AMADOR, Victoria

The Romantic Myth of Kate and Spence

One of the enduring romantic myths of Hollywood is the on-and-off-screen partnership of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.  They starred in nine films together, from 1942’s Woman of the Year to 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a collaboration which poignantly ended with Tracy’s death shortly after filming ended.  Stories of their star-crossed relationship were part of the Hollywood celebrity couple’s legacy up until Hepburn’s death in 2003.

Their tale was well-known. They couldn’t marry because he was a Catholic with two children and didn’t believe in divorce.  She was a fierce feminist, divorced once and not anxious to remarry, so the situation suited them both.  The press protected them and avoided discussion of their illicit affair because they were so respected.  Hepburn interrupted her career to take care of Tracy during his numerous bouts of ill health and alcoholism.  Their mutual friend Garson Kanin, co-author with his wife Ruth Gordon of two of their best films, Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, fuelled the fable with his 1971 book, Tracy and Hepburn. Martin Scorsese’s biopic about rumoured Hepburn lover Howard Hughes, The Aviator, showed their romance ending after Hepburn fell for Tracy.  Hepburn spoke in detail about Tracy in her autobiography Me, and in the 1993 documentary, All About Me, she was filmed reminiscing with Tracy’s daughter.

But after Hepburn’s death, several biographies about both actors have asserted her lesbianism as well as her difficult connection to Tracy.  The enduring love affair was instead an off-on friendship which served both of them well, despite Tracy’s alcoholism and affairs with other women, fuelled by Hepburn’s loyalty to men, including director John Ford, whose personal demons mirrored her dominating father’s personality. Most recently, a salacious memoir by Scotty Bowers, Full Service, a famous sexual concierge mentioned in various Hollywood biographies (including Kenneth Anger’s notorious Hollywood Babylon), claims that Bowers found same-sex lovers for both Tracy and Hepburn.

Their fractured fairy tale mirrors many elements of celebrity couple mythmaking: their enduring devotion; their adultery (largely undocumented), forgiven because they were such beloved actors; their off-screen, all-American identities reflecting the way their studio, MGM, presented them on screen; the playful gender constructs and challenges within their films; and their willingness to fuel the myth through their film choices and Hepburn’s later “confessions.”  Yet why would these multi-Oscar winners, their friends and the Hollywood system, endorse the charade for so long? This paper will address the need Tracy and Hepburn, the press, the studios, and their public had for this romantic, ironic legend.