CHAPTER 25
Louise took Johnny and Susie to Europe over the summer of 1950, the last time she would likely have them together for an extended length of time. Johnny, twenty-six, was a student at Chouinard Art Institute, and Susie, who turned eighteen on the voyage over, had been accepted for the fall semester at the University of Arizona, Tucson. They toured France, Italy, Switzerland, and England, then returned home aboard the Queen Elizabeth, docking in New York on August 21.
Spence kept in touch by wire, postcard, the occasional phone call, and was there to meet the kids when they arrived back in Los Angeles by plane, their mother following by rail. “Well, it’s great to see you back!” he beamed, and on the drive home he peppered them with questions: “How was it? Tell me about it! Did you enjoy Claridge’s in London?” (He once told Stewart Granger he’d like to spend the rest of his life at Claridge’s, the service and comfort were so outstanding.) True to their tag-team existence, Spence was off to New York the moment Louise hit town, pausing only for dinner with her at Chasen’s.
Louise’s profile was looming ever larger, her work with the clinic increasingly in the news. The Los Angeles Times named her a Woman of the Year on the last day of 1950, one of eleven civic leaders so honored for works as diverse as managing the city’s philharmonic orchestra, serving on Stanford’s board of regents, and swimming the English Channel. When the Academy Awards were handed out in March 1951, it was she who attended with Johnny and Susie and Susie’s friend Donna Bullard in tow. (José Ferrer beat out Spence for the Best Actor Oscar, which didn’t seem to upset anyone very much.) The West Coast premiere of Father’s Little Dividend was held to benefit the clinic’s building fund, with Esther Williams, Cyd Charisse, Janet Leigh, Nancy Olson, Diana Lynn, and Maureen O’Hara serving as the welcoming committee. Listening Eyes was again shown, George Murphy acted as master of ceremonies, and singer Eileen Christy sang two songs. Christy and Murphy then led the audience in singing “Happy Birthday” to Tracy, who was, in Johnny’s words, “very surprised to find out they knew it was his birthday.”
Northwestern University awarded Louise an honorary doctorate in June, which prompted her husband to begin referring to his wife as “Dr. Tracy.” He began worrying that his presence at certain events could have the effect of overshadowing Louise and her work, and he made sure he was out of town when the groundbreaking for the clinic’s new building took place on July 28, 1951. He observed a groundbreaking of his own when George Cukor began work on a pair of cottages at the lower end of his Beverly Hills estate, one to serve as a secluded residence for one of the world’s best-known actors. Settling on a place to live was no simple matter for Spence, and there was a brief period of time when he enlisted Bill Self’s help while Kate was away on tour.
“I kind of scouted the town at one time,” Self recalled, “trying to find a place for him, and reported back on a couple of places I thought were possibilities. He hated them all. He looked at me like I was an idiot. He calls up and says, ‘That’s a motel! You want to put me in a motel?’ [Then] he was looking for a house, and he considered, believe it or not, Peggy and me and our child moving in with him. I guess semi-caretaker to him in a way, you know? We actually talked about that a little bit, and Kate and I talked about that a little bit, but it was always looked upon as being totally impractical. I felt it would destroy our relationship.”
By the time Cukor came to the rescue, Tracy was living, in Kate’s words, in “a terrible little apartment on South Beverly Drive down an alley off the actual drive. Trying to make it attractive was really not possible. In desperation we had Erik Bolin—French furniture maker—make some wooden valances for the curtains.”
Tracy was a restless traveler when Kate was out of town—New York and back again, Chicago when he took the train, Freeport, Milwaukee once in a great while. Constance Collier was never sure where he was. “Did Spence come?” she asked when Hepburn was playing As You Like It in San Francisco. “I called twice but could not get him, so I suppose he went.” And later: “I don’t know if Spencer is here. I haven’t seen him at all.” He would slip in and out of town on a moment’s notice. “I’d go out to the ranch to play tennis with Johnny,” Bill Self remembered, “and Spencer would be there. And I didn’t even know that he was in town. I’d say, ‘What are you doing here? I thought you were in New York.’ He’d say, ‘No, I didn’t go’ or ‘I came back last night’ or something like that, but he would be there, and I think Louise liked that.”
If there was one constant in Tracy’s life at the time, it was Sunday Mass wherever he happened to be. “There was a time in my life in the late forties and early fifties when I went to Mass almost every Sunday at Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills,” said Darryl Hickman. “Tracy was always there and sat by himself. Even though he was such a famous, recognizable film star, none of the parishioners ever approached him, including me. I had acted with him in two films when I was growing up, but I did what everybody else did—pretend I didn’t know him, or even know who he was. We didn’t dare intrude on such a ‘private’ public man. He would often be there before I arrived, a solitary figure standing in front of the church before Mass. Being so unapproachable, I wondered why he didn’t go right in. Like so many other things about Tracy, I could never figure that out.”
When Tracy went east for the Red Cross, it was to do Father of the Bride over the radio for the Theatre Guild. Larry Keethe accompanied him, and President and Mrs. Truman attended the broadcast in Washington with their daughter Margaret. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who first met Tracy in New York in the 1920s, had come to resemble him to such an extent that he was frequently taken for him in crowds. “By prearrangement, I waited for him at the rear exit,” Douglas recounted in his autobiography. “Many people surged into the dimly lit alley, and taking me for him, asked, ‘Mr. Tracy, will you give us your autograph?’ I obliged, and several dozen took the forgeries home. Most of the crowd had gone when Spencer appeared, and my account of the episode made him chuckle as we sipped a nightcap in a secluded spot.”
When Tracy arrived in New York to shoot exteriors for The People Against O’Hara, he found the entire troupe laid up with the flu. He had time for Mass at St. Patrick’s, a walk in Central Park, shopping for shoes at Abercrombie and Fitch. The producer of NBC’s The Big Show, a weekly all-star extravaganza, asked him to do a guest shot, and he agreed to go by the theater to “listen to it and see how they do it” but emphasized that he didn’t think he wanted to appear. “Radio is the bane of my life,” he groaned to Frank Tracy, who was in New York at the time and managed to meet up with him. “I can’t handle it. I can’t stand in front of that goddamn stick and emote. I can’t do that. No good at it.”
