Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [530]
And with that she tapped the brake and watched as the hearse and its precious cargo eased away.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Biographies of Katharine Hepburn
No fewer than twenty-five books exist on the life and career of Katharine Hepburn, and all, to varying extents, touch on her decades-long relationship with Spencer Tracy. The first major Hepburn biography, Charles Higham’s Kate (1975), drew its strength from the author’s interviews with a number of Hepburn’s friends and coworkers, including Laura Harding, Larry Weingarten, and George Stevens. In writing of the “deep, overpowering love” Hepburn felt for Tracy, Higham came closest to getting it right. Later attempts were less advantaged but made more prodigious use of archival resources. Anne Edwards’ A Remarkable Woman (1985) was thicker than the Higham book but relied more on previous books and clippings than original research and is riddled with errors. According to Edwards, Tracy’s affair with Loretta Young extended into 1938, and Louise Tracy was “president” of John Tracy Clinic until her death in 1983. Edwards’ source notes sometimes lead nowhere, and the heft of her book is, in part, the result of padding.
Barbara Leaming appeared to do a better job of library work in her Katharine Hepburn (1995) but misread the correspondence in Bloomington’s John Ford Collection and proclaimed “Pappy” Ford the true love of Hepburn’s life. The Ford correspondence in the Hepburn Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shows that while Ford nursed a lifelong crush on Kate, she reciprocated with a genuine but studied fondness—probably after a brief infatuation—and was in touch with Ford’s wife and kids over the decades.
Leaming’s biases extend to her lurid coverage of Tracy, whom she portrays, in the words of Larry Swindell, as “a brutal whoremongering drunkard with no redeeming qualities.” Leaming makes the common mistake of regarding Bill Davidson’s inventions as fact when she reports that Tracy disappeared into the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn “many times through the years,” his only luggage “a case of Irish whiskey.” On page 308, she describes Tracy as a mean drunk “who beat up a prostitute in a bordello called Lu’s,” another imaginary episode lifted from Davidson. She goes on to inform the reader that Up the River was made by RKO and that, upon its completion, Tracy was told by studio executives to learn “something about film technique” by observing Ford at work on Seas Beneath—a neat trick since Tracy was appearing onstage in The Last Mile—first in New York, then in Chicago—during the time Seas Beneath was in production. On page 401, Leaming goes Davidson one better when she states that Tracy “blamed his own visits to brothels and the venereal infections he contracted there” for Johnny’s deafness. There is no source given for this allegation—and one would make no difference as such an occurrence would have been a medical impossibility.
After Spencer Tracy’s death in 1967, it was established conclusively that the cause of John Tracy’s deafness (and eventual blindness) was type 1 Usher syndrome, a recessive disorder inherited when both parents pass the same mutated gene to a child. Spencer and Louise Tracy were both carriers, and a roll of the genetic dice resulted in John’s condition—a one-in-four chance. Susie Tracy, with the same parentage, was born without Usher syndrome, meaning she did not inherit the same changed gene from both parents. Needless to say, genetic disorders cannot be caused or transmitted by “venereal infections.” While it is true that syphilis can mimic the symptoms of Usher syndrome—deafness and retinal damage—the syphilis bacterium can only be passed to a child via his or her mother. If the father alone is infected and the mother is not, the child cannot be infected.
None of Spencer Tracy’s confidential medical histories makes any mention of venereal disease at any time in his life.