Kate Remembered

Katharine Hepburn and Irene Mayer Selznick had, after all, been friends for more than fifty years. Kate had known Irene through most of her fifteen-year roller-coaster ride of a marriage to Benzedrine-fueled David Selznick; and they became closer in its aftermath, when the divorced Irene reinvented herself as a major force on Broadway. For her part, Irene had been ringside for Kate’s arrival in Hollywood, her exile, and then her comeback, as well as the five successful decades that followed. She had also observed Kate’s serial love affairs of the thirties yield to the one serious romance that consumed her for the next twenty-five years. With one Selznick son or the other almost always on the outs with his mother—sometimes Jeffrey and Danny were “in the doghouse” at the same time—“Sister Kate” became a favorite “aunt” to them. Despite all that shared history, by the end of the 1980s, the two women had all but stopped speaking to each other. But I can hardly remember a single telephone conversation or visit in which Irene did not ask, “How is your friend Kate?”

They had experienced less of a rift than a drift, two seemingly parallel lives that gradually arced in different directions. Born a month apart, each entered her eighties differently. Irene, a lifelong hypochondriac (the only way to get attention growing up alongside a sickly sister), was proud of her age. While often complaining of undiagnosable aches and pains, she bragged that she had “all her marbles,” and she worked steadily on a book of memoirs. Kate never said boo about her foot, which refused to heal properly; she stoically applied ice packs and stuck to her physical regimen as best she could; and she continued to entertain offers to work. She complained only that she couldn’t remember things so well as she used to. For years, I had been suggesting that she commit episodes of her life to paper—something I learned she had already quietly been doing; but their actual publication struck her as a kind of death knell to her acting career. She didn’t celebrate birthdays, though every year—usually on the wrong date that she had disseminated for publicity purposes back in 1932—the press ballyhooed the occasion. In May of 1989—her eighty-second birthday—one newspaper announced that she had just turned seventy-nine. “It’s bad enough that I have to get older every year,” Irene dashed off in a note she mailed to Kate. “But do you have to keep getting younger?” Irene never received a reply. “The Kate I used to know would have called up and laughed,” Irene told me a few nights later at dinner.

Without ever saying a word directly on the subject, to each other or to me, their life-paths seemed bound never to recross. For one, Irene didn’t get around much anymore. While she was still “full of piss and vinegar” (as she used to say) on almost any topic, from politics to Broadway to her children, her social life was shrinking to long telephone conversations with her intimates—Kitty Carlisle Hart, Leonora Hornblow, Jean Kerr, and Mr. Paley chief among them—and dinners for two in her apartment. Every now and then, she would say to me, “I’ve got to have that bean soup at the Post House” or “I’ve got to have some Chinese food tonight”; and without a moment’s thought, we’d tear down to Chinatown and eat five or six courses, each in a different restaurant—one specializing in dim sum, another in Szechuan soup, another in Peking duck. Such nights became rarer, and with each visit to the Hotel Pierre, I found her a little less willing to venture out.

Kate, Irene claimed, was “growing old disgracefully.” After years of privacy and discretion, she appeared to be ubiquitous—needlessly grabbing headlines. There had been the performance she attended of Candide at which the audience had to sit on benches so uncomfortable that she felt impelled to seat herself in a more comfortable chair—on the stage! While attending a play written by her niece Katharine Houghton, Kate fainted to the floor—through no fault of her own, really: the paint fumes from the still-wet scenery simply knocked her out cold. She attended a Michael Jackson concert at Madison Square Garden as the artist’s special guest; and she was appearing in a string of what Irene called “horrible little” television movies. “Dad always said Garbo had the right idea. Get off the screen while they still love you,” Irene would add to underscore her point.

Perhaps hardest for Irene was that Hepburn seemed to be chugging along with a new train of friends, mostly younger. Anthony Harvey, who had directed her in The Lion in Winter, was proving himself as caring a friend as he had been her director—in many ways replacing George Cukor in her life. Laura Fratti, who had coached Kate in faking her piano-playing in movies and onstage, came around with her intellectual husband and their daughter. Sally Lapiduss, who had been a stage manager while Kate was performing The West Side Waltz on the road, accompanied her back to New York as a personal assistant and became a friend of Kate’s, prior to becoming a successful television writer-producer.

“I remember when that phone number was a state secret and only a few of us had it,” Irene recalled one night, somewhat wistfully. “Now everybody does.” Mrs. Selznick, on the other hand, was in the phone book. (“If you really don’t want to be found,” she once told me, “list yourself in the Manhattan directory.”) Somehow, Irene kept current on everybody who came in and out of Kate’s life—through Norah, I always suspected, whom she liked a great deal and who was always up for a good gab.

Cindy was, in fact, a young woman from Maine named Cynthia McFadden, who had worked her way from Bowdoin College to Manhattan, where she apprenticed to the legendary newsman Fred Friendly. She became executive producer of his Media and Society Seminars on Public Broadcasting, a stimulating series on moral, legal, and ethical issues, in which a law professor would hit fungo-like questions to a team of experts, batting them back and forth Socratic-style. A highly ambitious graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, Cynthia moved on to produce a show about books for Lewis Lapham.

Cynthia’s introduction to Kate came through Hepburn’s sister Marion, who arranged for her to meet Kathy Houghton and Kate herself. A deep friendship quickly developed. One night I called from Los Angeles and caught Kate in the middle of what sounded like a rousing dinner. “You should be here,” she said. “I even have a dinner companion for you, a brilliant young girl. She has big beautiful eyes, beautiful skin, and she wears her hair—why, she wears her hair piled high and tied in a knot like—”

On my next visit to New York, I met Cynthia at dinner and found her as attractive as Kate had said—though not quite the lookalike I had expected. Kate said she was sorry my room was currently occupied, would I mind using another? I had, in fact, already made arrangements to stay with another friend across town. Over the next few years, Cynthia’s friendship with Kate blossomed, as did her career. She was extremely attentive to Kate, treating her with respect and tenderness. This infusion of young blood—a woman starting out on her career in Manhattan and making Kate’s home her own—had an obviously tonic effect.

While Kate still preferred to arrange most of our dinners for just the two of us, we always had fun when Cynthia or Kathy Houghton or Tony Harvey came over. One night Kate and Cynthia and I went to the home of Nancy Hamilton, a longtime friend from the theater. We were celebrating Cynthia’s having taken the New York bar exam that day. After dinner, Nancy—a songwriter, among many talents—wanted to play a record of Kirsten Flagstad singing Wagner. Kate could not have been less interested. She tried to get Nancy Hamilton to turn off the machine and return to conversation, but Nancy would not stop the music. Kate fired a desperate look my way, suggesting that I do something. At the close of an aria, I just sat down at the piano and started playing—making it impossible for our hostess to ignore me. The first song that came to mind was “Coco,” a number Kate had performed several hundred times. After playing it from start to finish, Kate looked puzzled and said, “Play that again,” which I did. Looking even more puzzled, she asked, “What is that song? I know I’ve heard it!”

Cynthia was always interested in meeting new people; and she tended to make Kate more social, even less averse to appearing in public. Besides accepting the occasional dinner invitation, Hepburn increasingly found herself “on the town” during the day, occasionally performing unnecessary tasks. One day we had to find the perfect carrot peeler. Kate’s driver took us to three different stores before we found an emporium selling kitchen utensils that had the exact size and model she wanted. I was fascinated to watch a dozen shoppers in that store near Union Square all suddenly develop an interest in carrot peelers and to see Kate’s way of noticing them without being noticed.

