When Tracy returned to Los Angeles and the Beverly Hills Hotel on September 28, Hepburn was already settled in a house on nearby Beverly Grove and anxious to get Without Love before the cameras. “We actually are going to begin shooting next week,” she reported to Terry Helburn in a letter. “I feel as though I’d already made the darned thing four times.” The supporting cast, she went on, had been settled with Keenan Wynn, Lucille Ball (“she made a very good test”), Patricia Morison, Emily Perkins (her secretary and onetime dresser, appearing under the stage name of Massey), and Carl Esmond. The director, Harold Bucquet, was a veteran of Metro’s Dr. Kildare pictures and had, like Fred Zinnemann, made his bones in the short-subject department. Bucquet had replaced the tubercular Jack Conway on Dragon Seed, and Hepburn, in the midst of a grueling five-month shoot, took a liking to him. Soft-spoken and English by birth, Bucquet was inclined to stay out of the way, and one principal cast member, when later asked, could scarcely recall him.
“As always,” said Larry Weingarten, “Kate was into everything … People always said to me, ‘She’s trying to do everything.’ And my reply was, ‘The thing I’m afraid of, and you should be afraid of, is that she can do everything.’ Producer, director, cameraman! That’s what she was! Her idea of everything was always better than you could have ever envisioned.” Actress-singer Morison, as a seventeen-year-old drama student, had witnessed the filming of Hepburn’s New York screen test in 1932, but she didn’t formally meet the actress until her first day on the picture. Casually clad in white linen pants and matching shirt, Kate was obviously running the show, head-to-head with the director and the cameraman while Tracy retreated to the relative calm of his dressing room. Morison knew Tracy from a formal dinner party a few years earlier when, attending stag, he had graciously offered to drive her home.
“I remember we stopped at the top of Mulholland Drive—not for anything romantic, but because the view was so beautiful. He didn’t make a pass, which was unusual in those days. It was very refreshing.” Tracy, she recalled, was always cordial and charming to her on the set of Without Love, his relationship with Hepburn an open secret. “I think in the business it was common knowledge. I knew it.” Tracy was less cordial to the director, whom he seemed to regard as inept in matters of staging, and Hepburn went so far as to consult with George Stevens for a scene built entirely on physical comedy.
Sleeplessness had brought Tracy to the ragged edge of sanity, and neither booze nor medication could quell the demons within him. He tossed and heaved, his mind a tornado of shame and worry. “I didn’t believe that he did it,” Kate said years later, “and I lay on the floor of his room one night and watched him and he could not get to sleep … he twisted and he turned and it took him an hour and a half to quiet down at all.” On October 29 she sat on the set, the script serving as a desk, and wrote a long letter to Ellen Barry, Phil’s wife, telling them how appalled they’d be at the changes and eliminations made for the film and remembering with pleasure a month that she and her sister Peg had spent with the Barrys at their winter home on Florida’s eastern shore. “When we finish the picture & the retakes & everything which will be around the first of February—Spence is going to take a year away from the studio—He is a wreck & cannot sleep & is feeling as though he might go mad—I have been trying to describe Hobe Sound to him—for it seems to me the perfect place for him to go … He thought he might go and take a quick look—between the end of shooting & the beginning of retakes & then if it seemed to be the spot he would go back for several months—”
Weather slowed an already troubled shoot, delaying location work during one of the wettest Novembers on record. Tracy was “ill” the last half of the month, eventually forcing a complete shutdown. “There were times they had to cancel a day’s shooting,” Patricia Morison remembered. “I didn’t know why, but I understand now it was because he had been drinking. Which everybody knew was a problem except me. I didn’t know why I suddenly had three days off. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I don’t have to get up at four anymore.’ ”
Tracy hated the character of Pat Jamieson and what Don Stewart had done to it under Hepburn’s constant yammering. According to Larry Weingarten, he resisted the role “until the last day of shooting.” Tracy “took sick” on Without Love, Weingarten believed, because his loathing of the part was “so violent.” Hepburn had never before worked with him when he was hitting the bottle, and she assumed the burden of bringing him back. “Mayer was a practical man,” she said,
and I just used to call up and say, “Look, I need a little help here, and I’m going to move him out of the Beverly Hills Hotel and up into my house.” It was very difficult to do that because, I thought, if any tragedy occurred, to have him in my house might be wildly difficult. But it had to be done, because I couldn’t leave him in the hotel. Because he was so noisy that the hotel said, “Get him out.” Carroll was a weak man, [and] I think that Louise just deliberately … did … not … know…[so] if I felt he was in trouble, I’d move into the hotel or else I’d move him into my house. But I was always afraid that something would happen and there would be a scandal that would embarrass Louise. It wouldn’t have embarrassed me so much, but I really wanted her to be protected.
