It would be impossible for all biographers to have this experience with their subjects: negotiate a first meeting for quotes about your current biographical subject and run into resistance; determine to write a short magazine piece about the person and begin developing a good rapport with the subject, abandon the magazine project but begin keeping notes on the person and spending large chunks of time staying in the person's home with them and eating meals. 20 years after you have met and your subject has passed away, take all your good notes and write the book.This book not only contains memories of Katharine Hepburn's early life, it also includes vignettes of her later life, from her 70s to her death in her 90s. There are sad moments but there are great pieces of dialogue that made me laugh out loud. Katharine Hepburn always got to be her own self. She had so much control of her career and the way she lived her life. She had failings, to be sure, but she lived her life honestly and honorably. I thought A. Scott Berg's depiction of her throughout the book was also honest. He had the ability to question her many times on a position she held strongly and stubbornly to make her look again at her stubbornness. He had the opportunity to spend so much time with Ms. Hepburn but at the same time could see how opinionated she could be on everything and sometimes for no good reason. She sometimes wisely sized people up pretty quickly but she also had formed opinions of people she had never met, merely based on things she had heard about them. The author's ability to show her charms, her acting abilities, her capacity to love at the same time he shows her flaws, seems to give a more sincere portrayal of the famous actress. This was an entertaining read. I realized in reading it how very little I knew about Hepburn, about her relationship with Spencer Tracy and her many movies.
Just last week I read a quote by or about Katharine Hepburn. For the life of me, I can not recall where I ran across the quote or even what it dealt with. Nevertheless, it piqued my interest in reading about Katharine Hepburn. My local library is small (can you believe, not supported by tax dollars?), but offered three biographies of Katharine Hepburn. I chose Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg due to name recognition, having read his Lindbergh biography.Not a film buff or idolizer of movie stars, I really enjoyed the way Mr. Berg shared both Miss Hepburn's life and the remarkable friendship they developed over the last thirty years of her life. Reading Kate Remembered, I discovered I had actually seen more of her movies than I remembered. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, I saw while in high school, Lion In Winter I saw while in college and On Golden Pond a bit later. And, yes, I do recall she and Spencer Tracy made some movies together earlier in her career. But, most of the detailed descriptions of other film and stage ventures, were lost on me. In fact, if I were to pressed to select my least favorite parts of the book, it would be the some what tedious accounts of her great volume of work. And, I'm still scratching my head wondering why all the print given to Irene Mayer Selznick. I learned that Spencer Tracy was married, an alcoholic and a womanizer, yet Kate loved him as a soul mate and cared for him through his dying and death; that she and Howard Hughes, he's (nearly) deaf, you know, had a love affair; that she had not met Henry Fonda until they worked together on On Golden Pond and that she found him cold, cold, cold. I most enjoyed reading of the deep, loving friendship between Miss Hepburn and Mr. Berg, her personal life, her family, Fenwick, and her outlook on life.Thank you Scott Berg for this intimate look at Katharine Hepburn.
Do You like book Kate Remembered (2004)?
Based on the style Berg uses, I'm tempted to read his biography on Goldwyn as well (if it's told in any fashion like this). He narrates this biography as a friend, not a biographer, the result being a more gentle tale of the woman. And he captures the spirit of a woman, rather than a legend.Several times I laughed out loud. In the beginning he describes her impatience with people by simply describing how mad she once got at him because he sucked at being her partner in a game of Parcheesi.Or her nymph-like humor, in demasculating him one time by suggesting he wear one of her secretary's dresses since he got caught in rain and was wet. I howled with laughter.In fact, after reading of her nature and their friendship, it inspired me to want to live with a little more dignity and grace. I finished the book not only feeling inspired by Kate's life (you feel like you've actually befriended her), but by A. Scott Berg's life, too.Clearly, a brilliant biography of a wonderful friendship.
—Natalie
I loved every bit of this book. Every page. Every word. Mr. Berg made me laugh the whole way through his journey of his friendship with Ms. Hepburn. It's not a thousand pages about her youth or a troubled personal life, etc. It's a poignant, well-pieced together story of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted out of life. Mr. Berg's description of Kate made me want to be her best friend, to be like her, to know her through and through. I often find myself reading biographies but having no opinion either way because the author doesn't draw me into the story. That is not the case with this book. If you read no other book about Katharine Hepburn, this one is most definitely worth your time. XOXO
—Morgan Wiley
A very unusual biography in that the author became great friends with Katherine Hepburn over the last 20 years of her life. It's strange to realize that someone as famous as Hepburn -- and as much in the public eye as she was -- was relatively alone and isolated in her later years.Katherine Hepburn seems to have been exactly the person she seemed to be: remarkably little pretense for a person whose stock in trade is role-playing.Berg's friendship with his subject means that we get to see the real, daily minutiae of the life of a figure normally seen from afar, as an icon. Hepburn is opinionated, strong-willed, lively, down-to-earth, self-confident. Anyone would be better for having known her -- which might be one of the best things you could say about a person.A couple of cameo appearances in this biography are hilarious. The first is Michael Jackson, who claims to have watched Hepburn's films. But when Berg recites title after title, Jacko doesn't recognize any of them. Berg doesn't offer this possibility but I wondered whether Jackson hadn't confused Katherine Hepburn with Audrey Hepburn.The other cameo is Warren Beatty, who was obsessed with getting Hepburn to play the role of the old aunt in his remake of Love Affair (first made in the 1930s with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, then in the 1950s with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr). Beatty is a talented guy -- no doubt about that -- but he really is as vain as people say.
—David