While Kate and Phyllis went to the cash register to pay for the item—Kate never carried cash, just a checkbook; Phyllis was there to pull out a roll of bills from a change purse of household money—I lingered with the crowd. Eleven out of twelve shoppers bonded in excitement—“Is it really her? She still looks great. She’s my grandmother’s favorite; she’s my mother’s favorite. She’s my favorite.” One severely tailored, middle-aged matron said, “I always thought she overacted.” I reported the results of my straw poll to Kate, who said I should always tell people she was my aunt, so they would be polite enough not to criticize her, at least in our presence.

Kate was back to seeing every show on Broadway; and she often asked if we might duck out to the movies, though little interested her there. She avoided action pictures and couldn’t believe that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were international stars. “I don’t understand him,” she said of the latter after we had seen a preview of one of his movies. As I tried to explain the worldwide appeal of the Austrian-born bodybuilder, she said, “No, I mean when he speaks—I don’t understand him!” She found most of the Merchant-Ivory pictures “a bore,” though she delighted in Vanessa Redgrave’s performance in their production of The Bostonians—or any role she ever saw her in. She had flipped for John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and she greatly admired Sally Field in Norma Rae and Places in the Heart. She liked Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast and again in Working Girl. She said the new star of that picture, Melanie Griffith, reminded her of Judy Holliday but feared her career would fade fast. “There’s something lethargic about her,” she explained, “where Judy was full of energy.” She had zero tolerance for Woody Allen movies, though she thought The Purple Rose of Cairo captured the flavor of the RKO movies of her vintage. After seeing Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza, she predicted her becoming “the next big movie star,” the first she had “seen in years.” Meryl Streep was her least favorite modern actress on screen—“Click, click, click,” she said, referring to the wheels turning inside her head.

Glenn Close was her least favorite actress on stage. “She’s got these big, fat, ugly feet,” Hepburn told me upon returning from a matinee of Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing, in which Close had opened on Broadway opposite Jeremy Irons. “And she goes around barefoot in the play and almost ruins the whole thing.” She thought Irons gave a spectacular performance, though she didn’t think he was a well-trained actor. “It’s a personality performance,” she said, “all tricked up with mannerisms and charm—like me.” On the other hand, she admired Irons’s wife, Sinead Cusack, who was in New York around that time performing with Derek Jacobi and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Much Ado About Nothing and Cyrano de Bergerac. Hepburn thought she was “the real McCoy—one of the most exciting actors I’ve ever seen.”

Glenn Close’s feet notwithstanding, Kate insisted I see The Real Thing. She thought Stoppard was a cold playwright but that this was the most emotional work he had written. She wangled two house seats for a Wednesday matinee, one for me and one for “your friend Irene.” (Irene would later assert that Irons’s performance was one of the three greatest performances she had ever seen, ranking alongside Brando’s in Streetcar. The third great performance she would later cite was John Lithgow’s in Requiem for a Heavyweight, which had been adapted from a Rod Serling teleplay for a short-lived Broadway run.)

In addition to the tickets, Kate invited us back to her house for dinner that night. The invitation thrilled Irene and led to an amusing evening. I sat back and listened as these two old friends hop-scotched across a half century of show-business acquaintances, all the obvious Hollywood names plus some mutual Broadway friends—producer Hugh “Binky” Beaumont, agent Audrey Wood, Lillian Hellman, Tallulah Bankhead . . . “and do you remember how Myron was always betting on that goddamned horse named Malicious?” Irene asked. “Always a long shot and it paid off every time.”

The next morning, Kate said it had been nice to see Irene, but “all she talks about are aches and pains and dead people.” Irene said it had been nice to see Kate, but “you’re the only one of her friends that I can stand.” Although she hadn’t met Cynthia McFadden, she didn’t like the sound of her. She bristled at Kate’s extreme interest in the young woman’s career. She occasionally asked longingly about my visits to Fenwick, wondering, “Who makes the beds?” I said everyone seemed to make his or her own . . . and if I was ever slow about it, Kate would just march in and make it. “That’s what I was afraid of,” said Irene. She returned only once more in her life to 244 East Forty-ninth Street.

I finished my Goldwyn biography in the late spring of 1988, a rocky moment in the history of my publishers, Alfred A. Knopf. The firm’s longtime standard-bearer, and my editor, Robert Gottlieb, had recently decided to leave the publishing house upon being offered the editorship of The New Yorker. A brilliant gentleman from London, Sonny Mehta, replaced him, and my book was assigned to one of Gottlieb’s protégées to edit. I handed over the twelve hundred—page manuscript on which I had worked for some eight years and made a plea few editors ever hear: “Please,” I begged, “cut anything you can out of this manuscript. I feel it’s about four hundred pages too long, so if anything even makes you pause for a moment, please mark it as material I might cut.”

Four months later the editor returned the manuscript to me—shorter by twelve pages. As she put the book into production, I sent this “edited” version to Irene. A day later she called to say, “You’ve sent me the wrong pages. I’ve got one of your rough drafts.” After I explained that this was the edited version, Irene said that was unacceptable. She strongly felt that the material was all there but that much of it was out of proportion. If that was the best Knopf was going to do with my book, she said, she would just have to edit the book herself. For the next ten days, she did just that, working it over word by word. Twice a day she would call outraged by something. “Zsa Zsa Gabor’s in your book, but no Pearl White!” she screamed one day, reminding me that I had left out the silent screen’s most famous cliff-hanging heroine. Her edited version had marginalia everywhere—all perfectly precise. When she had reached a paragraph I had written about Jon Hall, the star of Goldwyn’s production of The Hurricane, for example, she simply wrote in the margin: “Sonny Tufts,” a reference to a second-string leading man who also didn’t warrant much attention.

The Pierre was featuring a special chef that week she was playing editor, and Irene recommended that we sample his food one night in her apartment while discussing the manuscript. Over turbot with an intense lobster sauce, she pointed out stories that ran on for pages that should be condensed to paragraphs, paragraphs that should become sentences, and sentences that should be two-word mentions. When we reached the pages I had written about a terrible Goldwyn picture called A Song Is Born, I spoke of simply cutting most of it. Upon hearing that, Irene grabbed a piece of bread out of my hand and mopped her plate clean of the remaining sauce. “What made that sauce so good?” she asked rhetorically. Before I could speak, she provided her own answer: “Reduction.”

An editor at Knopf introduced me to the executrix of the Tennessee Williams estate—Maria Grenfell, Lady St. Just—who was then actively searching for a Williams biographer. This was a brass ring in nonfiction circles. Arguably America’s greatest playwright, (the debate still rages between pro-Williams and pro-O’Neill camps), Williams left a massive collection of unpublished material; and a well-researched, well-written life story of the man had not yet appeared. The Lady St. Just was a colorful character—reputedly Williams’s model for Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and a former actress who had married a Morgan Bank heir. Upon her longtime friend Tennessee’s death, she was left to oversee his literary matters. “I remember when she was working the streets,” Irene told me when I discussed my having dinner with her.

Our meeting was such a triumph that the next day the Lady St. Just literally pulled me by the hand to two different law offices to meet her co-executors and to arrange for my securing the necessary rights and permissions to the Williams archives. A lovely man and friend of mine named Lyle Leverich had been researching a Williams biography for years, working from authorization by Williams himself. But the Estate was trying to block him at every turn, including their ultimate threat that they would prohibit his quoting any Williams material. I figured I might be influential with the Estate in allowing Leverich to publish his work, knowing that I would have access to material he did not have and that my book would be published at least a decade later. After everything seemed to be arranged for me to write the official biography—all too quickly, I thought, especially after one of the attorneys showed me Leverich’s authorization and commented, “it’s not exactly the wine-soaked cocktail napkin Maria says it is”—I went to the Hotel Pierre bursting with my good news. “Congratulations!” Irene said upon learning of the offer. “Now run like hell.”

