Katharine Houghton Hepburn came from the kind of family that Spencer Tracy, in another life, might have wished for himself. Her paternal grandfather was an Episcopalian minister in Hanover County, Virginia, her grandmother a Powell, the family having lost a three-thousand-acre plantation during the Civil War despite having freed their slaves decades earlier. The Reverend Sewell Stavely Hepburn was known for his dramatic flair at the pulpit, a strain of talent that may have passed to his eldest granddaughter. Her father, Thomas Norval Hepburn, was similarly gifted in oratory and, like Tracy, honed his skills in college. A born healer, Dr. Hepburn was reputed to have been Connecticut’s first urologist. In 1910 he became secretary of the Connecticut Social Hygiene Association, capping a crusade against venereal disease initiated by his wife, the former Katharine Martha Houghton.
Mrs. Hepburn was descended from money and position yet always held the less privileged in her sympathies and spent her life fighting for the vote, broad access to birth control and family planning services, and the right of free expression in all its permutations. She was a graduate of Bryn Mawr, where she took a master’s degree in 1900. Four years later she married Tom Hepburn, who was then in his final year of medical school. Not wanting to practice in a big city, Tom took her to Hartford, where he became an intern and later a resident at the hospital.
Her activism dated from a 1908 talk she attended on the struggle to gain voting rights for women, and was further galvanized by the great English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, who came to Hartford the following year and was a guest in the Hepburn home. After Mrs. Pankhurst’s visit, she formed local and statewide organizations to press for the right to vote and lauded the subsequent ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment for raising the legal status of women from “children, idiots, and criminals” to “self-respecting adults.” Her interest in legalized birth control dated from 1921, when she became a familiar figure around the state capital, urging repeal of a restrictive 1869 law, declaring, with typical directness, that a woman “ought to have some say in the number of children she has.” She became a close friend of the pioneering social activist Margaret Sanger, and if she ever feared ostracism for her and her husband’s activities, she never said so, and she encouraged an unconventional spirit in each of her six children.
Kathy, the second eldest, was born in May 1907. She was a well-balanced child, quick-witted and creative, with the intensity of her mother, the good looks of her father, and the boundless energy of both. She grew into a spirited competitor, mastering golf, tennis, and swimming, and learned early on to go after whatever she wanted, which, as she grew into puberty, included men who interested or otherwise attracted her. It became family lore, later recounted in her autobiography, that she pursued the poet H. Phelps Putnam with such fervor that her father took Putnam aside and, likening his daughter to “a young bull about to charge,” threatened to shoot him if he laid hands on her. She posed nude for the camera while still a student at Bryn Mawr, married at twenty-one, and went determinedly her own way at twenty-five, having taken Ludlow Ogden Smith as her husband and then cast him aside when he was no longer of value in her drive to become a star. “Kate,” said George Stevens, “didn’t absolutely have to have a husband as most women do. She could get things done without turning her problem over to a man to succeed with or fail with.”
In love with herself (as she readily admitted), Hepburn took a succession of beaux, graduating to some of the most accomplished and best-known men in America. “I’ve never discovered any evidence whatsoever that she was a lesbian,” said her niece, actress-playwright Katharine Houghton. “She had many more affairs with men than people know about, always rich and/or powerful men that could benefit her career in some way. I do think she really loved Spencer as much as she was capable of loving anyone besides herself. But for her the great aphrodisiac was POWER, not sex, and I believe if she were asked, she would concur.”
Agent Leland Hayward and industrialist Howard Hughes were two of her more serious involvements, but she generally seemed to approach the opposite sex as if roaming the aisles of a fancy toy store, initially delighting in the gyrations of a clever mechanism, then tearing it apart to see how it worked. “Leland and Howard were both sweet and fun,” she said, “but I cared more about me than I cared about them.” Hayward memorably described her on his deathbed as “The best. God, yes.” And Hughes stayed in touch long after he had disappeared from public sight.
Press reports not long after Hepburn’s arrival in Los Angeles had her marrying actor Joel McCrea, and John Ford became a particular favorite in the mid-thirties, when he directed her in Mary of Scotland. Although linked superficially to Garson Kanin at the time she met Tracy, she was living for the summer with sculptor Robert McKnight, whom she had known since the age of fifteen. “Why in the world don’t I marry him?” she wondered. “I know him … I like him … we both like tennis.” She was attracted to strong, decisive men with outsize personalities, ofttimes married, frequently alcoholic. “I always liked bad eggs, always, always—and always attracted them. I had a lot of energy and looked as if I was (and I was) hard to get—wasn’t mad about the male sex—perfectly independent, never had any intention of getting married, wanted to paddle my own canoe, didn’t want anyone to pay my way.”
There was something mystical about the Tracy name. One of her first memories of New York was sitting on a tenement balcony watching the Tracy tugboats go by. Then later came the role of Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story. There can be no doubt that she targeted Spencer Tracy as the project that became Woman of the Year took shape, but it’s unlikely that falling for him was part of the plan. It happened so fast that it took her by surprise, and it must have been Tracy’s initial reticence combined with his willingness to play along—albeit on his own terms—that girded her resolve. “We started our first picture together and I knew right away that I found him irresistible. Just exactly that, irresistible.”
Tracy, of course, was at the top of his game, outdistancing even Clark Gable as an attraction at the American box office.1 There was no longer any chasing, as there had been for Loretta Young, and women routinely tumbled for a man of his stature. Joe Mankiewicz could remember the sight of one script girl nudging another as they observed Tracy in casual conversation with a third. “He’d have them off their feet like THAT!” Mankiewicz said, snapping his fingers for emphasis. Gable once observed a similar scene in the company of unit publicist Emily Torchia. “You know,” he said in mock indignation, “Spence can outdo me with these girls!”
“He did have quite a line of conquests,” Claire Trevor acknowledged. “Women loved him. He was a very attractive man.” Tracy knew where to go to avoid being seen by the press, especially when he was with somebody well known, and when he was spotted alone with, for example, Ingrid Bergman, it was never at a popular nightspot like Ciro’s and was, therefore, never reported. “To me,” said Sheilah Graham, “it was something you didn’t print. Because I had been warned very severely never to print stories of married producers and directors who had extra-marital affairs with girls … My boss John Wheeler [founder of the North American Newspaper Alliance] said, ‘Never write about the romances of married men.’ And I stuck to that quite scrupulously.”
In 1940 Tracy was seen publicly with Olivia de Havilland on at least two occasions, a fact that got reported in the columns precisely because it wasn’t presumed to be an affair. The actress’ official date, it was explained, was Tim Durant, a buddy of Tracy’s from the Uplifters Club who had suddenly taken ill. The two men had grown increasingly close in the late 1930s and Durant, for a while, assumed Carroll’s duties as a traveling companion following the IRS debacle of 1939. “He was not only a great artist,” Durant said of Tracy, “but a fine friend. We had much in common and many good times together … We stopped off in New York on the way to England, where a crowd of fifty spent all night outside Claridge’s Hotel to await the chance of seeing Spencer the next morning.”
A tall, good-looking guy who was generally regarded as one of the best-dressed men in Hollywood, Thomas W. “Tim” Durant was a stockbroker in the mid-1920s when he met and married Adelaide Brevoort Close, the eldest daughter of famed cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. When they divorced, Durant, an unrepentant womanizer, was awarded their place on Bedford Drive, a main house and two guest houses on several acres of prime Beverly Hills real estate. He rented out the main house for a tidy sum and took up residency in the larger of the two guest houses, a secluded bachelor pad tastefully furnished in early American. Entered off an alleyway, the other guest house—presumably a servants’ quarters—was often borrowed by friends for trysts. Tracy stayed there when he couldn’t bear the drive to Encino, and Durant once told actor-producer Norman Lloyd the Tracy-Hepburn affair was conducted in that house.
