CHAPTER 20
The debacle of the Alaskan tour weighed heavily on Tracy for months afterward. Scores of movie figures were now in uniform, and many of the ones who weren’t—Bob Hope, Cagney, Bing Crosby, virtually all the women—gave tirelessly to the job of morale on the home front as well as overseas. Metro alone had Melvyn Douglas, Robert Taylor, Jimmy Stewart, Van Heflin, Richard Ney, and Robert Montgomery on active duty, with Mickey Rooney and Red Skelton soon to follow. Tracy’s pal Gable had enlisted with the U.S. Army Air Forces and flown combat missions in Europe. All Tracy had to show for the war effort were his hospital visits, a little radio work, and a few high-profile appearances for war bonds and the like. More than ever, his neuroses were dictating his actions, and only the scotch he permitted himself seemed to bring him relief.
Kate spent the 1943 Christmas season in Los Angeles—her first away from her family—and thought the experience “horrible.” The studios all quit work at noon on the twenty-fourth, then everyone proceeded to get drunk. The weather was hot and it didn’t seem like Christmas at all. Spence gave her some old after-dinner coffee cups, an antique silver bell, a fireplace set—poker and tongs—and ten crisp new fifty-dollar bills. When Time, in its review of A Guy Named Joe, said he was, as usual, “extremely competent,” she and Spence spent an entire evening looking through a dictionary, Tracy maintaining the words always applied to him—capable, competent, etc.—just meant he knew enough “not to fall down.” And, for as much as she could say to the contrary, he insisted there was a world of difference between “extremely competent” and “brilliant.”
Hepburn was on a campaign to film Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra with herself as Lavinia and Greta Garbo as her murderous mother. Spence, in the meantime, had arranged to visit navy bases on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Michigan as the first step toward greater involvement with the Hollywood Victory Committee. With four days of retakes on The Seventh Cross now behind him, he and Carroll set out for Chicago on May 13, first to visit the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, where he himself had trained in the waning months of the last war, and then on to Manitowoc to see the shipbuilding yards and talk with the officers and crew of the newly launched submarine U.S.S. Icefish (for which he was named mascot). In Milwaukee he saw Buck Herzog of the Sentinel (who described him as “bronzed from his first vacation from film chores in many months”) and said he planned to go on to New York for a round of visits to government hospitals.
In Freeport the boys visited their uncle Andrew and aunt Emma, and relatives drove in from nearby. Ann Willits, the nine-year-old granddaughter of the late Frank J. Tracy, could recall Spence telling her about Susie, who was close in age, and asking if she knew how to play hopscotch. “I did, but I said, ‘No.’ And much to the frustration of Aunt Mame [Andrew’s wife], who had lunch ready, he showed me how to play. I remember asking my mom and dad on the way home how he just happened to have chalk in his pocket.”
Emma Brown, a classic maiden lady who favored black clothing and wore dresses until they were threadbare, was in her seventies but still owned the family feed business on Galena Avenue. “Aunt Mum” would typically meet her nephews at the Hotel Freeport, where Spence, in particular, would hole up and rarely leave. “They were the closest three people you ever saw,” said Bertha Calhoun, “Aunt Mum and Carroll and Spencer.”
Whether Tracy made it to New York or not is unclear, for his drinking was growing steadily worse. M-G-M studio records show he was “ill” a total of sixteen days on The Seventh Cross, and Fay Kanin, Michael Kanin’s wife and later writing partner, got a glimpse of such illness firsthand: “I remember having to meet Spencer for lunch at one of the fancy Beverly Hills restaurants—I don’t remember which one—and he had been drinking. Boy, had he been drinking … we had a perfectly good time, though.”
Herzog recalled that Tracy was imbibing freely in Milwaukee, Carroll hovering protectively, and his drinking likely continued in Chicago after Carroll returned to California. Actress Edith Luckett, who toured with Tracy in The Baby Cyclone, had settled in Chicago after marrying Dr. Loyal Davis, a prominent neurosurgeon, in 1929. Tracy generally saw the Davises when he was in town for any length of time, and according to Luckett’s daughter Nancy, he stayed at the family’s East Lake Shore Drive apartment so often that he “practically became a member of the family.”
