James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  And indeed it did—in spite of Gable’s continued philandering. The couple bought and refurbished Raoul Walsh’s Encino spread, a two-story Connecticut farmhouse on twenty acres of land about five minutes from the Tracy ranch. They all golfed together, Carole gamely lugging her own clubs, Eddie Mannix usually completing the foursome, and socialized occasionally—holiday parties and the like. Lombard was genuinely solicitous of Spence, sensitive to his predicament amid the free-flowing scotch of the Gable household. “Carole Lombard was a very big star in her own right,” said Adela Rogers St. Johns, “much loved by Hollywood. But everybody who went to the rambling white house overlooking the San Fernando Valley knew it was Clark’s house. Carole had created and maintained it to suit him. It was the most joyous house I was ever in.”

  Tracy liked Lombard, liked her sense of humor and her ability to make Gable laugh. It was as if her appeal stood completely apart from the fact that she was also a world-class beauty, a gifted comedienne, and a fine dramatic actress. She made the ideal home for her husband, doing what he did, liking what he liked. Lombard had been east selling U.S. Series E Savings Bonds—now widely being referred to as war bonds—and had reportedly raised $2.5 million in her home state of Indiana when, eager to return west to her husband and a new picture, she muscled her way onto a TWA Skysleeper bound for Burbank, accompanied by her mother and M-G-M publicist Otto Winkler. After an unscheduled refueling stop in Las Vegas, the plane took off in clear skies on the last—and reputedly easiest—leg of an eighteen-hour trip that had begun in Indianapolis at four in the morning. All authorities had to go on were eyewitness accounts of an explosion and flames along the steep eastern face of Mt. Potosi, thirty-two miles southwest of the airport. Gable, who was awaiting his wife’s arrival at home, was removed to Las Vegas on a chartered flight, where he was dissuaded from making the arduous climb to the crash site by Eddie Mannix and publicist Ralph Wheelwright, both of whom went in his stead. He holed up at the new El Rancho Vegas resort on Highway 91, and it was there he learned there had been no survivors.

  Tracy worked most of Saturday at the studio—“pretty upset,” as Peggy Gough recalled—then left for Nevada at five that afternoon. He drove six straight hours, arriving in Vegas at eleven that night. Gable was composed but hadn’t slept, hollow-eyed with grief. Tracy sat with him, Howard Strickling, and the others, said little, remained at hand. The charred bodies were recovered from the wreckage, wrapped in army blankets, and taken down the mountain by horseback. Tracy remained at the hotel with Gable until 8:30 the next evening, then returned to Los Angeles, where he was due back on the set of Tortilla Flat. The funeral, in Glendale on the afternoon of the twenty-first, was private and strictly limited to immediate family and friends. Gable, hidden from view in an alcove reserved for the family, said nothing during the course of the service, which consisted of a few readings and a simple affirmation of faith. It was over in ten minutes. “Clark, beyond consolation, would talk only to Fieldsie, Carole’s great friend and manager, Madalynne Fields,” said Myrna Loy, one of the very few marquee names invited to attend. “He wouldn’t talk to anyone else, no matter who it was.”

  Spence was there with Louise, but his mind was focused elsewhere—on his mother, who had suffered another stroke that day and was, as he noted in his book, “very low.” He worked only until noon the following day, a Thursday, then went to be at Carrie’s side. She appeared to recognize Carroll and him, smiled at them faintly and clasped hands. Apparently she did not speak, although according to family lore she said to Spencer, “Take care of Carroll.” The next day, January 23, 1942, she had yet another stroke and died very quietly at the age of sixty-six. She did not, according to Spence’s entry in his datebook, seem to suffer.

  The next day, Spence, Carroll, Louise, and Dorothy accompanied Carrie Tracy on her final trip home, fourteen years after her husband had been laid to rest in Freeport’s Calvary Cemetery. The train was met at Dixon by a hearse from the Eichmeier & Becker funeral home, while Spence and Carroll and their wives were collected by their sad-eyed uncle Andrew and driven into town. The scene at the Hotel Freeport was chaotic—news of the great star’s impending arrival had been published in the Journal Standard—and the lobby was packed with the morbid and the merely curious. “People were clustered around him, probably bodyguards, and they were trying to whisk him through,” recalled Marie Barcellona, the hotel’s longtime desk clerk. “But he was very gracious—he took time out to stop and talk to someone he apparently knew or someone that knew his mother. He looked much more youthful and thinner in person.”

