He did indeed slip from the tightrope in early August—not into the bottle, as Kanin may have feared, but into retirement … or at least a declaration of it. The announcement came in Stockholm, where Tracy had gone to see Alf Sjöberg’s film of Barabbas, a work he described as “thrilling.” Resigned to Schary’s “absolute turndown” of an American version, Tracy told a man with the UP he planned to give up the movie business altogether. “When I have fulfilled my contract duties to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer within some three years,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything else left for me than quit the screen.”
The news, of course, went around the world, though nobody at M-G-M took it seriously. Then Kate had an attack of laryngitis that threatened to take her out of The Millionairess, and doctors advised her not to speak at all except when onstage at the New Theatre. Taking it all as a sign of exhaustion, Tracy was thinking of coming home when he received a telegram from the Kanins asking him to call their friend June Dally-Watkins at the Cumberland Hotel.
The business with Gene Tierney hadn’t gone well, and Hepburn was so depleted it took everything she had just to get through the play each night. Spence, Kanin observed, was “[s]ort of at loose ends” and had “had a bad time in Paris” (presumably with Tierney, although he didn’t say as much). When he told the Kanins on a call from London that he “needed a friend,” Ruth shouted into the receiver, “Well, you’ve got two!” and they began making plans to join him in France toward the end of September.
Dally-Watkins happened along in the interim, a charming, self-assured Australian whom Gar and Ruth had met in Los Angeles through the Aussie costume designer Orry-Kelly. As a top fashion model, she had founded her country’s first schools of deportment and was on a tour of the schools and modeling agencies of Western Europe. “At the appointed time,” she recalled, “I saw him descend the hotel’s marble staircase, glance at me and look away as if to seek out another face. It was obvious he had not been given a recognizable description, so I introduced myself and he seemed surprised. No wonder! Over afternoon tea he told me that Garson and Ruth had played a joke on him, saying I was an older actress from Australia and thought I would make a good mother for Debbie Reynolds’ character in his next movie.”
In London, June found Tracy solitary and “introspective,” more interested in knowing about her than in talking about himself. “Spencer showed a romantic interest in me, and there was a spark between us that culminated in a kiss.” She responded to his dry humor, the way he’d put things, and had no awareness of his relationship with Katharine Hepburn. “I was,” she said, “twenty-five and stupid—well, let’s say unworldly—and I was a single girl, traveling alone.” They went to the ballet at Covent Garden, where he took her backstage to meet prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn. He didn’t want to wait in Europe for the Kanins, though, and returned to New York before they had time to sail. (“Remaining here longer impossible,” he wired.) June was scheduled to go on to Paris but promised to see him again when she returned to California.
While Pat and Mike had garnered excellent reviews, it was The African Queen that put Katharine Hepburn back in the public eye in a big way. Both she and Bogart drew Academy Award nominations for their roles in the picture, and Bogart subsequently won the Oscar for his work as Charlie Allnut after shrewdly and tirelessly campaigning for it. With Hepburn bringing The Millionairess to Broadway for a limited run, Time began preparations for a cover story on the forty-five-year-old actress and put researchers on the job in Connecticut, Los Angeles, and New York City. Kate’s father, as always, refused to talk, as did the Kanins, but there were plenty of other witnesses willing to say their piece—stand-ins, crew members, journalists, and press agents among them. Cary Grant cooperated to the point of telling a couple of anecdotes, as did Howard Hawks, Joe Mankiewicz, George Stevens, and Eddie Knopf. George Cukor was circumspect, speaking only in generalities, and nobody would admit that she was in a long-term relationship with her frequent costar, Spencer Tracy.
Nobody, that is, except one.
Humphrey Bogart, according to Time staff writer Jim Murray, confirmed a romance did indeed exist, that he had seen Tracy and Hepburn together, and that Hepburn was “unaccustomedly subdued and effeminate” in Tracy’s presence. And, he added, she didn’t hog the conversational limelight on such occasions, a real departure for her.
