Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [490]
Lean was pleased to find Hepburn “greatly calmed and more tolerant” than she was during the making of Summertime. “Kate,” he wrote, “amazed me by saying she thought that monogamy and marriage as we know it is all wrong. (This is a reaction to all the guilt she used to carry around about her love affair with Spence.) As we agreed, if society suddenly changed and it was alright to have free love we wouldn’t all be dancing into any more beds than we do at the present. Even less perhaps … Kate says she finds it damned difficult to live in the same house as a man. Not, I presume, that she doesn’t spend a lot of nights up with Spence … She makes me laugh like mad because she’s part schoolgirl, part very logical man, and part straight as they come woman.”
There was some talk of work—Seven Days in May, briefly, playing the president, and an offer from Dino De Laurentiis to do Abraham in a film based on the Holy Bible. Louise didn’t think he should work at all. “He should have quit after Mad World. That took a great deal out of him.” Kate also knew the strain of a role on him, the toll that it took: “It was so hard for him to get to sleep. He was a real artist inside, that’s where he did his work, preparing for a role, you couldn’t see it, just as you couldn’t see it in his acting.”
He had begun seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Karl Von Hagen, who was chairman of the Department of Neurology at the USC School of Medicine. Tracy and Dr. Von Hagen would sit together. Kate would retire to another room, but she could never hear an exchange of voices. She wanted to take him away for the summer, and Dr. Von Hagen thought the best prospect was a rental near Chester and Sally Erskine at Malibu.
It was at Traucas Beach that Tracy received a letter—accompanied by a script—from John Ford. “I would appreciate it very much if you would read this script, Cheyenne Autumn,” Ford wrote. “This, of course, is the first draft … overlong … overwritten, but that’s the way I prefer the first draft.”
The proposal was to play Carl Schurz, the “first great liberal of our country, Secretary of the Interior, and the man who finally settled the Indian question. He tells the story in narration and finally comes in at the finish in person. This would entail about a week’s work on your part. This is not a charity job as Abe Lastfogel will tell you, but a firm, legitimate offer.” The picture was being produced by Bernard Smith, who had managed the filming of How the West Was Won and envisioned another all-star epic, one entirely under the direction of Jack Ford. Tracy could see no reason not to do the picture, given the minimal amount of work involved, and signaled Lastfogel to go ahead and make the deal.
Hepburn described that summer in Malibu as “a very quiet time,” the first time in twenty-two years that she and Spence had actually lived together. By all accounts, he seemed relaxed, though frail, down to 180 pounds, a weathered shadow of his former self. They had completed two months together in the house on Broad Beach Road when, one Sunday, Tracy began having trouble breathing. Kate managed to get him out to the car; then, certain it was a heart attack, she called for help from the nearby Zuma Beach fire station. When the men arrived, they found him “ashen gray and his breathing extremely labored” as Hepburn, seated next to him, held his hand and soothed him as best she could. “Be calm and just relax … Everything is going to be all right.” As the rescue team began administering oxygen, Sally Erskine summoned a doctor from a nearby house, who gave Tracy an injection. To cover the awkward circumstances, Kate told the authorities they were about to go on a picnic. “This is a hell of a way to spend a picnic,” Tracy commented as he began feeling better.
A private ambulance arrived, followed by Tracy’s personal physician of the moment, Dr. Karl Lewis. The patient was able to