  The townspeople remembered the gentle, white-haired woman who occasionally came to Freeport to visit her sister, a chauffeur-driven limousine carrying them through the streets of town with a stately grace. Some longtime residents could think back to the days when she was still Carrie Brown of Stephenson Street, Ed Brown’s younger daughter and one of the most beautiful women in a hundred-mile radius. Spence had time to venture out, as if avoiding the pending business at hand, and he paid a call on Elmer Love, who was briefly a classmate of his at the Union School on South Chicago Avenue. “He was just as common as he could be,” said Josephine Love, Elmer’s widow, “and had such a wonderful personality. You wouldn’t think he was a big famous star. He talked about his old school chums. ‘Whatever happened to so and so?’ he would ask. He and Elmer had quite a conversation. He laughed when he told Elmer that his wife was a little jealous of his leading lady, Katharine Hepburn.”

  A simple funeral took place on the afternoon of January 26. Carrie had embraced Christian Science in her later years, but her sister Emma was active in the First Presbyterian Church and had the pastor, a Dr. Odiorne, officiate. It wasn’t as emotional an occasion as the funeral for John Tracy had been, Carrie having lived into her mid-sixties, but Spence wept all the same and kept pretty much to himself. The ground at the cemetery was frozen solid, and Carrie couldn’t be buried in the Tracy plot alongside John until after the spring thaw. They left for Chicago the next morning in a heavy fog and were back in California on the twenty-ninth.

  The filming of Tortilla Flat dragged on endlessly, and the picture was still in production when Woman of the Year opened at the Radio City Music Hall on February 5. After a mid-December sneak in which the new ending had played flawlessly, the studio got behind the picture in a big way. Metro budgeted $2.5 million annually in display advertising, dividing it among general circulation magazines, farm magazines (which accounted for eight million rural subscribers), the various fan magazines, and 145 newspapers reaching a combined circulation of 31 million readers. Immediately after “The Hepburn Story,” a serialized biography, appeared in five consecutive issues of the Saturday Evening Post, M-G-M ran a full-page ad in the magazine for Woman of the Year. Two-column teasers followed in 118 key city newspapers: “SPENCER TRACY is crazy about KATHARINE HEPBURN—but she’s too busy!” A cartoon pictured her surrounded by photographers, with Tracy knocked to the ground in the stampede to get to her. “She’s the WOMAN OF THE YEAR!”

  The lines around the Music Hall, despite some nasty weather, reflected the enormous popularity of The Philadelphia Story when it played the same theater in December 1940. (At that point, it had been seven years since Hepburn had last filled the place with Little Women.) Tracy’s personal drawing power had long been established, having built steadily since 1936 and been demonstrated most recently with the crowds that flooded the Astor to see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The combination of the two names was seemingly all the people needed to drive Woman of the Year to a first week’s total of $99,000—which was essentially capacity business for the 5,945-seat venue.

  “They call the new Music Hall offering Woman of the Year,” William Boehnel wrote in the World-Telegram, “but I think a far better name for it would be Film of the Year, for seldom have I seen a more freshly written, gayer, wiser, more beautifully acted and directed entertainment than this one. To begin with, it has Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in the leading roles
. This in itself would be enough to make any film memorable. But when you get Hepburn and Tracy turning in brilliant performances to boot, you’ve got something to cheer about.” Bosley Crowther said practically the same thing, adding that Woman of the Year made him feel “like tossing his old hat into the air and weaving a joyous snake dance over the typewriter keys” for the first time in months. Propelled by exceptionally strong notices in all the New York dailies, Woman of the Year built to an even better $102,000 in its second week. It stayed a total of six weeks, equaling the unprecedented run of The Philadelphia Story, an astonishing feat for a picture that had neither a book nor a play for its foundation. As it made its way across the country—it reached Los Angeles in April—Woman of the Year showed its strength in the biggest cities, amassing a domestic gross of $1,937,000. When Tracy reached New York on February 16, Hepburn was reveling in the film’s success and eager for another pairing of the new Tracy-Hepburn team.