Katie Treat, widow of Earl Treat, the founder of the Chicago chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, remembered a call placed to her husband by Edith Davis sometime in the mid-1940s. “Lucky” (as she was known to her friends) told Earl
that she had a friend that she had been on the stage [with]…He was in great trouble at the Blackstone [Hotel], but she was going to move him up to their house … Would Earl come to their house and talk to this man? So Earl galloped down there and Nancy opened the door … and it was Spencer Tracy who was in trouble. And he really was. He would go to the Blackstone and hole in there and just drink himself to death. And they’d go and get him and take him home. So Earl kept track of him and every time Spencer came to town he’d call Earl and they’d have lunch or dinner together and Earl would [talk to him]. Spencer didn’t stop drinking—he kept right on—so finally he said to Earl, “How would you like to go to Hollywood?” Earl said he had never really thought of going to Hollywood. Spencer said, “I’ll move your family out there, I’ll give you a house and a car and all the servants you need if you’ll dance attendance on me and keep me sober.” And Earl said, “I’ll tell you something: If I accepted that, I’d be drunk in a week!”
The concept of alcoholism as a disease didn’t originate with Alcoholics Anonymous, but A.A. certainly popularized the notion. Embracing it helped build the organization by persuading potential members they were truly “powerless over alcohol,” the first step in an ongoing journey to sobriety. But making alcoholism a disease negated the idea of personal responsibility and the sense of guilt it engendered. Tracy could never accept the idea that he wasn’t personally responsible for his drunken lapses, for he could never fully justify the self-loathing he carried deep within himself. Kate, moreover, dismissed out of hand the idea of Spence going to Alcoholics Anonymous. Tracy, she pointed out, was “the biggest star in the world” and were he to join A.A. he wouldn’t be anonymous for very long. “There are certain people who JUST CAN’T go to places like that. Spencer was a really curious, enormously complicated, very oversensitive human being with an enormous problem [that there was] no way out of.”
Loyal Davis’ son Richard knew that Tracy and his father were “very, very close” and that Tracy spent time in Chicago hospitalized under his father’s care. “There was a very private floor at Passavant [Memorial Hospital]—the top floor—and I remember he was there maybe six weeks getting dried out. Loyal and Edith kept that very quiet.” This was likely around the time of Tracy’s Midwestern tour, for there are few gaps in the time line that would accommodate such an extended period of treatment.1 Moreover, Richard Davis, on leave from the army, attended the Democratic National Convention in the company of his parents and Mayor and Mrs. Edward J. Kelly in mid-July 1944, and Tracy, he recalled, was there with them. Franklin Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term, but the party found itself split over a Supreme Court decision invalidating whites-only primaries in Texas and the South.
“The big issue,” said Davis, “was black voting rights, and Spencer Tracy just went bananas about this. He could not understand why there were all these ridiculous rules about blacks voting in the South, and he didn’t waste any time telling Mayor Kelly. I can’t say that my father [who was an arch conservative] disagreed with Spencer Tracy. I don’t think he said anything. He respected Spencer Tracy’s viewpoint.”
Hepburn had been east herself, due back at the studio June 1 to begin work on the film version of Without Love. Tracy likely returned to Los Angeles the following month but was not seen publicly until August 12, when he recorded an episode of Command Performance for Armed Forces Radio. Back at the studio, he spent five days shooting a two-reeler in support of the Seventh Victory Loan for Canada called Tomorrow, John Jones. Played entirely in pantomime, the film was designed to be shown throughout the British Dominion during the October drive, carrying either a French or English narration track as appropriate. He would later receive a special citation for his work in the film from the Canadian Motion Picture War Services Committee, as would L. B. Mayer and all the others involved in its making.
The Seventh Cross was released on September 1, 1944, and became the best-reviewed picture Tracy had made since Woman of the Year—something of a surprise to its recalcitrant star. “This picture is going to be an artistic success,” he had groused to Rosalind Shaffer of the Baltimore Sun while waiting for a scene to be set up one morning on the grounds of the Riviera Country Club. “It will get one good review from one critic and not make any money.”
In fact, it received high praise from all corners, starting in London where it was described in a studio teletype as “a box office smash that was accorded the best press in many war-weary months.” It hit New York in late September, arriving at the Capitol after ten weeks of David O. Selznick’s home front extravaganza Since You Went Away. Zinnemann’s careful compositions (flawlessly executed by the dreaded Freund) and his placing of prominent European figures such as Helene Weigel and Helene Thimig in minor roles—bit parts really—gave the film an unusual texture for an M-G-M production. Taut and suspenseful, it was crowned by Tracy’s spare and often wordless performance, a startling departure from the likes of Tortilla Flat and A Guy Named Joe. And if it wasn’t quite the crowd-pleaser Joe had been, it did restore a certain luster to the Tracy brand.