I didn’t have to sell the producer of A Streetcar Named Desire on the importance of my subject. But she felt compelled to tell me that my writing such a book would be like “entering a snake pit.” She suggested that I would never survive working with “that woman”—Maria St. Just—and that Tennessee Williams’s affairs were as big a “cesspool” after his death as they had been during his lifetime. I was happy to have somebody with whom I could discuss all aspects of the story before I signed a decade of my life away; and I made all the compelling counterarguments about the drama of Williams’s life. Irene listened to my earnest oral argument, staring at me through her glasses. At last, she closed the debate by saying, “Lousy third act.”

Before I left her that night, she urged me to discuss the subject with “your friend Kate.” Hepburn had, after all, played two of Tennessee Williams’s juiciest parts—Violet Venable and Amanda Wingfield; and he had written another, Hannah Jelkes in Night of the Iguana, for her. I stopped by 244 the next day. “I am afraid,” Kate said, “Irene’s right. Tennessee’s life was a nightmare, a total nightmare; and I don’t think you’ll ever wake up. You really don’t want to spend years with those people, his people.” Kate had just read the finished manuscript of Goldwyn—for which she unsolicitedly called my publishers and gave them an advertising blurb—and said, “That man was a pirate, but there was lift to his life. I didn’t much care when he died in real life, but I did when he died at the end of the book. I don’t think you’ll feel the same about Tennessee. His life was one long suicide. He dragged people down in the gutter with him, and I’m afraid he’ll drag you too.”

I rethought. But even before I could express my doubts to anyone, the Lady St. Just—of whom many joked she was “none of the three”—suddenly announced that she was rescinding her offer because she had heard that I was “incompetent.” Case closed. Once again, I was casting my net in the biographical waters.

I continued to put feelers out, and told the editor I had been assigned at Knopf that I was actively looking for a subject, another great American cultural figure but—because I had written about Perkins and Goldwyn—not somebody from the worlds of publishing or film. When she suggested Italian film director Luchino Visconti, I felt free to roam.

At the urging of Phyllis Grann, then head of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, I began to chase the rights to the papers of Charles Lindbergh. My pursuit took most of a year. Irene heard the idea and screamed, “Aaah, Goyishkeit!” But she saw all the dramatic possibilities of the story of the great hero who became a great victim and a great villain. “I don’t like him,” she said. “But I want to know more about him. And at my age, I can’t say that about too many people.”

Kate adored the idea before I could get it out of my mouth. “I can’t wait to read it,” she said. “It has everything—spectacle, tragedy, controversy, mystery, and a love story. You’ve got to do it.” I explained that the rights were complicated, as Lindbergh had evidently died prohibiting anyone’s entry to the papers for years after the death of his wife . . . and Anne Morrow Lindbergh was very much alive and well. I told Kate that I seemed to be making some inroads with the Lindbergh children, but Mrs. Lindbergh still held the key.

I said that was a good idea, and a generous one at that . . . and that we must all keep mum on the subject. “Oh, don’t worry about Phyllis,” Kate assured me. “She’s an absolute crypt. She’s walking around with all sorts of secrets. Of course, she’s losing her mind, so God only knows what she even remembers any longer.”

The next day Kate showed me her letter, which she had entrusted Cynthia to type. It was strong and concise; and we agreed it could only help. Just days after Kate mailed it, I learned that Mrs. Lindbergh was willing to meet me, the first sure sign that the permissions to write her late husband’s biography might be mine. Weeks later, they were.

Suddenly, I had unique access to some two thousand boxes of papers, the bulk of which were in Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University in New Haven, about forty miles down the turnpike from Fenwick. The headquarters for my work for the next few years would become Connecticut, and the time I would get to spend with Kate would increase and intensify.

Hepburn continued to become more public than she had in the past. She agreed to show up at benefits for the Actors’ Home in New Jersey, to accept an occasional fashion award (“Are you sure they didn’t mean Audrey?” I asked her while opening one such invitation, and she pushed an ice-cream cone in my face), and to be the guest of honor at the annual Planned Parenthood banquet, for which she wrote a long, moving speech. (I urged her to conclude her remarks with the statement, “I believe strongly in Planned Parenthood because I had the benefit of a mother and father who planned theirs.” But she dismissed it as “too corny.”) In 1990 she accepted one of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors, having refused the decoration several times. When I asked why she had finally agreed to take part in the ceremonies that year, she explained that she just couldn’t turn down George Stevens, Jr.—one of the founders of the award and the son of her former paramour—any longer. “And,” she said, “I was waiting until the Reagans were out of the White House, because I wanted nothing to do with either of them.”

She also began to allow documentary filmmakers into her life—into her houses and her history. She sometimes called the night before a shoot, ostensibly about something else but ultimately to discuss what she might talk about. Katharine Hepburn hardly needed coaching; but I think she was questioning the seemliness, at her age, of talking about her personal life, notably the one topic she had avoided most of her lire—Spencer Tracy. The primary reason she had long held out was Tracy’s widow. But Louise Tracy had died in 1983, and Kate had since come to meet their daughter, Susie. She took a real liking to her and repeatedly made a point of saying they were friends.

I gave one general piece of advice to Kate—that if she was about to discuss Spencer Tracy in an upcoming documentary, she should not be coy. Kate asked what I meant by that. I said that a lot of people for a long time had made certain assumptions about her relationship with him, but that until somebody heard something from her lips, it was hearsay. Only she, I said, knew her true feelings; and if she planned to “go public,” then she should be specific about them.

She asked how frank she should be. Coming from someone who had guarded her privacy so masterfully for so many decades, this question threw me. I could see that she was growing anxious—eager to impart but not to exploit. I suggested she make her comments more about herself than about Tracy, about how she felt. If you could, I asked, what would you say to him today? That, I explained, might show the audience what he meant to her, with twenty years of hindsight. That night she wrote a letter to Tracy, which allowed her to put some of her thoughts and feelings in perspective. To my amazement, she read it the next day—rather dramatically, as it turned out—on camera.

My friend Irene once said, “I liked Spence, but I never really understood him or what his life with Kate was about.” In many ways, neither did Kate. Her open letter to him was largely a litany of questions—Why couldn’t he sleep? What did he like to do? What were the demons he was battling? Why the “escape hatch” of alcoholism “to get away from the remarkable you? What was it, Spence?” Even more revealing, Kate added, “I meant to ask you.”

Spencer Bonaventure Tracy was born in Milwaukee on April 5, 1900, the second son of Carrie Brown, a Protestant turned Christian Scientist, and John Tracy, a hard-drinking Irish Catholic whose parents had been refugees from the Great Potato Famine. In one generation, the Tracys had become middle-class, middle-of-the-road Midwesterners, as John worked his way up to becoming general sales manager of a trucking company. According to Kate, who never met him, “he worked hard and drank hard” and made his two sons toe the line. Spencer often fell short.

Possessed of seemingly ordinary intelligence and looks, he stumbled through his youth, getting kicked out of several schools and serving a hitch in the navy before completing high school and entering Ripon College. He didn’t find himself until a dorm-mate introduced him to college dramatics. On the Ripon stage, Tracy proved to have a prodigious memory for dialogue and an utterly natural acting style. He suddenly had an identity on campus, doing something at which he excelled.

Road companies of Broadway hits often came to Milwaukee, and one provided Tracy his first glimpse of a professional theatrical production—Laurette Taylor in a wildly popular sentimental comedy, Peg o’My Heart. By the time the collegian saw the play, it had become Taylor’s war-horse, a role she had played on and off for a decade. Kate noted, “Spence always said it was the most exciting piece of theater he ever saw in his life.”