On March 6, he and Kate—who had just concluded her tour in Rochester—saw Claude Rains in Darkness at Noon and were spotted by one of Dorothy Kilgallen’s informants. He was in Chicago on the tenth, headed back to Hollywood, when he drove down to Freeport to visit his aunt Mum in the hospital, where she had just undergone surgery for breast cancer. He saw his uncle Andrew and aunt Mame and was back in Chicago that same evening.
He still saw his friends at the Boys’ Club but not with the frequency that he once had. Cagney was spending more time at Martha’s Vineyard, Pat O’Brien was working nightclubs, and Frank McHugh was planning a return to New York City, where he could find work in the theater and on television. With Hepburn determinedly sustaining their relationship, Tracy had gradually become part of her social circle, uncomfortable with old friends who knew him from when he was still out and around with Louise. “When he came [to the Boys’ Club dinners], which was rarely, he would not really join in,” said actor Jimmy Lydon, who was invited into the group sometime in the mid-1940s. “He’d have a couple of knocks and he would just kind of sit and enjoy listening to everybody else.”
In place of Joe Mankiewicz, Frank Borzage, Walt Disney, and Vic Fleming, Tracy was now spending his time with George Cukor, Constance Collier, Irene Selznick, and the Kanins. “I’ve never been able to see the Spence I knew so well participating in that group,” Mankiewicz said of the shift.
I used to go to the fights with him. He lived the life of a sportswriter, a sort of New York sportswriter—really tough. He liked going to the fights. He liked reading. We used to spend evenings together, reading. It was an extremely close relationship, so close that Spence was my eldest son’s godfather, but after Kate enfolded him I saw nothing of him. He used to keep sending the same doll to Chris, his godson, when the boy was well into the age of puberty. Everything just stopped between us and I didn’t see Spence at all. I think I got a phone call when I hit the jackpot—I got four Academy Awards or something1—and Kate called and said how pleased they were but Spence never got on the phone.
So it came as something of a surprise when Tracy learned that Pat O’Brien was having trouble finding work. Having finished off a seven-year contract at RKO, Pat found there was no work in features for a whole class of actor that populated films in the 1930s and ’40s—when the major studios were routinely making forty to fifty pictures a season. Averages had dropped in the years following the war, and budgets had tightened. “During several discussions at dinner of the Boys’ Club,” said Frank McHugh, “it was concluded that the picture business, as we knew it, was on the wane.” Major names like George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, Mickey Rooney, and Don Ameche were working in independent productions or, more frequently, on television, where the schedules were brutal and the money light. Pat sustained an average of two pictures a year, even into the fifties, but had three households to maintain and couldn’t quite figure it all out. “I was confronted with a strange situation I did not think could ever happen to me,” he wrote. “I suddenly could not get my foot inside a studio gate. I could not figure out what happened. Whatever it was, I was now unable to get a job in pictures.”
Tracy’s muscle at the studio, meanwhile, had never been greater. With the enormous success of Father of the Bride, he was once again polling as one of the nation’s top stars, and Father’s Little Dividend, thanks to promotional tie-ins with Sunbeam Bread, Libby’s Baby Foods, Lux Soap, FTD, Lane Bryant, and others, was drawing on a par with the first picture in places like Buffalo, New Haven, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. He went to bat for his boyhood pal, landing Pat—whom he still called “Bill”—a featured part in The People Against O’Hara at $4,375 a week on an eight-week guarantee. “Spence had to put on a wild, desperate fight to secure the role for me,” O’Brien said, “even threatening to walk out unless I was signed.”
The two men lunched at the studio just five days after the deal was set, a pair of graying veterans in a picture full of youthful faces—Diana Lynn, William Campbell, James Arness, Richard Anderson. And when Tracy arrived in Manhattan for location work, Pat was there waiting for him, laid up with the flu like everyone else. “He wanted me to go out with him, but I just couldn’t raise my head. A little later, when he had gone out, I learned that the director and producer and some of the other players were also sick with the flu and that Spence had taken over the job of filming the background shots down at the fish market.”
Production resumed in Culver City on March 19. Tracy’s character, Jim Curtayne, was written as a recovering alcoholic whose drinking had derailed a successful career as a criminal defense attorney. It was a grim and uncomfortable job for a man of his particular history, and where Pat was his usual gregarious self, taking the younger actors under his wing and proffering nonstop advice and encouragement, Tracy kept to himself, insular in a way he had not been on either of his two previous pictures. That he was trying to quit smoking at the time made him edgier still, and the other members of the cast were told to extinguish their cigarettes whenever he came onto the stage.
“Anytime I saw him he was all business,” said James Arness, who had come to M-G-M to be in Dore Schary’s Battleground and was playing the young defendant, the title character in the picture. “No kidding around or having fun—anything like that. He would, as a matter of fact, be offstage most of the time … They would call him and he’d come in and any kind of light conversation going on came to a screeching halt.”
John Sturges made a practice of rehearsing every scene, a departure from the old Metro routine where even run-throughs were a sometime thing. “The thing I remember most about Spence,” he said, “is the pleasure I had watching a scene played for the first time come alive by this man.” Sturges, as Arness remembered it, would have the chairs arrayed in a semicircle. “Mr. Tracy would be in the middle of this semicircle and the director would sit facing us. He would come onstage, walk up, ‘good morning’ briefly, and then we’d sit down and read through the scene, rehearse, and then get up and go onto whatever set it was and do it on its feet.” Tracy was, as far as Arness could tell, devoid of any technique. “It wasn’t an actor—this was a real guy in a real courtroom and you were on the stand.”
As The People Against O’Hara worked its way toward completion, Katharine Hepburn left New York for London and the start of a new picture. Her world had been shaken by the death of her beloved mother just two weeks prior to her departure, and she had scarcely had a month’s rest since concluding her tour for the Theatre Guild. It had been four years since she had made a film apart from Tracy, and her unpopularity at the box office rivaled the days when she had been forced to buy herself out of her RKO contract. Producer Sam Spiegel induced her to play Rose in The African Queen at a fraction of her usual fee with the promise of a percentage of the profits—a shrewd bargain considering the film’s eventual popularity. Sweetening the deal was the prospect of working opposite Humphrey Bogart under the direction of John Huston. Both Tracy andConstance Collier feared for her health, but after pondering the offer she wouldn’t be dissuaded.
