On May 27, Dr. Covel found him “depressed and very anxious” because of recurrent episodes of shortness of breath. “He was very anxious about that: Why was this happening?” He was better over Memorial Day, seemed to be regaining some strength. At the behest of a news magazine, he was asked to confirm his retirement. “Well,” he hedged, “there was a fellow named Eddie Leonard on the stage and he made 471 curtain speeches announcing his retirement. Sarah Bernhardt made 178 curtain speeches announcing her retirement. I always announce my retirement—until the next picture comes along.”
He was anxious and short of breath again on June 6, and there was a mounting sense of dread about him, as the attacks were coming with greater frequency. He was “all right and stable” by the eighth, but the doctor was concerned: “I went to see him, and I was thinking of taking him to the hospital … He didn’t want to go.” The doctor’s note in his file that day: “We’ll wait.”
He visited Tower Road again on the morning of the ninth, driving himself in his old T-bird, the top down, his ever-present sunglasses giving him a jaunty look he rarely affected on screen. “He would wear—even on the warmest days—a shirt, a sweater, and a jacket,” Susie said, “and I wondered if that was to make him look a little heavier.” He seemed fine, stayed for about an hour. Susie told him a friend in Australia had written a script and asked if he would read it when he had some time. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Give it to me now.” Bill Self was reading it, she told him, and she would have to get it back. “Well, when he’s done with it,” her father said.
They all walked outside, stood at the car and chatted. Louise kissed him on the cheek, and he told her that he would call her later. Louise, John, and Susie took in an unlikely double feature that night: The Dirty Dozen—action John could easily follow—and Georgy Girl. The second phone in Louise’s bedroom—the hot line between the hill and St. Ives—rang when they got home, the familiar signal—two rings and then silence. “Sometimes he would carry on long, long conversations,” Louise said. “Other times it would be just ‘How is everybody?’ and ‘How is everything?’ and ‘Well, all right, talk to you later.’ ” On that night he said: “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Weezie.”
He went to sleep, and when Kate thought him settled, she crept out of the room as she always did and down the long hall to her own bedroom at the opposite end of the house. He had the buzzer right next to his bed if he wanted anything, and she always took the bell with her if she went anywhere inside, its cord “two miles long.” He didn’t ring, but about three o’clock she heard him shuffling down the hall toward the kitchen. They always kept the kettle at a very low boil, and he would get up in the middle of the night and brew himself a cup of tea. When she heard that he had reached the kitchen, she got up, put on her slippers, and started for the door.
“Just as I was about to give it a push, there was the sound of a cup smashing to the floor—then clump—a loud clump.” He had arrested; his heart had stopped beating. “Just stopped—BANG! The box broke. The container had just become too small for all that—what would you call it?—all that wild stuff whirling around inside. Peace at last.”
She crouched down and took him up in her arms. “No life—no pulse—dead.” His eyes were closed, the tea spilled all over him. “Dear, dear friend—gone. Oh, lucky one. That’s the way to exit. Just out the door and—gone.”
She called Phyllis Wilbourn up at the old Barrymore place. “Spence’s dead.”
“I’ll come …”
She called Ida and Willie, who lived in the cottage next door, and they helped her get him onto a rug, and then the three of them dragged him the length of the house and managed to get him back into bed. She drew up the covers and then lit some candles. “He looked so happy to be done with living, which for all his accomplishments had been a frightful burden to him.”
Dr. Covel was the first to arrive. He found Kate in a state of shock, unsure of what to do next. “Call the family? Call Stanley Kramer? Move out—no—yes—then call. Phyllis came. We moved all my stuff—clothes, personal stuff—out into my car. Then I thought—God—God—Kath—what are you doing—you’ve lived with the man for almost thirty years. This is your home. Isn’t it? These walls—this roof—this spot on the earth.” Calmly, deliberately, she unloaded the car—clothing, personal effects, paintings off the walls—and carried everything back into the house.
And then she awaited the arrival of Louise Tracy.
