Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  Woman of the Year was a huge hit, coming out shortly after the United States entered World War II, when women in large numbers were, for the first time, working outside the house. The film provided a glimpse of the feminism that the world would be seeing more of over the next half century. More important, it was great fun. The film’s basic formula, enhanced by the genuine chemistry of its stars, would provide the template for another eight pictures in which Tracy and Hepburn would appear together over the next twenty-five years, making them the most enduring romantic screen team in history. “Christ,” Kate said one day with a belly laugh, “I think we were together longer than Abbott and Costello.”

  Tracy always got top billing. “That’s the way it should have been,” Kate explained. “I was just coming back when we started working together. Spence was tops in his field and had never been away. I was just damned grateful he was willing to work with me.” At one point, Joe Mankiewicz had discussed the credits with Tracy, asking, “What about women and children first?”

  “Hell,” Tracy replied. “It’s a movie, not a sinking ship.”

  In my first conversation with Kate—back when I was interviewing her in 1983—I reminded her of her quotation about what Astaire and Rogers each brought to their partnership and asked what she might say in substituting the names Tracy and Hepburn. “Oh, I’m not sure it worked that way,” she said. “I think he was so steady and I was so volatile, that we exasperated each other. And we challenged each other, and that was the fun of it. But the truth is, I think we just looked good together.” By the end of filming Woman of the Year, Hepburn and Tracy were, in the phrase of the day, “keeping company.” He never really went home again to his ranch in Encino.

  Hepburn surrendered to love as she never had before. At thirty-four years of age, with a string of broken hearts behind her and any number of would-be suitors all around, she was—she told me my first night at Fenwick—“hit over the head with a cast-iron skillet.” Hardly a pretty boy, Spencer Tracy had the plain, rugged looks that appealed to Hepburn—“manly” was the word she used time and again, as she did to describe John Ford and George Stevens. Big, redheaded, and completely natural—rather like, as I saw in photographs, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn. She believed, without qualification, that Spencer Tracy was simply the best actor in movies. “A baked potato,” she often said, referring to his talent—absolutely plain, basic, and essential. His personal life was well known to everybody in Hollywood, and his appeal to former leading ladies certainly contributed to his being attractive to Hepburn.

  I sensed that what got to her most was his essential neediness. Tracy exuded a sad loneliness that verged on the tragic. And that brought out the missionary in Hepburn. After living thirty-five years entirely, as she said, “for me, me, me,” she realized it was time to start living for somebody else. For the first time, she admitted, it dawned on her that she could love somebody for what she might give more than for what she might get.

  She almost consciously decided to devote herself to his wants and needs, often at the expense of sublimating her desires and suppressing her personality. Hepburn—ever striving and often strident, irrepressible to the point of irritating, exhilarating, and sometimes exhausting—assumed the most difficult role of her life. As Tracy’s lover and companion, she became supportive in ways that sometimes forced her to be servile, patient to an extreme that often left her patronized, and devoted until she was sometimes reduced to a life in denial. She was periodically subjected to his humiliations, occasionally in front of others. On the set or in a living room, she often sat, literally, at his feet.

  They had their most wonderful times together—the best of which, Kate said, were just being quietly alone in each other’s company. They lived like married people: eating dinner together, meat and potatoes; reading the Sunday newspaper; taking drives up the coast; painting. Never especially comfortable with his emotions, he could be tender and affectionate when they were by themselves or with their most trusted friends—George Cukor, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, later Bogart and Bacall. They kept separate residences and generally arrived at social events under separate cover. He spoke to his wife regularly.

  In an industry where gossip passed for gospel, a brood of columnists had come to wield great power, their word spreading around the world. Louella Parsons and then Hedda Hopper and Sheilah Graham, as well as a string of imitators, were, therefore, feared and fawned over. Hepburn and Tracy generally ignored them. In most cases, such failure to truckle to what Kate called “the rag hags” provoked nasty, sometimes career-crushing, columns. Strangely, Hepburn and Tracy were left alone, with little ever appearing in any of the columns that linked the two outside the studio walls. This tacit hostility proved the easiest way for each side to deal with its obvious contempt for the other’s behavior.

