CHAPTER 33
We needed prayers,” Louise wrote, “and although I am sure a magnificent team of doctors helped, I believe it was the prayers of many people that brought him through. He was just all but gone Wednesday night when suddenly there was a little, just a little, turn upward.”
There had been a question as to whether they were going to do peritoneal dialysis—an early form of the procedure done through the abdominal cavity—but the improvement, which Dr. Covel characterized as “a kind of miracle,” prompted them to hold off. Tracy was responsive on the seventeenth—“out of danger,” as the papers reported—and continued to improve steadily until they stopped the intravenous fluids and took him off the respirator on the morning of the twentieth. Visiting times were carefully—and strictly—coordinated to allow for Louise’s comings and goings. “When Louise would come,” said Dr. Covel, “Kate would disappear. Kate was there most of the time, as I recall.” One day, as Louise was visiting, the phone rang and she reflexively picked it up. “Kate?” said Garson Kanin, calling from New York.
“He hated to be sick,” Louise said. “While he wanted us to come and see him, we’d get there and he’d say, ‘Well, you might as well go home now.’ It disturbed him to be so ill. He hated it.” During the crisis, John remembered his mother as calm, quiet, matter-of-fact. “I bumped into her going into the hospital one day,” said Virginia Thielman, who oversaw the correspondence course at the clinic, “and I’m sure it was a very difficult time … You felt a poignancy and a sadness but always with dignity … Mrs. Tracy would not wear her heart on her sleeve.” Spence would show them cards and telegrams when they came, and on their last visit, just prior to his release on September 28, the doctors lined up so that Louise, John, and Susie could “shake hands in gratitude for their efforts to save his life.”
Tracy went home with medications for his diabetes, his heart, and kidneys, “practically normal” (as Louise put it) but very weak. Dr. Covel, who lived five minutes away, saw him most days, early in the morning or late in the evening. “He was the kind of guy,” the doctor said, “who almost needed constant medical care—either in the form of real illnesses, crises, or support and reassurance. That was one of the reasons we got along so well, I guess, because I understood. Other physicians who were less patient—well, he wouldn’t tolerate them.”
In October Tracy developed a rash that covered much of his lower body, an unpleasant side effect of one of the medicines he was taking. Frank Tracy visited on Halloween and was startled by his appearance: “If I hadn’t known it was Spence who was coming through the door, I might not have recognized him. The change was shocking—almost eerie. He looked terrible, all shriveled up, weak. He was pale and half-shaved; he had missed under his chin, around his throat, leaving them grizzled white … I shook hands with him and thought, ‘Why, he’s a little old coot!’ ”
The current issue of Motion Picture carried the cover story “Spencer Tracy’s Fight for Life!,” but it was mainly a rehash of the old triangle business that had also graced recent issues of Confidential, Modern Screen, and Inside Story. All showcased the same news agency shot of a distraught Louise behind the wheel of her car, intermingled with stills of Spence and Kate from their various films together. Hepburn wasn’t there when Frank came to visit, and the subject never turned to her, however obliquely.
He said, “Jesus, Frank, I never realized. I got letters from nuns in Australia praying for me, from priests in England I never knew.” He was crying. He said, “I didn’t—” I said, “For chrissakes, Spence, you’re a big star! You’re all over the world and have been for thirty years! They all saw you and admired you.” [From] some grade school in Australia the nun wrote and the kids all signed it. All praying for him. He couldn’t believe it. He said, “I heard from all my old friends—telegrams, letters, cards. The only guy I didn’t hear from, the son of a bitch, was Cagney.” He and Cagney got into some sort of a fight … I know Pat O’Brien tried to get them together on several occasions. (A couple of times he almost made it. They were going to have dinner, both of them were going to be in New York, or something, and Pat got it all set up, and one guy called up and said, “I can’t make it. I’ve got to do something else …”) Spence said, “That son of a bitch wouldn’t even wish me to get well.”1
There was now a further narrowing of his world, a result of both ill health and acquiescence. Kate became his full-time physician, the one who slept in the room at the other end of the hall, the one at the other end of the buzzer he always kept at the side of his bed. “She was one of the best doctors he ever had,” said Dr. Covel. “And when they were together, happily, I think, he didn’t feel he had the need for [the alcohol, the barbiturates, and the amphetamines]…They were just devoted to one another. Just violently interested in each other’s welfare. They worshiped one another.”
Katharine Houghton saw it from a more pragmatic angle: “Once he was sort of an invalid, Kate no longer had to worry about his dalliances. They had their ‘quiet little life’ as she called it, and she and he thrived on the stability of their routine.”
There were chest pains, which had to be checked to make sure they weren’t something new. They usually turned out to be muscular, but then there were also the colds and rashes, malaise and nausea. “And, of course, they were all major problems for him. Somebody who was a little more stable wouldn’t have called a doctor. [To him] these were major things, major episodes.” On December 8 his heart was skipping beats, an old problem that had persisted for decades.
“I talked to him at length at home and it became apparent that much of the agitation was because Kate and I were urging him to take exercise. And he got upset about that. And the skipped beats were because he got upset about us advising him to get off his fanny and do something instead of sitting in that wonderful chair he had. And then the skipped beats made him even less inclined to get out of his chair. It was a vicious cycle.”
Among those who found their way to St. Ives in the days following Hepburn’s occupancy were some of the Catholic priests who wrote to Tracy, men who, in many cases, came of age at a time when he was redefining the public face of the church in San Francisco and the Boys Town pictures. While Kate had no personal interest in religious dogma of any sort, she readily indulged the spiritual needs Spence so clearly had without ever really understanding just how deeply held they were. One such priest who made the trek up Doheny was Eugene Kennedy, a professor of psychology at Loyola University, Chicago, who had written in the days following the news of Tracy’s brush with death. Father Kennedy found himself struck by the few distinctive accents that softened the room in which Tracy spent so much of his time—the stormy Vlaminck seascape above the desk, the stuffed goose suspended in full flight, the bowls of freshly cut flowers. He found his host clad in tan slacks and a dark blue cardigan, clutching a ball for Lobo.
“Your letter touched me very much,” Tracy told him as they entered his bedroom, stark in its simplicity. “To hear from priests and nuns who were praying for me …” His eyes glistened as he reached for a wooden Madonna he had found in Chamonix. “This is something I truly love,” he said, barely above a whisper. “It’s so simple …” Dinner was ready—roasted stuffed chicken as prepared by Ida Gheczy of George Cukor’s staff—but there was still a minute or two to talk without Kate overhearing. “You know,” Tracy continued, “I thought about being a priest once; I guess every Catholic kid does, or did anyway. I don’t know how they feel with all these changes taking place. Now Pope John XXIII, he was my kind of Pope. But with this Vatican II, I’m not sure that priests believe in sin anymore or still hear confessions.” He paused a moment, then caught the priest’s eyes.
“You still know how to?” he asked.
In the lean times that followed the dissolution of Ealing, William Rose tinkered with the idea of a play, a farce concerning a white family in South Africa whose only daughter appears one day with a black man she is intent upon marrying. By 1958 Rose had the story fully developed for the stage. In 1959 and again in 1961, he tried without success to interest various people, including Stanley Kramer, in filming it. At the time, Kramer naturally thought of Sidney Poitier, who was soon to star in Kramer’s Pressure Point—a picture he was producing but not directing—but both he and Rose were in the midst of preparing It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and there wasn’t any time—or creative energy—left to expend on the development of another comedy. The idea did, however, stick in Kramer’s mind, and one day on the set of Mad World he mentioned it to Tracy.
“The substance of that conversation was, ‘I don’t know whether I will ever do it, but Rose has a hell of an idea, a hell of a part for you.’ And I said, ‘I think what would be terribly interesting—I don’t know whether she is interested, but co-starring you and Katharine Hepburn in starring roles as a vehicle …’ The role I described to Mr. Tracy was a successful, liberal man who was a father, head of a family, very well off, substantial, married to a modern woman, liberal. All I can recall is the liberal aspect of the gentleman in question in the story.” Kramer, apart from work, saw Tracy a few times a year. At some point Tracy asked, “What happened to it?”
Mad, Mad World completed Kramer’s commitment to United Artists, and in August 1962 he signed a three-picture deal with Columbia that was to commence with Ship of Fools. Kramer’s second film was to have been Andersonville, an ambitious blending of MacKinlay Kantor’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel and the 1959 Broadway play The Andersonville Trial. He worked nearly two years on a screenplay, first with Millard Kaufman, later with Abby Mann, but the commercial failure of Ship of Fools soured his relationship with the studio. “When they budgeted it—and we started to build sets down in Georgia—it was too much money for them. But they had a commitment to me and they said, ‘We’ll go for any picture up to $3 million to get rid of your commitment, to pay you off.’ ”
At the time, Bill Rose was in California, completing work on The Flim Flam Man, a one-off for producer Lawrence Turman and 20th Century-Fox. When told that Andersonville was about to be abandoned, Rose pressed Kramer to do one of his original stories.
I pointed out that I had profited enormously by my standards from our previous association, and that a film I had written the previous year called The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was also prospering, and that I was in a position to be of service to him and would like to be. Stanley, I recall, said that the difficulty was in finding a story. I assured him I had a hundred stories and urged him to stop thinking in terms of a story and to start thinking in terms of what I call “marquee value.” I recall saying specifically, “Who are the actors with whom you most like to work?” Stanley reflected and mentioned first Spencer Tracy as being the man for whom he had the most respect and affection in the business, but he pointed out that Mr. Tracy had been unwell and had not worked professionally since our first venture, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. He said it would be marvelous to have a story which would suit the talents of both Spencer Tracy and Miss Katharine Hepburn. I assured him that such a story would not be difficult to write, and asked what other actors he most enjoyed working with. He then said that his association with Sidney Poitier had been a particularly happy one and that he had great admiration for him. At that point, I said with some enthusiasm that if he got a pretty girl to play the part of Mr. Tracy’s and Miss Hepburn’s daughter he had the entire cast for the racial prejudice comedy which I had been trying to sell him for several years. Stanley was almost totally unimpressed.
