James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  He had begun seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Karl Von Hagen, who was chairman of the Department of Neurology at the USC School of Medicine. Tracy and Dr. Von Hagen would sit together. Kate would retire to another room, but she could never hear an exchange of voices. She wanted to take him away for the summer, and Dr. Von Hagen thought the best prospect was a rental near Chester and Sally Erskine at Malibu.

  It was at Traucas Beach that Tracy received a letter—accompanied by a script—from John Ford. “I would appreciate it very much if you would read this script, Cheyenne Autumn,” Ford wrote. “This, of course, is the first draft … overlong … overwritten, but that’s the way I prefer the first draft.”

  The proposal was to play Carl Schurz, the “first great liberal of our country, Secretary of the Interior, and the man who finally settled the Indian question. He tells the story in narration and finally comes in at the finish in person. This would entail about a week’s work on your part. This is not a charity job as Abe Lastfogel will tell you, but a firm, legitimate offer.” The picture was being produced by Bernard Smith, who had managed the filming of How the West Was Won and envisioned another all-star epic, one entirely under the direction of Jack Ford. Tracy could see no reason not to do the picture, given the minimal amount of work involved, and signaled Lastfogel to go ahead and make the deal.

  Hepburn described that summer in Malibu as “a very quiet time,” the first time in twenty-two years that she and Spence had actually lived together. By all accounts, he seemed relaxed, though frail, down to 180 pounds, a weathered shadow of his former self. They had completed two months together in the house on Broad Beach Road when, one Sunday, Tracy began having trouble breathing. Kate managed to get him out to the car; then, certain it was a heart attack, she called for help from the nearby Zuma Beach fire station. When the men arrived, they found him “ashen gray and his breathing extremely labored” as Hepburn, seated next to him, held his hand and soothed him as best she could. “Be calm and just relax … Everything is going to be all right.” As the rescue team began administering oxygen, Sally Erskine summoned a doctor from a nearby house, who gave Tracy an injection. To cover the awkward circumstances, Kate told the authorities they were about to go on a picnic. “This is a hell of a way to spend a picnic,” Tracy commented as he began feeling better.

  A private ambulance arrived, followed by Tracy’s personal physician of the moment, Dr. Karl Lewis. The patient was able to walk to the ambulance—he refused to lie down—and, accompanied by his brother Carroll, was delivered to St. Vincent’s Hospital at approximately 2:30 p.m. Early that evening Dr. Lewis announced that he had suffered “a little congestion of the lungs” and developed shortness of breathing. “He is recovering, improving, and feeling fine.” Later, Louise, who left the hospital shortly before midnight, told reporters, “He is doing as well as can be expected. He seems to be coming along very nicely. We hope he will be able to come home in two or three days.” In the news reports, it was invariably noted that Louise Tracy and her husband had been “estranged for many years.” The Los Angeles Times added the seemingly gratuitous information that Katharine Hepburn was “a divorcee.”

  Shielding himself from news photographers as he is wheeled into St. Vincent’s Hospital. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  Letters came from all over the world, and wires arrived from friends and professional acquaintances as diverse as Betty Bacall, Lew Douglas and his family, Earl Kramer (Stanley being in Europe), and Buddy Hackett. Judy Garland sent flowers, George Cukor a scold:

  SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU EXPOSE YOURSELF TO THAT FRESH SEA AIR? COME BACK TO THE DANK SMOG OF ST IVES AND YOULL BE OKAY FOREVER

  From his hospital bed, Tracy dictated replies, Hepburn faithfully taking them down in longhand. By July 23—two days after the attack—he was reported as feeling fine, sitting up and eating well. Dr. Lewis told the press that Tracy was suffering from pulmonary edema, the inability of the heart to pump effectively, thus causing an accumulation of fluid in the lungs. A spokesman for St. Vincent’s added that he would remain in the hospital for “a few days while they are making tests.” When he did finally leave, Carroll at his side, Tracy had been hospitalized for twelve days. Telling the nurses he was “feeling fine,” he was driven home to St. Ives, where Kate had effectively taken up residence. A new phone line had been installed for her personal use, leaving the original to serve as Spence’s direct line to Louise.