  I once suggested to Kate that part of the reason the female gossip columnists ignored her relationship with Tracy was that they secretly admired her for it and for the way she sustained herself over the years in a man’s world. Later in their careers, Hedda Hopper approached Hepburn at a Hollywood function with her hand held out. “Isn’t it time we bury the hatchet and become friends?” the big-hatted reporter asked. “Oh, Hedda,” Hepburn replied, “we’ve gone this long without speaking to each other. Why spoil a perfectly good enmity?”

  In the days and decades after Woman of the Year ended production, friends of Tracy and Hepburn—and ultimately their fans—spoke with great authority about how they could never marry. His wife would never grant him a divorce, they said; Catholic and guilt-ridden about his son’s deafness, he would never seek one. But there was one more factor seldom considered, which Kate insisted was paramount. As she told me that first night in Fenwick, “I never wanted to marry Spencer Tracy.”

  It has also been suggested that Hepburn was always attracted to men who were, if not married, at least, somehow attached to other women. There’s truth to that notion. But I think it was more that the men to whom she was drawn were unmarriageable. Living “like a man,” as Kate so often asserted—by herself, paying her own bills, and ultimately, answering to nobody—she liked that arrangement and could afford to live that way.

  A leading lady’s career seldom extended longer than a decade, which forced many of them into peculiar circumstances. Most stars suddenly found themselves living in a style to which they quickly became accustomed—only to find themselves unable to maintain it for long. That partly explained why practically all of them married repeatedly, at least once for money. (Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Greer Garson, and Jennifer Jones all counted business tycoons among their multiple husbands.) Not Hepburn. Luddy was certainly there to launch her career; and Howard Hughes helped her enter the stratosphere. But she left them so that she would not be further indebted. She wanted less from her men, not more.

  With Spencer Tracy, she was able to take that way of living one step further—appreciating one intense, intimate relationship over a quarter of a century. He and Katharine Hepburn experienced the ups and downs of any married couple; but in never sealing their arrangement legally, they were able to retain an element of unreality in the relationship, a false quality based on neither of them being locked in. In many ways, their time together had the feeling of a “reunion” more than a union, because there was always this escape hatch through which either of them could pass whenever he or she pleased. Tracy periodically slipped out to fight personal demons, resulting in drinking binges and sexual conquests; Hepburn often packed her bags too—for professional conquests, acting roles. It quickly became apparent that even her briefest absences could be enough to set off a cycle of insobriety.

  Upon the completion of Woman of the Year, for example, they went their separate ways. Against his wishes, Hepburn honored an agreement she had made with the Theatre Guild to appear in a new play by Philip Barry called Without Love. While she took it out for a pre-Broadway run, Tracy brooded his way through an MGM production of John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. When w
ord that he was mixing alcohol with barbiturates reached Hepburn, she felt that she had to suspend the tour in order to spend the summer in California with him. She told the Guild she would return to New York for the play’s Broadway opening.

  In the summer of 1942, a project intended for Tracy and Hepburn came along. It was the most anomalous of their joint vehicles, but under the circumstances, she considered it a godsend. Donald Ogden Stewart, who had so successfully adapted her two Philip Barry plays for the screen, had just written a screenplay based on a novel by I. A. R. Wylie called Keeper of the Flame. It was a melodramatic political thriller, capturing much of the tenor of the times, in which a journalist tracks down the zealously protective widow of a great American hero—Lindbergh-like in some ways—whose Yankee Doodle patriotism turns out to be a front for fascism. It was not difficult for Hepburn to press George Cukor, always eager to prove he could direct drama as well as romantic comedy, into service. She convinced Tracy that this would be a wonderful way to make a worthwhile political statement.