Kramer, however, mentioned the idea of combining Tracy, Hepburn, and Poitier in a picture to Mike Frankovich, who was in charge of production at Columbia. “He took the ball,” Kramer said, “and discussed it at New York and we had a carte blanche on the material.” He then spoke to Tracy: “I decided to go ahead with that idea of Rose’s that I talked to you a long time about. He’s very enthusiastic about it and I don’t feel I can make the picture without you.”
Tracy said, “I’m in.”
“I want Kate to do that other part,” Kramer added. He spoke to Hepburn later that same day.
I said that I thought it was possible that the woman’s role was as good or better than the role I was asking Tracy to play. Her response to that was, “Well, it doesn’t have to be if he’s going to do it and if the role is at all reasonable, you know, I’d be interested in certainly doing it.” I mentioned to them at the time that I hoped to speak to Sidney Poitier sometime directly after that, and that I was hopeful I could get him to play the part because I don’t know who else I would want for it, and his part might not be as large as theirs in the film, so it bothered me as to whether or not he would take it. But I said I would certainly, on my own background with him, approach him on the strongest possible level.
This was, Kramer emphasized, before they had a script—it was just an idea and a package. “I told Mr. Tracy and Miss Hepburn we were trying to make a comedy of miscegenation.” Shortly thereafter, Kramer flew to New York and met Sidney Poitier at the Russian Tea Room. Poitier was enthusiastic about the idea of handling it as a comedy. “He, at the time, agreed that he thought it would be an adventure, and he told me that I had carte blanche to go ahead and feel he would be part of the project.”
It was only then that Kramer got back in touch with Bill Rose. “Stanley, who was in California, called me in the Channel Islands in Jersey and said, ‘I must have been out of my mind.’ I asked why and he said, ‘That story. I want it.’ I said, ‘Which story?’ He said, ‘The race comedy.’ He said that he had spoken to Tracy and to Miss Hepburn and to Poitier and that all three had reacted with great excitement and enthusiasm and that he had had time to think about the project and that he was determined to do it. He asked if I had been serious in my proposal, and I said that I had been.”
On July 5, 1966, Columbia formally agreed that Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier, and Samantha Eggar were preapproved for the project. Rose would receive $50,000 for his original story and another $150,000 for the screenplay (plus 7.5 percent of the profits). “My suggestions,” said Kramer, “encompassed a Negro maid who was involved in the story, the priest, but Mr. Rose had the fire for this story. He had the last scene written in the story, which he could recite almost verbatim as it finally appeared on the film up to and inclusive of the line, ‘Screw all the bigots. The thing for you to do is get married.’ He worked all the ideas backwards from that, really, because that was the theme of it, the importance of it.”
The development of the script took place during nighttime walks and meetings held in the drugstore at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “One of the things to which we devoted a good deal of time during those discussions,” said Rose,
was the question of the professional status of any of the central characters, and I recall specifically advancing the notion that the tone of the entire production was going to be very firmly set by the personality of Miss Hepburn. I asked that whereas Mr. Tracy was perfectly believable and acceptable in roles which ranged from a high court judge to an impoverished Cuban fisherman, that Miss Hepburn appeared to me to have distinct limitations and, for want of a better American word, an excess of class. Thus, it seemed to me it would make no sense if she played, say, the wife of a cop on the beat whose daughter became involved with a Negro cab driver. We discussed various possibilities for the character that Mr. Tracy was ultimately to portray, bearing in mind that he had to be a character of such class or status that it would be wholly credible for a personality of Miss Hepburn’s obvious status and class to have married. We considered among other possibilities that Tracy might be a United States senator or that he might be the head of a large engineering firm.
Tracy had reached a point in his life where offers had slowed to a trickle, primarily on the perception around town that he was either retired or too sick to work. Hepburn’s absence from the marketplace only reinforced such notions, and so it came as a surprise in mid-July when he attended a wedding reception for Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow. Kate had gone ahead with George Cukor, the bride’s godfather, and Tracy drove separately, pulling up at Edie and Bill Goetz’s house in his familiar old Thunderbird, the first time anyone had seen him in months. “He had no thought of going,” Cukor said, “but was appreciative of the invitation. Then he thought he might go, and he vacillated back and forth. Finally, he did attend the reception, and stayed only a little while, but of course he was the hit of the affair. He always enjoyed himself once he arrived somewhere … but he just hated to go.”
The appearance established to the Hollywood elite that he wasn’t dead quite yet and indirectly prompted an offer from producer William Dozier to make a cameo appearance on the hit TV series Batman. Dozier tried appealing to Tracy’s sense of fun, suggesting that he must have grandchildren who would get “a big boot” out of his appearing on the show. In his reply, Tracy acknowledged that it would indeed be fun “but not for my first ‘live’ time on TV. I expect to be vastly overpaid for that.”2
Subsequently, Bill Self brought a more substantial proposal, the idea of building an entire series around a character Tracy would play. “I was now president of Fox Television,” he said,
and I ran into Cukor on the lot, who was doing something. He said, “Bill, have you seen Spence and Kate lately?” I said, “No, I haven’t. It’s my fault. I’ve been busy.” He said, “You know, he’s very fond of you and he knows how well you’ve done. He watches some of your shows. You really ought to give him a call.” I said, “Well, I certainly will.” So, remembering some of my past experiences, I called Kate. And I said, “You know, I’d love to come see Spencer, but I never know where I stand with Spence. I’m cautious to call him up.” “Oh,” she says, “call him up. He’d really love to see you.” I said, “What do you think he’d say if I offered him a job?” She laughed. And she said, “Go ahead.”
So, anyway, I went up to see them … and he couldn’t have been nicer. And she couldn’t have been nicer. We reminisced and told some stories, and I said, “Spence, I’m going to suggest something to you and I hope you’re not offended.” He said, “Go ahead.” I said, “Well, I have a series I’m planning called Bracken’s World. It takes place on a movie lot, we have our own police department, our own fire department, our own schools, chorus kids and all that kind of stuff. Bracken is the lead, and if you would consider it, I could structure every script so that your scenes were very confined.” I knew he wasn’t well. “Most of the time, when you see Bracken, you see him in his office. People come to him. Or if you want to vary it a little bit, you come to a projection room. But it’s not a series where you’d have to do a lot of physical things. And you play the head of the studio.” He said, “Well, that’s kind of appealing. What are you going to pay me?” I said, “Spence, I’m not going to discuss with you what I’m going to pay you. I know you’re with the William Morris Agency and Abe Lastfogel.” He said, “No, no. Come on Bill, we’ve known each other a long time. What are you going to pay me?”
So I said, “Well, I didn’t come here prepared to discuss business with you. I have no idea.” “Well,” he said, “you must have some idea.” I said, “Well. I know what television in general can afford to pay. I will ad-lib to you a formula, in that I will pay you $10,000 a day for every day you work, with a minimum of maybe two days a week that you get paid no matter what. If you work three days, you get $30,000. If you work two days you get $20,000. I just know that we can afford that; whether it’s fair or not, I don’t know.” So he says, “Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.” He looked at Kate and said, “What do you think?” and she said that didn’t sound too bad. So, anyway, we had that conversation. He said, “I’ll let you know. Let me think about it.” Kate walked me to the door, and she said, “Bill, Spence needs it, but I want to warn you—he may not be up to it. We’re praying that he can get through the new picture.” She said, “I wouldn’t count on it.”
Anyway, I took all this information back to NBC, and Herb Schlosser, who was head of West Coast at that time, said, “What’s he look like?” I said, “I beg your pardon? What do you mean? What’s he look like? He looks like Spencer Tracy.” He said, “Well, is he too old?” I said, “You got to be kidding. This is the biggest Academy Award winner that would ever be on your network. You ought to thank your stars that he’s even considering it.” And he said, “I’d like to meet him.” I said, “Well, let me see what I can do.” So I called Spence and said, “Herb Schlosser, the head of West Coast, blah, blah, blah, wants to meet you.” Spence says, “Why does he want to meet me?” I said, “Well, you know, he wants to be sure I’m not lying to him about the possibility of your doing it. And he’d like to report to his boss in New York that he actually met with you about it.” He said, “He just wants to see if I’m too old or something?” I said, “Of course not.” So we set up a meeting.
Schlosser was one hour late to the meeting up at Spencer’s house. And they were fuming. I was embarrassed. So the doorbell finally rang, and Kate goes to the door and opens it and says, “Are you Mr. Schlosser?” He says, “Yes.” She said, “You’re very rude.” He said, “Well, I apologize.” That’s the way the meeting started. So, at the end of the meeting, Schlosser left, and he and I walked out to the street. He said, “Well, he looks fine.” So, I went back in and Spence was showing all this interest. I went back to my office, and then I got a phone call from Abe Lastfogel. He said, “Bill, what the hell are you doing? I’ve known you twenty years. You know you shouldn’t talk to Spence about money.” I said, “I know that. He doesn’t know it.” And I went through the whole thing about what happened. He said, “Well, look. We’re not going to work for that kind of money. If Spence does a television series, and he likes your idea, he’s going to have to have ownership, he’s going to have to have residuals, he’s going to have to have some controls, et cetera and so forth.” I said, “Fine. If he really goes forward, we’ll sit down and talk about all of those things. At the moment, I’m not sure he’s really going to do it.”
Once Tracy committed to the new picture, which quickly picked up the title Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Stanley Kramer got into the habit of stopping by St. Ives whenever there was news to report. “The anticipation of going to work again was one of the things which bolstered him up a great deal,” Kramer said, “and one of the reasons why I was anxious that he be kept apprised of as much as I knew at the time, because we did not have a script per se.” At first, Kramer left the exact plot of the film murky, positioning it to Columbia management as a “social comedy” while cobbling together all the elements of the package, principal among them assurances that the film would go forward should ill health force Tracy to drop out.
