In the 1952 film, "Pat and Mike" Hepburn's a tennis star and Tracy is her trainer.For audiences dreaming of romance, `30s Hollywood offered a variety of lush fantasies. Ballroom lovers and martini-quaffing swells, screwball heiresses and millionaire eccentrics — pretty Deco dreams for an age that had seen too much grim reality.
But starting in 1942, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn provided something more honest — and just as magical.
In nine films made over 25 years, they detailed the war between the sexes, skirmish by skirmish, providing a lively look at how smart people truly lived together, at how grown-up love actually worked.
“Tracy and Hepburn: The Definitive Collection,” from Warner Home Video ($59.92), finally assembles all their collaborations (two of them new to DVD) as well as Hepburn’s TV tribute, 1986’s “Spencer Tracy Legacy.” In a rare bit of home-video cooperation, the set includes features made for a variety of studios.
Perhaps Hepburn and Tracy just bring out the best in people. They certainly did in each other.
Although their films routinely cast them as complementary opposites, they were not unalike. Hepburn came from real wealth, but Tracy’s parents had been comfortable enough to send him to a succession of private Jesuit schools. Both actors went to college, hit Broadway in the ’20s, and married young; by the next decade, they were also both in Hollywood, picking up Oscars.
Never easy people, they sometimes made things harder than they needed to. Tracy — torturing himself over a faltering marriage, and a profoundly deaf son — could descend into angry, self-destructive binges. Hepburn — whose own marriage had been brief — was always too quick to tell off producers, the public and the press.
Tracy’s sins were overlooked — he was a man, and a moneymaker — but the less-popular Hepburn found forgiveness more difficult to come by. Only the success of “The Philadelphia Story” — whose rights she owned, thanks to boyfriend Howard Hughes’ money — restored her clout. In 1942, she used it to launch a new project, “Woman of the Year.”
Although Hepburn had never met Tracy, she wanted him as her co-star in the romantic comedy. Their first meeting, though, was inauspicious. Tracy observed, in silent disapproval, that her fingernails were dirty; Hepburn, uncharacteristically self-conscious in high heels, blurted “I fear I may be too tall for you, Mr. Tracy.”
“Don’t worry, Kate,” producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz piped up. “He’ll cut you down to size.”
In fact, once filming began, the two stars became friends — and then more than that. Gene Kelly remembers seeing them talking softly together, holding hands as they ate lunch. Director George Cukor, a Hepburn confidante, offered a cottage for discreet rendezvous. Everyone knew, but no one would say a thing.
No one expected it to last, either. Tracy was an unhappily married but guilt-ridden Catholic. Hepburn was frankly self-sufficient, and uninterested in any institution which, she quipped, meant giving up “the admiration of many men for the criticism of one.”
Yet the pair’s love stretched over 25 years, and if there’s little evidence of it — they avoided photographers, and Hepburn refused to publicly acknowledge the romance as long as Tracy’s wife was alive — you can see the depth and difficulties of the relationship in their films.
Independent people
Indeed, “Woman of the Year” is a story of accommodation: How do two very different, very independent people make love work? Well, eventually political pundit Tess Harding has to realize “success is no fun unless you share it with someone”; sportswriter Sam Craig must admit that he doesn’t want this free soul to “be just Mrs. Sam Craig.”
Gender roles prevailed, though. Although Tracy honored no ladies-first courtesies in billing (“It’s a movie, not a lifeboat,” he snapped) “Woman of the Year” insisted on husbandly supremacy. Hepburn’s liberated character had to get her comeuppance — which explains the movie’s one ugly misstep, a supposedly comedic climax portraying Tess as a female failure because she can’t cook.
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in the first film they made together, "Woman of the Year."Hepburn hated the new, hastily rewritten ending (ordered up because of a bad sneak preview, where women apparently found the heroine just a little too perfect to bear). Still, the actress went along. She knew it made the picture possible.
She also had begun to learn what made a relationship with Tracy possible. For all his on-screen stoicism, offscreen the actor demanded he be catered to, and for all her real-life feminism, Hepburn was willing to cater — at least to this one singular person.
That she was willing to accept second billing offscreen, too, is something many Hepburn admirers find hard to accept. But like any truly strong person, Hepburn liked strong people. (In her 70s, she admitted to a girlish crush on current co-star John Wayne). And there was something deep in Tracy — what Hepburn called his unadorned, "baked potato" honesty — that she found endlessly attractive.