Collier accompanied her to London, where the two took over a suite at Claridge’s, and Tracy made plans to follow—at least as far as Europe—as soon as O’Hara had been completed. Spiegel was holding the company together in fits and starts while Huston polished the script, and Hepburn wondered if there would be enough money to cover even the cost of their room. When Tracy did leave for New York on April 27, it was in the company of Benny Thau, who would be making the trip with him. Together, they caught Pat O’Brien’s opening as MC at the Plaza Hotel, then sailed for Naples on May 5 aboard the S.S. Independence. Obligingly, Tracy posed for press photos, perched on a rail on the ship’s top deck and by the interior window of his stateroom, at age fifty-one a distinguished elder statesman of the American motion picture industry.
In Rome he met up with Kate and found the city “unbelievable” in its power and majesty. On the eighteenth, he was received in an audience with Pope Pius XII, an event he described as “truly the culmination of [a] lifelong anticipation.” His Holiness, he recounted, “received me at the same time he received 50 young crewmen from the U.S.S. plane carrier, the Coral Sea. It was a wonderful experience to be present when he talked with these young men and listened with such interest and sympathy to their adventures and problems. He commented sadly to me on their youth.” The Holy Father, he concluded, was “wonderful” and blessed a rosary he had brought for his cousin Jane.
Hepburn left to start work on The African Queen on May 20. Tracy flew by Pan Am to Paris on the twenty-fourth—a terrifying experience when three of the plane’s four engines quit in midflight. Although he had said he would spend an entire month on the French Riviera, he lingered just two days before moving on to England. In London he checked in at Claridge’s and asked to be left “very much alone.” A few hours later, dressed in a flannel suit and navy tie, he ambled down the stairs and greeted a reporter from the Daily Mirror, seemingly grateful for the company and practically pushing the man into a waiting armchair. “I’m just a white-haired, middle-aged movie star,” he groused, shoving his lower lip out in a characteristic pose. “Who the hell cares about a guy like me?”
He took Constance Collier to see Caesar and Cleopatra, walked the town a bit with Benny Thau, and wired that he was shipping back a Fiat station wagon he had purchased for Susie. Kate, said Collier, was in the Congo writing “horrifying” letters and having “an awfully tough time I think, even she admits it, and it is hard to get her to admit anything like that.”
By return mail Constance advised her that Spence would be cabling her “and said I might tell you that M-G-M have a picture by Gar Kanin called ‘Mike and something’ for you and he, so that is thrilling and a lovely thing to look forward too [sic]. So hurry up with that stunt, darling, and get back home.” Spence, she added, was “longing for a letter from you saying things are a bit better. He is so desperately worried about you, but I know you and I think in spite of the terrible hardships you will find a way of getting a kick out of the place.”
With Tracy in London, Hepburn naturally gravitated to John Huston for companionship. Huston remembered “the many nights I sat with Katie on the top deck of the paddle boat and watched the eyes of the hippos in the water all around us, every eye seemed to be staring in our direction. And we talked. We talked about anything and everything. But there was never an idea of romance—Spencer Tracy was the only man in Katie’s life.”
Tracy, however, resented her absence and may well have been in the midst of a midlife crisis. He seemed unsettled, unhappy, acutely conscious of his age and weight. One night in London he dined with Bill and Edie Goetz—she being the elder daughter of Louis B. Mayer—and the actressJoan Fontaine, whom he had never before met. He was withdrawn, Fontaine remembered, and not particularly good company. Later, he called her at her hotel and asked her to have dinner with him the following evening. She replied that out of respect to Kate—whom she knew slightly—she could not consider seeing him alone. He made a lame attempt at recovery, explaining that while he and Hepburn were “terribly good friends,” they had a “completely platonic” arrangement.
“That’s what they all say!” the actress responded, refusing to buy any of it. She left for Sweden within days, only to be greeted upon her arrival by another call from Tracy pressing her once again to see him when she returned to England. “I’m afraid not,” she returned, shutting him down as forcefully as she could. “Not only is there Kate to consider, but you are a married man.”
“I can get a divorce whenever I want to,” came his reply. “But my wife and Kate like things just as they are.”
Katharine Houghton believed that Tracy and her aunt were indeed going through a “rough patch” at the time, based on “inklings I got from scraps of things” that were said. “Losing himself in a beautiful woman was a bit like losing himself in drink, it seems to me, and he would go a long way to catching his prey, like telling Fontaine that he and Kate were just friends.” Hepburn, meanwhile, asked Phyllis Wilbourn, Collier’s secretary, to deliver a food parcel and some flowers to Tracy’s room at Claridge’s with a card signed “Lutie” (one of his many pet names for her).
“I think Spence’s ulcer has been a little tiresome,” Collier fretted in a subsequent letter.
He has been having a doctor all the time and staying in bed a lot. It’s so silly of him to worry around with English doctors, they don’t know anything and it would be much better if he flew back and went straight to Boston for a few days to check up with the doctors who understand his case. We drove down to spend the day with Viv and Larry. Spence was absolutely charming, though I think he had a little pain. We left in the afternoon. I do think he behaved too beautifully. Larry and the men were drinking all around him and yelling and very gay and Spence never wavered with his ginger beer, or whatever he was drinking. It must have been very difficult.
I think he has seen a good deal of Viv and Larry and they try to make him stay up late and it is very hard to resist that. Oh dear, how I wish you were here with him, I think he would stay in London and enjoy it. He loves the country so and it looks so wonderful. I lunched with him the other day at Claridge’s … Darling, if you get a chance, persuade them to come home. Do do it. Spence is hanging around here, wondering whether to wait for you and if you only get back a little sooner, he will wait, I am sure, but it is very lonely for him without you though he is longing to see you.
Tracy did indeed leave town just a couple of days later, catching the Queen Mary and enduring one of the roughest crossings in the ship’s fabled history. The men were back in L.A. by June 20, Tracy, specifically, to discuss a picture Dore Schary desperately wanted him to make, a costume drama of the Pilgrims’ voyage to America, an unfathomable imperative with the deadly title The Plymouth Adventure. Schary had somehow become enamored of the story on the basis of a novel by Ernest Gebler, which had been purchased from galleys. Its acquisition was heralded in the Hollywood Reporter as “one of the biggest story buys in months,” even as Schary himself acknowledged that films about the Mayflower were invariably jinxed. Envisioned as a Technicolor extravaganza, the production head wanted the picture top-lined by several major stars, and his quest for a rock-solid Captain Christopher Jones inevitably led him to Tracy.
