JK “Hello Joan. It’s Kate.”
It was August 18, 1982, and even though David and I had spoken with Katharine Hepburn many times by then, and had been invited by her for afternoon teas and lunches, it was still a jolt to pick up the phone and hear that voice when I didn’t expect it.
“Good morning. How are you today?”
It was a mundane question, just to give myself a few seconds to tune in. And then, without telling me how she was, her next comment made my mouth drop open.
“Now that I have friends in public television, why don’t we do a show about Spence together?”
That was the last thing I ever expected to hear from her. I think I uttered something appropriate, but I knew I needed time to gather my thoughts. Somehow I found the nerve to say, “Miss Hepburn, I have someone on my other line. Would you please hold on a second?”
I pushed the “hold” button and called across the hall for David.
Katharine Hepburn had never before spoken publicly about her twenty-seven-year relationship with Spencer Tracy, and no one had ever even dared to bring it up when she occasionally granted an interview.
David said, “Ask her if she’ll host it.”
I picked up the phone again. “Miss Hepburn, I have a loaded question.”
“Go ahead. What is it?”
“Would you be willing to host the program?”
“What the hell do you think I was talking about? Of course, I should host it. Come for tea tomorrow afternoon.”
We didn’t know then that we wouldn’t begin production for over three years.
JK and DH It was obvious that this could be an exceptional show. It also dawned on us that it could be our ticket to bigger things. So, instead of offering it immediately to WNET, we decided to test the commercial television waters.
We heard every excuse one can imagine, including, “No one will know who Spencer Tracy was.” We were amazed; we couldn’t believe that anyone would turn down the chance to support a program that Katharine Hepburn had not only suggested, but had agreed to host.
At some point during those frustrating three years, we offered it to HBO: no interest. We contacted Dick Clark, who had a long relationship with the commercial networks. He was excited by the project and we went to several meetings with him to pitch it. ABC, CBS, and NBC all passed on it.
By then, it was 1984 and we were worried about Hepburn getting older. She was in her late seventies, and had had several operations: one on her shoulder, another for a hip replacement, and she almost lost a foot when she ran her car into a telephone pole near her home in Connecticut.
There was another big obstacle: getting the excerpts from Tracy’s films. Our first thought was to contact MGM, which owned the bulk of his movies, and ask them to co-produce the program. To our surprise, they also turned us down.
It was time to use our trump card: Katharine Hepburn herself. We asked her if she would send a letter, and she came up with a “beaut.” It ended with: “You should be an important part of this venture, with David Heeley, Joan Kramer and myself.”
DH I had read in the trade press that Frank Yablans, the new Chief Operating Officer of MGM, was known for returning every phone call that he received. So I decided to find out whether he’d return mine.
What happened next was that we almost got caught red-handed. At this time, I was also the executive producer of Nature, and was on location in Puerto Rico for a shoot with the host of the series, George Page, who was also Joan’s and my boss at WNET, and who knew nothing about the Tracy project. We were in my room at the DuPont Plaza Hotel going over the script for the next day’s filming when my phone rang.
“Hello. This is Frank Yablans at MGM. Is this David Heeley?”
I panicked, but tried not to show it.
“Speaking,” I said.
“I received a letter from Katharine Hepburn, and I don’t know who told you that we are not interested in a program about Spencer Tracy, because we are.”
“Oh, thank you. I’m very pleased to hear that. I’m on location now. Can I call you when I get back to my office at the end of the week?”
“Of course, call any time.”
Somehow I’d pulled it off. George didn’t even ask what the call was about.
Eventually, our sad tale of futile deception ended, and I told George Page that Hepburn had suggested a show about Tracy. He immediately picked up the phone and called his PBS contact. A few minutes later we had a green light.
JK and DH We spent many hours with Kate, during which she painted a picture of a complex man: “Spencer had eyes like an old, wild animal; he had a soul that had no release; you were not looking into an empty room. He found acting easy and life difficult. He was like a baked potato. I, on the other hand, am more like an ice cream sundae with whipped cream.”
