The last time she saw him was in profile. He was laid out in an open casket for the Rosary on Sunday night. His strong Irish face had diminished with the years, the thick brown hair of his youth now white and closely cropped. Both Susie and Louise remarked on how much better he looked than he had the previous morning. Had the mortician touched him up? Given him the coating of base he had tried to avoid his entire professional life? The scene seemed surreal, formal, quiet, and airless, not at all like Knocko Minihan’s wake, where he might have been more at home, Jimmy Gleason greeting the guests, Ed Brophy, Frank McHugh, and Wally Ford mingling among them, keeping the liquor flowing and passing the hat for the widow. There were a lot of flowers on display, bushels of them, and Dorothy went around checking the tags. On some of the arrangements the tags had been removed, and she found later that these were the tributes Katharine Hepburn had sent. Earlier, Kate had come to the vigil and she had placed a little painting of flowers under his feet.
The priest led the mourners in prayer for the soul of the departed, candles flanking the casket, a gold crucifix on display. After the service he approached Louise and Susie and said that they could either take the cross with them or have it placed in the coffin. Louise deferred to her daughter, who thought for a moment and then said that she thought it would be nice if it went into the box with him. Kate returned later that night, after the vigil had ended, and wanted to place “a few little tokens” in the casket. Dorothy had ordered the lid closed, and they apologized; Kate told them it really didn’t matter, that she would just stay for a minute. “I would have liked to have seen his face once more—but what was the difference—yesterday—today—tomorrow … He was gone—Dad was gone—Mother was gone.”
A requiem mass was celebrated on Monday, June 12, at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church in the East Hollywood section of Los Angeles, a decidedly working-class area of town chosen for its proximity to the cemetery. Serving as active pallbearers were George Cukor, Stanley Kramer, Bill Self, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, John Ford, Garson Kanin, and Abe Lastfogel. Numbered among the honorary pallbearers were Edward G. Robinson, Lew Douglas, Robert Taylor, Larry Weingarten, Benny Thau, Tim Durant, R. J. Wagner, Loyal Davis, Chester Erskine, Harold Bumby, Chuck Sligh, Jack Benny, George Burns, Mike Romanoff, and Senator George Murphy. Howard Strickling, in striped pants and dark vest, escorted Louise, who appeared somewhat lost in a fog of grief. Msgr. John O’Donnell, who had served as a technical adviser on Boys Town, offered a simple forty-five-minute mass in which he praised the deceased as “a humble man who kept removed from the limelight.” The some five hundred attendees included Gregory Peck, Leo G. Carroll, Laraine Day, Dave Chasen, Billy Grady, Robert Mitchum, and Walter Winchell. Another 250 onlookers were gathered outside.
A private graveside ceremony followed, though most of the thirty-five cars that joined the procession to Glendale were uninvited. At Forest Lawn, Strickling saw a TV truck parked on the roadway in front of the Freedom Mausoleum and directed cemetery officials to have it removed. “Nobody gets out of the car,” he declared. “We’re not moving until they leave!” Appropriately, the marble tablet eventually affixed to the brick wall enclosing the garden plot bore no individual names, dates, or epitaphs. It simply read TRACY.
More accolades appeared in the weeks that followed. Newsweek coupled its Tracy obituary with one for Dorothy Parker, who had died in a New York hotel room three days earlier. Acting? “I don’t like anything about it,” Tracy was quoted as saying. “But I did very well by it. I learned the trade well. It’s never been very demanding. It doesn’t require much brainwork. Acting is not the noblest profession in the world, but there are things lower than acting—not many, mind you, but politicians give you something to look down on from time to time.”