On September 21, Kramer outlined the specifics of the deal in a memo to Columbia’s Gordon Stulberg: Tracy would receive $200,000—$50,000 at the end of photography, $75,000 one year later, and the balance a year after that. Also $150,000 deferred from profits. Hepburn would get $150,000 and a small percentage of Kramer’s own share of the profits.
Hepburn will be in the third position behind Tracy and Poitier, but I have agreed to talk to Poitier about letting her split the two men just for balance … No compensation shall accrue either to Spencer or to Katie until they have either completed rendition of their services in the picture … Katie will be covered by cast insurance and will have to take a cast physical. Spencer will not be covered by any insurance. It is understood that if Spencer is unable to finish the rendition of his services because of his physical condition or his failure or refusal to perform, neither he nor Katie will be entitled to any compensation unless the picture is released containing the results and proceeds of his services. In other words, if he should finish 75% of his services and then is unable to continue for health reasons, they would not be entitled to any compensation unless the picture is not re-shot and they appear in the roles for which they are employed in the picture and it is released … Katie would have the option to play the female role if Spencer’s part were recast and re-shot.
Four days later, Kramer announced the project by way of a press conference held in the studio dining room. Tracy, looking dapper in a blue blazer and gray slacks, was in the best of moods, relaxed and agreeable. How did he feel about going back to work? “I feel great about this one,” he said. “I keep reading about actors who have turned down 30 or 35 scripts. I’ve turned down a couple and they’ve been made … It was just as well I turned them down. But I knew Stanley would come up with something eventually.” What was it like filming with Miss Hepburn? “Gee whiz, I can’t remember. What’s it been? Ten years? Desk Set was the last one. No. We worked well together. We didn’t mind cutting one another off now and then.” He said he rarely saw motion pictures any more, and that “mostly I just stay home and read books.” When pressed, he mentioned enjoying several recent war novels and Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer.
The news got excellent play in the domestic press, and the accompanying photos showed Tracy looking better than he had in years, robust and smiling. In October, Bill Rose sent 102 pages consisting of “part dialogue, part discussion, and part treatment” that would form the basis of the screenplay. He returned to California in December and completed a first draft in early January 1967. As was his habit of forty years, Tracy gave Rose’s script to Louise for her reaction, and she, in turn, passed it along to Johnny and Susie. Nobody liked it—particularly Louise. (“I had to say I didn’t. I couldn’t say that I did.”) Spence and Louise had always been on opposite sides of the political spectrum, and as the kids had been reared in their mother’s church, so had they also come to subscribe to her political beliefs. “He was a Democrat,” said Susie, “surrounded by Republicans.”
Weeze didn’t much care for the subject matter, nor did she like Rose’s comedic treatment of it. Yet it was material both Spence and Kate felt strongly about; Tracy, in fact, had personally broken the color line at Romanoff’s in 1954 when he brought Willie Mays to dinner. (“Well, a gasp went up when a black man walked into the room,” said Laraine Day, who was married to Leo Durocher at the time. “Tracy just cut that right off and put him down at the table and pretty soon then everybody was eating again, after they got over the initial shock.”)
“We were all very taken aback that he was going to do a picture like that,” Susie remembered. “He came up to the house on Tower Road, and we walked around the motor court, all of us … He wanted to do it; I think he was a little testy that we weren’t more for it. My mother said, ‘Would you want Susie to marry a black man?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t care if Susie said she wanted to marry a fuzzy-wuzzy.’ I think he was just annoyed that we didn’t [like it] and that was the tack he took. He just sort of bristled at the whole thing.” Louise advised against doing the picture. “However,” she qualified, “if you must work, you won’t find an easier one, excepting for that long speech [at the end].”
With filming set to begin in March, only the role of the daughter was left to be filled. Kramer had decided that he didn’t need a big name in the part and was on the verge of giving it to Hepburn’s twenty-one-year-old niece, Katharine Houghton. In May 1964, when Houghton was still an undergraduate, Kate had sent over some pictures when Kramer was casting Ship of Fools. The following year, while passing through New York, Kramer caught Houghton in Garson Kanin’s staging of A Very Rich Woman at the Belasco. “She had a small part,” he remembered, “but she impressed me.” About the same time Carl Reiner read her for a part in Enter Laughing. “We had a wonderful time together,” Houghton recalled. “He was very funny about saying I was a good little actress but not a good Jew.” It was Reiner who reminded Kramer that Houghton was Hepburn’s niece.
In the fall of 1966, Kramer was bound for New York to see “many young actresses” when Hepburn told him, “You must see my niece.” Said Kramer: “I went, I saw her, and I was completely intrigued.” In California he asked Hepburn if she thought young Kathy was up to the role. “We discussed my trepidation that if it were not played very carefully it might be thought to be very silly, could go overboard very easily, but we wanted to maintain this attitude of almost never-never land despite everything.” Houghton, who turned down a role on TV’s Peyton Place to remain available for the film, met Kramer in New York for a formal audition. “I asked him what he wanted me to read and he said, ‘Start at the beginning and read all the parts.’ So I did. I was particularly good as Poitier.”
Actress Karen Sharpe, who had recently become Stanley Kramer’s third wife, recalled that the choice came down to Mariette Hartley, who, at twenty-six, was in the proper age range, and Katharine Houghton. “I said, ‘What does she look like? And can she act?’ He said, ‘Well, she looks a little bit like Kate.’ I said, ‘Take her. Use her.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because she’s her niece. It’s great for the film; it’s great publicity. Why not do it? She’s got Kate and Spence, and she’s got you. You’re the director—do it.’ ”
Houghton was set for the film in late January 1967. According to Abe Lastfogel, her aunt reviewed and approved her deal, which included options on four additional pictures. “She’s a bloody lucky girl,” Hepburn said, “to be starting with Spence.”
The screenplay had been finalized and Kramer’s production manager, Ivan Volkman, was working out the shooting schedule when Tracy suffered another attack of pulmonary edema on the morning of February 19. “He’d been pretty well controlled with his heart medications and his diet,” Dr. Covel said, “[but] he’d been off his diet, had been taking an extra amount of salt, which helps to precipitate heart failure. You take an overload of salt. Part of the treatment of heart failure is to restrict the salt and get rid of the extra salt in the body with diuretics. He’d go off his diet and eat something he liked … He awakened with shortness of breath … took some coffee and went back to bed and was again short of breath. He called his housekeeper for oxygen. She was unable to start it and he panicked and became severely short of breath. The rescue squad was called, and I was called … He was treated with morphine intravenously, and by twelve noon he was back to normal.”
The episode made the papers on the twenty-first, prompting Tracy to call the doctor, worried he was putting Kramer and the studio at too great a risk. “I went over to the house to see him. He was fine … I thought he could work if it could be properly controlled.” At first Kramer assumed Tracy to be uninsurable. Then two insurance doctors consulted with Dr. Covel and it looked as if he could be insured, but at the astronomical premium of $71,000. (By comparison, the cast insurance premium for Mad World, covering thirteen artists, including Tracy, was $193,820.) With insurance and neither Tracy nor Hepburn accepting compensation until their scenes had been completed, Frankovich and Stulberg were willing to take the risk.
Then came the matter of billing. Tracy would, of course, be billed first above the title, but for the first time in their nine pictures together, Hepburn’s name would not be next to his—Sidney Poitier’s would. Graciously, the younger man had ceded first position to Tracy but held firm to second billing, despite Kramer’s having spoken with him, at Kate’s insistence, about letting her split the two men “just for balance.” Aside from being Hollywood’s only black leading man, Poitier was also Hollywood’s only black movie star. Arguably, he was a bigger draw at the box office than either Tracy or Hepburn. Kate, however, thought it only appropriate, given their history, that she and Spence be billed side by side and was likely nursing a grudge the day the forty-year-old actor was brought to the birdcage for an initial meeting.
“When I arrived at her door and that door opened, she looked at me and didn’t say a word and didn’t crack a smile,” Poitier recalled. “But that was her M.O. After the longest while she said, ‘Hello, Mr. Poitier,’ and I said, ‘Hello, Miss Hepburn,’ and the conversation began. I could tell I was being sized up every time I spoke, every response I made. I could imagine a plus and a minus column, notations in her mind. That’s how big a step this was for her, at least to my mind.3 After that first meeting, Stanley took me to Tracy’s house [off] Doheny Drive for a little dinner party with the two of them and some other guests. This time Miss Hepburn was much more natural and at ease, but it was still obvious that I was under close observation by both of them.”
Poitier wasn’t a man with a chip on his shoulder, but he was sensitive to whites who may never have encountered blacks who were doctors, teachers, lawyers … or actors. “I must say I haven’t known any colored person particularly well,” Hepburn freely admitted at the time. “I’ve never had one as a friend. But I can’t see any difference and I’m sure there isn’t any difference. It’s all a question of a man is a man is a man.” Bill Rose’s script was as much about the generational divide in families as it was about race, all the parents in the story having presumably been born between 1900 and 1910, when the racial equation in America was vastly different. Poitier gave them the benefit of the doubt: “I looked at them as ordinary, decent folks. And in fact they turned out to be that—and a hell of a lot more. But they were anxious early on, for good reason, and they simply had to find out about me.”
It was, Poitier said, some evening.
When the delicious meal was over and the after-drinks had been served, Miss Hepburn encouraged Mr. Tracy to entertain us with some of the classic stories he had a reputation for spinning. They were delightful stories, beautifully told, but more arresting than the stories was Miss Hepburn’s reaction to them. Although she must have heard them dozens of times, she listened to each one with wide-eyed fascination, as if she were hearing it for the first time. It was heart-warming to see how much affection flowed between that man and that woman. He treated her with an offhand appreciation, but at the same time he obviously loved her. “Oh, Katie, just shut up and let me tell the story,” was one of the ways he showed her who was boss. And I got the impression that was the way she liked it.
