Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [351]
On the tennis court, circa 1944. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Kate played along, aware that Spence had a real need to believe that Louise didn’t know, but she realized, of course, that Louise couldn’t possibly have been so clueless. “She’d have had to have been so dense, which she wasn’t. Smart woman. Unsensitive. What shall I say? I think she had no sense of magic, she had no sense of the enormous complication of an Irish drunk.”
Chuck Sligh could remember a brief exchange with Louise while visiting Los Angeles in the early fifties. The kids were out on their own, and she was alone at the ranch in Encino.
Louise would round the three up so that we could all be together. This one time she called each of the children and Spence. Then she took me down to Chasen’s and each of the others came in their own car, so we had five people and four cars. We had a nice dinner, friendly. Spence was, of course, always fun to listen to. Finally, somebody said, “Well, I guess we’ve got to be going.” And each of them went out and got in their own car and went. Louise and I drove back to the house, and on the way out I said, “Louise, how come you and Spence are still married? I’m surprised you haven’t divorced him. I know he’s a Catholic, but—”
She said, “Well, he is a Catholic … and I thought at first this would all just … blow over … but it didn’t … Now … I think it would be sort of silly after all this time to divorce him.” And that was the end of that conversation.
In April 1949 Kate was finally ready to do As You Like It for the Theatre Guild, and it became a source of some tension between her and Tracy. For most of the time she had known him, she had made it her business to be where he was, to do what he wanted. “He couldn’t have left me,” she said. “I was too adorable—and sensible. I loved him and made a life for him that was irresistible to him. Otherwise, I think he would have wandered off.”
Eight years into the relationship, with her Metro contract having lapsed and her only work being pictures in which she was costarred with Tracy, she needed to get away, to go back to the stage, to stretch herself and try something different. Over the summer of 1949 she worked with actress Constance Collier, whose roles had included Juliet and Portia and Lady Macbeth and who had excited her interest in Shakespeare after years of prodding on the part of Lawrence Langner.
Retakes for Adam’s Rib finished the last week of August 1949. Hepburn staged the company wrap party and then headed east to Connecticut. Tracy followed shortly thereafter, installing himself at New York’s Pierre Hotel. He was back in New York in October, beset by stomach troubles and headed for Boston, where he checked into Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for “the works.”
As Kate could never be a part of the Tracy family, neither could Spence ever fit in with the Hepburns. “I think,” said Kate, “he was embarrassed with Mother and Dad because he was married and because it had gone on so long. I didn’t blame him, in a way.” Still, she never really left home, went back most weekends when she was in New York. “And when I went back there, I didn’t go to my atmosphere; I went to their atmosphere—of which I was a part.”
Tracy always portrayed Kate’s family as if they were Old Man Vanderhof’s clan from You Can’t Take It With You—strident, self-righteous, a little nuts around the edges. He loved twitting her about her “sacrosanct goddamn family” (as Katharine Houghton so aptly put it), throwing asides into master takes with the hope of sending her up. Shooting State of the Union on the set of a Detroit hotel room, his character was attempting to get a haircut when actor Frank Austin burst in through a side door, a pamphlet-wielding