James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  “One time at Romanoff’s—this is after we had heard that Mrs. Tracy was willing to get a divorce—I said, ‘Why don’t you and Katie get married?’ He said, ‘Too late. I’ve asked her. She said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it now. It doesn’t matter. We’ve lived this long with things this way.’ I think she enjoys her independence. We’re together all the time anyway. So I’m not pushing her. And she’s not pushing me.’ ”

  St. Ives seemed the perfect home for him, simple and spare. “I don’t own one damned thing I’d miss for more than five minutes if I lost it or it were swiped,” he once said to Garson Kanin. “I like to check in and check out.” For years he didn’t spend much time there, and Cukor, who never could tell whether he was in residence or not, took to referring to him as “my elusive tenant” in his notes to Kate. (“My elusive tenant turns up at his little home from time to time, unexpected and unannounced. Before I know it, he’s gone again …”) He never really settled in until he came to regard the location as a permanent base, as he had the Beverly Hills Hotel for so many years.

  “He knew the way from the Beverly Hills Hotel down Beverly Drive into Beverly Hills to Romanoff’s,” said Kate,

  and he knew the way to go to Chasen’s … George built him a charming house and Spencer rented it, but his sense of direction … he didn’t know where he was. Well, what to do, what to do? Being a simple fellow and a sensible man, he thought, “Well, I’ll go down Doheny to Sunset, and I’ll go back Sunset to the Beverly Hills Hotel. And then I’ll go from there.” Well, everything was fine until one night he and his brother Carroll decided that they’d go to Chasen’s. So Spencer got into the car to drive it. He backed out of the garage, he turned onto Doheny, got to Sunset and turned right, and Carroll thought, “What the hell is he doing?” But he shut up, and Spencer continued until he got to the Beverly Hills Hotel. He turned left, he went down Beverly Drive, he got to Santa Monica, he turned left, he got to Beverly Boulevard, and he turned right, and he went down Beverly Boulevard and he got to Chasen’s. It was there on the corner, and they drove into the parking lot.

  But before he got out of the car, Carroll said to him, “Spencer, you could have gone out your driveway, straight down Doheny, across Santa Monica, still down Doheny, across the beginning of Melrose, and you would have arrived at Chasen’s in two minutes instead of ten.” Spencer was thrilled. He said, “Is that really true?” Carroll said, “Yes, it’s true, Spencer. You live right up there on that hill.” When I heard that story for the first time I said, “It’s amazing he ever found Dr. Livingstone, isn’t it?”

  A rare snapshot of Tracy and Hepburn at a private function, circa 1956. (JUDY SAMELSON COLLECTION)

  Tracy enjoyed a measure of contentment at St. Ives. Gone were the halfhearted days of womanizing he had known in the early 1950s. After five years of life on the run, Hepburn had once again returned to make “a life for him that was irresistible” so that he would not, as she put it, wander off.

  “I think he thought Kate very attractive,” Joe Mankiewicz said,

  and Kate somebody he could talk to. Not only that, but [somebody] he could listen to. But most of these [other] women couldn’t amuse him. Kate had anecdotes, Kate came in with gossip, Kate was like marrying The Hollywood Reporter, except she knew everything from all sources. And one thing Spence was very, very curious about [was] gossip. He loved to hear stories about people. Well. Would you like to have Ingrid Bergman come in and tell you stories about people? Or would you like to have Joan Bennett tell you about people? But KATE, who had the entire mirage of English society and French society and Riviera society and Florida society, plus the theatre society! Constance Collier, up and down, coming in with gossip. This was kind of a jackpot of entertainment for Spence. And, in a way, a kind of tribute to him. Laying all this at his feet. Oh, this was a tremendous jackpot that Spence hit. What he liked in terms of entertainment, liked more than anything else in the world, was gossip about people—who’s doing what to whom. Kate never went out after it, but my God it came to her. Cukor! Cukor was the Generalissimo of gossip! Both homosexual and heterosexual. And here he sat in the middle of this place, and all these busy bees gathering this honey for him! This information. [A] constant, never-ending source of information, gossip, and amusement for him. He didn’t have to go out, sit through a whole night of conversation before he got to bed with a woman. This was wonderful, because Louise wasn’t about to tell him who was doing what to whom. Louise wanted to keep him comfortable and happy, give him books to read.