Durant worked for Charlie Chaplin, officially as a writer but more specifically as a personal assistant, and he brought Tracy into Chaplin’s circle, where he frequently served as a fourth for tennis. He was also well connected socially and introduced Tracy to, among others, Harry Crocker, of the San Francisco banking family, and Betsey Cushing Roosevelt, the president’s erstwhile daughter-in-law, with whom the two men stayed when visiting East Hampton. Durant was likely Tracy’s closest confidant in the early days of the Hepburn relationship, and although she was certain and unwavering in her attraction to him, he was likely dubious of anything more than a quick and memorable liaison. “I think that you imagined I was a lesbian,” Hepburn wrote in an epistolary chapter years after his death. “But not for long. Did you.”
In him she saw a man as solid and admirable as her own father, warm and witty and full of unexpected observations. “They were the only two men in her life who really challenged her,” Katharine Houghton commented, “and she felt comforted by the boundaries they set for her. My grandfather was a more classically handsome man than Spencer, but they both exuded a vigorous and not-to-be-messed-with male energy.” The balance Tracy brought to her life was oddly liberating in that she could be as bossy and as much a pain in the ass as she pleased, and she knew that when she had gone too far, when she had provoked and jabbered and carried on past all reasonable tolerance, he would simply say, as no man had said to her before, “Kate, shut up!” It was an accommodation he taught her, one she had always sought from others but had never before given herself.
Hepburn was like Louise in that they were both athletic, both actresses of some attainment, both plainspoken in a world where directness didn’t always count as a virtue. But where Hepburn could be confrontational, Louise was not, and where Kate saw a man in need of love and maintenance, Louise saw a job she was no longer able to do. What remained of the marriage was trust, friendship, and a sense of shared experience that was well-nigh unbreakable, but it was no longer a thing that was sustainable or mutually nourishing. Spence had outlets—his career, women, his small circle of friends. Louise had Johnny, Susie, her book, and her horses. She had the world-famous Tracy name, but it wasn’t nearly enough for a woman of her drive and intellect.
The relationship with Katharine Hepburn contributed to a time of almost unprecedented turmoil for Spencer Tracy; not since 1933–34 had his life been so completely shaken by a sequence of events. He was already deeply involved with Hepburn—more than he had been with any woman since Loretta Young—when he made his only network appearance with Ingrid Bergman on the Lux Radio Theatre. Kate and he were doing retakes for Woman of the Year, and she was plainly jealous of the fact that he was seeing Bergman again, even in a strictly professional capacity. (“Kate never felt she was beautiful enough for him,” said Katharine Houghton.) Spence wasn’t himself that night, and Bergman later characterized the broadcast as a fiasco, noting that Tracy read his part “as though he was appearing at gunpoint.” Kay Brown went so far as to advise Bergman that she shouldn’t do radio anymore, and Selznick, who thought Bergman lost a lot of her appeal over the air, agreed.2
Filming concluded in a miasma of shock after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Tracy summarized events in his datebook: “Air raid warnings L.A. Enemy planes sighted over San Francisco. Japs gain big advantage: Bombed Manilla, captured Wake Island, Guam Island.” On Monday, December 8, President Roosevelt went before a joint session of Congress to call for a declaration of war against Japan. Three days later Adolf Hitler furiously declared war on the United States. Kate, committed to the new Philip Barry play, returned east to spend the holidays in Connecticut with her family, leaving Spence in California with Vic Fleming and the cast of Tortilla Flat. Johnny arrived home from school on the nineteenth, and Christmas was spent at the ranch with Carroll and Dorothy and Mother Tracy, rain falling late into the day.
He marked three years and eight months of sobriety as the new year began. The first days of 1942 were filled with work and news of war. He had a rare day off on January 6—Fleming was ill—and spent it playing tennis at the ranch with Louise. The next day he attended a bachelor luncheon thrown by L. B. Mayer for Mickey Rooney, who, at the age of twenty-one, was marrying starlet Ava Gardner. Ribald advice was offered the bridegroom by the likes of Clark Gable and Robert Taylor, then Tracy struck a more ominous note when he told the story of the sink and the marbles: “You’ll never have a year like your first year. Every time you make love to her then, you put a marble in the sink. After that, every time you make love to her, you take a marble out. But Mickey, you know what? You’ll never empty the sink.”
Tortilla Flat was behind schedule, the rushes listless and uninspired. Tracy was looking forward to being free of it when, on January 11, he formally accepted the chairmanship of the Motion Picture Committee for Celebration of the President’s Birthday, an event that kicked off the yearly door-to-door fund drive of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis— commonly known as the March of Dimes. Without mentioning his own son’s battle with poliomyelitis, he posed for photos with Bette Davis, enlisting her help for a national radio appeal and the traditional birthday ball to be held in Washington at the end of the month. “We of America may well be thankful that we may pause amid this world conflict to hear the pleas of these little sufferers,” Tracy said in a statement for the cameras. “We are their only hope.”
His work for the foundation was interrupted less than a week later when, on a windy Friday night, Carole Lombard disappeared in the air over southern Nevada. She and Clark Gable had married in March 1939—as soon as his divorce from Ria Gable became final—and for the first time in his life Gable married for something other than the furtherance of his career. “They’re suited to each other,” Tracy said approvingly at the time of their first anniversary. “They’re two regular people. And from where I sit, it looks like love.”
And indeed it did—in spite of Gable’s continued philandering. The couple bought and refurbished Raoul Walsh’s Encino spread, a two-story Connecticut farmhouse on twenty acres of land about five minutes from the Tracy ranch. They all golfed together, Carole gamely lugging her own clubs, Eddie Mannix usually completing the foursome, and socialized occasionally—holiday parties and the like. Lombard was genuinely solicitous of Spence, sensitive to his predicament amid the free-flowing scotch of the Gable household. “Carole Lombard was a very big star in her own right,” said Adela Rogers St. Johns, “much loved by Hollywood. But everybody who went to the rambling white house overlooking the San Fernando Valley knew it was Clark’s house. Carole had created and maintained it to suit him. It was the most joyous house I was ever in.”
Tracy liked Lombard, liked her sense of humor and her ability to make Gable laugh. It was as if her appeal stood completely apart from the fact that she was also a world-class beauty, a gifted comedienne, and a fine dramatic actress. She made the ideal home for her husband, doing what he did, liking what he liked. Lombard had been east selling U.S. Series E Savings Bonds—now widely being referred to as war bonds—and had reportedly raised $2.5 million in her home state of Indiana when, eager to return west to her husband and a new picture, she muscled her way onto a TWA Skysleeper bound for Burbank, accompanied by her mother and M-G-M publicist Otto Winkler. After an unscheduled refueling stop in Las Vegas, the plane took off in clear skies on the last—and reputedly easiest—leg of an eighteen-hour trip that had begun in Indianapolis at four in the morning. All authorities had to go on were eyewitness accounts of an explosion and flames along the steep eastern face of Mt. Potosi, thirty-two miles southwest of the airport. Gable, who was awaiting his wife’s arrival at home, was removed to Las Vegas on a chartered flight, where he was dissuaded from making the arduous climb to the crash site by Eddie Mannix and publicist Ralph Wheelwright, both of whom went in his stead. He holed up at the new El Rancho Vegas resort on Highway 91, and it was there he learned there had been no survivors.
