Tracy agreed. “I like to believe the audience will gradually accept more and demand more; then the screen will give it to them. That’s the tendency now, don’t you think?”
“You speak of the audience,” said Erskine, “and I admit that theirs is the controlling influence, but why shouldn’t screen actors of the first rank demand something too? In other arts—architecture, sculpture, painting—the great artists set the pace for the public.”
“In those other arts,” Tracy replied, “the leaders can wait for the public to catch up. But the actor must speak to his public immediately during the performance. However, there is no reason why we shouldn’t exercise more leadership than we do. I believe there is a gradual pressure in that direction. But I think it should be leadership in artistic ideals, rather than in political or economic or social theories, since pictures are the art of the people and should give a real portrait of them rather than of the individual artist.”
“Shouldn’t a film give more than a portrait of individual characters in themselves? Shouldn’t we be able to see from a number of individual screen characters something that we’d all recognize as a true account of life, the general principles of it, the inevitable relations of cause and consequence?”
“And you don’t think the screen gives those principles?”
“I don’t. Do you?”
“I wouldn’t say the screen is entirely false to life, but I agree that it sometimes dodges the deeper principles, sometimes soft-pedals what you call cause and effect.”
“To that extent,” asked Erskine, “aren’t pictures selling out the audiences?”
“Maybe the audience isn’t fooled,” Tracy replied. “Perhaps they are willing to accept a certain amount of nonsense, as they accept a dramatic convention, in exchange for something else which they really enjoy.”
“But great dramatists don’t feed the world nonsense. If audiences habitually find their entertainment in stories that aren’t true, they’ll lose the ability to find pleasure in stories which are. Shan’t we end up after much picture-seeing by believing that the homes of the rich in America are as the pictures portray them, and that the poor almost never occur, and the middle class, unless it is comical, never exists? That’s the picture our screen asks us to recognize as true, isn’t it?”
Tracy laughed. “You’re a little hard on us, but you and I don’t disagree. I hope pictures will tell the whole truth of life while I’m still on the screen.”
* * *
1 Tracy was a big tipper, a practice Louise thought terrible. “You think these people make a lot of money,” he lectured. “They don’t. It’s only a few of us who do it; other people don’t. I can do it and like to do it, so don’t talk to me about it.”
2 Having taken part in the reorganization of the Screen Writers Guild in 1937, Ring Lardner, Jr., had been branded a radical by M-G-M East Coast story editor William Fadiman. Hepburn’s keeping the authorship of the untitled treatment a secret was partly a negotiation tactic, partly to keep Lardner’s name from scotching the deal.
3 The book that resulted from Steinbeck’s excursion was Sea of Cortez.
CHAPTER 18
I’ve Found the Woman I Want
* * *
Katharine Houghton Hepburn came from the kind of family that Spencer Tracy, in another life, might have wished for himself. Her paternal grandfather was an Episcopalian minister in Hanover County, Virginia, her grandmother a Powell, the family having lost a three-thousand-acre plantation during the Civil War despite having freed their slaves decades earlier. The Reverend Sewell Stavely Hepburn was known for his dramatic flair at the pulpit, a strain of talent that may have passed to his eldest granddaughter. Her father, Thomas Norval Hepburn, was similarly gifted in oratory and, like Tracy, honed his skills in college. A born healer, Dr. Hepburn was reputed to have been Connecticut’s first urologist. In 1910 he became secretary of the Connecticut Social Hygiene Association, capping a crusade against venereal disease initiated by his wife, the former Katharine Martha Houghton.
Mrs. Hepburn was descended from money and position yet always held the less privileged in her sympathies and spent her life fighting for the vote, broad access to birth control and family planning services, and the right of free expression in all its permutations. She was a graduate of Bryn Mawr, where she took a master’s degree in 1900. Four years later she married Tom Hepburn, who was then in his final year of medical school. Not wanting to practice in a big city, Tom took her to Hartford, where he became an intern and later a resident at the hospital.