When “Woman of the Year” was a hit, the studio pushed the two to re-team; because this was old Hollywood, the idea was not to simply churn out a sequel, but to find the team new sorts of projects.
So there was the political melodrama of “Keeper of the Flame,” with Tracy investigating a great man’s death; there was the Western “The Sea of Grass,” with Hepburn as a sophisticate replanted on the prairie. A comedy, “Without Love,” tried — too hard — to play off the same housing shortage that had inspired “The More the Merrier.”
Sparring partners
Better, though, were the movies that simply focused on the couple. In the comic “Adam’s Rib,” they spar in and out of court, with Hepburn defending a female client caught in a crime of passion; in the slightly more serious “State of the Union,” Tracy’s a dark horse sensation whose future depends on Hepburn keeping alive the fiction of their happy home.
For all their light entertainment, though, both films flicker with wounded feelings and painful jealousies. They’re movies about people who love each other, but sometimes have to work at remembering why.
The lightest of their pictures, “Pat and Mike” — made a decade after they met — shows them more at ease. Tracy, having a grand time, is Mike, a Runyonesque character speaking a “kind of left-handed English”; Hepburn, playing to her own natural grace, is Pat, a gifted athlete whom Mike is trying to turn pro.
Relaxed, playful, they bring a real intimacy to their scenes. (Watching Pat walk away, Mike appreciatively notes “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce.”) Even though there’s the obligatory scene of male embarrassment — when, sticking up for Tracy, Hepburn beats up Charles Bronson, of all people — it’s an ego-deflater, not a deal breaker. Mike may sound dumb, but he’s too smart to let this one get away.
Not Tracy, though. Shortly after “Pat and Mike,” the two actors went through a brief estrangement. Tracy apparently had an affair with Gene Tierney, his co-star in “Plymouth Adventure”; in self-pitying reaction, perhaps, Hepburn rushed a little too quickly into playing plucky spinsters. They didn’t work together for five years.
They reunited professionally for “Desk Set,” though, a pleasant workplace comedy helped immeasurably by crisp Technicolor (Hepburn’s red party dress is like an explosion) and nice wide-screen compositions. They’d rekindled their romance, too.
Yet while Tracy was still triumphing as an actor — “Bad Day at Black Rock,” “Inherit the Wind” — the body he’d always so cruelly mortified was beginning to rebel. In 1963, too ill to start “The Cincinnati Kid,” he basically retired. Loyally, Hepburn joined him, quietly turning down her own offers, sitting by his bed during his nightly bouts of insomnia.
“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get,” she said once. “Only with what you are expecting to give.”
In 1967, director Stanley Kramer coaxed them back for one more picture, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," about a professedly liberal couple confronting the real-life possibility of a black son-in-law. A quarter of a century after their first film together, they went back to work.
The movie was a little flat, a little preachy. Yet there was something wistful and bittersweet about it, especially with Hepburn’s niece, Katharine Houghton, playing their daughter. It looked like the life the couple could have — should have — had together. And sounded like it, as Tracy delivered his big third-act speech about love and mortality.
“Old, yes,” he admits shakily. “Burned out, certainly. But I tell you the memories are still there, clear, intact, indestructible. And they’ll be there if I live to be 110.”
As for the young couple’s proposed mixed marriage, he concludes, “It doesn’t matter a damn what I think. The only thing that matters is what they feel and how much they feel for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt, that’s everything.”
The camera then cuts to Hepburn, her eyes brimming with tears. It cuts back to Tracy — proud and at peace. Back to her, once more, barely holding it together. And that electric moment passing between them has nothing to do with who they were as actors, and everything to do with what they were to each other.
Seventeen days after they finished the film, Tracy got out of bed to get a glass of milk and dropped dead of a heart attack.
Hepburn did not go to the funeral, in mute acknowledgement of the back street role she’d always played. The public grief, the official eulogizing, the long black-veiled ride out to the cemetery — she had not been cast in that part, and she knew it.
What she and Tracy had — what they shared — was different, private, meant to stay unseen.
Except we still see it in their films — when he looks at her long legs in “Woman of the Year,” when she bristles at his casual chauvinism in “Adam’s Rib.” And what we feel is a quarter-of-a-century of respect and competition, insults and collaboration — and heartbreakingly simple, endlessly complicated, grown-up love.