Tormented by guilt and a family tragedy, why Spencer Tracy never left his wife for Katharine Hepburn

By Katherine Whitbourn
Updated: 03:42 EST, 12 October 2011

On the morning of Spencer Tracy’s funeral, a slender woman with striking, angular cheekbones drove up to the mortuary where the body of the great screen actor lay.

There was no one to be seen – just an empty hearse. Driving on, she found an attendant. ‘Is anyone else coming?’ she asked. ‘No,’ he replied.

‘In that case, may I help you?’ she asked. ‘Why not?’ he said. And so, with the help of two others, they gently eased the coffin into the hearse and closed the door.

When the vehicle finally moved off, the woman, famed the world over as the actress Katharine Hepburn, got back into her Chrysler and followed it on its six-mile journey through the streets of Los Angeles.

Devoted: Despite their 26-year relationship, Katharine Hepburn did not attend Spencer Tracy's funeral

As Spencer’s lover for more than 26 years, and his co-star in nine Hollywood romances, who knows what was going through her mind at that moment? History does not relate, though Hepburn later admitted that her original plan that morning in 1967 had been to follow the hearse, then slip quietly into the church and sit at the back. 

But her thoughts must certainly have turned to Louise, Spencer’s wife of more than 40 years, and his children John and Susie, whom he had always been anxious to protect — not only from humiliation but also the scrutiny of the Press.

Would he really have wanted all the fuss and attention that would be caused by his long-time mistress gatecrashing his funeral?

Their relationship had been an open secret in Hollywood for decades and they would all be looking out for her: the film crews, the photographers, the autograph hunters.

As the church came into view, Katharine could see the crowds. There was only one thing to be done.

‘Goodbye, friend,’ she said under her breath. ‘Here’s where I leave you.’ And putting her foot gently on the brake, she watched as the hearse and its precious cargo pulled away from her.

At the finale of Spencer’s illustrious career, as at its beginning, it would be Louise, the real Mrs Tracy, and not his famous lover, who was at his side.

Family: Tracy could never bring himself to leave his daughter Susie, wife Louise and son John

When Spencer Tracy and Louise Treadwell first met on a New York train as young actors in their 20s, she had been the better known of the two. A classic brunette beauty known to her family as Weeze, she was a clever and serious young woman who could have been almost anything she wanted: a writer, a journalist, a dancer, a poet. She chose acting.

With his strong Irish features and thick, sandy hair, Spencer was unlike any actor she’d ever known. They were married when Louise was 27 and he was 23, and their first child, John, was born almost nine months to the day later.

The little boy was just ten months old when Louise made the devastating discovery that would change their lives. Accidentally slamming a door next to the sleeping baby’s crib, she noticed that he had failed to react to the sound. Neither did he wake when she called his name. Only when she touched him did he open his eyes and smile at her.

John Tracy was profoundly deaf. Even more heartbreaking for Louise, doctors told her it was likely that he would never speak.

From that moment on, said friends, Louise became obsessed with the baby: distracted, depressed, endlessly researching cures, while all the time keeping the news a secret from her husband.

‘There was nothing in her life except Johnny,’ said Emily Deming, a theatre dresser who often babysat for them. ‘And that wasn’t quite fair to Spencer, because he knew he came second.’

Before long, rumours of an affair between Spencer and his leading lady of the time, Selena Royle, began to circulate. Decades later she would admit: ‘I was in love with Spence, and I believe he was in love with me,’ although she always denied ever having slept with him.

Father: Spencer was always aware of his duty towards his profoundly deaf son, John

By the time Louise got wind of an affair and wrongly suspected Selena, Spencer was involved with the company’s ingénue, a pretty brunette named Betty Hanna. ‘Once, when I was babysitting for them, when they [Spencer and Louise] came back they were arguing,’ said Emily Deming. ‘I was upset by what was happening, and I thought as I went out the door: “I’d smash a plate over your head if you were my husband!” That was the only time I ever heard him yell at her. I didn’t hear her voice at all.’

Three months after John’s diagnosis, Louise finally told Spencer the truth about the boy. ‘He buried his face in his hands,’ she recalled later, ‘and then, after a moment, he said brokenly: “He’ll never be able to say Daddy’’.’

