When Spencer Tracy died in 1967, he left a widow, and it was not Katharine Hepburn. While Hepburn and Tracy had been a couple onscreen and quietly off for 27 years, she did not go to his funeral because, she writes here, it would have been "too conspicuous." Instead she drove to the funeral home before the service and said goodbye to "the old boy" by helping to heft his casket onto the hearse.
A few days later, with characteristic forthrightness, Hepburn rang up Tracy's widow, Louise. She told Louise, from whom Tracy had become estranged even before falling for Hepburn while they were making Woman of the Year (1942), that maybe the two women could now be friends. Louise said, "I thought you were only a rumor..."
"After nearly 30 years...Some rumor," says Hepburn in this honest, charming and at times moving memoir.
Hepburn, now 84, doesn't tell all here, but she tells enough. Eschewing a ghostwriter, she uses her own no-nonsense, let's-just-get-on-with-it voice and tells her own story at her own speed. Not until page 389, near the close of the book, does she finally get to the subject about which her fans most want to know, her love affair with Tracy. "You may think you've waited a long time," she tells he readers. "But let's face it, so did I. I was thirty-three."
The wait is worth it, and the time spent getting there is not wasted.
Although film historians will be disappointed at finding how little space Hepburn has devoted to discussing the specifics of many of her 43 films, her directors and costars, Hepburn enthusiasts will be pleased to find out about her large and Loving family; about her early experiences onstage and in movies, when her polished looks and "a sort of wild confidence based on nothing but energy and ego" led to her winning an Oscar at age 26 for Morning Glory (1933); and about the husband (businessman Ludlow Ogden Smith) and lovers (agent Leland Hayward and millionaire Howard Hughes) who had preceded Tracy in her affections.
Minor carp: Me has no index and the generous selection of photos could have benefited from more informative captions.
Nonetheless, it's a fun book, and wholly representative of Hepburn's irresistible mix of Connecticut Yankee and canny Hollywood Star. Who else would devote as many chapters to gardening, changing tires and cleaning up after a hurricane as to making films and meeting Presidents? (Knopf, $25)
by D. Keith Mario
This sprightly thriller, Mano's seventh novel, begins in Nebraska, from which young Mike Wilson is summoned to Queens, New York, by his brother Tony's wife.
Tony has vanished, and Ethel has four kids to raise—will Mike please run the Smoking Car, Tony's restaurant, till things straighten out? What gives this situation real zip is that Mike is an Episcopal priest and what Ethel calls a restaurant is a topless bar.
Topless is Mike's diary account of managing the Smoking Car, his clerical identity concealed from patrons and dancers, his employment kept from his Episcopal superiors.
The handsome priest is kept hopping. Lecherous dancers make passes; he becomes chief suspect in a series of grisly murders; his fiancée, a prim librarian, arrives from Nebraska.
For Playboy, where he was a contributing editor (he has also contributed to PEOPLE), Mano researched the world of topless dance. The contemplated articles weren't written, he says in a note, but he taped about 200 interviews in 25 or so bars: "The fictional plot line for Topless surfaced through that ocean of authentic detail."
We learn, for instance, that managers should pay attention to a dancer's weight—sudden loss is a tip-off to drug use; that dancers are often students working their way through college; that an average-looking young woman working five nights may take home a tax-free $1,500 per week.
Topless has its faults. The contraction, in dialogue, of infinitive forms—"t'be," "t'go," "t'come"—is irksome, and the plotting is no great shakes; indeed the climax, resolving the linked mysteries of brother Tony's disappearance and the dancer killings, is as preposterous as it is startling. But Father Mike has charm, wit and a good ear for raunchy jokes; his diary is a treat. (Random House, $18)
by Ken Follett
It was meant to be a flight to freedom. A Pan American Clipper, leaving Southampton in England, heading for the apparent safety of the New York shore. It was 1939, and for the passengers boarding the Clipper, it was one last attempt to escape the growing Nazi threat.
