Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [532]
While these might all seem like little things, they go to a pattern of inaccuracy that unfortunately seems to permeate the book. The author sets up John Tracy as an emotionally distant man who “drank hard” and, in the modern cliché, “withheld praise.” He notes all the standard newspaper items, the Sunset Boulevard arrest and the Yuma episode with Hugh Tully, and lays the public exploitation of “little Johnnie [sic] Tracy’s deafness” to the M-G-M publicity machine. All this, of course, leads up to speculation as to just what the nature of Tracy’s torment really was. Mann insists the relationship between Tracy and Hepburn wasn’t physical and—bizarrely—cites as proof the testimony of people who never knew Tracy or observed the relationship firsthand: Gavin Lambert, James Prideaux, members of George Cukor’s inner circle, and the anonymous voices that populate all books of this ilk. Finally, on page 336, he gets around to his smoking gun, a “male madam” named Scotty Bowers (coyly referred to in the text simply as “Scotty”).
Bowers is full of glib stories and revelations, all cheerfully unverifiable. He claims, for example, a “long, happy association” with Vivien Leigh and another, in a Variety interview, with Tyrone Power. Mann devotes considerable space to establishing Bowers’ credibility. (“I’ve never known Scotty not to tell the truth,” the late Gavin Lambert is quoted as saying.) He then allows Bowers to torpedo himself with the very first statement attributed to him. Bowers describes his initial encounter with Spencer Tracy as having taken place at Cukor’s home soon after the end of the war: “That was the first time, but it went on for years. Tracy would be drinking when I arrived. He’d get so loaded. He’d sit there drinking at the table from five o’clock in the afternoon until two in the morning, when he’d fall onto the bed and ask me to join him … And in the morning he’d act like nothing happened. He’d just say thanks for staying over” (emphasis added).
What Bowers obviously didn’t know when he made that statement is that Tracy was completely sober from the time he was discharged from Doctors Hospital in May 1945—nearly four months before the end of the war—until well into the fifties. And, of course, he was never the guzzler Bowers portrays him to be. Later, on page 383, Bowers reappears to again assert a relationship, reputedly showing up at St. Ives sometime in 1956 while Hepburn is in the kitchen washing dishes. Tracy is once again portrayed as drinking, while Hepburn is shrewish: “She’d tell him he was a fool just to sit there and drink. She could be very cutting to him. Then she’d walk off and leave us alone to have sex.”
Here, as before, it should be noted that Tracy, except for his lapses in Cuba and New York City, records no drinking in his datebooks for 1956 and 1957. Moreover, his address book, a 1952 gift from Constance Collier that he used for the rest of his life, shows no entries for Scotty Bowers, the Richfield station he managed, nor anyone under any name or identification whatsoever who could possibly have functioned in the capacity Bowers claims for himself. Such a story, in fact, asks the reader to believe that Hepburn, so famously protective of Tracy she would not even allow cast members near him on the set of The Devil at 4 O’Clock, would freely walk away and leave him to the company of “Cukor’s friend from the gas station” so that the two of them could “have sex.”
These key scenes are embroidered with comments from a handful of minor figures who present themselves as having the real dope on Tracy and Hepburn. Press agent Richard Gully, who died in 2000, is quoted from a posthumous Vanity Fair profile as saying that Tracy was a bisexual who was “never sober” (thus establishing he had very little—if any—real knowledge of Tracy). “I don’t think he functioned as a man,” Gully added. “He and Katharine Hepburn had chemistry only on screen.” In nearly