AUTHOR’S NOTE
No fewer than twenty-five books exist on the life and career of Katharine Hepburn, and all, to varying extents, touch on her decades-long relationship with Spencer Tracy. The first major Hepburn biography, Charles Higham’s Kate (1975), drew its strength from the author’s interviews with a number of Hepburn’s friends and coworkers, including Laura Harding, Larry Weingarten, and George Stevens. In writing of the “deep, overpowering love” Hepburn felt for Tracy, Higham came closest to getting it right. Later attempts were less advantaged but made more prodigious use of archival resources. Anne Edwards’ A Remarkable Woman (1985) was thicker than the Higham book but relied more on previous books and clippings than original research and is riddled with errors. According to Edwards, Tracy’s affair with Loretta Young extended into 1938, and Louise Tracy was “president” of John Tracy Clinic until her death in 1983. Edwards’ source notes sometimes lead nowhere, and the heft of her book is, in part, the result of padding.
Barbara Leaming appeared to do a better job of library work in her Katharine Hepburn (1995) but misread the correspondence in Bloomington’s John Ford Collection and proclaimed “Pappy” Ford the true love of Hepburn’s life. The Ford correspondence in the Hepburn Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shows that while Ford nursed a lifelong crush on Kate, she reciprocated with a genuine but studied fondness—probably after a brief infatuation—and was in touch with Ford’s wife and kids over the decades.
Leaming’s biases extend to her lurid coverage of Tracy, whom she portrays, in the words of Larry Swindell, as “a brutal whoremongering drunkard with no redeeming qualities.” Leaming makes the common mistake of regarding Bill Davidson’s inventions as fact when she reports that Tracy disappeared into the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn “many times through the years,” his only luggage “a case of Irish whiskey.” On page 308, she describes Tracy as a mean drunk “who beat up a prostitute in a bordello called Lu’s,” another imaginary episode lifted from Davidson. She goes on to inform the reader that Up the River was made by RKO and that, upon its completion, Tracy was told by studio executives to learn “something about film technique” by observing Ford at work on Seas Beneath—a neat trick since Tracy was appearing onstage in The Last Mile—first in New York, then in Chicago—during the time Seas Beneath was in production. On page 401, Leaming goes Davidson one better when she states that Tracy “blamed his own visits to brothels and the venereal infections he contracted there” for Johnny’s deafness. There is no source given for this allegation—and one would make no difference as such an occurrence would have been a medical impossibility.
After Spencer Tracy’s death in 1967, it was established conclusively that the cause of John Tracy’s deafness (and eventual blindness) was type 1 Usher syndrome, a recessive disorder inherited when both parents pass the same mutated gene to a child. Spencer and Louise Tracy were both carriers, and a roll of the genetic dice resulted in John’s condition—a one-in-four chance. Susie Tracy, with the same parentage, was born without Usher syndrome, meaning she did not inherit the same changed gene from both parents. Needless to say, genetic disorders cannot be caused or transmitted by “venereal infections.” While it is true that syphilis can mimic the symptoms of Usher syndrome—deafness and retinal damage—the syphilis bacterium can only be passed to a child via his or her mother. If the father alone is infected and the mother is not, the child cannot be infected.
None of Spencer Tracy’s confidential medical histories makes any mention of venereal disease at any time in his life. Leaming’s assertion that he blamed his own “venereal infections” (note the plural) for his son’s deafness is pure conjecture, unsourced and unsupported by the facts. Even so, a 2003 monodrama called Tea at Five insistently perpetuates this myth when the playwright puts the following words into the mouth of Katharine Hepburn: “The boy. Johnny. You see, his son was conceived when Spence unknowingly had a venereal disease. Gonorrhea.” Katharine Houghton, with considerable justification, characterized the play as “trash.”
A. Scott Berg’s Kate Remembered appeared within days of Hepburn’s death in 2003 and provides the best summary overview of Hepburn’s life and work, framed as it is in the form of a memoir of the author’s friendship with the actress. There followed three more biographies, all part of a curious subgenre pandering to an audience that apparently wants to be told that practically everyone in Old Hollywood was secretly gay. Katharine the Great by Darwin Porter came first in 2004, followed by James Robert Parish’s Katharine Hepburn: The Untold Story in 2005 and William J. Mann’s Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn in 2006.