Tracy worked most of Saturday at the studio—“pretty upset,” as Peggy Gough recalled—then left for Nevada at five that afternoon. He drove six straight hours, arriving in Vegas at eleven that night. Gable was composed but hadn’t slept, hollow-eyed with grief. Tracy sat with him, Howard Strickling, and the others, said little, remained at hand. The charred bodies were recovered from the wreckage, wrapped in army blankets, and taken down the mountain by horseback. Tracy remained at the hotel with Gable until 8:30 the next evening, then returned to Los Angeles, where he was due back on the set of Tortilla Flat. The funeral, in Glendale on the afternoon of the twenty-first, was private and strictly limited to immediate family and friends. Gable, hidden from view in an alcove reserved for the family, said nothing during the course of the service, which consisted of a few readings and a simple affirmation of faith. It was over in ten minutes. “Clark, beyond consolation, would talk only to Fieldsie, Carole’s great friend and manager, Madalynne Fields,” said Myrna Loy, one of the very few marquee names invited to attend. “He wouldn’t talk to anyone else, no matter who it was.”
Spence was there with Louise, but his mind was focused elsewhere—on his mother, who had suffered another stroke that day and was, as he noted in his book, “very low.” He worked only until noon the following day, a Thursday, then went to be at Carrie’s side. She appeared to recognize Carroll and him, smiled at them faintly and clasped hands. Apparently she did not speak, although according to family lore she said to Spencer, “Take care of Carroll.” The next day, January 23, 1942, she had yet another stroke and died very quietly at the age of sixty-six. She did not, according to Spence’s entry in his datebook, seem to suffer.
The next day, Spence, Carroll, Louise, and Dorothy accompanied Carrie Tracy on her final trip home, fourteen years after her husband had been laid to rest in Freeport’s Calvary Cemetery. The train was met at Dixon by a hearse from the Eichmeier & Becker funeral home, while Spence and Carroll and their wives were collected by their sad-eyed uncle Andrew and driven into town. The scene at the Hotel Freeport was chaotic—news of the great star’s impending arrival had been published in the Journal Standard—and the lobby was packed with the morbid and the merely curious. “People were clustered around him, probably bodyguards, and they were trying to whisk him through,” recalled Marie Barcellona, the hotel’s longtime desk clerk. “But he was very gracious—he took time out to stop and talk to someone he apparently knew or someone that knew his mother. He looked much more youthful and thinner in person.”
The townspeople remembered the gentle, white-haired woman who occasionally came to Freeport to visit her sister, a chauffeur-driven limousine carrying them through the streets of town with a stately grace. Some longtime residents could think back to the days when she was still Carrie Brown of Stephenson Street, Ed Brown’s younger daughter and one of the most beautiful women in a hundred-mile radius. Spence had time to venture out, as if avoiding the pending business at hand, and he paid a call on Elmer Love, who was briefly a classmate of his at the Union School on South Chicago Avenue. “He was just as common as he could be,” said Josephine Love, Elmer’s widow, “and had such a wonderful personality. You wouldn’t think he was a big famous star. He talked about his old school chums. ‘Whatever happened to so and so?’ he would ask. He and Elmer had quite a conversation. He laughed when he told Elmer that his wife was a little jealous of his leading lady, Katharine Hepburn.”
A simple funeral took place on the afternoon of January 26. Carrie had embraced Christian Science in her later years, but her sister Emma was active in the First Presbyterian Church and had the pastor, a Dr. Odiorne, officiate. It wasn’t as emotional an occasion as the funeral for John Tracy had been, Carrie having lived into her mid-sixties, but Spence wept all the same and kept pretty much to himself. The ground at the cemetery was frozen solid, and Carrie couldn’t be buried in the Tracy plot alongside John until after the spring thaw. They left for Chicago the next morning in a heavy fog and were back in California on the twenty-ninth.
The filming of Tortilla Flat dragged on endlessly, and the picture was still in production when Woman of the Year opened at the Radio City Music Hall on February 5. After a mid-December sneak in which the new ending had played flawlessly, the studio got behind the picture in a big way. Metro budgeted $2.5 million annually in display advertising, dividing it among general circulation magazines, farm magazines (which accounted for eight million rural subscribers), the various fan magazines, and 145 newspapers reaching a combined circulation of 31 million readers. Immediately after “The Hepburn Story,” a serialized biography, appeared in five consecutive issues of the Saturday Evening Post, M-G-M ran a full-page ad in the magazine for Woman of the Year. Two-column teasers followed in 118 key city newspapers: “SPENCER TRACY is crazy about KATHARINE HEPBURN—but she’s too busy!” A cartoon pictured her surrounded by photographers, with Tracy knocked to the ground in the stampede to get to her. “She’s the WOMAN OF THE YEAR!”
The lines around the Music Hall, despite some nasty weather, reflected the enormous popularity of The Philadelphia Story when it played the same theater in December 1940. (At that point, it had been seven years since Hepburn had last filled the place with Little Women.) Tracy’s personal drawing power had long been established, having built steadily since 1936 and been demonstrated most recently with the crowds that flooded the Astor to see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The combination of the two names was seemingly all the people needed to drive Woman of the Year to a first week’s total of $99,000—which was essentially capacity business for the 5,945-seat venue.
“They call the new Music Hall offering Woman of the Year,” William Boehnel wrote in the World-Telegram, “but I think a far better name for it would be Film of the Year, for seldom have I seen a more freshly written, gayer, wiser, more beautifully acted and directed entertainment than this one. To begin with, it has Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in the leading roles. This in itself would be enough to make any film memorable. But when you get Hepburn and Tracy turning in brilliant performances to boot, you’ve got something to cheer about.” Bosley Crowther said practically the same thing, adding that Woman of the Year made him feel “like tossing his old hat into the air and weaving a joyous snake dance over the typewriter keys” for the first time in months. Propelled by exceptionally strong notices in all the New York dailies, Woman of the Year built to an even better $102,000 in its second week. It stayed a total of six weeks, equaling the unprecedented run of The Philadelphia Story, an astonishing feat for a picture that had neither a book nor a play for its foundation. As it made its way across the country—it reached Los Angeles in April—Woman of the Year showed its strength in the biggest cities, amassing a domestic gross of $1,937,000. When Tracy reached New York on February 16, Hepburn was reveling in the film’s success and eager for another pairing of the new Tracy-Hepburn team.
But first there was the matter of Without Love, the Philip Barry play to follow The Philadelphia Story. As with the latter, Barry wrote it with Hepburn in mind, and she owned a 25 percent interest in it—same as the playwright. As part of the arrangement, she agreed to play the part of Jamie Coe Rowan for $1,000 a week, enabling the Theatre Guild to fulfill a promise to its subscribers that a Hepburn play would be part of its 1941–42 season. The New York Times carried a formal announcement on January 19, and performances were set to begin in New Haven on February 26, 1942. Yet nothing seemed terribly certain as Tracy hit town. The play itself was an awkward fusion of romance and diplomacy, a set of implausible plot turns animated by a curiously unappealing mix of characters. Left unspoken was the most basic of the show’s flaws: an utter lack of chemistry between its star actress and her staid leading man, actor-playwright Elliott Nugent.