When the phone rang on Tower Road, Susie Tracy glanced at the clock: 3:50 a.m. She reached for the extension, but her mother, in her own room, had already picked up. Susie heard Dr. Covel’s voice: “Hello? Louise?” And she heard her mother say, “Oh no—” She placed the handset back in its cradle and got out of bed. When she reached her mother’s room, Louise was sitting on the edge of the bed in a kind of a daze. “Father’s gone,” she said. “We’ll have to wake John.”
By 4:30 they had gotten themselves together and left for St. Ives, Susie piloting her mother’s black Lincoln, the one her father had driven across country, all three of them crammed together in the front seat. When they arrived at the house, the gate was open and Susie pulled right in. Kate emerged from inside to meet them, putting her arm around Susie, who, in turn, automatically put her arm around Kate.
Susie thought back to a phone conversation she had with her father in which he had said that the Kramers were expecting a baby. They had decided, he told her, to name it Spencer if it was a boy, Katharine if it turned out to be a girl. There was a pause, as if he needed a reaction. “That’s wonderful, Daddy. I think that’s fine.” There seemed to be so much unsaid, hanging there in the air. “He was acknowledging that I knew about Kate,” she later said, “and that he knew I knew. I was so pleased … I felt it was the beginning of a new relationship for us. I was an adult, and he was opening a door.”
Carroll, distraught and unshaven, was already there, as was Dorothy, and George Cukor was lingering in the background. Louise, Susie, and John made their way to the bedroom, the candles still flickering in the predawn darkness. He had said that he was going to have his hair cut short, but they hadn’t yet seen it. And then Susie glanced to one side and saw all the medications lined up on the desk, two rows—at least a dozen prescriptions, probably more. Dr. Covel came in and said quietly to Louise, “Would you like me to give you something?”
When Susie emerged from the room, Kate was waiting for her. “Susie,” she said, giving her the car keys, “would you take my car off the road and park it up the hill?” Susie found Hepburn’s black Chrysler across the street and drove it up around the curve on St. Ives to where it could not be seen from the house. Then she returned and they again found themselves standing in the hallway, groping for words.
“We were good pals,” Hepburn finally said to her.
Kate had called Howard Strickling, and they all had to wait as he drove into town from his ranch in Chino, some fifty miles to the east. She mouthed a few comforting words to John, who was stoic, stunned as they all were. Later, she approached him in the living room and offered him breakfast. Nobody else seemed particularly hungry, but John was gratefully addressing a meal of eggs, toast, and coffee when Strickling arrived. The press would have to be notified, inquiries would have to be managed. Louise accepted a cup of coffee, went back down the hall again to be with Spence. “Well,” Hepburn later acknowledged, putting her own distinctive spin on the situation, “she was in a peculiar spot—no doubt about that. She could never bear to admit failure. Now he was dead. And he would never come back. She had dreamed—hoped—imagined that he would. This strange woman—me—had obviously been with him when he died.”
Carroll had called Cunningham & O’Connor, a mortuary scarcely two blocks from where the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had its headquarters. What suit to give them? Hepburn had gathered together some old clothes—gray slacks, a brown tweed jacket.
“But he was my husband,” Louise protested. “I should pick out the—”
<
br /> “Oh Louise,” said Kate, “what difference does it make?”
Once they had gone—first the doctor, then Cukor, then Strickling, who had made all the appropriate calls, Dorothy stepped up to Phyllis and presumed to ask for the keys. “What did you say, Dorothy? The keys to this house—our house?” Dorothy was silenced by Phyllis’ indignation, the stark reality of the situation having left her, for one of the few times in her adult life, completely and utterly wordless.
The next thing Susie knew, they were driving to the mortuary with Ross Evans at the wheel. Louise and she waited in the car while Carroll and Evans picked out a mahogany casket, the cost of which, along with the undertaking, would run nearly $3,000. “Well,” said Louise, who was dreading an out-of-state speaking tour, “I guess I don’t have to go on that trip now.”
