Kate Remembered (24 page)

Indeed, apart from their great acting ability, Tracy had never appeared so attractive in the movies before, with a genuine spring in his flat-footed walk. And Hepburn had never appeared so demure, so sexy. She had abandoned many of the mannerisms from her ingenue days and flowered into a striking contemporary woman. “Hell,” Mankiewicz explained, “she was gorgeous, and they were in love . . . and it's still pretty goddamned exciting to watch!” The scenes in which Sam Craig first confronts Tess Harding in their editor's office, as she's adjusting her stocking, then when she catches him pursuing her, and later when she agrees to sit in on her first baseball game remain classic moments for just that reason.

Woman of the Year was a romantic comedy, the likes of which had not been seen before. It was modern and sophisticated, with a female character at least as accomplished as the male, strong but also vulnerable. Unlike Rosalind Russell in
His Girl Friday
or even Jean Arthur in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
Hepburn believed it was important to show that Tess Harding was “not trying to be a man. She wasn't even trying to make it in a man's world. She was like me, someone who was making it without thinking about it, working in a man's world, succeeding. And like my mother—who held her own with men without compromising her femininity.”

Actually, the film concludes with a great compromise on the issue of feminism, a battle over which Kate never completely forgave herself for capitulating. During the course of the screenplay, Tess and Sam marry, though she continues to be more professional than uxorial, which ultimately sends Sam packing. Upon hearing the vows at her father's second marriage, however, she comes to appreciate her own nuptials with a renewed belief in the sanctity of a relationship built on the principles of give-and-take. Originally, Woman of the Year was meant to conclude with Tess at another baseball game, having become an even more ardent fan than her husband. But in 1941—“when men were men and women were still pretty much at home,” Kate explained—the executives didn't feel that would satisfy the audience. They didn't want Hepburn to appear to be denigrating the vast majority of non-career women.

So a new finale was fashioned—a nearly farcical, largely improvised scene in which Tess attempts to make breakfast for her new husband and proves she can't even make toast or coffee. It was a gentle form of comeuppance, a means of allowing, as Kate explained, “all the women in the audience to say, ‘Even I can do that,' and all the men to say, ‘I'm pretty lucky with the wife I've got.' And that Katharine Hepburn, she may be high and mighty, but what she really needs is the love of a good man.”

Over the years, many would express their admiration of Hepburn because she had forged her career without compromise. This angered more than amused her, because she believed it was patently false and denied the struggles she had waged. “I had to compromise left and right,” she said. “But I was careful to choose my battles. Fight the important ones. The ones I thought I could win. I often lost and was often proved wrong.” No question—she compromised plenty. But generally, she stooped only to conquer.

Woman of the Year
was a huge hit, coming out shortly after the United States entered World War II, when women in large numbers were, for the first time, working outside the house. The film provided a glimpse of the feminism that the world would be seeing more of over the next half century. More important, it was great fun. The film's basic formula, enhanced by the genuine chemistry of its stars, would provide the template for another eight pictures in which Tracy and Hepburn would appear together over the next twenty-five years, making them the most enduring romantic screen team in history. “Christ,” Kate said one day with a belly laugh, “I think we were together longer than Abbott and Costello.”

Tracy always got top billing. “That's the way it should have been,” Kate explained. “I was just coming back when we started working together. Spence was tops in his field and had never been away. I was just damned grateful he was willing to work with me.” At one point, Joe Mankiewicz had discussed the credits with Tracy, asking, “What about women and children first?”

“Hell,” Tracy replied. “It's a movie, not a sinking ship.”

In my first conversation with Kate—back when I was interviewing her in 1983—I reminded her of her quotation about what Astaire and Rogers each brought to their partnership and asked what she might say in substituting the names Tracy and Hepburn. “Oh, I'm not sure it worked that way,” she said. “I think he was so steady and I was so volatile, that we exasperated each other. And we challenged each other, and that was the fun of it. But the truth is, I think we just looked good together.” By the end of filming
Woman of the Year,
Hepburn and Tracy were, in the phrase of the day, “keeping company.” He never really went home again to his ranch in Encino.

