Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [296]
He said he had been “directed” for so long that he’d lost the ability to make decisions. In these small hours, among other things, he said he envied me the necessity of making “either-or” choices. Either people made his decisions for him, or it was a matter of choosing some tangible item (car, clothing, etc.) and he could have anything he wanted. He had five Cadillacs and the planning of acquiring anything had lost its kick. So he worried about his public image. After he returned to Hollywood, he phoned me several times to inquire if Seattle papers had unfavorable publicity. No mention had been made and his days of agony were unnecessary.2
Tracy told Lincoln Cromwell the younger man obviously “needed a vacation” and insisted on his accompanying them on the flight back. For the next two weeks Cromwell saw him daily, staying with him in his two-bedroom suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Tracy had left him upon their arrival in L.A.
He went on up the hill to see Katharine Hepburn. Later that evening, he sent a limousine down to bring me up to her house … I knew that he and Mrs. Tracy had been living apart since my first year at McGill. At the party Spencer gave for me between my first and second years of medical school, Louise Tracy was conspicuous by her absence. I recall that I spent most of that evening sitting across the table talking with Katharine Hepburn, while Spencer tromped back and forth in front of the window, looking down at Hollywood below. He was still preoccupied with his aborted Alaska excursion. Miss Hepburn had grown up in a medical family … and she was interested in—and conversant with—a variety of medical topics. We had a long, spirited discussion about biology, medicine, and philosophy with Spencer participating little, if at all.
During the days, Spence went to work at the studio, and I drove around Los Angeles, renewing old friendships. He made his car available for my use, even requesting the Rationing Board to make more gas available for me. I repaid him by running some of his errands. One of these was to return a heavy parka he had borrowed from Jimmy Roosevelt to wear in Alaska. Spencer was a dedicated Democrat, with friends high up in the Roosevelt administration. In the evenings, we would go out to a restaurant to eat or have food sent up from the hotel. Spence did no cooking there. While still at medical school, I had been cautioned by Dr. Dennis to avoid alcohol—both the subject and the substance—when with Spencer. During this period, however, we usually had a couple of drinks before dinner, and Spence never over-indulged. At no time I was with him did he conduct himself as anything but a gentleman.
Kate was no more a drinker than Louise, but where Louise’s tactic was sheer avoidance, Hepburn would give him a drink and then challenge him to handle it. Like most Americans of the time, she considered the abuse of alcohol a failure of the will, though not necessarily the moral failing that temperance crusaders and prohibitionists contended. There’s every indication, in fact, that she never especially wanted Tracy to quit drinking altogether. He maddened her, grieved her at times, but never bored her. “You have to say, ‘What do you expect of life?’ I’ve known several men who drank too much and they were all extremely interesting.” To their friend Bill Self she was blunter still: “All of my men have been drunks.”
It was like a badge of honor, a pattern she had no interest in breaking. “I don’t think anything destroyed Spencer,” she said, “except the fact that he had produced a son that was very severely handicapped and he felt responsible for it. And he was absolutely unable to face it … I never interfered in a stupid way. And I never tried to moralize about the evils of drink. And if I interfered in a clever way, why, it wouldn’t be interfering, would it? Well, I’d just try to change the atmosphere. But a drinker is going to stop on his own. I think you can very seldom influence