The Full Biography
Spencer Tracy. Actor. Milwaukee. The man who made honesty look like a lack of technique, and technique look like a man talking.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a squared face, a voice that did not decorate a sentence, a priest or a fisherman or a father who has already decided what he thinks. Sometimes the still is Father Flanagan of Boys Town. Sometimes it is the last close-up in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a sick man talking about love to Katharine Hepburn while the camera, and the country, understood that the talk was also a farewell. What the still cannot show is Spencer Bonaventure Tracy of Milwaukee, a Catholic boy who found the stage after the Navy, a husband who remained a husband, and a partner who spent a quarter century with Hepburn without ever giving Louise Tracy’s place away.
He was born on April 5, 1900, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father, John Edward Tracy, sold trucks. His mother, Caroline Brown, kept the house. There was an older brother, Carroll. The family was Irish and Catholic and Midwestern in the way that does not advertise itself. He was not a natural scholar. He was a boy who could fight and a boy who could listen. In 1918 he enlisted in the Navy as the war was ending and sat out the fighting at the Naval Training Station in North Chicago. The war did not make him. It delayed him.
Ripon College, in Wisconsin, is the door most people skip. He went there after the Navy, found the campus dramatic society, and discovered that a stage would take the restlessness the classroom would not. He left for New York and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. The 1920s were stock companies, road work, Broadway when it came: a decade of learning how little a voice needs to do if the thought is finished. In 1923 he married Louise Treadwell, an actress he had met in a stock company. Their son, John, was born deaf in 1924. The fact organized the marriage. Louise learned, taught, and built what became the John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles, a place for the parents of deaf children. A daughter, Louise “Susie,” arrived in 1932. Tracy was a father who loved his children and a man who could not always stay in the room. Alcohol was already the other companion.
The film door was Fox, and a picture called Up the River (1930), a prison comedy directed by John Ford that also introduced Humphrey Bogart to the screen. Tracy had a Broadway hit in The Last Mile as a man on death row; Hollywood wanted the heat. The early Fox years are the apprenticeship the public forgets: programmers, tough guys, a face the camera already trusted. He was not pretty in the Valentino sense. He was specific. In 1935 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed him. Louis B. Mayer’s studio was in the business of monuments. Tracy became one without looking like a monument.
Fury (1936), for Fritz Lang, put him in the hands of a lynch mob — a man the town tries to burn, a picture about American violence that did not flinch. San Francisco (1936), opposite Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald, made him a priest in a disaster picture that still works as a disaster picture. Then the two statues in a row, a feat no actor had managed. Captains Courageous (1937), from Kipling, asked him to play Manuel, a Portuguese fisherman, a role that could have been an accent and a wig. He made it a man. The Academy Award for Best Actor followed. The next year, Boys Town (1938) asked him to play Father Edward J. Flanagan, who built a home for boys nobody else wanted. He won again. Back-to-back Best Actor Oscars. The first time. The industry, which likes a coronation, coronated him. He did not make a speech of it. He went back to the lot.
MGM used him as the studio’s idea of American decency: Stanley and Livingstone (1939), Northwest Passage (1940), Edison, the Man (1940), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941). Before that, and beside it, there were the Gable pictures — Test Pilot (1938), Boom Town (1940) — two men the studio could put in a frame and trust the public to buy the argument. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) made him Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, a wartime biopic that asked for the plain speech he already owned. A Guy Named Joe (1943) put him in a dead pilot’s ghost, a fantasy the war needed. The decency was not a costume. The drinking was not a rumor. The two facts sat in the same body. Colleagues described a man who arrived ready, who hated fuss, who could hold a close-up as if the camera were a person he did not need to impress. Young actors studied him the way carpenters study a joint that does not show. Laurence Olivier, who did not hand out compliments as souvenirs, named Tracy when the subject was who was best on film. The praise embarrassed him. He went back to the mark.
Katharine Hepburn arrived in 1942, on George Stevens’s Woman of the Year. She was the political columnist. He was the sportswriter. The picture invented a marriage of equals who could argue without losing the room. Eight more pictures followed: Keeper of the Flame, Without Love, The Sea of Grass, State of the Union, Adam’s Rib, Pat and Mike, Desk Set, and, last, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. On screen they were a civic couple. Off screen they were a private fact the columns whispered and the town protected. He remained married to Louise. Hepburn organized her life around his work, his health, and the fact that Louise was his wife. Twenty-five years. Nine pictures. No wedding. The arrangement is not a romance novel. It is a man who would not undo a first vow, a woman who would not steal another woman’s public claim, and a Catholic conscience that did not dissolve because the heart had moved. The Hepburn years did not alter the license.