“Dore Schary was sort of like a rabbinical student who feels badly about having become a mountebank,” said veteran costume designer Lucinda Ballard, who was newly married at the time to Howard Dietz. “He was so moralistic and always wanting to do something about God or the pilgrims, which people don’t want to see, and it really was one of the things that wrecked him in the end.”
There was, in fact, a general feeling of disgruntlement among the old hands on the M-G-M lot, for Schary was a writer, not an administrator, and his bent for moralizing was milking all the sex and showmanship from the M-G-M brand. For a western called Lone Star, Schary had cut an unscripted shot of Ava Gardner strolling happily down a street, singing to herself, after an evening of obvious lovemaking with Clark Gable, maintaining the image was neither funny nor in good taste. Director Vincent Sherman could remember Tracy’s rueful comment upon hearing the story over lunch one day. “Since Schary took over,” he said, “there’s no fucking in M-G-M pictures.”
L. B. Mayer hated Schary’s taste in material and, at the age of sixty-six, could feel himself being pushed aside by the younger man and his patron, Nicholas Schenck, whose relationship with Mayer had deteriorated to the point where the two men were no longer speaking. Thau, a Mayer partisan whose coolness toward Schary never wavered, had doubtless seen Mayer’s ultimatum coming and conspired to be out of the country when the inevitable rupture took place. As he and Tracy departed for New York, Mayer was rumored to be part of a syndicate looking to buy a controlling interest in Warner Bros. for $25 million.
Reports of Mayer’s resignation were circulating anew as Thau and Tracy quietly knocked about London. The announcement came on June 22, 1951, when the old man issued a statement through a spokesman saying that he was quitting the company that bore his name but not the industry he had helped establish. “I am going to remain in motion picture production, God willing. I am going to be more active than at any time during the last 15 years,” Mayer was quoted as saying.
A formal farewell followed on the twenty-fifth. (“Naturally, I regret severing the ties and relationships that have been built up over the years …”) Both Thau and Mannix took Tracy to dinner at Romanoff’s to assure him that all was well within the company. Tracy had an afternoon appointment with Mayer on the twenty-seventh to say good-bye, and was on hand when Mayer officially left, treading a red carpet laid at the door of the Thalberg Building, the assembled executives and secretaries applauding as he made his exit.
There was a time when it seemed that Dore Schary’s story department functioned largely for the purpose of generating material for Spencer Tracy. In 1950 alone, no fewer than seven properties were supposedly allocated to Tracy and his schedule, when only two could actually be made. Yankees in Texas dealt with the relocation of a Connecticut aviation plant to Texas during the war; People in Love was an original from Karl Tunberg and Leonard Spiegelgass; Angels in the Outfield, a comedy about a ball team so bad that only a miracle could save it.
Tracy resisted When in Rome, another comedy, because it had him playing a crook posing as a priest. Jealousy was one of those multipart affairs in vogue at the time, three stories of the green-eyed monster from three different perspectives, a different actress for each. He turned down Amigo, from a screenplay by Jo Swerling and Sy Bartlett, on the excuse that nobody could follow the late Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa. The flow continued into 1951 with greater success: Plymouth Adventure was always part of the mix, a bad idea that seemingly refused to go away, but January also brought the purchase of Ruth Gordon’s autobiographical play Years Ago, for which Tracy was set to play her father (a role taken on Broadway by Fredric March). And several months later, Pat and Mike was formally added to the M-G-M schedule, intended, as always, to be another vehicle for Tracy and Hepburn.
Originally set as the second of Tracy’s two pictures for the year 1952, Pat and Mike got moved up on the schedule when the script for Plymouth Adventure ran afoul of its star. Then William Wellman, the original director, opted out. Schary offered the project to Mervyn LeRoy, who could tell it was a stiff without even bothering to read it. “Look,” he said, “I’ve been waiting my whole life to see Spencer Tracy with a gun and a turkey in his hands.” After nearly a year’s worth of research, outlines, and notes on the part of screenwriter Helen Deutsch, Clarence Brown agreed to direct the thing, though he said that he wouldn’t be available until November 1.
Schary, who had hoped to get the film under way sometime over the summer of 1951, apologized for unnecessarily bringing Tracy home from Europe and offered to send him back at the company’s expense—officially for conferences with the Kanins, unofficially to be with Kate, who had just arrived back in London from Africa and was looking at several weeks of interiors before finishing The African Queen. The People Against O’Hara was previewed on the night of July 20, and Tracy was off the next morning for New York, pulling into town in the midst of a seasonal heat wave.
While in Europe, Tracy spent the company’s money lavishly, covering most meals and car expenses to the tune of nearly $7,000—only about 30 percent of which could legitimately be charged to the continuity of Pat and Mike. He shopped for the family, did some interviews, went to Mass at Notre Dame. Kate came over from London on August 4 and they saw a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition together, dining at the Coq D’Hardi that evening and kicking the story around with its authors. “I keep remembering seeing her in Paris with Spencer,” said Lauren Bacall, who was there over the Bank Holiday with her husband Humphrey Bogart and John Huston. “She was wearing a dress. Spencer refused to take her out unless she wore a dress. She wore one of the two dresses that she owned and she was glowing, brimming over with joy.”
Garson Kanin found the inspiration for Pat and Mike while watching a tennis lesson given Hepburn one day by four-time Wimbledon champion Bill Tilden. “She plays tennis like an actress,” Kanin observed, “with a great sense of form and style.” Her part of a “lady athlete” evolved quickly, followed a short time later by an amalgam of all the Lindy sports promoters he had ever known—the Tracy side of the equation. But while the title characters sprang forth fully formed, the plotting of the thing gave the authors fits. They darkened the husband’s character, put Mike at the center of a scheme to throw a game, and had him falling desperately in love with Pat halfway through the story. No good; the relationships were all wrong.