On September 14 Tracy began a USO tour of Hawaii, visiting the wounded at thirteen army and navy hospitals in his usual low-key manner, refusing all press interviews and relenting only when Major Maurice Evans of the army’s Entertainment Section dispatched a man to his suite at the Royal Hawaiian. Tracy, the man observed, was traveling with two snugly strapped brown suitcases, at least one of which was filled with liquor. He offered the obviously terrified young private, dripping in ill-fitting khaki, a long pull from what tasted like a bottle of bonded bourbon.
“I recall the liquor dribbling down my chin,” Dan Alexander wrote. “Eventually, he removed the bottle, saying, ‘Don’t talk yet. Have another drink.’ I did and now started feeling more relaxed. When I finished this second, Mr. Tracy asked if I smoked and bid me have a cigarette when I said yes. As I puffed, I became aware that he was scrutinizing me—and then, as if satisfied, he said, ‘Now start your interview.’ Which I did, handily, and then easily shared my notes with the waiting media.”
Tracy made the rounds without fanfare, walking in unannounced and introducing himself individually to the men. He signed hundreds of short-snorters, pictures, and scraps of paper, and accepted scores of messages for delivery back home to relatives and sweethearts. In one ward, he saw Joe Breen’s son Tommy, who had lost a leg in a raid on Saipan. In another, he struck up a conversation with a Midwestern boy who hailed, he discovered, from Ipswich. (“My God, Ipswich!” he erupted. “That’s where my Uncle Frank Tracy lived …”) Routinely, he started the day at 5:00 a.m. and continued until nightfall, taking just an hour out for lunch and a swim. On nine of his twelve days there, he also appeared at GI theaters showing A Guy Named Joe and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.
He arrived back in the States on the twenty-sixth, relieved to know that he didn’t need a formal routine to do his bit for the troops. “You don’t have to get up and do a song and dance,” he said. “They just want to talk to you and know someone is thinking of them.” He told Louella Parsons that he wanted to go back, and he started looking for a play he could do in the camps. “I actually think,” said Adela Rogers St. Johns, “that he believed they would take one look at him and say, ‘Is that Spencer Tracy? What a sell. Tell him to go away and send Betty Grable.’ ”
Katharine Hepburn regarded the film version of Without Love as a chance not only to fix the failings of the Barry play, which were manifest, but also to—at long last—do it with the proper leading man. Its sale to M-G-M had made news in 1942, but the selling price, as it turned out, wasn’t nearly as unique as it seemed. That same season, Warners paid $250,000 for Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army, Fox an estimated $300,000 for The Eve of St. Mark. Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson was heard to explain: “All the film companies got together and agreed not to pay less than $250,000 for any play.”
At first the property was assigned to Leon Gordon, whom Hepburn may have blamed in part for her troubles on Keeper of the Flame. Gordon, newly elevated to the rank of full producer, brought in playwright Samson Raphaelson, Ernst Lubitsch’s frequent collaborator, to do the script. In all, Gordon and Raphaelson spent six months working on the picture, the tension between them evident in the condescending tone Gordon assumed in his notes. Few problems seemed to get resolved, and the ending was satisfactory to no one.
Gordon put the material aside, and the project stalled until March 1944, when Hepburn was able to get the material reassigned to the studio’s veteran comedy specialist, Larry Weingarten. Just prior to going east at the completion of Dragon Seed, she participated in at least one story conference in which Michael Arlen and Howard Emmett Rogers were given sections of the Raphaelson screenplay to review and revise. Within weeks, Weingarten had decided to start fresh with Donald Ogden Stewart, who was the obvious choice and who had a draft screenplay for Hepburn to see when she returned to California on June 16.
A problem with the original play was its topicality; Without Love was dated within two years of its first performance. Under Stewart, only the core of the loveless marriage was retained, Pat, the political economist, becoming a natural scientist working on an improved oxygen mask. In the revised character of Jamie, Hepburn may have been projecting some of her own feelings toward Tracy in making her the daughter of a famed research scientist whose interest in Pat is aroused by his own experimental work. “I often felt that she was submerging herself to him,” her youngest brother, Dr. Robert Hepburn, said of Tracy. “I think, too, that Spencer was a sort of younger edition of her father in her mind. I think she admired his ruggedness.”
