One who did remain dry-eyed through that evocation of gallantry and emotional loyalty was Louise Tracy, who was given a private screening in a projection room at Columbia Pictures. With her were John and Susie, Carroll and Dorothy, her sister Eleanor, others from the extended family. Susie found her father’s summation “very difficult” to watch and was concerned for her mother, but Louise remained quiet and impassive throughout. “I liked him very much,” Louise said years later of her husband’s final performance. “I didn’t like the picture. He shouldn’t have done that picture.”
Columbia’s ad campaign was dominated by the full-figure images of Poitier and Houghton walking arm in arm, the catch line “A love story of today” clearly putting the emphasis on Poitier and the miscegenation theme. Tracy and Hepburn were shown in subordinate positions, almost as afterthoughts. Upon its release in December 1967, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was an immediate sensation, breaking the all-time single-week records at both the Victoria and the boutique Beekman in New York City. The story was the same in Los Angeles, where it promptly broke the house record at the venerable Westwood Village. Kramer flogged the film exhaustively, eventually putting in appearances on college campuses to stir up discussion and prompt word of mouth, a goal ultimately crushed by the same generational disconnect the movie depicted. There were other hit films in the marketplace—Wait Until Dark, Valley of the Dolls, Camelot, the upstart Graduate—but none dimmed the broad appeal of Kramer’s now-famous gamble. In two years domestic rentals would exceed $22 million, making it the most successful picture in Columbia’s history.
The film’s commercial fortunes were compounded by an astounding ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Picture. The Tracy family attended the Oscar ceremony on April 10, 1968, at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, with Louise planning to go up to the podium were Spence actually to win, just as she had done exactly thirty years earlier for Captains Courageous. In the long runup to the major prizes that evening, they saw the film shut out in nearly every category, with only William Rose scoring a win for his original story and screenplay. Hepburn took the Oscar for Best Actress, a big surprise, clearing the way for the Best Actor statuette to go to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night. Sidney Poitier, who had starred in three smash hits that year, wasn’t nominated for any of them.
Kate chose to take her award—which George Cukor accepted on her behalf—as “a nice affectionate pat on the back for us both—very touching.” Sometimes, though, she privately admitted that she was “disgusted” that Tracy didn’t also win an Oscar.
“I think very often about Spence,” Stanley Kramer reflected in a letter. “I guess, in recent years, I never really considered a project in which he didn’t participate in my thoughts. I miss so much the feeling he always gave me of a confidence in me—and how my ego really swelled when he would tell somebody how he felt about me. I really did love him. I came to him—and he to me—so late. But I never wanted to make it easier for anyone to be as great as he always was. I guess he made it seem so easy—and it isn’t, God knows.”
A few days after Tracy’s death, the phone rang on Tower Road. The housekeeper announced that Miss Hepburn was calling, and Louise decided to take it in the privacy of the downstairs den. “You know, Louise, you and I can be friends,” Kate remembered saying. “You knew him at the beginning, I at the end—or we can just pretend that—I might be a help with the kids.” John and Susie were now forty-two and thirty-four, respectively.
“Well, yes,” Louise said, pausing for emphasis. The razor-sharp wit she had spent a lifetime suppressing now came to the fore. After twenty-six years she finally had her husband’s lover in her crosshairs, and the temptation to pull the trigger was too great to resist. “But you see, I thought you were only a rumor…”
The shot hit its mark with deadly accuracy. “After nearly thirty years?” Hepburn raged in her autobiography. “A rumor? What could be the answer to that?” Louise later told Susie that Kate had said that she would like to get to know Johnny and Susie “as an extension of Spencer.” Then she added, unnecessarily, “I play tennis.”
“Well,” Louise said, “I’ll think about it.”
She was coming up the stairs as Susie emerged from her room. “Well,” Louise said, a hint of admiration creeping into her voice, “that took guts.”
