James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Since, in support of As You Like It, Hepburn had cooperated with Gehman, albeit minimally, Tracy may well have blamed her for the humiliation Louise no doubt suffered. Said Herzog: “We started the evening at the Club Madrid and wound up in the wee hours of the morning. He left the following day for Hollywood, followed by gossip column reports that his whirlwind courtship with Miss Hepburn, whom he had followed on tour, ended in a spat.”

  Joan Bennett remembered a phrase Tracy had picked up from Kate: “Bore, bore, bore …” She heard it at the start of Father’s Little Dividend, but once he got into it, he actually seemed to be enjoying himself, racing through the picture in twenty-one days, seven days under schedule. “I went out to George [Cukor]’s for my first party to say goodbye to Viv[ien Leigh] and Larry [Olivier]—and Spence was there,” Constance Collier wrote in a letter to Hepburn, hoping, perhaps, to mend the rift. “In all the time I have known him—I have never seen him look so well—really wonderful—very brown and thinner and he was so funny and charming.”

  At one point, Tracy became concerned that one of the twin babies playing his grandson in the picture was either hard of hearing or completely deaf. “I don’t think anything was wrong,” said Don Taylor, “but he was VERY concerned about it—I know that—and he called his wife.” Louise came to the set, and Spence, in light of the Flair article, was uncommonly solicitous, posing for pictures with her and talking up her work with the clinic. “They were very sweet to each other,” Taylor said. “She came on and he said, ‘Hello! Hi! How are you?’ They were dear. He introduced the mother, and his wife talked to the children.”

  With sets recycled from the first film, Minnelli was able to wrap the picture $150,000 under budget. “These last three comedies have entirely changed my viewpoint,” Tracy told a visitor. “Where before I doted on doing dramatic roles, I have never been as happy as I am now. In these uncertain times I think the public wants escapist pictures and I hope I’ll get my share of them.”

  There was never, however, an overabundance of comedies during Dore Schary’s reign at M-G-M. Tracy was bolstered in his quest for escapist fare only by the knowledge that the Kanins were at work for him on another original. Carrying the title Pat and Mike, the story concerned a woman whose controlling husband has little time for their marriage. When Pat Ford tells off the wife of an important client, Joe blows up and tells her that she couldn’t earn a penny on her own. Pat impulsively decides to turn athlete under the guidance of a local golf pro and quickly becomes the sensation of the Hot Springs Open. She attracts the attention of one Mike Cavanaugh, a destitute promoter, and goes on to phenomenal success in tennis and baseball under his shrewd management. It is Mike who tries injecting sex into sports by matching women against men, an idea that culminates in a big charity game between Pat’s girls and the Giants. The girls, of course, win, and Pat comes to realize that it is Mike she truly loves.

  Where Adam’s Rib had come together quickly, all the pieces falling smoothly into place, Pat and Mike proved a much tougher job. Though conceived expressly for Tracy and Hepburn, the initial reader’s report was not encouraging: “A not too successful attempt to pound a clever but slight and difficult idea into comedy form. It has lots of laughs, but despite the unquestioned ability and experience of the writers, it doesn’t have quite the flair to put this sort of thing across. Many of the gags are pointless and familiar, as are the trick camera effects. And the galaxy of famous sports and political figures involved certainly deserve a better showcase.”

  Pat and Mike was still under development when Tracy finished with Father’s Little Dividend, and the Hacketts said he proposed a plot for yet another sequel, this one taking him and Elizabeth Taylor on a European cruise. Joan Bennett, however, didn’t remember it that way: “When they asked him to make another [sequel] to Father of the Bride, he said no, he didn’t want to be playing Judge Hardy.”

  All this left him free for something a little closer to Schary’s heart, a gritty courtroom drama called The People Against O’Hara. Anything but escapist fare, it began as an outline called Johnny O’Hara’s Life by Eleazar Lipsky, a novelist and assistant district attorney who was attached for four years to the homicide bureau of New York County. The author of Kiss of Death, Lipsky proposed a robbery-murder scenario, detailing in documentary fashion the events flowing from an ordinary criminal act. “We will see not only the machinery of justice turning, but also the steps taken by the defense to anticipate the prosecution. The cat-and-mouse play between the two should develop simultaneously.” Offered initially on an option basis, Lipsky subsequently submitted a 366-page manuscript, which became the novel on which the picture was officially based. Molding Lipsky’s story into a star turn for someone of Tracy’s magnitude took nearly a year.