When Tracy returned to Los Angeles and the Beverly Hills Hotel on September 28, Hepburn was already settled in a house on nearby Beverly Grove and anxious to get Without Love before the cameras. “We actually are going to begin shooting next week,” she reported to Terry Helburn in a letter. “I feel as though I’d already made the darned thing four times.” The supporting cast, she went on, had been settled with Keenan Wynn, Lucille Ball (“she made a very good test”), Patricia Morison, Emily Perkins (her secretary and onetime dresser, appearing under the stage name of Massey), and Carl Esmond. The director, Harold Bucquet, was a veteran of Metro’s Dr. Kildare pictures and had, like Fred Zinnemann, made his bones in the short-subject department. Bucquet had replaced the tubercular Jack Conway on Dragon Seed, and Hepburn, in the midst of a grueling five-month shoot, took a liking to him. Soft-spoken and English by birth, Bucquet was inclined to stay out of the way, and one principal cast member, when later asked, could scarcely recall him.
“As always,” said Larry Weingarten, “Kate was into everything … People always said to me, ‘She’s trying to do everything.’ And my reply was, ‘The thing I’m afraid of, and you should be afraid of, is that she can do everything.’ Producer, director, cameraman! That’s what she was! Her idea of everything was always better than you could have ever envisioned.” Actress-singer Morison, as a seventeen-year-old drama student, had witnessed the filming of Hepburn’s New York screen test in 1932, but she didn’t formally meet the actress until her first day on the picture. Casually clad in white linen pants and matching shirt, Kate was obviously running the show, head-to-head with the director and the cameraman while Tracy retreated to the relative calm of his dressing room. Morison knew Tracy from a formal dinner party a few years earlier when, attending stag, he had graciously offered to drive her home.
“I remember we stopped at the top of Mulholland Drive—not for anything romantic, but because the view was so beautiful. He didn’t make a pass, which was unusual in those days. It was very refreshing.” Tracy, she recalled, was always cordial and charming to her on the set of Without Love, his relationship with Hepburn an open secret. “I think in the business it was common knowledge. I knew it.” Tracy was less cordial to the director, whom he seemed to regard as inept in matters of staging, and Hepburn went so far as to consult with George Stevens for a scene built entirely on physical comedy.
Sleeplessness had brought Tracy to the ragged edge of sanity, and neither booze nor medication could quell the demons within him. He tossed and heaved, his mind a tornado of shame and worry. “I didn’t believe that he did it,” Kate said years later, “and I lay on the floor of his room one night and watched him and he could not get to sleep … he twisted and he turned and it took him an hour and a half to quiet down at all.” On October 29 she sat on the set, the script serving as a desk, and wrote a long letter to Ellen Barry, Phil’s wife, telling them how appalled they’d be at the changes and eliminations made for the film and remembering with pleasure a month that she and her sister Peg had spent with the Barrys at their winter home on Florida’s eastern shore. “When we finish the picture & the retakes & everything which will be around the first of February—Spence is going to take a year away from the studio—He is a wreck & cannot sleep & is feeling as though he might go mad—I have been trying to describe Hobe Sound to him—for it seems to me the perfect place for him to go … He thought he might go and take a quick look—between the end of shooting & the beginning of retakes & then if it seemed to be the spot he would go back for several months—”
Weather slowed an already troubled shoot, delaying location work during one of the wettest Novembers on record. Tracy was “ill” the last half of the month, eventually forcing a complete shutdown. “There were times they had to cancel a day’s shooting,” Patricia Morison remembered. “I didn’t know why, but I understand now it was because he had been drinking. Which everybody knew was a problem except me. I didn’t know why I suddenly had three days off. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I don’t have to get up at four anymore.’ ”
Tracy hated the character of Pat Jamieson and what Don Stewart had done to it under Hepburn’s constant yammering. According to Larry Weingarten, he resisted the role “until the last day of shooting.” Tracy “took sick” on Without Love, Weingarten believed, because his loathing of the part was “so violent.” Hepburn had never before worked with him when he was hitting the bottle, and she assumed the burden of bringing him back. “Mayer was a practical man,” she said,
and I just used to call up and say, “Look, I need a little help here, and I’m going to move him out of the Beverly Hills Hotel and up into my house.” It was very difficult to do that because, I thought, if any tragedy occurred, to have him in my house might be wildly difficult. But it had to be done, because I couldn’t leave him in the hotel. Because he was so noisy that the hotel said, “Get him out.” Carroll was a weak man, [and] I think that Louise just deliberately … did … not … know…[so] if I felt he was in trouble, I’d move into the hotel or else I’d move him into my house. But I was always afraid that something would happen and there would be a scandal that would embarrass Louise. It wouldn’t have embarrassed me so much, but I really wanted her to be protected.
