I am pretty sure I've read somewhere that Scott Berg's biography of Katharine Hepburn wasn't tawdry for a celebrity biography. A couple of things I didn't know--Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable were the first choice for Kate and Spencer Tracy's roles in "State of the Union"? Spencer Tracy was to have been Penny Baxter in the first attempt to film The Yearling?--were interesting to contemplate and didn't make me feel dirty, but reading about her acquaintance with Michael Jackson and her frail, prideful (and well-founded) reluctance to appear in a Warren Beatty (ugh) remake of "An Affair to Remember" (double ugh) did.
But I liked reading about Fenwick and knowing that she swam every day of the year. In high school when I mastered crossing the Baldwin Bridge over the Connecticut River (several hundred feet up, and where "mastered" means "did it several times without being blown over the side by an 18-wheeler or otherwise dying, even when I had a cast on my arm"), I rode all over Old Saybrook, sometimes to sell advertisements for the yearbook and sometimes just because. Also I went to Fenwick because it was pretty and as close to the Lynde and Breakwater lighthouses as you can get by land--and I didn't consider what I did to be trespassing. Soon after I passed a "No Trespassing" sign (whether it said "please go away" I can't be certain of), walking my bike innocent as a lamb, a woman in a gardening hat asked me who I was and told me to scarper. If that was Phyllis, it is probably as close as I got to Kate in life.
Except now that I look for it, Kate's house was several away from Lynde Point, by itself near a salt pond. Well, someone told me to bugger off, anyway.