Senator Robert F. Kennedy had a statement inserted into the Congressional Record. Bosley Crowther lamented Tracy’s passing as breaking “one more strong and vibrant cable in the slowly crumbling bridge between motion pictures of this generation and the great ones of the past.” Stanley Kramer shut himself up in a room and, on an impossibly tight deadline, wrote a remembrance for Life that appeared under the title “He Could Wither You with a Glance.” It began:
Tracy’s casket is carried into the church. Active pallbearers included James Stewart and Frank Sinatra. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
I can’t explain why I was never able to say to him what I wanted to say: that he was a great actor. Everyone else said it a thousand times over, but I never managed it. Once I told him I loved him. That came quite easily, and he believed me and was emotional about it. But I was afraid to say “Spencer, you’re a great actor.” He’d only say: “Now what the hell kind of thing is that to come out with?” He wanted to know it; he needed to know it. But he didn’t want you to say it—just think it. And maybe that was one of the reasons he was a great actor. He thought and listened better than anyone in the history of motion pictures. A silent close-up reaction of Spencer Tracy said it all.
In the days following his death, Kate busied herself acknowledging the cards and wires she had received from friends and acquaintances and prominent strangers, all in her own hand, often on Spence’s notepaper. To Justice William O. Douglas she wrote of how she was always trying to hold him up as a fine example of a walker, “[b]ut I must say it didn’t have much effect.” To Joan Blondell: “What can one say—He was such a delicious + remarkable man + actor—I was lucky to be around him for so long.” To Anne Pearce Kramer: “He was really a unique creature, Spencer + I was lucky to be the one—So I try to think of that + I am glad he did not have a humiliating half alive time—just stopped.” To Jack Hamilton: “So there is silence where once a delicious Irish wit sparkled my days with laughter and tears—It seems incredible doesn’t it—I did not realize about death—the end—the absolute end—This roadblock will never be removed. Now we will see how much character I really have.”
A stricken Louise Tracy is escorted from the church by Howard Strickling. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Dorothy Gopadze wrote of her gratitude when her daughter was permitted to visit the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. “Do you remember A Guy Named Joe? I’d like to think of Mr. Tracy prowling around Heaven right this minute, telling the Archangel Gabriel he expects him to be better organized.”
From London, Vivien Leigh wired, “DEAREST GIRL MY WHOLE HEART IS WITH YOU.” And then a week later: “I am blinded with sorrow for you …” Three weeks after writing that note, Leigh herself was dead of tuberculosis at the age of fifty-three.
From San Francisco, Joe Cohn wrote of the “wholehearted devotion, care, and companionship” that Kate had given Spence. “Because of this you made his life a much richer one—far too many people are so unfortunate they never encounter this in their entire lives. I hope the realization of this and the awareness that you were never found wanting when he needed you will in some measure ease the loss of a truly magnificent person and a rare rare companion.”
She responded: “Your letter was so touching and I am so grateful to you for making me feel happy about myself—I just really loved Spence—he—well I said to him just the other day—You know my friend—you just get to me—And he did—I was lucky—And he just wasn’t a bore was he—such a unique slant—so funny—He was so pleased to get your wire at the beginning of the picture—And he did a fine job—& finished it—But I think Joe—he was tired out—he’d led quite a life—And his heart just stopped—He was getting a cup of tea in the kitchen at 3 AM as he often did—& I was just coming through the door to help him—when—& it was the end—no struggle—no terror—just end.”
The estate was valued at $1,049,675, of which $226,526 was in cash, the rest in assets. The house on Tower Road was appraised at $200,000, but Tracy’s personal effects and property were worth just $1,880. Carroll inherited almost everything in the house on St. Ives, along with Spence’s 1958 and 1961 Thunderbirds. Once all claims and expenses had been paid, the final valuation of the estate was $664,147. Louise claimed half pursuant to the terms of the will and half by virtue of her community property interest. A trust for John and Susie was established in March 1968, and for the period 1968–70 it received a total of $46,000 from the estate. John benefited separately from a trust established by his maternal grandfather, Allienne Treadwell, which included shares in the family newspaper business.
Carroll Tracy felt lost without his brother, who had been his employer and benefactor since 1933. He and Dorothy settled into a much quieter life in their apartment on Spalding Drive, and it was there that he suffered an even greater blow when his wife died on Christmas morning, 1967.
“It was a terrible shock,” he wrote Kate. “Went to mass Xmas eve came home after stopping for dinner. Had a pleasant evening. Said the angina pains were bad but would not call a doctor. Next morning I walked in [the] room and it was all over. I knew she had not been feeling well for some time. She was so tired and had lost interest in so many things. All the doctors said nothing could have been done. She would never tell me when she felt bad.”