Nine working days were lost, but there wasn’t a hint of trouble outside the gated walls of M-G-M. “We didn’t publicize him,” said June Dunham, Howard Strickling’s longtime secretary. “At times, he’d be in the room with Hepburn for three days while she sobered him up. But those things never got to the press.” When Tracy returned on November 27, the tension on the set was fierce and it would only grow worse. A pervasive sense of doom settled over the company, so certain was almost everyone involved that the picture would be awful. “What goes on with Spencer Tracy?”Hedda Hopper wondered in her column of December 4. “He has become a verifiable matinee idol, wants to see rushes, and hasn’t been nice to Lucille Ball on the set of Without Love. Could it be because he and Katharine Hepburn are no longer speaking?” By the thirteenth, conditions had deteriorated to the point where Keenan Wynn was reported to have taken a poke at assistant director Earl McAvoy.
The level of violence between Tracy and Hepburn is largely a matter of conjecture. “Mind you, I don’t frighten easily,” Kate once said, “but when he became … you know, he had a violent temper. At times, at times.” In response to a question from A. Scott Berg, one of her biographers, she acknowledged that Tracy had once hit her. “She proceeded,” wrote Berg, “to describe a fiendish night at the Beverly Hills Hotel. While Kate was trying to put Tracy to bed, he smacked the back of his hand across her face. She said he was so drunk she believed he neither knew that he’d done it nor that he’d remember.”
Critic and author Martin Gottfried remembered Hepburn once telling him that Tracy used to “knock me around” when he drank too much. “When I expressed surprise, saying, ‘I’d’ve thought that once would have been enough for someone like you,’ she replied, ‘Why? I could hit him back, couldn’t I?’ ” Screenwriter Millard Kaufman and his wife Lori heard an even more startling revelation, as both were close to Signe Hasso. Once Hasso recalled to them a night when Hepburn phoned and asked if she could come over to stay. “Apparently,” said Kaufman, “Tracy had beaten hell out of her.”
Such reports didn’t surprise Katharine Houghton, who was loath to regard her aunt Kat as anyone’s victim, particularly Tracy’s.
She once told me that Spencer could stop drinking at will for months or even years at a time. Maybe this is what gave her the idea that alcohol was not an addiction. Maybe this is what gave her the idea that she could wrest the drink away from him with force. If he gave her a good whack on such an occasion, it’s my suspicion that she asked for it. She was not a frail person. Anyone who’s seen her in a film in which she exposes her impressive strong arms and broad shoulders, could imagine that she was a formidable physical adversary.
Christmas 1944. (SUSIE TRACY)
For her part, Hepburn was conciliatory, even if she and Tracy stopped speaking for a time: “I don’t think he’d ever hurt anyone. He’d be incapable of hurting anyone. Not physically violent with people at all.” Then, considering the general question of Tracy’s alleged rampages whenever he was truly in his cups: “Well, I think if you’re drunk enough and you do something like that, is that the same? I mean, ’tisn’t the same to me. If Spencer was sober he would never have touched anyone. But, I mean, if you’re drunk and fight, it depends on how old you are and how much do they stop you when you say, ‘Get outta here.’ I don’t think that means anything except that you’re drunk.”
Without Love officially finished on December 27, 1944, but neither Tracy nor Hepburn could leave town as yet. Samson Raphaelson was already at work on changes to Don Stewart’s September 29 draft of the screenplay, and Dorothy Kingsley was preparing a set of retakes for Lucille Ball. Tracy himself did one day of retakes after the first of the year, but then was left idle for three weeks—two of which he evidently spent hammered. He had plans to attend the January 20 inauguration in Washington with Louise, as well as an invitation to afternoon coffee with the president and Mrs. Roosevelt the day before. But further work on the picture kept him in Hollywood until well past the historic event, and he must have been bitterly disappointed. It wasn’t, in fact, until February 1 that he was finally cleared for travel, determined, as Kate wrote the Barrys, to take off the entire year. On the strength of A Guy Named Joe, The Seventh Cross, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, however, the annual Quigley poll of exhibitors had confirmed him as M-G-M’s top moneymaking star of the year 1944, and the most the studio would allow was the six-week vacation guaranteed under the terms of his contract.
