by Priya Parmar
Katharine Hepburn wouldn’t have relished the portrait Parmar paints in THE ORIGINAL (Ballantine, 372 pp., $30), but anyone interested in Hepburn’s early career will have a hard time resisting this stylish, insightful deconstruction of her carefully crafted public persona. The novel’s action moves from Connecticut in the 1920s to Broadway and Hollywood 20 years later, focusing not on Hepburn the established star but on Hepburn the willful, sometimes ruthless newcomer whose unconventional private life and stubborn independence led her, at one point, to be branded “box office poison.”
There’s no sign of Spencer Tracy here. You will, however, find Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, George Cukor, the Selznicks, Howard Hughes and Leland Hayward. Hepburn had liaisons with those last two, in addition to a turbulent romance with Laura Harding, the New York heiress who made a home for her in California. The saddest member of this offscreen cast is Hepburn’s self-sacrificing husband, who eludes the gossip columnists by changing his name, then makes all the arrangements for Hepburn to travel in secret (with Harding) to Mexico so she can divorce him.
Parmar’s depiction of Hollywood in the 1930s is particularly adroit: “In this town, the air is curdled with sex. Here, anything can happen, and anything happens every night.” Yet as the Depression tightens its grip, the movie colony must, at least on the surface, mend its ways. There’s now a Production Code, with new morality standards, and Hepburn insists on making a movie that tests its boundaries. Parmar ends the novel with Hepburn’s triumphant return in “The Philadelphia Story,” using its heroine, Tracy Lord, as camouflage: “Tracy, this new Kate, is biting and strong and not me, but she is who they think I am. … She is who I will be from now on.”