“It was,” Hepburn later wrote, “a deep and fundamental wound—deeply set—never to be budged. Almost thirty years Spence and I had known each other—through good and bad times. Some rumor. And by never admitting that I existed—she remained—the wife—and she sent out Christmas cards. Spencer—the guilty one. She—the sufferer. And I—well now, I was brought up in a very unconventional atmosphere. And I had not broken up their marriage. That happened long before I arrived on the scene.”
Hepburn came to believe that she had taken the easy road, that she had declined to force the issue, to “straighten things out,” as she put it. If there had been a divorce, “then everyone—and in this case, Susie and Johnny—would have been able to know their father with me. It would have been better. But it would have had to be pushed by Louise—the loser in the situation. Yet it would, I believe, have been ennobling to her. And supremely honest. And it would have made it easy for him to do—what would in this case have been the direct and simple thing for him to do. Then he could have had the best of both worlds. And if he had felt that it was her idea, his guilt would have been removed.”
But, of course, it could never have been that simple. Tracy’s guilt ran far deeper than Kate could ever imagine. And Louise’s paralysis was rooted in her heritage, her Victorian upbringing and her inability to work through many of the same issues she saw as an impressionable young girl in the marriage of her father and mother. “Spencer’s faith, along with unbreakable bonds of an emotional sort, is what kept him married to Louise,” Eugene Kennedy said. “He felt as a Catholic that he had been married, and that he could not be, as it were, un-married. That is one of the reasons Kate and Spence felt that I understood them. I appreciated what it meant to be in love and to have an institution holding terrific sway over your choices.”
Hepburn eventually got to know Susie, who, at the urging of her friend Susan Moon, went up and spoke to her one morning through the chain-link fence of the tennis courts at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Kate gave her a phone number, told her to call at any time. It wasn’t until October 1969 that Susie had a reason to call. “It’s Carroll,” Kate said immediately, knowing without being told that Spence’s older brother had died. In 1975 Susie published a short piece in the Ladies’ Home Journal, an as-told-to with Jane Ardmore called “My Friend: Katharine Hepburn.” If her mother ever saw the piece, she never mentioned it, and the relationship continued after Hepburn left the house on St. Ives in April 1979 and returned permanently to New York and Connecticut. “Kate,” said Katharine Houghton, “was always thrilled when Susie called or visited.”
In the latter months of 1967, Hepburn busied herself with the planning of a TV special that would document Tracy’s life and work. Written by Chester Erskine, the show would be all-inclusive, inviting on-camera contributions from Louise, Carroll Tracy, Joe Mankiewicz, George Cukor, the full range of family, friends, and coworkers. She got M-G-M to throw in as the producing company, furnishing the film clips, and ABC to commit a two-hour time slot. But the whole thing hinged on Louise’s cooperation, and ultimately, after reading the script, she declined to participate, failing to see clearly in Erskine and Hepburn’s version the man she had known longer than any of them.
Soon Hepburn was back in the swim of making movies, traveling to France to make The Lion in Winter. Director Anthony Harvey found her “enormously vulnerable” and said that Tracy was practically never out of her mind. “She was mad about him in every way.” It was Tracy, Katharine Houghton observed, who brought out a selflessness in her. “It fulfilled something deep in her nature. Spencer, in fact, may have been surprised to observe that it
was he alone, his living, breathing presence, that enabled Kate, after her father’s death, to carry high that standard which she so admired—‘character!’ When she lost Spence, the center of her life was destroyed. And I think every year that took her farther away from him caused her life to further unravel. Their relationship seemed to me to balance both of them—a yin and a yang.”
Katharine Hepburn never saw Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, could never bear to. Katharine Houghton saw it only after she was asked to accept the David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actor on Tracy’s behalf in August 1968. “That last speech of Tracy’s was a killer,” she said. “At the award ceremony they showed the film, and afterward I was supposed to go up and make an acceptance speech. I got up to the podium and burst into tears. I couldn’t say anything except, ‘Thank you.’ Anna Magnani threw her arms around me and said something charming like, ‘In Italy we respect tears, not words. You do not have to speak.’ ”
On the morning of the funeral, Kate and Phyllis Wilbourn arrived at the mortuary a little after eight, intent, she later admitted to Bill Self, on following the hearse to the church and then slipping inside. They found no one there, just the hearse, and they drove up into the driveway.