At Forest Lawn, the iconic cemetery where Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, and Irving Thalberg were interred, Louise was drawn to a private garden outside the Freedom Mausoleum, near where the ashes of Walt Disney had been placed the previous year. Gently, Ross Evans steered her away, knowing the neighborhood to be a little too pricey for the means of the Tracy estate. Around the corner they found another spot, walled in brick and gated, shown on the plot map as the Little Garden of Divine Guidance, roughly half the cost of the other location—$19,262 with bench and endowment.
The news media had the story by six that morning, and reporters began working the phones. “Some idiot called me at seven o’clock in the morning,” Jean Simmons remembered, “and said, ‘What is your reaction on Spencer Tracy’s death?’ And I just hung up. I thought: ‘How awful can people be?’ ” Lauren Bacall was on a flight to Boston when her husband, actor Jason Robards, overheard the news from a passenger in a nearby seat. She had been one of the people he and Kate had called the week they finished the picture. Karen and Stanley Kramer were in Las Vegas when Stanley heard the news from his son, Larry. Eddie Dmytryk had spoken to Tracy just the previous week. “I’m not feeling up to par,” Tracy had confided.
The news was all over the radio by midmorning, and calls began to come into the house on Tower Road, where the housekeeper fended off strangers and deflected nosy inquiries from the press. Strickling had fed his contacts the story that Tracy had been alone at the time of his death, that he had, in fact, died in his sleep. His body was discovered at six in the morning by Ida Gheczy, who first summoned Dr. Covel, then Carroll Tracy, the actor’s brother. Arriving shortly thereafter was Mrs. Tracy, who lived nearby, accompanied by their son and daughter. Katharine Hepburn, Mr. Tracy’s longtime friend and costar, appeared with director George Cukor, who for years had rented the hillside house to the two-time Academy Award winner.
Stanley Kramer told the Los Angeles Times that he “worshiped” Mr. Tracy. “I’m glad for his sake that he could make the picture. It was better than sitting at home. That wasn’t his way.” The New York Times described him as “one of the last screen titans of a generation, a star whose name alone spelled money at the box office.” Bob Thomas, in his AP dispatch, wrote: “The death of Tracy erases from the Hollywood scene a performer whom most other actors considered the best in American film history.” James Powers, in the Hollywood Reporter, characterized him as “a man of pure metal in a tinsel community.” The Freeport Journal Standard remembered that, as a boy, Tracy had spent his summers in Freeport and that both his parents were buried there.
In Evergreen Park, outside of Chicago, where he was appearing with his wife in Holiday for Lovers, Pat O’Brien told the Milwaukee Journal he was “in a state of shock all day” after getting the news. “We were friends for 50 years,” he reminisced. “We were at Marquette High together, we enlisted in the Navy together in World War I, and we were roommates in New York when we were attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. The only time we weren’t together was college. Spence went to Ripon and got interested in dramatics there. He played a little baseball. I went to Marquette and was Red Dunn’s substitute on the football team.”
Obituaries appeared worldwide. The Times of London saw Tracy as “[t]ough, honest, and indomitable, a man of sober authority and rugged good sense” who became “a symbol on the screen of all those qualities which represented the pioneering spirit of America.” The Daily Telegraph appropriated Maximilian Schell’s “grand old man” appellation, while News of the World reported that he had outlived most of his contemporaries. “Bogart, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper are all dead,” Tracy was quoted as saying. “Jimmy Cagney has taken his millions off to retire and I’m alone. It gets lonely.”
And in Moscow, the Soviet director Sergei Gerasimov, writing in the government newspaper Izvestia, eulogized him as one of the great artists of the modern cinema. “By remaining true to himself, Spencer Tracy opened for many persons the best traits of his people … Soviet audiences came to love him for his manly sincerity, his just, kind, and somewhat sad view on the intricate world around him.”
