Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn

How do you sum up a love affair kept secret for three decades? For Katharine Hepburn,
those four words seemed to evoke all that was magical — and all that wasn’t — about her
clandestine relationship with the moody, mercurial (and married) Spencer Tracy.
ed cripps plays psychoanalyst ...
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Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in 1940.
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f all the Hollywood love stories, Spencer Tracy and
Katharine Hepburn’s is the most complicated. It’s a
little crass to look for narrative patterns in the lives
of others, or superimpose the tracing paper of a three-act
structure. But if Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s romance
was a Theatre of the Absurd, all modernist repetitions and lifeart self-circlings, Tracy and Hepburn’s had the architecture
of a 19th-century novel: grand, tormented, perversely moral,
stuccoed with the Catholic guilt of Graham Greene and the
high-society depression of late Scott Fitzgerald, a palm-tree
of secrets and fronts whose leaves were clipped by the studio
publicity hawks. Though both had a capacity for cruelty, they
were adored performative pioneers who complemented
each other on every level, their hearty, slightly dated film
collaborations (all nine of them) antiseptic reflections of a
home life dappled with disquiet. They were, as Huysmans once
said of a Cézanne painting, skewed fruit in besotted pottery.
We might as well begin with their childhoods. Born in
Hartford, Connecticut, in 1907, Katharine Houghton Hepburn
was the daughter of a surgeon and a suffragist whose enlightened
opinions on venereal disease and birth control instilled a
progressive lilt towards sexual politics. She challenged female
stereotypes from a young age, one summer cutting her hair and
insisting on being called ‘Jimmy’. Aged 14 she discovered the
dead body of her beloved brother, Tom, hanging from the ceiling.
Her parents always insisted it wasn’t suicide (one theory is that it
was a magic trick gone wrong). He was 16.
After graduation from Bryn Mawr College and parts with
stock theatre companies, she asserted control of her career with
the help of her first husband, Ludlow Ogden Smith, a wealthy
Pennsylvanian businessman, and of other lovers. Often described
as ‘spirited’, a word with the lightest whiff of condescension,
her gargled New England vowels, blackberry-dipped voice,
carpentered cheekbones and even her trousers were a timely
affront to Hollywood norms. Capitalising on the stage success
of The Philadelphia Story (whose rights her on-off flame Howard
Hughes had bought for her), Hepburn agreed to let M.G.M. film
it on the condition she played the lead. She asked for Spencer
Tracy and Clark Gable to play her suitors; she got Cary Grant and
James Stewart. It was a monumental hit. Though they’d still not
met, she requested Tracy again for her next film, Woman of the
Year, to play the sports journalist opposite her political reporter.
She got him, and so it began.
Spencer Bonaventure Tracy was born in Milwaukee in 1900.
His family were stout Catholics, his father a truck salesman.
A charismatic, hyperactive child, he cheeked his way through a
school run by Jesuits, briefly joined the Navy, then won a place
at Ripon College, where he made his stage debut. Rising through
the ranks of stock theatre, Broadway and television for Fox, he
was signed by M.G.M., the most prestigious studio in Hollywood.
While a member of the New York Wood Players, his first stock
company after Ripon, he met the actress Louise Treadwell. They
married in 1923 and had a son, John, the following year. When
Tracy found out, shortly after John’s first birthday, that his son
was deaf, he was distraught, certain that his own sins (such as
adultery) had been vested on the child. He emotionally estranged
himself and threw himself into his work.
Hepburn was more open about the guilt she felt over her
first marriage. She made her husband change his surname so
she wouldn’t be known as Kate Smith, reaped his contacts, and
divorced him as soon as she won her first Oscar (in 1934, for
Morning Glory). She later admitted in an interview that she had
been “an absolute pig with Luddy ... he was an angel.” Indeed, for
all the ground she broke, the young Hepburn was hardly a saint.
The New York Times review of her autobiography, Me: Stories of My
Life, paints her as “an archetypal American actor: narcissistic,
ambitious, sometimes ruthless and rarely concerned about
people other than herself or ideas other than those of practical
use in her advancement.”
Tracy left his family home in 1933 and reached an amicable
separation with Louise, though they never divorced. He had
affairs with co-stars including Loretta Young, Joan Crawford and
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Ingrid Bergman before he met Hepburn on the set of Woman of the
Year in 1942, when he was 41 and she was 34. Initial impressions
were cagey, and their first exchange had the zip of a screwball
comedy. Hepburn served with, “Mr. Tracy, you’re a little short
for me”. “Don’t worry,” he shot back, “I’ll cut you down to size.”
Hepburn “knew right away that I found him irresistible”.
