Katharine Hepburn: All About Me. The Television Documentary

KATHARINE HEPBURN: ALL ABOUT ME

This review is part of the Summer Under the Stars Blogathon. Today's star is Katharine Hepburn.

Katharine Hepburn was one of the major figures of what is called the Golden Age of Cinema. Her career spanned 62 years, twelve Oscar nominations and four Best Actress wins, currently still the most by any actress. Ten years before her death, Hepburn looked back on her life and career in the documentary Katharine Hepburn: All About Me. It is as open a retrospective as the fiercely private Hepburn would ever give the public. All About Me acknowledges the legend, covers most of the good, touches on some of the bad, and reveals what Hepburn wanted revealed. 

Narrating her own life story, Hepburn tells us about her early days as an upper-class Yankee. Deciding she was not cut out for an intellectual's life like her parents, she decides to be an actress. She goes to Broadway, where according to herself, the trouble was never finding jobs but in keeping them. Ultimately came the play The Warrior's Husband. "They liked the play OK, but I was a hit," Hepburn declares. 

From that came a screen test and a contract to RKO. Starting with her first film, A Bill of Divorcement, Hepburn endured great heights and terrible lows on screen and stage. She does not shy too far away from the disastrous production of The Lake, a play where she, by her own admission, walked through on opening night. Hepburn's The Lake performance was so wooden that writer Dorothy Parker quipped that "Miss Hepburn ran the gamut of emotion from A to B'.  Out of this fiasco, however, she learned what she called the most important lesson of her career. "You are the person responsible for what happens to you and to the play," Hepburn states.

Her film career was also struggling, with the nadir of it being called "box office poison". With nowhere to go, she retreats to her family in Connecticut. Her career and personal life, following a short-lived marriage to Ogden Ludlow Smith, is revived with the successful stage play The Philadelphia Story and the gifting of the film rights by her paramour, Howard Hughes.

She had asked for Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy for the film version of The Philadelphia Story. Cast were her friend Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, which Hepburn observes were "not bad". Another project she brought to MGM was Woman of the Year. This time, she got Spencer Tracy. From their first encounter began what she called a twenty-seven-year relationship, madness, happiness, love affair. Their partnership produced nine films and an enduring romance that ended with his death. 

Hepburn pulls herself together once again, continuing her career, winning three more Oscars and working on stage to push herself as an actress. She also works with people she calls legends like John Wayne and Laurence Olivier. She also shares her views on life, work and career.

"So, this is about Katharine Hepburn, public, private. Can you tell which is which? Sometimes I wonder myself," Hepburn observes in the opening minutes of All About Me. What we get here is someone perhaps not so much reminiscing as attempting to control what people know about her. She is surprisingly open about many things, particularly her long affair with Spencer Tracy. 

She admits, for example, that people might be shocked that, in her words, she gave up her independence to be with a man, even changing things about herself that he did not like. As she tells us, the reason for that is that it brought her pleasure to make Tracy happy. That, I think, sums up that curious and often strange idea called "love": the willingness to make sacrifices for the other.

Other information is quite surprising. She recounts that one summer, she decided to cut her hair short and call herself "Jimmy". Long before the idea of transgenderism took hold, Hepburn went through a phase where she decided that being a girl was, in her words, a bore. Surrounded with boys, including her older brother Tom whom she adored and who might have committed suicide, she opted to see things through a male gaze. Perhaps had she lived a century later, Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn would have perhaps gone more than along with the idea that Katharine was actually a boy. 

While Hepburn does not say what her parents thought about when Kathy or Kath as she was called switched to Jimmy, it appears she eventually went back to being Katharine. I figure they let her be, neither discouraging nor encouraging their daughter's ideas. 

Hepburn quietly dismisses the idea that she was a lesbian, pointing out that while she and her friend Laura Harding was rumored to be, "more than friends", their male lovers found the idea funny. Hepburn, apart from speaking about Tracy and touching on her marriage to Smith, does not give us insight into her personal life. She suggests that after Tracy she would never find love like that again. She also is aware that their relationship had issues, remarking that they were never seen together due to Mrs. Tracy deserving that respect of not having her husband's mistress appear with him.

Hepburn is more interested in her career, the films that made her interesting enough for people to care, as she described it. She was not opposed to winning Oscars. She actually mentions with pride how Alice Adams, a film she was particularly proud of, won her a nomination. With regards to the first film to win her the Oscar, Morning Glory, she tells of how she pushed to get the part, seeing herself in the character. "Showy part, lucky me," she quips. Hepburn does remark that Oscars are "very nice, but they don't help when you're doing the laundry". 

You can see moments of pride in her career, such as when she talks about her desire to play more than "Katharine Hepburn", thus pushing her to go on the stage more and more. She does not touch much on her turn in the musical Coco, save for wondering whether she was out of her mind in agreeing to be in the musical biopic of Coco Chanel. She is happy about how she saw the audience actually cared about her, but not much reflection on how poor her alleged singing was. 

We learn how, for example, she got a permanent eye infection while filming Summertime, chastising herself for doing her own stunts. She did want to work with David Lean, however. She also delights in remembering how she worked with people like John Huston, John Wayne, Laurence Olivier and Henry Fonda. Other projects, such as Spitfire, she considers idiotic to downright crazy. 

Her clipped New England tones sometimes make what she says sound odd. When she speaks about an old friend named Ali Barbour, it sounds like she's talking about Ali Baba. She is impish at times when speaking directly to the camera, and we see her staff: longtime assistant Phyllis, cook/housekeeper Norah, driver Jimmy. We do not get any perspective about what they are to her and certainly from them. It is All About Me, so Hepburn will be the one doing all the talking.

Katharine Hepburn: All About Me is a good primer from Hepburn on Hepburn, touching on her life and career, ending with a few observations about life. She insists that she did not have Parkinson's, thinks a lack of work destroys people and that while there may or may not be a God, you can't expect Him to do all the work. She also observes that she has both been loved and been in love, which are different things.

"But let's face it: it's how you live that really counts," the then-85-year-old observed at the end of Katherine Hepburn: All About Me. This and her family motto, which ends the documentary, sum up this actress' worldview. "Listen to the song of life".   

8/10