Her activism dated from a 1908 talk she attended on the struggle to gain voting rights for women, and was further galvanized by the great English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, who came to Hartford the following year and was a guest in the Hepburn home. After Mrs. Pankhurst’s visit, she formed local and statewide organizations to press for the right to vote and lauded the subsequent ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment for raising the legal status of women from “children, idiots, and criminals” to “self-respecting adults.” Her interest in legalized birth control dated from 1921, when she became a familiar figure around the state capital, urging repeal of a restrictive 1869 law, declaring, with typical directness, that a woman “ought to have some say in the number of children she has.” She became a close friend of the pioneering social activist Margaret Sanger, and if she ever feared ostracism for her and her husband’s activities, she never said so, and she encouraged an unconventional spirit in each of her six children.
Kathy, the second eldest, was born in May 1907. She was a well-balanced child, quick-witted and creative, with the intensity of her mother, the good looks of her father, and the boundless energy of both. She grew into a spirited competitor, mastering golf, tennis, and swimming, and learned early on to go after whatever she wanted, which, as she grew into puberty, included men who interested or otherwise attracted her. It became family lore, later recounted in her autobiography, that she pursued the poet H. Phelps Putnam with such fervor that her father took Putnam aside and, likening his daughter to “a young bull about to charge,” threatened to shoot him if he laid hands on her. She posed nude for the camera while still a student at Bryn Mawr, married at twenty-one, and went determinedly her own way at twenty-five, having taken Ludlow Ogden Smith as her husband and then cast him aside when he was no longer of value in her drive to become a star. “Kate,” said George Stevens, “didn’t absolutely have to have a husband as most women do. She could get things done without turning her problem over to a man to succeed with or fail with.”
In love with herself (as she readily admitted), Hepburn took a succession of beaux, graduating to some of the most accomplished and best-known men in America. “I’ve never discovered any evidence whatsoever that she was a lesbian,” said her niece, actress-playwright Katharine Houghton. “She had many more affairs with men than people know about, always rich and/or powerful men that could benefit her career in some way. I do think she really loved Spencer as much as she was capable of loving anyone besides herself. But for her the great aphrodisiac was POWER, not sex, and I believe if she were asked, she would concur.”
Agent Leland Hayward and industrialist Howard Hughes were two of her more serious involvements, but she generally seemed to approach the opposite sex as if roaming the aisles of a fancy toy store, initially delighting in the gyrations of a clever mechanism, then tearing it apart to see how it worked. “Leland and Howard were both sweet and fun,” she said, “but I cared more about me than I cared about them.” Hayward memorably described her on his deathbed as “The best. God, yes.” And Hughes stayed in touch long after he had disappeared from public sight.
Press reports not long after Hepburn’s arrival in Los Angeles had her marrying actor Joel McCrea, and John Ford became a particular favorite in the mid-thirties, when he directed her in Mary of Scotland. Although linked superficially to Garson Kanin at the time she met Tracy, she was living for the summer with sculptor Robert McKnight, whom she had known sin
ce the age of fifteen. “Why in the world don’t I marry him?” she wondered. “I know him … I like him … we both like tennis.” She was attracted to strong, decisive men with outsize personalities, ofttimes married, frequently alcoholic. “I always liked bad eggs, always, always—and always attracted them. I had a lot of energy and looked as if I was (and I was) hard to get—wasn’t mad about the male sex—perfectly independent, never had any intention of getting married, wanted to paddle my own canoe, didn’t want anyone to pay my way.”
There was something mystical about the Tracy name. One of her first memories of New York was sitting on a tenement balcony watching the Tracy tugboats go by. Then later came the role of Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story. There can be no doubt that she targeted Spencer Tracy as the project that became Woman of the Year took shape, but it’s unlikely that falling for him was part of the plan. It happened so fast that it took her by surprise, and it must have been Tracy’s initial reticence combined with his willingness to play along—albeit on his own terms—that girded her resolve. “We started our first picture together and I knew right away that I found him irresistible. Just exactly that, irresistible.”