At the end of his first school year, Tracy leapt at an offer to join the Ripon debating team—because it meant a trip to New York City. There he not only saw more plays but he also auditioned for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Upon his acceptance, he dropped out of Ripon to study acting. His father’s unexpected approval of the decision came no doubt because Spencer was self-supporting, receiving a monthly pension as a veteran. He shared a small room with a friend from Milwaukee who was also taking classes at the American Academy, Pat O’Brien. He quickly picked up bit parts—including a nonspeaking role as one of the robots in the Theatre Guild production of R.U.R.

In 1923, Tracy graduated from the Academy and went on to small roles in summer stock. In White Plains, New York, he met Louise Treadwell, the leading lady in his repertory company, which dissolved after one season. When she was offered a similar position in another troupe in Cincinnati, she accepted—on the condition that they hire Spencer Tracy as her leading man. That September, they married.

Nine and a half months later, their first child was born—a son, John, who, they realized a year later, was totally deaf. While the boy’s condition remained a dark subject into which Hepburn herself seldom delved, she said, “Spencer felt responsible, for the rest of his life. It just didn’t seem possible to him that God should have brought such an innocent creature into the world that way, and, so, it must be his fault. This was his cross to bear, and when he could take it no longer, he drank to forget about it.” Kate’s few descriptions to me of Tracy’s marriage made it sound as though it had been based more on his gratitude toward his wire—for believing in him and his talent—than love, and that the Tracys’ lives were bound together by his feelings of indebtedness and guilt.

For a few years, Tracy found little solace in his career. He got a promising part in a forgettable play called A Royal Fandango, starring Ethel Barrymore and featuring a young Edward G. Robinson; but it quickly closed. (A framed playbill listing the dramatis personae—Ethel Barrymore at the top of the list and Spencer Tracy at the very bottom—sat on a bookcase in Kate’s bedroom.) When he sought comfort in bottles and brothels, his wife looked the other way.

After almost seven years of good enough performances in bad plays to keep getting cast again, Spencer Tracy received the lead role of Killer Mears in a prison drama called The Last Mile. It opened in February 1930, and the star became that year’s “overnight sensation,” receiving powerful notices in what became a hit play.

When Up the River proved to be a hit, Fox offered Tracy a five-year contract. The actor moved to Hollywood with his wife and son. He made two dozen films during that period, most of them forgettable. Unlike Katharine Hepburn, who became an instant star, Tracy followed the path of most studio players, who had to slog through scripts whose primary distinction was that they were ready to be filmed right away, thus fulfilling the studio-owned theaters’ need for new product. Tracy continued to drown his sorrows and to find solace in one-night stands, becoming known as one of the biggest drunks and womanizers in town. Louise Tracy revealed her concern publicly only when one of her husband’s affairs with a costar proved to be of greater significance. The Tracys separated, and he announced that he wanted to marry Loretta Young. Ultimately, she refused his offer, however, and Louise Tracy took her husband back.

His studio no longer felt the same. Despite Tracy’s consistently strong performances—notably in Preston Sturges’s production of The Power and the Glory—Fox wearied of his drunken escapades and resultant bad press. In one picture, he went missing so long that they had to replace him. In April 1935, Fox let his contract lapse.

MGM wasted no time in offering him a richer one. With it came better material and bigger costars. Within the next five years, Tracy had worked with Clark Gable twice (in San Francisco and Test Pilot) and won his back-to-back Oscars. He also made films—and had affairs—with Myrna Loy (during Whipsaw) and Joan Crawford (during Mannequin). Despite the endless gossip about Tracy’s escapades, most people in Hollywood contended that he had become the finest actor in movies. Louise contented herself with her ceremonial role as Mrs. Spencer Tracy, which now included caring for their second child as well, the daughter named Louise whom they called Susie.

In 1941 Tracy reluctantly agreed to appear in an MGM remake of the classic story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He had hoped to play the dual role with a minimum of makeup, allowing the characterizations of the dueling personalities to come from within. The studio and the director, Victor Fleming, saw things differently. The production was an unhappy experience for Tracy, proving to be his biggest flop and one of the few times he received poor reviews. His only consolation was a love affair that bloomed between him and his leading lady, Ingrid Bergman. The actress had appeared in but a handful of American movies; but, like Hepburn—with her healthy, scrubbed looks and distinctive voice—she had a meteoric rise in Hollywood. Although Bergman was married and a mother, her relationship with Tracy continued beyond their time on the set together. He soon left for Florida to film The Yearling; and when that picture shut down, the lovers picked up where they had left off.

I learned over the years that Kate had a rather trustworthy memory of most important moments in her life, but she was genuinely vague concerning those things about which she chose not to know. Of that moment just before she had met Spencer Tracy, she would later write in her memoirs about the details of his performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, how he had been so embarrassed by the theatrical accoutrements demanded for the performance that he used to ride to and from the set in a limousine with the shades drawn. “Ingrid Bergman played the whore,” Kate added correctly; “she won an award, I think.” About that, Kate thought wrong, though she was clearly trying to bend over backwards to give credit to an actress she greatly admired, even where it was undue. Bergman did not receive the first of her three Oscars until Gaslight, a few years later.

Woman of the Year began filming in late August of 1941. As Joe Mankiewicz remembered, “This was the biggest picture on the lot, the one everyone in town was talking about. Of course, anything with Spence was big; and Kate had just come back in a big way. But she knew she was still skating on thin ice. One picture a new career does not make.” As if all that were not enough to keep rumor mills grinding, Kate had selected the director for Woman of the Year herself; and instead of attempting to duplicate her recent success with George Cukor, she chose to fall back again on George Stevens.

And, briefly, back again into his arms. Although Tracy and Cukor would become intimate friends over the years, Hepburn—functioning as a quasi-producer on Woman of the Year—felt it was essential that Tracy feel “completely at ease” with the director. She said, “I just thought he should have a big, manly man on his team—somebody who could talk baseball.”

Within days, however, something extraordinary happened on their MGM soundstage. The very romance depicted in the movie—the unpretentious, plain-talking guy falling for the fancy, hyperactive cosmopolite—played out before the very eyes of the entire cast and crew. At first, producer Mankiewicz wasn’t sure if he was imagining things or not; but with each day of the production, he said, more and more people watching the rushes of the film noticed as well. “It’s the goddamnedest thing,” he asserted years later. “It’s there in the finished movie for the whole world to see.”

Indeed, apart from their great acting ability, Tracy had never appeared so attractive in the movies before, with a genuine spring in his flat-footed walk. And Hepburn had never appeared so demure, so sexy. She had abandoned many of the mannerisms from her ingenue days and flowered into a striking contemporary woman. “Hell,” Mankiewicz explained, “she was gorgeous, and they were in love . . . and it’s still pretty goddamned exciting to watch!” The scenes in which Sam Craig first confronts Tess Harding in their editor’s office, as she’s adjusting her stocking, then when she catches him pursuing her, and later when she agrees to sit in on her first baseball game remain classic moments for just that reason.

Woman of the Year was a romantic comedy, the likes of which had not been seen before. It was modern and sophisticated, with a female character at least as accomplished as the male, strong but also vulnerable. Unlike Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday or even Jean Arthur in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Hepburn believed it was important to show that Tess Harding was “not trying to be a man. She wasn’t even trying to make it in a man’s world. She was like me, someone who was making it without thinking about it, working in a man’s world, succeeding. And like my mother—who held her own with men without compromising her femininity.”

Actually, the film concludes with a great compromise on the issue of feminism, a battle over which Kate never completely forgave herself for capitulating. During the course of the screenplay, Tess and Sam marry, though she continues to be more professional than uxorial, which ultimately sends Sam packing. Upon hearing the vows at her father’s second marriage, however, she comes to appreciate her own nuptials with a renewed belief in the sanctity of a relationship built on the principles of give-and-take. Originally, Woman of the Year was meant to conclude with Tess at another baseball game, having become an even more ardent fan than her husband. But in 1941—“when men were men and women were still pretty much at home,” Kate explained—the executives didn’t feel that would satisfy the audience. They didn’t want Hepburn to appear to be denigrating the vast majority of non-career women.

