Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [431]
But before he got out of the car, Carroll said to him, “Spencer, you could have gone out your driveway, straight down Doheny, across Santa Monica, still down Doheny, across the beginning of Melrose, and you would have arrived at Chasen’s in two minutes instead of ten.” Spencer was thrilled. He said, “Is that really true?” Carroll said, “Yes, it’s true, Spencer. You live right up there on that hill.” When I heard that story for the first time I said, “It’s amazing he ever found Dr. Livingstone, isn’t it?”
A rare snapshot of Tracy and Hepburn at a private function, circa 1956. (JUDY SAMELSON COLLECTION)
Tracy enjoyed a measure of contentment at St. Ives. Gone were the halfhearted days of womanizing he had known in the early 1950s. After five years of life on the run, Hepburn had once again returned to make “a life for him that was irresistible” so that he would not, as she put it, wander off.
“I think he thought Kate very attractive,” Joe Mankiewicz said,
and Kate somebody he could talk to. Not only that, but [somebody] he could listen to. But most of these [other] women couldn’t amuse him. Kate had anecdotes, Kate came in with gossip, Kate was like marrying The Hollywood Reporter, except she knew everything from all sources. And one thing Spence was very, very curious about [was] gossip. He loved to hear stories about people. Well. Would you like to have Ingrid Bergman come in and tell you stories about people? Or would you like to have Joan Bennett tell you about people? But KATE, who had the entire mirage of English society and French society and Riviera society and Florida society, plus the theatre society! Constance Collier, up and down, coming in with gossip. This was kind of a jackpot of entertainment for Spence. And, in a way, a kind of tribute to him. Laying all this at his feet. Oh, this was a tremendous jackpot that Spence hit. What he liked in terms of entertainment, liked more than anything else in the world, was gossip about people—who’s doing what to whom. Kate never went out after it, but my God it came to her. Cukor! Cukor was the Generalissimo of gossip! Both homosexual and heterosexual. And here he sat in the middle of this place, and all these busy bees gathering this honey for him! This information. [A] constant, never-ending source of information, gossip, and amusement for him. He didn’t have to go out, sit through a whole night of conversation before he got to bed with a woman. This was wonderful, because Louise wasn’t about to tell him who was doing what to whom. Louise wanted to keep him comfortable and happy, give him books to read.
By 1956 the break with Louise was so complete that Spence wasn’t even on hand for her sixtieth birthday. In the days leading up to the event, he made two attempts to leave for New York—one by air, one by rail—and canceled both times. He finally got away on July 24, taking a TWA sleeper flight to Idlewild and spending the next three days at the office of his dentist, Dr. Carl Bastian. He went to Mass at St. Patrick’s, dined with Bert Allenberg and Benny Thau, spent the night of Weeze’s birthday attending a performance of My Fair Lady with the Allenbergs and Frank Sinatra. (“You made the little wop cry!” he rather sweetly told Rex Harrison afterward.) The following evening he dined solo with Sinatra and, as he noted in his datebook, the “grape.”
“Well,” said Sinatra, “we lifted a few, in New York particularly. You know, Jesus, at four o’clock in the morning, five o’clock … and I was doing six shows a day at the Paramount [in between showings of Johnny Concho] and had to look fairly well—not like I was dying at 132 pounds. He said, ‘Oh the hell with it. We’ll have another one and you’ll be there on time and you’ll be great.’ I said,