Tracy, of course, was at the top of his game, outdistancing even Clark Gable as an attraction at the American box office.1 There was no longer any chasing, as there had been for Loretta Young, and women routinely tumbled for a man of his stature. Joe Mankiewicz could remember the sight of one script girl nudging another as they observed Tracy in casual conversation with a third. “He’d have them off their feet like THAT!” Mankiewicz said, snapping his fingers for emphasis. Gable once observed a similar scene in the company of unit publicist Emily Torchia. “You know,” he said in mock indignation, “Spence can outdo me with these girls!”
“He did have quite a line of conquests,” Claire Trevor acknowledged. “Women loved him. He was a very attractive man.” Tracy knew where to go to avoid being seen by the press, especially when he was with somebody well known, and when he was spotted alone with, for example, Ingrid Bergman, it was never at a popular nightspot like Ciro’s and was, therefore, never reported. “To me,” said Sheilah Graham, “it was something you didn’t print. Because I had been warned very severely never to print stories of married producers and directors who had extra-marital affairs with girls … My boss John Wheeler [founder of the North American Newspaper Alliance] said, ‘Never write about the romances of married men.’ And I stuck to that quite scrupulously.”
In 1940 Tracy was seen publicly with Olivia de Havilland on at least two occasions, a fact that got reported in the columns precisely because it wasn’t presumed to be an affair. The actress’ official date, it was explained, was Tim Durant, a buddy of Tracy’s from the Uplifters Club who had suddenly taken ill. The two men had grown increasingly close in the late 1930s and Durant, for a while, assumed Carroll’s duties as a traveling companion following the IRS debacle of 1939. “He was not only a great artist,” Durant said of Tracy, “but a fine friend. We had much in common and many good times together … We stopped off in New York on the way to England, where a crowd of fifty spent all night outside Claridge’s Hotel to await the chance of seeing Spencer the next morning.”
A tall, good-looking guy who was generally regarded as one of the best-dressed men in Hollywood, Thomas W. “Tim” Durant was a stockbroker in the mid-1920s when he met and married Adelaide Brevoort Close, the eldest daughter of famed cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. When they divorced, Durant, an unrepentant womanizer, was awarded their place on Bedford Drive, a main house and two guest houses on several acres of prime Beverly Hills real estate. He rented out the main house for a tidy sum and took up residency in the larger of the two guest houses, a secluded bachelor pad tastefully furnished in early American. Entered off an alleyway, the other guest house—presumably a servants’ quarters—was often borrowed by friends for trysts. Tracy stayed there when he couldn’t bear the drive to Encino, and Durant once told actor-producer Norman Lloyd the Tracy-Hepburn affair was conducted in that house.
Durant worked for Charlie Chaplin, officially as a writer but more specifically as a personal assistant, and he brought Tracy into Chaplin’s circle, where he frequently served as a fourth for tennis. He was also well connected socially and introduced Tracy to, among others, Harry Crocker, of the San Francisco banking family, and Betsey Cushing Roosevelt, the president’s erstwhile daughter-in-law, with whom the two men stayed when visiting East Hampton. Durant was likely Tracy’s closest confidant in the early days of the Hepburn relationship, and although she was certain and unwavering in her attraction to him, he was likely dubious of anything more than a quick and memorable liaison. “I think that you imagined I was a lesbian,” Hepburn wrote in an epistolary chapter years after his death. “But not for long. Did you.”
In him she saw a man as solid and admirable as her own father, warm and witty and full of unexpected observations. “They were the only two men in her life who really challenged her,” Katharine Houghton commented, “and she felt comforted by the boundaries they set for her. My grandfather was a more classically handsome man than Spencer, but they both exuded a vigorous and not-to-be-messed-with male energy.” The balance Tracy brought to her life was oddly liberating in that she could be as bossy and as much a pain in the ass as she pleased, and she knew that when she had gone too far, when she had provoked and jabbered and carried on past all reasonable tolerance, he would simply say, as no man had said to her before, “Kate, shut up!” It was an accommodation he taught her, one she had always sought from others but had never before given herself.
