Kate Remembered

by A. Scott Berg

  “Gadg,” she said to a man she had not spoken to in more than forty years, “that can’t be you.” He beamed and leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. While they exchanged greetings, I could see another elderly man watching the reunion. Emboldened, he walked over as well, and said, “And will you speak to me?”

  “Of course, I will,” she said, having no idea who was then pecking at her other cheek. As he spoke to Kazan for a moment, I whispered, “Joe Mankiewicz.”

  “Good God,” she said.

  For the next two minutes everybody was all smiles. Then Kate said she had to leave. I accompanied her to the street. She said she was going home but that I should go back to the party and come over when it was done. She climbed into the backseat of the waiting car, and before the driver pulled away from the curb at the Pierre’s Sixty-first Street entrance, she rolled down her window and said, “Do I look as awful as they do?”

  “God no, Kate. At least they knew who you were.”

  I returned to the tenth floor. After a few minutes, I slipped away from the living room and retreated to the den, where Irene and I had always sat. A guard was posted there, watching over the artwork and personal effects. I went to the little refrigerator and pulled out the bottle of “Cary’s aquavit” and poured myself a shot. Then I sat in the chair in front of the Mary Cassatt picture of the little girl and cried.

  IX

  Always Mademoiselle

  No, I couldn’t in all truth say I was surprised by the offer,” Kate remembered of that afternoon at the end of 1966. “But, honestly, can you imagine me as a fireman’s wife?”

  Stanley Kramer, who had become Hollywood’s most socially conscious filmmaker and who had directed Spencer Tracy three times already, visited the Cukor guesthouse with a new idea for a movie he was hatching with the screenwriter of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, William Rose. A handsome—and alcoholic—American expatriate living on the Channel Island of Jersey, Rose was plotting the story of a wealthy British couple whose daughter brings home the man she intends to marry, “perfect in every way”—except for his being of another race. Sidney Poitier, then the most successful man of color ever to have appeared in motion pictures, had already expressed interest in playing the fiance, a cultivated professional man, the kind of role model that had not appeared in a mainstream film. With that piece in place, Kramer set about casting the costars.

  A devoted friend and fan of Spencer Tracy, Kramer had suddenly thought this film might provide a glorious last hurrah for the ailing actor. By transplanting the story from its English locale to American soil, Tracy could easily play a retired, middle-class Irish-American, a former cop or fireman. Having broached the idea to Tracy without being brushed off, Kramer continued to spin his gears. If, indeed, this was likely to be Spencer Tracy’s last appearance in motion pictures—in a love story at that—he asked himself what would be more moving than casting him opposite his romantic partner of twenty-five years.

  By the time Kramer had arrived at the cottage, the story had shifted even further. “Once I heard Stanley describe the setup, and he was suggesting that the fireman be in a more elevated position,” Kate recalled, “I knew that he was thinking of me to play the wife.” The three kicked around several possibilities that day. Tracy, who had for decades played the “conscience” in so many dramas—the all-American voice of truth and justice—would be wasted playing a priest in this romantic story; and he had already portrayed a judge for Kramer. They discussed his being a newspaper publisher, a man who had long been a liberal voice of reason, a man who stood for social justice—who suddenly balked when the ultimate test of his liberalism landed on his own doorstep. He would find himself coming up against his wife, who would be speaking from the heart, a sensible woman who would be the voice of romance.

  Kate had mixed feelings about the project. She thought it sounded like a wonderful film—“with something important to say”; and she was eager to do it. For the first time, however, she worried that Tracy was not physically able to complete the job. Even in the world of studio doctors who routinely signed off on major health risks so that movies could get made, Spencer Tracy had become uninsurable. Knowing that, Kramer made two unusual promises to the actor. He said he would arrange the entire shooting schedule around Tracy, so that he would only have to shoot a few hours a day—and in the morning at that, when he was at his best. Furthermore, he said if Hepburn and Tracy would not make this movie, neither would he.

  Columbia Studios agreed to finance the picture only if Hepburn would put her quarter-million-dollar salary in escrow along with the director’s half million until the completion of principal photography. That would provide enough insurance to reshoot with another actor, should that eventuality arise. Kramer put his money where his mouth was, an act of faith and friendship that Hepburn never forgot. “All of Stanley’s movies came straight from the heart,” she said. “There are damn few like him.”

  He retreated to Jersey with writer Rose, who knocked out the script of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in a matter of weeks. In some ways, the material might have been better suited as a play. A handful of characters—the young lovers, their respective sets of parents, and a priest and maid for some comic relief—converge upon a single set, the San Francisco home of Matt and Christina Drayton, where they deliver speeches that argue all sides of the issue of the impending interracial marriage. But knowing they had Tracy and Hepburn—with at least one of them in a valedictory role—gave Rose and Kramer not only the voices to work with but also years of cinematic history.

  Unlike Garbo and Gilbert, Myrna Loy and William Powell, Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan—even Abbott and Costello—Tracy and Hepburn had matured as a couple. Over a generation, the public had watched them encounter a number of different situations together, always a little ahead of their times. Paradoxically, this unmarried twosome had become the symbol of the all-American couple, exemplars of family values and, even more, of human values. Kate told me years later that while working on his script, “Willy Rose said he’d often ask himself, ‘Now what would Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn say here?’ Not the real Spence and the real me. But the images everybody knew. Queer, isn’t it?”

