TV REVIEW : Hepburn Recalls Tracy in ‘All About Me’

Only in recent years--since the death of Spencer Tracy’s widow--has Katharine Hepburn felt free to talk about her quarter-century relationship with Tracy. And she has never spoken about him to the camera more movingly than on “All About Me,” a 90-minute documentary co-produced and co-written (with Hepburn) by Joan Kramer and David Heeley and directed by Heeley. It airs for the first time at 9 tonight on the TNT cable channel.

Kramer and Heeley had worked with Hepburn before on a special they did about Tracy himself. For “All About Me,” Hepburn trotted out her scrapbooks, stills and home movies, including the only footage she shot of Tracy, made as they examined the countryside during a vacation in England.

Hepburn is the show’s host, addressing the camera in the same breezy and confident tone, at once self-astonished, analytical and amused, that marked her recent autobiography, “Me.” She quotes Dorothy Parker’s famous one-line dismissal of her work in a Broadway play, “Miss Hepburn ran the gamut of emotions from A to B,” and somehow implies that Our Miss Parker was not far wrong. She is candid about the lean Hollywood years when a trade paper article flatly declared she was box office poison. “No one seemed to like me.”

Kramer and Heeley, who have made eight award-winning show business documentaries previously, including one on the Group Theatre, have done a remarkable job of editing together Hepburn live with the mementos and precisely chosen clips from the films, from “A Bill of Divorcement” with John Barrymore to the extraordinary monologue by Tracy near the end of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” when it is evident he is addressing not simply the plot but Hepburn herself and what their love has meant to him. (He died 17 days after they finished shooting, and Hepburn says she has never been able to watch the whole film.)

There is rare footage of her rather stiff and mannered screen test at RKO. (She got the part anyway.) The home movies include glimpses of her doctor-father and mother, whose feisty independence of mind (he campaigned against venereal disease, she demonstrated for women’s suffrage) has been so clearly reflected in Hepburn herself.

But the heart and impact of the documentary are Hepburn now, remembering Tracy for the camera. She stands at the side entrance of the Thalberg Building, recalling her first off-screen view of Tracy, as he walked from the MGM commissary with Joseph Mankiewicz, who had just produced “The Philadelphia Story” and was about to produce “Woman of the Year,” the first of the nine Tracy-Hepburn films.

Hepburn, nervous and excited (“I stood there like a goof”), apologized for wearing high heels at the moment, adding to her 5-foot-7--Tracy was 5 feet 10 inches. Mankiewicz grinned and said, immortally, “Don’t worry, Kate. He’ll cut you down to his size.”

So began their sometimes stormy 27-year relationship, punctuated by Tracy’s heavy but intermittent drinking. “I never knew what bothered him,” Hepburn says. “I just tried to help. Living was very difficult for Spence; acting was easy.”

They never discussed marriage, and she explains that although Tracy’s own marriage was effectively over well before he met Hepburn, it was important for Louise Tracy to remain Mrs. Tracy, not least in her admirable work with deaf children.

The Tracy-Hepburn romance was conducted with such discretion and dignity (“I learned to be invisible in all the proper places”) that the columnists and other journalists left them alone, as Hepburn gratefully acknowledges.

Tracy died one morning, making a cup of tea in the kitchen of the small house they rented from George Cukor. Holding a small bust she sculpted of Tracy, Katharine Hepburn says, “When people write and ask about us, I think, ‘Well, I’ve been lucky, I’ve known a lot about love. Thank you, Spencer.’ ”

The moment is as moving as any film.