Here’s Why The Formidable Katharine Hepburn Hid Her 26-Year Romance With Spencer Tracy

Altogether, Tracy and Hepburn starred in nine films together. And although they kept it quiet, the two did have a loving relationship. Not that it was much of a secret! Everyone knew that they were a couple. The pair just didn’t acknowledge their love in public despite it being so widely understood.

You might have thought that the studios would fuel the rumors of Hepburn and Tracy’s love affair. But instead, they actually helped keep it quiet. Perhaps this was done because they felt that the movie audience of the day wouldn’t approve. In any case, the two weren’t a public couple at all.

Wisconsin native Tracy came from humble origins – the son of a man who sold trucks. Staunchly Catholic, he went to a Jesuit school before a stint in the Navy. It didn’t last long, and soon the star had graduated from theater to the big screen, where he featured in largely forgettable films for Fox.

There, Tracy developed his understated acting style. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Hollywood legend and friend Humphrey Bogart said of Tracy, “[You] don’t see the mechanism working – the wheels turning. He covers up. He never overacts or is hammy. He makes you believe what he is playing.” Yet Tracy claimed to be doing nothing special.

After Fox, Tracy signed up with Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. And by the late 1930s he was a bona fide superstar with the studio – gaining two Oscars. They came in 1937’s Captains Courageous and Boys Town a year later. As Tracy played a fisherman and a priest, these two movies showcased his versatility and range.

In fact, Tracy’s quiet effectiveness allowed him to play all sorts of roles. His star didn’t wane across a rich career that continued after WWII right into the 1960s. Even when the actor struggled with his health – damaged by alcoholism and respiratory complaints – he turned in brilliant performances that kept him at the top of the Hollywood tree.

Throughout Tracy’s career, the star remained married to an actress that he’d met in the early 1920s. She was Louise Treadwell, who would become the mother of his son John in 1924 – the year after they married. Soon after the boy turned one, though, his parents found out that he was deaf. Tracy, for his part, took this to be a sign of divine disapproval of his adultery, according to The Rake website.

Meanwhile, Hepburn entered a more affluent and less conventional family in Hartford, Connecticut. The New York Times notes that she inherited some fierce feminist views from mom Katharine, who had been a suffragist. Despite her public image as a spinster, Hepburn was divorced when she met Tracy – having married Ludlow Ogden Smith in 1928.

Hepburn caught the eye of director George Cukor when she was trying out for a film in the early 1930s. Although the talent didn’t think much of her performance, he did think she had a certain something. The actress put that on show in his film A Bill of Divorcement – her first movie role. Cukor later became a firm friend and worked with Hepburn many times.

Cukor wasn’t wrong about Hepburn, either. In 1933 the actress scored an Oscar for her part in Morning Glory. She’d go on to win three further Oscars – one of them opposite Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? In typically spiky Hepburn fashion, she didn’t bother turning up at the awards ceremony for any of her wins!

Even though Hepburn would become feted, she wasn’t always the most popular – particularly with the critics. After a great start, the star’s career stalled. According to The New York Times, she said, “I strike people as peculiar in some way, although I don’t quite understand why. Of course, I have an angular face, an angular body and, I suppose, an angular personality, which jabs into people.”

But people did grow fonder of Hepburn – especially as the times changed – and her ways became more acceptable. Even her wearing of pants stopped being quite so objectionable! And with the benefit of hindsight, a lot of her work in the 1930s is now viewed favorably. This wasn’t really the case at the time, though.

Bringing Up Baby – the 1938 screwball comedy that Hepburn led along with Cary Grant – is now much loved. Though it was snubbed by audiences at the time. And the former had gained the reputation of being “box office poison.” Faced with a movie that the star didn’t want to do, she paid her way out of the contract with her studio: RKO.

Yet things changed with The Philadelphia Story. Hepburn happened to own the rights to the play thanks to then-boyfriend Howard Hughes. As per The New York Times, she took them to MGM’s head Louis Mayer and told him she’d let him have the rights if he chose her as the lead. She asked for Tracy as her co-star, but the studio didn’t get him. Regardless, though, the film was a smash.

Riding on the back of that success, Hepburn offered Mayer another property: Woman of the Year. Again, she urged him to hire Tracy to play her co-star in the romcom. And this time, he was given the part. The two of them had never met before, but once they did, the sparks flew. Well, kind of.

A few years older than Hepburn and with something of a reputation as a philanderer, Tracy didn’t immediately impress her. As per The Rake, the actress put it to him, “Mr. Tracy, you’re a little short for me.” He wasn’t abashed by this, though, replying, “Don’t worry. I’ll cut you down to size.” Hepburn later said that she “knew right away that I found him irresistible.”

The liberal divorcee Hepburn did not impress Tracy much, though. So, it took a while for their relationship to warm up. But things did move on from the very formal start where they described each other as “Mr. Tracy” and “Miss Hepburn.” Soon, they were demonstrating the elusive magic of “chemistry.”

And moviegoers simply adored them together. Tracy and Hepburn sparked off each other – whether engaging in the back-and-forth of quickfire chat or the smoldering glances that blazed through their nine films together. Seeing two people who worked so well as a pair left viewers with the notion that they weren’t even acting!

The two actually rehearsed a familiar pattern in several films. Tracy plays a man full of common sense and decency, with both feet firmly on the ground. Hepburn, conversely, is a little flighty – hugely intelligent but with emotions that betray her. Tracy does indeed cut the actress down to size, and she’s okay with it.

