by Anne Edwards
Jack Hamilton, senior editor for Look, who had been given the okay to come on the set for an interview with her, found to his surprise that “She had declared herself an ally something like China coming over to our side.” Nonetheless, when Hamilton arrived for their meeting, the sight of her wearing what she called her “Civil War veteran’s rags” and red socks, scruffy shoes and no makeup unsettled him. He recalls, “She was fiercely protective of Spencer Tracy who was sitting there . . . looking like a marvelous, quiet king lion. Here was Katharine Hepburn of legend, who always considered the press Ter natural enemy,’ and was as untouchable and removed as Garbo.” Why was she cooperating? “We figured out later she must be feeling mellow about their [Tracy and herself] working together again, and the movie bow of her young niece.”
“Listen, I’ll be the easy one to get,” she confided to Hamilton. “I gab a lot. It’s Spencer we’ll have to work on. He gets melancholia if he thinks too much about the past. He’s an uncommunicative kind of fellow anyway. Doesn’t like discussions. Not interested in the give and take of philosophical opinions.”
Once Kate started talking, she could hardly be stopped. “People say the story’s a shocker [Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner]. Even anybody with a pint-sized brain knows the day is soon coming when interracial marriages won’t be funny, or surprising or anything else. It will be just: ‘There it is.’ It’s a defenseless position, to judge people by their color. Sidney Poitier is black, but he and Kathy don’t look odd together at all. I’m spotted [a reference to her freckles], he’s black, she’s white, so . . . ? . . . . We’re living in very odd times, you know. We insist on knowing everything about everything. What the dickens, are you going to accept only what you know? What about the mystery of life? . . . religion? . . . sex? Sex! Are you going to have some sort of draughtsman tell you what the delights of sex are, or are you going to allow your own imagination a little more free range? . . . Is it the man’s walk, or the spring in his walk, the lift in his walk, that intrigues you? We are becoming so literal minded. . . . I think disillusioned authors are destroying the sex act.
“You think I’m dated? I think life is rather a romantic episode. It’s romantic as the blue sky and the bright clouds and Kathy suddenly getting an opportunity.* This is romantic, life is romantic. And I think young girls are the same as when I was a young girl. I think a few of them hop into bed more often than they used to. . . . My mother encouraged me to live in the image of George Bernard Shaw and lead a colorful life. Now, everybody is drafted and they are stood up naked and stamped and sent on, and it doesn’t encourage individuality.”
When Kate talked like this, Tracy would smirk at her and then start to rise—a cue to her to bring him into the conversation, to persuade him to tell some story she knew he told well. Her behavior with the press was perhaps attributable to the knowledge, learned from Tracy’s doctors, that this film was to be his last, and she wanted to do everything possible to help make it a tremendous success. During the filming, everyone involved thought the subject matter would put the public off unless it was both intrigued by and used to the theme by the time of its release. Therefore, her seduction of the press.
Four days before the last shot was filmed, Tracy put his arm around Kramer and said, “You know, I read the script again last night, and if I were to die on the way home tonight you can still release the picture with what you’ve got.” After Kate had finished a scene during one of the last shooting days, she rushed to her dressing room and, as was her habit, immediately changed back into a pair of trousers and a comfortable shirt. Tracy was being set up for a close shot when she returned and she slipped behind him and into a director’s chair out of camera range preparing to feed him lines. His back to her, she propped her feet up on a set piece and gave him his cue. Tracy, without turning, asked, “Do you intend to sit there with your feet up like that?” an edge to his voice.
Kate, not having realized he had seen her, was taken by surprise and was unable to answer.
He then told her slowly, the way a father might reprimand a child, “We can begin when you put your goddamn feet down and sit like a lady!”
