Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [367]
Collier accompanied her to London, where the two took over a suite at Claridge’s, and Tracy made plans to follow—at least as far as Europe—as soon as O’Hara had been completed. Spiegel was holding the company together in fits and starts while Huston polished the script, and Hepburn wondered if there would be enough money to cover even the cost of their room. When Tracy did leave for New York on April 27, it was in the company of Benny Thau, who would be making the trip with him. Together, they caught Pat O’Brien’s opening as MC at the Plaza Hotel, then sailed for Naples on May 5 aboard the S.S. Independence. Obligingly, Tracy posed for press photos, perched on a rail on the ship’s top deck and by the interior window of his stateroom, at age fifty-one a distinguished elder statesman of the American motion picture industry.
In Rome he met up with Kate and found the city “unbelievable” in its power and majesty. On the eighteenth, he was received in an audience with Pope Pius XII, an event he described as “truly the culmination of [a] lifelong anticipation.” His Holiness, he recounted, “received me at the same time he received 50 young crewmen from the U.S.S. plane carrier, the Coral Sea. It was a wonderful experience to be present when he talked with these young men and listened with such interest and sympathy to their adventures and problems. He commented sadly to me on their youth.” The Holy Father, he concluded, was “wonderful” and blessed a rosary he had brought for his cousin Jane.
Hepburn left to start work on The African Queen on May 20. Tracy flew by Pan Am to Paris on the twenty-fourth—a terrifying experience when three of the plane’s four engines quit in midflight. Although he had said he would spend an entire month on the French Riviera, he lingered just two days before moving on to England. In London he checked in at Claridge’s and asked to be left “very much alone.” A few hours later, dressed in a flannel suit and navy tie, he ambled down the stairs and greeted a reporter from the Daily Mirror, seemingly grateful for the company and practically pushing the man into a waiting armchair. “I’m just a white-haired, middle-aged movie star,” he groused, shoving his lower lip out in a characteristic pose. “Who the hell cares about a guy like me?”
He took Constance Collier to see Caesar and Cleopatra, walked the town a bit with Benny Thau, and wired that he was shipping back a Fiat station wagon he had purchased for Susie. Kate, said Collier, was in the Congo writing “horrifying” letters and having “an awfully tough time I think, even she admits it, and it is hard to get her to admit anything like that.”
By return mail Constance advised her that Spence would be cabling her “and said I might tell you that M-G-M have a picture by Gar Kanin called ‘Mike and something’ for you and he, so that is thrilling and a lovely thing to look forward too [sic]. So hurry up with that stunt, darling, and get back home.” Spence, she added, was “longing for a letter from you saying things are a bit better. He is so desperately worried about you, but I know you and I think in spite of the terrible hardships you will find a way of getting a kick out of the place.”
With Tracy in London, Hepburn naturally gravitated to John Huston for companionship. Huston remembered “the many nights I sat with Katie on the top deck of the paddle boat and watched the eyes of the hippos in the water all around us, every eye seemed to be staring in our direction. And we talked. We talked about anything and everything. But there was never an idea of romance—Spencer Tracy was the only man in Katie’s life.”
Tracy, however, resented her absence and may well have been