Rating: TV-14
Runtime: 1 hour, 26 minutes
Director: Lorna Tucker
Quick Impressions:
I arbitrarily decided Katharine Hepburn was the greatest American film actress when I happened to see The Philadelphia Story on TV when I was seven years old. It was quite a grand proclamation for a seven-year-old to make. I didn’t feel I needed to see the work of any other actresses for comparison. She gives such a strong performance there that I was just like, “Well, I’ve seen all I need to see here. Greatest actress of all time. She wins.” (Based on those anonymous Oscar ballots that get published every year, that’s the way some Academy members vote even as adults.) (It’s funny. I shared my verdict with my mom, and she said, “Oh yes, many people do think she’s the best actress. She’s won the most Best Actress Oscars.” And I was like, “I knew it!”)
So since then, I’ve been a Katharine Hepburn fan. I didn’t read Me until I was in high school. (I guess that’s not too strange because she didn’t write it until I was in middle school.) That was around the time I became obsessed with Bringing Up Baby. My mom and I started watching it together all the time. Even in college, I still had never questioned my second-grade assumption that Katharine Hepburn was our greatest actress (which is a little odd).
But it wasn’t until grad school (around the time of her death) that I became obsessed with her. Over the next five years, I compulsively read everything I could about her and watched all of her movies. My favorite source of information about her was Lauren Bacall’s memoirs and interviews. (Lauren Bacall gave the best interviews! I read By Myself in middle school, and I’d always get so excited when I’d discover a new TV or print interview. By the time Google existed, I might have Googled her every day until her death, to see if she’d given any new interviews. That probably sounds weird, but she often had. (I’ve never seen anyone who found a way to get interviewed as often as Lauren Bacall! She was always so thoughtful and cogent and had such interesting things to say.) If Lauren Bacall is your main source for learning about Katharine Hepburn, you’re going to come away with a very positive impression of her.
If you know anything about Hepburn, you’ll probably have already heard just about everything that’s in this documentary. But the draw of Call Me Kate is what you’ll see—footage from events throughout Hepburn’s life, some of which I don’t remember seeing before.
This is on Netflix, and it’s a pretty quick watch. It’s refreshingly non-sensationalized. You won’t hear anything surprising, but you will hear Hepburn’s own voice, and I’m pretty sure some of the footage used hasn’t been shown to the public before. (It’s not like secret footage, though. At one point, you see an old home movie of her doing a flip while you hear her voice talking about standing on her head.)
The Good:
The best part of this documentary is that my seven-year-old for some reason was paying attention to it. He was quite surprised to learn that Katharine Hepburn broke into houses. He found this delightful and made running jokes about it through the whole thing (kind of the way he teases me about my reckless driving and pyromania) (i.e. theatricality while driving safely and love of lighting birthday candles).
At one point, we’re told that though Hepburn auditioned well during her early years on the stage, she consistently struggled once in the role. “But she kept getting fired…”
My son jumped in, “She kept breaking into the director’s house. She said she just wanted to wash his dishes, but he wasn’t sure.”
And later Katharine Hepburn tells us, “Laura and I decided to move to Hollywood.”
He added, “So naturally, she broke into a house in Hollywood because that’s how she did it.”
I was delighted to see him take an interest in Katharine Hepburn. I’m positive he had no idea who she was before this. My fourteen-year-old didn’t know too much about her either, and she’s extremely interested in film. I know she’s seen Bringing Up Baby, The African Queen, and The Lion in Winter, but Hepburn’s life was new to her. I’m not sure why we’ve never talked about her. (Well, I think I did read her some of her African Queen book when we watched the movie, but that was a really long time ago.)
Probably my favorite aspect of this film is that we spend time with some of her actual family members, notably Mundy Hepburn. I greatly enjoyed listening to him tell anecdotes about her. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him before, beyond maybe a picture. I knew he was her brother Dick’s son, and that he’s an artist. That’s interesting to me because the way she always talked and wrote about Dick, you see that they had sort of a mildly…I don’t want to say adversarial or antagonistic…but you know, he’s her younger brother, and they were sharing their family home together. And in all of her stories (or the accounts of other close friends and relatives) Dick is someone who is never afraid to antagonize her. He doesn’t hold her in any awe or reverence. She’s just his sister. (And, of course, they had some conflict in the past.) So it’s cool to me to see Dick’s son telling talking about her as someone who had lived with her and frequently interacted with her. And I think it’s cool that we get to see Mundy blowing glass, and then we see his own art behind him later. We’re unobtrusively shown who he is, which is interesting if you’ve read about his father. We also see Katharine Houghton (in already existing footage, I believe). Schuyler Grant is mentioned.