“Ordinarily,” Bogart said, “she talks a blue streak. We listened for the first couple of days when she hit Africa and then began asking ourselves, ‘How affected can you be in the middle of Africa?’ She used to say that everything was ‘divine.’ The goddamn stinking natives were divine. ‘Oh, what a divine native!’ she’d say. ‘Oh, what a divine pile of manure!’ You had to ask yourself, ’Is this really the dame or is this something left over from Woman of the Year?”
Tracy had remained in touch with Bogart over the years, but the two men weren’t terribly close until The African Queen, through Hepburn, brought them together. Likely, as with Gable, it was Bogart’s love of scotch that forced Tracy to hold him at a distance, but gradually Spence had developed the discipline to confront booze and stare it down, and his sobriety was no longer considered so precarious. Kate put them together—tentatively at first—and they found they enjoyed each other’s company enormously, even as, socially, they were completely different animals. “Bogart and Tracy had a special rapport,” said writer Peter Viertel, “based on their mutual admiration and strikingly devoid of professional jealousy.”
Romanoff’s was common ground for them both, but for entirely different reasons. There was nothing secluded about the hexagonal dining room—even the entrance off the bar required a descent down a short flight of steps that ensured all in the room had a chance to take notice—but where Bogart used it as a showcase, a home away from home, a place to hold forth, Tracy frequented the room because it was familiar ground and no one was likely to bother him. The proprietor himself usually managed the seating chart, a Lithuanian émigré and sometime actor who posed as Prince Michael Dimitri Alexandrovich Obolensky-Romanoff, nephew to the late czar of Russia, a harmless fiction that somehow suited a community full of poseurs and phonies. “It’s the parts, not the acting,” Bogart told the AP’s James Bacon one day over lunch, commenting on his recent Oscar win. “If it were acting, Spencer Tracy would win it every year.”
“He was innately a marvelous actor,” Lauren Bacall said of Tracy,
and also a hugely intelligent one. He and Bogie used to compare notes on some of the actors who called themselves actors and what they did during a scene. I remember they were discussing this one actor standing in a scene. The actor would put his left hand on his tie, and his right hand in his pocket. After a while he’d shift gears and put his left hand in his pocket and his right hand on his tie. Very funny stuff. They took no prisoners, those two men, because they had real talent and they had respect for their craft, and the people who called themselves stars, half of them were jokes. Because of the studio system, some of them were in an exalted position they never should have been in. The talent did not require that. It was great to be in their company, I must say. I just loved it.
The magazine, which hit the stands just prior to Labor Day, was largely laudatory and mentioned only that Hepburn and Tracy were “fast friends.” Kate closed in London on September 20 and immediately returned to the United States for minor surgery. She was in and out of Hartford in three days, Tracy at hand the entire time. Emily Perkins, from her place in Maine, urged a complete rest: “You and Spence should go to Ireland for three months’ quiet, go collecting shells by the seaside away from telephones and so forth.” George Cukor thought it “goddamn silly” for Kate to drive herself so hard, closing one night, flying out the next day, then starting New York rehearsals for The Millionairess practically without stop. “She’s been arranging things on such a tight schedule for herself for the last three years or so, driving herself to such a pace that I’m afraid of what will happen to her.”
By September 29,
Tracy was back at the Pierre Hotel, attempting calls to the Kanins and June Dally-Watkins in Paris with no apparent success. “Has she run off [with] handsome stranger?” he asked Gar and Ruth via cable. “Cruel after sweet letters. When coming here? Lonesome and discouraged and now broke.” He also pressed for news of Gene Tierney, who had grown somewhat close to Ruth in the interim. “I was surprised,” said Bill Self, “because once in a while Carroll and Spence would talk about some other affair that he was having or thinking of having while he was very involved with Hepburn. And I always—naively, I suppose—thought Spence had his affairs while he was married, before Hepburn, but when Hepburn came into his life, that was the woman of his life. And, apparently, that wasn’t true.”
Constance Collier reported Hepburn as resting, ready to start in again on The Millionairess and make the play as great a success on Broadway as it had been in England. “I can’t tell you what we went through in London,” Collier confided in a letter to George Cukor. “Kate was really ill, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I think it is delayed shock. She has never let down since the death of her mother, and with the strain of the part and everything else, I think it piled up and really upset her terribly.” Years later, Hepburn wrote of her mother’s death and of the repression of grief that had by then become something of a tradition in the family.2 “I stood—my mother—dead—my darling mother—the only mother I’ll ever have—gone. I took her hand—still warm—unclasped her fingers from the sheet she had pulled up—and I kissed her and went down to Dad. No goodbyes. Just gone.”