  But first there was the matter of Without Love, the Philip Barry play to follow The Philadelphia Story. As with the latter, Barry wrote it with Hepburn in mind, and she owned a 25 percent interest in it—same as the playwright. As part of the arrangement, she agreed to play the part of Jamie Coe Rowan for $1,000 a week, enabling the Theatre Guild to fulfill a promise to its subscribers that a Hepburn play would be part of its 1941–42 season. The New York Times carried a formal announcement on January 19, and performances were set to begin in New Haven on February 26, 1942. Yet nothing seemed terribly certain as Tracy hit town. The play itself was an awkward fusion of romance and diplomacy, a set of implausible plot turns animated by a curiously unappealing mix of characters. Left unspoken was the most basic of the show’s flaws: an utter lack of chemistry between its star actress and her staid leading man, actor-playwright Elliott Nugent.

  Hepburn had little time to devote to Tracy. Being what she described as a “one track Charlie,” she poured all her energies into the hopeless task of making the play work. They saw each other when they could, generally late at night, but it wouldn’t do for him to be haunting rehearsals and he scrupulously stayed away. He saw shows: Maurice Evans’ Macbeth, Cheryl Crawford’s revival of Porgy and Bess. On the nineteenth he fulfilled a commitment to Garson Kanin, now with the Division of Information in Washington, to record the narration for a one-reel subject titled Ring of Steel. (“I am the American soldier … the ring of steel around democracy.”) Then, with little else to do in New York City, he asked his seventeen-year-old son to spend the weekend with him at the River House, a swank art deco club and apartment complex at the eastern terminus of Fifty-second Street. There were squash and tennis courts, a swimming pool, a floating dock for pleasure craft. The weather was beautiful, but Johnny was reticent about staying alone with his father and all they managed to do was play a lot of tennis. “The boy had told me he wanted to talk to me,” Tracy said to Matie Winston, principal of the Wright Oral School, “but then he withheld any closeness of communication. Why?”

  Johnny had been home for the holidays, but his father hadn’t been around much. The children were reared Episcopalians, so there hadn’t been the critical bonding that Spence had enjoyed with his own father. And whenever Tracy saw his son, Louise was always there as if to act as interpreter. At school Johnny was one of fifteen boarders, and, for almost the first time in his life, he began reading on his own, using a dictionary to expand his vocabulary and focus his mind. Miss Winston tried explaining, tactfully, that maybe Johnny’s reticence came from a desire to have more regular interaction with his dad, a greater sense of companionship and exchange. Louise wasn’t writing as regularly as before and Spence hardly ever wrote at all—even postcards. The boy rightly felt abandoned, and then there was his father’s habit of bringing his hand to his mouth when he spoke, which made the reading of his lips impossible.

  “He can’t see your lips!” Louise would scold, and he would say, “Oh, yes, yes…,” and then two minutes later he’d be doing it again. “He went through life with his hand over his mouth,” Louise said. “It was one of his firmest habits, and he couldn’t break it. He tried very hard.” At an age when a young man naturally yearns for the company of his father, a very basic disconnect separated Johnny and his dad, and the boy sometimes got to see more of his father on screen than in person. “John was always a little overwhelmed by his father,” his mother said. “[Spence] expected a great deal of him, and John always felt he was not up [to it], I think … Their conversations were always like ‘talking times.’ He would [sometimes] get down to something that was serious, but they never really discussed things as men might.”

  And so Tracy continued to ask, “Why won’t the boy talk to me?” but he could never fully grasp the reasons. He spent the rest of the day glumly knocking about the city. That night, he and a ravenous Kate managed a late supper at Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club, where they sat for a time with Lieutenant Jimmy Stewart and actress Phyllis Brooks. In an AP wirephoto that circulated the next day, Tracy could be seen to the right of Stewart and Brooks, a worn and quizzical look on his face and a tall drink in front of him. Kate was nowhere to be seen, and within a couple of days, neither was he. “Weather beautiful,” he wrote in the last entry to be found in his pocket diary. “Another perfect day.”

