`An Affair To Remember' -- Tracy Was A Heel, Hepburn Was His Doormat In The Longest Running Star Partnership In History

Jul 13, 1997

Christopher Andersen

Special To The Seattle Times

FIRST OF A TWO-PART SERIES

Today and tomorrow in The Seattle Times, Scene is running excerpts from the new book, "An Affair to Remember: The Remarkable Love Story of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy." You'll learn: Spencer Tracy was abusive, Hepburn his doormat; Kate's description of sex and how Richard Nixon saves Tracy's and Hepburn's careers (today); Tracy's other affairs, and why Tracy's monogrammed bathrobe still hangs in Kate's bathroom (tomorrow). . .

Sounds trashy? Yeah. But it's summer. And they were, says the book's author Christopher Andersen, the longest-running star partnership in history, onscreen and off. -----------------------------------------------------------------

Katharine Hepburn called herself one the "giant ladies" of Hollywood, and at just 5 feet 7 1/2 inches she actually was taller than many of the leading men of the day - not to mention nearly all the studio chiefs. "When a woman looks down on a man, it does something to his ego," Kate said. "It's quite extraordinary. They become so uncomfortable that they give you practically anything you ask for just to get rid of you. Works every time."

To maximize the effect, Kate liked to slip on what she called her trick shoes - heels that boosted her height a full four inches. Add to this an upswept hairdo and ramrod-straight posture, and Kate could make any man of smaller stature feel inconsequential indeed. "The idea," she said, "is to put the man in his place."

When Kate met Spencer Tracy for the first time she was wearing her "trick heels" as she emerged from the side entrance to the Thalberg Building at MGM and, on the steps outside, encountered producer Joe Mankiewicz and Tracy as they left the commissary. "They got nearer and nearer," she recalled, "and I got more and more excited. I hope he likes me. . ." As she got closer, Kate realized that she was two inches taller than the 5-foot-9-inch Tracy.

"Sorry I've got these high heels on," Kate said, trying to break the ice. "But when we do the movie I'll be careful about what I wear."

Tracy looked at Kate with "those old lion eyes of his." Then Joe Mankiewicz spoke up. "Don't worry, Kate," Mankiewicz said. "He'll cut you down to size."

Afterward Kate rushed to Mankiewicz' office, eager to hear what opinion the great Tracy had of her. "What did he think? What did he think?" she demanded.

Mankiewicz shifted nervously in his chair. "He said, `Katharine Hepburn has dirty nails, hasn't she?' "

Mankiewicz also shared the fact that Tracy disapproved of the mannish suit she was wearing (custom-made for her by the leading men's tailor Eddie Schmidt) and her too-firm handshake. "Not me, boy!" he told Mankiewicz the moment she left. "I don't want to get messed up in anything like this."

On the set of "Woman of the Year," Kate quickly realized that she had met her match - "and then some." She was so nervous when they started the picture that she knocked over a glass of water while filming a restaurant scene. She expected Tracy to stop everything and call a propman to clean it up, but instead "he never batted an eyelash. Looking straight into my eyes and continuing with his lines, he picked up a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and handed it to me. I thought, `You old son of a bitch,' and began damping up the mess. Then it started dripping through the table, so I just said, `Excuse me,' and bent down to mop it off the floor - all the while saying our lines as if nothing unusual had happened! It worked beautifully, and we kept it in the film."

Mankiewicz and the rest of the cast watched as the two screen giants adjusted to each other.

They realized that their differences made them oddly compatible - the magical, indefinable "he-she chemistry" that came from being locked in an eternal male-female struggle for dominance.

As with the characters they were portraying, the real-life scenario being played out was between a stubborn man of the people with his own unshakeable code of morality and an equally strong, financially independent woman who had, by her own account, behaved like any man in a world dominated by men.

For both, the choice was neither easy nor logical. Kate was 34 when they began work on "Woman of the Year" on Aug. 29, 1941. Tracy was 41. Both had come with entire cargo holds of emotional baggage. Motivated more by concern for his children and personal feelings of remorse than by religious conviction, Spencer was adamant about not divorcing his wife, Louise, from whom he had been separated since 1940.

He still visited his family most weekends and phoned Louise without fail every day.

Certainly he could have found a less challenging lover than Kate, someone whose habits and personality traits were less at loggerheads with his. Yet at this time of life Spencer needed someone who was more than merely beautiful and smart. "He could find that anywhere," Mankiewicz said. "Spencer wanted someone who would match him point for point, who would put up a fight - not too much of a fight, mind you - someone who was exciting to be around, someone stimulating. God knows Kate was all those things.

"Leland Hayward couldn't tame Kate, and neither could Howard Hughes. Spencer knew all about them; the whole country knew. So, if Spencer was understandably wary of her at first, he had to take some pride in knowing he could accomplish what these other rather formidable gentlemen couldn't."

Kate's reasons for being drawn into an affair with the famously difficult Spencer Tracy were no less complex. She knew that Tracy had once been passionately and very publicly in love with Loretta Young and that if he would not divorce Louise to marry her, it was almost inconceivable that he would make the break for any woman.

Spencer's ineligibility for marriage was actually a plus.

