Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [299]
Morale was low, and Tracy’s dark moods were sharpened by the drinks he now permitted himself at the end of each workday. Hume Cronyn thought him “a lovely man” who had a “rough tongue” on occasion, particularly after having imbibed a few. Seated one evening in Tracy’s dressing room, drink in hand, Cronyn shot to his feet when Hepburn, whom he had never before met, walked in. “Spence was feeling morose,” said Cronyn, “and made no effort to move or introduce us. Perhaps he assumed we knew one another. I introduced myself. We shook hands and she said, ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything—please sit down.’ She was tall, slim, beautiful, and very direct, and her look was as firm as her handshake. I was aware that she was appraising Tracy and conscious of his mood.”
Hepburn turned to him and said cheerfully, “How are you doing, old man?”
“On my ass.”
“Problems?”
But he was drinking and didn’t bother to answer. She continued, “I think I’ll get myself a drink.”
Cronyn got up again. “Can I get it for you?” he said.
“She told you to sit down!” Tracy snapped, as though Cronyn were hard of hearing. Cronyn sat down, and presently Kate joined them.
“Spence seemed withdrawn into sullen reverie. I wondered what was wrong; he’d been talkative enough before Miss Hepburn arrived, despite the irritation he expressed over the time it was taking to light our scenes. Miss Hepburn talked to me, ignoring Spence’s silence. She asked me about the film and what I was playing; she knew the script well. She was charming. At one point she produced a cigarette and I got up to light it for her. That did it.”
Tracy exploded: “Why don’t you two find a bed somewhere and get it over with?”
“I stood there, frozen, until the match burned my fingers,” said Cronyn. “Miss Hepburn just smiled.”
Tracy waved him down. “Sit down, for Christ’s sake! You keep bouncing around like corn in a popper!”
Cronyn finished his drink and got out as quickly as possible; there was something about Kate’s presence that addled Tracy, as if she were revealing a dark secret about the two of them she had no business exposing. It wasn’t jealousy, Hepburn insisted: “No. No, he’d had a few.”
Joe Mankiewicz, who knew both men intimately, agreed, though not quite for the same reason. “Hume had done two things that were irritating Spence. Jumping up from that seat when she came in and jumping up now. ‘Let me do it for you.’ Because it’s obviously ‘good manners,’ because Kate Hepburn, in my life, in my world, is perfectly capable of fixing her own friggin’ drink if the drinks are there. If it’s troublesome to get, well … And getting up as she comes into the room! Again, at our age and our status in the business, we don’t do that. But if you’re Hume…‘and I got up to light her cigarette!’ ” He laughed. “Knowing Spence, he’s picked the three spots where his temper is going boom, boom, boom!”
There may have been yet another reason for Tracy’s irascibility. Ingrid Bergman had been back on the M-G-M lot shooting Patrick Hamilton’s Victorian thriller Gaslight, and one day she was photographed on the set of A Guy Named Joe talking with Tracy and Irene Dunne. As soothing as Kate’s presence could be, it could also be disruptive, for she had fallen deeply in love with a man who could never tell her that he loved her.4 “I have no idea how Spence felt about me,” she wrote in her memoir. “I can only say I think that if he hadn’t liked me he wouldn’t have hung around.” But now it was Kate who was hanging around, and she was going through a period where she was obsessed with him. Hairstylist Helen Hunt once told