to tell about Hepburn, from Tennessee Williams, Bette Davis, Gregory Hemingway (son of Ernest), Marlene Dietrich, director George Cukor, actress Ruth Gordon, and Garson Kanin, who wrote Adam's Rib and other screenplays specifically for Spencer Tracy and Hepburn," Porter said.
Porter also had access to the journals of Anderson Lawler, a minor actor known mainly in Hollywood history for his love affair with Gary Cooper. Lawler's manuscript was deemed unpublishable in his day because of its libelous tell-all contents. Porter also drew extensively on the journals of actor Kenneth MacKenna, whom Hepburn always referred to as "my original deflowerer."
Porter also used the extensive journals of his former writing partner, Stanley Haggart, who knew Hepburn intimately during the 1930s and 1940s and was a close personal friend of Hepburn's only husband, "Luddy."
Both Haggart and Porter knew George Cukor, who provided valuable insights and stories but with the stipulation that nothing was to be published during his lifetime or during Hepburn's lifetime.
There'a a carload of other biographies about Hepburn that either got the facts wrong or whitewashed them. But here at last is a biography that isn't afraid to wrestle with the outrageous ego and ferociously guarded privacy of Hollywood's most mysterious, Katharine the Great.
Rating:
Summary: Hepburn's Bio Fascinates with its Polarities:
Review: There's a curious thing about this fine book: It manages, almost by even existing, to radically polarize readers into two sometimes enemy camps. Those who are comfortable with the possibility that an American film icon might have been gay, and those who foam at the mouth at the horror of such a thing. Bisexuality is not unusual within the consciousness of many artists and actors. As such, why should Katharine Hepburn (who always DID look a bit mannish) be exempt from such a possibility? And if she were bisexual, why should that arouse such fury in the mindless? My father worked at both RKO and at MGM, and over a period of many years, he corroborated much of the material that Porter exposed "for the first time" in Hepburn's biography. Ironically, to hundreds of Hollywood insiders and in-the-know hipsters, including many who are still alive, the stories that Porter has accumulated were common knowledge. EVERYBODY in town knew some of the stories--the cool thing about Katharine the Great is that it has accumulated most of them into one volume. One wonders about the ones that never got recorded! I admire this book. Even though the material certainly didn't shock me AT ALL, I'm delighted that at last some savvy author has at last published it. Thanks, and happy reading.
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