Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [512]
Hepburn was busy crafting her own performance while seeing to Tracy’s health and well-being, knowing he could suffer a serious setback at any time, delaying the picture or shutting it down entirely. “She was under more pressure than anybody,” said Katharine Houghton. “To see the love of your life fading before your eyes—she was extremely tense through the whole picture.”
As bossy and insufferable as she could be under normal circumstances, Kate grew even more controlling as the film progressed, desperate to see Tracy through what would likely be his final role. “One night—it was a Saturday night—I said I was going to go out with friends,” Houghton remembered.
She absolutely hit the ceiling. I can understand she might be worried that I’d get in a car accident or something, but it was also an extraordinary way to behave to a younger woman who was in her twenties. If I had been in my teens, I could see her saying, “Who is it?” and “Where are you going?” But she also knew me well enough by now to know that I was not a drinker or high-liver. I certainly wasn’t going to jeopardize my work. I was very, very disciplined. So she blew the whole thing up into a great brouhaha that then became Spencer was angry with me. Phyllis Wilbourn called and said, “Your aunt is very upset with you. And not only that—Mr. Tracy is very upset with you.” That really bothered me, because I didn’t want him to be angry with me.
Before I went out with my friends, I stopped at the house and she came to the kitchen door. I said, “I want to speak to Spencer.” She said, “You can’t. He’s in bed.” As if I’d killed him. I said, “Well, I’m going into the bedroom.” So I walked into the bedroom, and there he was in bed with his pajamas on. I was very upset, and I sat down by his bed and I said to him, “Spencer, I don’t want you to be angry with me. I’m sorry that I caused all of this trouble, but I’m just going out with my friends. We’re going to dinner at one of their homes in Pacific Palisades. They’re very nice people, and they don’t misbehave. They don’t do drugs.” (I didn’t say “drink” because I didn’t want to offend him.) “I’ll be back early …” He said to me, “Don’t worry about it, Little Kath. Your aunt is just a big fuss.”
He knew her game, but I think she also had gotten him upset. I think she had gotten him into a kind of How dare she? frame of mind. Then Kate lit into me later: “Spencer thinks you’re the most ungrateful person in the world. Here I have done all of this for you and you’re so ungrateful.” Her way of talking to me was one of the reasons I left Hollywood soon after the film was over. It did not impress me as the right way to behave. If she was doing that to me, I have to assume that she did it to other people, and maybe, to a certain extent, she was manipulative with him too.4 After that, he seemed to forget about it, but she hung onto it. And she told me persistently, and other people too, that Spencer didn’t like me. And I don’t believe that was true. I don’t know that he had any wild feelings about me one way or the other. There was never any unpleasantness between us. He was always very good to me, always very protective of me.
The element of the film that concerned Tracy the most was the climactic speech he had to make to the assembled members of the Drayton and Prentice families. With stage directions, it took up nearly five single-spaced pages in the script. He brooded over it, practicing the scene around the house. One evening, when Katharine Houghton was sitting with him at St. Ives, he turned to her and started to tell her something. “The moment I walked into this house this afternoon, Miss Binks said to me, ‘Well, all hell’s done broke loose now.’ I asked her, naturally enough, to what she referred, and she said, ‘You’ll see.’ And I did. After some preliminary guessing games, at which I was never very good, it was explained to me by my daughter that she intended to get married …” At first Houghton thought he was talking about Susie, and then it dawned