  The “contract trouble” Edward Streeter alluded to was typically over vacation and rest periods and the number of pictures Tracy could be required to make in a given year. In August 1949 a new interim agreement was signed that limited him to just two pictures a year and allowed thirteen consecutive weeks of vacation. Late in 1950 the William Morris Agency undertook a further modification of the deal, extending his rest periods to a minimum of six weeks between films and boosting his compensation to $150,000 a picture, or $5,769.23 a week on a fifty-two-week guarantee.

  By doubling production, Schary had cut overhead costs per picture in half. He shortened production schedules—Woman of the Year took fifty-nine days to shoot while Father of the Bride took just twenty-eight days—and cut the average number of writers on a project from 7.3 (under the old Thalberg model) to 1.2—a dramatic reduction. He also began to root out the deadwood, bringing in younger directors who weren’t mired in the old Metro ways and were used to working at a faster clip.

  One of those men was John Sturges, a former editor who, at the age of thirty-nine, was younger than many directors on the lot by at least a decade. In little more than a year, Sturges had completed four films for M-G-M, including The Magnificent Yankee—which had so impressed Tracy that he recorded a voice-over for the film’s trailer. Sturges, however, still needed Tracy’s approval to direct him in The People Against O’Hara. “It was traditional,” he said, “if you met anybody, you, your agent, and that person, if he was a star, had to meet at Romanoff’s. And we did. And talked about the picture we were going to do. Very brief conversation. ‘Look forward to it,’ he said. ‘Look forward to it,’ I said. Both left. That’s all there was to it.”

  Sturges later recalled that he and Bert Allenberg, Tracy’s new agent at William Morris, were sipping martinis that day, while Allenberg’s client was calmly drinking a cup of coffee. “Five years later we were talking about alcoholism, and I asked [Spence] how long it had taken him to get over the urge to drink. He reminded me of that moment at Romanoff’s and said, ‘You know, at that time I hadn’t had a drink for five years, but I wanted that martini and I looked at it with as much longing as the day I quit.’ So that’s what the man lived with.”

  Tracy began his sixteenth year at M-G-M with a new agent, a new contract, and a new picture in Father’s Little Dividend that was previewing even better than the original. “Audience chortled and howled throughout,” Schary was advised by Larry Weingarten in a wire. “Ending played very well. Looks like this one will pay the rent.”

  Tracy was preparing to go east for a Red Cross broadcast and location work on The People Against O’Hara when it was announced that he had received an Academy Award nomination for his work in Father of the Bride—his first Oscar nomination since Boys Town a dozen years earlier.

  * * *

  1 This was likely Homecoming (1948).

  2 Richard Houghton Hepburn (1911–2000) was a free spirit, the self-styled playwright of the family, sporadically produced. “Dick was no more eccentric than the rest of them,” Katharine Houghton said, “but he was closest to Kate in age and had been to Hollywood several times, unlike the rest of them. She had complex issues with Dick.”

  3 Another frequent signature
he used was T.O.T., which probably stood for “Tired Old Tracy.” He rarely, if ever, signed his correct name with close friends. To the Kanins he was “Old Tom.” To George Cukor he was always “Corse Payton,” the flamboyant Brooklyn matinee idol known for billing himself as “America’s Best Bad Actor.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Rough Patch

  * * *

  Louise took Johnny and Susie to Europe over the summer of 1950, the last time she would likely have them together for an extended length of time. Johnny, twenty-six, was a student at Chouinard Art Institute, and Susie, who turned eighteen on the voyage over, had been accepted for the fall semester at the University of Arizona, Tucson. They toured France, Italy, Switzerland, and England, then returned home aboard the Queen Elizabeth, docking in New York on August 21.

  Spence kept in touch by wire, postcard, the occasional phone call, and was there to meet the kids when they arrived back in Los Angeles by plane, their mother following by rail. “Well, it’s great to see you back!” he beamed, and on the drive home he peppered them with questions: “How was it? Tell me about it! Did you enjoy Claridge’s in London?” (He once told Stewart Granger he’d like to spend the rest of his life at Claridge’s, the service and comfort were so outstanding.) True to their tag-team existence, Spence was off to New York the moment Louise hit town, pausing only for dinner with her at Chasen’s.