To heighten the drama behind this fictional final flight, Follett populates his novel with a miniseries-rich international cast of characters, among them Lady Margaret Oxenford, spoiled and selfish daughter of a British fascist; Harry Marks, a jewel thief who relies more on luck than on skill; Diana Lovesey, who can't decide whom to live with—her husband or her lover, who are both conveniently on the flight; Nancy Lenehan, a career-driven woman looking to boot her brother out of the family shoe business; and flight engineer Eddie Deakin, concerned only about the safety of his pregnant wife, a hostage held by a gang trying to keep the Clipper from reaching its final destination.
Follett (Eye of the Needle, The Pillars of the Earth) weaves from one character to another, linking them when possible, never losing sight of the main mission—to escape the coming war.
Night over Water is a first-class adventure, a Christie mystery set at 20,000 feet. Follett's best novel since The Key to Rebecca, it is a slick, 1930s melodrama with all the prerequisites of the genre—passion (there's enough sex on this plane to steam up every window), mystery (will Lenehan lose the company to her brother? will Eddie Deakin risk the passenger' lives to save his wife? will Diana Lovesey be the first woman to sleep with two men on a transatlantic flight?) and, of course, there's plenty of danger (take your pick—the Nazis, gangsters or airline food).
To put it another way, every flight ought to be as entertaining as this book. (Morrow, $23)
by Dan Rather with Peter Wyden
There'll be no earthquakes here, no encounters with presidents or dictators, just a series of freeze-frames of my own small-town America and its vanishing lifestyle of 50 years back, an eternity." So CBS anchorman Dan Rather, now 59, begins this folksy, at times engaging, more often tedious memoir of a Texas childhood.
Rather grew up in the Heights Annex, a rundown Houston neighborhood now vanished, "sucked up by its surroundings as if it were a puddle." Here, age 9, hawking the Houston Chronicle, he began his journalism career. In 1960 Houston's KHOU-TV brought him from radio to television. A year later he signed with CBS.
But such career notes are few: I Remember, as promised, is almost entirely recollections of small-town life, of loving parents, of friends, teachers and childhood escapades—and of the great "outside" forces brought to bear, during the '30s and '40s, on the insular Heights Annex world: the Depression, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the impact of movies and radio.
Rather is enormously proud of his parents. Father Irvin was a "tough as iron" oil pipeline worker, a devout, proud, inquisitive man. (In the early '30s, his son recalls, in an effort to understand Hitler, "tight finances notwithstanding, Father dispatched Mother to get a copy of Mein Kampf.") Mother Beryl, a cheerful woman of staggering energy, not only managed the household hut added income by selling encyclopedias door-to-door, sewing and waitressing. Yet, Rather notes, "I can't remember a time when she wasn't home for supper."
Familial devotion doesn't quite excuse the wordiness of this book. "I've had complaints," Rather says, "that I sometimes overexplain." I Remember will produce more complaints.
His grandparents' home had an outhouse. A "toilet," Rather explains. A retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story provokes such windy trivia as "Six movies were made commemorating their lives; the last film, by Arthur Penn in 1967, with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, is remembered as a classic and a box-office smash." And we could do without Rather's mother's recipe for vinegar pie, a ghastly-sounding Depression-era dessert.
Did Rather ramble into a tape recorder relying on coauthor Peter Wyden, an experienced writer-editor, to tighten things up? If so, Wyden failed him. While I Remember has its moments, far too much of it drones. And drones. And drones...(Little, Brown, $19.95)
>The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste REMEMBER JELL-O MOLDS WITH FRUIT cocktail? How about mood rings and fuzzy dice? Editors Jane and Michael Stern remind us of these and other tacky fads. (Harper Perennial)
Surrender the Pink IN HER SECOND NOVEL, Carrie Fisher proves she can pack a punch line—though this tale about a female soap writer and her romantic obsessions is strictly lightweight. (Pocket Star)
Rabbit at Rest John Updike's FINAL BOOK ABOUT HIS celebrated character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom finds Rabbit in his mid-50s, overweight, still crass and headed toward trouble. (Fawcett Crest)
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Jeff Brown,
- Lorenzo Carcaterra.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