Carroll vacated the apartment and told Bertha Calhoun in a letter that he would never go home again. He lived in a hotel for as long as he could, but within a year of Dorothy’s death he was in a rest home in Santa Monica. Louise worked diligently to have him in a good place—and under some Medicare—but there was a huge bill to be paid, and she struggled under the weight of it all.
John Tracy Clinic was closed the morning of Spencer Tracy’s funeral, but it reopened to get on with the work at hand. Louise, however, was absent for several months, adjusting to the loss she had endured and answering by hand the mountain of cards and letters and donations that flowed in. When she returned, the clinic launched a $3 million growth campaign, starting with a $100,000 gift from the Disney Foundation. In its twenty-fifth year, John Tracy Clinic’s work was spread across ninety-four countries in fifteen languages. In 1972, at the age of seventy-five, Louise agreed to a series of interviews with freelance journalist Jane Ardmore, who had the notion of ghosting an autobiography. Louise saw it as a chance to tell the clinic’s story, but Ardmore knew there would have to be a lot about Spence in the book for it to find a wide audience. Howard Strickling pushed the idea, but in the end Louise put two restrictions on the project that sealed its fate. Indulging her writer’s pride of long ago, she would not take a byline on a book authored by somebody else. And she would not, under any circumstances, discuss her husband’s relationship with Katharine Hepburn.
Later that year, she was the guest of honor on an episode of Ralph Edwards’ This Is Your Life, welcoming Pat O’Brien, Walter Pidgeon, Dr. Lowell, and some of the families who had come back to Los Angeles to celebrate the clinic’s thirtieth anniversary. As she approached eighty, Louise grew more forgetful, and in 1974 she resigned from the board of the clinic, promising they had not yet seen the last of her. She still came in from time to time, whenever Susie could drive her, and she still spoke at graduations and special occasions. By the summer of 1977, when she was asked to give a talk in the auditorium, Susie was dubious and thought seriously of calling it off. “But as long as she was talking about the clinic,” Susie said, “she was usually okay.”
Susie drove her that day, not sure what was going to happen. Once her mother was in front of the group, however, a reflex kicked in, and the things that she had said so many times before—giving hope and encouragement to young families that had been wounded as hers had once been—came tumbling out. It was as if she had been asked to work the old magic one final time, just as Spence had done on the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner a decade earlier. Susie returned her to Tower Road, and by September Louise was under twenty-four-hour nursing care, her mind clouded by arteriosclerosis and at least one stroke.
She died in 1983 at the age of eighty-seven.
Stanley Kramer saw a rough cut of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner within days of its completion and knew he had everything he needed by June 1. Editor Robert C. Jones had begun work on the picture with the first dailies, following Tracy’s performance with an eye toward vigor as well as nuance. The early scenes of befuddlement weren’t hindered by Tracy’s occasional lapses of energy. “But,” said Jones, “in the last twenty minutes, he had to take control of that entire group.” Assembled at first for performance alone, the summation scene suffered whenever Tracy showed fatigue.
“He would run out of gas. I’d have to cut away to someone I wouldn’t normally cut to [in order to] change takes on Tracy. I was going through and looking for the best takes I could find on each line—and in some cases using lines from over his shoulder and putting them into his mouth. Actors tend to be more relaxed if they’re offstage, so I’d steal those lines, too … There would be, sometimes, wide discrepancies; he couldn’t complete a sentence, couldn’t think of the words … We also treated his voice in mixing to give it more energy.”