  By 1956 the break with Louise was so complete that Spence wasn’t even on hand for her sixtieth birthday. In the days leading up to the event, he made two attempts to leave for New York—one by air, one by rail—and canceled both times. He finally got away on July 24, taking a TWA sleeper flight to Idlewild and spending the next three days at the office of his dentist, Dr. Carl Bastian. He went to Mass at St. Patrick’s, dined with Bert Allenberg and Benny Thau, spent the night of Weeze’s birthday attending a performance of My Fair Lady with the Allenbergs and Frank Sinatra. (“You made the little wop cry!” he rather sweetly told Rex Harrison afterward.) The following evening he dined solo with Sinatra and, as he noted in his datebook, the “grape.”

  “Well,” said Sinatra, “we lifted a few, in New York particularly. You know, Jesus, at four o’clock in the morning, five o’clock … and I was doing six shows a day at the Paramount [in between showings of Johnny Concho] and had to look fairly well—not like I was dying at 132 pounds. He said, ‘Oh the hell with it. We’ll have another one and you’ll be there on time and you’ll be great.’ I said, ‘Thanks a lot.’ ”

  Tracy had known Sinatra since the day in 1945 when the singer walked up and introduced himself on the M-G-M lot. “I was in a sailor suit doing a dance picture with [Gene] Kelly, and he thought I was in the Navy … He said, ‘Where are you stationed?’ And I said, ‘Right here.’ And, of course, I teased him for about five minutes. And then he said, ‘Oh, you’re the guy with the swooning and all that stuff.’ And I said, ‘I guess so.’ And we became fast friends after that. Immediately.”

  The break with Louise had never been clean, never final, never the sort of thing where the parties could heal and move on. It was an open wound for them both, something neither of them could face or acknowledge. “In a way,” said Seymour Gray, “he did love her. He felt responsible to her. There was the time he had this fight with Hepburn in front of me about this coat that he bought [Louise]. Hepburn was furious. ‘Why didn’t you buy me one?’ He said, ‘Because you don’t need one. And you’ve got enough money to buy your own.’ I think he admired her and had enormous respect for her … And I don’t think Spencer wanted a divorce.”

  And yet he ran from Louise on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, and he hated himself for it. Two weeks later he emerged from another self-induced stupor at the Pierre and placed himself under the care of Dr. Richard Stock, a prominent cardiologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. On August 18, 1956, Carroll Tracy quietly settled the hotel bill for $2,700, and he and Kate, who had just finished work on The Rainmaker, took him home to California.

  * * *

  1 Heston was thirty-one at the time. In the book, Isaiah Vaudagne, the elder brother, is fifty-two, while Marcellin is “barely thirty.” In MacDougall’s screenplay the brothers were renamed Zachary and Chris Teller, their ages unspecified.

  2 When Susie was in high school, her best friend tried telling her that her father had a drinking problem. “Oh, he doesn’t drink,” Susie insisted. “He orders ginger ale or 7-Up whenever we have dinner with him.”

  3 Tracy liked to tease Kath about her age, pointing out that he had given her joy in her “latter days.” The name “Ratty” was a term of affection they tossed between themselves, though never in public. “Old One” and “Old Rat” were generally applied in the third person.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Last Hurrah

  * * *

  Doubtless the conversation between T
racy and Frank Sinatra touched on the condition of their mutual friend, Humphrey Bogart. In February 1956 Bogart had undergone surgery for esophageal cancer, and both men were tracking his progress. Early in July, having just returned from Cuba, Tracy and Hepburn visited the Bogarts’ Holmby Hills estate. “Bogie post-operative seems very ill,” Tracy wrote in his datebook. “Weighs 120 lbs.” There was no improvement in August and, after a Labor Day visit, Tracy mused, “Poor Bogie—6 mos??” The arrival of his namesake, Tracy Stewart Granger, on September 10 cheered him considerably, and he postponed a drive to Las Vegas to visit Jean and the baby.

  As The Mountain neared its September release date, Tracy’s attitude toward the film hardened and, as with Bad Day at Black Rock, he became convinced it would be a flop, a “disaster.” His bleak outlook may have been influenced somewhat by an ill-advised attempt on the part of Paramount to recover the money the studio figured his eleven days of “illness” had cost the company. Bert Allenberg initially agreed they were entitled to perhaps $50,000, yet Tracy had finished his role in the picture in the twelve weeks allotted under the terms of his contract, and cast insurance had already paid $11,000 toward the alleged loss.

