Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [297]
And so with Kate Hepburn at his side, Tracy began a period in which he tried moderating his drinking rather than stopping it entirely, a shaky proposition when, as Audrey Caldwell once observed, all he needed was “a dessert with rum in it” to set him off.
Joe Mankiewicz believed Tracy and Hepburn well matched because “if you were going to be in an intimate relationship with Spence it had to be one where essentially you took care of him, waited on him, cleaned up after him. Spence was in your care. On good psychological grounds the alcoholic is in that infantile position. He renders himself helpless, which is a state of infancy and which is the most powerful position that the human being is ever in. He has to be taken care of as an infant. He has to be wiped and dried and fed and dressed and cleaned as an infant. And Kate, I think, wanted to do that.”
Tracy never touched booze around Louise and the kids, and neither Johnny nor Susie could remember ever having seen him with a drink in his hand. One evening he drove Lincoln Cromwell out to the ranch for dinner. “We spent the night there, and I remember, after Spence had gone to bed, the long conversation Louise and I had concerning her feelings about Spencer and their marriage. Finally, she asked my advice: Should she divorce him? While I could certainly see her side of the situation, my basic loyalty was to Spencer and I felt that if he had wanted a divorce, he would have asked for it. I replied to her that since most things seemed to be going smoothly between them, without a lot of emotional strain, I could not see what a divorce would accomplish. In short, I advised her to do nothing.”
In October Tracy was asked to appear at a rally of twelve thousand War Chest volunteers in Colorado, headlining a three-hour bill of entertainment that included opera star Mona Paulee, the eighty-piece symphonic band from Buckley Field, a soldier chorus of sixty voices, and the stars of the WACavilcade, a national touring company of thirty. Studio publicist Hal Elias was assigned to go with him.
Prior to going I had never met him, and Howard Strickling, who was head of publicity, called me into his office one day and he [said], “I want you to meet Spencer Tracy.” So Tracy knew that I was to accompany him to Denver—that was where the war bond drive was supposed to take place. And he said, “Hal, I want one thing understood.” He said it very sternly. “Nobody is going to tell me when and how much to drink.”
He was very self-conscious of his heavy-drinking reputation. And I said, “Spence, I’m not making this trip to be a guardian and tell you when and what to drink. I’m merely there to protect the publicity interests of M-G-M and YOUR interests.” That settled it. Now we arrived in Denver, and we retired to a beautiful suite of rooms. I’ll never forget—there was a dining room table in the middle of the room, and it was loaded with liquor of every description. They knew it was Spencer Tracy, and they knew he was a heavy drinker. So he looked at it and said, “Hal, give all these bottles to the motorcycle escort who brought us over here.” And Spencer Tracy didn’t take one drink during the entire trip.
Tracy returned to M-G-M to make added scenes for A Guy Named Joe, which, like Keeper of the Flame, had run afoul of the Production Code. The War Department had never been enthusiastic about the picture and only grudgingly provided cooperation after two major revisions in the screenplay. (“The presence of hovering ghosts of deceased pilots, and the unreal, fantastic, and slightly schizophrenic character of the scenario hardly combine to produce a sensible war time film diet,” the chief of the Information Branch complained.) The picture’s ending, as written by Dalton Trumbo and staged by Fleming, had Irene Dunne’s character crashing after the bombing of an enemy ammunition dump, thereby reuniting her with Tracy’s Pete Sandidge at the fade-out. The PCA’s Joe Breen objected to the ending on the presumption that Dorinda’s commandeering of the bomber—intended for the Van Johnson