  Louise’s profile was looming ever larger, her work with the clinic increasingly in the news. The Los Angeles Times named her a Woman of the Year on the last day of 1950, one of eleven civic leaders so honored for works as diverse as managing the city’s philharmonic orchestra, serving on Stanford’s board of regents, and swimming the English Channel. When the Academy Awards were handed out in March 1951, it was she who attended with Johnny and Susie and Susie’s friend Donna Bullard in tow. (José Ferrer beat out Spence for the Best Actor Oscar, which didn’t seem to upset anyone very much.) The West Coast premiere of Father’s Little Dividend was held to benefit the clinic’s building fund, with Esther Williams, Cyd Charisse, Janet Leigh, Nancy Olson, Diana Lynn, and Maureen O’Hara serving as the welcoming committee. Listening Eyes was again shown, George Murphy acted as master of ceremonies, and singer Eileen Christy sang two songs. Christy and Murphy then led the audience in singing “Happy Birthday” to Tracy, who was, in Johnny’s words, “very surprised to find out they knew it was his birthday.”

  Northwestern University awarded Louise an honorary doctorate in June, which prompted her husband to begin referring to his wife as “Dr. Tracy.” He began worrying that his presence at certain events could have the effect of overshadowing Louise and her work, and he made sure he was out of town when the groundbreaking for the clinic’s new building took place on July 28, 1951. He observed a groundbreaking of his own when George Cukor began work on a pair of cottages at the lower end of his Beverly Hills estate, one to serve as a secluded residence for one of the world’s best-known actors. Settling on a place to live was no simple matter for Spence, and there was a brief period of time when he enlisted Bill Self’s help while Kate was away on tour.

  “I kind of scouted the town at one time,” Self recalled, “trying to find a place for him, and reported back on a couple of places I thought were possibilities. He hated them all. He looked at me like I was an idiot. He calls up and says, ‘That’s a motel! You want to put me in a motel?’ [Then] he was looking for a house, and he considered, believe it or not, Peggy and me and our child moving in with him. I guess semi-caretaker to him in a way, you know? We actually talked about that a little bit, and Kate and I talked about that a little bit, but it was always looked upon as being totally impractical. I felt it would destroy our relationship.”

  By the time Cukor came to the rescue, Tracy was living, in Kate’s words, in “a terrible little apartment on South Beverly Drive down an alley off the actual drive. Trying to make it attractive was really not possible. In desperation we had Erik Bolin—French furniture maker—make some wooden valances for the curtains.”

  Tracy was a restless traveler when Kate was out of town—New York and back again, Chicago when he took the train, Freeport, Milwaukee once in a great while. Constance Collier was never sure where he was. “Did Spence come?” she asked when Hepburn was playing As You Like It in San Francisco. “I called twice but could not get him, so I suppose he went.” And later: “I don’t know if Spencer is here. I haven’t seen him at all.” He would slip in and out of town on a moment’s notice. “I’d go out to the ranch to play tennis with Johnny,” Bill Self remembered, “and Spencer would be there. And I didn’t even know that he was in town. I’d say, ‘What are you doing here? I thought you were in New York.’ He’d say, ‘No, I didn’t go’ or ‘I came back last night’ or something like that, but he would be there, and I think Louise liked that.”

  If there was one constant in Tracy’s life at the time, it was Sunday Mass wherever he happened to be. “There was a time in my life in the late forties and early fifties when I went to Mass almost every Sunday at Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills,” said Darryl Hickman. “Tracy was always there and sat by himself. Even though he was such a famous, recognizable film star, none of the parishioners ever approached him, including me. I had acted with him in two films when I was growing up, but I did what everybody else did—pretend I didn’t know him, or even know who he was. We didn’t dare intrude on such a ‘private’ public man. He would often be there before I arrived, a solitary figure standing in front of the church before Mass. Being so unapproachable, I wondered why he didn’t go right in. Like so many other things about Tracy, I could never figure that out.”