Hepburn’s input was sharp and detailed; Tracy’s was more tempered and generalized. The material, Kate remembered, was “very intimately discussed between us all, which I think was an enormous help to everyone concerned. It was very ‘ensemble’ in spirit. And things we didn’t like, or which irritated one, or you didn’t understand, you were able to state it, which one doesn’t always get an opportunity to do in this business. It was not just friendship, but an artistic collaboration.” In the space of a few hours, they began to move the story toward the form it would eventually take.
Kate had to fly back to London on the sixth, leaving Tracy to a city shimmering with neon and light rain. It was a place he could only truly enjoy at sunrise and sunset, when he could go out in public and was less likely to be recognized. He and Ruth discussed Years Ago—she was writing the screenplay—and one night he was coaxed out of his room and his daily routine for a walk along the Champs-Élysées, a stroll that ended abruptly with a ringside table at the Lido. He appeared to be enjoying himself, a Coke conspicuously at hand, when a band of American acrobats pulled him up onto the stage and proceeded to make him part of a human pyramid. He was furious, reducing the check to confetti and threatening the manager with a bill from the William Morris Agency. Flash photos had been taken, and all he could think about was the impression they would make. (“Boy! That’s all I need. Nightclub hi-jinks pictures plastered all over. They’ll think Tracy’s on the ol’ heimerdeimer again.”) Gar Kanin had the help of the M-G-M press department in confiscating them, and Tracy later claimed to have destroyed them all, although at least one print managed to survive. When Kate came to town again the following weekend, she refused to believe any part of the story until shown the evidence.
Tracy and the Kanins dined at Maxim’s one night toward the end of his stay, and the party of five included actress Gene Tierney, who was in the process of divorcing her husband of ten years, the French-born fashion designer Oleg Cassini. Tracy seemed uncommonly interested in the green-eyed beauty, who had been in pictures since 1940 and spoke French like a native. Having made a film on the Argentine pampas that previous winter, Tierney said something to the effect that she was eager to work again in the comfort of an American studio.
Tracy rose to the bait with the subject of Plymouth Adventure: “He asked me if I were interested in doing the role [of Dorothy Bradford],” Tierney said, “and that led to the commitment.” Two nights later, Tracy and the Kanins were back again, this time with Tierney alone completing a foursome.
“Pat and Mike with George Cukor was an agony to me,” Katharine Hepburn admitted. “He kept saying, ‘Sink the putt, Kate.’ Well, the putt was thirty feet on a sloping green. ‘Sink it. Sink it.’ And Babe Didrikson was in that picture, and she finally taught me how to sink that putt. When I sank that putt, I really just jumped up and down for joy. But George never realized how difficult anything was. At all. He was the funniest director in the world to have direct that picture.”
Tracy unwillingly joined a band of American acrobats onstage at the Lido in Paris. He later claimed to have destroyed all the photographic evidence, but this shot survived. (SUSIE TRACY)
Cukor was, of course, on the show because he had directed all the previous films the Kanins had written—three so far. He knew nothing of sports, had no interest in such matters, but thought of such a deficiency as a positive. “Too many pictures dealing with golf have been approached from the expert’s point of view,” he reasoned. “Nine hundred and sixty-five out of 1,000 moviegoers don’t know anything about the fine points of the game either. Therefore, if I can stage a golf match in a way that will interest me, then I’m pretty sure it will also look good to those 965.”
The screenplay revision of October 5 recast Pat as a basketball coach at Southern Tech, engaged to Alan Fletcher, who also works at the school. She enters a golf tournament, but her confidence in herself is undermined by Alan’s presence in the gallery. Mike sees her, gives her his card, and the script begins to crackle. Accompanied by the Kanins, Hepburn arrived in Los Angeles on October 10 so that talks with Cukor could begin. “Spencer,” she said, “never used to join those conferences we had, George and Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon—who wrote the scripts. We’d meet on the weekends, and Spencer would make a general comment on what he’d heard. During the reading of Pat and Mike, Spencer sat in a corner of the room when we had a reading of the script one night at George’s house.”
Tracy had already absorbed the words—which were not always easy to say in Mike’s particular brand of “left-handed English”—and the character had been rolling around his mind since those conferences in Paris. Gradually, he had worked out a manner of speaking, a way of seeing things that brought the character to life, a minor-league sporting man “far more real and complex” than the person the screenwriters had imagined. “Spencer,” said Cukor, “put his glasses on—we thought he would simply read the words—but suddenly he had departed and instead there appeared in his place this crude prizefighting manager of Pat and Mike. There was no sign of the Spencer Tracy we’d just seen there a minute before.”
In time, Pat Pemberton became a widow, engaged to Collier Weld at a college in Gross Point, but Tracy’s character remained essentially as he read it that first night, so vivid was the personality he brought to the role. As plans went forth for the picture, the seventh Tracy-Hepburn teaming in the space of a decade, Walter Winchell led his column of November 6 with a calamitous item: “M-G-M is sitting on an atomic bomb—trying to keep Katharine Hepburn’s Greatest Romance sotto voce. Both stars are tired of Keeping It Quiet.”
No one at the studio mentioned it, and if Louise saw it, she didn’t say anything over dinner at Chasen’s or during tennis with Bill Self and the kids. Spence drove up the coast to “paint the sea,” contemplative as the start date for the picture grew near. Kate had committed to playing The Millionairess in England, her mother having “worshipped” every word the late George Bernard Shaw ever wrote. The engagement would require her to leave as soon as the picture for Metro had wrapped, and she would be overseas for much of the new year while Spence remained stuck in California with Schary and Plymouth Adventure. It didn’t make for a happy time, and when the tests for Pat and Mike came back, the studio decided that Kate looked too thin and postponed the film three weeks while she fattened herself up. Spence, conversely, was too heavy and began popping a Dexedrine each morning to control his appetite. The goal was to lose twelve pounds by the start of production, bringing him to a trimmer 190.
