Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [310]
Katharine Houghton, when apprised of the story, didn’t buy it, contending that “anyone who knew the house” would find such a scene absurd.
Some sort of fight may well have occurred during which he tried to choke her, but the idea that she imprisoned a crazed Spencer Tracy in a very small closet is improbable for at least two reasons: First of all, despite her strength, I doubt she could have forced his bulk into that closet. And second, I doubt that she would have put a drunken man whom she loved into such danger. His only way out of that closet would have been to climb to the roof, and she certainly wouldn’t have wanted to take the chance that he would fall from the roof. Over the years, Kate recounted various incidents that were complete fabrications—good stories, yes, but untrue … In all these fabrications, she cast herself in a good or heroic light … If Spencer had really wanted to strangle her, I’m sure he could have succeeded without much difficulty.
Still, given the events that ensued in the months that followed their time together in New York, it’s clear something deeply disturbing happened between them, that Tracy had felt so out of control he never wanted to put himself in such a position again. For if the fight was over his drinking, as it most likely was, both parties could well have been enraged to the point of physical violence. “Assuming they had a fierce fight,” Houghton continued, “what would really interest me is why they had a fight, and why Kate chose that particular fight to embroider into a tale. Was it because she felt guilt concerning her part in it? In the family we were all witness, from time to time, to her being maddeningly self-righteous and bossy, no doubt with good intentions, but still way out of line. With Spencer she may well have been guilty on occasion of what he rightly would have considered egregious behavior.”
Was Hepburn’s own culpability something she could never fully acknowledge? Did the fracas continue? Or was Tracy immediately docile, suddenly aware of what might have happened? Nobody knows; of the two people with direct knowledge of that night, only one ever spoke of it, and only briefly, off mike, as in the shared whisper of a confidence. “I don’t know how he got so loaded, but he really did,” said Bob Hepburn, who was in New York awaiting the commissioning of the navy hospital ship U.S.S. Repose. “I had to call the hospital—Presbyterian—and they came down and fetched him and dried him out somehow.” Tracy’s “rumored” arrival at Harkness Pavilion was reported by Walter Winchell on February 28, and on March 10 the studio quietly extended his vacation without pay for another six weeks.
Without Love moved into the Music Hall on March 22, 1945, and, despite pallid reviews, had the biggest Lenten opening in the theater’s twelve-year history. Accompanied by Radio City’s annual “Glory of Easter” pageant, the picture played to $17,000 on the first day alone and sold a record 92,138 tickets over the four-day holiday weekend. Tracy attended Easter Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, quietly and without fanfare, and was afterward photographed walking along Fifth Avenue, the first time he had been observed in public in more than a month. The next day he was seen lunching with Sherwood, who had just returned from service in the Pacific as a representative of the Navy Department.
“Are you ever going to write another play?” Tracy asked him. It had been five years since There Shall Be No Night, the playwright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the Russian invasion of Finland.
“I’m thinking about one,” Sherwood replied, “and if it develops along the lines I contemplate, I’d surely like to