Between the Hepburn pictures he made other monuments. Father of the Bride (1950) and Father’s Little Dividend (1951), with Elizabeth Taylor as the daughter, are domestic comedies that still teach a father how to lose a room and keep a heart. Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), one-armed and on a train into a town that has already committed a crime, is a western in modern clothes and one of his hardest pieces of work. The Old Man and the Sea (1958) put Hemingway’s fisherman on his back. Inherit the Wind (1960), as Henry Drummond, a stand-in for Clarence Darrow, and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), as the American judge who must decide what a country owes its crimes, are the civic sermons. He did not orate them. He thought them, out loud, at a pace the audience could follow.
Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.Spencer Tracy
The turn is not the second Oscar. The turn is the decision, already visible by the 1940s, that the work would be a kind of plain speech — no flourish, no actorly weather — even as the life off camera was not plain at all. He hid the drinking when he could. He did not hide the craft. Peers who were more decorated in public still named him when they were asked who was best.
Six things most people never knew
- The Navy year was training, not a battlefield. 1918. North Chicago. The war ended before the boy from Milwaukee was shipped.
- John Tracy was born deaf. 1924. Louise built a clinic out of the fact. The father’s fame paid bills. The mother’s labor built the institution.
- Back-to-back Best Actor Oscars were a first. Captains Courageous, then Boys Town. 1937 and 1938. The record still sits in the book.
- He stayed married to Louise. From 1923 until his death. The Hepburn years did not alter the license.
- Hepburn did not attend the funeral. She stayed away out of respect for Louise. Say that cleanly. It is the key to the arrangement.
- Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was the last work. He finished it seventeen days before he died. The last speech is a man using the last strength he had.
By the mid-1960s the body was arguing. Lungs, heart, the decades of alcohol. Stanley Kramer wanted him for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a picture about a white San Francisco couple whose daughter brings home a Black fiancé — Sidney Poitier — in 1967. Insurance companies did not want Tracy. Kramer and Hepburn put their salaries in escrow so the picture could be made. He worked short days. He sat when he could. The last monologue, about love, delivered toward Hepburn, is the scene the country kept. He knew what he was doing. So did she.
The later years
The last decade was not a fade. It was a tightening. After Bad Day at Black Rock he chose pictures that could use a man who no longer needed to prove he was a star. The Last Hurrah (1958), for John Ford, put him in a Boston mayor’s race, a political animal who understands that the city is a set of rooms. Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg asked him to be the American conscience without the halo Boys Town had rented. He could still do comedy: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) put him in a police captain’s chair while the rest of the picture ran around him. He did not have to chase the frame. The frame came to him.
Home, in those years, was a small house on a studio lot’s weather and, more honestly, the rooms Hepburn kept ready so he could work and rest without a crowd. Louise remained his wife. John and Susie remained his children. The John Tracy Clinic remained Louise’s monument, funded in part by the famous name and run as a school, not a shrine. He saw the children. He did not give the columns a reconciled family portrait. He gave them pictures.
Between Nuremberg and the last dinner-table speech there was still How the West Was Won (1962), a narrator’s job, and the Kramer courtroom pictures that had already made him the studio’s idea of a judge. He took the work he could finish. He declined the work that would have required a younger man’s lungs. Friends from the lot describe a man who still knew every line on Monday and could not promise Friday. Hepburn ran the logistics the way a producer runs a budget: visitors, rest, the next call time. Louise remained the wife on the official card. The children remained the children. The clinic remained the family’s other studio.
Kramer’s set in 1967 is the last workplace. Short hours. A man who could not climb a stair without planning it. Hepburn watching the clock and the color in his face. Poitier, who understood what the picture was asking of everyone, matching the older man’s pace. When they finished, Tracy went home. He died on June 10, 1967, in Beverly Hills, of a heart attack. He was sixty-seven. Seventeen days after the last shot. The funeral was for Louise and the children and the Church. Katharine Hepburn did not attend. She stayed away out of respect for Louise. Friends who wanted a scene did not get one. The absence was the last courtesy of a twenty-five-year partnership that had never stolen a wife’s pew.
The picture opened in December. The country watched a dead man argue for a living future and did not know, unless they read the papers, how little time he had left when he said the words. The Academy nominated him again. The statue, this time, stayed in the future. He had already won the two that matter in the book, and the nine pictures with Hepburn that matter in the memory.
After he was gone
Louise outlived him. The clinic kept her name for the work, not for the marriage’s private weather. Hepburn did not write the romance in public until she was old; even then she protected Louise’s claim. The nine pictures still play as a seminar in how two people can share a frame without one of them shrinking. Boys Town still plays as a civic myth. Bad Day at Black Rock still plays as a warning. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner still plays as a last speech.
He came out of Milwaukee, found a stage at Ripon, married Louise, learned he had a deaf son, won two Oscars in two years, loved Katharine Hepburn without unmaking his marriage, and died seventeen days after finishing a picture about whether love is allowed in a dining room. If you only remember the priest, you have the still. If you remember Manuel, the one-armed stranger, the last monologue, and the funeral Hepburn refused to disturb, you have him.
Portrait: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (publicity) · Public domain (PD-US-not renewed) · via Wikimedia Commons