  In the end, studio head Y. Frank Freeman felt they were unlikely to recover anything more without incurring the expense (and unwanted publicity) of a lawsuit, and the money was ultimately rolled into the negative cost, which came to $2,119,000. Variety handed the film a pan, judging Tracy’s performance as “no more than adequate” and rightly placing much of the blame for the picture’s failure on Ranald MacDougall’s script and the uneven direction of Eddie Dmytryk. The Reporter, on the other hand, thought it wonderful, a reaction that clearly left its top-billed star flummoxed. All the trade notices agreed the film’s best moments took place on the mountainside, where the dialogue was held to a minimum and the process plates were used to good effect as the Teller brothers make their ascent to the summit.

  “Tracy was an actor, not a mountain climber,” Dmytryk wrote,

  yet no one, in my opinion, ever made mountain climbing more real, more harrowing, or more perilous than he did. In one scene, while supposedly standing on an inch-wide ledge (I used inserts made with his climbing double to establish this) he reaches for a crack, finds it filled with ice, carefully takes out his ice ax and chips it away, replaces his ax in his belt, and finally, after a breathless pause, makes the short leap necessary to reach the next handhold. Throughout the scene, shot in close-up, he was standing on the bottom of an upturned apple box, perhaps eight inches off the ground, but you would have sworn it was a matter of life and death on Everest. That’s acting. In the final film I let the scene run without a cut, except for a couple of foot inserts—it must have lasted a full four minutes. Only an actor of Tracy’s caliber could have sustained a scene of this kind for so long.

  The New York opening put Tracy on edge, and the day it took place he recorded a “big temper blow up with Kate.” To cool down, he took a drive up the coast in his new Lincoln convertible, returning in time for dinner on Tower Road.1 The notices weren’t terrible, he found, but neither were they laudatory. He listed them carefully in his book, noting where the film had been panned but where his own performance had been well received. The Times, the Post, Saturday Review, and Newsweek were all counted as bad; the Herald Tribune, the News, the New Yorker, and Time good—at least so far as his personal notices were concerned. Herbert Kupferberg of the Herald Tribune found Tracy’s work as Zachary Teller “intensely moving,” while Bosley Crowther described an actor who had allowed his rugged old guide to waver between “a vague sort of peasant valor” and gawking stupidity. “It is hard to determine how to take him, except as a first-class mountain goat.”

  After eight years of exile in foreign locales, an unbowed Katharine Hepburn began work on The Rainmaker with the same “no press” policy that had made her such a headache for the publicity people at M-G-M. “We made inquiries with interviewers,” said Teet Carle, “and found that not one had any need (or desire) to do stories on her. I went on the set to tell her we would protect her and keep away media folks.”

  It’s possible that Hepburn got wind of such widespread apathy, for in August 1956, having just retrieved Tracy from his latest New York misadventure, she sat for a formal one-on-one with Edwin Schallert, the drama editor of the Los Angeles Times. Schallert was conscious of how rare an occasion this was and said as much in the lede of his write-up. The paper played the story up big, giving it a prominent page-one placement and accompanying it with a generous head shot gamely peering out at the reader, eyes flashing, teeth shining, collar upturned, at forty-nine the “queen of the international stars” (as the caption would have it). The talk focused on the new movie, in which she had been paired with Burt Lancaster, but ranged over a number of topics, her travels, her likes and dislikes, and her by now legendary pictures with Spencer Tracy.

  “It is regrettable,” she lamented, “that no one has been able to find a comedy, such as we formerly did, which would be suitable for us.” Within days, Fox production chief Buddy Adler was on the phone to Abe Lastfogel with just such a comedy, a modest hit on Broadway titled The Desk Set.

  Adler had picked up the rights as part of an investment strategy that gave Fox an ownership stake in several plays, the final price in each case calibrated to the length of the play’s New York run. In the role of the spinsterish Bunny Watson, head of the research department of a major TV network, the show had starred Shirley Booth, a masterful comedienne who was never much of a draw in the movies (despite having collected an Academy Award for her work in Come Back, Little Sheba). As with Time of the Cuckoo, Booth ceded a role she had created onstage to Hepburn, the crucial change of Bunny ending up with computer consultant Richard Sumner (instead of her boss) having already been effected in a draft screenplay. Adler had originally given the property to writer-producer Charles Brackett, who lasted scarcely three weeks on the assignment. (“It’s not my cup of tea,” Brackett fretted, “and every time I rewrite a scene it gets worse.”) Eventually, Desk Set was settled on the husband-wife team of Henry and Phoebe Ephron.

