Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [430]
Tracy, who spoke to Parsons as well, said he never had any argument with Zinnemann and that they were good friends. The following day, he flew back to New York, where he sequestered himself in a suite at the Pierre and slept on and off for hours at a stretch.
“Did not take any calls from Gar!!!” he wrote in his book.
When Tracy arrived back in Los Angeles, Hepburn, for once, was already there, finishing off her first week of filming The Rainmaker. Spence had dinner on Tower Road that first night back—it was John’s thirty-second birthday—but otherwise spent the week with Kate. He had been absent from St. Ives for three months and seemed to enjoy burrowing in, seeing no one in particular and basking in some near-perfect weather. There was talk of resuming Old Man and the Sea in the waters off Nassau, but he thought Hayward too eager to get going again and opposed such a move. He backed the more cautious approach of the picture’s new director, John Sturges, who wanted time with the script and favored closing the film down until fall or even the spring of 1957. Under protest, Hayward eventually agreed to the delay.
After nearly a decade of hotel living, Tracy’s move to 9191 St. Ives effectively put an end to any hopes of reconciliation between him and Louise. In earlier days, he could still come to the ranch for meals and the occasional game of tennis with John, and he still had a room there where he could lie down on Sunday afternoons and take a nap. (“Do an el foldo,” as he put it.) After 1951, though, the house on White Oak was no longer his legal address, and when Louise chose the house on Tower in 1955, she did so with the wrenching knowledge that it had only three bedrooms—one for her, one for Susie, and one, should he ever need it, for John. According to Eddie Dmytryk’s wife, the actress Jean Porter, it was about this same time that Louise told Spence that he could have a divorce if that was what he wanted.
“One time at Romanoff’s—this is after we had heard that Mrs. Tracy was willing to get a divorce—I said, ‘Why don’t you and Katie get married?’ He said, ‘Too late. I’ve asked her. She said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it now. It doesn’t matter. We’ve lived this long with things this way.’ I think she enjoys her independence. We’re together all the time anyway. So I’m not pushing her. And she’s not pushing me.’ ”
St. Ives seemed the perfect home for him, simple and spare. “I don’t own one damned thing I’d miss for more than five minutes if I lost it or it were swiped,” he once said to Garson Kanin. “I like to check in and check out.” For years he didn’t spend much time there, and Cukor, who never could tell whether he was in residence or not, took to referring to him as “my elusive tenant” in his notes to Kate. (“My elusive tenant turns up at his little home from time to time, unexpected and unannounced. Before I know it, he’s gone again …”) He never really settled in until he came to regard the location as a permanent base, as he had the Beverly Hills Hotel for so many years.
“He knew the way from the Beverly Hills Hotel down Beverly Drive into Beverly Hills to Romanoff’s,” said Kate,
and he knew the way to go to Chasen’s … George built him a charming house and Spencer rented it, but his sense of direction … he didn’t know where he was. Well, what to do, what to do? Being a simple fellow and a sensible man, he thought, “Well, I’ll go down Doheny to Sunset, and I’ll go back Sunset to the Beverly Hills Hotel. And then I’ll go from there.” Well, everything was fine until one night he and his brother Carroll decided that they’d go to Chasen’s. So Spencer got into the car to drive it. He backed out of the garage, he turned onto Doheny, got to Sunset and turned right, and Carroll thought, “What the hell is he doing?” But he shut