Kate dropped her feet and with a little smile adopted a ladylike posture. She fed him the line again, and Tracy nodded to Kramer that he was prepared to begin. The line he spoke comes after a scene where Drayton has listened carefully to all his daughter and her black fiance have to say in defense of the rightness of their marriage. After they have finished speaking, Drayton turns to his wife, who is seen for a moment from his point of view. Then the camera comes in close to Tracy. “If what they feel for each other is even half what we felt”—he tells her, his voice cracking—“then that is everything.” Kate was so moved that she had to bite back her tears.*
Production ended on May 26 and an on-the-set party was given to celebrate the windup. Tracy’s strength had all but given way and he could not attend. But he called Garson Kanin in New York and jubilantly and incredulously cried, “Did you hear me, Jasper? I finished the picture!” While Tracy rested, Kate mixed with all the members of the company, sharing memories of the film’s funny and sticky moments. During dinner Kramer stood up and proposed a toast: “To Spencer Tracy, the greatest of all motion picture personalities.” At this point, Kate “rose from her chair and the long-legged figure in the white slack suit” strode to the microphone and spoke with much emotion to the crew:
“You are the people who make an actor able to act, and I don’t know how many of you realize that. But I want you to know that I shall be everlastingly grateful to you all. And I know that your help . . . made a hell of a lot of difference . . . to Spence.”
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released the following November, and the film was to be one of Kate’s greatest box-office successes as well as a personal triumph. The critics, however, “virtually unanimously” found it “loathsome.” As one maintained: “the race issue is prettified and preguaranteed a happy solution here because of the extraordinary character of this black man, and the built-in liberal stance of the parents, especially since Poitier represents the quintessentially respectable and unthreatening black, and Tracy and Hepburn represent the settled, estab-lishmentarian liberals who can win over any case and make the nastiest world safe for love and ideals.”
Poitier had quite different feelings about the character he portrayed: “People said I was cast as the stereotype of the intellectual black man with no flaws. . . . There was a great hue and cry. . . . They said I should have played a garage mechanic, or someone like that, brought home to this wealthy San Francisco family by the daughter and presented as a candidate for marriage.
“Well, this objection has absolutely no historical sense. In 1967, it was utterly impossible to do an in-depth interracial love story, to treat the issue in dead earnestness, head on. No producer, no director could get the money, nor would theaters in America back it. But Kramer made people look at the issue for the first time. . . . He treated the theme with humor . . . delicately . . . humanly . . . lovingly. . . . Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a totally revolutionary movie, and this is what so many critics failed to see. For the very first time, the characters in a story about racism are people with minds of their own, who after deliberations in a civilized manner, and after their own private reflections, come to a conclusion—the only sensible conclusion that people could come to in a situation like this!”*
No matter what barbed criticism was thrust at the content of the film, all the critics shouted Bravo! BRAVA! for Tracy and Hepburn. “Mr. Tracy,” began Brendan Gill at The New Yorker, “gives a faultless performance [and has] turned his role into a stunning compendium of the actor’s art . . . as if he were saying . . . 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.’” Penelope Mortimer of the London Observer felt that “while either [Tracy or Hepburn] or both are on screen the most savage criticism [of the story] is replaced by gratitude. To me, at any rate, Trac
y’s craggy face and burly build, the exploding humour, extraordinary gentleness and toughness of old leather, have always represented the ideal man. . . . Miss Hepburn is, of course, unchanged and unchangeable. Anyone who feels as I do about this pair will go and see Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner regardless of its fallacies and its hokum.”
Tracy was never to know the controversy that surrounded the film upon its release, nor the glowing reviews received by both him and Kate, nor the incredible success of his eighty-fourth movie. At around six A.M. on Saturday morning, June 10, just fifteen days after the completion of principal photography, Tracy was stricken with a fatal heart seizure as he drank a glass of milk in the kitchen of his small house. Kate arrived unsuspecting a short time later to find him hunched over the kitchen table. She called the doctor, Cukor, and Tracy’s brother, Carrol Tracy, who, in turn, notified Louise. Tracy was moved to the bed in his monk’s cell of a bedroom, which contained only an oak chest, one chair and an old bed. (Cukor had said that the room “had the aura of a place where a man might do penance.”) Kate was left alone with the body. About ten minutes later she emerged from his room, eyes moist but tears in control, and walked out of the cottage on Cukor’s arm. A few moments later, Louise arrived with John and Susie.