Jones and Kramer grappled as well with a tremor Hepburn had developed, which, at times, caused her head to bobble, particularly during close-ups. Kramer would minimize the problem by discreetly calling for another take, but Jones still had to be on the lookout for it when assembling a sequence. Editing scenes that contained both Tracy and Hepburn became especially tricky, bolstering Tracy’s energy level while diminishing any involuntary movements on the part of Kate. “We tried to hide it as much as possible,” Jones said.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was scored at the Goldwyn studios over the week of September 18, 1967. Previews had demonstrated a profound impact on audiences, but Kramer knew that he was in for rough sledding, given his reputation for issues-oriented moviemaking. A true believer in film as an agent of social change, Stanley Kramer could come off as needlessly pompous in interviews where he alternately disparaged the “message” angle while embracing the notion that a truly important film had to be about something of size and weight. Pauline Kael declared open season on him in her 1965 essay “The Intentions of Stanley Kramer,” a withering review of Ship of Fools prefaced by a snarky career overview. That Kael misunderstood Kramer’s work as a producer didn’t seem to matter, and her views gained traction with a generation of critics eager to tear down the shrines of their elders. Branded as hopelessly old school, Kramer was seen as simplistic and naive, a throwback to the sedate fifties when he was first making his mark.
For his part, Sidney Poitier knew that Kramer and Rose had pushed the major studio envelope as far as it would go. He had previously explored interracial romance in A Patch of Blue, but that film was art house fare compared to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which would have to win broad favor with the moviegoing public to justify its cost.
“How possible was it then, in 1967, to make a film like that in America? It was close to impossible,” Poitier said in 2006. Early on there was criticism that he was too perfect to be realistic, that the filmmakers, in their zeal to make the dilemma about race and nothing else, had robbed him of human frailties and, in the minds of some, his blackness. Poitier, however, had to be an equal and balancing force to Tracy, to push back in a way that would have been impossible had he been a mechanic or a short-order cook. Could the average black man identify with the character of John Wade Prentice? Or was the identification, as Kramer contended, more generational than racial?
“Who says it’s a story only about the black man?” Kramer demanded. “It’s about young and old viewpoints, and in this case the bone of contention happens to be the acceptance of interracial marriage. But this film says that the new generation won’t live like the last generation simply because that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Life has moved on.”
Ideally, the film would appeal to older viewers as the ninth and final teaming of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. To younger audiences, the presence of Sidney Poitier and the theme of interracial marriage would be the drawing cards, Poitier having appeared in two recent hits, To Sir, With Love (released June 14) and In the Heat of the Night (released August 2). Hepburn, eager for audiences to see Tracy’s last performance, agreed to a press conference in late October, a side-by-side with her niece at the New York restaurant 21. Acknowledging she had regularly avoided the press in the past, she said brightly, “I’m getting nicer in my old age. Most people become grumpy.” In tan slacks and a black turtleneck sweater, she cut a striking figure, her finely chiseled features belying even her official age of fifty-seven. In good form, she told a female reporter that her clothes were a mess and a male reporter that he was talking a lot of Freudian rot. When the subject turned to Tracy, however, her manner changed abruptly.
“I think Spencer and Laurette Taylor were the best actors I’ve ever seen,” she said. “They were both Irish and both had problems in their lives, but they were so direct. They had concentration.” As she got deeper into the subject of Tracy, her remarks veered toward intimacy and grew poignant. As an actor, she said, he was as simple and unadorned as “a baked potato.” In contrast, she described herself as “a dessert, with lots of whipped cream.” He had no mannerisms, she added. “He never got in his own way. I still do.” She listened to a question about Tracy and then answered carefully and with some feeling: “I think Spencer always thought that acting was a rather silly way for a man to make a living. He felt he should have been a doctor or something. We both came from backgrounds totally removed from acting. But he was of such an emotional balance, you know, that he had to be an artist.”
George Cukor saw Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner at an advance screening in November and couldn’t stop raving about it. “I think the film itself is one of the finest I’ve ever seen: human, dignified, passionate,” he told Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times. “I believe Katharine feels the same way, and that’s why she’s allowing herself to be interviewed to promote it, something she almost never does. In a sense, she’s doing it as an act of gratitude to Kramer, who cast Tracy in the picture even though his life was no longer insurable. It was a tremendous risk, and we must be grateful to Kramer for taking it.”
Noël Coward wired Kate the moment he saw it:
HOW WONDERFUL THAT DEAR SPENCE’S LAST PERFORMANCE COULD BE ONE OF THE FINEST HE HAS EVER GIVEN WHICH IS SAYING A GREAT DEAL.