Nine working days were lost, but there wasn’t a hint of trouble outside the gated walls of M-G-M. “We didn’t publicize him,” said June Dunham, Howard Strickling’s longtime secretary. “At times, he’d be in the room with Hepburn for three days while she sobered him up. But those things never got to the press.” When Tracy returned on November 27, the tension on the set was fierce and it would only grow worse. A pervasive sense of doom settled over the company, so certain was almost everyone involved that the picture would be awful. “What goes on with Spencer Tracy?” Hedda Hopper wondered in her column of December 4. “He has become a verifiable matinee idol, wants to see rushes, and hasn’t been nice to Lucille Ball on the set of Without Love. Could it be because he and Katharine Hepburn are no longer speaking?” By the thirteenth, conditions had deteriorated to the point where Keenan Wynn was reported to have taken a poke at assistant director Earl McAvoy.
The level of violence between Tracy and Hepburn is largely a matter of conjecture. “Mind you, I don’t frighten easily,” Kate once said, “but when he became … you know, he had a violent temper. At times, at times.” In response to a question from A. Scott Berg, one of her biographers, she acknowledged that Tracy had once hit her. “She proceeded,” wrote Berg, “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.”
Critic and author Martin Gottfried remembered Hepburn once telling him that Tracy used to “knock me around” when he drank too much. “When I expressed surprise, saying, ‘I’d’ve thought that once would have been enough for someone like you,’ she replied, ‘Why? I could hit him back, couldn’t I?’ ” Screenwriter Millard Kaufman and his wife Lori heard an even more startling revelation, as both were close to Signe Hasso. Once Hasso recalled to them a night when Hepburn phoned and asked if she could come over to stay. “Apparently,” said Kaufman, “Tracy had beaten hell out of her.”
Such reports didn’t surprise Katharine Houghton, who was loath to regard her aunt Kat as anyone’s victim, particularly Tracy’s.
She once told me that Spencer could stop drinking at will for months or even years at a time. Maybe this is what gave her the idea that alcohol was not an addiction. Maybe this is what gave her the idea that she could wrest the drink away from him with force. If he gave her a good whack on such an occasion, it’s my suspicion that she asked for it. She was not a frail person. Anyone who’s seen her in a film in which she exposes her impressive strong arms and broad shoulders, could imagine that she was a formidable physical adversary.
Christmas 1944. (SUSIE TRACY)
For her part, Hepburn was conciliatory, even if
she and Tracy stopped speaking for a time: “I don’t think he’d ever hurt anyone. He’d be incapable of hurting anyone. Not physically violent with people at all.” Then, considering the general question of Tracy’s alleged rampages whenever he was truly in his cups: “Well, I think if you’re drunk enough and you do something like that, is that the same? I mean, ’tisn’t the same to me. If Spencer was sober he would never have touched anyone. But, I mean, if you’re drunk and fight, it depends on how old you are and how much do they stop you when you say, ‘Get outta here.’ I don’t think that means anything except that you’re drunk.”