While the unsourced Porter book is impossible to take seriously and the Parish is merely insinuative, the Mann book offers fifty-six pages of notes and sources, which encouraged readers and reviewers alike to embrace its wildest assertions with a minimum of skepticism. Standing almost alone in their dissents were Richard Schickel (“In the end, the book is just gossip-mongering with high-end aspirations”) and John Anderson of Newsday, who called it “a dishy, needy book” unworthy of its subject. “Mann’s style—a slightly elevated version of the journalism-as-salespitch practiced by the likes of Entertainment Weekly—abets his smarmy search for facts to support his claims about (1) Hepburn’s sexuality (she may have had lesbian affairs with, among others, longtime companion Laura Harding); (2) what gnarled complexes really lay behind the alliance with Spencer Tracy; and (3) how much of Hepburn’s image was founded in fact. But Mann’s desperation to prove such points—none of which is as critical to Hepburn’s ultimate cultural importance as any one of a dozen film performances—makes the experience of Kate rather tiresome.”
Rumors accusing the pants-wearing actress of lesbianism date to the early thirties and are as venerable as the oft-whispered suspicion that Mae West was really a transvestite. To put across his thesis, Mann at the outset seeks to establish that Tracy and Hepburn never lived together, that Hepburn surrounded herself with known lesbians (making the old guilt-by-association case), and that Garson Kanin’s 1971 book Tracy and Hepburn was a conscious and well-meaning exercise in mythology. “After seventy years,” the author states in a self-aggrandizing preface, “I thought it was finally time to tell the story outside the star’s control.”
In having at the legend, Mann not only seeks to show that Hepburn herself was bisexual, but that, in a sort of revisionist scorched-earth policy, almost everyone around her was equally ambiguous, including Spencer Tracy. To pull that off, he must establish that Tim Durant was gay—no easy task—and that Tracy himself had assignations that could, in some form, be documented. He lards his notes with claims of thoroughness, but in Tracy’s case he doesn’t start off well. He cites Selden West, Larry Swindell’s 1969 Tracy biography, Bill Davidson’s ubiquitous hatchet job, the Wisconsin Historical Society, U.S. Census records, Milwaukee city directories, and World War I draft registrations in documenting Tracy’s early life and still manages to get most of it wrong. John Tracy, for instance, was never a truck driver, and the story of his going from tavern to tavern on the night of Spencer’s birth is yet another fanciful invention from Davidson. He misses the Freeport connection entirely, has Tracy slipping into a soldier’s uniform in 1917, training at Norfolk rather than Great Lakes, graduating from Northwestern in 1921, and entering Ripon at the same time as Kenny Edgers. Later, he confuses Encino with the house on Tower Road, repeatedly referring to the ranch in the flatlands of the San Fernando Valley as “The Hill.”
While these might all seem like little things, they go to a pattern of inaccuracy that unfortunately seems to permeate the book. The author sets up John Tracy as an emotionally distant man who “drank hard” and, in the modern cliché, “withheld praise.” He notes all the standard newspaper items, the Sunset Boulevard arrest and the Yuma episode with Hugh Tully, and lays the public exploitation of “little Johnnie [sic] Tracy’s deafness” to the M-G-M publicity machine. All this, of course, leads up to speculation as to just what the nature of Tracy’s torment really was. Mann insists the relationship between Tracy and Hepburn wasn’t physical and—bizarrely—cites as proof the testimony of people who never knew Tracy or observed the relationship firsthand: Gavin Lambert, James Prideaux, members of George Cukor’s inner circle, and the anonymous voices that populate all books of this ilk. Finally, on page 336, he gets around to his smoking gun, a “male madam” named Scotty Bowers (coyly referred to in the text simply as “Scotty”).
Bowers is full of glib stories and revelations, all cheerfully unverifiable. He claims, for example, a “long, happy association” with Vivien Leigh and another, in a Variety interview, with Tyrone Power. Mann devotes considerable space to establishing Bowers’ credibility. (“I’ve never known Scotty not to tell the truth,” the late Gavin Lambert is quoted as saying.) He then allows Bowers to torpedo himself with the very first statement attributed to him. Bowers describes his initial encounter with Spencer Tracy as having taken place at Cukor’s home soon after the end of the war: “That was the first time, but it went on for years. Tracy would be drinking when I arrived. He’d get so loaded. He’d sit there drinking at the table from five o’clock in the afternoon until two in the morning, when he’d fall onto the bed and ask me to join him … And in the morning he’d act like nothing happened. He’d just say thanks for staying over” (emphasis added).
