To write the new screenplay, Ransohoff hired Ring Lardner, who had spent the previous fifteen years blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten. It was Ransohoff’s idea that Lardner accompany him to a meeting with Tracy and Hepburn, thinking, apparently, that the cowriter of Woman of the Year would somehow forge a stronger bond with The Cincinnati Kid. At St. Ives, Kate answered the door and received Lardner warmly.
“Spence was in his dressing gown,” Lardner remembered. “He looked pretty bad.” At some point, struggling to make conversation, Ransohoff told Tracy that Joe Levine was making a picture about Jean Harlow. Tracy didn’t have much to say about Harlow, so Ransohoff added that Carroll Baker—“the titless wonder”—was going to play her. “At the phrase ‘the titless wonder’ I noticed Tracy, who was sitting very still, his eyes went to Kate to see her reaction to this phrase. And she didn’t show any at all, but there was the faintest smile on Tracy’s face, because [of] how she would react, with her particular figure, to this crude bastard talking about ‘the titless wonder.’ ”
The meeting likely had the opposite effect of what Ransohoff had intended, for when the new script came in, Tracy read it and then, in Kate’s words, “complained of bellyache.” The next day Phyllis read the script and had the same reaction—she also complained of a bellyache. In a subsequent meeting with Lastfogel and Kellogg, it was agreed to view anything else from Ransohoff “only at arm’s length.”
There was, besides, a much more promising project in the offing, as producer Walter Wanger had optioned Louis Auchincloss’ new novel, The Rector of Justin, and proposed to turn it into a film for Tracy and Hepburn with George Cukor directing. On September 25, Wanger and Cukor came to lunch, and they all parted company thinking they had a firm commitment. Then Cukor found the tone of Wanger’s follow-up “disquieting” in that Metro seemed very excited about it and that Wanger hoped to sign contracts. “To me,” Cukor said, “it sounds alarmingly like so many of the messages I’m getting these days, ‘Don’t call us we’ll call you.’ ”
By late October, Peckinpah had replaced Ransohoff as Tracy’s day-to-day connection with The Cincinnati Kid, dropping off a revised script on the twenty-ninth and confiding that he didn’t much like Ransohoff either. Hepburn thought the script more like the book, but the troublesome part of Lancey “still about [the] same.” Phil Kellogg, hyping the indisputable fact that the script was indeed better, urged Tracy to do the picture, as did Ransohoff and Peckinpah, and, at least momentarily, Tracy said that he would. He was, however, undecided again after they left and “appalled” at their pushing him.
“It is very hard to know,” Kate wrote. “Spence said that he got very tired going to Kramer studio. He puzzles me—he wants the associations but the WORK? Phyllis finished & Carroll & thought script better but part not—I told Spence I personally would not do it—too mediocre a part—could say as they have just said that McQueen would play7 it then he ST can withdraw—the other parts are really better than his & it’s just not good enough.”
In consultation with Lastfogel and Kellogg, it was decided to warn Ransohoff that Tracy would “probably not do” the picture but that he would still read further revisions of the script. Ransohoff responded by saying that he couldn’t wait any longer and would be forced to look for somebody else. Tracy said okay—the answer was no. Hepburn’s notation the next day was that Metro would not wait twelve hours for Tracy to read a new ending to the script, so the picture was off. “Spence very thrown by apparent slam to his position—the part was very poor & I feel it was correct to turn it down. It may affect Rector of Justyn [sic]. Peckinpah called to say how sorry he was & how nice two people we were. I hope we were right—I think he would have been miserable doing a bad part.”
At Kate’s suggestion, Walter Wanger signed playwright Sam Taylor to adapt The Rector of Justin, but the whole project felt shaky. Wanger told Cukor the studio was mad at Tracy over The Cincinnati Kid, but Cukor thought Wanger was just “being used.” Steve McQueen wrote Tracy on November 18, expressing regret they wouldn’t be involved together on the picture. “I was looking forward very, very much to working with you.” Tracy responded on the twentieth, saying that he, too, was sorry it didn’t work out. “I had felt from the book that it could develop into a very interesting part and a wonderful situation between them, but somehow the old man never came to life for me, and when you’re my age, you just cannot play someone you don’t comprehend. I think you are very wise to go ahead, for while it’s not the book, it’s a damn good part.”