Preproduction on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner began on March 6, 1967, when Kramer began making process plates and shooting car run-throughs at San Francisco International Airport. Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton, dressed to work, flew in the following morning to film exteriors at the airport and on the sidewalk outside the art gallery owned in the movie by Hepburn’s character, Christina Drayton. When, at the end of a long day, Houghton got to her room at the St. Francis Hotel, there was a message to call Kate.
“The film’s going to be canceled,” Hepburn told her niece. Spooked by the news of Tracy’s most recent edema attack, the insurance company had backed away, declining, in effect, to shoulder the risk of Tracy’s illness or death at any price. Working the phones—and unwilling to settle for another actor in the role of Matt Drayton—Kramer struck an eleventh-hour bargain with Frankovich and Stulberg, agreeing to defer his own $300,000 salary until the successful completion of Tracy’s scenes. “My head was on the chopping block,” he said. “Spencer was shot to pieces by all those years of drinking. If he died, I’d be ruined.”
Rehearsals began the following Monday on Columbia’s Stage 9, where the entire ground floor of the Draytons’ French Colonial home—entry hall, living room, study, sewing room, dining room, pantry, kitchen—had been erected. Designed by Robert Clatworthy, the set included a terrace and garden area, and a panorama of the city below. A conference table and ten chairs had been set up on the terrace, with floor heaters scattered about and six stage dressing rooms off to one side. Kramer got the cast on their feet the next day, working through the early scenes involving Houghton, Poitier, Hepburn, and actress Isobel Sanford as the family’s longtime housekeeper, Tillie. Tracy wasn’t required that day, and it was then that Kramer outlined his plan for getting the picture made.
“His idea,” said Marshall Schlom, “was that we would shoot up to about four or four-thirty, light for the next morning, and then, because of Tracy’s health, bring Tracy in at ten o’clock, do all of his work, and then he’d go home and then I would play Tracy offstage. Stanley pitched this at the reading, and they all said, ‘Absolutely.’ I said, ‘I’m not an actor, but I will study his delivery and I’ll try and do it as best I can.’ Poitier was great. He put his arm around me and said, ‘I have faith in you.’ ”
Tracy appeared the next morning for a makeup test, as the Caucasians in the cast had to wear a dark base to narrow the contrast, for photographic purposes, between their skin tones and those of the African American actors. He then joined Kate on the set to rehearse his first scenes in the picture, the ones in which Matt hears for the first time of Joey and John’s plans to be wed. It would, in some ways, be the most intense three days of rehearsal Tracy had ever endured for a picture, taking his character up to the point where he comes out against the marriage. “In the rehearsals,” Kramer said, “I drained Kate and Spencer. I made them simply give out every single idea, every concept they could. Once I came to shooting, I’d exhausted all the avenues and that was going to be the best I could do.”
“We had some tensions on the picture,” Kramer acknowledged.
I was irritated by [Kate’s] fear over her so-called “ugly neck”—she wore scarves and high collars, and “played low.” Many times she would come in a room and kneel, or sit down at once, so people wouldn’t be aware of her neck. During rehearsal, Tracy would be sitting there; suddenly she’d come in and she’d kneel. He’d say, “What the hell are you doin’ kneeling?” And she’d say, very grandly, “Spencer, I just thought it would be appropriate,” and he’d mock her highfalutin’ accent, saying, “Spensah! Christ, you talk like you’ve got a feather up your ass all the time! Get out of there, will yah?” And she’d start to say, “I just thought that—” and he’d snap out, “Just do what the director guy tells you, will ya?” and she’d reply, humbly, “All right.” She’d take anything from him. She’d take nothing from anybody else, from him everything.
Filming began on March 20 with Joey and John’s arrival at the house and continued chronologically for the balance of the week. Tracy remained sequestered in his home on St. Ives, studying the script and conserving his energy. At night he would enjoy the single Danish beer he permitted himself—“I’m having my one beer,” he would say—and eat supper with Kate and Katharine (whom he called Kath or sometimes “the kid”).
“My aunt had no desire to be a wife,” Houghton remarked. “That was something almost repellent to her. But I think the role of helpmate and companion and ‘significant other’ (or whatever you want to call it) was something she took great pride in. She was very proud of Spencer. She adored him. And she also thought that he was a consummate artist. If she hadn’t felt he was a consummate artist she wouldn’t have been interested in him. It far outweighed any of his other peccadilloes … She always felt that he was a better actor than she was, and she liked that. It comforted her to feel that she was in the presence of somebody who was superior to her.”
Tracy’s work on the picture began with a ten o’clock call on Monday, March 27. Matt enters the house through a side door and encounters Tillie, who, arms waving, tells him, “All hell’s done broke loose now!” In Rose’s script, Drayton bolts through the living room, banging his knee on a table and noisily knocking over some bric-a-brac on his way to the terrace. Tracy eschewed the cheap slapstick for subtler business, playing the scene as a concerned father, slightly befuddled when told an unfamiliar doctor is on the premises. (“The key to Spencer is that he plays with humor always,” said Hepburn. “He sees the ludicrous side to everything.”) He finished at 11:30 and left for the day, leaving the reaction shots and close-ups of the other actors to be played with Marshall Schlom.
The next day was a different story. Invigorated by the work, Tracy stayed until three, completing the first part of the lengthy scene in which Matt meets John Wade Prentice for the first time. The next day he remained until 4:15, and the day after that until 4:50. Nine days into filming,Sidney Poitier had a critical scene to play with just Tracy and Hepburn in Matt’s study, where Prentice tells Joey’s parents there will be no marriage unless they unequivocally approve of the union.
“I had all the words,” Poitier said. “Very well written scene too. And came time, and I’m thoroughly rehearsed. I knew everything I wanted to do. I was prepared to do my shadings, had little nuances here and there, was ready I thought. The quiet came on the set, as usually it does just before they roll. They rolled the camera, and I’m ready to start the scene and I started the scene. And suddenly into my mind came the realization that I am working in concert with these two people. I went up. I couldn’t remember a word. I blew every line for at least 45 minutes. I couldn’t—I couldn’t work. I was awestruck, actually. Simple as that.”
Hepburn said:
[H]e had played quite a few scenes with me first, which didn’t discombobulate him at all. He just was Sidney Poitier, a good actor. But when he first met Spencer, Spencer was sitting in the foreground … I was standing back … and Poitier comes in from the side to ask Spencer for his daughter’s hand in marriage. And Poitier came in and looked at Spence and couldn’t think of a word. Not a word. Just blank. So, Kramer said, “Well, let’s try it again.” And the same thing happened. He got about one line out and dried. So this was a rather serious situation. Kramer said, “Well, let’s do it tomorrow morning.” [The next morning] I said to Spencer, “I’m on my way. What time are you going to leave?” And he said, “I don’t know what time I’m going to leave. I may not go at all.” I said, “What the hell do you mean, you may not go at all? It’s Poitier’s big scene.” And he said, “Yes, that’s what I mean. I think he might be happier without those two old owls staring at him.”
So he didn’t go—I went. I thought, “Well, he’s just wrong.” But I thought, “Well, he’s pretty sensitive,” on my way down. So I went to my dressing room, and I wrote a note to Stanley Kramer and sent it over to him on the set. I didn’t appear. I said, “I’m here in case you want me.” And he had someone rush back and say, “Please stay where you are.”
Tracy began work on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in high spirits. (SUSIE TRACY)
With the picture under way, Hepburn did her best to manage the working environment at the studio as thoroughly as she controlled the living environment at home. “She wanted us all to learn how to play tennis at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Leah Bernstein, Earl Kramer’s secretary, remembered. Nothing and nobody escaped her attention, and she weighed in on matters of wardrobe, lighting, and camera angles, as well as the fine art of washing one’s own hair. She called it “keeping the set alive so everyone won’t go to sleep,” but she also admitted to a long-held ambition to direct a picture. “She and I had a strange relationship,” Kramer reflected, “because I loved Tracy, and I think he loved me, and, in a way, I felt for a while that Kate and I were rivals. Isn’t that a peculiar way to feel? Of course, we weren’t. But he’d keep saying to Kate, ‘Don’t bug him, don’t bother him. Jeez, he’s worked it out, for Christ’s sake.’ ”
Little escaped Kate’s notice. She was a constant presence on the set when Tracy was working. (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy worked a full day on his sixty-seventh birthday, playing his first scene with veteran actor Cecil Kellaway, who, at seventy-three, was having trouble mastering his lines. Tracy and Hepburn assured him it was “just one of those days” and stayed with him as Kramer made multiple takes, literally piecing his performance together line by line. That evening was like any other, dinner in the living room at St. Ives, Tracy in his horsehair chair, Kath to his right on the couch. “Your job is to entertain Spencer every time I go out of the room,” her aunt had told her, and Tracy, it seemed, was only too eager to engage her.
“Kath,” he said to her one evening, “you studied philosophy?”
“Yes.”
“Now, if your aunt comes back in the room, change the subject.”
“Okay.”
“What do you think happens when you die?”
Houghton recalled:
This was a conversation that had no end, a metaphysical conversation, but I didn’t have my aunt’s attitude that it was not something intelligent people talked about. She would be happy to talk about sex or vivisection or anything you wanted to talk about, but you couldn’t talk about anything to do with life after death. Spencer would say, “She thinks that when you die you just rot in the ground.” So he wouldn’t talk about it in front of her. There were a few priests that he was friendly with, and I know he talked with them about metaphysics, so I was sort of a poor substitute for a priest when they weren’t around.
I said, “Well, I can tell you what I don’t think happens.” He said, “What?” And I said, “I don’t think you go to Hell or Heaven.” He said, “You don’t think I’m going to pay for my sins in Hell?” I said, “No.” He said, “What do you think is going to happen to me?” I said, “I think that your spirit will live on and that all kinds of wonderful and mysterious things will happen to you.”
