I Know Where I'm Going: Katharine Hepburn, A Personal Biography

The intense-looking Katharine Hepburn is the immediate draw to Charlotte Chandler's I Know Where I'm Going: A Personal Biography, but the author doesn't attempt to make this anything but a soft lens look at a screen icon.

Actually, this is merely an organized oral history by the Great Kate herself, ensconced at some point late in her career at George Cukor's house, where she reminisces for Chandler. Now that Hepburn is gone, invoking her mystique is probably a guarantee bestseller, and Chandler offers another flimsy volume capitalizing on the star's life, with scant new biographical merit.

In her later years, Hepburn actually did her best to deflate her iconic status (after a lifetime of escaping the spotlight) by publishing an indulgently goofy memoir titled Me, and talking about her career endlessly. Chandler was present for those confessionals, and hangs on every word; the book version of Hepburn's outpourings, though, is an exercise in redundancies. Chandler allots two pages, for instance, to the point that George Cukor and the actress herself agreed that Hepburn was perfect in Little Woman. Other fillers, like including synopses of Hepburn's films in the text, are particularly clammy.

Hepburn's gay audience will be disappointed at Chandler's filters as well. The selectivity of the book is apparent right away in an anecdote about Kate and George Cukor. Chandler talks about the design of the director's home by silent screen star William Haines, but fails to mention that both Cukor and Haines were two of the most famous and influential gay men in Hollywood.

In a famous anecdote about her first meeting with John Barrymore, Hepburn would tell the story about how a metal burr flew in her eye while she was traveling by train to Hollywood. Seeing her bloodshot eyes, Barrymore said that he had the same trouble often, meaning hangovers, but the joke escapes Chandler. She leaves out the real punch line.

There is little discernment in these oft-told stories of the star, and it is only in the end passages, when Hepburn talks about "the Creature"--aka, her persona--that there is anything new to be found here. Otherwise, it's wall to wall Hepburn, airbrushed to death.