* * *
1 Frank was under the impression the falling out had something to do with Tribute to a Bad Man, but, if it did, neither man ever mentioned it. Cagney disputed Garson Kanin’s assertion that he and Tracy lost touch because it was he who stopped calling. “Bullshit,” Cagney said in an exchange with his biographer, John McCabe. “I had hardly ever called him because he was almost never at the number I was given, and so it became a kind of ritual between us that he would call me. At any hour of day or night … As for my calling him less and less, again bullshit. He started to call me less and less, I always assumed for reasons of health. Pat said that he began to get fewer calls too, and there was no one closer to Spence than Pat. And as to Kanin’s implying that Spence and I were at loggerheads because Spence was liberal and I became a Republican, triple bullshit. Spence always respected other people’s moral and political commitments even if they were a hundred and eighty degrees different from his—as long as those commitments were honestly held, as mine certainly were. Spence was not only a great actor, he was a great heart, and a great heart does not turn away from old friends because they are different from you.”
2 Tracy later told an interviewer that he remembered Maggie Sullavan’s supposed response when offered a Hardy Family picture: “I’ll do one when it is titled Death Comes to Andy Hardy.” Said Tracy: “And I’ll do a Batman when it’s called, ‘Death Comes to Batman.’ ”
3 In all fairness, Hepburn would likely have “sized up” any prospective costar she didn’t already know personally. “I think Kate always gave her co-stars the once-over inspection,” said Katharine Houghton. “I know she did with Nick Nolte because I saw it.”
4 Houghton recalled her mother’s warning when she left for Los Angeles: “Watch out for Kate—she’ll knock you down so that she can pick you up.”
CHAPTER 34
A Humble Man
* * *
The last time she saw him was in profile. He was laid out in an open casket for the Rosary on Sunday night. His strong Irish face had diminished with the years, the thick brown hair of his youth now white and closely cropped. Both Susie and Louise remarked on how much better he looked than he had the previous morning. Had the mortician touched him up? Given him the coating of base he had tried to avoid his entire professional life? The scene seemed surreal, formal, quiet, and airless, not at all like Knocko Minihan’s wake, where he might have been more at home, Jimmy Gleason greeting the guests, Ed Brophy, Frank McHugh, and Wally Ford mingling among them, keeping the liquor flowing and passing the hat for the widow. There were a lot of flowers on display, bushels of them, and Dorothy went around checking the tags. On some of the arrangements the tags had been removed, and she found later that these were the tributes Katharine Hepburn had sent. Earlier, Kate had come to the vigil and she had placed a little painting of flowers under his feet.
The priest led the mourners in prayer for the soul of the departed, candles flanking the casket, a gold crucifix on display. After the service he approached Louise and Susie and said that they could either
take the cross with them or have it placed in the coffin. Louise deferred to her daughter, who thought for a moment and then said that she thought it would be nice if it went into the box with him. Kate returned later that night, after the vigil had ended, and wanted to place “a few little tokens” in the casket. Dorothy had ordered the lid closed, and they apologized; Kate told them it really didn’t matter, that she would just stay for a minute. “I would have liked to have seen his face once more—but what was the difference—yesterday—today—tomorrow … He was gone—Dad was gone—Mother was gone.”
A requiem mass was celebrated on Monday, June 12, at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church in the East Hollywood section of Los Angeles, a decidedly working-class area of town chosen for its proximity to the cemetery. Serving as active pallbearers were George Cukor, Stanley Kramer, Bill Self, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, John Ford, Garson Kanin, and Abe Lastfogel. Numbered among the honorary pallbearers were Edward G. Robinson, Lew Douglas, Robert Taylor, Larry Weingarten, Benny Thau, Tim Durant, R. J. Wagner, Loyal Davis, Chester Erskine, Harold Bumby, Chuck Sligh, Jack Benny, George Burns, Mike Romanoff, and Senator George Murphy. Howard Strickling, in striped pants and dark vest, escorted Louise, who appeared somewhat lost in a fog of grief. Msgr. John O’Donnell, who had served as a technical adviser on Boys Town, offered a simple forty-five-minute mass in which he praised the deceased as “a humble man who kept removed from the limelight.” The some five hundred attendees included Gregory Peck, Leo G. Carroll, Laraine Day, Dave Chasen, Billy Grady, Robert Mitchum, and Walter Winchell. Another 250 onlookers were gathered outside.
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