Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [361]
YOU MAY FORGET ALL THEM THINGS I LEARNED YOU ABOUT UNDERPLAYING BUT PLEASE REMEMBER THE REST. THE NEXT VOICE YOU HEAR I HOPE WILL BE MINE.
He signed the communiqué “Ever – Old Pot,” a likely reference to all the coffee he guzzled.3
According to Buck Herzog of the Sentinel, Tracy turned up in Milwaukee about a week later, completely unnoticed and making the rounds with Gene Sullivan. It was at the height of widespread rumors that Tracy and Hepburn were “more than just good friends,” and both were fuming over a splashy article by Richard Gehman in the high-end arts and fashion journal Flair that helped fuel such talk. Profiling Hepburn, Gehman essentially outed the relationship, suggesting their devotion to each other was an established fact: “They are together whenever professional commitments permit: Tracy turned up in Boston when As You Like It was there, and in 1945 when he was playing in Robert E. Sherwood’s The Rugged Path, Hepburn followed him about and, on one occasion, reportedly scrubbed the floor of his dressing room. They have often been seen riding in Hepburn’s black Lincoln convertible (Connecticut license KH-6), but they have never furnished column material by appearing in a public place.”
Since, in support of As You Like It, Hepburn had cooperated with Gehman, albeit minimally, Tracy may well have blamed her for the humiliation Louise no doubt suffered. Said Herzog: “We started the evening at the Club Madrid and wound up in the wee hours of the morning. He left the following day for Hollywood, followed by gossip column reports that his whirlwind courtship with Miss Hepburn, whom he had followed on tour, ended in a spat.”
Joan Bennett remembered a phrase Tracy had picked up from Kate: “Bore, bore, bore …” She heard it at the start of Father’s Little Dividend, but once he got into it, he actually seemed to be enjoying himself, racing through the picture in twenty-one days, seven days under schedule. “I went out to George [Cukor]’s for my first party to say goodbye to Viv[ien Leigh] and Larry [Olivier]—and Spence was there,” Constance Collier wrote in a letter to Hepburn, hoping, perhaps, to mend the rift. “In all the time I have known him—I have never seen him look so well—really wonderful—very brown and thinner and he was so funny and charming.”
At one point, Tracy became concerned that one of the twin babies playing his grandson in the picture was either hard of hearing or completely deaf. “I don’t think anything was wrong,” said Don Taylor, “but he was VERY concerned about it—I know that—and he called his wife.” Louise came to the set, and Spence, in light of the Flair article, was uncommonly solicitous, posing for pictures with her and talking up her work with the clinic. “They were very sweet to each other,” Taylor said. “She came on and he said, ‘Hello! Hi! How are you?’ They were dear. He introduced the mother, and his wife talked to the children.”
With sets recycled from the first film, Minnelli was able to wrap the picture $150,000 under budget. “These last three comedies have entirely changed my viewpoint,” Tracy told a visitor. “Where before I doted on doing dramatic roles, I have never been as happy as I am now. In these uncertain times I think the public wants escapist pictures and I hope I’ll get my share of them.”
There was never, however, an overabundance of comedies during Dore Schary’s reign at M-G-M. Tracy was bolstered in his quest for escapist fare only by the knowledge that the Kanins were at work for him on another original. Carrying the title Pat and Mike, the story concerned a woman whose controlling husband has little time for their marriage. When Pat Ford tells off the wife of an important client, Joe blows up and tells her that she couldn’t earn a penny on her own. Pat impulsively decides to turn athlete under the guidance of a local golf pro and quickly becomes the sensation of the Hot Springs