What he was really thinking when he would ask me these questions, I don’t know. But he did say to me, “I’m going to pay for my sins. I’ve not been a good person, and I’m going to pay for it.” I would say, “I think you have paid for it. I think you pay for your sins on this earth, in this life. I don’t think it’s going to happen after you die.” He’d say, “Shhh—here she comes.” So then we’d talk about something else. And then she’d go out of the room again.
I’d say, “Come on, Spencer. You’ve been a wonderfully positive influence in this world on millions of people whom you don’t even know. You can’t just discount that.” And he would say, “I haven’t done anything worthwhile except for the John Tracy Clinic.” So all the peccadilloes, the other women, the fights, the binges—whatever it was that was going through his mind as his litany of sins—haunted him.
Production moved ahead fitfully, Tracy channeling all the energy he could muster into his time before the camera, brightening and then fading again like a manually powered lightbulb. “I think,” said Marshall Schlom, “he was embarrassed that it got down to this, that his career ended up with his not being able to act the way he normally would act. We were all pulling for him, obviously, [but] in Judgment at Nuremberg he was a vital man. He wasn’t vital on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner at all. We supported him, and we felt badly for him. And it was as if he was thinking, ‘Okay, you’re sensitive and I’m letting you down.’ I think he was that kind of a man, that he had that kind of integrity. I personally felt very badly because I had to stand there and say his words for him. And I know how he must have been embarrassed about that.”
By the middle of April, Tracy’s energy was flagging, and Kramer reverted to his original plan. Each day Tracy would arrive on the stage at ten o’clock, made up and ready to work, and the filming of the master shot would generally be the first order of business. Kramer would move in for Tracy’s close-ups, the few over-the-shoulder shots that were deemed necessary, and then he would leave for home when the company broke for lunch.
“Kramer tried to work him as little as possible,” said Katharine Houghton, “and when he did work, almost always only his shots were done. He was always letter perfect, and sometimes improvised some amusing dialogue. It was a big thing every time he did a scene and it got in the can.” More acutely aware than anyone of what was riding on the picture, Tracy took to calling out to Sam Leavitt, Kramer’s director of photography, “Did you get any of it, Sam?”
Between shots he would sit calmly drinking from an ever-present glass of milk, an ice cube bobbing on its surface. (“Milkman, milkman!” he would call. “If I couldn’t have my one glass of beer at night, I’d really be through.”) Jack Hamilton, a senior editor from Look, came to the set and was surprised by Kate’s almost conspiratorial welcome, due in part to the presence of actor Roddy McDowall, who was serving as photographer for the magazine. “I know what you fellows are after,” she told them. “I’ll try to give you something interesting.” Later, Hamilton was plopped down next to Tracy, and eventually Hepburn marched off. “Do you notice she’s the same with everybody—how she always tries to help people?” Tracy mused, regarding her affectionately. “She helps little Kathy, she helps Cecil Kellaway in his long dialogue, she helps me, she helps you …”
George Glass, Kramer’s associate producer, began allowing selected journalists to visit what was otherwise considered a closed set. UPI’s Vernon Scott observed a scene being made and spent a moment with Tracy and Hepburn between shots. “He is the best actor I’ve ever seen or worked with,” Kate said in a familiar refrain. “I’m still learning things from Spence.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Tracy grumbled, clearly pained at such hyperbole.
“Oh, yes I do. He can focus on a line or an expression thoroughly. His mind seems absorbed totally by what he’s doing. I’ve never seen anything like it. I try, but it’s not the same.”
Rehearsing a scene for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Left to right: Sidney Poitier, Tracy, Katharine Houghton, Katharine Hepburn, and Stanley Kramer. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Columnist Dorothy Manners came the following week and had her moments with Tracy completely apart from Hepburn. “This is absolutely my last picture,” he said flatly. “I’ve had it and I feel my fans have had it. From now on I hope to spend my time catching up on the places I’ve wanted to go, the books I’ve wanted to read, the people I want to know better.” Manners wondered if the state of his health had something to do with his determination to retire. “No, I feel well. I’m just too old to go on. I don’t talk about my birthdays. I had one right on this picture, but no one came around with a cake. I would have thrown it right in his kisser.”
The most lengthy interview Tracy gave on the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was to journalist Roy Newquist, who was compiling material for what was to become a book on the making of the film. Tracy talked of his early days in the theater, Kate seated at his side, urging him on. (“Well, tell him how you got the job with George M. Cohan—that’s a good story.”) He sounded tired, displaying none of the vigor he showed on camera. “I miss M-G-M,” he said at one point, “but all the people I really knew there are gone. Scattered or dead. There’s hardly anyone I know there, now. I’m the last of the tribe.”
One figure from his M-G-M days, now in his mid-thirties, was sneaked onto the set one day by a friend of his, a studio plumber, “literally through the back door.” He found Tracy sitting alone.
“Uncle Spencer?” he said, walking up to him.
Tracy’s eyes shot up, regarding him warily.
“I’m Bobs Watson. I played Pee Wee in Boys Town.”
“Oh my God! Bobby!” Suddenly he was full of life. “Bobby, how are you? What are you doing?” Watson had been working as an actor, taking occasional roles on television.
“I’m going into the ministry,” he said.
Tracy froze a moment, a bit shocked, and then he said with a smile, “That’s just fine … That’s marvelous! I’m happy for you. I’m really proud of you.”
“And I wanted to tell you that though I know it was a role, the way you were as Father Flanagan—the warmth and loving and caring I felt—was a major influence on my decision to enter the ministry.”
When Bobs Watson recalled the encounter in 1991, he had been a Methodist minister for twenty-two years. “I could tell that he was very moved, that it made a profound impact on him.” Had he gone through channels, Watson would never have gotten on the set, as Hepburn routinely discouraged guests. “I was going to go visit him,” Jean Simmons said, “and I was told that it was better not to because he was not well. I should have insisted, and I regret that I didn’t.” A. C. Lyles, who was based nearby at Paramount, called and Kramer asked that he delay his visit. “Please wait until we call you,” he said.
Hepburn was busy crafting her own performance while seeing to Tracy’s health and well-being, knowing he could suffer a serious setback at any time, delaying the picture or shutting it down entirely. “She was under more pressure than anybody,” said Katharine Houghton. “To see the love of your life fading before your eyes—she was extremely tense through the whole picture.”
As bossy and insufferable as she could be under normal circumstances, Kate grew even more controlling as the film progressed, desperate to see Tracy through what would likely be his final role. “One night—it was a Saturday night—I said I was going to go out with friends,” Houghton remembered.
She absolutely hit the ceiling. I can understand she might be worried that I’d get in a car accident or something, but it was also an extraordinary way to behave to a younger woman who was in her twenties. If I had been in my teens, I could see her saying, “Who is it?” and “Where are you going?” But she also knew me well enough by now to know that I was not a drinker or high-liver. I certainly wasn’t going to jeopardize my work. I was very, very disciplined. So she blew the whole thing up into a great brouhaha that then became Spencer was angry with me. Phyllis Wilbourn called and said, “Your aunt is very upset with you. And not only that—Mr. Tracy is very upset with you.” That really bothered me, because I didn’t want him to be angry with me.
Before I went out with my friends, I stopped at the house and she came to the kitchen door. I said, “I want to speak to Spencer.” She said, “You can’t. He’s in bed.” As if I’d killed him. I said, “Well, I’m going into the bedroom.” So I walked into the bedroom, and there he was in bed with his pajamas on. I was very upset, and I sat down by his bed and I said to him, “Spencer, I don’t want you to be angry with me. I’m sorry that I caused all of this trouble, but I’m just going out with my friends. We’re going to dinner at one of their homes in Pacific Palisades. They’re very nice people, and they don’t misbehave. They don’t do drugs.” (I didn’t say “drink” because I didn’t want to offend him.) “I’ll be back early …” He said to me, “Don’t worry about it, Little Kath. Your aunt is just a big fuss.”
He knew her game, but I think she also had gotten him upset. I think she had gotten him into a kind of How dare she? frame of mind. Then Kate lit into me later: “Spencer thinks you’re the most ungrateful person in the world. Here I have done all of this for you and you’re so ungrateful.” Her way of talking to me was one of the reasons I left Hollywood soon after the film was over. It did not impress me as the right way to behave. If she was doing that to me, I have to assume that she did it to other people, and maybe, to a certain extent, she was manipulative with him too.4 After that, he seemed to forget about it, but she hung onto it. And she told me persistently, and other people too, that Spencer didn’t like me. And I don’t believe that was true. I don’t know that he had any wild feelings about me one way or the other. There was never any unpleasantness between us. He was always very good to me, always very protective of me.
The element of the film that concerned Tracy the most was the climactic speech he had to make to the assembled members of the Drayton and Prentice families. With stage directions, it took up nearly five single-spaced pages in the script. He brooded over it, practicing the scene around the house. One evening, when Katharine Houghton was sitting with him at St. Ives, he turned to her and started to tell her something. “The moment I walked into this house this afternoon, Miss Binks said to me, ‘Well, all hell’s done broke loose now.’ I asked her, naturally enough, to what she referred, and she said, ‘You’ll see.’ And I did. After some preliminary guessing games, at which I was never very good, it was explained to me by my daughter that she intended to get married …” At first Houghton thought he was talking about Susie, and then it dawned on her that he was speaking to her in character.
Kramer knew he couldn’t possibly shoot Matt’s statement in one continuous take. “But,” he said,
it was the summation of everything he felt. What everybody else felt. What they should feel. Et cetera, et cetera. “And don’t interrupt me!” That sort of thing. So it had to be made to feel like one. My own experience as an editor helped some, because I broke it into five sections, so that he only had to do one page per day. Maybe one day was one-and-a-quarter pages and the next day was three-quarters, depending upon where it ended. But it always ended on a turn and an exit, so that it could be picked up on the next day. Or on a close-up, so it could drop back to a [wider] shot the next day. And it was all plotted out, rehearsed, reviewed with him how he would do it. And he was such a consummate artist that it [just felt] as one.