  The next two weeks passed in something of a blur. Studio records show that he spent four days in the exclusive Harkness Pavilion of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, admitted under the fanciful name of Bernhardt (as in Sarah) and accompanied by Hepburn, who took her own private room nearby. Broadway columnist Dorothy Kilgallen caught wind of the arrangement and, completely unhindered by Howard Strickling’s legendary control of the West Coast media, printed the first public intimation of the Tracy-Hepburn relationship in her column of March 13, 1942. Howard Dietz, Metro’s New York–based director of advertising and publicity, made little secret of his dislike for Tracy and considered him to be Culver City’s problem when he wasn’t in town on official business. “Tracy,” said Dietz, “had the mistaken idea that a movie star can have the freedom of the city and the right to put it into practice. He had no idea how to handle people, and he drank at an unpredictable rhythm.”

  Kate had never before witnessed Tracy under the influence of alcohol and had no idea of the depths to which his binges could take him. She stayed with him as long as she possibly could, but when she left town with the company of Without Love, there was nothing to prevent him from falling back onto the sauce. Tortilla Flat had been put before a preview audience in Los Angeles, and he was needed back in California for retakes. He had remained friends with Myrna Loy, and although they hadn’t worked together since Test Pilot, the studio occasionally presumed upon that, thinking that she could somehow handle him when he gave them extraordinary trouble.

  “We both happened to be in New York,” Loy remembered,

  when Benny Thau called from Hollywood: “Myrna, we’re waiting to start Tracy’s picture, and he’s there on a bender, holed up at the River House with his male nurse. See what you can do?” I called; Spence asked, “Where are you?” and I told him. I shouldn’t have. He was at the door of my St. Regis suite in no time. Days of drinking had left him belligerent. He made his usual play for me, bringing his fist down with such emphatic frustration at one point that he smashed a glass-topped coffee table. Then he turned defensive. “You don’t have to worry about me anymore,” he said like a sulky child. “I’ve found the woman I want.” As he outlined the virtues of Katharine Hepburn, I was relieved, but also a bit disappointed. As selfish as it sounds, I liked having a man like Spence in the background wanting me. It’s rather nice when nothing’s required in return.

  Without Love had its first performance in Princeton on March 4, 1942, and the reaction was nowhere near what they had hoped it would be. Tracy didn’t go but attempted a boozy call to eighty-six-year-old Sister Mary Perpetua instead, possibly to tell her that in the wake of his mother’s death he was taking steps to amend his birth certificate and that his middle name would
soon, at long last, reflect his baptismal name, Bonaventure, in place of Bernard. His datebook entry for March 6 read, “Back on wagon” but then those words were crossed out.

  “Apparently they just couldn’t handle him in the New York office,” said Eddie Lawrence, who came to town on unrelated business and was pressed into service. “They were exhausted. So I went over to the hotel. They greeted me like a long lost friend. And they were just bringing him out. They were cutting him down, a little bit of brandy or whatever they do. I was hungry—I hadn’t eaten anything—and I said, ‘Spencer, I’m going to eat something.’ So we talked. There were two doctors there, and I think they were giving him some form of medication, because the stomach obviously [couldn’t hold anything].”3

  On March 11, while Hepburn was playing a week’s stand in Baltimore, Tracy was placed on a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles in the care of a doctor. In California, he continued to drink, and there were discussions at the studio over the proper course of action. Thau, Eddie Mannix, and Joe Cohn conceded that Tracy was “in no condition to do retakes,” but a staff lawyer advised that formal notice be served “to protect our position.” Tracy’s failure to report for work meant that all payments by the studio could cease and that his time absent could be counted against the eighteen weeks’ vacation to which he was entitled under the terms of his contract. Thau advised Leo Morrison of the need to serve formal notice but expressed concern over “Tracy’s reaction to this notice, particularly in his present state.” Morrison phoned Carroll, and the two men agreed that Morrison would collect the notice at the studio mail room, thereby effecting delivery, but would not show it to his client.