The pair addressed each other at first as Miss Hepburn
and Mr. Tracy, but within days they were on first-name terms;
on testier days, he would also refer to her as “Shorty” or “that
woman”. There was also a clash of technique — Hepburn the
fervid rehearser versus the more spontaneous Tracy, who often
gave his best performance on the first take. His philosophy was
simple: “Come to work on time, know your lines, and don’t bump
into the other actors.” (Tracy, for all his moods, had a knack for
the trim one-liner: he once claimed there were “times when my
pants were so thick, I could sit on a dime and know if it was heads
or tails”.) But the blend worked.
Such was the alchemy and popularity of their combined
pedigree that they made a further eight films together: Keeper of the
Flame (1942), Without Love (1945), The Sea of Grass (1947), State of
the Union (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952), Desk Set
(1957), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). The template of
clever, cold, insecure Hepburn and practical, salt-of-the-earth,
humane Tracy was tailored for them to play couples, rival lawyers,
rival reporters, even athlete and manager. Guess Who’s Coming
to Dinner notwithstanding (a treat we’ll save for the end), the
films feel a little old-fashioned now, the comedies in particular
a movable farce of fickle toasters, slamming doors and kitchen
one-upmanship.
In the cracks, though, are intriguing hints of their real life.
The flash of stockinged leg the first time Tracy sees Hepburn on
screen in Woman of the Year; Tracy’s appraisal in Pat and Mike that
there’s “not much meat on her, but what’s there is ‘cherce’”; The
State of the Union’s tagline that “she fought to keep her man from
... the other woman” (one wonders how that went down with
Louise); Tracy’s ultimatum to Hepburn in Adam’s Rib that “if you
want to be a big He-Woman, go and be one, but not with me”.
Asked why he always received top billing above Hepburn, Tracy
said: “Because this is a movie, chowderhead, not a lifeboat.”
Their careers were aristocratic, orchid waterfalls. In total
she received four Oscars for Best Actress (still a record, and she
didn’t collect three of them) and 12 nominations to Tracy’s two
wins and nine nominations. Cate Blanchett even won an Oscar
for playing Hepburn (in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, a far more
interesting film than The Wolf of Wall Street). Hepburn said Tracy
was the acting equivalent of “meat and potatoes ... I’m more like
a fancy French dessert ... a little bit fancy. But I wish I were meat
and potatoes.” In the famous letter she read out on television
(more on which later), she praised “that glorious simplicity, that
directness”, and felt — like Laurence Olivier, Lee Strasberg and
David Lean – that Tracy was the best actor of his time. He knew
it, too: “The kids keep telling me I should try this new ‘method
acting’,” he said. “But I’m too old, I’m too tired and I’m too
talented to care.”
One can’t be absolutely sure how it all worked, given the blackbelt expertise of the Hollywood studio hushing it up, Tracy’s refusal
to articulate his feelings for Hepburn in public, and Hepburn’s
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late-life inebriation with her own mythology (not to mention the
lack of psychological curiosity in her autobiography). But Tracy
was so keen to keep the affair from his wife, just as M.G.M. were
to avoid a controversy, that they kept it a ‘secret’ for 26 years (many
in the ‘biz’ knew, of course). They tried not to be seen together in
public, retained separate homes to avoid gossip, and Hepburn
never pushed for marriage. Busy film schedules meant the time they
spent together was scarce, especially in the fifties, when Hepburn
was abroad shooting the likes of The African Queen. According to
his friend Joan Fontaine, Tracy could “get a divorce whenever I
want to, but my wife and Kate like things just as they are”. It was a
deceptively progressive triangle of convenience, the secrecy a cloak
of both freedom and frustration.
But Tracy’s was a troubled soul. He grew on the side — as
best he could, and to borrow from Saul Bellow — a little herb
garden of good, generous feelings. But it fought a thunderhead
of alcoholism, depression, anxiety and insomnia (he once ‘joked’
that he used to take “two-week lunch hours”). Hepburn called
him “tortured”; his wife, Louise, said he had “the most volatile
disposition I’ve ever seen ... when he’s low, he’s very, very low.”
Hepburn put his interests and demands first: “I wanted him to
be happy, safe, comfortable. I liked to wait on him, listen to him,
feed him, work for him. I tried not to disturb him ... I was happy
to do this.”
This is Hepburn at her most heroic — he sometimes used
to bellow at her, pissed, until he passed out — and all the
more moving behind closed doors. Less glamorous than the
hypersexual rages of Burton and Taylor, or the noir-boiled
cool of Bogart and Bacall, in some ways it’s deeper. As Mrs.
Elton says in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, real love is
“wiping someone’s arse or changing the sheets when they’ve
wet themselves”. That uncomplaining little, “I was happy to
do this” has a maternal, nurse-like, even religious altruism —
unconditional devotion to a force she never fully understood.
“What was it?” she wondered. “Never at peace ... Tortured by
some sort of guilt. Some terrible misery.”
When Tracy’s health deteriorated in the sixties, Hepburn
took a professional hiatus to look after him. “I virtually quit work
just to be there so that he wouldn’t worry or be lonely,” she said.
