Katharine the Great 1907-1950: Secrets of a Lifetime Revealed

Rating:
Summary: Trash
Review: Would have given it no stars if that was an option. Poorly written and poorly edited with no credible bibliography. Prepeosterous recreations of conversations to which no one was a party except the two principals, yet Porter states what was supposedly said without benefit of having spoken to either of the principals. Dialogue lifted directly from some of Kate's films used as supposed conversations with alleged friends and lovers! As Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman's writing "every word was a lie including "and" and "the" ditto for this book.

Rating:
Summary: Beneath Contempt
Review: [...]
Since you can't libel the dead, Darwin Porter goes to town on just about everyone....his pages and pages of "sources" are just a list of names with nothing specific (just a lot of vague allusion) attributed to any one of them (an old trick, by the way, to make your material seem credible) and my FAVORITE bit of lunacy (amidst so much garbage) is Lucille Ball (on page 293) quoted as saying "What must Hepburn have thought when little hooker me ended up buying the whole f****** studio?" Now, the "author" puts quotes around this to insinuate that Ball said this either in an interview or...I don't know....maybe even to the author himself. HAAAAAAHH! To think that Lucille Ball would EVER in a million years have referred to HERSELF as a "little hooker" is just lunatic and I would challenge the "author" to show the source notes on that, but I'll bet his dog ate them.

As a gay man, I am also outrageously offended at the charge that anyone who doesn't believe the "author's" claims that almost EVERYONE in Hollywood was gay is somehow homophobic. That old "us vs. them" mentality is agenda pushing at its worst. I don't need to prove that everyone else is gay to validate myself, so you hacks posing as reviewers can back off on that one...it won't win you any points.

Really I can't say enough about how rotten and worthless this book is.