Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [595]
Selected Bibliography
BOOKS
Andersen, Christopher. An Affair to Remember. New York: Morrow, 1997. A dual biography of Tracy and Hepburn, focusing on their twenty-six-year relationship. Relying heavily on the Bill Davidson book (see below), Andersen falls for every outlandish fabrication and ends up making a muddle of Tracy’s life. (See notes for this page and this page for additional commentary.)
Davidson, Bill. Spencer Tracy: Tragic Idol. New York: Dutton, 1988. A blatant fraud of a book, presumably written for quick money after The Spencer Tracy Legacy appeared on public television in 1986. Davidson’s M.O. was to take legitimate interviews (Don Taylor, Robert Wagner, Walter Seltzer), cook the quotes to make them as sensational as possible, then intermix them with “interviews” that were entirely—and obviously—fictional. (See notes for this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page for particularly egregious examples.) Edward Everett Horton is quoted describing the preview of Six Cylinder Love at the Loyola Theater in Westchester a full fifteen years before that theater was built. Louise Tracy is quoted as saying it was she who was offered a job with Stuart Walker’s company in Cincinnati, not Spencer, and that it was she who subsequently told Walker she “wanted Spencer Tracy as my leading man.” Gene Kelly describes his friend Spence as a “right wing conservative” when Kelly would certainly have known better. Davidson also quotes from interviews he supposedly conducted with the likes of Clark Gable, Humphrey Bo-gart, Eddie Mannix, Charles Jehlinger, and a host of other figures who died years—if not decades—prior to the book’s appearance. According to Davidson, Tracy discovered his son’s deafness in Brooklyn, not Grand Rapids, and he disappeared into the Hotel St. George as a result. Toots Shor, a bouncer at Billy LaHiff’s, is quoted as telling Davidson that Tracy got “loaded” and beat up one of the girls at a neighborhood whorehouse called Lu’s—but Shore didn’t even arrive in New York until 1930, the year Tracy filmed Up the River and relocated to California. Though every page brings a fresh distortion, this crude exercise in biography has been regarded as a primary resource on Tracy for more than twenty years.
Deschner, Donald. The Films of Spencer Tracy. New York: Citadel Press, 1968. The first book-length study of Tracy’s career.
Fisher, James. Spencer Tracy: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. An academic approach to Tracy’s life and career, admirably balanced.
Hepburn, Katharine. Me. New York: Knopf, 1991.
Kanin, Garson. Tracy and Hepburn. New York: Viking, 1971. A self-described “intimate memoir” derived from “written records + journals and memorandums of telephone conversations + of correspondence” kept by the author over a period of some thirty years. Though Kanin’s memoir, on the whole, is remarkably accurate, Katharine Hepburn considered it a betrayal of their friendship—as did many of their mutual friends—and refused to speak to him for a number of years. “[T]aking detailed notes on private conversations … then publishing them … and not very accurately I’m afraid … is hardly the act of a friend,” she wrote. “I think had I been dead and S[pence] alive he would not have dared.”
Kartseva, Elena Nikolaevna. Spenser Tresi. Moscow: Isdatelstvo Iskustvo, 1970.
King, Alison. Spencer Tracy. New York: Crescent, 1992.
Newquist, Roy. A Special Kind of Magic. Skokie, Ill.: Rand McNally, 1967. Interviews with Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Houghton, Stanley Kramer, and George Glass on the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Packer, Eleanor. Private Lives of Movie Stars. Los Angeles: Bantam, 1940. Tracy is one of ten stars whose biographies