Without Love officially finished on December 27, 1944, but neither Tracy nor Hepburn could leave town as yet. Samson Raphaelson was already at work on changes to Don Stewart’s September 29 draft of the screenplay, and Dorothy Kingsley was preparing a set of retakes for Lucille Ball. Tracy himself did one day of retakes after the first of the year, but then was left idle for three weeks—two of which he evidently spent hammered. He had plans to attend the January 20 inauguration in Washington with Louise, as well as an invitation to afternoon coffee with the president and Mrs. Roosevelt the day before. But further work on the picture kept him in Hollywood until well past the historic event, and he must have been bitterly disappointed. It wasn’t, in fact, until February 1 that he was finally cleared for travel, determined, as Kate wrote the Barrys, to take off the entire year. On the strength of A Guy Named Joe, The Seventh Cross, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, however, the annual Quigley poll of exhibitors had confirmed him as M-G-M’s top moneymaking star of the year 1944, and the most the studio would allow was the six-week vacation guaranteed under the terms of his contract.
In New York it was Hepburn’s strategy to get Tracy into a play, since his deal with Metro allowed for one. In February 1944 he had made a tentative return to the stage in narrating Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait for two performances with the L.A. Philharmonic. Plainly, however, he was terrified at the prospect of going back to the theatre after an absence of fifteen years. When the Playwrights’ Company offered him a comedy (likely S. N. Behrman’s Jacobowsky and the Colonel), he replied, “It is delightful and amusing, but, I am afraid, not for me.” He then shut off all further discussion by making a seemingly impossible request: “Please send me something by Bob Sherwood.”
Kate tried letting the matter lie, busying herself with her own plans to appear for the Guild in a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Short term, everything from Tracy’s perspective looked bleak, and he filled his days with morose thoughts and the dark certainties of an Irish temperament.
In the legend that grew up around Tracy and Hepburn, one of the most durable of images is that of Kate going bar to bar, after the fashion of a Gilded Age temperance song, looking for Spence. It was a notion she dismissed as “stupid” and made up: “In the first place I wouldn’t do it because that would be too public for him, and in the second place I wouldn’t do it because it would be too public for me, too. My friend, my driver then, who worked for me for forty-three years, was Charles Newhill. He used to go out publicly when Spencer was drinking [and] walking around New York City. Charles would be with him, [so] unless I were dumb, I would know he was out drinking.” Newhill, a sturdy Italian, was a former boxer who could handle Tracy and at the same time protect him from himself and the public at large. “[Spencer] wasn’t out all that much,” she added. “He’d start it and go out, but then when he began to get really seriously into it he wouldn’t go out. And I certainly wouldn’t let him go out. I’d see to it that he couldn’t go out … I was not able to solve his problems, but I was able to help him by seeing that he didn’t fall down the stairs, you know, or break his goddamn neck or just be miserable.”
Containing Tracy’s impulses and abetting them were two different things entirely and would have elicited, in Joe Mankiewicz’s estimation, two very different sets of responses. “Kate,” he said in 1992,
has a whole new characterization that she’s maintaining for herself—part Constance Collier, part Mrs. Siddons, and part some very elegant lady of affairs. There must be no touch of Marilyn Monroe–type life or Hollywood-type life. So when Kate says, “When Spencer asked for a drink, oh yeah, I gave him a drink,” well, put yourself [in her position]. This isn’t the first time we’ve been together. The whole thing of going to bed together … we’re sort of tied together now. I’m Spence and I feel I’ve got to have a drink. It isn’t like saying, “I’ll have a scotch and soda.” That saying “I want a drink” is an important mark…
He says, “I want a drink.” Now she says, “Of course, Spence,” and gets it for him. She removes him of guilt. She removes a certain amount of guilt, and that does not please Spence. That irritates him, because in a way she’s shoving booze on him. Once you get into a twisted emotion, you’ve got to be able to trace the emotion and stay with it. And when she says, “I’ll give you the drink,” does that make him happy? Spence, if he wanted a drink, part of having a drink is knowing that he’s doing something wrong and he can’t help doing it. So whenever I hear the woman say, “No sir, I gave him these drinks”—that’s horseshit. “I’m being a big woman now. I’m changing my character; I’m going back after the fact to change my characterization.” Because if she really did that, it wouldn’t have played. It just wouldn’t have made sense. Because if she said, “I’ll get you a drink,” he probably would have exploded with anger: “Stay the fuck out of my life!” You know—that life. “The last thing I want is two years from now to think of you giving me drinks! Making me hate you!”