She also told us why she decided now was the time to do this program. “Recently I was asked to do a picture about Rose Kennedy. But I know that family, and I feel I cannot do it while she is still alive. This situation is similar; I couldn’t speak publicly about Spence out of respect for Mrs. Tracy, but she died last year. And Spencer’s daughter, Susie, is a friend of mine; I’ll call her and ask if she’ll help us.”
At one point she said, “I have to go upstairs. I’ll be right back.” She came down holding a painting and a small bronze sculpture. “I did this bust of his head a long time ago,” she said. “Regal, isn’t it? But never could paint his face,” as she showed us a portrait of Tracy reading a newspaper which partially obscured his features. “You can use these in the show, if you want. But that’s up to you.” Needless to say, we did.
When we pointed out that our legal department would be sending her a contract, she said, “You already have a contract with me.”
We discussed who should be interviewed, and she was full of suggestions. As we were to discover, everyone we invited to participate accepted, and in the end, we had an illustrious roster of actors, directors, and Tracy admirers: Joan Bennett, Joanne Woodward, Burt Reynolds, Lee Marvin, John Sturges, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Richard Widmark, Robert Wagner, Garson Kanin, Sidney Poitier, Frank Sinatra, Mickey Rooney, and Elizabeth Taylor1. It was a surplus of riches, more than we had had for any other program. They were all surprised to hear that Hepburn was doing the show and many of them called her to confirm that it was true.
JK A few were even more surprised when I told them that she had suggested we contact them. Among them were Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Garson Kanin, each of whom had had a falling out with her years earlier.
Mankiewicz had not only produced Hepburn’s comeback film, The Philadelphia Story, but also Woman of the Year, her first film with Spencer Tracy. Then in 1959, he directed her in Suddenly Last Summer, co-starring Montgomery Clift, who was recovering from a car accident. She thought Mankiewicz was unreasonably harsh in his treatment of Clift, not showing any consideration for the fact that he wasn’t well. After the last shot, when she was assured that she was no longer needed for any pick-ups or dubbing, she spat in Mankiewicz’s face, saying, “That’s for being so cruel to Monty.” They never spoke again. Not surprisingly, he asked me more than once whether Hepburn knew and approved of my calling him. When he arrived for the interview, he said, “I’m so happy that Kate wants me to be a part of this show.” There were tears rolling down his cheeks.
Garson Kanin and his wife, Ruth Gordon, had been close friends of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn for many years. Their town house was next door to hers in New York, and they often had dinner and even went on vacations together. After Tracy’s death, Kanin wrote a book called Tracy and Hepburn, based on the copious notes he took of their most intimate conversations. Hepburn was furious, feeling that he’d betrayed her trust, and she banished him from her life.
DH We knew how important Kanin had been in Tracy’s career, and decided to ask Kate how she would feel about his participation. She said, “Spencer and Garson were great friends and he wrote some of our best pictures. He should be on the show.”
When I first reached him, he turned me down. But he called back a few days later, saying he’d changed his mind. We told Hepburn, and after the program aired, she invited him for dinner, mending their relationship. However, she confided, “I’ve decided we can be friends again, but I still don’t trust him. I’ll always be wondering if he’s writing down everything I say.”
JK Our executive producer at MGM, George Paris, was also concerned about Kate’s advanced age, and asked us to shoot an on-camera interview, so that we would have her thoughts and stories about Spencer Tracy on tape. That interview would serve as an insurance policy in case anything happened to her before we finished the program. She was familiar with “test shoots” for movies, and so never questioned the need for this one. Of course, she was no fool, and might well have known what it was really about, but if so, she never let on.
The interview also had another important purpose—giving our writer, John Miller, Hepburn’s own words with which to write her scripted pieces. She would later say to him, “You write quite well for my kind of lingo.”