Hepburn had little time to devote to Tracy. Being what she described as a “one track Charlie,” she poured all her energies into the hopeless task of making the play work. They saw each other when they could, generally late at night, but it wouldn’t do for him to be haunting rehearsals and he scrupulously stayed away. He saw shows: Maurice Evans’ Macbeth, Cheryl Crawford’s revival of Porgy and Bess. On the nineteenth he fulfilled a commitment to Garson Kanin, now with the Division of Information in Washington, to record the narration for a one-reel subject titled Ring of Steel. (“I am the American soldier … the ring of steel around democracy.”) Then, with little else to do in New York City, he asked his seventeen-year-old son to spend the weekend with him at the River House, a swank art deco club and apartment complex at the eastern terminus of Fifty-second Street. There were squash and tennis courts, a swimming pool, a floating dock for pleasure craft. The weather was beautiful, but Johnny was reticent about staying alone with his father and all they managed to do was play a lot of tennis. “The boy had told me he wanted to talk to me,” Tracy said to Matie Winston, principal of the Wright Oral School, “but then he withheld any closeness of communication. Why?”
Johnny had been home for the holidays, but his father hadn’t been around much. The children were reared Episcopalians, so there hadn’t been the critical bonding that Spence had enjoyed with his own father. And whenever Tracy saw his son, Louise was always there as if to act as interpreter. At school Johnny was one of fifteen boarders, and, for almost the first time in his life, he began reading on his own, using a dictionary to expand his vocabulary and focus his mind. Miss Winston tried explaining, tactfully, that maybe Johnny’s reticence came from a desire to have more regular interaction with his dad, a greater sense of companionship and exchange. Louise wasn’t writing as regularly as before and Spence hardly ever wrote at all—even postcards. The boy rightly felt abandoned, and then there was his father’s habit of bringing his hand to his mouth when he spoke, which made the reading of his lips impossible.
“He can’t see your lips!” Louise would scold, and he would say, “Oh, yes, yes…,” and then two minutes later he’d be doing it again. “He went through life with his hand over his mouth,” Louise said. “It was one of his firmest habits, and he couldn’t break it. He tried very hard.” At an age when a young man naturally yearns for the company of his father, a very basic disconnect separated Johnny and his dad, and the boy sometimes got to see more of his father on screen than in person. “John was always a little overwhelmed by his father,” his mother said. “[Spence] expected a great deal of him, and John always felt he was not up [to it], I think … Their conversations were always like ‘talking times.’ He would [sometimes] get down to something that was serious, but they never really discussed things as men might.”
And so Tracy continued to ask, “Why won’t the boy talk to me?” but he could never fully grasp the reasons. He spent the rest of the day glumly knocking about the city. That night, he and a ravenous Kate managed a late supper at Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club, where they sat for a time with Lieutenant Jimmy Stewart and actress Phyllis Brooks. In an AP wirephoto that circulated the next day, Tracy could be seen to the right of Stewart and Brooks, a worn and quizzical look on his face and a tall drink in front of him. Kate was nowhere to be seen, and within a couple of days, neither was he. “Weather beautiful,” he wrote in the last entry to be found in his pocket diary. “Another perfect day.”
The next two weeks passed in something of a blur. Studio records show that he spent four days in the exclusive Harkness Pavilion of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, admitted under the fanciful name of Bernhardt (as in Sarah) and accompanied by Hepburn, who took her own private room nearby. Broadway columnist Dorothy Kilgallen caught wind of the arrangement and, completely unhindered by Howard Strickling’s legendary control of the West Coast media, printed the first public intimation of the Tracy-Hepburn relationship in her column of March 13, 1942. Howard Dietz, Metro’s New York–based director of advertising and publicity, made little secret of his dislike for Tracy and considered him to be Culver City’s problem when he wasn’t in town on official business. “Tracy,” said Dietz, “had the mistaken idea that a movie star can have the freedom of the city and the right to put it into practice. He had no idea how to handle people, and he drank at an unpredictable rhythm.”
Kate had never before witnessed Tracy under the influence of alcohol and had no idea of the depths to which his binges could take him. She stayed with him as long as she possibly could, but when she left town with the company of Without Love, there was nothing to prevent him from falling back onto the sauce. Tortilla Flat had been put before a preview audience in Los Angeles, and he was needed back in California for retakes. He had remained friends with Myrna Loy, and although they hadn’t worked together since Test Pilot, the studio occasionally presumed upon that, thinking that she could somehow handle him when he gave them extraordinary trouble.
“We both happened to be in New York,” Loy remembered,
when Benny Thau called from Hollywood: “Myrna, we’re waiting to start Tracy’s picture, and he’s there on a bender, holed up at the River House with his male nurse. See what you can do?” I called; Spence asked, “Where are you?” and I told him. I shouldn’t have. He was at the door of my St. Regis suite in no time. Days of drinking had left him belligerent. He made his usual play for me, bringing his fist down with such emphatic frustration at one point that he smashed a glass-topped coffee table. Then he turned defensive. “You don’t have to worry about me anymore,” he said like a sulky child. “I’ve found the woman I want.” As he outlined the virtues of Katharine Hepburn, I was relieved, but also a bit disappointed. As selfish as it sounds, I liked having a man like Spence in the background wanting me. It’s rather nice when nothing’s required in return.
Without Love had its first performance in Princeton on March 4, 1942, and the reaction was nowhere near what they had hoped it would be. Tracy didn’t go but attempted a boozy call to eighty-six-year-old Sister Mary Perpetua instead, possibly to tell her that in the wake of his mother’s death he was taking steps to amend his birth certificate and that his middle name would soon, at long last, reflect his baptismal name, Bonaventure, in place of Bernard. His datebook entry for March 6 read, “Back on wagon” but then those words were crossed out.
“Apparently they just couldn’t handle him in the New York office,” said Eddie Lawrence, who came to town on unrelated business and was pressed into service. “They were exhausted. So I went over to the hotel. They greeted me like a long lost friend. And they were just bringing him out. They were cutting him down, a little bit of brandy or whatever they do. I was hungry—I hadn’t eaten anything—and I said, ‘Spencer, I’m going to eat something.’ So we talked. There were two doctors there, and I think they were giving him some form of medication, because the stomach obviously [couldn’t hold anything].”3
On March 11, while Hepburn was playing a week’s stand in Baltimore, Tracy was placed on a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles in the care of a doctor. In California, he continued to drink, and there were discussions at the studio over the proper course of action. Thau, Eddie Mannix, and Joe Cohn conceded that Tracy was “in no condition to do retakes,” but a staff lawyer advised that formal notice be served “to protect our position.” Tracy’s failure to report for work meant that all payments by the studio could cease and that his time absent could be counted against the eighteen weeks’ vacation to which he was entitled under the terms of his contract. Thau advised Leo Morrison of the need to serve formal notice but expressed concern over “Tracy’s reaction to this notice, particularly in his present state.” Morrison phoned Carroll, and the two men agreed that Morrison would collect the notice at the studio mail room, thereby effecting delivery, but would not show it to his client.
Tracy later told Stewart Granger that Vic Fleming, waiting to make retakes on Tortilla Flat, was the only one left who seemed to care at all about him.