Her response: “What a wonderful, lovely looking, sensitive creature I’ve spent so much of my life with. I know that I am lucky—he kept me hopping and I never had time to think about myself. So—on again, alone …”
The trade notices were unabashedly ecstatic, Variety predicting “torrid b.o. response throughout a long-legged theatrical release.” And while the opinions of the press were divided along predictable lines, the older generation praising the film extravagantly, the younger despising almost everything about it, Tracy’s performance was singled out for praise in nearly every instance. “He and Miss Hepburn glisten with style,” Robert Kotlowitz wrote in Harper’s Magazine. “They are crusty, tough, intelligent, and sentimental, the essence of Yankeeness. Without even holding hands, they manage to suggest that they have had a bracing physical life together. Their intimacy crackles on the screen, and it is their exchanges—snapping and barking and laughing at each other—that give the film its only reality.”
Tracy, Brendan Gill wrote in the New Yorker, gave “a faultless and, under the circumstances, heart-breaking performance…[B]eing aware that it was the last picture he would ever make, he turned his role into a stunning compendium of the actor’s art; it was as if he were saying over our heads to generations of actors not yet born, ‘Here is how to seem to listen,’ ‘Here is how to dominate a scene by walking away from it.’ Moreover, the very words he spoke were written for him deliberately as ‘last words.’ ” And, added Joe Morgenstern, “when Tracy gives his blessings to the lovers in a noble speech that was written as a melodrama’s climax and may now serve as an artist’s epitaph, when he says his say about youth and yearning and whether an old, white-haired man is necessarily a burned-out shell who can no longer remember the passion with which he has loved a woman, then everything wrong with the film is right and we can see, through our tears, that the hero we worshiped was just what we always knew he was, an authentically heroic man.”
Even a skeptic as hidebound as Andrew Sarris fell under the spell of the film’s final minutes, Mrs. Prentice’s accusation that Drayton had forgotten true passion still ringing in his ears. “As Tracy repeats the charge to himself, Kramer shifts deliberately to a profile shot of Tracy on the left foreground of the screen and Hepburn, her eyes brimming with tears, on the right background looking at Tracy, and Tracy says no I have not forgotten, and he says it very slowly, and the two shot is sustained by a ghostly immortality, recording the rapturous rapport between a being now dead and a being still alive, but a moment of life and love passing into the darkness of death everlasting, and anyone in the audience remaining dry-eyed through this evocation of gallantry and emotional loyalty has my deepest sympathy.”
One who did remain dry-eyed through that evocation of gallantry and emotional loyalty was Louise Tracy, who was given a private screening in a projection room at Columbia Pictures. With her were John and Susie, Carroll and Dorothy, her sister Eleanor, others from the extended family. Susie found her father’s summation “very difficult” to watch and was concerned for her mother, but Louise remained quiet and impassive throughout. “I liked him very much,” Louise said years later of her husband’s final performance. “I didn’t like the picture. He shouldn’t have done that picture.”
Columbia’s ad campaign was dominated by the full-figure images of Poitier and Houghton walking arm in arm, the catch line “A love story of today” clearly putting the emphasis on Poitier and the miscegenation theme. Tracy and Hepburn were shown in subordinate positions, almost as afterthoughts. Upon its release in December 1967, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was an immediate sensation, breaking the all-time single-week records at both the Victoria and the boutique Beekman in New York City. The story was the same in Los Angeles, where it promptly broke the house record at the venerable Westwood Village. Kramer flogged the film exhaustively, eventually putting in appearances on college campuses to stir up discussion and prompt word of mouth, a goal ultimately crushed by the same generational disconnect the movie depicted. There were other hit films in the marketplace—Wait Until Dark, Valley of the Dolls, Camelot, the upstart Graduate—but none dimmed the broad appeal of Kramer’s now-famous gamble. In two years domestic rentals would exceed $22 million, making it the most successful picture in Columbia’s history.
The film’s commercial fortunes were compounded by an astounding ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Picture. The Tracy family attended the Oscar ceremony on April 10, 1968, at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, with Louise planning to go up to the podium were Spence actually to win, just as she had done exactly thirty years earlier for Captains Courageous. In the long runup to the major prizes that evening, they saw the film shut out in nearly every category, with only William Rose scoring a win for his original story and screenplay. Hepburn took the Oscar for Best Actress, a big surprise, clearing the way for the Best Actor statuette to go to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night. Sidney Poitier, who had starred in three smash hits that year, wasn’t nominated for any of them.