DH It was the Tuesday after Labor Day, and the temperature and humidity were both in the nineties. Then, with our added lighting equipment, it got even hotter, exacerbated further by the fact that we had to turn off the air conditioning while we were shooting because it caused too much background noise.
As the crew was setting up, Hepburn said, “I’ve been thinking about it, and I really don’t have too much to say about Spencer. No one really knew him. Not even me.”
“Don’t worry,” I replied. “Whatever you have to say will be helpful.” Little did she know that Joan and I had a list of over a hundred questions, and hoped that once we got going she wouldn’t realize how many there were.
About an hour after we began, we heard children laughing outside. I said, “Cut,” and our production manager went to see where the noise was coming from. Hepburn said, “Tell them to go inside because we’re making a movie here and need them to be quiet.” A few minutes later, the noise stopped and we picked up where we’d left off.
“Roll tape and tell me when you have speed,” I said to the crew.
Then again, the sound of children playing.
“Cut!” I said.
This time, Hepburn got up from her chair, navigated her way across our cables, and said, “Let me go. I think it’s the kids next door; the Brazilian Consul lives there with his family. I know them and I think they’ll pay attention to me if I tell them to stay inside.”
Sure enough, no more noise.
JK We had ordered a catered lunch. But Kate had asked her housekeeper, Norah, to prepare soup and sandwiches for all of us, so there were two lunches. And for dessert, she served vanilla ice cream with fresh raspberries. Hepburn insisted that all of us have a comfortable place to sit. She sat on the floor.
DH Following the break, we taped for several more hours, and for someone who had claimed she didn’t have much to say about Tracy, she’d answered every one of our questions by the time we finished at around 4:30. As the crew was breaking down, Hepburn started to help them. She said, “Don’t report me, guys. I’ve been around so long, I’ve got a waiver from all the unions.” Then suddenly she stopped what she was doing. “I’d better go tell the children that they can come outside now,” she said, as she headed downstairs. When she came back, she was laughing. “I thought I’d ordered the nanny to keep them quiet earlier, but I just discovered that it was actually Mrs. Brazil.”
The day had gone very well. She was comfortable, and certainly gave us an excellent back-up should we ever have needed it. Fortunately, we didn’t.
JK We had a summer intern that year, Blaine Smith, a young woman almost nineteen years old and about to enter her second year at Amherst. She mainly did research for the program, but we instantly recognized her potential. She was so bright and enthusiastic that, even though she had no hands-on television experience, we asked her if she’d like to serve as our production assistant on the shoot at Hepburn’s house, where she’d take notes of time code readings and help the crew. She was thrilled. In preparation, she asked to look at files of some of our previous shows, staying in the office after-hours and coming in on weekends to learn the mechanics of doing notes herself. She understood the responsibility we were giving her and embraced it wholeheartedly, knowing that there was a bonus: meeting Katharine Hepburn. Understandably, she was both exhilarated and terrified.
On the morning of the shoot, we introduced her to Hepburn. That was the extent of their interaction for most of the day. Our associate producer, Cindy Mitchell, had brought packages of plastic sheets and asked Blaine to cover the sofa and all the chairs in the living room where the crew was beginning to set up the camera and lights. The rest of the equipment was being put into an adjacent room where Blaine would spend the majority of her time.
At the end of the day, David and I were downstairs as the crew was about to leave, and Cindy asked Blaine to remove the plastic from the furniture. She was alone in the living room when Katharine Hepburn walked in. Blaine was facing the opposite direction at that moment, but she felt Kate’s presence and heard her mutter under her breath, “Boy, it’s hot.”
Blaine was about to say something, when she lifted the plastic from a chair and saw a huge red stain—the sign of fresh raspberries—right in the middle of the white upholstered seat cushion. She froze, horrified, not wanting to believe what she’d just discovered. But there it was, and she didn’t know what to do next.
