Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [364]
Northwestern University awarded Louise an honorary doctorate in June, which prompted her husband to begin referring to his wife as “Dr. Tracy.” He began worrying that his presence at certain events could have the effect of overshadowing Louise and her work, and he made sure he was out of town when the groundbreaking for the clinic’s new building took place on July 28, 1951. He observed a groundbreaking of his own when George Cukor began work on a pair of cottages at the lower end of his Beverly Hills estate, one to serve as a secluded residence for one of the world’s best-known actors. Settling on a place to live was no simple matter for Spence, and there was a brief period of time when he enlisted Bill Self’s help while Kate was away on tour.
“I kind of scouted the town at one time,” Self recalled, “trying to find a place for him, and reported back on a couple of places I thought were possibilities. He hated them all. He looked at me like I was an idiot. He calls up and says, ‘That’s a motel! You want to put me in a motel?’ [Then] he was looking for a house, and he considered, believe it or not, Peggy and me and our child moving in with him. I guess semi-caretaker to him in a way, you know? We actually talked about that a little bit, and Kate and I talked about that a little bit, but it was always looked upon as being totally impractical. I felt it would destroy our relationship.”
By the time Cukor came to the rescue, Tracy was living, in Kate’s words, in “a terrible little apartment on South Beverly Drive down an alley off the actual drive. Trying to make it attractive was really not possible. In desperation we had Erik Bolin—French furniture maker—make some wooden valances for the curtains.”
Tracy was a restless traveler when Kate was out of town—New York and back again, Chicago when he took the train, Freeport, Milwaukee once in a great while. Constance Collier was never sure where he was. “Did Spence come?” she asked when Hepburn was playing As You Like It in San Francisco. “I called twice but could not get him, so I suppose he went.” And later: “I don’t know if Spencer is here. I haven’t seen him at all.” He would slip in and out of town on a moment’s notice. “I’d go out to the ranch to play tennis with Johnny,” Bill Self remembered, “and Spencer would be there. And I didn’t even know that he was in town. I’d say, ‘What are you doing here? I thought you were in New York.’ He’d say, ‘No, I didn’t go’ or ‘I came back last night’ or something like that, but he would be there, and I think Louise liked that.”
If there was one constant in Tracy’s life at the time, it was Sunday Mass wherever he happened to be. “There was a time in my life in the late forties and early fifties when I went to Mass almost every Sunday at Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills,” said Darryl Hickman. “Tracy was always there and sat by himself. Even though he was such a famous, recognizable film star, none of the parishioners ever approached him, including me. I had acted with him in two films when I was growing up, but I did what everybody else did—pretend I didn’t know him, or even know who he was. We didn’t dare intrude on such a ‘private’ public man. He would often be there before I arrived, a solitary figure standing in front of the church before Mass. Being so unapproachable, I wondered why he didn’t go right in. Like so many other things about Tracy, I could never figure that out.”
When Tracy went east for the Red Cross, it was to do Father of the Bride over the radio for the Theatre Guild. Larry Keethe accompanied him, and President and Mrs. Truman attended the broadcast in Washington with their daughter Margaret. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who first met Tracy in New York in the 1920s, had come to resemble him to such an extent that he was frequently taken for him in crowds. “By prearrangement, I waited for him at the rear exit,” Douglas recounted in his autobiography. “Many people