Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [522]
A requiem mass was celebrated on Monday, June 12, at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church in the East Hollywood section of Los Angeles, a decidedly working-class area of town chosen for its proximity to the cemetery. Serving as active pallbearers were George Cukor, Stanley Kramer, Bill Self, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, John Ford, Garson Kanin, and Abe Lastfogel. Numbered among the honorary pallbearers were Edward G. Robinson, Lew Douglas, Robert Taylor, Larry Weingarten, Benny Thau, Tim Durant, R. J. Wagner, Loyal Davis, Chester Erskine, Harold Bumby, Chuck Sligh, Jack Benny, George Burns, Mike Romanoff, and Senator George Murphy. Howard Strickling, in striped pants and dark vest, escorted Louise, who appeared somewhat lost in a fog of grief. Msgr. John O’Donnell, who had served as a technical adviser on Boys Town, offered a simple forty-five-minute mass in which he praised the deceased as “a humble man who kept removed from the limelight.” The some five hundred attendees included Gregory Peck, Leo G. Carroll, Laraine Day, Dave Chasen, Billy Grady, Robert Mitchum, and Walter Winchell. Another 250 onlookers were gathered outside.
A private graveside ceremony followed, though most of the thirty-five cars that joined the procession to Glendale were uninvited. At Forest Lawn, Strickling saw a TV truck parked on the roadway in front of the Freedom Mausoleum and directed cemetery officials to have it removed. “Nobody gets out of the car,” he declared. “We’re not moving until they leave!” Appropriately, the marble tablet eventually affixed to the brick wall enclosing the garden plot bore no individual names, dates, or epitaphs. It simply read TRACY.
More accolades appeared in the weeks that followed. Newsweek coupled its Tracy obituary with one for Dorothy Parker, who had died in a New York hotel room three days earlier. Acting? “I don’t like anything about it,” Tracy was quoted as saying. “But I did very well by it. I learned the trade well. It’s never been very demanding. It doesn’t require much brainwork. Acting is not the noblest profession in the world, but there are things lower than acting—not many, mind you, but politicians give you something to look down on from time to time.”
Senator Robert F. Kennedy had a statement inserted into the Congressional Record. Bosley Crowther lamented Tracy’s passing as breaking “one more strong and vibrant cable in the slowly crumbling bridge between motion pictures of this generation and the great ones of the past.” Stanley Kramer shut himself up in a room and, on an impossibly tight deadline, wrote a remembrance for Life that appeared under the title “He Could Wither You with a Glance.” It began:
Tracy’s casket is carried into the church. Active pallbearers included James Stewart and Frank Sinatra. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
I can’t explain why I was never able to say to him what I wanted to say: that he was a great actor. Everyone else said it a thousand times over, but I never managed it. Once I told him I loved him. That came quite easily, and he believed me and was emotional about it. But I was afraid to say “Spencer, you’re a great actor.” He’d only say: “Now what the hell kind of thing is that to come out with?” He wanted to know it; he needed to know it. But he didn’t want you to say it—just think it. And maybe that was one of the reasons he was a great actor. He thought and listened better than anyone