So a new finale was fashioned—a nearly farcical, largely improvised scene in which Tess attempts to make breakfast for her new husband and proves she can’t even make toast or coffee. It was a gentle form of comeuppance, a means of allowing, as Kate explained, “all the women in the audience to say, ‘Even I can do that,’ and all the men to say, ‘I’m pretty lucky with the wife I’ve got.’ And that Katharine Hepburn, she may be high and mighty, but what she really needs is the love of a good man.”

Over the years, many would express their admiration of Hepburn because she had forged her career without compromise. This angered more than amused her, because she believed it was patently false and denied the struggles she had waged. “I had to compromise left and right,” she said. “But I was careful to choose my battles. Fight the important ones. The ones I thought I could win. I often lost and was often proved wrong.” No question—she compromised plenty. But generally, she stooped only to conquer.

Woman of the Year was a huge hit, coming out shortly after the United States entered World War II, when women in large numbers were, for the first time, working outside the house. The film provided a glimpse of the feminism that the world would be seeing more of over the next half century. More important, it was great fun. The film’s basic formula, enhanced by the genuine chemistry of its stars, would provide the template for another eight pictures in which Tracy and Hepburn would appear together over the next twenty-five years, making them the most enduring romantic screen team in history. “Christ,” Kate said one day with a belly laugh, “I think we were together longer than Abbott and Costello.”

Tracy always got top billing. “That’s the way it should have been,” Kate explained. “I was just coming back when we started working together. Spence was tops in his field and had never been away. I was just damned grateful he was willing to work with me.” At one point, Joe Mankiewicz had discussed the credits with Tracy, asking, “What about women and children first?”

In my first conversation with Kate—back when I was interviewing her in 1983—I reminded her of her quotation about what Astaire and Rogers each brought to their partnership and asked what she might say in substituting the names Tracy and Hepburn. “Oh, I’m not sure it worked that way,” she said. “I think he was so steady and I was so volatile, that we exasperated each other. And we challenged each other, and that was the fun of it. But the truth is, I think we just looked good together.” By the end of filming Woman of the Year, Hepburn and Tracy were, in the phrase of the day, “keeping company.” He never really went home again to his ranch in Encino.

Hepburn surrendered to love as she never had before. At thirty-four years of age, with a string of broken hearts behind her and any number of would-be suitors all around, she was—she told me my first night at Fenwick—“hit over the head with a cast-iron skillet.” Hardly a pretty boy, Spencer Tracy had the plain, rugged looks that appealed to Hepburn—“manly” was the word she used time and again, as she did to describe John Ford and George Stevens. Big, redheaded, and completely natural—rather like, as I saw in photographs, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn. She believed, without qualification, that Spencer Tracy was simply the best actor in movies. “A baked potato,” she often said, referring to his talent—absolutely plain, basic, and essential. His personal life was well known to everybody in Hollywood, and his appeal to former leading ladies certainly contributed to his being attractive to Hepburn.

I sensed that what got to her most was his essential neediness. Tracy exuded a sad loneliness that verged on the tragic. And that brought out the missionary in Hepburn. After living thirty-five years entirely, as she said, “for me, me, me,” she realized it was time to start living for somebody else. For the first time, she admitted, it dawned on her that she could love somebody for what she might give more than for what she might get.

She almost consciously decided to devote herself to his wants and needs, often at the expense of sublimating her desires and suppressing her personality. Hepburn—ever striving and often strident, irrepressible to the point of irritating, exhilarating, and sometimes exhausting—assumed the most difficult role of her life. As Tracy’s lover and companion, she became supportive in ways that sometimes forced her to be servile, patient to an extreme that often left her patronized, and devoted until she was sometimes reduced to a life in denial. She was periodically subjected to his humiliations, occasionally in front of others. On the set or in a living room, she often sat, literally, at his feet.

They had their most wonderful times together—the best of which, Kate said, were just being quietly alone in each other’s company. They lived like married people: eating dinner together, meat and potatoes; reading the Sunday newspaper; taking drives up the coast; painting. Never especially comfortable with his emotions, he could be tender and affectionate when they were by themselves or with their most trusted friends—George Cukor, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, later Bogart and Bacall. They kept separate residences and generally arrived at social events under separate cover. He spoke to his wife regularly.

In an industry where gossip passed for gospel, a brood of columnists had come to wield great power, their word spreading around the world. Louella Parsons and then Hedda Hopper and Sheilah Graham, as well as a string of imitators, were, therefore, feared and fawned over. Hepburn and Tracy generally ignored them. In most cases, such failure to truckle to what Kate called “the rag hags” provoked nasty, sometimes career-crushing, columns. Strangely, Hepburn and Tracy were left alone, with little ever appearing in any of the columns that linked the two outside the studio walls. This tacit hostility proved the easiest way for each side to deal with its obvious contempt for the other’s behavior.

I once suggested to Kate that part of the reason the female gossip columnists ignored her relationship with Tracy was that they secretly admired her for it and for the way she sustained herself over the years in a man’s world. Later in their careers, Hedda Hopper approached Hepburn at a Hollywood function with her hand held out. “Isn’t it time we bury the hatchet and become friends?” the big-hatted reporter asked. “Oh, Hedda,” Hepburn replied, “we’ve gone this long without speaking to each other. Why spoil a perfectly good enmity?”

In the days and decades after Woman of the Year ended production, friends of Tracy and Hepburn—and ultimately their fans—spoke with great authority about how they could never marry. His wife would never grant him a divorce, they said; Catholic and guilt-ridden about his son’s deafness, he would never seek one. But there was one more factor seldom considered, which Kate insisted was paramount. As she told me that first night in Fenwick, “I never wanted to marry Spencer Tracy.”

It has also been suggested that Hepburn was always attracted to men who were, if not married, at least, somehow attached to other women. There’s truth to that notion. But I think it was more that the men to whom she was drawn were unmarriageable. Living “like a man,” as Kate so often asserted—by herself, paying her own bills, and ultimately, answering to nobody—she liked that arrangement and could afford to live that way.

A leading lady’s career seldom extended longer than a decade, which forced many of them into peculiar circumstances. Most stars suddenly found themselves living in a style to which they quickly became accustomed—only to find themselves unable to maintain it for long. That partly explained why practically all of them married repeatedly, at least once for money. (Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Greer Garson, and Jennifer Jones all counted business tycoons among their multiple husbands.) Not Hepburn. Luddy was certainly there to launch her career; and Howard Hughes helped her enter the stratosphere. But she left them so that she would not be further indebted. She wanted less from her men, not more.

With Spencer Tracy, she was able to take that way of living one step further—appreciating one intense, intimate relationship over a quarter of a century. He and Katharine Hepburn experienced the ups and downs of any married couple; but in never sealing their arrangement legally, they were able to retain an element of unreality in the relationship, a false quality based on neither of them being locked in. In many ways, their time together had the feeling of a “reunion” more than a union, because there was always this escape hatch through which either of them could pass whenever he or she pleased. Tracy periodically slipped out to fight personal demons, resulting in drinking binges and sexual conquests; Hepburn often packed her bags too—for professional conquests, acting roles. It quickly became apparent that even her briefest absences could be enough to set off a cycle of insobriety.

Upon the completion of Woman of the Year, for example, they went their separate ways. Against his wishes, Hepburn honored an agreement she had made with the Theatre Guild to appear in a new play by Philip Barry called Without Love. While she took it out for a pre-Broadway run, Tracy brooded his way through an MGM production of John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. When word that he was mixing alcohol with barbiturates reached Hepburn, she felt that she had to suspend the tour in order to spend the summer in California with him. She told the Guild she would return to New York for the play’s Broadway opening.