  “I have been thinking about Spencer,” Tim Durant wrote Kate, “and the possibility of getting him to start riding again. Let’s face it, at our age it is the mildest but most complete of all forms of exercise. Every muscle is in use but the horse does the hard work. You can choose your own gait and one has the therapy of a massage with the esthetics of being out of doors. I have a very quiet horse which he could start on. He used to be a good rider, and I sincerely feel if he took it up again it would be a great thing for him as it has for me. The ranch has complete privacy and is easily accessible.”

  But Tracy’s blood pressure was now dangerously high, aggravated by anxiety, and the notion of putting him on a horse—even a “very quiet” one—was unthinkable. He was, in fact, back in the hospital “just to have some tests made” by the end of the month, and he remained there through the middle of September. “Katharine Hepburn could have her choice of several important Broadway plays,” Dorothy Kilgallen told her readers, “but she’s turning down all New York offers to stay near ailing Spencer Tracy in Hollywood. Her devotion to him for more than two decades has been absolutely selfless.”6

  While Tracy was in the hospital, he confessed to Kate that when he got out he wanted a snappy little sports car. “But then he said, ‘It wouldn’t do, would it—with the white hair and everything?’ And I said ‘Shoot, if it’s what you want, get it.’ So he ordered it and it was delivered to the hospital the day he got out and we went down together and there it was at the curb.” It was a dark blue Jaguar XK-E two-door convertible, one of the sexiest (and most powerful) production cars on the road. “All the nurses were leaning out of the windows, watching us. So he got behind the wheel and I got in beside him and he tried to start the motor and it wouldn’t start. And it wouldn’t start. So I jumped out, opened the hood, took a bobby pin out of my hair, and in two minutes flat I had it fixed. All the nurses started applauding. I took a bow. And we drove off in a blaze of glory.”

  Hepburn was by now in full control of Tracy’s care, coordinating his medications, fixing his meals, maintaining his house, scheduling his guests. Her cooking was famously poor, and Frank Sinatra remembered being served a steak that “looked like it had been jumped on by 14 soccer players” when he came to visit. “However, in the middle of dinner the three of us are seated and having dinner, the lights went out. And I said to Shanty [his nickname for Tracy], ‘Where’s the fuse box?’ ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘No, no, no. She does all that kind of work. Kate—fix the lights.’ Sure enough, sure enough, she said, ‘Yes, Spensuh!’ And she got a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, and I swore that she was going to electrocute herself, but she knew exactly what to do.”

  With Kate effectively making St. Ives her base in California (leaving Phyllis Wilbourn to occupy the birdcage), Tracy added a codicil to his 1961 will, bequeathing the contents of the house—furniture, fixtures, paintings—to his brother Carroll, who could in turn pass on to Hepburn everything that either belonged to her or that she wished to keep. She honored the simplicity of his home, the spare comfort designed into it, and did virtually nothing to alter it other than to move some clothes and a few personal effects into the spare bedroom. Close at hand at all times were oxygen (in case of another edema attack) and morphine (in the event of “cardiac distress”).

  With Tracy in such delicate shape, the world premiere of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World nearly passed unnoticed within the little household. As with Judgment at Nuremberg, Kramer flew in members of the world entertainment press, taking over the Beverly Hilton and working a packed schedule of conferences,
tours, and fetes. The press preview was set for November 3, 1963, at the new Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, followed by the invitational Mad World Ball with a number of cast members in attendance. The official world premiere took place four days later as a benefit for the Women’s Guild of Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Louise went and, as usual, called Spence the minute she was home. “He had been doing very serious things,” she later said. “I thought it was awful.” Kate subsequently saw the movie herself and pronounced it “funny as hell.” Tracy, as far as anyone knows, never watched it.

  The early trade notices were wonderful, predicting big things at the box office, while the secular press was more divided, the reactions ranging from “wild and hilarious” (Bosley Crowther) to “appalled by nearly everything I saw and heard” (Philip K. Scheuer). Being, in some respects, the godfather of the picture, Crowther was one of the few major critics to comment at length on Tracy’s crucial role in the comic mechanism Kramer and Rose had so painstakingly devised.

