Monday, Sep 8, 2008
A. Scott Berg's entertaining biography of Katharine Hepburn is intimate, thoughtful and considerate. But rushing it out two weeks after her death feels ghoulish.
Jul 16, 2003 | The world of letters is becoming more and more like the world of journalism: There are increasingly fewer venues and publishers willing to wait for a well-considered response to an event when they can simply have a fast one. First is considered best, no matter what; a writer who takes a bit longer, striving for nuance and insight, is lost in the dust, even if he or she comes up with material that's far superior to any number of feverish overnighters done on the fly. An event -- even the death of one of our most significant cultural figures -- is considered old news, barely worth the public's consideration, just two weeks after it happens.
That must be why "Kate Remembered," A. Scott Berg's memoir about his 20-year friendship with Katharine Hepburn, has been hustled into the stores by Putnam barely two weeks after the actress's heart, through 96 years of continuous action, finally stopped beating. And unfortunately, this is a case in which an author's decent intentions are seriously undermined by the necessity -- that is, the perceived necessity -- of being the first out of the gate. Hepburn died on June 29; the book hit the stores on Friday, July 11. The whole enterprise reeks of something distasteful and ghoulish, as if both an author and a publishing company were eager to cash in on Hepburn's life and legacy before her body had even turned cold.
The reality may, unfortunately, be something like that -- and yet, because reality is almost always inconveniently squirmy, not quite. Berg's book wasn't written in a week and a half: He has been working on it for years, bit by bit, and according to a piece in last week's New York Times, Putnam has had the completed book (completed, of course, but for the ending) stored in a drawer for two years. Only 10 people at the publishing house knew about it; it was called the "secret book." But it was always a given -- according to, we can gather, both Berg's own moral compass and the terms of his friendship with Hepburn -- that anything he ended up writing could not be published until after Hepburn's death.
And a span of two weeks does qualify, at least in some rough sense, as "after." But the bigger question, particularly when the book under consideration is as well-written, entertaining, courteous and sensitive as "Kate Remembered" is -- is it "after" enough?
Berg, an intelligent and, from all appearances, principled writer, has carved a respectable career out of writing serious biographies about very big men: "Max Perkins: Editor of Genius," about the man who cultivated the genius of writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway; "Goldwyn: A Biography," about Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn; and "Lindbergh," which won a Pulitzer Prize. Hepburn had always been Berg's favorite actress; he first met her in 1983, after pitching a piece on her to "Esquire" for its 50th anniversary issue. The piece never appeared -- Berg ended up pulling it from the magazine, for all the right reasons, after his editor reneged on a promise that he'd made to Berg, a reversal that changed the terms under which Berg had approached Hepburn in the first place. But Berg and Hepburn were already well on their way to becoming close friends. Before they met, Hepburn knew Berg was working on a book about Sam Goldwyn, and she was also familiar with Berg's Perkins book. (Because Hepburn had been a neighbor of Perkins' for a time, Berg had requested an interview with her in 1972, which she politely refused via a handwritten note; Berg subsequently sent her a copy of the finished book.) She seems to have sussed him out as a suitably interesting intellect. Berg clearly wasn't a starstruck old-movie queen breathlessly pursuing a friendship with one of his idols.
And Berg immediately adored her. On their first face-to-face meeting, she asked him in her imperious manner if he smoked. "No, Lady Bracknell, I don't," he said, invoking the bossy dowager from "The Importance of Being Earnest." She laughed, and the friendship took off from there.
As Berg presents it (an observation corroborated by a contemporary and longtime friend of Hepburn's, the producer-slash-socialite and pedigreed Hollywood eminence Irene Mayer Selznick), Hepburn seemed happy to have met someone she felt comfortable talking to, particularly after leading such a reclusive existence for most of her professional life. Hepburn hadn't exactly chosen Berg as an official biographer (that wouldn't have been her style, anyway). But it seems that in Berg she found someone whose company she enjoyed and whom she could also trust as a confidant -- one whom, she knew very well, might one day go on to write a book about her. The book is, Berg explains, neither a straight-ahead biography nor a critical study of her work (he admits that, caring for her as he did, he could never be objective enough to write such a thing), but "rather, as true an account of her life as I can present, based on countless hours of private conversations during which she reminisced ... As our conversations would invariably turn to her past, I soon felt that she was using me less as a sounding board than as an anvil against which she could hammer some of her emotions and beliefs."
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