Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [308]
Such reports didn’t surprise Katharine Houghton, who was loath to regard her aunt Kat as anyone’s victim, particularly Tracy’s.
She once told me that Spencer could stop drinking at will for months or even years at a time. Maybe this is what gave her the idea that alcohol was not an addiction. Maybe this is what gave her the idea that she could wrest the drink away from him with force. If he gave her a good whack on such an occasion, it’s my suspicion that she asked for it. She was not a frail person. Anyone who’s seen her in a film in which she exposes her impressive strong arms and broad shoulders, could imagine that she was a formidable physical adversary.
Christmas 1944. (SUSIE TRACY)
For her part, Hepburn was conciliatory, even if she and Tracy stopped speaking for a time: “I don’t think he’d ever hurt anyone. He’d be incapable of hurting anyone. Not physically violent with people at all.” Then, considering the general question of Tracy’s alleged rampages whenever he was truly in his cups: “Well, I think if you’re drunk enough and you do something like that, is that the same? I mean, ’tisn’t the same to me. If Spencer was sober he would never have touched anyone. But, I mean, if you’re drunk and fight, it depends on how old you are and how much do they stop you when you say, ‘Get outta here.’ I don’t think that means anything except that you’re drunk.”
Without Love officially finished on December 27, 1944, but neither Tracy nor Hepburn could leave town as yet. Samson Raphaelson was already at work on changes to Don Stewart’s September 29 draft of the screenplay, and Dorothy Kingsley was preparing a set of retakes for Lucille Ball. Tracy himself did one day of retakes after the first of the year, but then was left idle for three weeks—two of which he evidently spent hammered. He had plans to attend the January 20 inauguration in Washington with Louise, as well as an invitation to afternoon coffee with the president and Mrs. Roosevelt the day before. But further work on the picture kept him in Hollywood until well past the historic event, and he must have been bitterly disappointed. It wasn’t, in fact, until February 1 that he was finally cleared for travel, determined, as Kate wrote the Barrys, to take off the entire year. On the strength of A Guy Named Joe, The Seventh Cross, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, however, the annual Quigley poll of exhibitors had confirmed him as M-G-M’s top moneymaking star of the year 1944, and the most the studio would allow was the six-week vacation guaranteed under the terms of his contract.
In New York it was Hepburn’s strategy to get Tracy into a play, since his deal with Metro allowed for one. In February 1944 he had made a tentative return to the stage in narrating Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait for two performances with the L.A. Philharmonic. Plainly, however, he was terrified at the prospect of going back to the theatre after an absence of fifteen years. When the Playwrights’ Company offered him a comedy (likely S. N. Behrman’s Jacobowsky and the Colonel), he replied, “It is delightful and amusing, but, I am afraid, not for me.” He then shut off all further discussion by making a seemingly impossible request: “Please send me something by Bob Sherwood.”
Kate tried letting the matter lie, busying herself with her own plans to appear for the Guild in a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Short term, everything from Tracy’s perspective looked bleak, and he filled his days with morose thoughts and the dark