  “[I]t isn’t that Mr. Tracy is funny,” he wrote,

  so much as it is that he is cynical and sardonic about this wholesale display of human greed and is able to move from this position into ultimate command of the hoard when the parties converge upon it and he is there to take it away. In this respect, Mr. Tracy seems the guardian of a sane morality in this wild and extravagant exposition of clumsiness and cupidity. While the mad seekers are tearing toward the money in their various ways—in automobiles that race each other in breathtaking sweeps on hairpin turns in the wide-open California desert, in airplanes that wobble overhead—Mr. Tracy sits there in wise compliance, the dignity of the law. And then, by a ruse I dare not tell you, he shows how treacherous his morality is.

  Audiences kept the L.A. and New York reserved-seat engagements at capacity, while Kramer whittled away at the picture, stung by widespread comment that it was just too long, too loud, too much. When the murder of President John F. Kennedy occurred on November 22, attendance slumped badly at theaters across the nation as Americans remained glued to their TV screens. A rebound of sorts took place over the long Thanksgiving Day weekend and, thanks to advance sales, the film was back to smash business by the end of the month.

  Tracy found himself top-billed in the biggest, most talked-about picture in the world, Kramer’s elaborate $400,000 press junket having paid off in a tsunami of ink. He was now, however, just 160 pounds, completely unphotographable, and in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the Morris office notified Warner Bros.—Ford already being on location in Utah—that he couldn’t possibly do Cheyenne Autumn, that his doctor didn’t feel he was up to it. When the withdrawal was made public at the end of the year, it was with the news that Edward G. Robinson, who had himself suffered a serious heart attack the previous year, would step in as his replacement.

  Into the new year, Tracy was plagued with bouts of dizziness and depression. At times his blood pressure surged into stage-two hypertension, and Hepburn feared that he would suffer a stroke. His potassium and blood sugar levels were too high; Kate continued to manage his diet, feeding him peas, carrots, fruits, eggs, melba toast, and iron supplements and lecturing him on the merits of a positive attitude. To bolster his spirits, she bought him a puppy—part police dog, part coyote—he named Lobo.

  Stanley Kramer and Abby Mann came to dinner on February 4 to discuss Ship of Fools, for which Mann had drafted a screenplay. Kramer pitched Hepburn for the part of Mary Treadwell, but Kate said that she wouldn’t do the film—any film—without Spence. (“I think,” said Mann, “one of the reasons Stanley wanted Hepburn was to get Tracy.”) The day Hepburn called Mann to tell him what she thought of Ship of Fools, Abe Lastfogel and Phil Kellogg (the head of William Morris’ Motion Picture Department) stopped by to talk with Tracy about making another picture, this one with Steve McQueen.

  The Cincinnati Kid was based on the breakout novel of the same title by Richard Jessup, a writer more familiar to the readers of genre paperbacks than hardcover fiction. Jessup had modeled his book on Walter Tevis’ The Hustler, substituting cards for pool. Producer Martin Ransohoff wanted Tracy for the role of the old master, Lancey Hodges, who, in the game of stud poker, was known simply as The Man. After reading the book, Tracy expressed an interest if Ransohoff, best known for his TV work, could land McQueen, who was inclined to commit only if Tracy was. The tentative casting was announced in March 1964 with an October start date, giving Tracy time to regain some of the weight he had lost. The screenplay was assigned to Paddy Chayefsky, the man responsible for scripting Ransohoff’s most recent production, The Americanization of Emily.

  Hepburn resumed her morning tennis workouts at the Beverly Hills Hotel, even as Tracy continued to lose weight. After a bout of stomach trouble in May he was down to 158 pounds, fully clothed, and she began wondering if he could even be insured for a picture. Yet he seemed in good spirits and felt well enough to drive over to Columbia, where Kramer was shooting Ship of Fools with Vivien Leigh, Simone Signoret, and José Ferrer. He had a good time, stayed until 3:30, but was photographed on the set looking painfully thin and pale, coffee cup in hand, seated alongside actress Elizabeth Ashley. The next day, papers carried the picture nationwide, labeling the shot as his “first public appearance in a year.”