In New York it was Hepburn’s strategy to get Tracy into a play, since his deal with Metro allowed for one. In February 1944 he had made a tentative return to the stage in narrating Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait for two performances with the L.A. Philharmonic. Plainly, however, he was terrified at the prospect of going back to the theatre after an absence of fifteen years. When the Playwrights’ Company offered him a comedy (likely S. N. Behrman’s Jacobowsky and the Colonel), he replied, “It is delightful and amusing, but, I am afraid, not for me.” He then shut off all further discussion by making a seemingly impossible request: “Please send me something by Bob Sherwood.”
Kate tried letting the matter lie, busying herself with her own plans to appear for the Guild in a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Short term, everything from Tracy’s perspective looked bleak, and he filled his days with morose thoughts and the dark certainties of an Irish temperament.
In the legend that grew up around Tracy and Hepburn, one of the most durable of images is that of Kate going bar to bar, after the fashion of a Gilded Age temperance song, looking for Spence. It was a notion she dismissed as “stupid” and made up: “In the first place I wouldn’t do it because that would be too public for him, and in the second place I wouldn’t do it because it would be too public for me, too. My friend, my driver then, who worked for me for forty-three years, was Charles Newhill. He used to go out publicly when Spencer was drinking [and] walking around New York City. Charles would be with him, [so] unless I were dumb, I would know he was out drinking.” Newhill, a sturdy Italian, was a former boxer who could handle Tracy and at the same time protect him from himself and the public at large. “[Spencer] wasn’t out all that much,” she added. “He’d start it and go out, but then when he began to get really seriously into it he wouldn’t go out. And I certainly wouldn’t let him go out. I’d see to it that he couldn’t go out … I was not able to solve his problems, but I was able to help him by seeing that he didn’t fall down the stairs, you know, or break his goddamn neck or just be miserable.”
Containing Tracy’s impulses and abetting them were two different things entirely and would have elicited, in Joe Mankiewicz’s estimation, two very different sets of responses. “Kate,” he said in 1992,
has a whole new characterization that she’s maintaining for herself—part Constance Collier, part Mrs. Siddons, and part some very elegant lady of affairs. There must be no touch of Marilyn Monroe–type life or Hollywood-type life. So when Kate says, “When Spencer asked for a drink, oh yeah, I gave him a drink,” well, put yourself [in her position]. This isn’t the first time we’ve been together. The whole thing of going to bed together … we’re sort of tied together now. I’m Spence and I feel I’ve got to have a drink. It isn’t like saying, “I’ll have a scotch and soda.” That saying “I want a drink” is an important mark…
He says, “I want a drink.” Now she says, “Of course, Spence,” and gets it for him. She removes him of guilt. She removes a certain amount of guilt, and that does not please Spence. That irritates him, because in a way she’s shoving booze on him. Once you get into a twisted emotion, you’ve got to be able to trace the emotion and stay with it. And when she says, “I’ll give you the drink,” does that make him happy? Spence, if he wanted a drink, part of having a drink is knowing that he’s doing something wrong and he can’t help doing it. So whenever I hear the woman say, “No sir, I gave him these drinks”—that’s horseshit. “I’m being a big woman now. I’m changing my character; I’m going back after the fact to change my characterization.” Because if she really did that, it wouldn’t have played. It just wouldn’t have made sense. Because if she said, “I’ll get you a drink,” he probably would have exploded with anger: “Stay the fuck out of my life!” You know—that life. “The last thing I want is two years from now to think of you giving me drinks! Making me hate you!”
Oh no, that’s really too easy … Once you start thinking that way about Spence, it was his guilt. But don’t forget also he would have a kind of proprietary sense about that guilt. I’ve known several like that—alcoholics. My brother was one, but not like that. The kind Spence was … they’re gone. And they not only accept the guilt, they need the guilt to see them through this thing. Spence locked in a hotel room, going to the bathroom in his pants … every disgusting thing he did to himself. “I am beating myself up.” You know? This is what my father used to do. Jack Barrymore was a different kind of drunk. Spence was a black Irish drunk.