She thought: “Oh, God. There’s this big spot and I’m alone in the room with Hepburn; if I show it to her, I’ll probably get killed. But if I don’t, she’ll think everyone had known about it and nobody had the nerve to own up, and that would look terrible for Joan and David.” So she took a deep breath and turned around, hiding the view of the chair by standing directly in front of it. And this young woman who’d only said “Good morning, Miss Hepburn,” when she had arrived some eight hours before, suddenly began to talk in a nervous babble, moving her arms up and down at the same time:
“Oh my gosh, Miss Hepburn, I don’t know how it happened. I’m so sorry, but I’m sure our insurance will take care of it…It was obviously an accident, and I don’t know how it happened because there was plastic all over everything…I’m sooooo sorry.”
Kate interrupted her: “What is the problem, young lady? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Blaine started again, “Well, you see, I covered everything with plastic, but there was an accident and I don’t know how it could have happened, but look…there’s this big red raspberry stain on this chair. I’m so sorry.” And she moved aside, pointing at it.
Hepburn glanced at the cushion and saw not only the stain, but also the very real agony that Blaine was experiencing. She walked over to the chair, and then turned to Blaine. “Is that the problem? Is that what you’re so upset about? Well, watch this.” She picked up the cushion, flipped it over, fluffed it up a bit and put it back in place, clean side up, sat down on it, and said, “You see, there’s no longer a problem. Now no one will ever know, will they?”
Blaine was speechless. And when she recovered her composure, she began to laugh. So did Katharine Hepburn.
JK and DH We didn’t know anything about that story until we were back in our office, because Blaine felt that Hepburn had not wanted her to make a big deal over it. However, we called Kate and offered to have the chair cleaned. She refused. She said, “It’s seen worse. Forget about it. Did you get what you wanted on film?”
Ever the pro, she was worried about whether she’d performed well. We told her that indeed she had. But what she did best that day was not captured on camera.
For all we know, throughout years, that stain was still on the underside of her white cushion. Each time we went to the house for tea or lunch, we wondered about it. But it would have been rude to ask. Wouldn’t it?
DH Two months later, in December, 1985, we were all in Los Angeles for the location shoots2. MGM gave us an office in the Thalberg building, where many of the studio’s legendary leaders had wielded their power. However, we rarely used it, operating most often from our rooms at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Hepburn stayed at the home of Hal Wallis and his wife, actress Martha Hyer, who were out of town at the time. Wallis had not only produced dozens of great Warner Bros. pictures in the thirties and forties, but also had been responsible for Kate’s only film with John Wayne, Rooster Cogburn.
One afternoon, she invited us to the Wallis house for a drink, a visit that I knew would eventually include a discussion of the plans for the shoot a few days later. The house was large, light and airy, and filled with original paintings, including some by Monet and Renoir, as well as several bronze sculptures on tables and pedestals.
We chatted for a few minutes, and suddenly she said, “Is that a Giacometti?” pointing to one of the pieces.
“I don’t know,” I answered, “but it looks like his style.”
I went over to it and bent down, searching for any clues.
“I can’t see a signature anywhere.”
“Well, pick it up and bring it over here into the light. Now turn it over and see if it’s signed on the bottom.”
Sure enough, under the base was the signature, which made it very clear that I was holding in my hands a genuine, and possibly priceless, Giacometti.
Of course, the house had an intricate security system, which Kate never was quite able to master. So when she went out, she would often ask her assistant, Phyllis Wilbourn, to stay and guard the place—not very practical, since Phyllis was in her eighties, frail, and hardly capable of deterring thieves.
JK Shortly after she arrived in Los Angeles, Hepburn took her hairdresser, Ray Gow; makeup artist, Michal Bigger; Phyllis; and driver, Hilly, on a tour of the various homes she had lived in during her years in Hollywood. According to Gow, she gave second-by-second directions to Hilly as she pointed out who had lived where: “Turn left here; now turn right; go straight up this road; Bogie and Betty lived here; Leland Hayward owned the one over there; that one was mine.” They stopped to take closer looks at a few others. At one, Hepburn jumped over a fence and was chased by a barking dog. At another, she told a gardener, “Yes, you did see me in On Golden Pond.” She talked her way past a Spanish-speaking housekeeper and, as she was showing Ray, Michal, and Phyllis around the house, the woman who lived there returned home, carrying several bags filled with groceries. She was so astonished to find Katharine Hepburn standing in her living room that she dropped the bags. Oranges, apples, potatoes, and other vegetables rolled out onto the floor. Kate got down on her knees and helped pick them up, thanked the owner for letting them see the place, and left. We wonder whether the woman’s friends ever believed her story of finding that Katharine Hepburn had broken into her house.