In the summer of 1942, a project intended for Tracy and Hepburn came along. It was the most anomalous of their joint vehicles, but under the circumstances, she considered it a godsend. Donald Ogden Stewart, who had so successfully adapted her two Philip Barry plays for the screen, had just written a screenplay based on a novel by I. A. R. Wylie called Keeper of the Flame. It was a melodramatic political thriller, capturing much of the tenor of the times, in which a journalist tracks down the zealously protective widow of a great American hero—Lindbergh-like in some ways—whose Yankee Doodle patriotism turns out to be a front for fascism. It was not difficult for Hepburn to press George Cukor, always eager to prove he could direct drama as well as romantic comedy, into service. She convinced Tracy that this would be a wonderful way to make a worthwhile political statement.

Although the film was meant to emulate Hitchcock—with its whiffs of Rebecca and Suspicion—the material proved to be far from Cukor’s metier. Heavy-handed attempts at psychology and sociology tended to overwhelm the antifascist message of Keeper of the Flame. The film succeeded only in allowing Tracy and Hepburn to work together again and to spend time together in a house she rented in Malibu. At night, she would often drive him all the way back into town, to a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Intense romantic involvements have occurred on motion-picture sets since the days of D. W Griffith. Most prove to be like shipboard romances, usually ending as the cruise does. By the close of the summer of 1942, the Hepburn-Tracy love affair seemed fated to similar shoals. For months her return to Broadway in Without Love distressed her, torn as she was between an old commitment to the theater friends who had resuscitated her career and her new commitment to the one man who, she said, “taught me to love.” Tracy made it plain that he wished she would abandon the play.

At that moment, Louise Tracy, who had not seen her husband stray from home this long since his affair with Loretta Young, played her hand. Instead of folding her cards as she almost did nearly a decade earlier, she finessed her way into the public eye with her husband at her side. That fall the University of Southern California announced the creation of the John Tracy Clinic, an organization dedicated to the deaf and their families, largely underwritten by Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Tracy. Louise Tracy’s commitment to the cause was never less than genuine. Kate found her timing of the announcement, however, suspect—forcing, as it did, Spencer to play the role of admiring husband and reinforcing his feelings of guilt as a father.

At the same time, Tracy complained that he had never known a woman who kept so many of her old flames ignited—aflicker if not in full blaze—as Hepburn. Leland Hayward periodically checked in with career advice; and after divorcing Margaret Sullavan, he said his losing Kate was the great regret in his life. George Stevens remained friendly with her; and almost until the end of his life, John Ford spoke of retiring to Ireland, taking Kate with him. Howard Hughes told Irene Selznick that he considered his inability to persuade Kate to marry him “the biggest mistake” in his life.

Hughes maintained contact with Hepburn up to the very last years of his life. Until then, he continued to telephone her. At first the calls were ostensibly about The Philadelphia Story; but he kept ringing long after there was no business to conduct. A decade later, for example, Kate suddenly found herself looking for temporary lodging in Los Angeles; and during one of their calls, Hughes recommended the former Charles Boyer house, which RKO had bought from the actor a few years earlier as part of the settlement in terminating his contract. It was sitting empty; and, because Hughes owned RKO at that time, technically, he owned the house. He also offered Kate free run of the RKO prop and furniture departments.

Early one evening in 1951, after most people at the studio had gone home, she showed up at the RKO warehouse. She was wandering down a long aisle, looking over some lamps and vases, she said, when she heard a familiar voice call her name. “Howard? Is that you?” she replied, as a hatted figure in khakis and a white shirt approached her, a figure who might easily have passed for a propman—looking ordinary in every way, except for the handkerchief he held close to his mouth in the dusty hall. They hugged and made small talk, then sat for a moment—she on a plain, wooden chair, he (Kate insisted this was true) on a gold-painted throne. “Howard,” she laughed, “I see you haven’t lost your flair for the dramatic.”

Hughes asked if “everything was right” with her; and Hepburn said it was. She made it clear that both her career and her relationship with Tracy were on track. “There was nothing terribly dramatic about the meeting,” Kate recalled, “except that it happened at all, and that by then he was clearly becoming this eccentric figure. He was going around the bend, politically speaking, and, I suppose, in other ways as well. Very anti-Communist.”

Hepburn said they were happy to see each other; but, she added, “he seemed sad to me. I remember thinking there was something pathetic about the meeting, that he seemed so . . . detached,” she said, at last, reaching for the word. “Howard said I should just tell the warehouse supervisor what I wanted and that it would be delivered in the morning.” She thanked him, he left, and, said Kate, “That was the last time I saw him face to face.” They did continue to talk, with decreasing frequency; and she got reports of his increasing eccentricity through his doctor, Lawrence Chaffin. During one of Hughes’s last calls, he asked Kate what time it was. “Four o’clock,” she said, drowsily looking at her clock. “Day or night?” he asked.

And why, “for Pete’s sake,” Tracy kept asking Kate, was Luddy still in the picture? Like Hughes before him, Tracy didn’t understand why this ex-husband still had the license to pop in on them in Fenwick and why Kate had never divorced him properly in a United States courthouse. “I didn’t realize until then,” Kate later admitted, that “Luddy was a kind of a security blanket for me. And Spence made me see that keeping him in my life like that, I was leading him on. I was still being horribly selfish to him. Not letting him get on with his life.” In September 1942, Dr. Hepburn appeared in Superior Court in Hartford on behalf of his daughter, as a judge granted a divorce to Katharine and Ludlow Ogden Smith. Within months, Luddy had taken a second wife.

Only when the Theatre Guild applied its heaviest pressure—which included the threat of a lawsuit—did Hepburn agree to honor her vow to take Without Love to Broadway. Neither the play nor the critical response was especially good, but she played sixteen sold-out weeks to thunderous ovations. Increasingly, during those four months, Hepburn realized that the adulation of thousands of people did not mean as much to her as the adoration she sought from one man. Because of her growing devotion to Spencer Tracy, she did not set foot on a legitimate stage for the rest of the decade.

At one point, she thought she might retest the waters, by getting Tracy back to the theater. She arranged for him to meet playwright Robert Sherwood and accompanied him to the East Coast as he agreed to appear in a play at the war’s end called The Rugged Path. But this overwrought and underthought drama about a newspaperman who goes into battle proved to be an unsatisfactory vehicle, despite Tracy’s powerful central performance. He never appeared on stage again.

By then, Tracy considered himself a movie actor and nothing more. Benefiting from the number of stars in military service—Gable, Stewart, Fonda, and Tyrone Power, to name a few—he became one of the major attractions of the decade. He took the lead in at least one picture every year into the 1950s and maintained his following with such wartime efforts as A Guy Named Joe, The Seventh Cross, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Hepburn’s output during the same period was a mere fraction of that, as she put her personal life—supporting the man she loved—ahead of her career, turning down many good roles along the way.

Her only appearance in all of 1943, for example, was a cameo in Stage Door Canteen, a fable of sorts about the sacrifices everybody was making for the war effort. It featured dozens of walk-ons, including Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Harpo Marx, and Ed Wynn. Hepburn was asked to deliver the morale-building moral of the film, a pep talk meant to inspire the junior hostesses at the canteen, to say nothing of the largely female audiences across the country. Her only film the next year was in Dragon Seed, based on Pearl S. Buck’s bestselling novel. As Jade, a Chinese farmer’s wife, her high cheekbones allowed her to look only slightly more Asiatic than her costars Walter Huston, Hurd Hatfield, Agnes Moorehead, and Aline MacMahon. In 1946 she appeared in a minor contemporary melodrama—directed by Vincente Minnelli and featuring Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum—called Undercurrent. And the next year she portrayed Clara Wieck Schumann opposite Paul Henreid and Robert Walker, as Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, in Song of Love—another of her lesser pictures. It is one of the few times Hepburn appeared as a mother in the movies, tending to a noisy brood of seven. In the film, she did, however, display genuine virtuosity at the piano, the result of months of practice at a keyboard.