His health by now was a constant worry—to Kate, to Louise, to his close friends and family, and to the various doctors who attended him. There were days when Hepburn took his temperature hourly, and he was regularly bedeviled by bellyaches, constipation, colds and fevers, and the edema that occasionally returned, creating a drowning sensation that induced very real and sustained panic. One night over the telephone, while talking to Louise, he suffered an attack of some sort—probably breathlessness—and Louise, thinking him alone, jumped in the car and made the twelve-minute drive to St. Ives unannounced. She found him better, calmer, by the time she arrived, but the invisible wall that divided his two households had been, for the first time, intolerably breached.
“Don’t EVER do this again!” he scolded, concerned as much for Louise’s own protection as he was for Kate’s. Visibly shaken when she returned to Tower Road, she described to Susie what had just transpired. “I don’t know if Kate was in the other room, or hiding in a closet, or if she was even there at the moment,” Susie said, “but obviously he wanted to make sure that [my mother] never came uninvited again.”
By any measure, Tracy was a high-maintenance patient, and the office of his then regular doctor, William Paul Thompson, was downtown at Good Samaritan Hospital, a good thirty-minute drive from the house on St. Ives. In August 1964 Dr. Thompson put Tracy onto a former student of his, Dr. Mitchel Covel, a cardiologist who was on the clinical faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine. Dr. Covel began seeing him on a near-weekly basis, sometimes in his office on the Westwood campus, just as often at his home above Sunset, where the slightest upset could prompt an anxiety attack.
“There was always some reason,” Dr. Covel said.
He or Kate would call. Kate was his Chief Administrative Assistant; she looked after him very well. She was sensitive to his complaints and needs and his anxieties … He would have some minor illness—colds, sore throats, diarrhea … In January of 1965 I did a complete evaluation of him, physical examination and tests. My diagnosis then was hypertensive cardiovascular disease. Heart disease due to high blood pressure, with past congestive failure … At that time, too, diabetes appeared. It had been diagnosed before, [but] he hadn’t been on diabetes medication … He had a well-established diagnosis of heart disease and diabetes, and he was treated for both with medications.
A late snapshot of Louise and Spencer Tracy, taken at the house on Tower Road in August 1964. (SUSIE TRACY)
The patient’s weight stabilized, but he was still twenty pounds lighter than he had been for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and he had, by general consensus, looked terrible in that. With Kramer’s mammoth comedy having marked its one-year anniversary, on its way to domestic rentals of $19 million in its first four years of release, the only work Tracy could manage was the narration of The Ripon College Story, a half-hour promotional film he did as “a very special friend” of the school.
Early in 1965, producer Alan Pakula and director Robert Mulligan, the team behind To Kill a Mockingbird and Love with the Proper Stranger, submitted a draft screenplay combining John Cheever’s episodic novels The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal into a single picture, hoping to interest Tracy and Hepburn in playing the two principal characters, Leander and Honora. Invited to St. Ives, Mulligan was immediately struck by Tracy’s appearance—older, smaller, and frailer than he expected. “But the familiar grin was there. His voice was strong and his handshake firm. As we were introduced, his eyes f
ixed directly on yours and remained there for what seemed a long moment. Alan and I said later, it wasn’t so much Tracy looking at you but looking into you—and allowing you to do the same to him.”
In discussing the script, Hepburn thought her part underwritten, and there was “challenging Yankee flint” behind every remark she made.
Tracy seemed amused by all this—and then interrupted her. It was done softly, with a smile. He called her “Kathy.” He told her he was sure that we got the point, because she had been “emphatic” as usual. She smiled, turned to us, and said that as a peace offering she’d make some tea. Tracy then gave his notes. It was a completely different experience. His questions and remarks were all carefully thought out and non-combative. They were specific, focused on character—on how Leander served the story in certain scenes and on how he related to other characters. He was interested in emotional detail. His copy was marked with tabs, and he suggested moments from the novel. Would we consider including them in the next draft? We agreed to do that. It was a wonderful demonstration of a real actor at the work of breaking down a script.
