James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  A private graveside ceremony followed, though most of the thirty-five cars that joined the procession to Glendale were uninvited. At Forest Lawn, Strickling saw a TV truck parked on the roadway in front of the Freedom Mausoleum and directed cemetery officials to have it removed. “Nobody gets out of the car,” he declared. “We’re not moving until they leave!” Appropriately, the marble tablet eventually affixed to the brick wall enclosing the garden plot bore no individual names, dates, or epitaphs. It simply read TRACY.

  More accolades appeared in the weeks that followed. Newsweek coupled its Tracy obituary with one for Dorothy Parker, who had died in a New York hotel room three days earlier. Acting? “I don’t like anything about it,” Tracy was quoted as saying. “But I did very well by it. I learned the trade well. It’s never been very demanding. It doesn’t require much brainwork. Acting is not the noblest profession in the world, but there are things lower than acting—not many, mind you, but politicians give you something to look down on from time to time.”

  Senator Robert F. Kennedy had a statement inserted into the Congressional Record. Bosley Crowther lamented Tracy’s passing as breaking “one more strong and vibrant cable in the slowly crumbling bridge between motion pictures of this generation and the great ones of the past.” Stanley Kramer shut himself up in a room and, on an impossibly tight deadline, wrote a remembrance for Life that appeared under the title “He Could Wither You with a Glance.” It began:

  Tracy’s casket is carried into the church. Active pallbearers included James Stewart and Frank Sinatra. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  I can’t explain why I was never able to say to him what I wanted to say: that he was a great actor. Everyone else said it a thousand times over, but I never managed it. Once I told him I loved him. That came quite easily, and he believed me and was emotional about it. But I was afraid to say “Spencer, you’re a great actor.” He’d only say: “Now what the hell kind of thing is that to come out with?” He wanted to know it; he needed to know it. But he didn’t want you to say it—just think it. And maybe that was one of the reasons he was a great actor. He thought and listened better than anyone in the history of motion pictures. A silent close-up reaction of Spencer Tracy said it all.

  In the days following his death, Kate busied herself acknowledging the cards and wires she had received from friends and acquaintances and prominent strangers, all in her own hand, often on Spence’s notepaper. To Justice William O. Douglas she wrote of how she was always trying to hold him up as a fine example of a walker, “[b]ut I must say it didn’t have much effect.” To Joan Blondell: “What can one say—He was such a delicious + remarkable man + actor—I was lucky to be around him for so long.” To Anne Pearce Kramer: “He was really a unique creature, Spencer + I was lucky to be the one—So I try to think of that + I am glad he did not have a humiliating half alive time—just stopped.” To Jack Hamilton: “So there is silence where once a delicious Irish wit sparkled my days with laughter and tears—It seems incredible doesn’t it—I did not realize about death—the end—the absolute end—This roadblock will never be removed. Now we will see how much character I really have.”

  A stricken Louise Tracy is escorted from the church by Howard Strickling. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  Dorothy Gopadze wrote of her gratitude when her daughter was permitted to visit the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. “Do you remember A Guy Named Joe? I’d like to think of Mr. Tracy prowling around Heaven right this minute, telling the Archangel Gabriel he expects him to be better organized.”

  From London, Vivien Leigh wired, “DEAREST GIRL MY WHOLE HEART IS WITH YOU.” And then a week later: “I am blinded with sorrow for you …” Three weeks after writing that note, Leigh herself was dead of tuberculosis at the age of fifty-three.

  From San Francisco, Joe Cohn wrote of the “wholehearted devotion, care, and companionship” that Kate had given Spence. “Because of this you made his life a much richer one—far too many people are so unfortunate they never encounter this in their entire lives. I hope the realization of this and the awareness that you were never found wanting when he needed you will in some measure ease the loss of a truly magnificent person and a rare rare companion.”