Such was the baloney she sandwiched between her pictures with Spencer Tracy that decade. Even those pictures were mixed in quality. In an effort to recapture the magic that had brought them together in the first place, Hepburn got Tracy to appear in a film version of Without Love. Don Stewart, who had successfully translated two other Barry works to the screen for Hepburn, punched up the badinage of the script, knowing he had Hollywood’s most skilful sparring partners delivering the lines. This rendition was diverting at best, rather silly and a little slow.

The next Tracy and Hepburn picture digressed even farther from the career path they had set for themselves. The Sea of Grass, based on a novel by Conrad Richter, was an intense domestic drama set against the plains of the New Mexico Territory. In the film, Hepburn leaves her rough-hewn cattle baron of a husband to have an affair in Denver with his rival, a lawyer played by Melvyn Douglas. “Nobody ever sets out to make a bad picture,” Kate later said of the experience. “We really believed in this. Or, at least, we believed we believed in it.” The project came, unfortunately, at a time when Tracy was drinking heavily, spending night after night wending his way from one Hollywood watering hole to another—The Trocadero, Ciro’s, The Mocambo, The Players—until he’d pass out, somehow awakening in a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Knowing a strong director can occasionally mask a weak script with a lot of style and scenery, producer Pan Berman hired the most promising young director on either coast, Elia Kazan—the enfant terrible from the Group Theatre who had recently triumphed in Hollywood with his film version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, upon his arrival at MGM, “Gadg” (short for “Gadget,” a nickname he acquired in his youth because he had always been handy and useful, a fixer) Kazan learned that the gritty realism he had hoped to bring to this picture was being overruled. The studio had already decided on Walter Plunkett’s fancy costumes and process-screen shots on a soundstage instead of playing scenes on location.

Rather than challenge authority—or quit—Kazan chose to settle into luxurious Malibu surroundings with his family. Before he even began shooting, he threw in the artistic towel and passively directed the piece, giving the studio exactly what it wanted and nothing more. He would return to New York ashamed of the job, only to proceed directly to the works for which he would become justly famous, such Broadway milestones as A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman. Several years later, he would return to Hollywood with more artistic integrity, directing such bold films as Gentleman’s Agreement, Pinky, Viva Zapata!, and On the Water-front. At the time, Hepburn was grateful just to be working with Tracy on a project that went so smoothly. But in retrospect, she said, “I wish Gadg had put up more of a fight. I argued with him plenty as it was, but he never really engaged . . . and for me that’s part of the process of moviemaking. If he had, we’d have had a better picture.”

Kate was a lifelong liberal who publicly spoke out against the Communist witch-hunts in the late forties and early fifties; and one day, I had to ask how she felt about Elia Kazan’s role as one of the most famous show-business personalities to “name names” during that period. “Look, I can’t blame anyone for saying things so that he can keep working,” she said. “But when somebody says things that keep other people from working, he has crossed a line. Gadg did just that; and I always felt he could have found a way to move on with his career without hurting others. I felt he was a man of enormous talent but very little character. I felt that during Sea of Grass, and I was reminded of that experience during the Mc-Carthy period.”

The year after The Sea of Grass, Tracy and Hepburn reunited onscreen for more standard fare, State of the Union. Ironically, the project had not been intended for either of them. The picture, based on the Pulitzer Prize—winning play by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, was made by Liberty Films, a production company owned in part by the movie’s director, Frank Capra. In fact, Capra had envisioned reteaming his award-winning leads from his groundbreaking comedy It Happened One Night. Clark Gable was meant to play Grant Matthews, a Republican running for President; and Claudette Colbert was meant to play his estranged wife, Mary, who agrees to stand by his side to boost his chances. When she feels she has lost her husband altogether to a scheming newspaper heiress—masterfully played by Angela Lansbury—Mary blows her top at a dinner, haranguing the politicians present for surrendering their values. Nobody is more affected by her words than Grant. Upon realizing that he has forsaken everything he ever cared about, he withdraws from the race.

MGM would not make Gable available, but they eventually invested in Liberty Films and offered Spencer Tracy instead. Colbert was never thrilled with the material, and up until a few days before shooting was to begin, she threw several deal-breaking conditions at them—including her refusal ever to work after five in the afternoon.

At the eleventh hour, Hepburn stepped in. She announced that she was completely familiar with the script and was prepared to play the role at a moment’s notice. “I thought it would be wonderful to work with Capra,” she said, “and I’d get to work with Spence again.” More to the point, she had seen Tracy preparing himself psychologically for the part, and she feared his disappointment if it were scrapped. Sensing his anxiety, Hepburn felt the downtime would send him around the bend. Hepburn called Colbert, whom she liked on- and off-screen, and said, “Look, Claudette, you should know that they’re about to replace you in this picture.” Colbert said, “Kate, you’re welcome to it.”

The film plays to this day—with Hepburn’s first name misspelled as “Katherine” in the credits—as a hybrid. The style of sentimental and patriotic “Capra-corn” never completely meshed with the more sophisticated Tracy-Hepburn banter. While the film won no prizes, it reminded audiences then that no two movie actors performed better in tandem than Tracy and Hepburn. The public came to consider it an event whenever they partnered; and State of the Union reminded the stars that romantic comedy was their long suit.

With that in mind, Hepburn and Tracy sprang to new heights the next year, in their sixth picture together, again under the direction of George Cukor. Adam’s Rib is the story of a feminist attorney defending a dumb blonde who has shot her philandering husband. She finds herself coming up against her husband, a bright assistant district attorney who has been assigned to prosecute the case. The script—by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon—crackled with repartee in both the bedroom and the courtroom and included some feminist arguments that sound progressive fifty years later. Hepburn, in her early forties, and Tracy, almost fifty, continued to “look good together,” as Kate said. Because every line they uttered had been perfectly pitched to their key, they seemed to be providing glimpses of their off-camera life. Occasional unscripted improvisational moments—nicknames, swats on the backside, funny looks at each other—did exactly that. In so doing, Tracy and Hepburn became iconic as a twosome—smart, successful, supportive, and still sexy.

While Hepburn continued to boss people around on the set—questioning any detail that offended her—her motives proved less and less selfish. Since 1941, her primary concern was always Tracy’s comfort. He seldom argued with directors—simply delivering his lines, then leaving the set. If he had any strong objections, he never even had to voice them. Kate would fight his battles to the bitter end or until he yanked her chain and called her off.

For all her assertiveness, Kate’s interests were what she thought was best for the picture. “Now, I have always felt that moviemaking is about the survival of the fittest, but it’s never about just one person,” she explained one day in her living room in New York. “It’s a collaborative medium, but it’s not a democracy. And I always considered myself pretty bright with a good sense of what worked with an audience and what didn’t. So I would speak my mind. But after I had my say, I knew to shut up. I listened to the good strong directors . . . and I learned from them. I was smart enough to know that if everybody around me looked good, then I looked good.”

There was no better illustration of Hepburn’s philosophy than on Adam’s Rib, especially in the development of one of the supporting characters, the dizzy defendant, Doris Attinger. Hepburn, Tracy, and George Cukor were all besotted with Judy Holliday, an actress making a huge splash on Broadway in Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday. Holliday, who had kicked around the theater and even made a few film appearances, brought heart and soul to her role in the hit play, making something unique out of what might have been just another dumb-blonde role. Harry Cohn had secured the film rights of the play as a possible showcase for his leading lady, Rita Hayworth. It had not occurred to him to cast Judy Holliday, whom he never considered glamorous enough to be a film star.

