Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [529]
Soon Hepburn was back in the swim of making movies, traveling to France to make The Lion in Winter. Director Anthony Harvey found her “enormously vulnerable” and said that Tracy was practically never out of her mind. “She was mad about him in every way.” It was Tracy, Katharine Houghton observed, who brought out a selflessness in her. “It fulfilled something deep in her nature. Spencer, in fact, may have been surprised to observe that it was he alone, his living, breathing presence, that enabled Kate, after her father’s death, to carry high that standard which she so admired—‘character!’ When she lost Spence, the center of her life was destroyed. And I think every year that took her farther away from him caused her life to further unravel. Their relationship seemed to me to balance both of them—a yin and a yang.”
Katharine Hepburn never saw Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, could never bear to. Katharine Houghton saw it only after she was asked to accept the David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Actor on Tracy’s behalf in August 1968. “That last speech of Tracy’s was a killer,” she said. “At the award ceremony they showed the film, and afterward I was supposed to go up and make an acceptance speech. I got up to the podium and burst into tears. I couldn’t say anything except, ‘Thank you.’ Anna Magnani threw her arms around me and said something charming like, ‘In Italy we respect tears, not words. You do not have to speak.’ ”
On the morning of the funeral, Kate and Phyllis Wilbourn arrived at the mortuary a little after eight, intent, she later admitted to Bill Self, on following the hearse to the church and then slipping inside. They found no one there, just the hearse, and they drove up into the driveway.
“Is anyone coming?” Kate asked.
“No.”
“May we help?”
“Why not?”
So they helped lift Spence into his place in the vehicle, and they shut the door. Then the hearse pulled away, out onto Melrose Avenue and east toward the church. Kate and Phyllis jumped into Kate’s dependable old Chrysler and followed along after it, a miniature procession on a six-mile journey through rush-hour traffic, at once brazen and yet proudly anonymous. Through La Cienega Boulevard they crept, east along the upper border of Larchmont Village, then past the Desilu Studios complex that abutted Paramount. What Hepburn was thinking is anyone’s guess, but her musings must at some point have touched on Louise and how Spence was always at pains to protect her, to keep her safe from humiliation and the scrutiny of the press. That Kate was now contemplating the crashing of his funeral was something he would not have wanted, no matter how heartfelt, how necessary, such a grand gesture might have been.
Passing under the Hollywood Freeway, she turned left onto Vermont, past Los Angeles City College and on toward Santa Monica Boulevard. There would be a crowd of onlookers at the church, as there was for all celebrity funerals, photographers and TV cameramen shouldering their 16mm gear, eager to run off and get their footage processed and cut for the six o’clock news. Just how unseen could she possibly be, slipping into the back as if no one would know her? In a practical sense, they would all be on the lookout for her, the reporters, the freelancers, the autograph hounds for whom no event was too sacred to work. Left at Santa Monica, doubling back now, the Immaculate Heart of Mary six blocks ahead on the left. Of course she wouldn’t go, couldn’t go. She didn’t want, as she later told Bill, any “fuss.”
As the church came into view, they could see the crowds, the people arriving, the