Spencer blamed himself. He had committed adultery emotionally with Selena, and physically with Betty Hanna. Maybe there had even been others during Louise’s pregnancy. The guilt he felt as a result of his strong Roman Catholic upbringing gnawed constantly at him.

‘He adored his son,’ said Lorraine Foat, an actress from Spencer’s days in repertory theatre. ‘But he felt terribly about it. He suffered over it, feeling that somehow or other he had failed.’

But he was also unhappy about the physical aspect of his marriage, according to Chuck Sligh, one of the Tracys’ oldest friends. ‘Spencer at that time was very upset,’ said Sligh. ‘Louise had given her life over to John.

‘He gave me the feeling that she wasn’t too attentive to his needs … I don’t like to put words into his mouth, but the feeling I got was that: “Gosh, I don’t know, but Louise is so cold.” Something like that…’

Tracy came from a tradition within the Church that sex was solely for reproduction, and that recreational sex was immoral. ‘I really believe that it was a very separate part of their lives,’ said his cousin Jane. ‘It wasn’t part of their existence — not a normal, natural thing, accepted with joy.’

In later years, the movie director Joe Mankiewicz would say of Spencer’s infidelities: ‘He didn’t leave Louise. He left the scene of his guilt.’

Chemistry: But despite their long-running affair, Tracy never left his wife to be with Hepburn

The need to fund his son’s care now that Louise had abandoned her career to look after the young boy was, without doubt, a huge motivating force in Spencer’s prolific 75-film career.

A few years after being signed up by Hollywood he was earning $1,000 a week — a phenomenal amount at that time. He was also drinking too much, eating too much (he was addicted to chocolates and sweets) and womanising too much.

While Louise trekked backwards and forwards between Los Angeles and the East coast, consulting specialists and signing Johnny up with schools in Boston and New York (where he would learn first to lipread and then, aged around 11, actually to speak) her husband’s name was regularly linked with his co-stars.

A decade into their marriage, gossip began to swirl that the Tracys had separated. Confirming a trial parting, and attributing it to growing incompatibility and nothing more, Spencer told reporters: ‘If there is any blame to be attached, it is mine. Mrs Tracy and I are still excellent friends, and perhaps living apart for a while will lead to a reunion.’

In truth, Spencer had begun an affair with the actress Loretta Young, a fellow Catholic, then just 20, with whom he had even spoken of marriage.

But, Spencer told his friend Humphrey Bogart, he didn’t think he could go through with it. ‘What could I say to Johnny?’ he said. ‘How could I make a nine-year-old little boy understand that I’m leaving his mother?’

Louise, meanwhile, valiantly gave her side of the story. ‘I’ve repeatedly told him to go out with other people,’ she said in an interview. ‘Occasionally he’s gone out with some of the girls he’s worked with. I haven’t minded, because he always told me about it.

‘I can’t truthfully say that Spencer and I are still madly, passionately in love with each other. I don’t believe that kind of love ever lasts. But in its place comes a deep understanding, companionship and devotion.’

Passion: On their first meeting Hepburn was supposedly told that Tracy would 'cut her down to size'

Later would come high-profile affairs with Ingrid Bergman (of whom Hepburn was jealous long after the Swedish beauty’s influence had waned — there were even stories of Katharine staking out a hotel with a shotgun, convinced Spencer and Bergman were inside) and Joan Crawford, who ever afterwards resented the fact that it was she who had been dumped by Tracy, and not the other way round.

With Bette Davis there was a poignant might-have-been relationship. ‘Spence and I were smitten with each other,’ she said. ‘He didn’t have to pretend he was strong, because he was strong, but, oh, he could be tender, too.’ 

And all the while the strain of Johnny’s condition and the anguish over his adultery continued to torment Spencer.

‘Boys belong with their fathers, and even more, fathers belong with their sons,’ he told a friend in 1935. ‘I’d been thinking that I had “rights”; that I could lead my own life and all that sort of thing. But actually I forswore that right the day Johnny was born. I was responsible for this young life. His place is with me. Mine is with him.’

It was during this period that Louise began to talk to Spencer about starting a school for the deaf in Los Angeles.

‘I felt we might start in a very modest sort of way, say with three or four children,’ she later wrote. ‘I mentally began to turn our den and patio into a school room and play yard. Now all we needed were some children and a good teacher.’