When The New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby described the stellar couple, he said that they “so beautifully complemented each other” that their friendship never appeared to involve Hepburn just giving in to Tracy. Instead, he said, it came down to “a matter of understanding and acknowledging each other’s boundaries.”

Certainly, the fans could not get enough of what the pair had to offer. And Hepburn at least was aware that the magic had universal appeal. As per the website 9Honey, she said, “On screen, [Tracy] and I are the perfect American couple.” But that was only when they were together in films. In public, they weren’t any such thing.

In private, though, it was a different story. Dancing superstar Gene Kelly reminisced on one occasion about Tracy and Hepburn meeting in breaks. According to Biography.com, he said, “They’d just meet and sit on a bench on the lot. They’d hold hands and talk – and everybody left them alone in their little private world.”

Hepburn left no doubt when she penned her autobiography later in life and after Tracy had died. She wrote in Me: Stories of My Life, “It was a unique feeling I had for [Tracy]. I loved [him]… I would have done anything for him.” And other actors could see that this was true, as fellow star Lauren Bacall confirmed.

Despite the strength of their emotion, though, the couple kept it away from the public. They did reportedly have a home together, but it was nestled on Cukor’s estate, where he maintained a guesthouse. On paper, the couple retained their own addresses so that it wouldn’t become public knowledge that they were together.

At one point, Hepburn’s biographer A. Scott Berg asked her whether she’d thought of quitting the relationship, and she flatly said that wasn’t an option. The actress responded, “What would be the point? I mean, I loved him. And I wanted to be with him. If I had left, we would both have been miserable.”

Even Tracy’s poor health – which worsened in the 1960s – couldn’t keep Hepburn from his side. Talking of that decade, she said, “I virtually quit work just to be there so that he wouldn’t worry or be lonely.” And it was all about Tracy for her. The actress continued, “I wanted him to be happy, safe, comfortable. I liked to wait on him, listen to him, feed him, work for him. I tried not to disturb him… I was happy to do this.”

For the last two years of Tracy’s life, the pair lived in cozy domesticity. He’d had a brush with death in 1965 that left him poorly. On a morning in June 1967, the actor woke with a desire for a cup of tea and went to make one, according to Charlotte Chander’s book I Know Where I’m Going: Katharine Hepburn, A Personal Biography. The latter apparently heard a crash from the kitchen and found a broken cup next to Tracy, who had suffered a fatal heart attack.

But if Tracy and Hepburn were such a devoted couple, how come they didn’t just out themselves and maybe even get married? The answer is simple: the former was a staunch Catholic. He chose to stay married to his wife Louise Treadwell and wouldn’t contemplate divorce. They separated, but although Tracy told friend Joan Fontaine that his wife wouldn’t stand in the way of divorce, he didn’t seek one.

So, Hepburn was left with the task of being the “other woman” who had to inform the wife of her husband’s passing. As per biographer A. Scott Berg, she said to Treadwell, “You know... You and I can be friends. You knew [Tracy] at the beginning, I knew him at the end. Or, we can just go on pretending.”

The answer was quite stunning and very likely not what Hepburn had been expecting. Treadwell apparently replied, “Oh yes. But you see, I thought you were only a rumor.” The couple had been so successful at hiding their romance from others that even Tracy’s wife knew nothing at all about it.

Hepburn was apparently the least upset to hear it. She told Berg, “A rumor! Can you imagine? Thirty years her husband isn’t there, and she thinks I’m a rumor.” Even then, she had to stage the scene so that the public wouldn’t know anything. It was Treadwell who was present for the coroner, and Hepburn disappeared – allowing the public to think that she had only turned up hours afterwards.

In fact, Hepburn didn’t even attend Tracy’s funeral. The star had been to the morgue to pay her respects to him, but that was it. She drove along after the cortege, but as the church came into view, Hepburn turned back. Wanting to avoid public scrutiny, the actress allowed the solemn event to happen without her presence.

Some time afterwards, Barbara Walters had a conversation with Hepburn, which she noted in her memoir. The chat queen said that the actress had told her she hadn’t felt it was right to go to the funeral. Apparently, that was because Hepburn had not been married to the man.

Hepburn had more to share with Walters. The actress told her that she’d never viewed the film that they finished shortly before he passed: Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. The star explained to Walters, “The memories were too painful.” And she retained the cup that Tracy had been holding when struck down.

Not everyone buys the story of the starry romance, though. In 2018 Scotty Bowers – a man who had been around in the golden age of Hollywood – came forward with a very different tale. He claimed in a documentary released that year that the affair had never been real at all.

Bowers said that Hepburn had been a lesbian and had used Tracy to cover that up. Meanwhile, he claimed in his book Full Service, “The great Spencer Tracy was another bisexual man – a fact totally concealed by the studio publicity department.” Although Bowers did accept that they were friends, he insisted in the documentary, “They were not in the bed department together at all.”

The documentary’s director Matt Tyrnauer said, “It’s very interesting to me – if not a bit alarming – that people want to cling to a sort of straight-washed history as it pertains to the reputations of movie stars such as Hepburn and Tracy.” He also suggested that the criticism his film was receiving was “a form of homophobia.”

Well, anything’s possible, but the couple had a secret romance, and you might imagine if the relationship was a cover-up, it would have been very public. And Hepburn still kept quiet about it until 1983, when Louise Treadwell passed. Then, according to The Rake, she said, “[We] just passed 27 years together in what was to me absolute bliss.”

Hepburn never wavered in her feelings for Tracy – maintaining that he’d been the love of her life right up to the end. Just before she passed in 2003, she shared with Berg her last word about it, saying, “We just loved each other. [There is] nothing more to say.”