“Is anyone coming?” Kate asked.
“No.”
“May we help?”
“Why not?”
So they helped lift Spence into his place in the vehicle, and they shut the door. Then the hearse pulled away, out onto Melrose Avenue and east toward the church. Kate and Phyllis jumped into Kate’s dependable old Chrysler and followed along after it, a miniature procession on a six-mile journey through rush-hour traffic, at once brazen and yet proudly anonymous. Through La Cienega Boulevard they crept, east along the upper border of Larchmont Village, then past the Desilu Studios complex that abutted Paramount. What Hepburn was thinking is anyone’s guess, but her musings must at some point have touched on Louise and how Spence was always at pains to protect her, to keep her safe from humiliation and the scrutiny of the press. That Kate was now contemplating the crashing of his funeral was something he would not have wanted, no matter how heartfelt, how necessary, such a grand gesture might have been.
Passing under the Hollywood Freeway, she turned left onto Vermont, past Los Angeles City College and on toward Santa Monica Boulevard. There would be a crowd of onlookers at the church, as there was for all celebrity funerals, photographers and TV cameramen shouldering their 16mm gear, eager to run off and get their footage processed and cut for the six o’clock news. Just how unseen could she possibly be, slipping into the back as if no one would know her? In a practical sense, they would all be on the lookout for her, the reporters, the freelancers, the autograph hounds for whom no event was too sacred to work. Left at Santa Monica, doubling back now, the Immaculate Heart of Mary six blocks ahead on the left. Of course she wouldn’t go, couldn’t go. She didn’t want, as she later told Bill, any “fuss.”
As the church came into view, they could see the crowds, the people arriving, the cops managing the traffic, the pallbearers, perhaps even Louise and the family awaiting his return. “Goodbye, friend—here’s where we leave you …”
And with that she tapped the brake and watched as the hearse and its precious cargo eased away.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Biographies of Katharine Hepburn
No fewer than twenty-five books exist on the life and career of Katharine Hepburn, and all, to varying extents, touch on her decades-long relationship with Spencer Tracy. The first major Hepburn biography, Charles Higham’s Kate (1975), drew its strength from the author’s interviews with a number of Hepburn’s friends and coworkers, including Laura Harding, Larry Weingarten, and George Stevens. In writing of the “deep, overpowering love” Hepburn felt for Tracy, Higham came closest to getting it right. Later attempts were less advantaged but made more prodigious use of archival resources. Anne Edwards’ A Remarkable Woman (1985) was thicker than the Higham book but relied more on previous books and clippings than original research and is riddled with errors. According to Edwards, Tracy’s affair with Loretta Young extended into 1938, and Louise Tracy was “president” of John Tracy Clinic until her death in 1983. Edwards’ source notes sometimes lead nowhere, and the heft of her book is, in part, the result of padding.
Barbara Leaming appeared to do a better job of library work in her Katharine Hepburn (1995) but misread the correspondence in Bloomington’s John Ford Collection and proclaimed “Pappy” Ford the true love of Hepburn’s life. The Ford correspondence in the Hepburn Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shows that while Ford nursed a lifelong crush on Kate, she reciprocated with a genuine but studied fondness—probably after a brief infatuation—and was in touch with Ford’s wife and kids over the decades.
