Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [353]
“All the Katharine Hepburn–Spencer Tracy pictures I made were just mediocre successes,” Larry Weingarten lamented toward the end of his life. “When they got out of the big cities the fellows just didn’t understand them and the women—they didn’t go, it was too sophisticated for them.” There was also the scattered picketing of theaters from Kate’s presumed support of Henry Wallace and the Progressives.
Ironically, word-of-mouth benefited Adam’s Rib more than any of the previous Tracy-Hepburn pairings, and it ended up being the most profitable of all their pictures after Keeper of the Flame. Spence’s aunt Jenny, now living near her daughter in Renton, Washington, caught the buzz firsthand when she saw a doctor for stomach complaints—the family nerves that afflicted them all. “Mrs. Feely,” the doctor told her, “you should get out and do things. Go to a movie, get your mind off your worries. I saw the most wonderful movie last night—you should see it. I’ve laughed all day long. The name of it is Adam’s Rib.”
Jenny, a steely tone suddenly entering her voice: “No … I haven’t seen it yet, but I suppose that I’ll go.”
“It’s Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn,” the man continued, not knowing when to let up. “It’s a riot—you really should see it.”
“I don’t think you’d laugh so much,” she snapped back, “if it was your nephew making a fool of himself!”
“That was hard for her to take,” her daughter Jane commented. “Oh, dear God. Katharine. Katharine Hepburn. ‘The hussy.’ It was always the woman [never the man]. Oh, heavens no. You know that he was dragged by his neck into that unholy alliance by this woman of no principles whatsoever. And my mother was not that kind—she was a very bright woman, an intellectual Catholic, very well informed. But on certain subjects like that, [the instinct of] the mother and her cub took over. It was never on your family’s side; there was no fault there. That double standard—the lace curtains. Appearances must be kept up.”
Andrew Tracy was the only member of the family to have actually met Kate Hepburn during one of his infrequent visits to California. “I don’t think this Katharine Hepburn is such a big deal,” he said, clearly and instantly taken with her. “She stuck her paw out and said, ‘Hello, Uncle Andrew.’ That was enough for me.”
The situation with Louise was worrisome, the tension thick between Spence and his brother Carroll. Andrew’s son Frank could remember his father describing his nephew’s dressing room on the M-G-M lot, a living room and a bedroom alongside Gable’s on the second floor of the building. “Sometimes Spence came in and went in his bedroom, laid down and took a nap. I remember Dorothy would be complaining about his treatment of Carroll, that Carroll would come home all shaky and white and pale, practically in tears and ready for a rubber room. And, meanwhile, Spence was back up there in his dressing room sound asleep, oblivious to the hellacious behavior that had caused this poor man to come apart.”
Malaya went into distribution six weeks after Adam’s Rib. A pulpy melodrama that held little sway with city audiences, it played off well in the sticks, its modest cost a considerable factor in its commercial success. Tracy returned to L.A. on January 6, 1950, and was present on the sixteenth when Louise’s father, Allienne Treadwell, died in San Diego at the age of eighty-one. Spence had met the old man, a practicing lawyer who came up to Encino once in a while for dinner and to borrow money. Louise was bitter when she was young, but she had long since made her peace with him. “You have to forgive,” she said. “Everybody does. You have to believe everybody