Katharine Hepburn always denied that her first words on meeting Spencer, as frequently reported, were: ‘Mr Tracy, I believe I am too tall for you.’

‘I wouldn’t have said anything that dumb,’ she complained in later interviews.

But whatever her precise words, the response of Joe Mankiewicz, the film director who had introduced them, was: ‘Oh, don’t worry. He’ll soon cut you down to size.’

Double act: The stars appeared together in nine Hollywood romances - the last was 1957's Desk Set, pictured

The famously volatile Tracy-Hepburn relationship went on to become the stuff of Hollywood legend, their off-screen love affair bringing to their movies a chemistry believed by many to be the most convincing in movie history.

‘I found him irresistible — I would have done anything for him,’ said Hepburn, adding in the same interview: ‘I was perfectly independent, never had any intention of getting married. I wanted to paddle my own canoe.’

Spencer, for his part, never  actually told her he loved her.  ‘But he wouldn’t have stuck around if he hadn’t, would he?’ she reasoned.

Tracy was on occasion, however, no more faithful to Katharine than he had been to Louise, embarking on relationships with other  co-stars while she was filming elsewhere, and being witnessed by his agent Harold Rose stumbling out of a taxi in the company of a woman who was obviously a prostitute.

But when the director Clarence Brown asked Katharine: ‘Why the hell don’t you find a guy you can marry and raise a family with? Otherwise, when you’re older you’ll be all alone,’ she replied: ‘Yes, and I’ll look back at all the fun I had.’

Just a year after her husband had met Katharine Hepburn, Louise was about to create her own enduring legacy. In 1943, the school that she’d dreamed of setting up for deaf children and their parents became a reality.

With Walt Disney, a close family friend, on its board, and bankrolled entirely by Spencer for the first years of its existence, it would grow into the John Tracy Clinic — a major charity which thrives to this day, and which boasts of having helped thousands of deaf children and their parents worldwide.

Tracy said at the clinic’s official opening: ‘You honour me because I am a movie actor, a star in Hollywood terms. Well, there’s nothing I’ve ever done that can match what Louise has done for deaf children and their parents.’

At the same time, however, the dynamic of the marriage was being changed to an extraordinary degree, and Tina Smith, the daughter of Spencer’s secretary, remembers her mother describing how Louise once said: ‘I will be Mrs Spencer Tracy until the day I die.’

Was the clinic a factor in Louise’s decision? Apart from her love and respect for her husband, was she loath to lose her access to people who could help the project so dear to her heart?

And from Spencer’s point of view, did the charity give him a chance to redeem himself, a way to respond to his son’s deafness that was not guilt and recrimination, that was to be preserved at all costs?

When Spencer and Louise had been married more than 30 years, their friend Chuck Sligh asked her why they had never divorced.

‘Well, he’s a Catholic,’ she told him. ‘And I thought at first this would all just blow over. Now I think it would be sort of silly after all this time to divorce him.’

A few days after Tracy’s funeral, the phone rang at Louise’s home. It was Katharine Hepburn, who had nursed her lover through his final months and been with him at her home when he died.

‘You know, Louise, you and I can be friends,’ said Hepburn. ‘You knew him at the beginning, I at the end. I might be a help with the kids.’ (John and Susie were at that point 42 and 34 respectively.)

‘Well, yes,’ Louise said, pausing for emphasis. ‘But you see, I thought you were only a rumour …’

The shot hit its mark with deadly accuracy. Hepburn raged later: ‘After nearly 30 years, a rumour?’

‘What could be the answer to that?’

‘It was,’ she later wrote, ‘a deep and fundamental wound, deeply set, never to be budged. ‘Almost 30 years Spence and I had known each other, through good and bad times. Some rumour.

‘And by never admitting I existed, she remained the wife. She sent out the Christmas cards.

‘Spencer, the guilty one. She, the sufferer. I had not broken up their marriage. That happened long before I arrived on the scene.’

And when Louise died in 1983, the recipient of numerous awards for her tireless charity work, she had been, and forever remained, the one and only Mrs Spencer Tracy.

Spencer Tracy by James Curtis is published by Hutchinson at £18.99. To order a copy for £16.99 (incl p&p) call 0843 382 0000.