  She responded: “Your letter was so touching and I am so grateful to you for making me feel happy about myself—I just really loved Spence—he—well I said to him just the other day—You know my friend—you just get to me—And he did—I was lucky—And he just wasn’t a bore was he—such a unique slant—so funny—He was so pleased to get your wire at the beginning of the picture—And he did a fine job—& finished it—But I think Joe—he was tired out—he’d led quite a life—And his heart just stopped—He was getting a cup of tea in the kitchen at 3 AM as he often did—& I was just coming through the door to help him—when—& it was the end—no struggle—no terror—just end.”

  The estate was valued at $1,049,675, of which $226,526 was in cash, the rest in assets. The house on Tower Road was appraised at $200,000, but Tracy’s personal effects and property were worth just $1,880. Carroll inherited almost everything in the house on St. Ives, along with Spence’s 1958 and 1961 Thunderbirds. Once all claims and expenses had been paid, the final valuation of the estate was $664,147. Louise claimed half pursuant to the terms of the will and half by virtue of her community property interest. A trust for John and Susie was established in March 1968, and for the period 1968–70 it received a total of $46,000 from the estate. John benefited separately from a trust established by his maternal grandfather, Allienne Treadwell, which included shares in the family newspaper business.

  Carroll Tracy felt lost without his brother, who had been his employer and benefactor since 1933. He and Dorothy settled into a much quieter life in their apartment on Spalding Drive, and it was there that he suffered an even greater blow when his wife died on Christmas morning, 1967.

  “It was a terrible shock,” he wrote Kate. “Went to mass Xmas eve came home after stopping for dinner. Had a pleasant evening. Said the angina pains were bad but would not call a doctor. Next morning I walked in [the] room and it was all over. I knew she had not been feeling well for some time. She was so tired and had lost interest in so many things. All the doctors said nothing could have been done. She would never tell me when she felt bad.”

  Carroll vacated the apartment and told Bertha Calhoun in a letter that he would never go home again. He lived in a hotel for as long as he could, but within a year of Dorothy’s death he was in a rest home in Santa Monica. Louise worked diligently to have him in a good place—and under some Medicare—but there was a huge bill to be paid, and she struggled under the weight of it all.

  John Tracy Clinic was closed the morning of Spencer Tracy’s funeral, but it reopened to get on with the work at hand. Louise, however, was absent for several months, adjusting to the loss she had endured and answering by hand the mountain of cards and letters and donations that flowed in. When she returned, the clinic launched a $3 million growth campaign, starting with a $100,000 gift from the Disney Foundation. In its twenty-fifth year, John Tracy Clinic’s work was spread across ninety-four countries in fifteen languages. In 1972, at the age of seventy-five, Louise agreed to a series of interviews with freelance journalist Jane Ardmore, who had the notion of ghosting an autobiography. Louise saw it as a chance to tell the clinic’s story, but Ardmore knew there would have to be a lot about Spence in the book for it to find a wide audience. Howard Strickling pushed the idea, but in the end Louise put two restrictions on the project that sealed its fate. Indulging her writer’s pride of long ago, she would not take a byline on a book authored by somebody else. And she would not, under any circumstances, discuss her husband’s relationship with Katharine Hepburn.

  Later that year, she was the guest of honor on an episode of Ralph Edwards’ This Is Your Life, welcoming Pat O’Brien, Walter Pidgeon, Dr. Lowell, and some of the families who had come back to Los Angeles to celebrate the clinic’s thirtieth anniversary. As she approached eight
y, Louise grew more forgetful, and in 1974 she resigned from the board of the clinic, promising they had not yet seen the last of her. She still came in from time to time, whenever Susie could drive her, and she still spoke at graduations and special occasions. By the summer of 1977, when she was asked to give a talk in the auditorium, Susie was dubious and thought seriously of calling it off. “But as long as she was talking about the clinic,” Susie said, “she was usually okay.”

  Susie drove her that day, not sure what was going to happen. Once her mother was in front of the group, however, a reflex kicked in, and the things that she had said so many times before—giving hope and encouragement to young families that had been wounded as hers had once been—came tumbling out. It was as if she had been asked to work the old magic one final time, just as Spence had done on the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner a decade earlier. Susie returned her to Tower Road, and by September Louise was under twenty-four-hour nursing care, her mind clouded by arteriosclerosis and at least one stroke.

