Spencer Tracy: A Biography
by James Curtis
Hutchinson
*****
“Acting was easy for him. Living was hard.” This brief description of Spencer Tracy, by his co-star and soulmate Katharine Hepburn, encapsulates in just eight words the man considered by many to be America’s greatest film actor.
In fact, James Curtis’s compelling new biography reveals that Tracy’s genius was not so much for acting as re-acting. In an era of rigid typecasting, he offered an onscreen naturalism that few others in Hollywood possessed. As a result, he became one of Tinseltown’s most bankable stars, appearing in 75 films and gaining a record nine Academy Award nominations.
The young Tracy grew up in Milwaukee, and decided on an acting career while still at college. It soon paid off. One of his early champions, the impresario George M. Cohan, once interrupted him during a rehearsal to shout: “Tracy, you’re the best goddamn actor I’ve ever seen.”
Success on Broadway in the 1930 prison drama The Last Mile catapulted him to Hollywood, where over the next three and a half decades he turned in some of the most memorable screen performances of any era, in films like Bad Day At Black Rock, Inherit The Wind and Judgment At Nuremberg.
Yet Tracy’s private life was complex and often ruinous. A lifelong Roman Catholic, he’d married actress Louise Treadwell in 1923, a union that produced two children. But profound guilt over the deafness of his first-born, John, plus a string of marital infidelities (conquests included Myrna Loy and Ingrid Bergman) led to an increasing reliance on alcohol that constantly derailed his normally generous and affable personality.
Any significant upset - bad reviews, a fall-out with a studio boss or another infatuation - would plunge him into reckless drinking binges, frequently resulting in a trip to hospital. While filming The Mountain he threw a glass at the young Robert Wagner, lacerating the fledgling star’s hand so badly it required stitches.
It was Tracy’s partnership with Katharine Hepburn that finally brought him some measure of emotional stability. Their first chance encounter in the lobby of a studio is the stuff of legend, Hepburn allegedly commenting: “I might be a little tall for you, Mr Tracy,” as she passed him. It marked the beginning of a personal and professional relationship that would span nine films and sustain Tracy throughout his increasingly desperate battle with booze.
Although by disposition independent and unsentimental, Hepburn adored him, and by the end of his life was both his wife and nursemaid in all but title. The two would have married, but his wife’s intransigence and Tracy’s Catholicism would never allow it.
Tracy always detested talking about his craft. To one reporter who asked where was his greatest happiness to be found as an actor, he replied: “In the cashier’s office.” Yet his studied public diffidence masked a fierce if suppressed pride. As his friend Joe Mankiewicz observed: “He was embarrassed when people told him he was a good actor, but he was terrified by the idea of people not telling each other he was a good actor.”
Tracy’s final role was in the 1967 movie Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, in which he was once more paired with his beloved Kate. By now ravaged by illness and booze, his performance nonetheless remains an example of screen acting at its most economical yet profound.
When he left the set after his final shot, director Stanley Kramer remarked quietly: “That’s the last time you’ll ever see Spencer Tracy on film.” His comment was overheard by Hepburn who responded with a furious reprimand, but Kramer’s words came prophetically true 17 days later, when Tracy died of a heart attack. Yet even after his death, such was the simmering enmity of his long-suffering wife towards her usurper in his affections that Hepburn wasn’t allowed to attend his funeral.
At nearly 900 pages, Curtis’s biography weaves a fascinating, not to say definitive portrait of an individual both naively simple and immensely complex. Some of the more lurid claims, including allegations of wife-beating and even homosexuality, are dealt with only at the end in a dismissive afterword.
Tracy once said of his genius: “I’d like to say I have a theory about acting, but I don’t. I’m just a sentimental Irishman and I play scenes the way they react on me.” His adoring Kate described him more deftly: “As simple as a baked potato.” - Daily Mail