James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Tracy later told Stewart Granger that Vic Fleming, waiting to make retakes on Tortilla Flat, was the only one left who seemed to care at all about him.

  I’d been picked up by the police and thrown into the drunk tank; I was filthy, unshaven, and ill. Vic found out where I was, squared the press, the police, and the studio, and took me home. He had a Filipino servant and, giving him instructions to bathe, shave, and put me to bed, went to get his doctor. After being given a thorough examination, I was lying there like death when Vic came in with a case of Scotch. He put it down beside my bed and went to the door. Turning back he said, “Spence, I’ve just talked to the doctor. He tells me one more bash like that and you’ll be dead. I want you to do me a favor. Drink that whole case of Scotch. It’s the last time you’ll see me, Spence. I’m through.” And he went out and left me alone.

  Tracy declared himself back on the wagon after nineteen days adrift. Eight days later, on March 23, he reported back to the set of Tortilla Flat, where he dutifully appeared for Fleming in five days of retakes. Finally free of a film he had grown to loathe, he left town again, bound for New York with every intention of spending his forty-second birthday in the company of Katharine Hepburn. Fueled by coffee and little else, he arrived in Manhattan on March 30, the same day it was announced that Without Love would continue to tour. With the show stuck in Philadelphia, Tracy, as he recorded in his book, suffered a monumental attack of the “jitters.” Fearful that he would again take to the bottle, he left the same day for home, and instead spent his birthday—Easter Sunday—with Louise, Johnny, and Susie in Palm Springs.

  Kate, meanwhile, was fighting a losing battle to keep Without Love afloat. The play had been altered considerably since Princeton, bringing the platonic relationship between Hepburn and Nugent into sharper focus while scuttling large chunks of the war plot. “Kate,” said actress Audrey Christie, who was playing a supporting role in the production, “was miserable throughout the tour. Elliott Nugent was drinking because he was aware of his inadequacy, and she hated that. But she concealed her feelings beautifully and was always considerate to Elliott. She used to drive her car out into the country in various places and scream to get her frustrations out, decades before anyone thought of primal-scream therapy.”

  Tracy left for New York again on April 16, this time in the company of Tim Durant. Keeper of the Flame had been announced as the next Tracy-Hepburn picture, and Kate was now publicly advancing the idea of Spence replacing Elliott Nugent when Without Love ultimately reached Broadway. Tracy went to Boston to confer with Jimmy Cagney—they were working up bits for a Hollywood Victory Caravan—as Kate took the play to her hometown of Hartford for two completely sold-out performances. She was welcomed extravagantly—seven curtain calls—but her mania for privacy was on full display, and despite a heartfelt curtain speech in which she spoke warmly of family and old friends, station porters, and even taxi drivers, she would see absolutely no one.

  Observing his forty-second birthday in the company of his family. Note the tall glass of milk to his right. (SUSIE TRACY)

  The show moved on to Cleveland, then to Pittsburgh, where Tracy was spotted in the opening night audience, furtively slouched in a rear seat. He told Karl Krug, drama critic for the Sun-Telegraph, that he had been in Washington and “just stopped off to see the show.” He denied that he was going to replace Elliott Nugent but said that he thought Barry’s play could “form the basis” of a good movie. His presence strengthened the suspicions of Kaspar Monahan, critic for the rival Pittsburgh Press, to whom he said much the same thing: “Mr. Tracy said he was going to leave immediately after the performance. But I noted at final curtain that he was not in too great a hurry to get out of town or to neglect to run backstage and congratulate Miss Hepburn.”

  Tracy was, in fact, on his way to Baltimore for a general checkup at Johns Hopkins, the same distinguished institution where Tom Hepburn had studied medicine and met his future wife. Tracy had never before crossed the continent to see a doctor, much less take a battery of tests, but Kate had arranged the visit in the aftermath of his most recent bender. On the afternoon of May 12, he sat apologetically across from clinician Louis V. Hamman, having just given his name to a clueless admissions nurse as “Mr. Clark Gable.” He said he was sure there was nothing physically wrong with him, that he was just neurotic, and that it was not right for him to be wasting the doctor’s time.