The Millionairess opened at the Shubert Theatre on October 17, 1952, but where the show had been widely acclaimed in London and the provinces, the reception of the New York critics was lukewarm at best. Kate’s boisterous performance was sometimes unintelligible, even as she drew praise for the physical stamina she displayed in the part. (“Miss Hepburn can be understood clearly,” Brooks Atkinson countered. “Perhaps that’s the trouble.”) Business was fine—they were sold out for the entire ten weeks of the run—and its star was reported as being in “fine spirits and good health.”
Gar Kanin wrote Tracy at the end of the same month, saying that Gene Tierney’s mother had called him but offering nothing more. Tracy took this as a bad sign and cabled back: NO REPORT GT GUESS BAD FOR OLD TOM. Concurrently, an item appeared in Kilgallen’s column to the effect that Tracy was “facing a decision that could make front page news. If so, it will startle the public—but not show business.” A few weeks after that, Walter Winchell compounded the news by suggesting that “Katharine Hepburn’s long-time heart” would seek a “special dispensation” to marry.
Curiously, it was around this time that Tracy sent Louise and Susie, who were in New York on a brief holiday, backstage to see “Kath” after a performance of The Millionairess. Susie had already met Hepburn on the set of Adam’s Rib, but Louise had seen her only on screen, never in person, and how Spence imagined it going is anyone’s guess. Susie was completely unaware of the relationship between Hepburn and her father—they were simply coworkers as far as she knew—but Louise would remember the strained cordiality of the encounter and the attention Hepburn lavished on her twenty-year-old daughter.
That Kate was caught off guard is almost a certainty, but why did Louise do it? Did she fix her adversary with a knowing glare? Did she insert a little dig into her greeting or her reaction to the performance? Did she gain any satisfaction from having the upper hand for once? Had the column items somehow emanated from Hepburn’s camp? And was suddenly putting his wife and daughter on display Spence’s way of answering them? Or, in choosing to go, was Louise answering them herself? “Don’t ever leave me,” Spence had said to her, and she assured him that she never would.
Kanin finally wrote Tracy on December 1, saying it was about time to accept the fact that it was “good-bye Charlie” with respect to Gene Tierney. She had recently been in the papers, photographed on the arm of Prince Aly Khan, the notorious playboy and estranged husband of actress Rita Hayworth. Gar asked Ruth to call Tierney at her hotel and see if she could find out exactly what was going on, but Gordon had already had a “great big girl-talk” on the subject, and it seemed that Tierney had been deeply stuck on another man—the implication being that it was Kirk Douglas—and that his alleged treatment of her was what drove her back into the “maelstrom of Paris highlife.” Tracy, in a handwritten Christmas letter to Gordon, complained she was “difficult to get information” from (“like you just refuse any word of talks with G.T.”) but then acknowledged having received a “nice letter from her—sort of the ‘kiss off’ ” that appeared to end the matter once and for all.
Plymouth Adventure was released on November 28, 1952, a Thanksgiving turkey that inspired more respect than praise, more lip service than business. While Clarence Brown readily admitted it was “not my best, not by any means,” Dore Schary was relentlessly optimistic about the picture, advising Tracy by cable of how well it was doing in preview (“cards wonderful, reaction good”) and how well Tracy’s performance had been received (“You are simply great and everybody says so.”) The press preview on October 20 had been polite, dignified, like the opening of a museum exhibit. The notices carefully embalmed the picture, Bosley Crowther labeling it “a thoroughly respectful and respectable adjunct to the schoolroom histories,” while Otis Guernsey, in the Herald Tribune, called it “the kind of film in which the characters cannot help being self-conscious of destiny.”
Most reviewers noted the truly spectacular storm sequence at the movie’s core but reserved comment on the pallid on-screen romance between Tracy and the doomed Gene Tierney. Business was weak from the outset, with its first-day gross comparable to that of The Magnificent Yankee, a modestly filmed play that boasted Louis Calhern and Ann Harding as its nominal stars. It went on to lose $1.8 million on total billings of just over $3 million—a disastrous showing.