We get to see Spencer Tracy’s grandson, too, and a great-grandson, again people I was aware existed but don’t really recall seeing often.
We also see quite a lot of footage of Laura Harding, and we hear some excerpts from her letters read aloud.
Not long after Hepburn’s death, there were some really bizarre and frustratingly reductive takes on her. Even though there’s a certain elegant simplicity to the way the material is presented here, there is a narrative that emerges. It gets increasingly explicit the longer the documentary goes on. And near the end, Mundy explicitly says, basically that we’ll never know definitive answers about her private life. And why would we want them? What we get is so much more fascinating.
Around the time I got married, I was incredibly exasperated with several things that were being written about Katharine Hepburn because they seemed to be (deliberately) missing the point of her. I used to rant to my husband, “Why in the world does she not get to choose the face she presents and create her own narrative and define her own life?” Everybody gets to do that!
I won’t call any books out by name, but as a stated methodology, “I didn’t talk to anybody who would disagree with me,” doesn’t seem like great writing practice to me. One author basically said that (counterintuitively) the truth about Katharine Hepburn could never be found out by talking to anyone who knew her closely (such as her family and friends). Yes, obviously Hepburn herself and people like Lauren Bacall are heavily, blatantly, deeply invested in mythologizing their stories and disseminating the version of themselves they’ve carefully crafted for public consumption. Anybody who doesn’t know that already is probably a child. But it’s disingenuous of an author not to admit that he’s keeping a wide berth of these accounts because he doesn’t want any more compelling narrative to overshadow or undermine the one he’s carefully crafting based on his own agenda supported through cherry-picked sources.
I don’t understand why you would tell a version of someone’s life by drawing a figure they wouldn’t recognize as themselves. I know we’re all different in the minds of all the various people who encounter us, but as a biographer, why would you want to present someone in a way that’s antithetical to not only their self-concept, but also their self-presentation style? I mean, I know Hollywood myths lay it on thick. And if your goal is just to cut through all the smoke and mirrors, fine. But if your goal is to present an authentic version of the subject, surely their own self-concept and the way in which they wanted their public facing persona portrayed has to factor in there somewhere. Otherwise you’re not writing about Katharine Hepburn. You’re writing about what you want to say, using Katharine Hepburn as a vehicle to sell your concept. That’s what I think.
This documentary allows for complexity and a degree of unknowableness. We see that Katharine Hepburn had a close, loving relationship with Laura Harding that lasted for decades. We see that she loved Spencer Tracy, took a very long hiatus from work to care for him, hung around with him for thirty years, and was still wearing his sweater long after his death, to carry his scent with her. We see that she loved Phyllis Wilbourn and had a long, very intimate (in terms of daily interaction, physical proximity) relationship with her until her [Phyllis’s] death. But what kind of sex she was or wasn’t having when with any of these people is really none of our business. For someone so notoriously private, Hepburn honestly is quite candid and revealing. There’s plenty that can be known about her, and when she cares for someone, she always says so. For someone who sometimes stressed her own selfishness and self-centeredness, she sure did have quite an abundance of long-lasting close friendships with people who adored her.
So what I’m saying is, rather refreshingly, this documentary doesn’t get bogged down in trying to decide how much of lesbian she was. Instead it just tells you all these things about her that are known to be true using primary sources, and then allows a picture to emerge. And I’m mentioning this because for a while after she died, a number of biographers got hyper-fixated on obsessing over her sexual orientation, to the point of denying everything she said about herself just because. (I don’t see the point of insisting her whole relationship with Tracy was performative because if the performance lasts thirty years, then that’s what you’ve been doing with three decades of your life. How is that not to some degree who you are—especially if you say so? I mean, aren’t we all just performing who we are?)