  “His symptoms,” Dr. Hamman said in his notes,

  are of rather long standing, ten years at least. He is introspective and says he suffers from vague fear, fear of what he does not know. He adds that part of it, he supposes, is fear of disease. Five years ago he was advised to have the thyroid out. Either doctors told him or in some way he found out that occasionally an enlarged thyroid is carcinoma, and he at once decided that it would turn out to be cancer. He goes on to explain that there has been great solicitude on his part about his heart. When he gets nervous or excited, his heart races, throbs and pounds and skips beats. He insists there is something wrong with his heart, but his doctor says over and over again that there is nothing wrong. He sleeps poorly. Goes to bed early, wakes and reads a while, goes to sleep again and then wakes about five or six in the morning and gets up. He has been doing this for a long time. He now enjoys the early morning hours, likes to be out of doors or preparing for his work by reading plays, and so on.

  Tracy went on to give a brief résumé of his schooling, his time at Ripon, and his early days on the stage.

  He loves acting, puts his whole heart into it, and gives it all his energy and ability. He has never learned to play, cares only to fish and cannot do that for long. He will start off on a vacation intending to spend a month, and after three or four days will go back to Hollywood. Therefore, he has worked not only intensively but more or less continuously. As soon as he finishes one play he is off on another. He realizes that this makes a heavy demand upon his nervous energy because he puts a great deal of energy into everything he does, and I think he knows he pays for this in the symptoms that he has. About ten years ago, he started out on periodic alcoholic bouts. Up to that time he had drank very little. After a play he would begin to celebrate, and would keep it up for a week or ten days. These periods of drinking would come about every eight months. Six years ago, he decided that things could not go on that way, and for two years he did not drink anything. Then he fell and had another bout of drinking. After that he went for four years without drinking, and then was off on another bout some three months ago. He says the last bout was utter folly. He decided that, not having had any alcohol for four years, he could handle it, but found that it was impossible for him to do so.

  The patient summarized his unremarkable medical and family histories, his height and weight (fudging the latter by about ten pounds), and said he usually smoked ten cigarettes a day. “The patient is a well-nourished man, stockily built and of robust, vigorous appearance,” Dr. Hamman concluded. “He is a very engaging person, and in telling his symptoms often laughs at himself.”

  Tracy spent the next three days getting a pretty thorough going-over. Teeth and eyes were checked, hearing, glands, sinuses, organs, respiration were all found to be normal. A blood analysis fixed his cholesterol level at 168, well within acceptable range, and a routine test for syphilis came back negative. X-rays showed his heart and aorta to be of normal size and shape and his lungs to be clear. A sleep observation under the supervision of Dr. Samuel Crowe, founder of the school’s division of otolaryngology, took place on the night of May 14, when Tracy was given a single Nembutal tablet, a dosage mirroring words he had written for the first time in his datebook the previous year: “one pill.” He was coming to rely on barbiturates to quiet a mind that was constantly turning, but all that Dr. Crowe could suggest was to reduce alcohol and tobacco consumption to a minimum. The patient was discharged on the fifteenth with the finding “no organic disease diagnosed.”

  The following morning, he made the five-hour drive back to Pitts
burgh, where Kate was giving her final matinee and evening performances of Without Love. Hepburn commemorated the occasion by engaging in a wrestling match with a photographer for the Bulletin-Index who snapped her without permission as she arrived backstage. The camera was smashed and the man suffered a few scratches before the two were separated by a cop who had heard the scuffle. The engagement closed with nearly $40,000 in the till—an excellent week—and Tracy drove her on to Cincinnati, the next stop on the company’s seemingly endless tour of the provinces, then went on to Chicago, where he met up with Carroll for the return trip to Los Angeles.