Near the end of his life, Schary contemplated what exactly happened with the picture. “It sank!” he said after thinking a moment. “Plymouth Adventure had some wonderful things. The voyage. Clarence Brown did some great things. But we made terrible mistakes in the casting. I thought some of the people were good. I thought Tracy did well, Gene Tierney was nice, Leo Genn was properly stolid, but Van Johnson was a thorough error, just terrible. It just never worked. Maybe because pictures where they wear long knickers and those big collars can’t be made real. They can’t come to life. I wanted that picture very badly; I fought for it. But it was a loss.”
When Ruth Gordon began dabbling in autobiography, the results came in the form of articles in Forum and the Atlantic Monthly. In 1944 she collected her experiences as a hopelessly stage-struck young girl living on the outskirts of Boston into a play called Journey to a Star. Two years later, a substantially revised version titled Years Ago opened at the Mansfield Theatre in New York with Fredric March as Clinton Jones, Florence Eldridge as his wife Annie, and Patricia Kirkland as the playwright’s own younger self, Ruth Gordon Jones. The play was a modest hit, lasting 206 performances, and March walked off with the Tony that season for Best Actor. Just prior to its closing in May 1947, M-G-M was erroneously reported as having agreed to pay $425,000 to bring Years Ago to the screen, an astounding sum for the time. Much later, the price was fixed at a more realistic $75,000, and Metro acquired the rights with the understanding that Spencer Tracy was to star in it.
The screenplay was drafted over the summer of 1951, then put on ice as Pat and Mike and Plymouth Adventure took precedence. By the fall of 1952, the picture was moving toward production with Debbie Reynolds in the part of Ruth, an idea that had followed the property since its purchase. Tracy was happy to do the picture, but was against the casting of Reynolds, and over the space of sixteen months did everything he could to scuttle it. The first salvo came in the form of a letter from Garson Kanin to George Cukor in August 1951. Tracy, Kanin advised, was “not at all convinced” that Reynolds was the best possible choice, worried, perhaps, that the pictu
re would be burdened with “the usual sweetening of songs, dances, and funny sayings” (as some early coverage had threatened). Gar urged open minds, as Ruth’s dream was to see Tracy in the part of Clinton Jones and she didn’t much care who played herself. The name of Wanda Hendrix was briefly floated, then it came down in Sheilah Graham’s column that Reynolds was out because she was “too old” for the part—she was twenty at the time—and that the role would likely go to Margaret O’Brien.
Cukor, however, wasn’t willing to give up on Debbie Reynolds quite so easily and shot a test of her in September 1952. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed,” he wrote Ruth, “I think we’ve got our girl.” But then he soured when he saw the footage and wondered if she was “exceptional enough.” Her strength was in her averageness, he said, and she had never before played a straight—that is, nonmusical—part. He suggested tricking her up a bit to give her a little character but lamented how very little of the “odd fish” there was about her. Tracy liked Reynolds, thought her clever enough but felt very much the same as Cukor. And neither of the Kanins thought much of the test, Ruth not minding it so much as Gar, who judged it a lot of “superficial nonsense.” Walter Plunkett was hard at work on Reynolds’ clothes, but the casting of the part still wasn’t settled when, on November 18, Tracy wired Kanin at St. Moritz:
MEETING S[C]HARY NOTHING RESOLVED. LOOKING GIRLS. AFRAID WORD WILL BE GO AHEAD PRESENT SETUP. UNBELIEVABLE LACK HELP BY PRODUCER. ONLY COURSE WOULD BE REFUSAL DO PICTURE WHICH OF COURSE WILL NOT DO.
With the start date fast approaching and no one else on the horizon, Tracy and Cukor went jointly to actress Jean Simmons, who was under contract to Howard Hughes and had recently starred for M-G-M in Young Bess. Simmons knew Tracy casually, as he occasionally came to the house to play poker with her husband, actor Stewart Granger. “He had the most wonderful sense of humor,” she said. “Wicked Irishman, you know—with a twinkle. I don’t know how other people felt about him; I just adored him.”
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