Tracy and Hepburn with Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, screenwriters of Pat and Mike. (JUDY SAMELSON COLLECTION)
With the picture temporarily on hold, Tracy turned his attentions to his new home on the Cukor property, which had been completed and would soon be ready for occupancy. Cukor seemed truly excited at the prospect of having such an illustrious tenant and involved Tracy and Hepburn in all the stages of design and construction. The plan had been to carve two homesites from a service yard at the very bottom of the director’s somewhat kidney-shaped parcel, which was bordered on the west by Doheny Drive and on its southern end by St. Ives, a narrow and winding roadway that became almost impassable at times of heavy rain. He commissioned architect John Wolfe to design the two simple structures—the floor plan of the Tracy cottage forming an extended H, the master bed- and dressing room separated from the rest of the house by a recessed entryway and an outdoor patio—and had the plans sent for Spencer’s perusal to the Arizona Inn, promising, in an accompanying letter, to drain the malarial swamps “to satisfy a certain touring actress” and assuring him that the sun regularly hit the property “once a week.”
The living room was done in planks of wormy chestnut, an accent of used brick, painted a creamy white, framing a small fireplace. There was a pegged hardwood floor, cut on the bias, with French doors leading out onto the patio. Kate took charge of decorating the place, having purchased an old horsehair rocker—a naked frame, really—on Olvera Street and gotten it upholstered as a first step. An oak gateleg table, a basket base lamp, a desk fashioned from the valances of the apartment on Beverly. The colors were all subdued, the look warm and comfortable; it was a terrific contrast to the chichi of the main house. She saw to air conditioning, the fitting of the kitchen, shutters, towels, carpeting, draperies, a new vacuum cleaner, and had a corner cupboard and two pickled pear tables shipped out from the East.
Spence had been a renter for so long he had virtually nothing apart from his books and his things out at the ranch—and most of those would have to remain where they were. Kate finished with the furnishing of the cottage at 9191 St. Ives on December 12 and promptly left for New York and Connecticut to spend Christmas with her family. Tracy took occupancy six days later—on December 18, 1951.
They began shooting Pat and Mike on January 2, 1952, Ruth and Gar having, by then, returned east, where they could confer with Cukor via mail and by wire. The pressures on Hepburn were extraordinary, not just in the early golfing scenes, where she had to be even better than she was in real life (which was pretty good), but in the tennis scenes, where she would be partnered with stars like Don Budge and Frank Parker and pitted against Wimbledon sensation Gertrude “Gussie” Moran. Parker, who started in the days when men still played in flannel trousers, doubled as Kate’s tennis coach, teaching her tournament form for the failed match against Gorgeous Gussie, when Collier’s mere presence in the stands is enough to cause Pat to fumble the match.
The early material didn’t involve Tracy at all, and his character didn’t make his appearance until the second reel—long after the picture had been established in the audience’s collective mind as Hepburn’s. But where in the past she might already have started to grate on the crowd, her aloofness and self-assurance putting them on edge, she showed a winning vulnerability in Pat and Mike that was unlike anything else in her catalog. It comes as no surprise when she declines to throw a tournament at Mike’s not-so-subtle suggestion. (“You see her face? A real honest face. The only disgustin’ thing about her.”) And she’s plainly chagrined when she falters in the final moments of her match with Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
Tracy played with the cadences of the dialogue, the words having been arranged as they might form in the mind of a person like Conovan, ill educated but streetwise, a man within whom both wisdom and larceny collided in a jumble of syntax. “You see what happened anyway if youda been willing to happen on purpose you coulda been walking outta here with a nice bundle, with a bushel basket like I said? It just goes to show.”
And when he admires Pat’s retreating form in his Broadway vernacular, telling his diminutive associate, “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce,” he not only reveals the early depth of his feelings for her but delivers one of the most warmly remembered lines in the history of the movies.
“Gar had written a line,” said Larry Weingarten, “in which Spencer said of Kate, ‘She’s pretty well stacked.’ I said, ‘Do you know the meaning of this word? Kate is not well stacked. She has a small bust.’ I pressured him, Cukor pressured him, and he came up with another line, ‘There ain’t much meat on her, but what there is is cherce!’ It got the biggest laugh in the picture.”
Kanin himself remembered writing the line as “choice” and that it was Tracy who insisted on delivering it as “cherce.” Cukor, he said, made two takes, Tracy stubbornly sticking to the same reading for both. Mindful that Tracy “just flattened out” after the third or fourth take, Cukor obviously chose not to push it. “You’ve got to know that in directing … when to shut up, when to press.”
For his part, Tracy liked to recall what George M. Cohan once told him: “Whatever you do, kid, always serve it with a little dressing.” And so he took a perfectly serviceable line and, by filtering it through the prism of character, made it genuinely memorable. It was, as Bill Self learned, a process of refinement that never let up when he was shooting a picture. “Spence would say to everybody, ‘Oh, I didn’t sleep last night. I don’t know what scene we’re doing. Can I see the pages for a minute?’ All nonsense, according to Hepburn. He was up all night running his lines. I know in the few little scenes I was in with him, or any scene where I was on the set when they shot it, God help you if you blew a line or missed your mark. He was very intolerant of other actors not being totally professional.”
The sparring between Tracy and Hepburn lacked the sharp edges of Adam’s Rib, Cukor achieving a gentleness and a lightness of tone that made the comedy seem effortless. The reason it worked, the director maintained, was that none of them took themselves very seriously. “We batted ideas around like tennis balls, we all felt the lines and situations without any kind of ghastly solemnity. If we all laughed, a line went in.” And, as with Judy Holliday on their previous picture together, both took a paternal interest in Aldo Ray, the ex-navy frogman whom Cukor had starred alongside Holliday in The Marrying Kind and who was now playing Mike’s dim-witted prizefighter, Davie Hucko.
It is in Mike’s relationship with Hucko—“heavyweight champion of the world … in a couple of years”—that the true nature of his character emerges: small-time operator, disciplinarian, hustler, and patron to numerous hangers-on. When he comes down on Davie, he does so by demanding the answers to the Three Questions:
“Who made you, Hucko?”
“You, Mike.”
“Who owns the biggest piece of you?”
“You, Mike.”
“And what’ll happen if I drop you?”
“I go right down the drain.”
“And?”
“And stay there.”
Pat signs a contract with Mike and his mysterious partners and is immediately put into training: no martinis, Mike tells her, no smoking, no late hours, no men “in any manner, shape, or form.”
“What’s to prevent me from smoking when you’re not around?” she asks.
“When am I not around?”