  Keeper of the Flame was the work of the Australian-born poet and novelist I.A.R. Wylie, a story specifically designed for the screen and submitted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer just weeks ahead of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Set for serialization in the American Magazine, it told the story of ace war correspondent Steve O’Malley and his assignment to write the biography of a New England governor and self-styled patriot named Robert Forrest. Forrest’s death inspires a wave of mourning befitting a beloved national figure, but unlike Citizen Kane, another film of the time with a similar setup, the author keeps the subject of O’Malley’s inquiry completely offstage, following instead the journalist’s interactions with local townspeople and the young widow as he uncovers the secret life of an American fascist.

  The model for Forrest became a matter of some discussion when the book was published by Random House in the spring of 1942. Speculation ranged from William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Wylie herself would never say, and all director George Cukor would allow was that “[w]e made this picture during a period of undercover Fascism in this country … Certain things were in the air but hadn’t come out into the open. I suppose, to draw attention to them, we exaggerated.”

  The property was for Tracy from the very beginning, and he was announced for the role in December 1941. Keeper of the Flame didn’t take on urgency, however, until Hepburn committed to playing Christine Forrest in April 1942. Aglow from her twin triumphs in The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year, she was instrumental in getting Cukor assigned to the picture and in arranging a test for Audrey Christie in the part of Jane Harding, O’Malley’s colleague and sounding board.

  “I’m most anxious to start the new film,” she told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, deftly taking ownership of the project. “The script has been written by Donald Ogden Stewart, who did the excellent screen treatment of Philadelphia Story, and George Cukor will again direct me … I want to repeat Woman of the Year, both as a picture and as a box office hit, for I really think it was an excellent film.”

  Without Love closed in Buffalo on May 30, and Hepburn promptly headed west, where June 2 had been set for the start date. She most likely read Stewart’s screenplay, developed under the supervision of producer Victor Saville, on her way out to California. The role of Christine, she said, fascinated her. “She is a woman, strong, resolute, placed in a tragic position in life. Thinking back, I am surprised to find that I have never played a mature woman. I have played girls, girls, girls—all sorts of girls, shy, whimsical, flamboyant, tempestuous—everything but mature human beings.”

  Having previously consumed the novel, Hepburn found much to dislike about the script and the changes that had been made. Stewart had based his conception of O’Malley on the knowledge that Tracy would be playing the part, contending that in the novel the character came off as an “impotent eunuch who plays sad love scenes.” Hepburn, it seemed, wanted a film as true to Wylie’s original as humanly possible. As Stewart complained in a letter to his wife, the journalist Ella Winter, “I created an intelligent character with action as his keynote … Is it not interesting that Miss H., not an active character in the story, is Goddamned if there will be an active male in the same story?”

  Kate originally had thought that she would stay away from the development of the script, knowing that she was considered a troublemaker on the M-G-M lot. (“I thought, ‘Express your opinion when asked, but don’t go over everybody and don’t try to be too helpful. Just keep your place and be an actor.’ ”) But it was difficult for her to be on the outside of things, if not completely impossible, and all she really managed to do was to be critical without being helpful, excited by the subject matter but no longer by the character she was being asked to play.

  Stewart, who had won an Oscar for his work on Philadelphia Story, thought Wylie’s book “exciting screen material” and saw his primary job as making sure the picture “accurately reflected the 1943 background.”4 Hepburn, Stewart told his wife, was not so much interested in the script as she was in control and had gone over the heads of both Saville and Cukor in taking her demands directly to the studio brass. In the book, Christine ensures her husband’s death when she chooses not to warn him that a bridge is out. Under the Production Code, a character who commits murder must be punished. But was passively allowing someone’s accidental death to occur the same as a willful act of murder? When the screenplay was first submitted to the Breen office, Saville purposely held back the ending, in which both Steve and Christine decide, in effect, to “print the legend” now that Forrest himself is safely dead. But the administrators of the Code could sense the direction in which the movie was headed: “We assume … that in order to comply with the provisions of the Code, you will either clear Christine of any suspicion of murder or else will punish her. Otherwise, we could not approve the finished picture.”

