Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [271]
There was something mystical about the Tracy name. One of her first memories of New York was sitting on a tenement balcony watching the Tracy tugboats go by. Then later came the role of Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story. There can be no doubt that she targeted Spencer Tracy as the project that became Woman of the Year took shape, but it’s unlikely that falling for him was part of the plan. It happened so fast that it took her by surprise, and it must have been Tracy’s initial reticence combined with his willingness to play along—albeit on his own terms—that girded her resolve. “We started our first picture together and I knew right away that I found him irresistible. Just exactly that, irresistible.”
Tracy, of course, was at the top of his game, outdistancing even Clark Gable as an attraction at the American box office.1 There was no longer any chasing, as there had been for Loretta Young, and women routinely tumbled for a man of his stature. Joe Mankiewicz could remember the sight of one script girl nudging another as they observed Tracy in casual conversation with a third. “He’d have them off their feet like THAT!” Mankiewicz said, snapping his fingers for emphasis. Gable once observed a similar scene in the company of unit publicist Emily Torchia. “You know,” he said in mock indignation, “Spence can outdo me with these girls!”
“He did have quite a line of conquests,” Claire Trevor acknowledged. “Women loved him. He was a very attractive man.” Tracy knew where to go to avoid being seen by the press, especially when he was with somebody well known, and when he was spotted alone with, for example, Ingrid Bergman, it was never at a popular nightspot like Ciro’s and was, therefore, never reported. “To me,” said Sheilah Graham, “it was something you didn’t print. Because I had been warned very severely never to print stories of married producers and directors who had extra-marital affairs with girls … My boss John Wheeler [founder of the North American Newspaper Alliance] said, ‘Never write about the romances of married men.’ And I stuck to that quite scrupulously.”
In 1940 Tracy was seen publicly with Olivia de Havilland on at least two occasions, a fact that got reported in the columns precisely because it wasn’t presumed to be an affair. The actress’ official date, it was explained, was Tim Durant, a buddy of Tracy’s from the Uplifters Club who had suddenly taken ill. The two men had grown increasingly close in the late 1930s and Durant, for a while, assumed Carroll’s duties as a traveling companion following the IRS debacle of 1939. “He was not only a great artist,” Durant said of Tracy, “but a fine friend. We had much in common and many good times together … We stopped off in New York on the way to England, where a crowd of fifty spent all night outside Claridge’s Hotel to await the chance of seeing Spencer the next morning.”
A tall, good-looking guy who was generally regarded as one of the best-dressed men in Hollywood, Thomas W. “Tim” Durant was a stockbroker in the mid-1920s when he met and married Adelaide Brevoort Close, the eldest daughter of famed cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. When they divorced, Durant, an unrepentant womanizer, was awarded their place on Bedford Drive, a main house and two guest houses on several acres of prime Beverly Hills real estate. He rented out the main house for a tidy sum and took up residency in the larger of the two guest houses, a secluded bachelor pad tastefully furnished in early American. Entered off an alleyway, the other guest house—presumably a servants’ quarters—was often borrowed by friends for trysts. Tracy stayed there when he couldn’t bear the drive to Encino, and Durant once told actor-producer Norman Lloyd the Tracy-Hepburn affair was conducted in that house.
Durant worked for Charlie Chaplin,