I’d been picked up by the police and thrown into the drunk tank; I was filthy, unshaven, and ill. Vic found out where I was, squared the press, the police, and the studio, and took me home. He had a Filipino servant and, giving him instructions to bathe, shave, and put me to bed, went to get his doctor. After being given a thorough examination, I was lying there like death when Vic came in with a case of Scotch. He put it down beside my bed and went to the door. Turning back he said, “Spence, I’ve just talked to the doctor. He tells me one more bash like that and you’ll be dead. I want you to do me a favor. Drink that whole case of Scotch. It’s the last time you’ll see me, Spence. I’m through.” And he went out and left me alone.
Tracy declared himself back on the wagon after nineteen days adrift. Eight days later, on March 23, he reported back to the set of Tortilla Flat, where he dutifully appeared for Fleming in five days of retakes. Finally free of a film he had grown to loathe, he left town again, bound for New York with every intention of spending his forty-second birthday in the company of Katharine Hepburn. Fueled by coffee and little else, he arrived in Manhattan on March 30, the same day it was announced that Without Love would continue to tour. With the show stuck in Philadelphia, Tracy, as he recorded in his book, suffered a monumental attack of the “jitters.” Fearful that he would again take to the bottle, he left the same day for home, and instead spent his birthday—Easter Sunday—with Louise, Johnny, and Susie in Palm Springs.
Kate, meanwhile, was fighting a losing battle to keep Without Love afloat. The play had been altered considerably since Princeton, bringing the platonic relationship between Hepburn and Nugent into sharper focus while scuttling large chunks of the war plot. “Kate,” said actress Audrey Christie, who was playing a supporting role in the production, “was miserable throughout the tour. Elliott Nugent was drinking because he was aware of his inadequacy, and she hated that. But she concealed her feelings beautifully and was always considerate to Elliott. She used to drive her car out into the country in various places and scream to get her frustrations out, decades before anyone thought of primal-scream therapy.”
Tracy left for New York again on April 16, this time in the company of Tim Durant. Keeper of the Flame had been announced as the next Tracy-Hepburn picture, and Kate was now publicly advancing the idea of Spence replacing Elliott Nugent when Without Love ultimately reached Broadway. Tracy went to Boston to confer with Jimmy Cagney—they were working up bits for a Hollywood Victory Caravan—as Kate took the play to her hometown of Hartford for two completely sold-out performances. She was welcomed extravagantly—seven curtain calls—but her mania for privacy was on full display, and despite a heartfelt curtain speech in which she spoke warmly of family and old friends, station porters, and even taxi drivers, she would see absolutely no one.
Observing his forty-second birthday in the company of his family. Note the tall glass of milk to his right. (SUSIE TRACY)
The show moved on to Cleveland, then to Pittsburgh, where Tracy was spotted in the opening night audience, furtively slouched in a rear seat. He told Karl Krug, drama critic for the Sun-Telegraph, that he had been in Washington and “just stopped off to see the show.” He denied that he was going to replace Elliott Nugent but said that he thought Barry’s play could “form the basis” of a good movie. His presence strengthened the suspicions of Kaspar Monahan, critic for the rival Pittsburgh Press, to whom he said much the same thing: “Mr. Tracy said he was going to leave immediately after the performance. But I noted at final curtain that he was not in too great a hurry to get out of town or to neglect to run backstage and congratulate Miss Hepburn.”
Tracy was, in fact, on his way to Baltimore for a general checkup at Johns Hopkins, the same distinguished institution where Tom Hepburn had studied medicine and met his future wife. Tracy had never before crossed the continent to see a doctor, much less take a battery of tests, but Kate had arranged the visit in the aftermath of his most recent bender. On the afternoon of May 12, he sat apologetically across from clinician Louis V. Hamman, having just given his name to a clueless admissions nurse as “Mr. Clark Gable.” He said he was sure there was nothing physically wrong with him, that he was just neurotic, and that it was not right for him to be wasting the doctor’s time.
“His symptoms,” Dr. Hamman said in his notes,
are of rather long standing, ten years at least. He is introspective and says he suffers from vague fear, fear of what he does not know. He adds that part of it, he supposes, is fear of disease. Five years ago he was advised to have the thyroid out. Either doctors told him or in some way he found out that occasionally an enlarged thyroid is carcinoma, and he at once decided that it would turn out to be cancer. He goes on to explain that there has been great solicitude on his part about his heart. When he gets nervous or excited, his heart races, throbs and pounds and skips beats. He insists there is something wrong with his heart, but his doctor says over and over again that there is nothing wrong. He sleeps poorly. Goes to bed early, wakes and reads a while, goes to sleep again and then wakes about five or six in the morning and gets up. He has been doing this for a long time. He now enjoys the early morning hours, likes to be out of doors or preparing for his work by reading plays, and so on.
Tracy went on to give a brief résumé of his schooling, his time at Ripon, and his early days on the stage.
He loves acting, puts his whole heart into it, and gives it all his energy and ability. He has never learned to play, cares only to fish and cannot do that for long. He will start off on a vacation intending to spend a month, and after three or four days will go back to Hollywood. Therefore, he has worked not only intensively but more or less continuously. As soon as he finishes one play he is off on another. He realizes that this makes a heavy demand upon his nervous energy because he puts a great deal of energy into everything he does, and I think he knows he pays for this in the symptoms that he has. About ten years ago, he started out on periodic alcoholic bouts. Up to that time he had drank very little. After a play he would begin to celebrate, and would keep it up for a week or ten days. These periods of drinking would come about every eight months. Six years ago, he decided that things could not go on that way, and for two years he did not drink anything. Then he fell and had another bout of drinking. After that he went for four years without drinking, and then was off on another bout some three months ago. He says the last bout was utter folly. He decided that, not having had any alcohol for four years, he could handle it, but found that it was impossible for him to do so.
The patient summarized his unremarkable medical and family histories, his height and weight (fudging the latter by about ten pounds), and said he usually smoked ten cigarettes a day. “The patient is a well-nourished man, stockily built and of robust, vigorous appearance,” Dr. Hamman concluded. “He is a very engaging person, and in telling his symptoms often laughs at himself.”
Tracy spent the next three days getting a pretty thorough going-over. Teeth and eyes were checked, hearing, glands, sinuses, organs, respiration were all found to be normal. A blood analysis fixed his cholesterol level at 168, well within acceptable range, and a routine test for syphilis came back negative. X-rays showed his heart and aorta to be of normal size and shape and his lungs to be clear. A sleep observation under the supervision of Dr. Samuel Crowe, founder of the school’s division of otolaryngology, took place on the night of May 14, when Tracy was given a single Nembutal tablet, a dosage mirroring words he had written for the first time in his datebook the previous year: “one pill.” He was coming to rely on barbiturates to quiet a mind that was constantly turning, but all that Dr. Crowe could suggest was to reduce alcohol and tobacco consumption to a minimum. The patient was discharged on the fifteenth with the finding “no organic disease diagnosed.”
The following morning, he made the five-hour drive back to Pittsburgh, where Kate was giving her final matinee and evening performances of Without Love. Hepburn commemorated the occasion by engaging in a wrestling match with a photographer for the Bulletin-Index who snapped her without permission as she arrived backstage. The camera was smashed and the man suffered a few scratches before the two were separated by a cop who had heard the scuffle. The engagement closed with nearly $40,000 in the till—an excellent week—and Tracy drove her on to Cincinnati, the next stop on the company’s seemingly endless tour of the provinces, then went on to Chicago, where he met up with Carroll for the return trip to Los Angeles.