She was by his side when he died (while making himself a cup of
coffee) in June 1967; he thanked her merely as his “wonderful
friend”. Hepburn didn’t attend Tracy’s funeral, mindful of his
family. Hepburn had “great respect” for Louise: she “never made
any difficulties at all” and they were mutually “careful of each
other’s reputations”. But Louise Tracy, at some point, allegedly
said to Hepburn that she “thought you were only a rumour”.
Hepburn bit her tongue and mourned alone.
It wasn’t until the death of Louise herself, in 1983, that
Hepburn broke her public silence on Tracy. She had befriended
his daughter, Susie, and felt it wouldn’t do any harm. Asked in
an interview why she stayed with Tracy for so long when their
relationship could never be official, she replied: “I honestly don’t
know. I can only say that I could never have left him. [We] just
passed 27 years together in what was to me absolute bliss.”
In 1986, a year shy of 80, Hepburn read out loud on
American television a letter she’d written to Spencer Tracy.
Some described it as sentimental. If sentimentality is (as
Clockwise from top left: Tracy in The Old Man
and the Sea in 1958; Hepburn, circa 1930;
Hepburn’s husband, Ludlow Ogden Smith;
Hepburn and Tracy in The Woman of the Year
in 1942; another scene from The Woman of the
Year; Tracy with his wife, Louise Treadwell, at a
film premiere, circa 1938.
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Clockwise from top left: a scene from The
Woman of the Year; Hepburn relaxing in 1952;
Hepburn and Tracy in The Sea of Grass in
1947; the pair again in The Woman of the Year;
making eyes on screen in The Woman of the
Year; together in Without Love in 1945; in State
of the Union in 1948; once more in The Sea of
Grass; a further shot from the same film.
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Hepburn put his interests and
demands first: “I wanted him to be
happy, safe, comfortable. I liked to
wait on him, listen to him, feed him,
work for him. I tried not to disturb
him ... I was happy to do this”
Hepburn and Tracy during filming of the 1967
movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Joyce defined it) unearned emotion, it was the opposite of
sentimental, because, God almighty, Hepburn had earned it
by then. Her delivery had a doddery theatricality, excusably,
but the most potent words were the most understated. She
describes his “tossing and turning” in life: “Living wasn’t
easy for you, was it?” She cites the priest who told Tracy he
concentrated on “all the bad and none of the good”. Acting,
alongside polo and fishing, was a rare escape: “What a relief
you could be someone else for a while.” The letter’s final
line, which distils to four drops the unfathomable ocean of
their relationship, is an unanswerable worthy of Beckett:
“What was it, Spence?”
Her autobiography, published in 1991, is even more candid.
The night of Tracy’s death quivers with frustration, pain and guilt,
though not necessarily (as some have argued) anger at his wife.
The aches, disavowed by society and the studios, split their husks
and spray like little fountains: “It was a unique feeling that I had
for [Tracy]. I would have done anything for him.” But she suggests,
with characteristic unorthodoxy, they wouldn’t necessarily have
married. “I think marriage is a strange relationship,” she wrote.
“It’s very trying to be living in the same house with someone all
the time if you’re a grown-up person.” (Hepburn, Hollywood’s
reluctant elder stateswoman, was a weary, starchy wit on aging:
she suggested people grew fond of her “like some old building”,
and likened the fallacy that old age is fun to saying, “I prefer
driving an old car with a flat tyre”.)
Why were they such a compulsive couple? (Variety reported
last year that a biopic of their affair is in development.) So
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much has been left unsaid that it’s anyone’s guess. Perhaps
because they had an awkward, angular beauty; a double helix
of oppositions (even political ones, he very Republican, she
“way left-of-centre”); their balance of the relatable and the
unexpected; an ultra-civilised disregard for convention joined
at the hip with blameless savagery; the parallel inadvertences
between life and the screen; and the strange shifting relationship
with the media. But most of all it’s the mystique, the injustice, the
Hepburn-skewed one-sidedness, her Love in the Time of Choleraesque patience, the repressed widowed dignity of the old man
in Up (whose look and grouchy persona Tracy inspired), that
unanswered open letter.
The final scene of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, their last
and comfortably best film together, became a double requiem, a
requiem to exactly the sort of socio-political open-mindedness
that Hepburn, especially, had championed all her life, but also a
requiem to their relationship. In a long monologue, Tracy gives
his blessing to his daughter’s engagement to Sidney Poitier’s
character by invoking his love for his wife (played by Hepburn),
which he lauds as “clear, intact, indestructible”. In the mask of
character, it’s as truthful, honest and expansive an expression of
Tracy’s feelings for Hepburn as possible, a rare irreticence. “The
only thing that matters”, he concludes, “is what they feel, and how
much they feel, for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt —
that’s everything.” Hepburn’s tears rasp the spine.
Seventeen days after the scene was filmed, Tracy died.
Hepburn never saw the completed film, as the memories of Tracy
were too painful. What was it, Spence?
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