  Although the film was meant to emulate Hitchcock—with its whiffs of Rebecca and Suspicion—the material proved to be far from Cukor’s metier. Heavy-handed attempts at psychology and sociology tended to overwhelm the antifascist message of Keeper of the Flame. The film succeeded only in allowing Tracy and Hepburn to work together again and to spend time together in a house she rented in Malibu. At night, she would often drive him all the way back into town, to a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  Intense romantic involvements have occurred on motion-picture sets since the days of D. W Griffith. Most prove to be like shipboard romances, usually ending as the cruise does. By the close of the summer of 1942, the Hepburn-Tracy love affair seemed fated to similar shoals. For months her return to Broadway in Without Love distressed her, torn as she was between an old commitment to the theater friends who had resuscitated her career and her new commitment to the one man who, she said, “taught me to love.” Tracy made it plain that he wished she would abandon the play.

  At that moment, Louise Tracy, who had not seen her husband stray from home this long since his affair with Loretta Young, played her hand. Instead of folding her cards as she almost did nearly a decade earlier, she finessed her way into the public eye with her husband at her side. That fall the University of Southern California announced the creation of the John Tracy Clinic, an organization dedicated to the deaf and their families, largely underwritten by Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Tracy. Louise Tracy’s commitment to the cause was never less than genuine. Kate found her timing of the announcement, however, suspect—forcing, as it did, Spencer to play the role of admiring husband and reinforcing his feelings of guilt as a father.

  At the same time, Tracy complained that he had never known a woman who kept so many of her old flames ignited—aflicker if not in full blaze—as Hepburn. Leland Hayward periodically checked in with career advice; and after divorcing Margaret Sullavan, he said his losing Kate was the great regret in his life. George Stevens remained friendly with her; and almost until the end of his life, John Ford spoke of retiring to Ireland, taking Kate with him. Howard Hughes told Irene Selznick that he considered his inability to persuade Kate to marry him “the biggest mistake” in his life.

  Hughes maintained contact with Hepburn up to the very last years of his life. Until then, he continued to telephone her. At first the calls were ostensibly about The Philadelphia Story; but he kept ringing long after there was no business to conduct. A decade later, for example, Kate suddenly found herself looking for temporary lodging in Los Angeles; and during one of their calls, Hughes recommended the former Charles Boyer house, which RKO had bought from the actor a few years earlier as part of the settlement in terminating his contract. It was sitting empty; and, because Hughes owned RKO at that time, technically, he owned the house. He also offered Kate free run of the RKO prop and furniture departments.

  Early one evening in 1951, after most people at the studio had gone home, she showed up at the RKO warehouse. She was wandering down a long aisle, looking over some lamps and vases, she said, when she heard a familiar voice call her name. “Howard? Is that you?” she replied, as a hatted figure in khakis and a white shirt approached her, a figure who might easily have passed for a propman—looking ordinary in every way, except for the handkerchief he held close to his mouth in the dusty hall. They hugged and made small talk, then sat for a moment—she on a plain, wooden chair, he (Kate insisted this was true) on a gold-painted throne. “Howard,” she laughed, “I see you haven’t lost your flair for the dramatic.”

  Hughes asked if “everything was right” with her; and Hepburn said it was. She made it clear that both her career and her relationship with Tracy were on track. “There was nothing terribly dramatic about the meeting,” Kate recalled, “except that it happened at all, and that by then he was clearly becoming this eccentric figure. He was going around the bend, politically speaking, and, I suppose, in other ways as well. Very anti-Communist.”

  Hepburn said they were happy to see each other; but, she added, “he seemed sad to me. I remember thinking there was something pathetic about the meeting, that he seemed so . . . detached,” she said, at last, reaching for the word. “Howard said I should just tell the warehouse supervisor what I wanted and that it would be delivered in the morning.” She thanked him, he left, and, said Kate, “That was the last time I saw him face to face.” They did continue to talk, with decreasing frequency; and she got reports of his increasing eccentricity through his doctor, Lawrence Chaffin. During one of Hughes’s last calls, he asked Kate what time it was. “Four o’clock,” she said, drowsily looking at her clock. “Day or night?” he asked.