Keeper of the Flame was the work of the Australian-born poet and novelist I.A.R. Wylie, a story specifically designed for the screen and submitted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer just weeks ahead of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Set for serialization in the American Magazine, it told the story of ace war correspondent Steve O’Malley and his assignment to write the biography of a New England governor and self-styled patriot named Robert Forrest. Forrest’s death inspires a wave of mourning befitting a beloved national figure, but unlike Citizen Kane, another film of the time with a similar setup, the author keeps the subject of O’Malley’s inquiry completely offstage, following instead the journalist’s interactions with local townspeople and the young widow as he uncovers the secret life of an American fascist.
The model for Forrest became a matter of some discussion when the book was published by Random House in the spring of 1942. Speculation ranged from William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Wylie herself would never say, and all director George Cukor would allow was that “[w]e made this picture during a period of undercover Fascism in this country … Certain things were in the air but hadn’t come out into the open. I suppose, to draw attention to them, we exaggerated.”
The property was for Tracy from the very beginning, and he was announced for the role in December 1941. Keeper of the Flame didn’t take on urgency, however, until Hepburn committed to playing Christine Forrest in April 1942. Aglow from her twin triumphs in The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year, she was instrumental in getting Cukor assigned to the picture and in arranging a test for Audrey Christie in the part of Jane Harding, O’Malley’s colleague and sounding board.
“I’m most anxious to start the new film,” she told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, deftly taking ownership of the project. “The script has been written by Donald Ogden Stewart, who did the excellent screen treatment of Philadelphia Story, and George Cukor will again direct me … I want to repeat Woman of the Year, both as a picture and as a box office hit, for I really think it was an excellent film.”
Without Love closed in Buffalo on May 30, and Hepburn promptly headed west, where June 2 had been set for the start date. She most likely read Stewart’s screenplay, developed under the supervision of producer Victor Saville, on her way out to California. The role of Christine, she said, fascinated her. “She is a woman, strong, resolute, placed in a tragic position in life. Thinking back, I am surprised to find that I have never played a mature woman. I have played girls, girls, girls—all sorts of girls, shy, whimsical, flamboyant, tempestuous—everything but mature human beings.”
Having previously consumed the novel, Hepburn found much to dislike about the script and the changes that had been made. Stewart had based his conception of O’Malley on the knowledge that Tracy would be playing the part, contending that in the novel the character came off as an “impotent eunuch who plays sad love scenes.” Hepburn, it seemed, wanted a film as true to Wylie’s original as humanly possible. As Stewart complained in a letter to his wife, the journalist Ella Winter, “I created an intelligent character with action as his keynote … Is it not interesting that Miss H., not an active character in the story, is Goddamned if there will be an active male in the same story?”
Kate originally had thought that she would stay away from the development of the script, knowing that she was considered a troublemaker on the M-G-M lot. (“I thought, ‘Express your opinion when asked, but don’t go over everybody and don’t try to be too helpful. Just keep your place and be an actor.’ ”) But it was difficult for her to be on the outside of things, if not completely impossible, and all she really managed to do was to be critical without being helpful, excited by the subject matter but no longer by the character she was being asked to play.
Stewart, who had won an Oscar for his work on Philadelphia Story, thought Wylie’s book “exciting screen material” and saw his primary job as making sure the picture “accurately reflected the 1943 background.”4 Hepburn, Stewart told his wife, was not so much interested in the script as she was in control and had gone over the heads of both Saville and Cukor in taking her demands directly to the studio brass. In the book, Christine ensures her husband’s death when she chooses not to warn him that a bridge is out. Under the Production Code, a character who commits murder must be punished. But was passively allowing someone’s accidental death to occur the same as a willful act of murder? When the screenplay was first submitted to the Breen office, Saville purposely held back the ending, in which both Steve and Christine decide, in effect, to “print the legend” now that Forrest himself is safely dead. But the administrators of the Code could sense the direction in which the movie was headed: “We assume … that in order to comply with the provisions of the Code, you will either clear Christine of any suspicion of murder or else will punish her. Otherwise, we could not approve the finished picture.”
A significant change that occurred on Hepburn’s watch was the compounding of her character’s guilt. Where before Christine had merely failed to warn her husband of the danger he faced, she now became responsible for disabling the bridge as well. Nearly all of Christine’s scenes were rewritten, but there came a point when the beleaguered Saville felt he had to push back:
A full conference was called in the executive producer’s office and all were present: Hepburn, Tracy, Cukor, Stewart, and myself. Katie was the first to speak, which she did with great passion and at length. She told us the story as she would like to see it. When she had finished, we looked at Tracy, who passed, as did Cukor and Stewart, and all eyes turned to me. I guess I must have been a little edgy as, just before going into the meeting, I had heard on the radio of the disastrous defeat of the British army by Rommel and the probability that Egypt would fall. In that frame of mind, my reaction was quite without compromise. “Katie has told us a very good story, but that’s not the story I want to tell, and if you prefer to use hers I suggest you get yourselves another boy.” Dead silence, broken only by Tracy getting up. “That’s it, boys. Let’s go to work.” And they all left the room.
Other than the original start date of production, Tracy recorded nothing in his datebook during the month of June 1942. He and Kath—the name he had taken to calling her in private—attended John Barrymore’s funeral on the second but otherwise kept a low profile. Louise, surely aware that something was up, wrote Matie Winston late in the month, saying that she thought she needed to do something—find a job, go back to the stage, get busy and contribute something to the war effort. Johnny and Susie were home for the summer, but there was the matter of Susie’s schooling to resolve, for gas rationing had made the commute to Brentwood impractical. Miss Winston, who once told Louise she thought she looked like Greer Garson, encouraged her to “[t]ake another flier while you are still so young and pretty. Send Susie to me. Hearing children work in beautifully here.”
Tracy never spoke of Keeper of the Flame, never said what he liked about it or what he didn’t. It was a good part for him in a picture that had something important to say, but he didn’t involve himself in the writing process the way Kate felt compelled to do. His part was solid, as tailored for him as any part he had ever played. The actor most at risk on the picture was Hepburn herself, and no one was likely to watch out for her the way that she was used to watching out for herself. Another incomplete script was submitted to the PCA in early July, and again Joseph I. Breen warned that “if it is to be indicated that Christine is guilty of her husband’s murder, she will have to be punished if the picture is to conform to the requirements of the Production Code.”
Still committed to a picture in which he passionately believed, Don Stewart found himself excluded from the story conferences Saville was now having almost daily. “I shall not resign,” he vowed, “as long as there is a chance to save the ‘message’ (not my face). Is it not humiliating that all the discussion now takes place without my being allowed to participate …?” He returned to his farm in the Adirondacks after completing the screenplay, and when filming began on July 14, Christine was guilty of murder in the first degree. Hepburn was tense—resigned, seemingly, to the failings of the script as she saw them, satisfied, perhaps, that it was at least a strong part for Tracy and that the story mirrored the antifascist sentiments of her mother. The battle for control had considerably dimmed her enthusiasm for the project, and it was starting to look less and less likely the film could end on the romantic note that both she and the studio seemed to require.
After a few days of filming, change pages began appearing that would establish Christine’s innocence. Don Stewart’s final contribution to the picture was a “tag” ending wired from New York on September 1 that had O’Malley kissing her and then jumping aboard a train, the camera holding on Christine’s face as it pulled away. Hepburn had played roughly a third of the picture believing her character to be guilty. Now she was faced with playing the rest of it knowing her innocence. She was short with people on the set, quiet and typically unresponsive to the demands of publicity.
