Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [381]
Tracy had remained in touch with Bogart over the years, but the two men weren’t terribly close until The African Queen, through Hepburn, brought them together. Likely, as with Gable, it was Bogart’s love of scotch that forced Tracy to hold him at a distance, but gradually Spence had developed the discipline to confront booze and stare it down, and his sobriety was no longer considered so precarious. Kate put them together—tentatively at first—and they found they enjoyed each other’s company enormously, even as, socially, they were completely different animals. “Bogart and Tracy had a special rapport,” said writer Peter Viertel, “based on their mutual admiration and strikingly devoid of professional jealousy.”
Romanoff’s was common ground for them both, but for entirely different reasons. There was nothing secluded about the hexagonal dining room—even the entrance off the bar required a descent down a short flight of steps that ensured all in the room had a chance to take notice—but where Bogart used it as a showcase, a home away from home, a place to hold forth, Tracy frequented the room because it was familiar ground and no one was likely to bother him. The proprietor himself usually managed the seating chart, a Lithuanian émigré and sometime actor who posed as Prince Michael Dimitri Alexandrovich Obolensky-Romanoff, nephew to the late czar of Russia, a harmless fiction that somehow suited a community full of poseurs and phonies. “It’s the parts, not the acting,” Bogart told the AP’s James Bacon one day over lunch, commenting on his recent Oscar win. “If it were acting, Spencer Tracy would win it every year.”
“He was innately a marvelous actor,” Lauren Bacall said of Tracy,
and also a hugely intelligent one. He and Bogie used to compare notes on some of the actors who called themselves actors and what they did during a scene. I remember they were discussing this one actor standing in a scene. The actor would put his left hand on his tie, and his right hand in his pocket. After a while he’d shift gears and put his left hand in his pocket and his right hand on his tie. Very funny stuff. They took no prisoners, those two men, because they had real talent and they had respect for their craft, and the people who called themselves stars, half of them were jokes. Because of the studio system, some of them were in an exalted position they never should have been in. The talent did not require that. It was great to be in their company, I must say. I just loved it.
The magazine, which hit the stands just prior to Labor Day, was largely laudatory and mentioned only that Hepburn and Tracy were “fast friends.” Kate closed in London on September 20 and immediately returned to the United States for minor surgery. She was in and out of Hartford in three days, Tracy at hand the entire time. Emily Perkins, from her place in Maine, urged a complete rest: “You and Spence should go to Ireland for three months’ quiet, go collecting shells by the seaside away from telephones and so forth.” George Cukor thought it “goddamn silly” for Kate to drive herself so hard, closing one night, flying out the next day, then starting New York rehearsals for The Millionairess practically without stop. “She’s been arranging things on such a tight schedule for herself for the last three years or so, driving herself to such a pace that I’m afraid of what will happen to her.”
By September 29, Tracy was back at the Pierre Hotel, attempting calls to the Kanins and June Dally-Watkins in Paris with no apparent success. “Has she run off [with] handsome stranger?” he asked Gar and Ruth via cable. “Cruel after sweet letters. When coming here? Lonesome and discouraged and now broke.” He also pressed