She had toyed seriously with the idea of marrying both Leland and Howard but had concluded that marriage was an institution for which she was ill suited.

"You can't have the whole bargain," she said. "An actor should never marry, not even another actor. You're too involved with yourself, and your work is too demanding, to give the necessary amount of attention to another human being."

Public was in the dark

The public at large would remain unaware of their offscreen romance for decades, despite the fact that it was common knowledge in Hollywood even before cameras stopped rolling on "Woman of the Year." This was partly due to the extreme discretion Kate and Spencer exercised. Unlike other movie star lovers, they took great pains never to be seen together off the set. They maintained separate residences and, when they traveled, checked into separate hotels. "We learned to be invisible," Spencer said, "in all the right places."

Kate soon discovered that Tracy was a deeply troubled and painfully insecure man who required a not-inconsiderable amount of mothering.

"He had a drinking problem, no doubt about it," Kate later said. "His drinking was no problem between us. Drinking is your own problem, and the only person who can do anything about it is you."

In the early months of their romance, Kate was blissfully unaware of the Jekyll-and-Hyde metamorphosis that took place when Tracy went on a bender. But things changed when Kate left his side to tour in "Without Love." That spring of 1942 she was getting her first horrifying glimpses of the creature Tracy could become when he fell off the wagon.

"Clark Gable and Tracy loved each other," said James Bacon, a drinking companion of both men. "They were both very down-to-earth guys. It never bothered Gable that Tracy was always considered the better actor, or Tracy that - no matter how good he was - he could never be quite as big a star as Gable."

When they got together, the occasion nearly always called for a drink - or several. "Gable was a big martini drinker," Bacon said, "and Tracy preferred Scotch, although he really wasn't too choosy." Once, Bacon remembered, Tracy and Gable were drinking after a polo match at the Riviera Country Club and then vanished. They turned up three days later in a Tucson hotel room. "They were blind drunk, and MGM Studio chief Louis B. Mayer was madder than hell.". . .

By August 1942 Kate was catering to Spencer's every whim. She picked him up at the Beverly Hills Hotel and drove him to the studio, brewed pots of coffee on the set, attended to his needs throughout the day, fed him lunch, drove him to her house after work, cooked dinner for him (over the years she had mastered a small but serviceable repertoire of dishes), massaged his ego, then drove him back to his hotel.

His off-the-cuff remarks - Spencer routinely called Kate his "Bag of Bones" and often dismissed her most heartfelt observations with a curt "Who in the hell asked you?" - came across as verbal abuse to co-workers and friends.

The thoughtless comments did not just roll off Kate's back. But in a curious way, they endeared Tracy even more to her. "If Tracy didn't like someone he simply ignored them," Mankiewicz said. "But if he liked you, he gave you holy hell. It meant he really cared."

More than platonic

Even so, among those who understood Tracy's unconventional way of expressing affection, there was considerable speculation that the Tracy-Hepburn relationship was essentially platonic. Not likely. Tracy boasted a long string of sexual conquests, and Hepburn had always had a free and open attitude toward sex. They both were intensely physical creatures, and this extended to their personal relationship.

"It's a force of life, sex, you can't deny the thrill of riding high, wide and handsome with someone you love," Kate later said of their affair. "The only thing is that age doesn't bring any sexual wisdom. You're just as confused 40 years later as you were when you first heard about it."

Kate's biggest challenge in the relationship had nothing to do with sex, however. Hepburn, who had once been dispatched by MGM Studio chief L.B. Mayer himself to have a heart-to-heart chat with the troubled Judy Garland, knew what the task of protecting Spencer from himself entailed. "If you are going to help anybody who is in trouble, this is not a two-hour-a-day job. It is a 24-hour-a-day job. You won't do anything else if you decide that you are going to resurrect and rearrange a human being. . .I was his."

This total devotion would be at the expense of Hepburn's own career. From 1942 on, every professional decision Kate made - every stage and movie role she accepted or refused - was arrived at on the basis of how it affected Spencer. Over the next eight years she starred in only 10 films, six of them with Tracy. Eight of the 14 pictures he made during that same period were without Kate, including some of the most successful of his career: "A Guy Named Joe," "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," "Cass Timberlane" and "Father of the Bride."

So long as she remained by his side, both Kate and Spencer reasoned, he would have the strength to resist temptation.

During the 1950s, Spencer Tracy began objecting to any project that would take Katharine Hepburn away from him for any extended period. First he tried drinking. He was too proud to come right out and say he needed her, that he might self-destruct without her, but she got the message.

She realized that he had to seek professional help if he was going to beat the problem once and for all. She urged him to join Alcoholics Anonymous or at the very least to see one of the battery of Beverly Hills physicians who had built entire careers on treating alcoholic movie stars.

Tracy responded by only drinking more. At one point he lost control and did the one thing he had never done before: Spencer struck Kate. He was too drunk to realize what he had done at the time and too mentally fogbound the next day to remember. Kate certainly would not tell him, though years later she described the incident to an acquaintance, writer Martin Gottfried. She knew that if she had told Spencer he had hit her, he would have been so overcome with remorse that it would have changed the nature of their love for each other. She did not want him to be bound to her by guilt, as he was to his wife, Louise.