It was at Hepburn’s four-story brownstone in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan—where Tracy, according to her, was essentially under house arrest—that some of their worst moments took place. Whether giving him a drink or wresting one from his hand, her actions—or the words that accompanied them—could easily have provoked him to the point of reflexive violence and, possibly, something even worse. For in 1991 Hepburn recounted a time when Tracy, she said, tried to choke her. She described fending off the attack by pushing him into the closet that housed the ladder to the roof—a considerable feat of strength and choreography when he outweighed her by sixty or seventy pounds.
Katharine Houghton, when apprised of the story, didn’t buy it, contending that “anyone who knew the house” would find such a scene absurd.
Some sort of fight may well have occurred during which he tried to choke her, but the idea that she imprisoned a crazed Spencer Tracy in a very small closet is improbable for at least two reasons: First of all, despite her strength, I doubt she could have forced his bulk into that closet. And second, I doubt that she would have put a drunken man whom she loved into such danger. His only way out of that closet would have been to climb to the roof, and she certainly wouldn’t have wanted to take the chance that he would fall from the roof. Over the years, Kate recounted various incidents that were complete fabrications—good stories, yes, but untrue … In all these fabrications, she cast herself in a good or heroic light … If Spencer had really wanted to strangle her, I’m sure he could have succeeded without much difficulty.
Still, given the events that ensued in the months that followed their time together in New York, it’s clear something deeply disturbing happened between them, that Tracy had felt so out of control he never wanted to put himself in such a position again. For if the fight was over his drinking, as it most likely was, both parties could well have been enraged to the point of physical violence. “Assuming they had a fierce fight,” Houghton continued, “what would really interest me is why they had a fight, and why Kate chose that particular fight to embroider into a tale. Was it because she felt guilt concerning her part in it? In the family we were all witness, from time to time, to her being maddeningly self-righteous and bossy, no doubt with good intentions, but still way out of line. With Spencer she may well have been guilty on occasion of what he rightly would have considered egregious behavior.”
Was Hepburn’s own culpability something she could never fully acknowledge? Did the fracas continue? Or was Tracy immediately docile, suddenly aware of what might have happened? Nobody knows; of the two people with direct knowledge of that night, only one ever spoke of it, and only briefly, off mike, as in the shared whisper of a confidence. “I don’t know how he got so loaded, but he really did,” said Bob Hepburn, who was in New York awaiting the commissioning of the navy hospital ship U.S.S. Repose.“I had to call the hospital—Presbyterian—and they came down and fetched him and dried him out somehow.” Tracy’s “rumored” arrival at Harkness Pavilion was reported by Walter Winchell on February 28, and on March 10 the studio quietly extended his vacation without pay for another six weeks.
Without Love moved into the Music Hall on March 22, 1945, and, despite pallid reviews, had the biggest Lenten opening in the theater’s twelve-year history. Accompanied by Radio City’s annual “Glory of Easter” pageant, the picture played to $17,000 on the first day alone and sold a record 92,138 tickets over the four-day holiday weekend. Tracy attended Easter Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, quietly and without fanfare, and was afterward photographed walking along Fifth Avenue, the first time he had been observed in public in more than a month. The next day he was seen lunching with Sherwood, who had just returned from service in the Pacific as a representative of the Navy Department.
“Are you ever going to write another play?” Tracy asked him. It had been five years since There Shall Be No Night, the playwright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the Russian invasion of Finland.
“I’m thinking about one,” Sherwood replied, “and if it develops along the lines I contemplate, I’d surely like to have you in it.”
When columnist Earl Wilson saw him on April 4, Tracy was already talking of the new Sherwood play as if it were a done deal. “I’ve got to go back to Hollywood and knock off an epic,” he said, “then I’m coming back to Broadway to see if I can still act.” He was drinking sarsaparilla from a demitasse cup, sober but weary on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday. “It’s your goddamn movie name that causes you trouble,” he went on. “You make so much money, your economic problem ceases to exist. No options to worry about. The dough rolls in. You forget how to act because you don’t have to act anymore. I heard of a guy who had a 15-year contract at M-G-M. If I had a 15-year contract, I could think of nothing but to get a .45 and blow my brains out. To think of coming in that gate at M-G-M or, for that matter, any gate for 15 years! A Broadway show would give me a chance to see if I can still act. I used to be able to act. Broadway doesn’t care about your goddamn movie name.”