Hepburn was like Louise in that they were both athletic, both actresses of some attainment, both plainspoken in a world where directness didn’t always count as a virtue. But where Hepburn could be confrontational, Louise was not, and where Kate saw a man in need of love and maintenance, Louise saw a job she was no longer able to do. What remained of the marriage was trust, friendship, and a sense of shared experience that was well-nigh unbreakable, but it was no longer a thing that was sustainable or mutually nourishing. Spence had outlets—his career, women, his small circle of friends. Louise had Johnny, Susie, her book, and her horses. She had the world-famous Tracy name, but it wasn’t nearly enough for a woman of her drive and intellect.
The relationship with Katharine Hepburn contributed to a time of almost unprecedented turmoil for Spencer Tracy; not since 1933–34 had his life been so completely shaken by a sequence of events. He was already deeply involved with Hepburn—more than he had been with any woman since Loretta Young—when he made his only network appearance with Ingrid Bergman on the Lux Radio Theatre. Kate and he were doing retakes for Woman of the Year, and she was plainly jealous of the fact that he was seeing Bergman again, even in a strictly professional capacity. (“Kate never felt she was beautiful enough for him,” said Katharine Houghton.) Spence wasn’t himself that night, and Bergman later characterized the broadcast as a fiasco, noting that Tracy read his part “as though he was appearing at gunpoint.” Kay Brown went so far as to advise Bergman that she shouldn’t do radio anymore, and Selznick, who thought Bergman lost a lot of her appeal over the air, agreed.2
Filming concluded in a miasma of shock after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Tracy summarized events in his datebook: “Air raid warnings L.A. Enemy planes sighted over San Francisco. Japs gain big advantage: Bombed Manilla, captured Wake Island, Guam Island.” On Monday, December 8, President Roosevelt went before a joint session of Congress to call for a declaration of war against Japan. Three days later Adolf Hitler furiously declared war on the United States. Kate, committed to the new Philip Barry play, returned east to spend the holidays in Connecticut with her family, leaving Spence in California with Vic Fleming and the cast of Tortilla Flat. Johnny arrived home from school on the nineteenth, and Christmas was spent at the ranch with Carroll and Dorothy and Mother Tracy, rain falling late into the day.
He marked three years and eight months of sobriety as the new year began
. The first days of 1942 were filled with work and news of war. He had a rare day off on January 6—Fleming was ill—and spent it playing tennis at the ranch with Louise. The next day he attended a bachelor luncheon thrown by L. B. Mayer for Mickey Rooney, who, at the age of twenty-one, was marrying starlet Ava Gardner. Ribald advice was offered the bridegroom by the likes of Clark Gable and Robert Taylor, then Tracy struck a more ominous note when he told the story of the sink and the marbles: “You’ll never have a year like your first year. Every time you make love to her then, you put a marble in the sink. After that, every time you make love to her, you take a marble out. But Mickey, you know what? You’ll never empty the sink.”
Tortilla Flat was behind schedule, the rushes listless and uninspired. Tracy was looking forward to being free of it when, on January 11, he formally accepted the chairmanship of the Motion Picture Committee for Celebration of the President’s Birthday, an event that kicked off the yearly door-to-door fund drive of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis— commonly known as the March of Dimes. Without mentioning his own son’s battle with poliomyelitis, he posed for photos with Bette Davis, enlisting her help for a national radio appeal and the traditional birthday ball to be held in Washington at the end of the month. “We of America may well be thankful that we may pause amid this world conflict to hear the pleas of these little sufferers,” Tracy said in a statement for the cameras. “We are their only hope.”
His work for the foundation was interrupted less than a week later when, on a windy Friday night, Carole Lombard disappeared in the air over southern Nevada. She and Clark Gable had married in March 1939—as soon as his divorce from Ria Gable became final—and for the first time in his life Gable married for something other than the furtherance of his career. “They’re suited to each other,” Tracy said approvingly at the time of their first anniversary. “They’re two regular people. And from where I sit, it looks like love.”
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