Most of us born after World War II knew Katharine Hepburn—if we knew her at all—as the warble-throated septuagenarian invited by Henry Fonda to “suck face” in 1981’s On Golden Pond. Sure, it won her an Oscar (a record-setting fourth), but it didn’t even hint that half a century earlier, she was Hollywood’s “It” girl.
Priya Parmar, author of the acclaimed Vanessa and Her Sister, rectifies this oversight in her meticulously researched and historically accurate novel The Original. After a brief introduction to Hepburn’s somewhat bohemian and complex childhood, Parmar drops us into the thick of pre-Hays Code Hollywood, where careers were made and broken, fantasies were fabricated and fractured, and skeletons lurked not only in closets, but also on sets and in bedrooms.
Classic film buffs will revel in the cast of characters attached to Hepburn’s rise, stall and reinvention. Cary Grant, Howard Hughes, producer David O. Selznick and director George Cukor all play central roles in Hepburn’s development, while such notables as Mae West, Spencer Tracy, Louis B. Mayer and John Ford pop in for cameos.
In crisp declarative sentences reminiscent of Hemingway (or perhaps Walter Winchell), Parmar unwinds the story of a fiercely independent young woman who doesn’t quite fit the narrative that her handlers would like to create. “Kate,” the author writes, “is table hard, where other actresses have the softness of a shelled pea.”
While the book is a fun romp through Tinseltown’s Golden Age, Parmar is unafraid to pose some of the larger questions surrounding not only the much-heralded actress, but anyone engaged in California’s second largest industry. What does it mean to remain authentic when your career is based upon illusion? How do you hang on to a bit of privacy when you are continually under a spotlight? And like the parable of the dog running after the bus, what do you get when you finally catch what you’re chasing?
Maybe you find yourself with a quartet of statuettes—a monument to a lifetime of persistence and determination—that have to stand in for the love you so desperately desired, but never gave yourself permission to enjoy. What a shame.