Hepburn surrendered to love as she never had before. At thirty-four years of age, with a string of broken hearts behind her and any number of would-be suitors all around, she was—she told me my first night at Fenwick—“hit over the head with a cast-iron skillet.” Hardly a pretty boy, Spencer Tracy had the plain, rugged looks that appealed to Hepburn—“manly” was the word she used time and again, as she did to describe John Ford and George Stevens. Big, redheaded, and completely natural—rather like, as I saw in photographs, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn. She believed, without qualification, that Spencer Tracy was simply the best actor in movies. “A baked potato,” she often said, referring to his talent—absolutely plain, basic, and essential. His personal life was well known to everybody in Hollywood, and his appeal to former leading ladies certainly contributed to his being attractive to Hepburn.

I sensed that what got to her most was his essential neediness. Tracy exuded a sad loneliness that verged on the tragic. And that brought out the missionary in Hepburn. After living thirty-five years entirely, as she said, “for me, me, me,” she realized it was time to start living for somebody else. For the first time, she admitted, it dawned on her that she could love somebody for what she might give more than for what she might get.

She almost consciously decided to devote herself to his wants and needs, often at the expense of sublimating her desires and suppressing her personality. Hepburn—ever striving and often strident, irrepressible to the point of irritating, exhilarating, and sometimes exhausting—assumed the most difficult role of her life. As Tracy's lover and companion, she became supportive in ways that sometimes forced her to be servile, patient to an extreme that often left her patronized, and devoted until she was sometimes reduced to a life in denial. She was periodically subjected to his humiliations, occasionally in front of others. On the set or in a living room, she often sat, literally, at his feet.

They had their most wonderful times together—the best of which, Kate said, were just being quietly alone in each other's company. They lived like married people: eating dinner together, meat and potatoes; reading the Sunday newspaper; taking drives up the coast; painting. Never especially comfortable with his emotions, he could be tender and affectionate when they were by themselves or with their most trusted friends—George Cukor, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, later Bogart and Bacall. They kept separate residences and generally arrived at social events under separate cover. He spoke to his wife regularly.

In an industry where gossip passed for gospel, a brood of columnists had come to wield great power, their word spreading around the world. Louella Parsons and then Hedda Hopper and Sheilah Graham, as well as a string of imitators, were, therefore, feared and fawned over. Hepburn and Tracy generally ignored them. In most cases, such failure to truckle to what Kate called “the rag hags” provoked nasty, sometimes career-crushing, columns. Strangely, Hepburn and Tracy were left alone, with little ever appearing in any of the columns that linked the two outside the studio walls. This tacit hostility proved the easiest way for each side to deal with its obvious contempt for the other's behavior.

I once suggested to Kate that part of the reason the female gossip columnists ignored her relationship with Tracy was that they secretly admired her for it and for the way she sustained herself over the years in a man's world. Later in their careers, Hedda Hopper approached Hepburn at a Hollywood function with her hand held out. “Isn't it time we bury the hatchet and become friends?” the big-hatted reporter asked. “Oh, Hedda,” Hepburn replied, “we've gone this long without speaking to each other. Why spoil a perfectly good enmity?”

In the days and decades after
Woman of the Year
ended production, friends of Tracy and Hepburn—and ultimately their fans—spoke with great authority about how they could never marry. His wife would never grant him a divorce, they said; Catholic and guilt-ridden about his son's deafness, he would never seek one. But there was one more factor seldom considered, which Kate insisted was paramount. As she told me that first night in Fenwick, “I never wanted to marry Spencer Tracy.”

It has also been suggested that Hepburn was always attracted to men who were, if not married, at least, somehow attached to other women. There's truth to that notion. But I think it was more that the men to whom she was drawn were unmarriageable. Living “like a man,” as Kate so often asserted—by herself, paying her own bills, and ultimately, answering to nobody—she liked that arrangement and could afford to live that way.

