This biography addresses Hepburn’s vigorous bisexuality, something considered impossible while she was alive. “That Hepburn loved other women is a defining aspect of her story,” says Mann. However, she did not regard herself as a lesbian, but “lived life as a man — a heterosexual man — not just in terms of a man’s privilege but in the way a man sees, perceives, and interacts with his world.” Mann understands how Hepburn “utilised a shrewd understanding of the zeitgeist to keep herself on top”, and writes perceptively about her later years, which other biographers have ignored.
BARBRA: The Way She Is
by Christopher Andersen
Aurum £20
When Katharine Hepburn shared the best-actress Oscar with Barbra Streisand in 1968, she declared they were both “monsters of our own creation”. In Barbra, Andersen captures the passion, vanity and business savvy of a woman who uses her website not only to promote her political views but also to flog her used possessions to fans for modest sums. As Paul Williams (lyricist of her song Evergreen) put it, working with Streisand is “like having a picnic at the end of an airport runway”.
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ORSON WELLES Hello Americans
by Simon Callow
Cape £25
In this second of a three-volume biography, Callow covers 1941- 1947, between Citizen Kane and Macbeth, and his dogged research reminds us that these years saw Welles at his most productive, even pursuing a political career. Suffering from the creative equivalent of multiple-personality disorder, Welles managed to stay on the acceptable side of charlatanry — just. Callow is a match for his subject in terms of showmanship, but he has gifts of analysis that eluded Welles, “a man in the grip of a temperament that was often fundamentally at war with his gifts”.
AVA GARDNER
by Lee Server
Bloomsbury £20
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From a poor background in North Carolina, and a woman with incomparable sexual allure, Gardner appealed to men from Sinatra to the bullfighter Dominguin. Server offers sure-footed assessments of the movies (“Her greatest films are hard to imagine without her”) and has an indefatigable appetite for her decadence. Fascinated by her carnality, he has tracked down even obscure one-night stands with a story to tell. In Server’s phrase: “She burnt bridges, usually from midstream.” Sheer delight.
BRANDO UNZIPPED
by Darwin Porter
Blood Moon £17.99
Asked by an impertinent interviewer about his love life, Brando gave the flippant but true response: “I can’t talk about something that doesn’t exist.” His sexual life was a different matter, however, and Porter’s salacious biography charts the homosexual as well as heterosexual history of what Brando called “my noble tool” during his golden age as an actor. Brando’s irreverence and humour are prominently on display, and his compulsion to use sex as a means of self-expression is fascinating.
()RED CARPETS AND OTHER BANANA SKINS
by Rupert Everett
Little, Brown £18.99
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Everett understands the cycle of compromise that makes it impossible to resist the most demeaning of Hollywood job offers: “Slowly but surely, what was once something that you would never do, first becomes the thing you’re using to get something else, and then suddenly it’s what you are doing. Next week.” His film career may have been patchy, but his writing is distinguished — indeed, his pen portraits of Madonna, Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone are among the best things that have ever been written about those stars. This is a heady triumph of observation.
TELLING SOME TALES
by Anna Massey
Hutchinson £17.99
In this charmingly self-deprecating autobiography, Massey reveals that the dominant note of her stage career was a combination of fear and disappointment in her ability. The daughter of the emotionally detached actor Raymond Massey (who insisted that all his children take “Raymond” as their middle name), Anna also struggled for many years to find happiness in her personal life. However, her reflective writing exudes the inner calm she has always craved.
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THE WAY HOLLYWOOD TELLS IT: Story and Style in Modern Movies
by David Bordwell
California UP £25.70
If you want to understand how the classic Hollywood storytelling tradition has evolved since 1960, this is a must-read. Bordwell is a film-studies academic who writes with peculiar perspicacity (and countless examples) about how “rapid editing, bipolar extremes of lens lengths, reliance on close shots, and wide-ranging camera movements” have contributed to the aesthetic of “intensified continuity” that now dominates cinema.
DEAN & ME: A Love Story
by Jerry Lewis and James Kaplan
Macmillan £17.99
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Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, the “pioneers of unscripted comedy routines”, accumulated “backlogs of fury” during the last 10 months of an intense 10-year partnership that resembled a fractious marriage. Searingly self-critical, Lewis writes with awe about Martin’s unflappable stage persona, and with humour and affection about the twists and turns of their relationship.
Top five
KATE: The Woman Who Was Katharine Hepburn
by William Mann
Faber £18.99
A fresh look at the great Hepburn’s life, her ‘vigorous bisexuality’ and later years
ORSON WELLES: Hello Americans
by Simon Callow
Cape £25
Callow is more than a match for Welles in his second of three volumes, featuring the years between Kane and Macbeth
RED CARPETS AND OTHER BANANA SKINS
by Rupert Everett
Little, Brown £18.99
Everett’s portraits of stars such as Madonna are a triumph of observation
THE WAY HOLLYWOOD TELLS IT
by David Bordwell
California UP £25.70
A must-read on the way the classic tradition of Hollywood storytelling has evolved since 1960
BRANDO UNZIPPED
by Darwin Porter
Blood Moon £17.99
Brando’s irreverence and humour are on display, along with the history of his ‘noble tool’
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Available at Books First prices (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585