The Wapshot project never came to fruition, nor did a proposed series of six one-hour specials titled The Red, White & Blue that would have marked Tracy’s network television debut. With no other prospects for work, he and Hepburn settled into a period of quiet domesticity. Kate painted and wrote, while Tracy read a great deal—everything from Pope John’s Journal of a Soul to the murder mysteries he would then send on to Louise. (“He would go through half a dozen in a week,” Louise said. “He had a standing order with the bookstore.”) Lunches were sometimes with friends, dinners were often quiet affairs served on trays in front of the TV set. “We led a tiny little life,” Kate wrote in her autobiography. “But it was very satisfactory. I felt very necessary to [him] and I really did enjoy that immensely. At a time when most ladies of my age were falling apart because they were no longer desirable—either personally or career-wise—I was wanted every hour of the day and night.”
She had to get away sometimes—to the beach, for tennis, shopping. On May 7, Tracy called Dr. Covel after stuffing himself with five hot dogs. “His diet was terrible most of the time until Kate took over. Five hot dogs! I don’t know whether he was compulsive or impulsive…[He had] indigestion. He thought he was having heart problems, or a heart attack. It was just—dog-itis! Hotdogitis.” The patient’s blood sugar was also intolerably high. “He had a blood sugar of 200 when normally it shouldn’t be above 110. Part of the reason was that he was drinking Cokes all the time, and they’re full of sugar. My advice to him then, among other things, was to switch to Diet-Rite Cola and Dad’s Low-Cal Root Beer.”
On June 23, he found Tracy upset by the death of David Selznick, who had suffered a heart attack at the age of sixty-three. “I just had to go over to him and talk to him,” said Dr. Covel, “and calm him down.” Abdominal cramps were frequent, as were urinary tract infections. In late August 1965 Tracy was admitted to Good Samaritan for tests and observation and the possibility of routine prostate surgery.
He underwent a prostatectomy on September 4, a Saturday, and for the next ten days his condition was generally regarded as good. Louise visited regularly, as did Kate, their comings and goings carefully monitored by Carroll, who staked out a place in the lobby to ensure no awkward encounters took place.
On the morning of September 14 Tracy was groggy, then semiconscious; by three in the afternoon his skin was mottled, his breathing a series of rapid, labored respirations. He went into shock, then turned blue as his kidneys began to fail. Dr. Covel explained the resulting condition, lactic acidosis, as “an electrolytic chemical disorder, when the chemicals in the body get out of whack because the kidneys aren’t operating.”
Tracy was put on a breathing machine, fed, medicated, and sustained intravenously. By late the following day, September 15, 1965, he was comatose and not expected to survive the night.
* * *
1 Tracy had withdrawn from How the West Was Won when the shooting of the Ford sequence conflicted with location work on Judgment at Nuremberg. His continued involvement with the film was due principally to Bing Crosby having earmarked his cut of the picture—reportedly 10 percent of the world gross—for the building of a new wing at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. (Crosby’s company had produced the record album on which the film was based.) Irene Dunne, who headed the hospital’s auxiliary committee, was instrumental in assembling the all-star cast.
2 This impression was likely created because Tracy was officially “on hold” whenever a stunt double was working as Captain Culpepper. Tracy had two doubles for Mad World—one for driving, the other for strenuous activities like running and climbing. “We had rubber masks molded on plaster casts of actors’ faces for the stunt men to wear,” said Carey Loftin, who was Kramer’s stunt coordinator on the show. “When John Hudkins, who doubled for Spencer Tracy, walked in wearing his mask, Tracy said, ‘My God! Who’s that?’ ”
3 This was probably the day of Monroe’s funeral, August 8, as production records show that Tracy didn’t work August 5, the day of Monroe’s death, which was, incidentally, a Sunday.
4 The films, as it turned out, did not overlap, but Tracy, who disliked the idea of playing the man who ordered Christ’s crucifixion, passed on Greatest Story anyway. (“Do you think George Stevens is really that good a friend of mine?” he mused to Kate.) At a party in early November, Stevens reportedly asked Bill Demarest, “Are you friendly with Spencer Tracy?” And when Demarest said, “Sure, I love the guy,” Stevens moved on without a word. Hedda Hopper caught wind of the story and, ever ready to stir up trouble, called Stevens’ office to ask if Tracy would perhaps be starring in Stevens’ next picture, only to be told rather curtly that Stevens didn’t expect to be finished with Greatest Story “for at least six months” and that he hadn’t even thought of another.