Kramer scheduled a private rehearsal—only the two of them and Marshall Schlom—for Saturday, May 6. There would then be a full rehearsal with the cast on Monday morning. Then the actual filming of the scene would begin, five days in all.
Tracy worked as usual on May 4, then was caught short of breath while Kate was still at the studio. “He was sitting in a chair hyperventilating,” Dr. Covel remembered. “Over-breathing out of anxiety.” He had no call for Friday, and Hepburn thought it best to forgo the Saturday rehearsal Kramer had scheduled. The rehearsal for Monday had to be scratched as well, and Kramer was forced to substitute a San Francisco bar scene with Poitier and Houghton for Tuesday’s scheduled work on the summation.
In a letter to a journalist, George Glass described the on-the-set situation as “tenser than tense.” There was a terrific sense of relief when Tracy reappeared on Wednesday morning and work on the sequence could finally began. The company was now five days behind schedule, but Kramer could see no way of picking up speed without exacerbating Tracy’s latent anxieties and risking the completion of the picture. The actors took their positions, and, after some preliminaries, Tracy began his oration:
MATT
I have a few things to say and you just might think they’re important. This has been a very strange day—I don’t think that’s putting it too strongly. I might even say it’s been an extraordinary day…
The first day’s work was completed at 11:45 and Tracy went home to nap as he did on Thursday and Friday, working for the week a total of six hours and ten minutes. On Monday it took another two hours for Tracy to work up to the point where, on Tuesday, the fifth day, he could make one of the most affecting speeches of his life. His call, as usual, was for ten o’clock, but Kramer, in concert with Bill Rose, had eliminated the last scene in the script, where the families gather at the airport to see John and Joey off to Geneva. This would be it—the end of the picture—and it couldn’t be done in the space of two hours. Tracy, for the last time on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, would work a full day.
Told by Mrs. Prentice, in a previous scene, that he has forgotten it all, forgotten what true passion is, Matt has remained out in the night air, pondering what she has said, what Christina has said, what John and Joey have said, and attempting to square it all with his own values and beliefs. Rose’s screenplay called for Matt to show fierce intensity, to shake his head, to register uncertainty, doubt, anxiety.
Now he stands staring vacantly up into the night at where, when he was a boy, Heaven was said to be. His glance moves slowly but with the speed of light from star to star as he recalls exactly what it was like to love Christina as he first loved Christina. And it’s true: he had forgotten, and he knows it. He stands there, and his expression now reveals a kind of astonished wonder. He seems stunned. Quietly, but aloud:
MATT
I’ll be a son of a bitch…
Tracy had dispensed with the tics and grimaces called for in the text, giving the audience a clean slate on which to overlay the character’s thoughts and transitions. Now he would give voice to his convictions and pay tribute to the woman who had made herself an indispensable part of his life for more than a quarter century. “And here I came to visit that particular day,” said Karen Kramer. “Kate came up to me: ‘You must be very quiet—Spence is working.’ I said, ‘Kate, I’ve been in the business many years. I’m not going to speak, so don’t worry about it.’ ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but you’ve got to be quiet to stay. This is a very important part of the picture.’ She was being a director. Spencer would just look and roll his eyes.”
Seated next to Roy Glenn, Sr., a veteran of previous films with Sidney Poitier and the Amos ’n Andy TV series, Tracy began:
MATT
Now Mr. Prentice, clearly a most reasonable man, says that he has no wish to offend me and wants to know if I’m some kind of nut. And Mrs. Prentice says, like her husband, I’m a burnt-out old shell of a man who can’t even remember what it’s like to love a woman the way her son loves my daughter…
There were breaks throughout the day, during which Tracy rested. “Our reaction shots were done without him, at least mine were,” said Katharine Houghton. “I vividly remember pretending like mad that I was watching and listening to him.” Kramer plotted Tracy’s movements around the room as if choreographing a dance number, the goal being to position Hepburn in the shot at significant moments, Spence, appropriately enough, in the foreground, Kate, eyes glistening, in the soft focus of the background.
Tracy continued when filming resumed:
And strange as it seems, that’s the first statement anybody’s made to me all day on which I’m prepared to take issue. Because I think you’re wrong. You’re as wrong as you can be. I admit that I hadn’t considered it. Hadn’t even thought about it. But I know exactly what he feels for her, and there is nothing—absolutely nothing—that your son feels for my daughter … that I didn’t feel for Christina. Old? Yes. Burnt out? Certainly. But I can tell you the memories are still there—clear … intact … indestructible. And they’ll still be there if I live to be a hundred and ten. Where John made his mistake, I think, was attaching so much importance to what her mother and I might think. Because in the last analysis it doesn’t matter a damn what we think. The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel … for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt … that’s everything.
The catch in his voice was as genuine as anything he ever displayed on the screen, and, by all accounts, Kate’s tears were just as real. “It was a superb, moving, and flawless performance,” wrote Charles Champlin, the columnist and film critic for the Los Angeles Times, who had been allowed on the set to watch, “and when at last Stanley Kramer, gently enough, said, ‘Cut,’ there was a burst of applause.”
Kramer captured reaction shots of them both, Kate, her lips quivering, Spence, smiling warmly, contentedly, back at her, and then the company broke for lunch. The afternoon was a long one, more resolution, a benediction of sorts for the two lovers soon to be off on their new life together. “Every person on that sound stage that afternoon became engrossed with Spencer Tracy’s character as that remarkable actor did his job,” Sidney Poitier wrote. “With unbelievable skill and finesse he dotted his i’s and flicked his commas, and hit his periods, and touched down lightly on his conjunctions on his way to making magic. We, his fellow actors in the scene, began falling under his spell until he had succeeded in converting all of us, one by one, into a single, captivated audience.”
At the conclusion of the scene, Christina marches forward and gives her husband a firm shake of the hand, a wry, congratulatory gesture for finally coming to his senses, another Tracy-Hepburn fade-out based on restraint and good sense, as any other actress on the screen would have tearfully thrown her arms around him and bawled like a baby. “They didn’t need to embrace,” Kramer later explained. “They never did embrace. They needed only to have the foundation of something that was very special. That’s what you look for in your life all the time. They had it. Whether they had it in real life and in their performance is almost beside the point. They had it.”
“They must have been very relieved when that scene was finished,” Katharine Houghton said. “It was the end of the film, most likely Tracy’s last film, and maybe even his last days. Everyone on the set knew he was ill, but I’m not sure they knew how ill. Kate knew. Kramer knew. I knew—just exactly what was at stake. After Spencer’s monologue the atmosphere on set was very emotional, but not entirely celebratory because one couldn’t help but think ahead and dread what was soon to come.”
At the end of the day, Tracy put his arm around Kramer: “You know, Kiddo, if I die on the way home tonight, you are all right. You can release the picture because my scenes are finished, and you don’t need me for these last three days.”
The pressure was off. He had done it.
The cast came together again on May 19, Tracy and Hepburn making the scenes that would surround a little self-standing vignette in which the Draytons go out for ice cream and Matt backs into the souped-up jalopy of a belligerent black kid. Scene 73 showed their return to the house. Tracy was required to mount the stairs, turn, and deliver a furious tirade to Hepburn, then continue up the staircase to the second floor. Kramer wanted to see if Tracy could manage the entire scene in one continuous take, but it was soon apparent that he lacked the breath for it. “After one step,” saidMarshall Schlom, “he was huffing and puffing.”
Dorothy Gopadze—the venerated Miss G. of Tracy’s M-G-M days—had been waiting for a good time to bring her fourteen-year-old daughter to the studio. “He didn’t know we were on the set,” said Tina Gopadze. “He was so ill … Miss Hepburn sent word over to us: ‘Don’t let him see you.’ ”
It was a grueling morning. Finally, Kramer broke up the scene, parceling it so that Tracy could deliver his lines in a medium shot without any climbing. “He came off and he was shaking,” said Tina.
And then he looked at Mom and his eyes got wider and wider, and he started tearing up. He said, “Well! Funny thing your being here!” She said, “This is my daughter Tina.” He looked at me and said, “You’re the reason I lost Miss G.!” We all sat down on that set overlooking San Francisco, and it was with Mr. Poitier and Katharine Houghton and Miss Hepburn and Mr. Tracy. He and Mom talked a little bit. In the meantime, Miss Hepburn turned to me and said, “Don’t ever drink. Don’t ever smoke. You have to have a wonderful exemplary attitude. Do you play sports?” I said, “Yes, I do. I play tennis.” She said, “Good. Don’t end up like your mother by drinking and smoking. Your mother’s a wonderful person, but you must never do these things.” Mr. Tracy didn’t say anything, but he kept glancing over at me … They were done shooting for the day, and he wasn’t feeling well.
On Saturday he again suffered shortness of breath. (“There are all kinds of scripts for these episodes, either real or anxiety or heart failure,” Dr. Covel commented. “You can’t be certain.”) It was good for him to have Sunday to rest up.
On Monday, May 22, Tracy and Hepburn began the ice cream sequence on Columbia’s Stage 8 using the process plates made in San Francisco. “I rehearsed the ice cream eating scene with [Alexandra Hay],” Kate said, “because she had never done anything. I didn’t want her to blow when she was suddenly playing with Spencer. People got terrified, because they had this curious feeling that they were into something that was far different from just actor to actor. It was deep, exciting. And their minds went.”
Later came the most basic of all process shots—a driving scene in a breakaway car. In the script, Matt is still boiling from an angry encounter at the drive-in.
MATT
What the hell is it today? Less than twelve
percent of the people in this city are colored
people, and I can’t even have a dish of Oregon
Boysenberry Sherbert without running into one!
“I remember we shot the scene several times,” said Marshall Schlom, “and as many times as he wanted to, he purposely mispronounced the name—for fun, of course. I think the flavor’s name had a ring to it that he loved, and he had a ball rolling the syllables around in his mouth … I remember sitting at dailies watching the scene several times, and I detected an ever-so-slight mispronunciation each time.” The version Kramer chose to use had Matt angrily pounding the steering wheel and substituting “Boozenberry” for “Boysenberry.” The next day, the two scenes with Hay were completed without incident.