I used to rant about this all the time, but I’m just not a fan of the style of biography that says everybody gets a say on who you are except you. (Also, I don’t like biographies that paint her as some morally bankrupt liar when, in fact, she lived her life by pointedly going around doing whatever she wanted all the time and not disguising any of it one bit.) (I mean, was she really that private? How can you be private when you’re like, “Hey! Come inside my house. Let me show you what a recluse I am and tell you all about it.” Yeah, she’s performing Katharine Hepburn for you, but whoever is listening to her is performing Person Listening to Katharine Hepburn, right?)
Let me get off this tangent. What I like about this documentary is that it takes the more useful approach of not getting bogged down in any of this. Its thesis seems to be that Katharine Hepburn was complex, complicated, and relentlessly dedicated to advancing her life using continuously honed self-narrative as a tool for coping with adversity and loss. That’s much more interesting.
I decided I liked this documentary when it began with Katharine Hepburn praising her parents as practically perfect and crediting them for setting her up for future success. And then we’re told, after her brother committed suicide, her father forbade them to speak of him ever again. And then we get some further commentary from Mundy. This is useful. It teaches the audience how to read her instead of just making a bunch of suppositions. We can see how she expresses herself. We gain insight into how she thinks, what motivates her. She emerges as a complex, fascinating individual. There’s abundant evidence of who she was. She was constantly being herself for ninety-six years, and then she left a whole archive of personal documents to a museum of herself. Reading silences is important, but I mean, read them, don’t just yell over them.
Best Scene:
I like Mundy’s anecdote about Phyllis. To me, it makes him seem more credible as a source (not like his identity doesn’t already do that). It’s just like, “Here’s a moment I remember. This was the best thing that ever happened. Oh wasn’t that what you wanted to hear?” He comes across as someone who knows all the stuff and knows it from such an insider’s perspective that he doesn’t conceive of her life the same way outsiders do and prioritizes moments for his own reasons. It makes me think, “Good choice to interview this guy. We should probably interview him some more. Maybe he doesn’t even know what he knows.” (But he probably does.) (I also just love the way he’s always casually blowing glass and sitting next to his own artworks. It’s somehow not at all surprising he’s Katharine Hepburn’s nephew.)
I also found what Jane Fonda had to say quite interesting. What an insight, how she says Hepburn made a point of giving her stories she could remember and share about her. And then she talks about one such moment and how Hepburn recognizes her pain. I think this documentary gets its thesis across so effectively without beating us over the head with it—that Hepburn uses herself as a medium for creating a narrative that helps her overcome pain and hardship—so this idea just seems to emerge as we watch.
Best Scene Visually:
It was very cool to see all the footage of Laura Harding.
Best Action Sequence:
I like the way Spencer Tracy is presented so enigmatically. Even his family is like, “Hmm….”
The Negatives:
Call Me Kate is an interesting watch, but if you don’t know anything about Katharine Hepburn when you start, you still won’t know that much when you’re done. It skims the surface of her career and major life events, moving very quickly and in a pretty superficial way most of the time. Honestly, though, that kind of makes sense because who doesn’t know all about Katharine Hepburn’s life already?
Actually, I don’t know the answer to that. I spent about five years down a Katharine Hepburn rabbit hole, so I’m not completely sure what’s common knowledge that the general public would know about her.
But this definitely has a supplementary feel. I assume the people making it are aware there’s a lot of material about Katharine Hepburn already floating around out there.
One small thing I noticed is that someone in the documentary notes that Hepburn was labelled Box Office poison in the 30s and that no man would get such a label. But that’s not accurate. A whole bunch of people were labelled Box Office poison, not just Hepburn. I’m pretty sure it was a co-ed list. We just associate it with her because she claimed it so hard and coopted it into her mythos.
I kept wanting to hear more about each topic brought up. I would watch another hour of this documentary, one that went into greater detail about everything mentioned.
Overall:
I liked Call Me Kate. I didn’t intend to write a review (and frankly I’m not sure that I have), but I was stuck on the chapter I’m writing and decided to rant about all the needlessly reductive takes of Katharine Hepburn I can’t stand and pass it off as a review of this documentary. It’s on Netflix. If you like Katharine Hepburn, check it out.