JK and DH While she was playing tour guide, we and our cinema-tographer went to survey The Riviera Country Club’s golf course, and MGM, to determine the exact locations we’d want to shoot later in the week. The following day, we were in the midst of taping an interview with Richard Widmark when Hepburn called.
“I’ve been waiting for Michal Bigger to come and practice my makeup for the filming, but she hasn’t shown up, so why don’t we go and look at the locations you’ve chosen?”
We explained that we’d already checked them out the day before, and that we couldn’t meet her for awhile because we were taping Widmark.
“Call me as soon as you’re done.”
We weren’t “done” until just before 3 pm.
“Meet me at Metro as soon as you can,” she said. “And hurry because we’re going to lose the light.”
We rushed to the lobby of the hotel and asked the valet for our car. But some sort of event was in progress there and, after what seemed like an eternity, but was actually only about ten minutes, the valet reported that he couldn’t find our car in the garage. Panicked, we got into a taxi and headed for MGM in Culver City.
JK Hepburn had arrived some twenty minutes before us, sending everyone at the studio into a tailspin. All rules suddenly were broken. The guard at the front gate had not only allowed Hilly to drive her onto the lot, against union regulations, but then told our taxi driver to do the same.
“Just go straight ahead,” he said. “They’re at Stage 10.”
We found Kate talking with George Paris, and as soon as she saw us, she said, “Let’s go; we don’t have much time,” as she put her arm through his and started walking. Over her shoulder, she said to us, “You go in the car with Hilly; I want to walk with him [George].” It was quite a trek to the next location, and when we met them there, David said, “Something’s not quite right here. The star shouldn’t walk while we ride.”
DH Each building on the lot was named after an MGM star, producer or director. The one that housed all the actors’ dressing rooms was now called the Stallone building. When Hepburn saw the sign, she said with a laugh, “Maybe some day I should play ‘Rocky’s’ grandmother.”
Phyllis, always prim and proper, said in her most British schoolteacher tone of voice, “No, no, no. This is serious. You must refrain from trying to make it funny.”
Kate then pointed to the windows where Tracy’s, Robert Montgomery’s, and Robert Taylor’s dressing rooms had been, and added, “Mine was at the far end on the second floor.” However, just as she was about to walk away, she looked up at the sign again and said, “Obviously times have changed.”
JK I noticed Sylvester Stallone’s reserved parking space with his name printed in big white letters on the ground at the front, and thought, “What would be really funny is if he arrived right now and saw Katharine Hepburn staring at ‘his’ building. I wonder what they would say to each other.”
A bit further on, we approached a rather drab-looking, small structure, which was the Tracy building.
Kate stood there quietly for a moment and then said, “Not very interesting. Doesn’t do him proud. I wonder what goes on in there. I hope it’s respectable for Spence’s sake.”
JK and DH We finished the tour and were heading for the car as the sun was setting. Shadows played across the windows of the buildings and Hepburn turned around and stopped again, staring into the distance. We were moved by the silence, and realized that she was absorbing the ambiance, thinking back to the days when she and Spencer Tracy made some of their best movies there. And that she wasn’t just being sentimental. It was her way of preparing for the shoot over the next two days when, for the first time publicly, she’d be telling stories about Tracy, the actor and the man.
Page from Spencer Tracy’s diary, noting the first day he and Hepburn worked together. Collection of Susie Tracy.
Authors’ collection.
