Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [524]
Carroll vacated the apartment and told Bertha Calhoun in a letter that he would never go home again. He lived in a hotel for as long as he could, but within a year of Dorothy’s death he was in a rest home in Santa Monica. Louise worked diligently to have him in a good place—and under some Medicare—but there was a huge bill to be paid, and she struggled under the weight of it all.
John Tracy Clinic was closed the morning of Spencer Tracy’s funeral, but it reopened to get on with the work at hand. Louise, however, was absent for several months, adjusting to the loss she had endured and answering by hand the mountain of cards and letters and donations that flowed in. When she returned, the clinic launched a $3 million growth campaign, starting with a $100,000 gift from the Disney Foundation. In its twenty-fifth year, John Tracy Clinic’s work was spread across ninety-four countries in fifteen languages. In 1972, at the age of seventy-five, Louise agreed to a series of interviews with freelance journalist Jane Ardmore, who had the notion of ghosting an autobiography. Louise saw it as a chance to tell the clinic’s story, but Ardmore knew there would have to be a lot about Spence in the book for it to find a wide audience. Howard Strickling pushed the idea, but in the end Louise put two restrictions on the project that sealed its fate. Indulging her writer’s pride of long ago, she would not take a byline on a book authored by somebody else. And she would not, under any circumstances, discuss her husband’s relationship with Katharine Hepburn.
Later that year, she was the guest of honor on an episode of Ralph Edwards’ This Is Your Life, welcoming Pat O’Brien, Walter Pidgeon, Dr. Lowell, and some of the families who had come back to Los Angeles to celebrate the clinic’s thirtieth anniversary. As she approached eighty, Louise grew more forgetful, and in 1974 she resigned from the board of the clinic, promising they had not yet seen the last of her. She still came in from time to time, whenever Susie could drive her, and she still spoke at graduations and special occasions. By the summer of 1977, when she was asked to give a talk in the auditorium, Susie was dubious and thought seriously of calling it off. “But as long as she was talking about the clinic,” Susie said, “she was usually okay.”
Susie drove her that day, not sure what was going to happen. Once her mother was in front of the group, however, a reflex kicked in, and the things that she had said so many times before—giving hope and encouragement to young families that had been wounded as hers had once been—came tumbling out. It was as if she had been asked to work the old magic one final time, just as Spence had done on the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner a decade earlier. Susie returned her to Tower Road, and by September Louise was under twenty-four-hour nursing care, her mind clouded by arteriosclerosis and at least one stroke.
She died in 1983 at the age of eighty-seven.
Stanley Kramer saw a rough cut of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner within days of its completion and knew he had everything he needed by June 1. Editor Robert C. Jones had begun work on the picture with the first dailies, following Tracy’s performance with an eye toward vigor as well as nuance. The early scenes of befuddlement weren’t hindered by Tracy’s occasional lapses of energy. “But,” said Jones, “in the last twenty minutes, he had to take control of that entire group.” Assembled at first for performance alone, the summation scene suffered whenever Tracy showed fatigue.
“He would run out of gas. I’d have to cut away to someone I wouldn’t normally cut to [in order to] change takes on Tracy. I was going through and looking for the best takes I could find on each line—and in some cases using lines from over his shoulder