Kate did not attend the requiem low mass said for Tracy at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church in Hollywood. Six hundred people were present at his burial at Forest Lawn Cemetery. All of Hollywood seemed to have turned out to pay their respects to one of their great ones and to his widow, daughter and son. Louise, cloaked and veiled, a brave and sad looking figure, held on to the arm of Metro’s Howard Strickland. Kate had remained at her home, secluded, refusing to talk to any reporters. Phyllis was with her, and Laura flew out to help her through the first difficult days. Forty-eight hours after the funeral, Kate paid her respects to Louise. Then, with Phyllis and Laura, she flew back to the East Coast and Fenwick, where the sea and her beloved home waited and would, she hoped, help her to heal her wounds.
Footnotes
* Gable had died in 1960 only a few months after the completion of the film The Misfits (1961) in which he co-starred with Monroe.
* William Rose (1918– ), though an American, won his first international success as the author of the British film Genevieve (1953). His credits include It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966).
† Sidney Poitier (1924– ) had starred in two previous Kramer films—The Defiant Ones (1958) and Pressure Point (1962). His success in films paved the way for other black performers in commercial cinema. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963) and gave outstanding performances in In the Heat of the Night and To Sir with Love the same year (1967) as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was made and released.
‡ Provision was made for a percentage of profits to each of the three if the film was released and made back its negative cost.
* Wrinkles had formed in the five years since Hepburn had been off the screen, giving her what she called a turkey neck. This part of her anatomy remained covered in all her subsequent films. Even on television interviews, she wore her shirt collar turned up and a scarf around her neck.
* Although Houghton received generally good reviews and photographed well, she has yet to fulfill her promise.
* In the final cut, as Tracy says these words, the camera reveals his profile on the left foreground of the screen and Hepburn, her eyes brimming with tears, on the right background, looking at Tracy. Actually, the shot was two separate shots spliced together in the final cut.
* The film ends with the interracial couple receiving final blessings to marry from both sets of parents.
A Life on Her Own
CHAPTER
24
Summers at Fenwick were a festival of life. The rooms Kate had so lovingly helped to design were once again filled with the sound of Hepburn voices, many of them very young, for Kate’s sisters and brothers were now grandparents. Early every morning “Aunt Kat” could be seen walking along the shoreline before swimming out to meet the incoming tide. She never seemed too tired for sports or games—three-legged races, blindman’s buff. Watching her dynamic energy, one could hardly believe the woman was approaching her sixtieth year. Yet, for all this activity and for the first time, Fenwick could not console her. The children were not hers and she had no husband to send back to the city on Sunday nights, no patient to care for, no parent to answer to. Katharine Houghton Hepburn was a woman on her own—alone, and even Fenwick could not ease her sense of loss or overcome her fear of a solitary future.
After two weeks, with Phyllis as a companion, Kate left Fenwick and took a small cottage at Martha’s Vineyard. Her habits did not change. She still walked the shoreline with the rising of the sun and swam out to meet the incoming tide. Within a matter of a few weeks, she was ready once again to tackle life as she did the waves, by refusing to let it overpower her. She did not know yet what position toward Tracy she would take—grieving friend, companion, widow? All three? Or only the first two? Louise remained—and would always remain—Mrs. Spencer Tracy.* Kate could not know at the time that within a matter of months the press and the public would cast her in the role of widow manqué. The secret that had been kept so assiduously for so many years, and even when leaked had not been really accepted, now became common knowledge.