Tracy felt comfortable twitting her, something no one else would have dared to do. “Emily,” he grandly told Emily Torchia on the first day of production, “you know, this is an open set.” His own sets were usually closed, but he went out of his way to be welcoming, Kate generally ignoring his attempts at baiting her. “The only person he was hard on,” Torchia remembered, “was the script girl, who had to worry about continuity. Mr. Tracy never wore makeup when I knew him, and he had his hair combed just once a day—in the morning. Now, of course, all day long he ran his hands through it, and his hair would never match from one shot to the next. The script girl would be beside herself. Once he said to a script girl, ‘Think you’re going to survive?’ ”
George Cukor had directed Hepburn in five pictures, beginning with her first, A Bill of Divorcement, and always knew precisely what she needed. Tracy, on the other hand, took some getting used to because his command of the character was so extraordinarily complete. “Kate says I was always giving her hundreds of suggestions,” Cukor said in 1971, “but none to Spence. Well, Spence was the kind of actor about whom you thought, ‘I’ve got a lot of things I could say to you, but I don’t say them because you know,’ and the next day everything I’d thought of telling him would be there in the rushes. Also, I was never sure whether Spence was really listening when I talked to him. He was one of those naturally original actors who did it but never let you see him doing it.”
The supporting cast was exceptionally good and included Richard Whorf as the dead man’s conniving secretary, Forrest Tucker, Frank Craven, Horace McNally, Percy Kilbride, Donald Meek, Howard Da Silva, and eleven-year-old Darryl Hickman as Jeb Rickards, a young acolyte who blames himself for the accidental death of his idol. Hickman was working on two other pictures simultaneously and could appreciate Tracy’s impatience with Cukor and Hepburn as they worked their way through a page of dialogue. “Before they shot take one,” he said, “Cukor and Hepburn would talk and talk and talk about the scene, about the characters, whatever, and Tracy would stand there, first on one foot and then the other, and finally, after about twenty minutes, Tracy would say, almost under his breath, ‘Let’s get on with it, Kate.’ And when Tracy said, ‘Let’s get on with it, Kate,’ we shot the scene.” And then, much as Joe Mankiewicz had observed on Woman of the Year, Tracy and Hepburn would seem to compete and undercut one another. “In the intimate scenes, Tracy would go low and Hepburn would go lower. The sound man would have to yell, ‘Cut! I’m not picking them up!’ ”
As the film progressed, Tracy’s relationship with Hickman’s tormented boy became more complex and shaded than the one with Hepburn’s Christine, the unintended consequence of a character written more as a cipher than as a grieving wife with a terrible secret to keep. (“I think,” Cukor said, “she finally carried a slightly phony part because her humanity asserted itself, and the humor.”) Jeb’s scene on a dark hillside, an emotion-charged exchange full of beats and transitions in which he decides that he can trust O’Malley, was, as Hickman later put it, “the most difficult scene I played as a child actor.” He credited its success to Cukor, who walked him through it change by change, and to Tracy, “who was so ‘with you’ as an actor that you could feel his energy. He was very still and very quiet and very unspoken, but he was with you psychically in a way that I have never felt from another actor. He listened to you with such intensity that he literally drew you into himself. It isn’t that he did very much; in fact, he did almost nothing. But he created a connection that was so intense that you couldn’t pull yourself away from him.”
Director George Cukor makes Darryl Hickman’s close-ups for Keeper of the Flame. “Tracy never budged,” Hickman recalled. “He was there with me every step of the way.” (DARRYL HICKMAN)
Hickman knew nothing of craft, but he came to see his time with Tracy and Cukor as the beginning of a process of learning that culminated in a successful career as a teacher of acting.
The only thing Tracy said to me directly, at some point during the shooting of that scene, was, “I think if you took more time there, you’d make a better transition.” I didn’t know what the word “transition” meant, but I got the sense of what he was talking about. He never, ever said anything to me, but I could feel his respect and that meant a lot. He would sit there when I did my closeups, and—I swear, we shot my closeups for a day—Tracy never walked away from that apple box he was sitting on. Most big-time stars would get up and go to their dressing room, then they’d come back and maybe they’d feed you your lines from beside the camera or maybe they wouldn’t. Tracy never budged. He was there with me every step of the way. And he gave me the same performance when he was beside the camera that he gave me in front of the camera. And that wasn’t the way most of those big-time movie stars did it.
Kate would appear on the set on days she wasn’t needed, sometimes to confer with Cukor, invariably to sit near the camera and watch Tracy as he worked. The pace of production was glacial, and the picture took as long to make as Tortilla Flat—nearly eleven weeks. As it dragged on, Hepburn’s partners at the Theatre Guild grew increasingly worried that she would be unable to rejoin Without Love as originally planned. The Guild’s business manager, Warren Munsell, began wiring in July, looking for a commitment to open the play in Columbus on September 17. Before long, it became apparent that Hepburn was ducking them. “What are you up to that you keep changing your phone number?” Theresa Helburn, Langner’s codirector at the Guild, wired on August 9. “I will guard your secret if you will send it to me. How is the picture going and how are things relative to our September dates?”
Now that she was on more intimate terms with him, Kate could plainly see the stress Spence put himself under during the course of a film and the psychological toll his insomnia was taking. When he wasn’t fretting about the picture, his part, and what he was doing with it, it was his life and the way he was living it. “He felt the miseries that he’d brought on people were avoidable,” she said, “and that if he hadn’t existed the world would have been better off.” Unworthy of God’s forgiveness, he could see only darkness before him, eternal punishment by fire, the literal interpretation of hell as preached to believers. Overwhelmed by a sensitivity to everything around him—the emotions of others, the stir of the wind—his heart beat furiously and occasionally it would skip, a chilling, ever-present reminder in the depth of the night that he could be taken at any moment.
He hated himself at times like these, hated his inability to live up to his own moral and professional standards, to be the good man he aspired to be, the man his audience believed him to be. Worse, he was unable to express these thoughts and feelings to anyone other than himself, for, as with Louise, Kate wasn’t Catholic—wasn’t anything, for that matter—and he knew that whatever he had to say, should he say it, would be taken, however politely and sympathetically, as nonsense. He would appear on the set every morning looking red-eyed and haggard, and he would speak to nobody. He’d disappear into his dressing room and not emerge until it was time for the first shot to be blocked. Everyone assumed he was hungover, but he wasn’t drinking anything stronger than tea at the time. He was just desperate for sleep, and his fatigue threatened the concentration he needed to do his best work.
As the wires from New York grew more insistent, Hepburn brokered the sale of Without Love to M-G-M for $260,000, a figure she hoped would satisfy all the parties involved so that she could put forth what she really wanted, which was to get out of doing the play in New York altogether. The studio was talking more pictures for the two of them, and Tracy had gotten her interested in Paul Osborn’s script for Madame Curie, which he had originally hoped to do with Garbo. The thought of Hepburn as the great Polish scientist struck everyone as odd, and Hedda Hopper reminded her readers that Irene Dunne had been the original choice for the role. Regardless, she was desperate to stay in California, desperate to stay with Spence and to help him get a handle on this curse that seemed to drain him of all life. Sleep had never been a problem for her; she retired early, slept soundly, often rose before dawn. If he could just set his mind to it, he could do that as well, and if it meant staying at M-G-M a while longer and making a few more pictures, then that was what she wanted and what she needed to do.
