Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [416]
“I bet I looked at 150 houses,” Louise said. “I looked at every house in Beverly Hills that came on the market. I got so discouraged; there was always something wrong.” The house she finally settled upon was a gated two-acre estate on Tower Road—three bedrooms, four baths, a vast lawn sloping down to the pool. “It was so quiet and lots of birds and trees,” she said. “I felt it would be the closest thing to the country. That was the big point. Then it had a lot of little points. It had a three-car garage. We had this beautiful piece of furniture, my great-grandmother’s secretary, and we had to have nine-and-a-half-foot ceilings to get this thing in. The ceilings were very high … It was a beautiful house.”
There were, of course, calls to and from Australia and meetings with Leland Hayward. In from New York, Herman Shumlin tried persuading Tracy to join the cast of Inherit the Wind for four weeks, long enough to give the play’s star, Paul Muni, a rest. Then Tracy had a courtesy call from Benny Thau, the last official interaction he was to have with M-G-M. Eddie Mannix had held up his pension payout—a sum amounting to $221,000 and change—until he had extracted an oral agreement from Bert Allenberg that Tracy would “sometime” do another picture for Metro at $150,000. (“No one but Mannix wants it,” Allenberg told his client, but since Tracy was technically one film shy of his contractual commitment, he was advised to go ahead and accept the provision.) Now, after much talk of shelving Tribute to a Bad Man—and turndowns from both Clark Gable and Gregory Peck—Thau wanted Tracy to know that Jimmy Cagney had agreed to do the picture after Nicholas Schenck had called him at Martha’s Vineyard and put it on a personal basis, asking him to “jump in” for his old friend. Said Cagney, “I was about as interested in working as I was in flying, which means a considerable level below zero, but after much gab, I agreed. I specified that I would need at least two or three weeks between jobs, and then I would come out and do it.” Tracy’s reaction to the news: “Who cares?”
In Australia, Hepburn had drawn unwanted attention of her own from a celebrity-starved press. “Is there a romance in Katharine Hepburn’s life?” asked the Sydney Sun. “We will say that there is. It’s Spencer Tracy. He loves theatre, watched all the rehearsals at the Old Vic Company, and flew back to New York in the plane with Katharine.” Hepburn did her best to deflect such items, consenting to a joint news conference with Bobby Helpmann where she batted back questions she considered too personal. “I saw a report where Spencer was said to have flown from London to see my rehearsals,” she said. “That’s not true because there was no one at the rehearsals. But, yes, Spencer was in London at the time. He joked that they wouldn’t let him in. ‘I was too lowbrow,’ he said.”
The scrutiny followed her to Brisbane, where the Old Vic Company opened at His Majesty’s Theatre on July 18. “Katharine Hepburn’s first waking thought today was to put a call through to Spencer Tracy,” the Brisbane Telegraph reported. “Spencer Tracy, though 10,000 miles away, was the only person who would get a word from Miss Hepburn this morning. It is understood that the Old Vic star phones him daily. A Sydney message says it is rumored that Spencer Tracy may take a brief holiday at Surfer Paradise during the Old Vic three-week season in Brisbane. For the whole morning, Miss Hepburn remained in her room at the city hotel, surrounded by the knick-knacks she insists on carrying around the world. These include three portraits of Spencer Tracy.” Sheilah Graham picked up on all the Queensland crosstalk and ran a slightly more oblique item in her New York Mirror column: “Katharine Hepburn, now in Australia, is spending something like 100 dollars