On Wednesday, May 24, D’Urville Martin, as Frankie, the kid with the roadster, played his scene with Tracy, again on the process stage. “I rehearsed quite a bit with Stanley Kramer,” Martin recalled.
In his trailer, in his office…[Then] I rehearsed with Spencer Tracy. We rehearsed over and over and over. This little scene! And finally Kramer said to me, “You’re not going to do it like that, are you?” I said, “No, I’m waiting to do it for the cameras.” He said, “Okay, let’s roll the cameras.” Then he told me, “Look, for the first take, I want you to be really vicious, mean, cold, selfish.” And I was!
Tracy reacted to the way that I did it. His face turned red, and he came back so real, so angry and violent, that it scared me. I thought maybe he was going to have a heart attack … In between takes, Katharine would go over to him, straighten his tie, tuck in his shirt. She was always doing that kind of thing to him between takes—brushing his hair—and he was always saying, “Awwww, shucks!” You know, like a big kid in a Jackie Cooper movie. He’d say, “Leave me alone!” But he wouldn’t mean it.
One thing they did for me that I noticed they did for everybody on that set. [Martin had requested—and received—permission to observe on the set and was there every day.] No matter how big or how small, they treated everybody on that set as if they were the star. They made me feel that I was the greatest actor in the world. I mean, between takes they would compliment me and tell me how fantastic I was. The two of them … I noticed the patience that they had with all the other actors, like Cecil Kellaway. He only had a few lines in one scene, and they must have made about thirty takes just to get those few lines out right. They always encouraged him, and they were always patient, and they were always sort of festive, and they made him feel good. They made everybodyfeel as if they were the greatest thing since the wheel.
(SUSIE TRACY)
On Tracy’s final day on the picture, he was in at ten and finished at ten minutes to twelve.
“How much will it cost to have it repaired?” he asked the kid with the roadster.
“Well look at it!” Martin shouted. “Thirty or forty bucks it’ll cost! Did you see it? Stupid old man! You oughtn’t be allowed out! You ought to be put away someplace—in a home or something!”
“Here!” Tracy returned savagely, stuffing a crumpled bill into Martin’s hand. “There’s fifty bucks! Don’t bother to have the thing fixed—buy a new one!!”
When Stanley Kramer called, “Cut!” and then “Print!,” Ivan Volkman, Kramer’s production manager, stepped onto the set and addressed the crew. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “that was Mr. Tracy’s last shot.” The applause was instantaneous, vigorous. Tracy and Kramer met at the camera and embraced, the crew’s applause sweeping over them in waves. No one could have mistaken the weight of the moment. A career that had stretched nearly half a century—from the dusty wings of the long-demolished Palace Theatre in White Plains to the golden heyday of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, from Boys Town and San Francisco to Black Rock and Nuremberg—had drawn to a close. Tracy shook hands with Sam Leavitt, waved to Marshall Schlom, and slowly made his way to the stage door. At the doorway, he stopped, the applause still rumbling, waved, and then turned and exited.
When the door closed behind him and the clapping died down, Kramer said, “That’s the last time you’ll ever see Spencer Tracy on film.” And Kate, who, during the shot, had been crouching to one side of the camera, lit into him, a white-hot flash of anger. “[T]hat made me wild,” she said. “I thought that was a silly thing to say. And I said to Stanley, ‘Why? You know?’ And poor Stanley was very upset. I attacked him.”
That morning Hepburn had handed Marshall Schlom an envelope. He pocketed it, didn’t open it until they had finished work for the day. Inside were a check for one hundred dollars and a handwritten note:
Dear Marshall
With thanks and thanks and more thanks—for doing my duties—please get something you want— you deserve it—
With affectionate gratitude from us both— ST and KH
That evening a party for the cast and crew was held on Stage 8. “The party, accordingly, had a valedictory tone,” Charles Champlin wrote, “and there were lumps in the throat and tears which the good food and drink couldn’t set aside.” Hepburn explained Tracy’s absence by saying, “He gets too sentimental at things like this.” Kramer was uncharacteristically emotional, at one point on the verge of tears: “Have you ever seen an era end? Tracy was originally a legit actor, but he has become the greatest ‘movie actor.’ When I go out, I’d like to go out like he did.”
Kate addressed the crowd, paying tribute to Kramer and to the people behind the scenes. “You are the people who make an actor able to act,” she told them. “I don’t know how many of you realize that. But I shall be everlastingly grateful to you. I know that your help made a helluva lot of difference to Spence.”
Tracy, meanwhile, was home working the phone, elated, relieved, and a little surprised by it all. “Finished!” he cried as Garson Kanin came on the line. “Do you believe it? I don’t. I was betting against myself all the way. I owe me a fortune. I may welch. But finished. Are you impressed?”
“No,” Gar replied. “What impressed me was you starting.”
“I get it,” he said. “Everybody’s down at the party. Both Kathies—everybody.”
“Why not you?”
“Hell, no. Too emotional. This is it. The Big Wrap-Up. I’ve retired.”
“You should have gone to the party.”
“I thought I might, but then right after the last shot today, Stanley said, ‘That’s the one!’ and I knew it was over and we shook hands and he started to cry and so did I, and I figured the hell with it and came home. I think I’ve got about five beers in me! But did you hear me, Jasper? I finished the picture!”
“He was very pleased,” said Louise. “He was very funny [when he came around] the next day. We were all sitting around talking about finishing it, and he said, ‘I told Stanley if I died tomorrow he had the picture. He had enough.’ He didn’t think there would be any retakes. He said, ‘He’s got the whole thing.’ He said, ‘I didn’t think I would make it.’ He pulled out a wad of bills and he said, ‘There. I’ve gotten my first payment.’ He gave us all a nice fat bill. ‘There,’ he said. He was very tired.”
And so he settled back into his cloistered existence in the cottage on St. Ives, still tossing and turning and struggling to sleep. “No bunk—no makeup—no over-interest in clothes—only a few rather pathetic personal treasures,” Kate would later write. “His Carrara marble Madonna made for him and given to him by the carvers at Carrara—a book signed, given to him by Bob Kennedy—a little silver orchestra given to him by Stanley Kramer—‘May your music play on and on’—an old tweed coat—a comfortable pair of shoes—an old hat given to him by Jack Ford—his chair—his car—his few dear friends. He was like a lion in a cage. You gave him meat, he ate the meat. You gave him water, he drank the water and then he walked up and down, up and down in the cage of life, looking out, and in those eyes you saw the jungle—the freedom—the fear—the affection—unblinking, unguarded.”
On May 27, Dr. Covel found him “depressed and very anxious” because of recurrent episodes of shortness of breath. “He was very anxious about that: Why was this happening?” He was better over Memorial Day, seemed to be regaining some strength. At the behest of a news magazine, he was asked to confirm his retirement. “Well,” he hedged, “there was a fellow named Eddie Leonard on the stage and he made 471 curtain speeches announcing his retirement. Sarah Bernhardt made 178 curtain speeches announcing her retirement. I always announce my retirement—until the next picture comes along.”
He was anxious and short of breath again on June 6, and there was a mounting sense of dread about him, as the attacks were coming with greater frequency. He was “all right and stable” by the eighth, but the doctor was concerned: “I went to see him, and I was thinking of taking him to the hospital … He didn’t want to go.” The doctor’s note in his file that day: “We’ll wait.”
He visited Tower Road again on the morning of the ninth, driving himself in his old T-bird, the top down, his ever-present sunglasses giving him a jaunty look he rarely affected on screen. “He would wear—even on the warmest days—a shirt, a sweater, and a jacket,” Susie said, “and I wondered if that was to make him look a little heavier.” He seemed fine, stayed for about an hour. Susie told him a friend in Australia had written a script and asked if he would read it when he had some time. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Give it to me now.” Bill Self was reading it, she told him, and she would have to get it back. “Well, when he’s done with it,” her father said.
They all walked outside, stood at the car and chatted. Louise kissed him on the cheek, and he told her that he would call her later. Louise, John, and Susie took in an unlikely double feature that night: The Dirty Dozen—action John could easily follow—and Georgy Girl. The second phone in Louise’s bedroom—the hot line between the hill and St. Ives—rang when they got home, the familiar signal—two rings and then silence. “Sometimes he would carry on long, long conversations,” Louise said. “Other times it would be just ‘How is everybody?’ and ‘How is everything?’ and ‘Well, all right, talk to you later.’ ” On that night he said: “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Weezie.”
He went to sleep, and when Kate thought him settled, she crept out of the room as she always did and down the long hall to her own bedroom at the opposite end of the house. He had the buzzer right next to his bed if he wanted anything, and she always took the bell with her if she went anywhere inside, its cord “two miles long.” He didn’t ring, but about three o’clock she heard him shuffling down the hall toward the kitchen. They always kept the kettle at a very low boil, and he would get up in the middle of the night and brew himself a cup of tea. When she heard that he had reached the kitchen, she got up, put on her slippers, and started for the door.
“Just as I was about to give it a push, there was the sound of a cup smashing to the floor—then clump—a loud clump.” He had arrested; his heart had stopped beating. “Just stopped—BANG! The box broke. The container had just become too small for all that—what would you call it?—all that wild stuff whirling around inside. Peace at last.”
She crouched down and took him up in her arms. “No life—no pulse—dead.” His eyes were closed, the tea spilled all over him. “Dear, dear friend—gone. Oh, lucky one. That’s the way to exit. Just out the door and—gone.”
She called Phyllis Wilbourn up at the old Barrymore place. “Spence’s dead.”
“I’ll come …”
She called Ida and Willie, who lived in the cottage next door, and they helped her get him onto a rug, and then the three of them dragged him the length of the house and managed to get him back into bed. She drew up the covers and then lit some candles. “He looked so happy to be done with living, which for all his accomplishments had been a frightful burden to him.”