  She died in 1983 at the age of eighty-seven.

  Stanley Kramer saw a rough cut of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner within days of its completion and knew he had everything he needed by June 1. Editor Robert C. Jones had begun work on the picture with the first dailies, following Tracy’s performance with an eye toward vigor as well as nuance. The early scenes of befuddlement weren’t hindered by Tracy’s occasional lapses of energy. “But,” said Jones, “in the last twenty minutes, he had to take control of that entire group.” Assembled at first for performance alone, the summation scene suffered whenever Tracy showed fatigue.

  “He would run out of gas. I’d have to cut away to someone I wouldn’t normally cut to [in order to] change takes on Tracy. I was going through and looking for the best takes I could find on each line—and in some cases using lines from over his shoulder and putting them into his mouth. Actors tend to be more relaxed if they’re offstage, so I’d steal those lines, too … There would be, sometimes, wide discrepancies; he couldn’t complete a sentence, couldn’t think of the words … We also treated his voice in mixing to give it more energy.”

  Jones and Kramer grappled as well with a tremor Hepburn had developed, which, at times, caused her head to bobble, particularly during close-ups. Kramer would minimize the problem by discreetly calling for another take, but Jones still had to be on the lookout for it when assembling a sequence. Editing scenes that contained both Tracy and Hepburn became especially tricky, bolstering Tracy’s energy level while diminishing any involuntary movements on the part of Kate. “We tried to hide it as much as possible,” Jones said.

  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was scored at the Goldwyn studios over the week of September 18, 1967. Previews had demonstrated a profound impact on audiences, but Kramer knew that he was in for rough sledding, given his reputation for issues-oriented moviemaking. A true believer in film as an agent of social change, Stanley Kramer could come off as needlessly pompous in interviews where he alternately disparaged the “message” angle while embracing the notion that a truly important film had to be about something of size and weight. Pauline Kael declared open season on him in her 1965 essay “The Intentions of Stanley Kramer,” a withering review of Ship of Fools prefaced by a snarky career overview. That Kael misunderstood Kramer’s work as a producer didn’t seem to matter, and her views gained traction with a generation of critics eager to tear down the shrines of their elders. Branded as hopelessly old school, Kramer was seen as simplistic and naive, a throwback to the sedate fifties when he was first making his mark.

  For his part, Sidney Poitier knew that Kramer and Rose had pushed the major studio envelope as far as it would go. He had previously explored interracial romance in A Patch of Blue, but that film was art house fare compared to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which would have to win broad favor with the moviegoing public to justify its cost.

  “How possible was it then, in 1967, to make a film like that in America? It was close to impossible,” Poitier said in 2006. Early on there was criticism that he was too perfect to be realistic, that the filmmakers, in their zeal to make the dilemma about race and nothing else, had robbed him of human frailties and, in the minds of some, his blackness. Poitier, however, had to be an equal and balancing force to Tracy, to push back in a way that would have been impossible had he been a mechanic or a short-order cook. Could the average black man identify with the character of John Wade Prentice? Or was the identification, as Kramer contended, more generational than racial?

  “Who says it’s a story only about the black man?” Kramer demanded. “It’s about young and old viewpoints, and in this case the bone of contention happens to be the acceptance of interracial marriage. But this film says that the new generation won’t live like the last generation simply because that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Life has moved on.”

  Ideally, the film would appeal to older viewers as the ninth and final teaming of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. To younger audiences, the presence of Sidney Poitier and the theme of interracial marriage would be the drawing cards, Poitier having appeared in two recent hits, To Sir, With Love (released June 14) and In the Heat of the Night (released August 2). Hepburn, eager for audiences to see Tracy’s last performance, agreed to a press conference in late October, a side-by-side with her niece at the New York restaurant 21. Acknowledging she had regularly avoided the press in the past, she said brightly, “I’m getting nicer in my old age. Most people become grumpy.” In tan slacks and a black turtleneck sweater, she cut a striking figure, her finely chiseled features belying even her official age of fifty-seven. In good form, she told a female reporter that her clothes were a mess and a male reporter that he was talking a lot of Freudian rot. When the subject turned to Tracy, however, her manner changed abruptly.