“You don’t expect to be watching me every minute … out of every … twenty-four hours … out of every day … do you?”
“If I have to, sure.”
“Not sure I’ll like that.”
“Not askin’ you to like it. But you’ll see pretty soon I’ll trust ya. Because you’ll trust me. Because what’s good for you is good for me and you for me, see? We’re the same, we’re equal, we’re partners, see? Five-oh, five-oh.”
Despite all this enforced intimacy, there is little to suggest the budding romance between Pat and Mike other than the care on his part, the glances on her part, the underlying attraction between the two actors playing the roles, the times again when their eyes locked, even when there was nothing more than a kiss on the cheek (“for luck”) to suggest Pat’s growing affection for her rough-hewn manager.
“I remember there was a scene in which Spencer massaged Kate’s leg,” George Cukor said. “No sex implied, but it was very sexy. You sensed the empathy between these two.” Kate was stressed throughout the filming, being coached as she was in golf, tennis, baseball (the latter by Pinkie Woods, star pitcher of the Hollywood Stars, for scenes that were ultimately cut from the film), basketball, boxing, and judo (for a shot in which she clobbers two of Mike’s “investors”). She was pushing herself—fear of mediocrity, fear of being only half good—and was battling to keep her weight up. It fell to Cukor to keep the production—as well as the strained relationship between his two stars—on an even keel. “George was like a big brother to Kate and Spence,” Aldo Ray observed. “He was mother hen, nurturing them, holding them together.”
With all the exteriors called for in the script, Pat and Mike was plagued by rain delays and ran over schedule. The company moved to Ojai in mid-February, finishing up there on the twenty-first. Hepburn was worn out, unsure of how the film would piece together, and had only a few weeks before she was due to leave for England and the start of rehearsals for The Millionairess. When she left California, it was for Connecticut and Fenwick, and she would not return until summer at the earliest. Once again, she was putting a continent between the two of them, driving herself in a way that was extraordinary even for her. Tracy approached the filming of Plymouth Adventure with a renewed sense of dread, not only for the quality of the material he was playing, but for the time he would be trapped in Los Angeles when all he longed for was to be in London with Kate.
Tracy clowns with Hepburn while cinematographer William Daniels takes a reading. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Gene Tierney wasn’t a lock, at least initially, for the female lead in Plymouth Adventure. Schary resisted casting someone who wasn’t an M-G-M contract player, and originally the talk had been of June Allyson doing the part. The film was populated with a number of British actors, Leo Genn and Barry Jones most prominent among them. With Hepburn gone, Tracy became almost unbearable to be around, sulky and petulant. When actress Dawn Addams, relatively new to Metro, was awarded the secondary role of Priscilla Mullins, the obligatory love interest and future wife of John Alden, Tracy could scarcely contain himself.
“I was having dinner with Spence at Chasen’s,” Bill Self remembered,
and Clark Gable came in and sat down for just a talk. Spence said, “What do you know about an actress named Dawn Addams?”
Gable said, “I don’t know anything about her much. She’s a young contract player.”
“She’s playing Priscilla. She looks like she’s made the voyage before.”
“I don’t know anything about her.”
“Well, she’s sleeping with someone. I have to tell you, this girl would not be in this movie if she wasn’t sleeping with somebody.”
Gable left, and a few minutes later Benny Thau came in. Spence called him over to the table. Thau sat down and Spence said, “How’s everything?”
“Fine,” he said, and at that point in waltzed his date for the evening. Thau said, “Oh, do you know Dawn Addams?”
Costume tests were made early in March, and Tracy’s captain’s outfit, with its knee-high boots, its braided coat, and its wide belt buckled tightly up around his belly, gave him a gnomelike appearance, rendering him shorter and rounder than he had ever before appeared on the screen, a sort of malevolent Mr. Pickwick of the high seas. Then he allowed them to darken his hair, which made him feel doubly ridiculous.
As the film’s start date approached, Gene Tierney, to placate Tracy, was borrowed from 20th Century-Fox for a role that could have been played by almost anyone. Mollified, he permitted Dawn Addams to remain in the cast but drew the line at Peter Lawford, who had been set for the part of Gilbert Winslow, the affable scribe whose diary of the voyage forms the basis of a narration. “Lawford,” said Frank Tracy, “was never prepared and was kind of an airhead, I understand. And Spence did, literally, tell him, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ ”
Ten days prior to the start of filming, Lawford was shunted to the lead in a romantic comedy called You for Me and the role of Winslow was filled by John Dehner, a radio commentator and sometime actor who had recently completed a part in Metro’s Scaramouche. Filming began on March 24, 1952, on M-G-M’s Joppa Square, a grouping of exterior sets on Lot 2 that stood in for medieval Europe in scores of pictures and incorporated the Prussian castle used in Conquest (1937).
Since all the important action took place aboard the Mayflower, director Brown made the pricy decision to shoot the entire picture in sequence, keeping the whereabouts of the individual passengers and crew members straight and ensuring that the movements of the facsimile vessels matched the miniature work, which was extensive and taking place concurrent to the filming of the live action sequences. (The ship’s principal model was one-eighth the size of the one on Stage 30 and crewed by a set of mechanical dolls.) Some five months of second-unit footage had been shot off Honduras by Arnold Gillespie’s crew, covering all possible weather conditions and times of day for background plates.
“Spence got me a part in Plymouth Adventure,” said Bill Self.
I had nothing to do in it; Clarence Brown hated me, I’m sure, because he didn’t know what to do with me. I made five pictures with Spence, and in three of them I actually had a little something to do. In this one, I had nothing to do. One day, John was coming over to have lunch, and Spence came to me and said would I take John to lunch? I said, “I’d be happy to, but, you know, I’m in the first scene after lunch, doing nothing, but I’m in it.” And he said, “There’s not going to be a scene after lunch.” I said, “Oh?’ And he said, ’Yes. I have sent for Dore Schary. I’m getting out of this picture.” Now, most people would not “send” for the head of the studio, so I said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “Oh, I look like an idiot in this costume, they should have gotten Errol Flynn to begin with, it’s a boring story, I regret that I’m doing it, and I’m going to tell Schary I’m out. Take John to lunch. Don’t worry about the time you get back. I guarantee they won’t need you.” I said, “Fine.” So I went to lunch. I have no idea what happened at that meeting, but when I came back everybody had been ready to shoot the scene, so Spence was back in the movie. But the thing that impressed me and I remembered was that he didn’t go see Dore Schary, Dore Schary came to the set to see him.