Another wire from Terry Helburn on September 1 considerably upped the pressure:
I MUST ADVISE YOU THAT SHOULD WE OPEN MORE THAN TWO WEEKS AFTER OUR AGREED DATE OF OCTOBER FIFTH WE WILL OWE A WEEKS SALARY TO MOST OF THE CAST FOR WHICH WE WILL HAVE TO HOLD METRO RESPONSIBLE SINCE YOUR CONTRACT WITH THEM EXPIRES OCTOBER FIRST AND BEGINS WITH US OCTOBER FIFTH.
While Tracy spent the Labor Day weekend with his family in Encino, Hepburn took pen in hand and began drafting a letter to Helburn, her partner Lawrence Langner, and Phil Barry, the gifted playwright whose work was at the center of it all. “I want to talk to you very seriously about the play,” she wrote. “I do not think you should have me do it. There are many reasons for my coming to this conclusion and I wish you would read them and think about them seriously.” She went on to warn that she would not stay with the show past her contracted time, which meant that they could play New York for a maximum of twelve weeks.5 She was not good in the part, she added, and she could not play well with Elliott Nugent. (“We are just unfortunate together.”) She said that she thought the play needed considerable work—new work, not revision—and that it was almost impossible to act in such a thing without conviction. “I am sunk to feel this way—but I have right along—and in a way I feel that I have done my part in it. I have played on the road to good business—made back the investment—helped settle the movie rights. You have certainly not lost anything by having me in it …”
The letter was lucid, reasoned, and made a solid case against dragging her back to Broadway for what was sure to be a drubbing. She thought about it, slept on it, then realized they would be hell-bent on bringing it in regardless. In Spence’s absence, Hepburn redrafted the letter and added a strictly emotional appeal: “Finally—for personal reasons—it will crucify me to be tied up in N.Y. for four months. I shall be frantic and miserable and I beg you not to force me to do it. In these times life is entirely uncertain, and for the sake of the extra money you may make with me in it, you may be ruining me. Please, as my friends, think these points over seriously … I have done the best I can do—please let me out of it—”
Postmarked September 7, 1942, the letter reached the Fifty-second Street offices of the Theatre Guild on the twelfth. Barry was “thunderstruck” when he read it, and Helburn and Langner set about the task of drafting a measured reply. While they sympathized deeply with the “emotional disturbance” she seemed to be in, there were duties and obligations that could not be overlooked. Barry’s career as a dramatist had to be considered, as did the Guild’s continuing position as an institution of the American theatre. They put the best possible spin on Without Love, insisting that audiences liked Hepburn better in it than they had in Philadelphia Story. “The fact that you are in pain when you are playing with Elliott is merely because you see Spencer in it, but the audience doesn’t, and everybody thinks that you and Elliott make a good team in it. You did yourself until you got feeling strongly about Spencer in it, and you are surely too good a trouper to let a purely personal point of view stand in the way of an objective success …”
After every conceivable argument had been committed to paper, they decided it would be wisest to talk it over with Kate in person. Helburn sent a telegram on the thirteenth: “YOUR LETTER OF COURSE A SHOCK TO US ALL …” and said that she would see her in Hollywood that coming Wednesday. The meeting was a hurried affair, and Hepburn’s hasty exit left their talk unfinished. Helburn thought she had an agreement from Kate to take the play into New York as long as their Detroit opening was postponed until October 26 and that Hepburn would cover a week’s worth of cast salaries out of the extra money she would be getting from Metro for her additional time on the picture. Back in New York, Helburn announced to the press that Without Love would arrive on Broadway in November.
They finished Keeper of the Flame on September 22, with a do-over on a key scene set for the following week. Actress Pauline Lord was revered on the New York stage, where she had starred in O’Neill’s Anna Christie and Strange Interlude, but she was almost completely unknown to movie audiences, having appeared in just two pictures. Her role as the vindictive Mrs. Forrest promised fireworks in the company of Tracy and Hepburn, but she was nervous and fidgety, overwhelmed by the mechanics of moviemaking, and Cukor had to nurse her along. The scene didn’t work well, and Saville, in collaboration with playwright Leon Gordon, drafted a set of retakes in which the part of Mrs. Forrest would be taken by Margaret Wycherly, an equally prominent—and considerably more seasoned—actress of both stage and screen. Wycherly’s revised scene, which made her character more crazy than evil, took three days to shoot. The film was readied for preview as Saville and Gordon busied themselves with still more emendations, and after putting it all before an audience it was decided that Christine would have to be guilty of murder after all. Soon, the men had forty-five pages of new material to shoot.
It was now October 6, and Hepburn was due in the East for rehearsals on the twelfth. New scenes requiring her participation, including her death at the hands of her husband’s former secretary, were dated as late as October 10. Tracy finished with his scenes on the seventeenth—Kate was long gone by then—and left within days for a new round of tests at Johns Hopkins, his principal complaint being “insomnia and general nervousness with vague feelings of fear.”
He met briefly with President Roosevelt on the twenty-ninth for a conference regarding a possible trip to England but was nowhere to be seen when the very public funeral of George M. Cohan took place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on November 7. At Johns Hopkins, a physical exam, as before, showed him to be in good health and completely normal. His first night of monitored sleep displayed a familiar pattern: asleep four hours, then awake thirty minutes, asleep for another hour, then awake ninety minutes. He got a total of six and a half hours with the aid of Nembutal, an hour less the following night. He remained at the hospital a total of four days and was discharged, it was noted, “with his condition improved.”
New York saw the opening of Without Love while Tracy was at Johns Hopkins, and Tracy hired a car to return to Manhattan on the afternoon of November 12. The play and Kate were, in her words, “roasted,” but the public disagreed with the critics, came, and evidently liked it well enough to send their friends. Tracy remained close at hand, marking ten months of sobriety on December 15, 1942. The city was under a blackout order, and the darkness after nightfall was the darkness of a country lane. No theater marquees could be lit, no restaurants could be lighted from the street, and it was possible to walk past Radio City Music Hall and not know it.
Another conference with Roosevelt, this time in the company of Robert Emmet Sherwood, overseas director of the Office of War Information, confirmed that Tracy would soon leave for Great Britain to convey Christmas greetings to American and British soldiers. The plan lost momentum, though, as the president began preparations for a secret conference with Winston Churchill at Casablanca. Kate was dutifully serving her time on the stage of the St. James Theatre when Spence left for Chicago on the eighteenth, arriving back home in Los Angeles on the evening of December 21. Christmas, as usual, was at the ranch, where he and his brother Carroll observed their first Yuletide together since the passing of their mother.
Tracy spent the next four consecutive days in Encino, his longest uninterrupted stretch of time there in more than a year.
1 Gable, however, was considerably more popular internationally.
2 Tracy subsequently canceled an appearance on CBs’ Silver Theater and, with one minor exception, never again appeared on a commercial radio broadcast. “I think the reason he isn’t on the radio more is because it makes him so nervous,” Peggy Gough commented at the time.
3 Treatment for alcoholism was often based on aversion therapies, where the consumption of liquor was accompanied by a powerful emetic. (Some so-called liquor cures even involved the use of leeches.)
4 Stewart, who had been president of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, also appreciated the political message of the film and thought his work on it could be, in the words of his wife, “a contribution to this war against Hitler.”
5 Hepburn’s commitment to the play was actually for sixteen weeks. Allowing for a two-week tryout period, she could have been required to play a maximum of fourteen weeks on Broadway, not twelve.