The stars, writers, and director of Adam’s Rib set out to prove him wrong. Not only did they offer her the role of Doris in their movie but they offered to beef it up, enough so that it would be better than any screen test Harry Cohn might make of her, which he refused to make anyway. While filming Holliday’s close-ups in Adam’s Rib, Hepburn remained on the set even when she was off-camera—a courtesy most big stars seldom extended—to provide moral support. Her generosity didn’t end there.

Hepburn suggested to Cukor that in shooting Holliday’s key scene, he do some big close-ups of her that wouldn’t even end up in the picture. For the rest of the scene, he recommended shooting with Hepburn’s back to the camera. “Everybody knew what I looked like,” Kate explained. “This way he could ‘present’ Judy, the way he had presented me in A Bill of Divorcement.”

Then Hepburn went to Howard Stickling, the publicity director at MGM, who leaked to the press some misinformation she had fed him, tidbits hinting that “Kate and Spencer are certainly burned because Judy Holliday was stealing the picture.” Once the rumors began to circulate, Harry Cohn asked if he might see some of the Adam’s Rib footage. Cukor sent him an entire scene shot and edited—complete with the unnecessary “ravishing” shots of Judy Holliday. Cohn promptly cast her in the role she had created on Broadway, assigned George Cukor to direct, and Born Yesterday proved to be one of the great successes of 1950. Competing that year against Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard and Bette Davis for All About Eve (both in “comeback” roles)—to say nothing of Hepburn, who was not even nominated for Adam’s Rib—Judy Holliday won the Academy Award as Best Actress. The success of Adam’s Rib was great enough to let Kate breathe easily for a moment, about both Spencer Tracy and her career.

Putting her work in second place during these years had left Hepburn with a lot of time on her hands. She used many of the spare hours to deepen friendships with several older actresses, especially Ethel Barrymore and Constance Collier. Just because she was not performing so much, she realized, was no reason not to keep practicing. Several hours a week she read and rehearsed the great plays with the great ladies of the theater, especially Miss Collier. Hepburn devoted herself to the role of Rosalind in As You Like It for a production the Theatre Guild was mounting. They rehearsed for a few weeks in New York, previewed on the road, then opened at the Cort Theatre at the end of January 1950. The reviews ranged from acceptable to wonderful; and everyone granted that Katharine Hepburn was the only movie star of her caliber working on a stage, performing Shakespeare at that. “I just felt I was getting flabby,” Kate said of the experience, “and this toned me up.”

Predictably, Tracy sank into a drunken depression. He had the willpower to sober up for his appearances in Malaya and Father of the Bride (with Elizabeth Taylor playing his daughter); and he visited Hepburn in a few of the towns on her tour. But before her departure and during her run, he was drinking harder than ever, often into a stupor.

Whenever Kate spoke to me about Spencer Tracy, I couldn’t help thinking he was a textbook alcoholic and she a classic enabler. It pained me to think of her stuck in a role of such powerlessness. One night, after we had both sipped several Scotches by the fireplace in Fenwick, she told me to “give the fire a kick.” Colorful sparks sprayed from the saltwater-soaked logs. As I returned to my chair, I asked, without quite facing her, “Did anyone ever think of Alcoholics Anonymous?”

“Of course,” she said. “I did.” But she wanted me to understand that AA was quite new and mysterious back then. She spoke of it as smoke-filled little rooms with “winos.” “Spencer Tracy was the biggest star in the world,” she said, “and I don’t think he would have been anonymous there for very long. And news of this sort would have killed his career.” Kate said she had investigated several private hospitals, where famous people could dry out in seclusion. “But he could control his drinking when he wanted to control his drinking,” she explained. “And as long as it didn’t interfere with his work, he didn’t think he had a problem. And as long as I was there for him, he seemed to be okay.” In fact, during that period when Kate was returning to the stage, he told a few friends that he was trying to clean up his act for fear that she would walk out on him for good.

She proceeded to describe a fiendish night at the Beverly Hills Hotel. While Kate was trying to put Tracy to bed, he smacked the back of his hand across her face. She said he was so drunk she believed he neither knew that he’d done it nor that he’d remember. Dignity prevented her from telling him the next day—not hers so much as protecting his. She made her separate peace, privately forgiving him but never forgetting.

Then I remembered Kate’s telling me how uncomfortable Tracy had always been at Fenwick. He found the clannish Hepburns—all well-educated, opinionated, and outspoken—so different from his own family. Additionally, he could never appreciate the simple wonders of nature there and the happy solitude it could provide. And in that moment, when Kate voiced her passion for this deeply troubled man, I realized that she was not, in fact, the victim I had supposed. I saw that she possessed the one trait most long-suffering spouses of alcoholics lacked: She ultimately took care of herself. Indeed, returning to the theater had not been strictly a professional decision. Even with Tracy’s periods of boozing and brawling, she had the wherewithal to take her leave and perform Shakespeare. She knew too well that “one man in his time plays many parts,” and she had learned to go off—whether it was to Fenwick or to Broadway—and play hers.

“I have a sense that Spencer Tracy was raised in a rather tough household with a hard-drinking father, a guy who probably wasn’t very happy with his lot in life and took it out on his wife and kids. He probably got drunk and loud and knocked them all around a bit. And he probably told Spencer that nothing he did was right, that he was good for nothing, that he was pretty worthless. And so young Spencer hid out as much as he could in his dreams—dreaming of getting out in the world, of being somebody. And every time he tried to express that, his father squashed him like a bug and said, ‘Who do you think you are? Don’t you know, you’re not very bright, you’re not very strong, you’re not very good-looking. You’re worthless.’

“And yet he held on to the dreamy part of his life and made his way into the theater, where he married the first woman who really smiled upon him. And just when things started to break right for him, his baby came into the world deaf. And so, of course, he thinks, ‘My father was right. I am worthless. And who did I think I was trying to find any kind of life in the theater with a family?’ And so, with his genetic predisposition, he drank, and he kept trying to cut himself off from them. He took up with a lot of women, because that made him feel attractive and powerful for a while, and it put a wedge between him and his wife and children. And it all became a vicious cycle, making his worthlessness a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so he drank some more.

“But he kept hanging on to the dream, and lo and behold, he made it and he made it really big. But because he ‘knew’ he was worthless, he couldn’t attach too much importance to all the fame and fortune that fell upon him. What did the world know? And so while he loved getting lost in his roles, he always felt unjustly rewarded for doing such artistic work, something not quite manly. There seemed to be something wrong with the system, something basically wrong with life, rewarding a worthless wretch like him. And so he drank some more.

“And then you came along, and you were the best and most beautiful creature he had ever seen. You got high on life. And he couldn’t quite believe that somebody like you could be interested in somebody like him; and he figured he could never keep up with the likes of you. And so he often tried to tear you down, squash your good nature. He made fun of your family and your endless enthusiasm. He tried to cut you down to size. And when he couldn’t do that, he started to realize that maybe he wasn’t so worthless to have kept somebody like you hanging in there. But periodically, he’d find that too hard to believe, and so he’d drink some more. Or, you would abandon him. You’d go off on location or go off and do a play. And he’d say to himself, ‘See, I told you I was worthless.’ And so he’d drink some more.

Kate, poker-faced, just rose from the couch. We turned out the lights and walked up the stairs without saying a word, her bad foot clomping behind on the bare wooden steps. When we reached the top, she came into my bedroom to turn down the bed. By then, she looked stunned, even a little wounded. We hugged good night; and, as she headed for the door, she spoke at last.