5 At the time Lean thought Guinness wrong for the part because he lacked the “size” they needed.
6 Earl Wilson printed a similar item a couple of days later.
7 Steve McQueen’s contract gave him the option of withdrawing from the film were Tracy unable—or unwilling—to do it.
CHAPTER 33
A Lion in a Cage
* * *
We needed prayers,” Louise wrote, “and although I am sure a magnificent team of doctors helped, I believe it was the prayers of many people that brought him through. He was just all but gone Wednesday night when suddenly there was a little, just a little, turn upward.”
There had been a question as to whether they were going to do peritoneal dialysis—an early form of the procedure done through the abdominal cavity—but the improvement, which Dr. Covel characterized as “a kind of miracle,” prompted them to hold off. Tracy was responsive on the seventeenth—“out of danger,” as the papers reported—and continued to improve steadily until they stopped the intravenous fluids and took him off the respirator on the morning of the twentieth. Visiting times were carefully—and strictly—coordinated to allow for Louise’s comings and goings. “When Louise would come,” said Dr. Covel, “Kate would disappear. Kate was there most of the time, as I recall.” One day, as Louise was visiting, the phone rang and she reflexively picked it up. “Kate?” said Garson Kanin, calling from New York.
“He hated to be sick,” Louise said. “While he wanted us to come and see him, we’d get there and he’d say, ‘Well, you might as well go home now.’ It disturbed him to be so ill. He hated it.” During the crisis, John remembered his mother as calm, quiet, matter-of-fact. “I bumped into her going into the hospital one day,” said Virginia Thielman, who oversaw the correspondence course at the clinic, “and I’m sure it was a very difficult time … You felt a poignancy and a sadness but always with dignity … Mrs. Tracy would not wear her heart on her sleeve.” Spence would show them cards and telegrams when they came, and on their last visit, just prior to his release on September 28, the doctors lined up so that Louise, John, and Susi
e could “shake hands in gratitude for their efforts to save his life.”
Tracy went home with medications for his diabetes, his heart, and kidneys, “practically normal” (as Louise put it) but very weak. Dr. Covel, who lived five minutes away, saw him most days, early in the morning or late in the evening. “He was the kind of guy,” the doctor said, “who almost needed constant medical care—either in the form of real illnesses, crises, or support and reassurance. That was one of the reasons we got along so well, I guess, because I understood. Other physicians who were less patient—well, he wouldn’t tolerate them.”
In October Tracy developed a rash that covered much of his lower body, an unpleasant side effect of one of the medicines he was taking. Frank Tracy visited on Halloween and was startled by his appearance: “If I hadn’t known it was Spence who was coming through the door, I might not have recognized him. The change was shocking—almost eerie. He looked terrible, all shriveled up, weak. He was pale and half-shaved; he had missed under his chin, around his throat, leaving them grizzled white … I shook hands with him and thought, ‘Why, he’s a little old coot!’ ”
The current issue of Motion Picture carried the cover story “Spencer Tracy’s Fight for Life!,” but it was mainly a rehash of the old triangle business that had also graced recent issues of Confidential, Modern Screen, and Inside Story. All showcased the same news agency shot of a distraught Louise behind the wheel of her car, intermingled with stills of Spence and Kate from their various films together. Hepburn wasn’t there when Frank came to visit, and the subject never turned to her, however obliquely.
He said, “Jesus, Frank, I never realized. I got letters from nuns in Australia praying for me, from priests in England I never knew.” He was crying. He said, “I didn’t—” I said, “For chrissakes, Spence, you’re a big star! You’re all over the world and have been for thirty years! They all saw you and admired you.” [From] some grade school in Australia the nun wrote and the kids all signed it. All praying for him. He couldn’t believe it. He said, “I heard from all my old friends—telegrams, letters, cards. The only guy I didn’t hear from, the son of a bitch, was Cagney.” He and Cagney got into some sort of a fight … I know Pat O’Brien tried to get them together on several occasions. (A couple of times he almost made it. They were going to have dinner, both of them were going to be in New York, or something, and Pat got it all set up, and one guy called up and said, “I can’t make it. I’ve got to do something else …”) Spence said, “That son of a bitch wouldn’t even wish me to get well.”1
James Curtis Page 108