  Kramer said to him: “I have your name on a director’s chair next to mine. Why don’t you go through the picture with us?” He went back a couple of more times that week, then fell into a routine of going in just once a week, specifically to have lunch with the director. “He’d come in a half hour or an hour early,” remembered Marshall Schlom, “just to hang out, and since he knew me from Judgment and Mad World, he’d come over and sit next to me. He’d want to know everything that had been going on, any gossip. He’d watch them shoot, then Stanley would call lunch and they’d go off together.”

  Production on Ship of Fools was slowed by Lee Marvin’s alcoholism and Vivien Leigh’s harrowing mood swings, which necessitated electroshock treatments. Kramer was happy to have Tracy on the set to talk to visiting journalists, somewhat taking the heat off the picture’s troubled cast. When assistant director John Veitch shouted “First team!” one morning, signaling the stand-ins to step out of the scene so the stars could take their places, Tracy, after the manner of an old fire horse, rose from his chair as if to answer the call.

  “Yeah, I’ve dropped 35 pounds,” he told the AP’s Bob Thomas, downplaying his various bouts of illness. “Now I can’t understand how I was able to pack all that weight around. How did I get rid of it? Just by cutting down on the chow. And I get some exercise every day. I’ve got a dog, and we go for long walks in the country.” He played along with the notion that he was studying Kramer’s technique as a director, but nobody took him very seriously. “Stanley’s as good or better than any director I’ve worked with. And I’ve worked with some of the great ones. I learned a lot watching Stanley work these last few weeks. The main thing it takes to be a director is patience. And I just don’t have the patience. I may never direct a picture.” He cast an appreciative glance toward twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Ashley. “I really come down here to look at the girls.”

  One day he was sitting with Marshall Schlom when an unfamiliar man approached with a dog-eared roll of paper. “Mr. Tracy,” the man began, offering him the roll, “I’m from M-G-M …” Tracy accepted the sheet and began uncurling an oversized print of a photograph so wide that Marshall had to take one edge in his right hand as Tracy held the other in his left. Before them was a group picture of the Metro star roster, sixty-five world-famous faces gathered for Louis B. Mayer’s birthday in 1943. There, seated front and center, was the old man, flanked by Kate on one side, Greer Garson on the other. Tracy himself was in the second row, directly behind the studio boss, clad still in the leather flight jacket he wore in A Guy Named Joe, Wallace Beery was to his right, Walter Pidgeon his left, the entire M-G-M galaxy (sans Gable) surrounding them.

  “The studio is coming up on its fortieth anniversary…,�
� the man began, but Tracy seemed transfixed, taking in the images of Red Skelton, Hedy Lamarr, Van Johnson, Irene Dunne, Lewis Stone, Lucille Ball, June Allyson, Lionel Barrymore, Jimmy Stewart, Marilyn Maxwell, Mickey Rooney, Margaret Sullavan, Robert Benchley, Donna Reed, Esther Williams, Bill Powell, dozens of others. “We’d like to restage this photograph, with everyone sitting exactly where they were twenty years ago, and leaving the chairs empty for those who have passed away.”

  By this time, Tracy was ignoring the man completely, lost in thought and a cascade of memories. Finally, leaning in toward Marshall, an impish grin crept over his face. After a moment he began to point with his free hand. “Her,” he said warmly, indicating one of the actresses in the front row. “Her,” he added, pointing to another. “Her…,” he continued. “And her …”

  By August, Martin Ransohoff had a director in Sam Peckinpah. “I thought that The Cincinnati Kid had the feel of a western,” Ransohoff said, “and felt that Sam would give that kind of feel to it. I was interested in doing a gunfight with a deck of cards; The Cincinnati Kid was almost a romantic western.” Paddy Chayefsky couldn’t see it that way, having written it more as a character study. On August 3, Ransohoff and Peckinpah came to see Tracy, admitting they had no script. Alternatives to Chayefsky were discussed—Ring Lardner, Dalton Trumbo. As Hepburn noted, Tracy was “not too impressed” with Ransohoff, and two days later, while taking a phone call from the producer’s secretary, he said the hell with it. Ransohoff managed to reengage him over the search for a girl to play Christian, and Tracy was persuaded to drive to the studio one day to watch a test made of Sharon Tate, a young actress Ransohoff had under personal contract. He had, however, lost so much weight that Joe Cohn, one of the very few of the old guard still left on the Metro lot, didn’t even recognize him.