  When Tracy went east for the Red Cross, it was to do Father of the Bride over the radio for the Theatre Guild. Larry Keethe accompanied him, and President and Mrs. Truman attended the broadcast in Washington with their daughter Margaret. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who first met Tracy in New York in the 1920s, had come to resemble him to such an extent that he was frequently taken for him in crowds. “By prearrangement, I waited for him at the rear exit,” Douglas recounted in his autobiography. “Many people surged into the dimly lit alley, and taking me for him, asked, ‘Mr. Tracy, will you give us your autograph?’ I obliged, and several dozen took the forgeries home. Most of the crowd had gone when Spencer appeared, and my account of the episode made him chuckle as we sipped a nightcap in a secluded spot.”

  When Tracy arrived in New York to shoot exteriors for The People Against O’Hara, he found the entire troupe laid up with the flu. He had time for Mass at St. Patrick’s, a walk in Central Park, shopping for shoes at Abercrombie and Fitch. The producer of NBC’s The Big Show, a weekly all-star extravaganza, asked him to do a guest shot, and he agreed to go by the theater to “listen to it and see how they do it” but emphasized that he didn’t think he wanted to appear. “Radio is the bane of my life,” he groaned to Frank Tracy, who was in New York at the time and managed to meet up with him. “I can’t handle it. I can’t stand in front of that goddamn stick and emote. I can’t do that. No good at it.”

  On March 6, he and Kate—who had just concluded her tour in Rochester—saw Claude Rains in Darkness at Noon and were spotted by one of Dorothy Kilgallen’s informants. He was in Chicago on the tenth, headed back to Hollywood, when he drove down to Freeport to visit his aunt Mum in the hospital, where she had just undergone surgery for breast cancer. He saw his uncle Andrew and aunt Mame and was back in Chicago that same evening.

  He still saw his friends at the Boys’ Club but not with the frequency that he once had. Cagney was spending more time at Martha’s Vineyard, Pat O’Brien was working nightclubs, and Frank McHugh was planning a return to New York City, where he could find work in the theater and on television. With Hepburn determinedly sustaining their relationship, Tracy had gradually become part of her social circle, uncomfortable with old friends who knew him from when he was still out and around with Louise. “When he came [to the Boys’ Club dinners], which was rarely, he would not really join
in,” said actor Jimmy Lydon, who was invited into the group sometime in the mid-1940s. “He’d have a couple of knocks and he would just kind of sit and enjoy listening to everybody else.”

  In place of Joe Mankiewicz, Frank Borzage, Walt Disney, and Vic Fleming, Tracy was now spending his time with George Cukor, Constance Collier, Irene Selznick, and the Kanins. “I’ve never been able to see the Spence I knew so well participating in that group,” Mankiewicz said of the shift.

  I used to go to the fights with him. He lived the life of a sportswriter, a sort of New York sportswriter—really tough. He liked going to the fights. He liked reading. We used to spend evenings together, reading. It was an extremely close relationship, so close that Spence was my eldest son’s godfather, but after Kate enfolded him I saw nothing of him. He used to keep sending the same doll to Chris, his godson, when the boy was well into the age of puberty. Everything just stopped between us and I didn’t see Spence at all. I think I got a phone call when I hit the jackpot—I got four Academy Awards or something1—and Kate called and said how pleased they were but Spence never got on the phone.

  So it came as something of a surprise when Tracy learned that Pat O’Brien was having trouble finding work. Having finished off a seven-year contract at RKO, Pat found there was no work in features for a whole class of actor that populated films in the 1930s and ’40s—when the major studios were routinely making forty to fifty pictures a season. Averages had dropped in the years following the war, and budgets had tightened. “During several discussions at dinner of the Boys’ Club,” said Frank McHugh, “it was concluded that the picture business, as we knew it, was on the wane.” Major names like George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, Mickey Rooney, and Don Ameche were working in independent productions or, more frequently, on television, where the schedules were brutal and the money light. Pat sustained an average of two pictures a year, even into the fifties, but had three households to maintain and couldn’t quite figure it all out. “I was confronted with a strange situation I did not think could ever happen to me,” he wrote. “I suddenly could not get my foot inside a studio gate. I could not figure out what happened. Whatever it was, I was now unable to get a job in pictures.”