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By Root 3844 0

in the midst of a midlife crisis. He seemed unsettled, unhappy, acutely conscious of his age and weight. One night in London he dined with Bill and Edie Goetz—she being the elder daughter of Louis B. Mayer—and the actress Joan Fontaine, whom he had never before met. He was withdrawn, Fontaine remembered, and not particularly good company. Later, he called her at her hotel and asked her to have dinner with him the following evening. She replied that out of respect to Kate—whom she knew slightly—she could not consider seeing him alone. He made a lame attempt at recovery, explaining that while he and Hepburn were “terribly good friends,” they had a “completely platonic” arrangement.

“That’s what they all say!” the actress responded, refusing to buy any of it. She left for Sweden within days, only to be greeted upon her arrival by another call from Tracy pressing her once again to see him when she returned to England. “I’m afraid not,” she returned, shutting him down as forcefully as she could. “Not only is there Kate to consider, but you are a married man.”

“I can get a divorce whenever I want to,” came his reply. “But my wife and Kate like things just as they are.”

Katharine Houghton believed that Tracy and her aunt were indeed going through a “rough patch” at the time, based on “inklings I got from scraps of things” that were said. “Losing himself in a beautiful woman was a bit like losing himself in drink, it seems to me, and he would go a long way to catching his prey, like telling Fontaine that he and Kate were just friends.” Hepburn, meanwhile, asked Phyllis Wilbourn, Collier’s secretary, to deliver a food parcel and some flowers to Tracy’s room at Claridge’s with a card signed “Lutie” (one of his many pet names for her).

“I think Spence’s ulcer has been a little tiresome,” Collier fretted in a subsequent letter.

He has been having a doctor all the time and staying in bed a lot. It’s so silly of him to worry around with English doctors, they don’t know anything and it would be much better if he flew back and went straight to Boston for a few days to check up with the doctors who understand his case. We drove down to spend the day with Viv and Larry. Spence was absolutely charming, though I think he had a little pain. We left in the afternoon. I do think he behaved too beautifully. Larry and the men were drinking all around him and yelling and very gay and Spence never wavered with his ginger beer, or whatever he was drinking. It must have been very difficult.

I think he has seen a good deal of Viv and Larry and they try to make him stay up late and it is very hard to resist that. Oh dear, how I wish you were here with him, I think he would stay in London and enjoy it. He loves the country so and it looks so wonderful. I lunched with him the other day at Claridge’s … Darling, if you get a chance, persuade them to come home. Do do it. Spence is hanging around here, wondering whether to wait for you and if you only get back a little sooner, he will wait, I am sure, but it is very lonely for him without you though he is longing to see you.

Tracy did indeed leave town just a couple of days later, catching the Queen Mary and enduring one of the roughest crossings in the ship’s fabled history. The men were back in L.A. by June 20, Tracy, specifically, to discuss a picture Dore Schary desperately wanted him to make, a costume drama of the Pilgrims’ voyage to America, an unfathomable imperative with the deadly title The Plymouth Adventure. Schary had somehow become enamored of the story on the basis of a novel by Ernest Gebler, which had been purchased from galleys. Its acquisition was heralded in the Hollywood Reporter as “one of the biggest story buys in months,” even as Schary himself acknowledged that films about the Mayflower were invariably jinxed. Envisioned as a Technicolor extravaganza, the production head wanted the picture top-lined by several major stars, and his quest for a rock-solid Captain Christopher Jones inevitably led him to Tracy.

“Dore Schary was sort of like a rabbinical student who feels