Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [307]
Weather slowed an already troubled shoot, delaying location work during one of the wettest Novembers on record. Tracy was “ill” the last half of the month, eventually forcing a complete shutdown. “There were times they had to cancel a day’s shooting,” Patricia Morison remembered. “I didn’t know why, but I understand now it was because he had been drinking. Which everybody knew was a problem except me. I didn’t know why I suddenly had three days off. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I don’t have to get up at four anymore.’ ”
Tracy hated the character of Pat Jamieson and what Don Stewart had done to it under Hepburn’s constant yammering. According to Larry Weingarten, he resisted the role “until the last day of shooting.” Tracy “took sick” on Without Love, Weingarten believed, because his loathing of the part was “so violent.” Hepburn had never before worked with him when he was hitting the bottle, and she assumed the burden of bringing him back. “Mayer was a practical man,” she said,
and I just used to call up and say, “Look, I need a little help here, and I’m going to move him out of the Beverly Hills Hotel and up into my house.” It was very difficult to do that because, I thought, if any tragedy occurred, to have him in my house might be wildly difficult. But it had to be done, because I couldn’t leave him in the hotel. Because he was so noisy that the hotel said, “Get him out.” Carroll was a weak man, [and] I think that Louise just deliberately … did … not … know…[so] if I felt he was in trouble, I’d move into the hotel or else I’d move him into my house. But I was always afraid that something would happen and there would be a scandal that would embarrass Louise. It wouldn’t have embarrassed me so much, but I really wanted her to be protected.
Nine working days were lost, but there wasn’t a hint of trouble outside the gated walls of M-G-M. “We didn’t publicize him,” said June Dunham, Howard Strickling’s longtime secretary. “At times, he’d be in the room with Hepburn for three days while she sobered him up. But those things never got to the press.” When Tracy returned on November 27, the tension on the set was fierce and it would only grow worse. A pervasive sense of doom settled over the company, so certain was almost everyone involved that the picture would be awful. “What goes on with Spencer Tracy?” Hedda Hopper wondered in her column of December 4. “He has become a verifiable matinee idol, wants to see rushes, and hasn’t been nice to Lucille Ball on the set of Without Love. Could it be because he and Katharine Hepburn are no longer speaking?” By the thirteenth, conditions had deteriorated to the point where Keenan Wynn was reported to have taken a poke at assistant director Earl McAvoy.
The level of violence between Tracy and Hepburn is largely a matter of conjecture. “Mind you, I don’t frighten easily,” Kate once said, “but when he became … you know, he had a violent temper. At times, at times.” In response to a question from A. Scott Berg, one of her biographers, she acknowledged that Tracy had once hit her. “She proceeded,” wrote Berg, “to describe a fiendish night at the Beverly Hills Hotel. While Kate was trying to put Tracy to bed, he smacked the back of his hand across her face. She said he was so drunk she believed he neither knew that he’d done it nor that he’d remember.”
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