Leaming’s biases extend to her lurid coverage of Tracy, whom she portrays, in the words of Larry Swindell, as “a brutal whoremongering drunkard with no redeeming qualities.” Leaming makes the common mistake of regarding Bill Davidson’s inventions as fact when she reports that Tracy disappeared into the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn “many times through the years,” his only luggage “a case of Irish whiskey.” On page 308, she describes Tracy as a mean drunk “who beat up a prostitute in a bordello called Lu’s,” another imaginary episode lifted from Davidson. She goes on to inform the reader that Up the River was made by RKO and that, upon its completion, Tracy was told by studio executives to learn “something about film technique” by observing Ford at work on Seas Beneath—a neat trick since Tracy was appearing onstage in The Last Mile—first in New York, then in Chicago—during the time Seas Beneath was in production. On page 401, Leaming goes Davidson one better when she states that Tracy “blamed his own visits to brothels and the venereal infections he contracted there” for Johnny’s deafness. There is no source given for this allegation—and one would make no difference as such an occurrence would have been a medical impossibility.
After Spencer Tracy’s death in 1967, it was established conclusively that the cause of John Tracy’s deafness (and eventual blindness) was type 1 Usher syndrome, a recessive disorder inherited when both parents pass the same mutated gene to a child. Spencer and Louise Tracy were both carriers, and a roll of the genetic dice resulted in John’s condition—a one-in-four chance. Susie Tracy, with the same parentage, was born without Usher syndrome, meaning she did not inherit the same changed gene from both parents. Needless to say, genetic disorders cannot be caused or transmitted by “venereal infections.” While it is true that syphilis can mimic the symptoms of Usher syndrome—deafness and retinal damage—the syphilis bacterium can only be passed to a child via his or her mother. If the father alone is infected and the mother is not, the child cannot be infected.
None of Spencer Tracy’s confidential medical histories makes any mention of venereal disease at any time in his life. Leaming’s assertion that he blamed his own “venereal infections” (note the plural) for his son’s deafness is pure conjecture, unsourced and unsupported by the facts. Even so, a 2003 monodrama called Tea at Five insistently perpetuates this myth when the playwright puts the following words into the mouth of Katharine Hepburn: “The boy. Johnny. You see, his son was conceived when Spence unknowingly had a venereal disease. Gonorrhea.” Katharine Houghton, with considerable justification, characterized the play as “trash.”
A. Scott Berg’s Kate Remembered appeared within days of Hepburn’s death in 2003 and provides the best summary overview of Hepburn’s life and work, framed as it is in the form of a memoir of the author’s friendship with the actress. There followed three more biographies, all part of a curious subgenre pandering to an audience that apparently wants to be told that practically everyone in Old Hollywood was secretly gay. Katharine the Great by Darwin Porter came first in 2004, followed by James Robert Parish’s Katharine Hepburn: The Untold Story in 2005 and William J. Mann’s Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn in 2006.
While the unsourced Porter book is impossible
to take seriously and the Parish is merely insinuative, the Mann book offers fifty-six pages of notes and sources, which encouraged readers and reviewers alike to embrace its wildest assertions with a minimum of skepticism. Standing almost alone in their dissents were Richard Schickel (“In the end, the book is just gossip-mongering with high-end aspirations”) and John Anderson of Newsday, who called it “a dishy, needy book” unworthy of its subject. “Mann’s style—a slightly elevated version of the journalism-as-salespitch practiced by the likes of Entertainment Weekly—abets his smarmy search for facts to support his claims about (1) Hepburn’s sexuality (she may have had lesbian affairs with, among others, longtime companion Laura Harding); (2) what gnarled complexes really lay behind the alliance with Spencer Tracy; and (3) how much of Hepburn’s image was founded in fact. But Mann’s desperation to prove such points—none of which is as critical to Hepburn’s ultimate cultural importance as any one of a dozen film performances—makes the experience of Kate rather tiresome.”
Rumors accusing the pants-wearing actress of lesbianism date to the early thirties and are as venerable as the oft-whispered suspicion that Mae West was really a transvestite. To put across his thesis, Mann at the outset seeks to establish that Tracy and Hepburn never lived together, that Hepburn surrounded herself with known lesbians (making the old guilt-by-association case), and that Garson Kanin’s 1971 book Tracy and Hepburn was a conscious and well-meaning exercise in mythology. “After seventy years,” the author states in a self-aggrandizing preface, “I thought it was finally time to tell the story outside the star’s control.”
James Curtis Page 115