Oh no, that’s really too easy … Once you start thinking that way about Spence, it was his guilt. But don’t forget also he would have a kind of proprietary sense about that guilt. I’ve known several like that—alcoholics. My brother was one, but not like that. The kind Spence was … they’re gone. And they not only accept the guilt, they need the guilt to see them through this thing. Spence locked in a hotel room, going to the bathroom in his pants … every disgusting thing he did to himself. “I am beating myself up.” You know? This is what my father used to do. Jack Barrymore was a different kind of drunk. Spence was a black Irish drunk.
It was at Hepburn’s four-story brownstone in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan—where Tracy, according to her, was essentially under house arrest—that some of their worst moments took place. Whether giving him a drink or wresting one from his hand, her actions—or the words that accompanied them—could easily have provoked him to the point of reflexive violence and, possibly, something even worse. For in 1991 Hepburn recounted a time when Tracy, she said, tried to choke her. She described fending off the attack by pushing him into the closet that housed the ladder to the roof—a considerable feat of strength and choreography when he outweighed her by sixty or seventy pounds.
Katharine Houghton, when apprised of the story, didn’t buy it, contending that “anyone who knew the house” would find such a scene absurd.
Some sort of fight may well have occurred during which he tried to choke her, but the idea that she imprisoned a crazed Spencer Tracy in a very small closet is improbable for at least two reasons: First of all, despite her strength, I doubt she could have forced his bulk into that closet. And second, I doubt that she would have put a drunken man whom she loved into such danger. His only way out of that closet would have been to climb to the roof, and she certainly wouldn’t have wanted to take the chance that he would fall from the roof. Over the years, Kate recounted various incidents that were complete fabrications—good stories, yes, but untrue … In all these fabrications, she cast herself in a good or heroic light … If Spencer had really wanted to strangle her, I’m sure he could have succeeded without much difficulty.
Still, given the events that ensued in the months that followed their time together in New York, it’s clear something deeply disturbing happened between them, that Tracy had felt so out of control he never wanted to put himself in such a position again. For if the fight was over his drinking, as
it most likely was, both parties could well have been enraged to the point of physical violence. “Assuming they had a fierce fight,” Houghton continued, “what would really interest me is why they had a fight, and why Kate chose that particular fight to embroider into a tale. Was it because she felt guilt concerning her part in it? In the family we were all witness, from time to time, to her being maddeningly self-righteous and bossy, no doubt with good intentions, but still way out of line. With Spencer she may well have been guilty on occasion of what he rightly would have considered egregious behavior.”
Was Hepburn’s own culpability something she could never fully acknowledge? Did the fracas continue? Or was Tracy immediately docile, suddenly aware of what might have happened? Nobody knows; of the two people with direct knowledge of that night, only one ever spoke of it, and only briefly, off mike, as in the shared whisper of a confidence. “I don’t know how he got so loaded, but he really did,” said Bob Hepburn, who was in New York awaiting the commissioning of the navy hospital ship U.S.S. Repose. “I had to call the hospital—Presbyterian—and they came down and fetched him and dried him out somehow.” Tracy’s “rumored” arrival at Harkness Pavilion was reported by Walter Winchell on February 28, and on March 10 the studio quietly extended his vacation without pay for another six weeks.
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