  A significant change that occurred on Hepburn’s watch was the compounding of her character’s guilt. Where before Christine had merely failed to warn her husband of the danger he faced, she now became responsible for disabling the bridge as well. Nearly all of Christine’s scenes were rewritten, but there came a point when the beleaguered Saville felt he had to push back:

  A full conference was called in the executive producer’s office and all were present: Hepburn, Tracy, Cukor, Stewart, and myself. Katie was the first to speak, which she did with great passion and at length. She told us the story as she would like to see it. When she had finished, we looked at Tracy, who passed, as did Cukor and Stewart, and all eyes turned to me. I guess I must have been a little edgy as, just before going into the meeting, I had heard on the radio of the disastrous defeat of the British army by Rommel and the probability that Egypt would fall. In that frame of mind, my reaction was quite without compromise. “Katie has told us a very good story, but that’s not the story I want to tell, and if you prefer to use hers I suggest you get yourselves another boy.” Dead silence, broken only by Tracy getting up. “That’s it, boys. Let’s go to work.” And they all left the room.

  Other than the original start date of production, Tracy recorded nothing in his datebook during the month of June 1942. He and Kath—the name he had taken to calling her in private—attended John Barrymore’s funeral on the second but otherwise kept a low profile. Louise, surely aware that something was up, wrote Matie Winston late in the month, saying that she thought she needed to do something—find a job, go back to the stage, get busy and contribute something to the war effort. Johnny and Susie were home for the summer, but there was the matter of Susie’s schooling to resolve, for gas rationing had made the commute to Brentwood impractical. Miss Winston, who once told Louise she thought she looked like Greer Garson, encouraged her to “[t]ake another flier while you are still so young and pretty. Send Susie to me. Hearing children work in beautifully here.”

  Tracy never spoke of Keeper of the Flame, never said what he liked about it or what he didn’t. It was a good part for him in a picture that had something important to say, but he didn’t involve himself in the writing process the way Kate felt compelled to do. His part was solid, as tailored for him as any part he had ever played. The actor most at risk on the picture was Hepburn herself, and no one was likely to watch out for her the way that she was used to watching out for herself. Another incomplete script was submitted to the PCA in early July, and again Joseph I. Breen warned that
“if it is to be indicated that Christine is guilty of her husband’s murder, she will have to be punished if the picture is to conform to the requirements of the Production Code.”

  Still committed to a picture in which he passionately believed, Don Stewart found himself excluded from the story conferences Saville was now having almost daily. “I shall not resign,” he vowed, “as long as there is a chance to save the ‘message’ (not my face). Is it not humiliating that all the discussion now takes place without my being allowed to participate …?” He returned to his farm in the Adirondacks after completing the screenplay, and when filming began on July 14, Christine was guilty of murder in the first degree. Hepburn was tense—resigned, seemingly, to the failings of the script as she saw them, satisfied, perhaps, that it was at least a strong part for Tracy and that the story mirrored the antifascist sentiments of her mother. The battle for control had considerably dimmed her enthusiasm for the project, and it was starting to look less and less likely the film could end on the romantic note that both she and the studio seemed to require.

  After a few days of filming, change pages began appearing that would establish Christine’s innocence. Don Stewart’s final contribution to the picture was a “tag” ending wired from New York on September 1 that had O’Malley kissing her and then jumping aboard a train, the camera holding on Christine’s face as it pulled away. Hepburn had played roughly a third of the picture believing her character to be guilty. Now she was faced with playing the rest of it knowing her innocence. She was short with people on the set, quiet and typically unresponsive to the demands of publicity.

  Tracy felt comfortable twitting her, something no one else would have dared to do. “Emily,” he grandly told Emily Torchia on the first day of production, “you know, this is an open set.” His own sets were usually closed, but he went out of his way to be welcoming, Kate generally ignoring his attempts at baiting her. “The only person he was hard on,” Torchia remembered, “was the script girl, who had to worry about continuity. Mr. Tracy never wore makeup when I knew him, and he had his hair combed just once a day—in the morning. Now, of course, all day long he ran his hands through it, and his hair would never match from one shot to the next. The script girl would be beside herself. Once he said to a script girl, ‘Think you’re going to survive?’ ”