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

by Darwin Porter

Release Date: February, 2004

Edition: Paperback

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Hepburn's Bio Fascinates with its Polarities:

There's a curious thing about this fine book: It manages, almost by even existing, to radically polarize readers into two sometimes enemy camps. Those who are comfortable with the possibility that an American film icon might have been gay, and those who foam at the mouth at the horror of such a thing.

Bisexuality is not unusual within the consciousness of many artists and actors. As such, why should Katharine Hepburn (who always DID look a bit mannish) be exempt from such a possibility? And if she were bisexual, why should that arouse such fury in the mindless?

My father worked at both RKO and at MGM, and over a period of many years, he corroborated much of the material that Porter exposed "for the first time" in Hepburn's biography. Ironically, to hundreds of Hollywood insiders and in-the-know hipsters, including many who are still alive, the stories that Porter has accumulated were common knowledge. EVERYBODY in town knew some of the stories--the cool thing about Katharine the Great is that it has accumulated most of them into one volume. One wonders about the ones that never got recorded!

I admire this book. Even though the material certainly didn't shock me AT ALL, I'm delighted that at last some savvy author has at last published it.

Thanks, and happy reading.

Morons will love it!!!

Darwin Porter, a hack homoerotic fantastist par-excellent, has produced another infatile fiction masking as biography. Needless to say, you have to be a very weakly educated and emotionally askew person to be impressed by this cheap, mindless junk. I'm all for hearing the intimate facts of Hepburn's life - it's my opinion from all I've ever heard and seen that she was probably something of an asexual lesbian - attracted to women, hostile to blatantly heterosexual men, but not that sexual of creature. This book presents a pretty bizarre caricature of a women's sexuality, whether gay or straight. Porter is such a shallow and inept writer - and the result here is like a gossip column on steroids - grotesquely overblown without any depth or substance. One can only take it as cheap fiction written by a verbose illiterate. I love the other reviews here. If you'll take the time, you'll see that Porter has a handful of staunch (but cliched) publicist friends and associates (whom he may well pay for their services) who submit rave, over-the-top reviews of all his meager efforts. It reminds me of the voting on American Idol, where clicks of immature obsessive groupies flood the phone lines each week to keep their untalented favorites in the race. Too bad! These phony friend reviews distort the purpose of Amazon's forum and undermine the sincerity and integrity of their entire format. With Porter's unknown publishing house (I'm assuming he's the publisher), the media reviews from imaginative names no one's ever heard of, the whole thing seems to me like something of a hoax. I think Amazon would do well to re-think their policies and strictly stick to limiting their list to books from established and reliable publishers and exclude mindless, driveling trash like this from their site. By doing so, they could keep themselves from being exploited by deceptive cons such as this.