Dr. Covel was the first to arrive. He found Kate in a state of shock, unsure of what to do next. “Call the family? Call Stanley Kramer? Move out—no—yes—then call. Phyllis came. We moved all my stuff—clothes, personal stuff—out into my car. Then I thought—God—God—Kath—what are you doing—you’ve lived with the man for almost thirty years. This is your home. Isn’t it? These walls—this roof—this spot on the earth.” Calmly, deliberately, she unloaded the car—clothing, personal effects, paintings off the walls—and carried everything back into the house.
And then she awaited the arrival of Louise Tracy.
When the phone rang on Tower Road, Susie Tracy glanced at the clock: 3:50 a.m. She reached for the extension, but her mother, in her own room, had already picked up. Susie heard Dr. Covel’s voice: “Hello? Louise?” And she heard her mother say, “Oh no—” She placed the handset back in its cradle and got out of bed. When she reached her mother’s room, Louise was sitting on the edge of the bed in a kind of a daze. “Father’s gone,” she said. “We’ll have to wake John.”
By 4:30 they had gotten themselves together and left for St. Ives, Susie piloting her mother’s black Lincoln, the one her father had driven across country, all three of them crammed together in the front seat. When they arrived at the house, the gate was open and Susie pulled right in. Kate emerged from inside to meet them, putting her arm around Susie, who, in turn, automatically put her arm around Kate.
Susie thought back to a phone conversation she had with her father in which he had said that the Kramers were expecting a baby. They had decided, he told her, to name it Spencer if it was a boy, Katharine if it turned out to be a girl. There was a pause, as if he needed a reaction. “That’s wonderful, Daddy. I think that’s fine.” There seemed to be so much unsaid, hanging there in the air. “He was acknowledging that I knew about Kate,” she later said, “and that he knew I knew. I was so pleased … I felt it was the beginning of a new relationship for us. I was an adult, and he was opening a door.”
Carroll, distraught and unshaven, was already there, as was Dorothy, and George Cukor was lingering in the background. Louise, Susie, and John made their way to the bedroom, the candles still flickering in the predawn darkness. He had said that he was going to have his hair cut short, but they hadn’t yet seen it. And then Susie glanced to one side and saw all the medications lined up on the desk, two rows—at least a dozen prescriptions, probably more. Dr. Covel came in and said quietly to Louise, “Would you like me to give you something?”
When Susie emerged from the room, Kate was waiting for her. “Susie,” she said, giving her the car keys, “would you take my car off the road and park it up the hill?” Susie found Hepburn’s black Chrysler across the street and drove it up around the curve on St. Ives to where it could not be seen from the house. Then she returned and they again found themselves standing in the hallway, groping for words.
“We were good pals,” Hepburn finally said to her.
Kate had called Howard Strickling, and they all had to wait as he drove into town from his ranch in Chino, some fifty miles to the east. She mouthed a few comforting words to John, who was stoic, stunned as they all were. Later, she approached him in the living room and offered him breakfast. Nobody else seemed particularly hungry, but John was gratefully addressing a meal of eggs, toast, and coffee when Strickling arrived. The press would have to be notified, inquiries would have to be managed. Louise accepted a cup of coffee, went back down the hall again to be with Spence. “Well,” Hepburn later acknowledged, putting her own distinctive spin on the situation, “she was in a peculiar spot—no doubt about that. She could never bear to admit failure. Now he was dead. And he would never come back. She had dreamed—hoped—imagined that he would. This strange woman—me—had obviously been with him when he died.”
Carroll had called Cunningham & O’Connor, a mortuary scarcely two blocks from where the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had its headquarters. What suit to give them? Hepburn had gathered together some old clothes—gray slacks, a brown tweed jacket.
“But he was my husband,” Louise protested. “I should pick out the—”
“Oh Louise,” said Kate, “what difference does it make?”
Once they had gone—first the doctor, then Cukor, then Strickling, who had made all the appropriate calls, Dorothy stepped up to Phyllis and presumed to ask for the keys. “What did you say, Dorothy? The keys to this house—our house?” Dorothy was silenced by Phyllis’ indignation, the stark reality of the situation having left her, for one of the few times in her adult life, completely and utterly wordless.
The next thing Susie knew, they were driving to the mortuary with Ross Evans at the wheel. Louise and she waited in the car while Carroll and Evans picked out a mahogany casket, the cost of which, along with the undertaking, would run nearly $3,000. “Well,” said Louise, who was dreading an out-of-state speaking tour, “I guess I don’t have to go on that trip now.”
At Forest Lawn, the iconic cemetery where Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, and Irving Thalberg were interred, Louise was drawn to a private garden outside the Freedom Mausoleum, near where the ashes of Walt Disney had been placed the previous year. Gently, Ross Evans steered her away, knowing the neighborhood to be a little too pricey for the means of the Tracy estate. Around the corner they found another spot, walled in brick and gated, shown on the plot map as the Little Garden of Divine Guidance, roughly half the cost of the other location—$19,262 with bench and endowment.
The news media had the story by six that morning, and reporters began working the phones. “Some idiot called me at seven o’clock in the morning,” Jean Simmons remembered, “and said, ‘What is your reaction on Spencer Tracy’s death?’ And I just hung up. I thought: ‘How awful can people be?’ ” Lauren Bacall was on a flight to Boston when her husband, actor Jason Robards, overheard the news from a passenger in a nearby seat. She had been one of the people he and Kate had called the week they finished the picture. Karen and Stanley Kramer were in Las Vegas when Stanley heard the news from his son, Larry. Eddie Dmytryk had spoken to Tracy just the previous week. “I’m not feeling up to par,” Tracy had confided.
The news was all over the radio by midmorning, and calls began to come into the house on Tower Road, where the housekeeper fended off strangers and deflected nosy inquiries from the press. Strickling had fed his contacts the story that Tracy had been alone at the time of his death, that he had, in fact, died in his sleep. His body was discovered at six in the morning by Ida Gheczy, who first summoned Dr. Covel, then Carroll Tracy, the actor’s brother. Arriving shortly thereafter was Mrs. Tracy, who lived nearby, accompanied by their son and daughter. Katharine Hepburn, Mr. Tracy’s longtime friend and costar, appeared with director George Cukor, who for years had rented the hillside house to the two-time Academy Award winner.
Stanley Kramer told the Los Angeles Times that he “worshiped” Mr. Tracy. “I’m glad for his sake that he could make the picture. It was better than sitting at home. That wasn’t his way.” The New York Times described him as “one of the last screen titans of a generation, a star whose name alone spelled money at the box office.” Bob Thomas, in his AP dispatch, wrote: “The death of Tracy erases from the Hollywood scene a performer whom most other actors considered the best in American film history.” James Powers, in the Hollywood Reporter, characterized him as “a man of pure metal in a tinsel community.” The Freeport Journal Standard remembered that, as a boy, Tracy had spent his summers in Freeport and that both his parents were buried there.
In Evergreen Park, outside of Chicago, where he was appearing with his wife in Holiday for Lovers, Pat O’Brien told the Milwaukee Journal he was “in a state of shock all day” after getting the news. “We were friends for 50 years,” he reminisced. “We were at Marquette High together, we enlisted in the Navy together in World War I, and we were roommates in New York when we were attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. The only time we weren’t together was college. Spence went to Ripon and got interested in dramatics there. He played a little baseball. I went to Marquette and was Red Dunn’s substitute on the football team.”
Obituaries appeared worldwide. The Times of London saw Tracy as “[t]ough, honest, and indomitable, a man of sober authority and rugged good sense” who became “a symbol on the screen of all those qualities which represented the pioneering spirit of America.” The Daily Telegraph appropriated Maximilian Schell’s “grand old man” appellation, while News of the World reported that he had outlived most of his contemporaries. “Bogart, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper are all dead,” Tracy was quoted as saying. “Jimmy Cagney has taken his millions off to retire and I’m alone. It gets lonely.”
And in Moscow, the Soviet director Sergei Gerasimov, writing in the government newspaper Izvestia, eulogized him as one of the great artists of the modern cinema. “By remaining true to himself, Spencer Tracy opened for many persons the best traits of his people … Soviet audiences came to love him for his manly sincerity, his just, kind, and somewhat sad view on the intricate world around him.”
1 Frank was under the impression the falling out had something to do with Tribute to a Bad Man, but, if it did, neither man ever mentioned it. Cagney disputed Garson Kanin’s assertion that he and Tracy lost touch because it was he who stopped calling. “Bullshit,” Cagney said in an exchange with his biographer, John McCabe. “I had hardly ever called him because he was almost never at the number I was given, and so it became a kind of ritual between us that he would call me. At any hour of day or night … As for my calling him less and less, again bullshit. He started to call me less and less, I always assumed for reasons of health. Pat said that he began to get fewer calls too, and there was no one closer to Spence than Pat. And as to Kanin’s implying that Spence and I were at loggerheads because Spence was liberal and I became a Republican, triple bullshit. Spence always respected other people’s moral and political commitments even if they were a hundred and eighty degrees different from his—as long as those commitments were honestly held, as mine certainly were. Spence was not only a great actor, he was a great heart, and a great heart does not turn away from old friends because they are different from you.”
2 Tracy later told an interviewer that he remembered Maggie Sullavan’s supposed response when offered a Hardy Family picture: “I’ll do one when it is titled Death Comes to Andy Hardy.” Said Tracy: “And I’ll do a Batman when it’s called, ‘Death Comes to Batman.’ ”
3 In all fairness, Hepburn would likely have “sized up” any prospective costar she didn’t already know personally. “I think Kate always gave her co-stars the once-over inspection,” said Katharine Houghton. “I know she did with Nick Nolte because I saw it.”
4 Houghton recalled her mother’s warning when she left for Los Angeles: “Watch out for Kate—she’ll knock you down so that she can pick you up.”