Kate chose to take her award—which George Cukor accepted on her behalf—as “a nice affectionate pat on the back for us both—very touching.” Sometimes, though, she privately admitted that she was “disgusted” that Tracy didn’t also win an Oscar.
“I think very often about Spence,” Stanley Kramer reflected in a letter. “I guess, in recent years, I never really considered a project in which he didn’t participate in my thoughts. I miss so much the feeling he always gave me of a confidence in me—and how my ego really swelled when he would tell somebody how he felt about me. I really did love him. I came to him—and he to me—so late. But I never wanted to make it easier for anyone to be as great as he always was. I guess he made it seem so easy—and it isn’t, God knows.”
A few days after Tracy’s death, the phone rang on Tower Road. The housekeeper announced that Miss Hepburn was calling, and Louise decided to take it in the privacy of the downstairs den. “You know, Louise, you and I can be friends,” Kate remembered saying. “You knew him at the beginning, I at the end—or we can just pretend that—I might be a help with the kids.” John and Susie were now forty-two and thirty-four, respectively.
“Well, yes,” Louise said, pausing for emphasis. The razor-sharp wit she had spent a lifetime suppressing now came to the fore. After twenty-six years she finally had her husband’s lover in her crosshairs, and the temptation to pull the trigger was too great to resist. “But you see, I thought you were only a rumor…”
The shot hit its mark with deadly accuracy. “After nearly thirty years?” Hepburn raged in her autobiography. “A rumor? What could be the answer to that?” Louise later told Susie that Kate had said that she would like to get to know Johnny and Susie “as an extension of Spencer.” Then she added, unnecessarily, “I play tennis.”
“Well,” Louise said, “I’ll think about it.”
She was coming up the stairs as Susie emerged from her room. “Well,” Louise said, a hint of admiration creeping into her voice, “that took guts.”
“It was,” Hepburn later wrote, “a deep and fundamental wound—deeply set—never to be budged. Almost thirty years Spence and I had known each other—through good and bad times. Some rumor. And by never admitting that I existed—she remained—the wife—and she sent out Christmas cards. Spencer—the guilty one. She—the sufferer. And I—well now, I was brought up in a very unconventional atmosphere. And I had not broken up their marriage. That happened long before I arrived on the scene.”
Hepburn came to believe that she had taken the easy road, that she had declined to force the issue, to “straighten things out,” as she put it. If there had been a divorce, “then everyone—and in this case, Susie and Johnny—would have been able to know their father with me. It would have been better. But it would have had to be pushed by Louise—the loser in the situation. Yet it would, I believe, have been ennobling to her. And supremely honest. And it would have made it easy for him to do—what would in this case have been the direct and simple thing for him to do. Then he could have had the best of both worlds. And if he had felt that it was her idea, his guilt would have been removed.”
But, of course, it could never have been that simple. Tracy’s guilt ran far deeper than Kate could ever imagine. And Louise’s paralysis was rooted in her heritage, her Victorian upbringing and her inability to work through many of the same issues she saw as an impressionable young girl in the marriage of her father and mother. “Spencer’s faith, along with unbreakable bonds of an emotional sort, is what kept him married to Louise,” Eugene Kennedy said. “He felt as a Catholic that he had been married, and that he could not be, as it were, un-married. That is one of the reasons Kate and Spence felt that I understood them. I appreciated what it meant to be in love and to have an institution holding terrific sway over your choices.”
Hepburn eventually got to know Susie, who, at the urging of her friend Susan Moon, went up and spoke to her one morning through the chain-link fence of the tennis courts at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Kate gave her a phone number, told her to call at any time. It wasn’t until October 1969 that Susie had a reason to call. “It’s Carroll,” Kate said immediately, knowing without being told that Spence’s older brother had died. In 1975 Susie published a short piece in the Ladies’ Home Journal, an as-told-to with Jane Ardmore called “My Friend: Katharine Hepburn.” If her mother ever saw the piece, she never mentioned it, and the relationship continued after Hepburn left the house on St. Ives in April 1979 and returned permanently to New York and Connecticut. “Kate,” said Katharine Houghton, “was always thrilled when Susie called or visited.”