  “I think Spencer and Laurette Taylor were the best actors I’ve ever seen,” she said. “They were both Irish and both had problems in their lives, but they were so direct. They had concentration.” As she got deeper into the subject of Tracy, her remarks veered toward intimacy and grew poignant. As an actor, she said, he was as simple and unadorned as “a baked potato.” In contrast, she described herself as “a dessert, with lots of whipped cream.” He had no mannerisms, she added. “He never got in his own way. I still do.” She listened to a question about Tracy and then answered carefully and with some feeling: “I think Spencer always thought that acting was a rather silly way for a man to make a living. He felt he should have been a doctor or something. We both came from backgrounds totally removed from acting. But he was of such an emotional balance, you know, that he had to be an artist.”

  George Cukor saw Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner at an advance screening in November and couldn’t stop raving about it. “I think the film itself is one of the finest I’ve ever seen: human, dignified, passionate,” he told Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times. “I believe Katharine feels the same way, and that’s why she’s allowing herself to be interviewed to promote it, something she almost never does. In a sense, she’s doing it as an act of gratitude to Kramer, who cast Tracy in the picture even though his life was no longer insurable. It was a tremendous risk, and we must be grateful to Kramer for taking it.”

  Noël Coward wired Kate the moment he saw it:

  HOW WONDERFUL THAT DEAR SPENCE’S LAST PERFORMANCE COULD BE ONE OF THE FINEST HE HAS EVER GIVEN WHICH IS SAYING A GREAT DEAL.

  Her response: “What a wonderful, lovely looking, sensitive creature I’ve spent so much of my life with. I know that I am lucky—he kept me hopping and I never had time to think about myself. So—on again, alone …”

  The trade notices were unabashedly ecstatic, Variety predicting “torrid b.o. response throughout a long-legged theatrical release.” And while the opinions of the press were divided along predictable lines, the older generation praising the film extravagantly, the younger despising almost everything about it, Tracy’s performance was singled out for praise in nearly every instance. “He and Miss Hepburn
glisten with style,” Robert Kotlowitz wrote in Harper’s Magazine. “They are crusty, tough, intelligent, and sentimental, the essence of Yankeeness. Without even holding hands, they manage to suggest that they have had a bracing physical life together. Their intimacy crackles on the screen, and it is their exchanges—snapping and barking and laughing at each other—that give the film its only reality.”

  Tracy, Brendan Gill wrote in the New Yorker, gave “a faultless and, under the circumstances, heart-breaking performance…[B]eing aware that it was the last picture he would ever make, he turned his role into a stunning compendium of the actor’s art; it was as if he were saying over our heads to generations of actors not yet born, ‘Here is how to seem to listen,’ ‘Here is how to dominate a scene by walking away from it.’ Moreover, the very words he spoke were written for him deliberately as ‘last words.’ ” And, added Joe Morgenstern, “when Tracy gives his blessings to the lovers in a noble speech that was written as a melodrama’s climax and may now serve as an artist’s epitaph, when he says his say about youth and yearning and whether an old, white-haired man is necessarily a burned-out shell who can no longer remember the passion with which he has loved a woman, then everything wrong with the film is right and we can see, through our tears, that the hero we worshiped was just what we always knew he was, an authentically heroic man.”

  Even a skeptic as hidebound as Andrew Sarris fell under the spell of the film’s final minutes, Mrs. Prentice’s accusation that Drayton had forgotten true passion still ringing in his ears. “As Tracy repeats the charge to himself, Kramer shifts deliberately to a profile shot of Tracy on the left foreground of the screen and Hepburn, her eyes brimming with tears, on the right background looking at Tracy, and Tracy says no I have not forgotten, and he says it very slowly, and the two shot is sustained by a ghostly immortality, recording the rapturous rapport between a being now dead and a being still alive, but a moment of life and love passing into the darkness of death everlasting, and anyone in the audience remaining dry-eyed through this evocation of gallantry and emotional loyalty has my deepest sympathy.”