Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [519]
And then she awaited the arrival of Louise Tracy.
When the phone rang on Tower Road, Susie Tracy glanced at the clock: 3:50 a.m. She reached for the extension, but her mother, in her own room, had already picked up. Susie heard Dr. Covel’s voice: “Hello? Louise?” And she heard her mother say, “Oh no—” She placed the handset back in its cradle and got out of bed. When she reached her mother’s room, Louise was sitting on the edge of the bed in a kind of a daze. “Father’s gone,” she said. “We’ll have to wake John.”
By 4:30 they had gotten themselves together and left for St. Ives, Susie piloting her mother’s black Lincoln, the one her father had driven across country, all three of them crammed together in the front seat. When they arrived at the house, the gate was open and Susie pulled right in. Kate emerged from inside to meet them, putting her arm around Susie, who, in turn, automatically put her arm around Kate.
Susie thought back to a phone conversation she had with her father in which he had said that the Kramers were expecting a baby. They had decided, he told her, to name it Spencer if it was a boy, Katharine if it turned out to be a girl. There was a pause, as if he needed a reaction. “That’s wonderful, Daddy. I think that’s fine.” There seemed to be so much unsaid, hanging there in the air. “He was acknowledging that I knew about Kate,” she later said, “and that he knew I knew. I was so pleased … I felt it was the beginning of a new relationship for us. I was an adult, and he was opening a door.”
Carroll, distraught and unshaven, was already there, as was Dorothy, and George Cukor was lingering in the background. Louise, Susie, and John made their way to the bedroom, the candles still flickering in the predawn darkness. He had said that he was going to have his hair cut short, but they hadn’t yet seen it. And then Susie glanced to one side and saw all the medications lined up on the desk, two rows—at least a dozen prescriptions, probably more. Dr. Covel came in and said quietly to Louise, “Would you like me to give you something?”
When Susie emerged from the room, Kate was waiting for her. “Susie,” she said, giving her the car keys, “would you take my car off the road and park it up the hill?” Susie found Hepburn’s black Chrysler across the street and drove it up around the curve on St. Ives to where it could not be seen from the house. Then she returned and they again found themselves standing in the hallway, groping for words.
“We were good pals,” Hepburn finally said to her.
Kate had called Howard Strickling, and they all had to wait as he drove into town from his ranch in Chino, some fifty miles to the east. She mouthed a few comforting words to John, who was stoic, stunned as they all were. Later, she approached him in the living room and offered him breakfast. Nobody else seemed particularly hungry, but John was gratefully addressing a meal of eggs, toast, and coffee when Strickling arrived. The press would have to be notified, inquiries would have to be managed. Louise accepted a cup of coffee, went back down the hall again to be with Spence. “Well,” Hepburn later acknowledged, putting her own distinctive spin on the situation, “she was in a peculiar spot—no doubt about that. She could never bear to admit failure. Now he was dead. And he would never come back. She had dreamed—hoped—imagined that he would. This strange woman—me—had obviously been with him when he died.”
Carroll had called Cunningham & O’Connor, a mortuary scarcely two blocks from where the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had its headquarters. What suit to give them? Hepburn had gathered together some old clothes—gray slacks, a brown tweed jacket.
“But he was my husband,” Louise protested. “I should pick out the—”
“Oh Louise,” said Kate, “what difference does it make?”
Once they had gone—first the doctor, then Cukor, then Strickling, who had made all the appropriate calls, Dorothy stepped up to Phyllis