In the latter months of 1967, Hepburn busied herself with the planning of a TV special that would document Tracy’s life and work. Written by Chester Erskine, the show would be all-inclusive, inviting on-camera contributions from Louise, Carroll Tracy, Joe Mankiewicz, George Cukor, the full range of family, friends, and coworkers. She got M-G-M to throw in as the producing company, furnishing the film clips, and ABC to commit a two-hour time slot. But the whole thing hinged on Louise’s cooperation, and ultimately, after reading the script, she declined to participate, failing to see clearly in Erskine and Hepburn’s version the man she had known longer than any of them.
Soon Hepburn was back in the swim of making movies, traveling to France to make The Lion in Winter. Director Anthony Harvey found her “enormously vulnerable” and said that Tracy was practically never out of her mind. “She was mad about him in every way.” It was Tracy, Katharine Houghton observed, who brought out a selflessness in her. “It fulfilled something deep in her nature. Spencer, in fact, may have been surprised to observe that it was he alone, his living, breathing presence, that enabled Kate, after her father’s death, to carry high that standard which she so admired—‘character!’ When she lost Spence, the center of her life was destroyed. And I think every year that took her farther away from him caused her life to further unravel. Their relationship seemed to me to balance both of them—a yin and a yang.”
Katharine Hepburn never saw Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, could never bear to. Katharine Houghton saw it only after she was asked to accept the David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actor on Tracy’s behalf in August 1968. “That last speech of Tracy’s was a killer,” she said. “At the award ceremony they showed the film, and afterward I was supposed to go up and make an acceptance speech. I got up to the podium and burst into tears. I couldn’t say anything except, ‘Thank you.’ Anna Magnani threw her arms around me and said something charming like, ‘In Italy we respect tears, not words. You do not have to speak.’ ”
On the morning of the funeral, Kate and Phyllis Wilbourn arrived at the mortuary a little after eight, intent, she later admitted to Bill Self, on following the hearse to the church and then slipping inside. They found no one there, just the hearse, and they drove up into the driveway.
“Is anyone coming?” Kate asked.
“No.”
“May we help?”
“Why not?”
So they helped lift Spence into his place in the vehicle, and they shut the door. Then the hearse pulled away, out onto Melrose Avenue and east toward the church. Kate and Phyllis jumped into Kate’s dependable old Chrysler and followed along after it, a miniature procession on a six-mile journey through rush-hour traffic, at once brazen and yet proudly anonymous. Through La Cienega Boulevard they crept, east along the upper border of Larchmont Village, then past the Desilu Studios complex that abutted Paramount. What Hepburn was thinking is anyone’s guess, but her musings must at some point have touched on Louise and how Spence was always at pains to protect her, to keep her safe from humiliation and the scrutiny of the press. That Kate was now contemplating the crashing of his funeral was something he would not have wanted, no matter how heartfelt, how necessary, such a grand gesture might have been.
Passing under the Hollywood Freeway, she turned left onto Vermont, past Los Angeles City College and on toward Santa Monica Boulevard. There would be a crowd of onlookers at the church, as there was for all celebrity funerals, photographers and TV cameramen shouldering their 16mm gear, eager to run off and get their footage processed and cut for the six o’clock news. Just how unseen could she possibly be, slipping into the back as if no one would know her? In a practical sense, they would all be on the lookout for her, the reporters, the freelancers, the autograph hounds for whom no event was too sacred to work. Left at Santa Monica, doubling back now, the Immaculate Heart of Mary six blocks ahead on the left. Of course she wouldn’t go, couldn’t go. She didn’t want, as she later told Bill, any “fuss.”
As the church came into view, they could see the crowds, the people arriving, the cops managing the traffic, the pallbearers, perhaps even Louise and the family awaiting his return. “Goodbye, friend—here’s where we leave you …”
And with that she tapped the brake and watched as the hearse and its precious cargo eased away.