Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [352]
In five days of tests and x-rays at Brigham, nothing proved conclusive. On Saturday, October 22, Tracy made the two-hour drive to Old Saybrook, where the Hepburn family’s summer estate, Fenwick, stood on three acres fronting Long Island Sound at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Katharine Houghton (née Grant, daughter of Kate’s younger sister, Marion), age four, was there with her parents and older brother.
“I remember him standing in the large tile foyer,” she said.
All of my family were assembled: grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. And, of course, Kate. I still have a vision of him standing there turning his hat in his hands and being quite nervous. I guess he must have come a little before lunch, and an autumn storm was brewing. At the dining table my older brother asked him to recite “Casey at the Bat” because we’d been told by my Aunt Katy that Spencer could do that very well. My grandfather, who was generally very suspicious of any of Kate’s beaux, wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the performance. Spencer, after all, was a married man. My grandfather didn’t know what he was about, what he was up to. The storm got worse and worse during lunch, and the little sailboats moored near the big breakwater south of the house were beginning to pull their moorings. Kate was watching them, as was everyone else in the family, but I don’t think Spencer was. All of a sudden, Kate got up and said in a loud voice, “Everybody drop your pants and follow me!” So everyone, except the young kids, leapt up and took off their shoes and pants and tore out to the beach. The little boats were about to crash into our jetty. Spencer didn’t move. He just sat there and said, “This whole family is nuts.”
I don’t remember his ever visiting the house again. I do, however, remember my Aunt Kate mentioning something about other visits on various occasions in the late seventies or early eighties. Driving back to New York City on I-95 she’d say, “You see that Howard Johnson’s?” I’d say, “Yes.” She’d say, “Spencer used to stay there when I would come east to see Mother and Dad at Fenwick.”
A dual portrait, apparently penned during the making of State of the Union. The inscription, in Tracy’s barely legible hand, reads: “To the old one with love from THE PRESIDENT.” (ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES)
Tracy returned that same evening to Boston, where his test results pointed to an ulcer and not the malignancy he had feared. He met with Seymour Gray, a gastroenterologist and associate professor at the Harvard School of Medicine, who saw before him a “tortured soul” who had “an enormous guilt complex about his mute [sic] son, which he interpreted as a punishment from God for his sins.”
Tracy went back to New York, where rehearsals for As You Like It were under way, and after a couple of days with little to do, flew home to Los Angeles, where Dr. Dennis affirmed all of Dr. Gray’s findings. Nausea overtook him, and he spent nearly two weeks without an appetite. He met with Benny Thau at the studio, confirming a tentative start date for his next picture, but it wasn’t until he went out to the ranch for dinner on November 9 that he began to feel better.
As You Like It opened in New Haven on December 8 before a capacity audience that included Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn and the playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder. Any doubts about Kate’s fitness for the role of Rosalind were dispelled by a spirited, if not particularly commanding performance, and she was accorded seven curtain calls. Moving on to Boston, the show settled in at the Colonial Theatre, where Spence came to see her at Christmas, another sell-out