  As a result, the entire film gave audiences the feeling that they were eavesdropping, listening in on relatives who had long been part of their collective consciences. The conceit was further enhanced by the actress who debuted in the film as their daughter, Katharine Houghton. The daughter of Kate’s sister Marion, and a stunning, literary graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Kathy burst onto the screen displaying a lot of her aunt’s zealous personality. Naturally, she looked enough like her to give rise to the rumor that she was, in truth, Tracy and Hepburn’s love child and that Kate’s sister had simply been their cover. “Now that’s one I haven’t heard,” Kate said of the canard when I mentioned it to her. “Too bad so many people are alive who remember when Marion was pregnant.”

  Everybody’s anxiety over Tracy’s health only fostered greater efficiency on the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But it was a nervous-making shoot for Hepburn, who had to perform double duty—always looking after him and performing a considerably challenging role herself. While the two actors had always stuck around for each other in the past, feeding lines for the other’s close-ups, most shots of Hepburn alone were delivered to the script supervisor, thus allowing Tracy to go home early each day, as promised. “I shouldn’t say most movie sets, but certainly on a lot of movie sets, you develop a sense of family,” Kate recalled; and, she added, she couldn’t remember that feeling ever being so “strong” as it was on the set of this picture.

  Tracy and Hepburn had long approached their work differently. He had a phenomenal memory, could read a script, absorb the lines, look over a scene the night before it was shot, and was usually word perfect on his first take. She liked to study a script, learning not only all her lines before production but most everybody else’s as well. She considered every possible reading she could
give—and was known to pass along advice to other actors as to how they might deliver their lines as well. In the past, when she had suggested they rehearse together, Tracy generally dismissed the notion by saying, “I’m saving it for the set.”

  On Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, however, Tracy asked Hepburn to run lines with him every night. He felt he owed as much to his director, for putting his salary on the line. He felt he owed Kate even more, for having put her career on ice for five years. He seemed eager to make this picture especially good, if only to help get her career back on track. So it was disconcerting for the actors to discover that, for the first time, he was having trouble remembering his lines.

  The climax of the film was Spencer Tracy’s delivery of its message, a kind of verdict. After starting out as the leading opponent to his daughter’s marriage and listening to each character articulate his or her position, he takes exception to a comment made by the mother of Sidney Poitier’s character, played by Beah Richards. She avers that he has become an old man who has forgotten what it is to love. That spurs him to render his ultimate opinion that “in the final analysis it doesn’t matter what we think. The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt,” he says looking toward Hepburn, her eyes brimming with tears, “. . . that’s everything.” It was a flawless performance; and there was not a dry eye on the set. Everybody knew that Spencer Tracy was a great actor; but that day, they felt he wasn’t acting. On May 26, 1967, Tracy shot his final scene and went home. Kate thanked the cast and crew for all their cooperation.

  Hepburn had been residing full-time in the Cukor guest cottage on St. Ives, though she continued to rent the Barrymore aviary a few minutes away on Tower Grove Drive. Phyllis spent her nights there. Kate generally sat up late with Tracy in the bedroom on St. Ives until he dozed off; then she repaired to the maid’s room off the kitchen. A buzzer sat on his bedstand and she carried the bell, attached to a long wire, wherever she went in the house. Day and night, she monitored his movements, as always, anticipating his needs. Before retiring, she’d put a big kettle of water on the stove, which she kept simmering all night, so that he could instantly prepare a cup of tea if he couldn’t sleep.

  At three o’lock in the morning of June 10, 1967, Kate heard Tracy come out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. She was getting out of bed to join him when she heard a teacup smash against the floor and then a thud. By the time she reached him, Spencer Tracy was dead of a heart attack. While he had been slowly dying over the last few years, she found immediate comfort in the fact that the death itself had come so swiftly.

  Hepburn immediately summoned Phyllis, George Cukor, the couple who lived on the grounds, and Howard Strickling, the MGM publicity chief, who had decades of experience dealing with the press at the death scenes of Hollywood stars. She was packing up her personal belongings and removing them from the premises when she suddenly came to her senses. “This was my house too,” she realized, “and I had lived with this man for most of my adult life.” She returned to the house and called Louise Tracy, their children, and Tracy’s brother.

  “It seemed the least awkward thing to do,” Kate explained to me. “To have done otherwise would have required a series of lies and would have served nobody.” Over the next few hours, she did her best to stay out of the way, to let the Tracy family have their final moments of bereavement—thus depriving herself of that same moment of closure. “It was all like a bad dream,” Kate recalled more than twenty years later, “a real nightmare.” It reached its most surreal when the morticians asked how the body should be dressed. Kate had pulled out an old jacket and some trousers, but Louise Tracy took umbrage at not being able to select the clothes herself. In that moment, Kate snapped. “Oh Louise,” she said, “—what difference does it make?” By six o’clock, a doctor had examined the deceased and the undertaking firm of Cunningham & Walsh had taken him away. The press would arrive midday—when they were told that Mr. Tracy’s friends Miss Hepburn and Mr. Cukor had come down to the cottage at eleven that morning.