  The initial offer from Fox was $250,000 for the Tracy-Hepburn combo, plus a 10 percent split of the gross after the film had earned double its negative cost in rentals. Kate didn’t like the up-front money, and there was friction between her and Bert Allenberg when she said as much directly to the studio. Fox upped the ante to $350,000 and 30 percent of the profits, which, profits being what they were in Hollywood, didn’t sound all that much better. Eager to meet a projected start date of November 1, Adler finally approved an offer of $400,000—$250,000 for Tracy and $150,000 for Hepburn—and 50 percent of the net profits. Tracy saw the first seventy-five pages of the Ephrons’ revised screenplay on October 2 and thought them only “fair.” Lastfogel finalized the contracts on October 22, the team splitting 10 percent of the gross after $4,400,500 and 20 percent after $4,750,000—an extraordinary deal for their first picture away from M-G-M.

  Tracy’s dismay at the first seventy-five pages resulted in an all-day script conference between Hepburn and the Ephrons, Kate clad in her familiar white slacks and matching shirt. “That morning, she and Spence had read the script aloud and had marked where changes in his role, his lines, his activity, could improve the script,” recounted Henry Ephron. “By the end of the day we were on a friendly, warm basis, wildly enthusiastic when we got the script past a sticky spot and violently depressed when we didn’t.”

  The second day they were joined by Walter Lang, the veteran Fox director who had been assigned the picture, and whose previous films for the studio had been the top-drawer musicals The King and I, There’s No Business Like Show Business, and Call Me Madame. The Ephrons considered Lang an ally—he had filmed their sly 1950 satire The Jackpot—and figured it would be “three against one” if they ever came to loggerheads with their leading lady. Someone had the idea to do a crucial scene—Sumner’s interrogation of Bunny by way of a personality test—on location, and A
dler went for it. (“Shoot in New York, start at Fifty-seventh and Madison, outside the IBM building, and take them west on Fifty-seventh Street to Sixth Avenue where they would lunch at one of those outdoor Jewish delicatessens.”) Hepburn and Henry Ephron made a quick trip east to scout locations for the sequence.

  Bogart, meanwhile, was fading rapidly. Tracy endured the gut-wrenching business of a visit on November 16 and found him frail and depleted. Pulling up a chair at the foot of the bed, he began to tell jokes, his coffee nearby, kidding around with his old friend as he always did. “He was great with Bogie when Bogie was sick,” said Lauren Bacall. “Katie used to say, ‘He was tortured before he went to your house, put on a great act when he was there, and was tortured when he left.’ ” That night, Tracy made a rueful note in his datebook: “Poor Bogie. Not long—2 months?”

  In the following days, his mood sank—there was trouble with his new Lincoln, trouble with The Mountain, trouble with the revised script of Desk Set. On Sunday, the L.A. Times ran a piece by movie columnist Philip K. Scheuer titled “TV Offers a Second Look at So-Called Film Classics.” Leading the article was a case in point—Tracy’s own version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  “For one thing,” Scheuer wrote, “Tracy’s portrayal (and movie) undoubtedly had its merits, though I was hard put to discover many of them when the film was first released in 1941 and I would hardly call it a masterpiece today. It was, I felt, inferior to the Jekyll-Hyde of Fredric March in 1932 and even to that of John Barrymore as far back as 1920, and I would have confided as much to everybody within earshot, if anybody had been there to listen.”

  To Henry Ephron, the reaction was obvious and easy to imagine. “I could see the whole scene: Spencer reads the L.A. Times, gets violently angry, and then reads the script in no mood to read a script. Soooo, it was no surprise to me when Kate showed up Monday morning and said, ‘Spencer wants out. How about Fred Astaire?’ ” Ephron called Buddy Adler, who not only wasn’t interested in Fred Astaire, but didn’t even want Hepburn if Tracy wasn’t part of the package. He went back to Kate and asked for a group meeting as soon as possible: “I’m sure that if all three of us talk to him, we’ll get him back in the picture.”