Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [528]
“Well, yes,” Louise said, pausing for emphasis. The razor-sharp wit she had spent a lifetime suppressing now came to the fore. After twenty-six years she finally had her husband’s lover in her crosshairs, and the temptation to pull the trigger was too great to resist. “But you see, I thought you were only a rumor…”
The shot hit its mark with deadly accuracy. “After nearly thirty years?” Hepburn raged in her autobiography. “A rumor? What could be the answer to that?” Louise later told Susie that Kate had said that she would like to get to know Johnny and Susie “as an extension of Spencer.” Then she added, unnecessarily, “I play tennis.”
“Well,” Louise said, “I’ll think about it.”
She was coming up the stairs as Susie emerged from her room. “Well,” Louise said, a hint of admiration creeping into her voice, “that took guts.”
“It was,” Hepburn later wrote, “a deep and fundamental wound—deeply set—never to be budged. Almost thirty years Spence and I had known each other—through good and bad times. Some rumor. And by never admitting that I existed—she remained—the wife—and she sent out Christmas cards. Spencer—the guilty one. She—the sufferer. And I—well now, I was brought up in a very unconventional atmosphere. And I had not broken up their marriage. That happened long before I arrived on the scene.”
Hepburn came to believe that she had taken the easy road, that she had declined to force the issue, to “straighten things out,” as she put it. If there had been a divorce, “then everyone—and in this case, Susie and Johnny—would have been able to know their father with me. It would have been better. But it would have had to be pushed by Louise—the loser in the situation. Yet it would, I believe, have been ennobling to her. And supremely honest. And it would have made it easy for him to do—what would in this case have been the direct and simple thing for him to do. Then he could have had the best of both worlds. And if he had felt that it was her idea, his guilt would have been removed.”
But, of course, it could never have been that simple. Tracy’s guilt ran far deeper than Kate could ever imagine. And Louise’s paralysis was rooted in her heritage, her Victorian upbringing and her inability to work through many of the same issues she saw as an impressionable young girl in the marriage of her father and mother. “Spencer’s faith, along with unbreakable bonds of an emotional sort, is what kept him married to Louise,” Eugene Kennedy said. “He felt as a Catholic that he had been married, and that he could not be, as it were, un-married. That is one of the reasons Kate and Spence felt that I understood them. I appreciated what it meant to be in love and to have an institution holding terrific sway over your choices.”
Hepburn eventually got to know Susie, who, at the urging of her friend Susan Moon, went up and spoke to her one morning through the chain-link fence of the tennis courts at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Kate gave her a phone number, told her to call at any time. It wasn’t until October 1969 that Susie had a reason to call. “It’s Carroll,” Kate said immediately, knowing without being told that Spence’s older brother had died. In 1975 Susie published a short piece in the Ladies’ Home Journal, an as-told-to with Jane Ardmore called “My Friend: Katharine Hepburn.” If her mother ever saw the piece, she never mentioned it, and the relationship continued after Hepburn left the house on St. Ives in April 1979 and returned permanently to New York and Connecticut. “Kate,” said Katharine Houghton, “was always thrilled when Susie called or visited.”
In the latter months of 1967, Hepburn busied herself with the planning of a TV special that would document Tracy’s life and work. Written by Chester Erskine, the show would be all-inclusive, inviting