Miss G., pregnant with her second child, had retired, leaving Tracy with a new secretary. For one of the few times in his career, he seemed to be having trouble breaking character between takes, and he was as irascible as Captain Jones over the fifty-seven days needed to shoot the film. He took an immediate dislike to actor Lloyd Bridges, who, as Coppin, the master’s mate, was the captain’s henchman and the most prominent member of the ship’s crew. “I don’t know why he hated me,” Bridges said years later, shaking his head. Bill Self could recall Tracy referring to Bridges dismissively as “that radio actor,” as if someone who worked in radio was the lowest form of life. “Tries to do too much with his voice” was all Tracy would offer by way of explanation.
“Oh,” said Reggie Callow, who was first assistant director on the show,
he moaned and groaned all through the picture … When we went on the deck it was raining, and the actors had to stand with the water coming down. Tracy would say, “I’m an old, old man; I can’t do all these things.” So we had to baby him. He wasn’t an old man; he was in his fifties then, but he always kept saying what an old man he was. If you gave him a ten o’clock call, and you didn’t get to him until about 10:10, he’d raise hell. He’d say, “Why am I called in at ten and it’s now ten after ten?” So I had a great idea: I said give him an eleven o’clock call, and if at ten-thirty we realized we weren’t going to get to him on time, I’d say, “Mr. Brown, would you mind skipping the next setup and set up Tracy?” So at eleven Tracy would walk in; he was always ready. I’d say, “Spencer, we’re ready for you.” And he’d say, “Oh boy, you’re the greatest.” After he did the first shot, he wouldn’t mind sitting in his dressing room for the rest of the day without being called. But he had to get that first shot on time.
Predictably, Tracy picked up a cold, which didn’t improve his disposition. The tension between Schary and the actor he professed to admire above all others only seemed to mount during the filming of Plymouth Adventure, and it came to a head on May 7, when an item in Mike Connolly’s column in the Hollywood Reporter suggested “some fur” would fly over an interview Schary had given Lloyd Shearer for Theatre Arts magazine “in which Shearer writes: ‘The old Mayer group of stellar personalities—Gable, Garson, Astaire, Pidgeon, Tracy—is just about washed up with today’s predominantly young movie-goers, and Schary must find replacements.’ ” Schary heard from “three or four sources” that Tracy was “steaming” after having seen the item in Connolly’s “Rambling Reporter” and he quickly drafted a letter denying that he ever said such a thing.
“To have this nuisance take place at any time is a lamentable experience for me,” he wrote, “but I wanted to write to you and tell you, firstly, that it should not concern you as an artist; and, secondly, that it must not concern you in terms of annoyance at me. In these awful days of tension and quick tempers and strained relationships, I must ask you as a friend and as a man of good will to dismiss directing your anger against me and the studio, because you must know, if you think about it, Spence, that such an attitude does not in any way reflect our thinking about you. I have told you before—and I’ll tell you again—I love you.”
Having just passed his fifty-second birthday—and with his repeated lamentations about being “an old, old man”—it may have been important for Tracy to prove himself with a younger woman. Kate was in London, Louise busy with the completion of the new building. The Kanins were in New York, Cukor was in Europe, Carroll and Dorothy on a cruise. Gene Tierney, at thirty-one, was becoming increasingly aware of her wild mood swings, a symptom she would eventually come to recognize as manic depression. She was seeing actor Kirk Douglas, and in his autobiography, Douglas described an endearingly quirky young woman who had a lovely overbite and insisted on his entering through a window when he came to see her at night. (“Maybe it was an aphrodisiac. I didn’t question it.”) Douglas made the mistake of telling her that he didn’t want to get married—a sentiment he innocently thought they shared—and it seems it was around this time that Tierney chose to involve herself with Tracy. Apart from being one of the world’s most beautiful women, she was a bright gal and a lively companion. “When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant,” she said. “I felt smarter. I had secrets. I saw things no one else could see. I could see evil in a toothbrush. I could see God in a light bulb.”
The intensity of the relationship—at least from Tracy’s perspective—was evident when Tierney informed Kirk Douglas that she would be marrying her costar while production of Plymouth Adventure was still under way. “This all happened so quickly, I didn’t believe it,” Douglas wrote. “She showed me a saccharine letter that he had written, telling her that he wanted to arrange things so that they could go off together. ‘Gene, I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘First, Spencer’s married. He’ll never get divorced. Second, he has a very intense relationship with Katharine Hepburn, and he’ll never give it up.’ ” Douglas, of course, couldn’t have known Tracy’s state of mind, nor Tierney’s exact motivation in telling him they would be wed. “I made the mistake of being blunt about not wanting to get married, and here was another man writing a flattering letter telling her what she wanted to hear.”
All the while, Tracy was in touch with Hepburn by cable, advising her of plans to sail for England in June, possibly with the Kanins, possibly alone. The Clarence Browns and L. B. Mayer had taken him to dinner, and Old Man Mayer, he reported, was “absolutely insane” about the new house on St. Ives. When Kate sent reviews of her tour of the provinces, Spence wired back that they were wonderful, as were the initial notices for Pat and Mike. Tierney was committed to a second film for Metro, a Clark Gable picture to be shot in England, and since he was set to meet Kate in London as soon as he was cleared for travel, Tracy told Hedda Hopper he intended to heckle Gable from the sidelines as he played his romantic scenes with Tierney. Hopper commented: “Spence, who’s been making love to Gene in his picture, thinks the King needs some lessons,” pointedly adding that he would also be on hand for Hepburn’s London opening in The Millionairess.
Tracy patched over his differences with Dore Schary and finished the movie, Brown boasting that they were able to make the entire movie on M-G-M’s Culver City lot, save just one scene of the landing of the first settlers, which was done on a beach near Oxnard. “I never heard him tell anyone in the cast what to do … I never saw him tell anybody anything,” Reggie Callow said of the director. “I don’t know how the hell he ever made the picture.”
1 Mankiewicz won three Academy Awards (if you count Best Picture) for All About Eve (1950).