The public reacted in a manner that might have surprised Tracy. Yes, of course, a Mrs. Spencer Tracy existed, but she and her husband had not lived together for nearly thirty years. And—hadn’t it been admirable, noble really, of the two stars to so respect the covenants of Tracy’s Catholic faith? In fact, only two days after the funeral, Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called their liaison “a remarkable legacy of an association as beautiful and dignified as any this town has ever known.” Louise might have worn the public mourning, but Kate was looked upon as Tracy’s true widow. Kate would soon discover this for herself and use a kind of professional widowhood for her personal protection ever after. But in August 1967, what was uppermost on her mind was finding work that would excite and involve her.
Toward the end of her stay at Martha’s Vineyard, Kate was sent The Lion in Winter, a script based on James Goldman’s twelfth-century drama about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, which had been produced on Broadway in 1965. Kate read it and then gave it to Phyllis to read. Both women believed the role of the aging and anguished Eleanor, who never loses her astonishing queenliness, ideal for Kate, and she quickly accepted the offer. Martin Poll, the film’s producer, had no trouble in signing Peter O’Toole* to play Henry II, Eleanor’s more youthful husband. But Poll could not immediately arrange financing and distribution. Goldman’s script, adapted from his play, was considered too intellectual and special to be a commercial venture. In September, 1967, it looked as if The Lion in Winter would never be made.
Ely Landau offered Kate a role in the adaptation of Jean Giraudoux’s play The Madwoman of Chaillot—that of Aurelia, the eccentric countess intent on saving Paris from a group of men who planned to turn it into a giant oil field. She read it and told him, aghast, “Oh no. What’s all this about? I’m a simple, nice person. I like to make Christmas wreaths, sweep floors. I don’t understand all this complicated stuff. I’m rather like my sister [Peggy] who’s a farmer and says that the most difficult thing she likes to attempt is carrying two pails of milk over a fence!”
Landau kept pressing. Although Kate was not convinced that she could be totally effective as Aurelia, Madwoman was to be produced by Landau, with whom she had worked so well in Long Day’s Journey into Night; and another old friend, John Huston, was scheduled to direct. She claims she finally accepted the role “in order to better understand what [the play] was all about.” No sooner had Kate agreed to appear in Madwoman than Martin Poll announced that he had obtained the financing for The Lion in Winter and hoped to begin production within a matter of weeks. Landau consented to postpone Madw
oman until Kate’s first commitment was honored. Both films were to be made in Europe {Lion in Wales, England and France; Madwoman in France), and Kate and Phyllis would be away from the States for nearly a year.
The idea of being abroad for so long suited Kate’s mood, as did the chance to submerge herself in work. She was determined to make a new life for herself. She had always been thoroughly capable of holding her own in a man’s world. Few if any other women stars had experienced the success that she had making her own deals, calling her own shots. For more than thirty-five years, she had been a queen of international renown, and she held herself with an enduring grace that lent as much luminosity to her appearance at sixty as it had at twenty-five. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, those two colorful ladies whose reigns had coincided with Kate’s, were now working in horror films,* while she still commanded the best leading men and the most prestigious scripts. There seemed suddenly to be a plethora of exceptional stories with a strong middle-aged woman as the pivotal character, and Kate was offered the very best of these.
Before she and Phyllis left for Europe to begin her two-picture schedule, Kate’s old friend Irene Selznick discussed with her the possibility of playing the role of the ageless Parisian couturiere Coco Chanel in a musical written by Alan Jay Lerner and planned for a year hence. Kate laughed loudly at this suggestion; the only public singing she had ever done was one chorus of “Onward Christian Soldiers” in The African Queen. Mrs. Selznick begged her not to say no without trying, and so Kate spent ten days in New York working with Roger Edens, Metro’s former music coach.*
“When she came to my house that first Sunday morning I got out about fifty songs,” Edens recalled. “But she just moaned about her repertoire. ‘I might just sing Onward Christian Soldiers,’ she said seriously. So we started from scratch to learn a few songs. At six o’clock I knew she was the third woman in my life [the other two, Judy Garland and Ethel Merman, were also Eden’s students].”