Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [380]
The business with Gene Tierney hadn’t gone well, and Hepburn was so depleted it took everything she had just to get through the play each night. Spence, Kanin observed, was “[s]ort of at loose ends” and had “had a bad time in Paris” (presumably with Tierney, although he didn’t say as much). When he told the Kanins on a call from London that he “needed a friend,” Ruth shouted into the receiver, “Well, you’ve got two!” and they began making plans to join him in France toward the end of September.
Dally-Watkins happened along in the interim, a charming, self-assured Australian whom Gar and Ruth had met in Los Angeles through the Aussie costume designer Orry-Kelly. As a top fashion model, she had founded her country’s first schools of deportment and was on a tour of the schools and modeling agencies of Western Europe. “At the appointed time,” she recalled, “I saw him descend the hotel’s marble staircase, glance at me and look away as if to seek out another face. It was obvious he had not been given a recognizable description, so I introduced myself and he seemed surprised. No wonder! Over afternoon tea he told me that Garson and Ruth had played a joke on him, saying I was an older actress from Australia and thought I would make a good mother for Debbie Reynolds’ character in his next movie.”
In London, June found Tracy solitary and “introspective,” more interested in knowing about her than in talking about himself. “Spencer showed a romantic interest in me, and there was a spark between us that culminated in a kiss.” She responded to his dry humor, the way he’d put things, and had no awareness of his relationship with Katharine Hepburn. “I was,” she said, “twenty-five and stupid—well, let’s say unworldly—and I was a single girl, traveling alone.” They went to the ballet at Covent Garden, where he took her backstage to meet prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn. He didn’t want to wait in Europe for the Kanins, though, and returned to New York before they had time to sail. (“Remaining here longer impossible,” he wired.) June was scheduled to go on to Paris but promised to see him again when she returned to California.
While Pat and Mike had garnered excellent reviews, it was The African Queen that put Katharine Hepburn back in the public eye in a big way. Both she and Bogart drew Academy Award nominations for their roles in the picture, and Bogart subsequently won the Oscar for his work as Charlie Allnut after shrewdly and tirelessly campaigning for it. With Hepburn bringing The Millionairess to Broadway for a limited run, Time began preparations for a cover story on the forty-five-year-old actress and put researchers on the job in Connecticut, Los Angeles, and New York City. Kate’s father, as always, refused to talk, as did the Kanins, but there were plenty of other witnesses willing to say their piece—stand-ins, crew members, journalists, and press agents among them. Cary Grant cooperated to the point of telling a couple of anecdotes, as did Howard Hawks, Joe Mankiewicz, George Stevens, and Eddie Knopf. George Cukor was circumspect, speaking only in generalities, and nobody would admit that she was in a long-term relationship with her frequent costar, Spencer Tracy.
Nobody, that is, except one.
Humphrey Bogart, according to Time staff writer Jim Murray, confirmed a romance did indeed exist, that he had seen Tracy and Hepburn together, and that Hepburn was “unaccustomedly subdued and effeminate” in Tracy’s presence. And, he added, she didn’t hog the conversational limelight on such occasions, a real departure for her.
“Ordinarily,” Bogart said, “she talks a blue streak. We listened for the first couple of days