He was back in Los Angeles when FDR died in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12. His wire to Sherwood the next day, praising the playwright’s radio address, urged him to get on with the play they had discussed—a call to postwar America to take on the greatest possible share of world leadership. “Whoever might be called upon to express your thoughts from a stage or screen would be highly honored, but that is really unimportant. It is only important that you write them and that they are imparted so the greatest number of people may know them.”
Seen lunching with Louise at Romanoff’s, Tracy told Louella Parsons he would make another picture before going into the Sherwood play so as to free up as much time as possible. “I would be off the screen for over a year if I waited until fall,” he reasoned. “That’s why I came home from New York.” Having, however, passed on They Were Expendable, his talks with the studio weren’t particularly productive. They squabbled over money, Tracy objecting to the inference he was worth only $110,000 a picture. The new deal, after a year’s leave of absence, would limit the studio to two pictures a year, with his guarantee capped at $220,000 per annum. At one point, Leo Morrison let drop the fact that his client had authorized him to terminate his contract, a prospect no one on the executive side found attractive.
Kate returned to California with plans to do a picture, Green Dolphin Street, and make a Pacific tour as Spence had done. They had scant time together; he was committed to a six-week tour of Europe for the OWI and left for New York within days of her arrival. But once there, something happened and plans for the tour were aborted. Whether it was canceled, scarcely a week before VE Day, or whether it was Tracy who, once again, bailed on the trip at the last possible moment, nobody seems to know. Garson Kanin remembered Tracy once telling him that President Roosevelt had wanted him to deliver a top-secret message to “someone, somewhere” and that Tracy laid the trip’s subsequent cancellation to the president’s sudden death. “The thing I couldn’t understand,” Tracy said to Kanin, “was why me of all people. But, of course, I said nothing and agreed to do as I was told, that’s all.” Waiting at the River Club for the trip to get under way, Tracy, in Kanin’s words, “fell ill.”
Howard Dietz had assigned the judicious Milton Weiss to look after M-G-M’s No. 1 star, and Weiss, in Dietz’s opinion, had his hands full. “I’m at the Sherry-Netherland,” Weiss advised Dietz over the phone one afternoon, “and the big man is drinking vodka martinis and smashing the glasses against the mirror back of the bar. He says you should be looking after him, not me, and he won’t stop drinking until you show him that you care. You’d better come up here.”
With Dietz’s appearance, Tracy turned belligerent: “You were too stuck up to come and meet me yourself. Well, let’s see if you can do better than Milton. Milton has it all over you as a diplomat. You think you’re too high class to give aid and comfort to an actor. You’ve had shows on Broadway and you go for actors like Fred Astaire, Clifton Webb, and dancers. It makes you a high-class press agent. Furthermore, you look like me. Well, I won’t go back to California unless you come with me.”
Dietz managed to whisper instructions to Weiss, whose subsequent departure Tracy didn’t seem to notice.
I got Tracy up to his suite on the seventh floor and worked on him. I finally got him to agree to go back to California. “But only if you come too,” he said. We took a limousine to LaGuardia, and the three of us, Tracy, Weiss, and I boarded the plane. Tracy’s consciousness was sketchy, so I left him in the hands of Milton, who gave instructions to the pilot to go west after I had climbed out. The plane took gracefully to the air, and I sank into a gratefully relieved sigh and headed for home and bed. The phone rang at midnight. It’s your guess who was on the wire. “You thought you were rid of me,” the voice said. “Well, I’ll meet you in the bar at the Sherry-Netherland at nine o’clock. You’d better relieve Milton, he needs some sleep.” Tracy was calling from Chicago.
Without Hepburn to contain him, Tracy ran amok in New York for the better part of a week, sometimes in the company of Charles Newhill, who was devoted to him, sometimes not. Agent Harold Rose’s abiding image of him came from this period, when a cab rolled up to the Sherry-Netherland and Tracy came tumbling out of the back seat in the company of an obvious prostitute. Whitey Hendry, M-G-M’s chief of police, was dispatched to New York, and it was Hendry and a few elite members of his studio constabulary who arranged for Tracy, fighting mad and struggling wildly against a set of camisole restraints, to be admitted to Doctors Hospital in the early morning hours of May 11, 1945.
1 It is unlikely, however, that Tracy was hospitalized for a period of six weeks. In August 1944 Jack Lait of Variety, subbing for Walter Winchell, reported that Tracy had spent “two weeks in a Chicago hospital, incognito,” and this is probably closer to the truth.