What Bowers obviously didn’t know when he made that statement is that Tracy was completely sober from the time he was discharged from Doctors Hospital in May 1945—nearly four months before the end of the war—until well into the fifties. And, of course, he was never the guzzler Bowers portrays him to be. Later, on page 383, Bowers reappears to again assert a relationship, reputedly showing up at St. Ives sometime in 1956 while Hepburn is in the kitchen washing dishes. Tracy is once again portrayed as drinking, while Hepburn is shrewish: “She’d tell him he was a fool just to sit there and drink. She could be very cutting to him. Then she’d walk off and leave us alone to have sex.”
Here, as before, it should be noted that Tracy, except for his lapses in Cuba and New York City, records no drinking in his datebooks for 1956 and 1957. Moreover, his address book, a 1952 gift from Constance Collier that he used for the rest of his life, shows no entries for Scotty Bowers, the Richfield station he managed, nor anyone under any name or identification whatsoever who could possibly have functioned in the capacity Bowers claims for himself. Such a story, in fact, asks the reader to believe that Hepburn, so famously protective of Tracy she would not even allow cast members near him on the set of The Devil at 4 O’Clock, would freely walk away and leave him to the company of “Cukor’s friend from the gas station” so that the two of them could “have sex.”
These key scenes are embroidered with comments from a handful of minor figures who present themselves as having the real dope on Tracy and Hepburn. Press agent Richard Gully, who died in 2000, is quoted from a posthumous Vanity Fair profile as saying that Tracy was a bisexual who was “never sober” (thus establishing he had very little—if any—real knowledge of Tracy). “I don’t think he functioned as a man,” Gully added. “He and Katharine Hepburn had chemistry only on screen.” In nearly six years of work on this book, I have not encountered one person who actually knew both Tracy and Hepburn who would endorse such a statement. In the same article, it should be noted, Gully fingered Giancana lieutenant Johnny Roselli as the true assassin of John F. Kennedy, claimed that Cary Grant had a “fleeting crush” on him, and spoke of Danny Kaye’s “love affair” with Laurence Olivier as if he knew of it firsthand—although the allegation of such a relationship was thoroughly discredited in Terry Coleman’s definitive biography of the actor.
Elliot Morgan, a member of George Cukor’s circle of cronies and acolytes known as the “chief unit,” is quoted as saying, “We knew Spencer wrestled with homosexuality.” Morgan goes on to suggest that Tracy and Tim Durant were lovers. “We definitely thought there was something between them.” Durant was a lot of things, but to the people who knew him well he was anything but homosexual. “Jesus Christ!” erupted actor Norman Lloyd, who met Durant in 1942 and considered him a dear friend. “Tim was the envy of every man in Hollywood for all the women he had.” Durant’s second wife, the author Mary Durant, patterned the serial womanizer Hoyt Bentley after him in her novel Quartet in Farewell Time. Later, his stepdaughter, Eleanor Cooney, wrote of him in her moving account of her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s, Death in Slow Motion. Describing him as a “charming prick,” Cooney doesn’t portray Durant as gay at all. Her mother, she says, “laid him bare like a frog on the dissection tray” when she painted him as “part rogue, part hungry poet, and part matinee idol” in her 1963 book.
There is no hint of homosexual activity in the Tracy papers nor in anything I have seen or learned elsewhere during the course of researching this book. There is evidence to the contrary, particularly in the Ruth Gordon–Garson Kanin papers at the Library of Congress, where Tracy repeatedly plumbs for word of Gene Tierney and June Dally-Watkins; and, of course, in his 1941 and 1942 datebooks, where he notes his times with Ingrid Bergman.
A thorough criticism of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn will have to wait until an authorized biographer is granted access to Hepburn’s journals and the correspondence still retained by her estate. Nevertheless, the book inspired a backlash from Hepburn fans, relatives, and friends who often knew the players and the situations far better than the people assigned to review it. Postings on such sites as Amazon inspired a spirited debate, into which the book’s editor frequently—and defensively—waded. From New Jersey, political consultant Sherry Sauerwine circulated a compelling point-by-point rebuttal to the book that runs fifty-eight single-spaced pages.
“I’ve read a lot of bios through the years,” Sauerwine wrote by way of introduction, “and never encountered one wherein the writer was so determined to bend the reader (let alone the subject) to his will.”