Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [489]
Tracy had finished his scenes for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and was looping dialogue for Kramer the day Kate’s father, Dr. Thomas Hepburn, died at the family home in West Hartford at the age of eighty-two. His death was not unexpected; he had been in failing health for nearly a year, enduring gallbladder and prostate surgeries and growing progressively weaker. Kate remembered that he seemed to be “just quietly leaving” this world: “He smiled—he looked at us and he just slowly stopped breathing. His chin fell. He closed his eyes—he was gone—just gone. [My brother] Bob and I sat there. Such a remarkable man Dad had been. So strong. So definite. So tough and funny.”
Tracy remained in California but stayed in close touch by phone and by wire. Katharine Houghton, then a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College, remembered taking the train home and going with her parents to the house on Bloomfield Avenue where Dr. Hepburn was “lying in our version of a wake and my step-grandmother, who was Italian, was making a great holler and fuss appropriate to her tradition.” Although the family was observing its tradition of deeply suppressed grief, it was clear to Katharine that the loss of her grandfather had left her eldest aunt devastated.
Although I have no specific memories of Kate’s grieving process at the time, from things she said to me over the years, I know that this death was the most poignant in her life to date … Not only did she have an unusually profound father-daughter relationship with her dad, brimming with mutual love and respect and, to a certain extent, a shared viewpoint on life, but his presence gave her a powerful position in the family and (in her mind) in the world at large. I’ve no doubt she focused more completely on Spencer after Hep’s death because he was now her only lifeline to herself … Tears, public moaning and groaning about death was never the Hepburn way, but that doesn’t mean her grief was any less poignant.
Long Day’s Journey into Night would be the last audiences would see of Katharine Hepburn for five years. Once the house on Bloomfield was cleaned up and vacated—it was donated to Hartford University—she flew west to California to be with Spence, and that year—atypically—they spent Christmas together in Palm Springs, “enjoying the rain.”
For the first time in memory, both Tracy and Hepburn saw a clear horizon—no commitments of any kind. (He was forced to pull out of The Greatest Story Ever Told when it looked as if production in Utah would conflict with the filming of Mad World.)4 Kate settled back into what she referred to as “Jack Barrymore’s birdcage,” the sparsely furnished aviary on Tower Grove where a stained-glass image of actress Dolores Costello dominated the living room. She did some minimal press to support Long Day’s Journey—even welcoming Hedda Hopper into her home—but was typically dismissive of a ninth Oscar nomination, which would, in fact, come in March.
The Academy Awards ceremony on April 8 brought David Lean to town, his Lawrence of Arabia having received ten nominations. Lean dined one evening with Tracy and Hepburn, neither of whom he had seen since the casting of The Bridge on the River Kwai, when he and producer Sam Spiegel had come to Kate’s New York home to try to persuade Tracy to take the part of Colonel Nicholson.
“Spencer, who read a great deal, had read the book Bridge Over the River Kwai and said, ‘I can’t do that part,’ ” Hepburn remembered. “And the first evening, he wouldn’t say yes. Then they said, ‘Can we come to dinner tomorrow night?’ And I said, ‘Fine, come on.’ So they came the next night, and he said, ‘You can’t. It isn’t right. You should have Alec Guinness