  For three evenings the mortuary received mourners. Kate showed up each night after hours. One night she placed an oil painting she had done of some flowers into the casket. The next night she learned that the casket had been sealed at the family’s request. She presumed her painting remained with him.

  Upon Tracy’s death, Hepburn behaved rather as she had during his lifetime, remaining unseen in public with the man she loved. Early on the morning of the funeral, Kate and Phyllis drove to the mortuary and helped place Spencer Tracy’s coffin into the hearse. Then from a respectable distance they followed the parade of black cars to the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Hollywood. When they got close enough to see that a crowd had formed, they turned around and headed for home. “Goodbye, friend,” said Kate.

  After the funeral, a handful of Tracy’s closest friends—those intimate enough to have been part of his actual domestic life—stopped by the house on St. Ives. Hepburn greeted Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, writer Chester Erskine and his wife, Sally, director Jean Negulesco and his wife, Dusty. Hepburn seemed to be in complete control of her emotions. “I wasn’t really putting up a brave front,” she later said. “I was just in a complete daze.” It wasn’t until the Negulescos left, and Jean made a comment about how angry he was that Spencer had left them, that Kate collapsed into his arms and sobbed.

  One night, some weeks later, Kate told me, she telephoned Mrs. Tracy. Thinking she might be of some help with the children, she said, “You know, Louise, you and I can be friends. You knew Spencer at the beginning. I knew him at the end. Or, we can just go on pretending—”

  “Oh yes,” Louise said. “But you see. I thought you were only a rumor.”

  Kate never got over this story. “A rumor!” she said to me. “Can you imagine? Thirty years her husband isn’t there, and she thinks I’m a rumor.” For a minute or two Kate tried to imagine what could possibly have been in Louise Tracy’s mind—what hoops of denial she must have jumped through to believe that. I suggested to Kate that Louise Tracy knew the score all along and simply said what she had to get her goat. “But why would she want to do that?” Kate asked in a state of agitation. “Exactly,” I said.

  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner opened the following year and became the most successful picture at the box office that either Tracy or Hepburn had ever appeared in, together or apart. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards—including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress. William Rose won an Oscar for his screenplay. The late Spencer Tracy was up against Warren Beatty for Bonnie and Clyde, Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, and Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night; the latter won. Hepburn’s competition was not quite as stiff: Anne Bancroft for The Graduate, Faye Dunaway for Bonnie and Clyde, Dame Edith Evans for The Whisperers, and Audrey Hepburn for Wait Until Dark. With this, her tenth nomination, Hepburn won her second Oscar—thirty-four years after her first. “I felt that was the Hollywood community’s way of honoring Spence,” Kate said years later, with undue modesty. There’s no denying that sentiment played heavily into the voting that year. But if the Academy was honoring a life and not that particular performance, this was probably more the Academy’s way of applauding Hepburn’s return to the public arena. By the time her Oscar was presented—as before, in absentia—she had already completed work on another movie and was in the middle of filming yet another.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald once commented that in American lives there were no second acts. Had he enjoyed a normal life span, he would have been able to see the curtain go up on the fourth act of the life of one of his favorite actresses, Katharine Hepburn—then sixty years of age.

  Kate recuperated from her loss on Martha’s Vineyard as the guest of the Kanins. Long swims, long drives, and long talks contributed to her recovery. But, as always with Hepburn, it was work, not recreation, that brought her back to life.

  That sum
mer the arrival of a screenplay called The Lion in Winter spurred her into action. James Goldman had adapted his own successful play, the story of the marriage of Henry II of England and his imprisoned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who is sprung for the Christmas holidays in 1183. During the course of the play, they argue the question of succession, a decision that will affect nations on both sides of the Channel. Peter O’Toole, who had played Henry II in Becket, would wear the same crown once more.

  “What was fascinating about the play,” Kate said, “was its modernness. This wasn’t about pomp and circumstance but about a family, a wife trying to protect her dignity and a mother protecting her children.” She grew even more excited about the project after seeing a film made by the director O’Toole was favoring—Dutchman, which presented a harsh look at urban life, with a woman stabbing a black man on a New York subway train. It hardly seemed an appropriate screen test for a film about twelfth-century European royalty, but Kate found director Anthony Harvey’s work “absolutely riveting. It grabbed you by the throat. Exactly the approach that our material needed. Not that glossy old MGM stuff, but cold people living in cold castles.” Furthermore, Harvey—an Englishman then in his mid-thirties—had been a film editor (for Stanley Kubrick, no less, on Lolita and Dr. Strangelove); and Hepburn had long been partial toward the profession. Similar to what she had said about David Lean, Kate reminded me that “nobody has the same love affair with film that cutters do. It’s a tactile medium for them.” She felt an instant rapport with the director, and they became great friends for the rest of Kate’s life. Nobody championed him more than she; and in her final years, nobody cared for her more than he.