Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [496]
His health by now was a constant worry—to Kate, to Louise, to his close friends and family, and to the various doctors who attended him. There were days when Hepburn took his temperature hourly, and he was regularly bedeviled by bellyaches, constipation, colds and fevers, and the edema that occasionally returned, creating a drowning sensation that induced very real and sustained panic. One night over the telephone, while talking to Louise, he suffered an attack of some sort—probably breathlessness—and Louise, thinking him alone, jumped in the car and made the twelve-minute drive to St. Ives unannounced. She found him better, calmer, by the time she arrived, but the invisible wall that divided his two households had been, for the first time, intolerably breached.
“Don’t EVER do this again!” he scolded, concerned as much for Louise’s own protection as he was for Kate’s. Visibly shaken when she returned to Tower Road, she described to Susie what had just transpired. “I don’t know if Kate was in the other room, or hiding in a closet, or if she was even there at the moment,” Susie said, “but obviously he wanted to make sure that [my mother] never came uninvited again.”
By any measure, Tracy was a high-maintenance patient, and the office of his then regular doctor, William Paul Thompson, was downtown at Good Samaritan Hospital, a good thirty-minute drive from the house on St. Ives. In August 1964 Dr. Thompson put Tracy onto a former student of his, Dr. Mitchel Covel, a cardiologist who was on the clinical faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine. Dr. Covel began seeing him on a near-weekly basis, sometimes in his office on the Westwood campus, just as often at his home above Sunset, where the slightest upset could prompt an anxiety attack.
“There was always some reason,” Dr. Covel said.
He or Kate would call. Kate was his Chief Administrative Assistant; she looked after him very well. She was sensitive to his complaints and needs and his anxieties … He would have some minor illness—colds, sore throats, diarrhea … In January of 1965 I did a complete evaluation of him, physical examination and tests. My diagnosis then was hypertensive cardiovascular disease. Heart disease due to high blood pressure, with past congestive failure … At that time, too, diabetes appeared. It had been diagnosed before, [but] he hadn’t been on diabetes medication … He had a well-established diagnosis of heart disease and diabetes, and he was treated for both with medications.
A late snapshot of Louise and Spencer Tracy, taken at the house on Tower Road in August 1964. (SUSIE TRACY)
The patient’s weight stabilized, but he was still twenty pounds lighter than he had been for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and he had, by general consensus, looked terrible in that. With Kramer’s mammoth comedy having marked its one-year anniversary, on its way to domestic rentals of $19 million in its first four years of release, the only work Tracy could manage was the narration of The Ripon College Story, a half-hour promotional film he did as “a very special friend” of the school.
Early in 1965, producer Alan Pakula and director Robert Mulligan, the team behind To Kill a Mockingbird and Love with the Proper Stranger, submitted a draft screenplay combining John Cheever’s episodic novels The