A leading lady's career seldom extended longer than a decade, which forced many of them into peculiar circumstances. Most stars suddenly found themselves living in a style to which they quickly became accustomed—only to find themselves unable to maintain it for long. That partly explained why practically all of them married repeatedly, at least once for money. (Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Greer Garson, and Jennifer Jones all counted business tycoons among their multiple husbands.) Not Hepburn. Luddy was certainly there to launch her career; and Howard Hughes helped her enter the stratosphere. But she left them so that she would not be further indebted. She wanted less from her men, not more.

With Spencer Tracy, she was able to take that way of living one step further—appreciating one intense, intimate relationship over a quarter of a century. He and Katharine Hepburn experienced the ups and downs of any married couple; but in never sealing their arrangement legally, they were able to retain an element of unreality in the relationship, a false quality based on neither of them being locked in. In many ways, their time together had the feeling of a “reunion” more than a union, because there was always this escape hatch through which either of them could pass whenever he or she pleased. Tracy periodically slipped out to fight personal demons, resulting in drinking binges and sexual conquests; Hepburn often packed her bags too—for professional conquests, acting roles. It quickly became apparent that even her briefest absences could be enough to set off a cycle of insobriety.

Upon the completion of
Woman of the Year,
for example, they went their separate ways. Against his wishes, Hepburn honored an agreement she had made with the Theatre Guild to appear in a new play by Philip Barry called
Without Love.
While she took it out for a pre-Broadway run, Tracy brooded his way through an MGM production of John Steinbeck's
Tortilla Flat.
When word that he was mixing alcohol with barbiturates reached Hepburn, she felt that she had to suspend the tour in order to spend the summer in California with him. She told the Guild she would return to New York for the play's Broadway opening.

In the summer of 1942, a project intended for Tracy and Hepburn came along. It was the most anomalous of their joint vehicles, but under the circumstances, she considered it a godsend. Donald Ogden Stewart, who had so successfully adapted her two Philip Barry plays for the screen, had just written a screenplay based on a novel by I. A. R. Wylie called
Keeper of the Flame.
It was a melodramatic political thriller, capturing much of the tenor of the times, in which a journalist tracks down the zealously protective widow of a great American hero—Lindbergh-like in some ways—whose Yankee Doodle patriotism turns out to be a front for fascism. It was not difficult for Hepburn to press George Cukor, always eager to prove he could direct drama as well as romantic comedy, into service. She convinced Tracy that this would be a wonderful way to make a worthwhile political statement.

Although the film was meant to emulate Hitchcock—with its whiffs of
Rebecca
and
Suspicion
—the material proved to be far from Cukor's metier. Heavy-handed attempts at psychology and sociology tended to overwhelm the antifascist message of
Keeper of the Flame.
The film succeeded only in allowing Tracy and Hepburn to work together again and to spend time together in a house she rented in Malibu. At night, she would often drive him all the way back into town, to a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Intense romantic involvements have occurred on motion-picture sets since the days of D. W Griffith. Most prove to be like shipboard romances, usually ending as the cruise does. By the close of the summer of 1942, the Hepburn-Tracy love affair seemed fated to similar shoals. For months her return to Broadway in
Without Love
distressed her, torn as she was between an old commitment to the theater friends who had resuscitated her career and her new commitment to the one man who, she said, “taught me to love.” Tracy made it plain that he wished she would abandon the play.

At that moment, Louise Tracy, who had not seen her husband stray from home this long since his affair with Loretta Young, played her hand. Instead of folding her cards as she almost did nearly a decade earlier, she finessed her way into the public eye with her husband at her side. That fall the University of Southern California announced the creation of the John Tracy Clinic, an organization dedicated to the deaf and their families, largely underwritten by Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Tracy. Louise Tracy's commitment to the cause was never less than genuine. Kate found her timing of the announcement, however, suspect—forcing, as it did, Spencer to play the role of admiring husband and reinforcing his feelings of guilt as a father.