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Biographer says Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were bisexual

Biographer says Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were bisexual

Publishers Weekly reports that Anne Edwards, author of the newly reprinted biography Katharine Hepburn: A Remarkable Woman, says that both Hepburn and her lifelong companion, Spencer Tracy, were both bisexual. Edwards made her comments following the recent publication of gay biographer A. Scott Berg's Kate Remembered, a book that featured the actress's close collaboration. "Scott Berg is a super, wonderful writer," Edwards told Publishers Weekly. "I assume he had as many problems as I did with Kate. She told me, 'I don't care what you write as long as it's not the truth.' I think my writing this biography [in 1985] spurred her to writing her 1990 memoir." Edwards further describes Hepburn: "She was a woman who fictionalized her life to the public. She romanticized and fictionalized her relationship with Spencer Tracy, a bisexual, abusive alcoholic--not so much physically as verbally abusive. I had great respect for her, and she was the ultimate film performer, but she was not honest about her life. Between the lines, I was able to say that she lived a bisexual life most of her life. She and Spencer were great beards for each other throughout their lives. I can understand why she would have to keep her sexuality a secret, but in later years I felt it was less moral of her to never make some sort of gesture to the gay community. This was, after all, a woman who married a gay man and took her longtime companion, Laura Harding, on their honeymoon." Berg's book makes no mention of Hepburn's possible bisexuality, outside of a reference to her friend Irene Mayer Selznick's suspicions regarding Hepburn's sexual orientation.

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