  And why, “for Pete’s sake,” Tracy kept asking Kate, was Luddy still in the picture? Like Hughes before him, Tracy didn’t understand why this ex-husband still had the license to pop in on them in Fenwick and why Kate had never divorced him properly in a United States courthouse. “I didn’t realize until then,” Kate later admitted, that “Luddy was a kind of a security blanket for me. And Spence made me see that keeping him in my life like that, I was leading him on. I was still being horribly selfish to him. Not letting him get on with his life.” In September 1942, Dr. Hepburn appeared in Superior Court in Hartford on behalf of his daughter, as a judge granted a divorce to Katharine and Ludlow Ogden Smith. Within months, Luddy had taken a second wife.

  Only when the Theatre Guild applied its heaviest pressure—which included the threat of a lawsuit—did Hepburn agree to honor her vow to take Without Love to Broadway. Neither the play nor the critical response was especially good, but she played sixteen sold-out weeks to thunderous ovations. Increasingly, during those four months, Hepburn realized that the adulation of thousands of people did not mean as much to her as the adoration she sought from one man. Because of her growing devotion to Spencer Tracy, she did not set foot on a legitimate stage for the rest of the decade.

  At one point, she thought she might retest the waters, by getting Tracy back to the theater. She arranged for him to meet playwright Robert Sherwood and accompanied him to the East Coast as he agreed to appear in a play at the war’s end called The Rugged Path. But this overwrought and underthought drama about a newspaperman who goes into battle proved to be an unsatisfactory vehicle, despite Tracy’s powerful central performance. He never appeared on stage again.

  By then, Tracy considered himself a movie actor and nothing more. Benefiting from the number of stars in military service—Gable, Stewart, Fonda, and Tyrone Power, to name a few—he became one of the major attractions of the decade. He took the lead in at least one picture every year into the 1950s and maintained his following with such wartime efforts as A Guy Named Joe, The Seventh Cross, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Hepburn’s output during the same period was a mere fraction of that, as she put her personal life—supporting the man she loved—ahead of her career, turning down many good roles along the way.

  Her only appearance in all of 1943, for example, was a cameo in St
age Door Canteen, a fable of sorts about the sacrifices everybody was making for the war effort. It featured dozens of walk-ons, including Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Harpo Marx, and Ed Wynn. Hepburn was asked to deliver the morale-building moral of the film, a pep talk meant to inspire the junior hostesses at the canteen, to say nothing of the largely female audiences across the country. Her only film the next year was in Dragon Seed, based on Pearl S. Buck’s bestselling novel. As Jade, a Chinese farmer’s wife, her high cheekbones allowed her to look only slightly more Asiatic than her costars Walter Huston, Hurd Hatfield, Agnes Moorehead, and Aline MacMahon. In 1946 she appeared in a minor contemporary melodrama—directed by Vincente Minnelli and featuring Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum—called Undercurrent. And the next year she portrayed Clara Wieck Schumann opposite Paul Henreid and Robert Walker, as Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, in Song of Love—another of her lesser pictures. It is one of the few times Hepburn appeared as a mother in the movies, tending to a noisy brood of seven. In the film, she did, however, display genuine virtuosity at the piano, the result of months of practice at a keyboard.

  Such was the baloney she sandwiched between her pictures with Spencer Tracy that decade. Even those pictures were mixed in quality. In an effort to recapture the magic that had brought them together in the first place, Hepburn got Tracy to appear in a film version of Without Love. Don Stewart, who had successfully translated two other Barry works to the screen for Hepburn, punched up the badinage of the script, knowing he had Hollywood’s most skilful sparring partners delivering the lines. This rendition was diverting at best, rather silly and a little slow.

  The next Tracy and Hepburn picture digressed even farther from the career path they had set for themselves. The Sea of Grass, based on a novel by Conrad Richter, was an intense domestic drama set against the plains of the New Mexico Territory. In the film, Hepburn leaves her rough-hewn cattle baron of a husband to have an affair in Denver with his rival, a lawyer played by Melvyn Douglas. “Nobody ever sets out to make a bad picture,” Kate later said of the experience. “We really believed in this. Or, at least, we believed we believed in it.” The project came, unfortunately, at a time when Tracy was drinking heavily, spending night after night wending his way from one Hollywood watering hole to another—The Trocadero, Ciro’s, The Mocambo, The Players—until he’d pass out, somehow awakening in a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel.