Why Spencer Tracy Didn’t Leave His Wife for Katharine Hepburn: ‘He Didn’t Want to Put Her Through Any Pain’

One night, just days before Spencer Tracy’s passing, Katharine Hepburn tried to lull him to sleep by talking.

“I lay there watching you and stroking Old Dog,” she recalled in a letter she wrote to her costar and lover years after his death. “I was talking about you and the movie we’d just finished — Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner — and my studio and your new tweed coat and the garden and all the nice sleep-making topics … but you never stopped tossing.”

A gifted actor but a tortured soul, the two-time Oscar winner appeared in some 75 films.

“You couldn’t enter your own life, but you could become someone else,” wrote Katharine, who praised Spencer’s naturalistic acting style, calling him one of the greats. “You were a killer, a priest, a fisherman, a sportswriter, a judge, a newspaperman. You were it in an instant.”

For decades, the real-life romance between “Spence” and “Kate” was an open secret in Hollywood circles but only hinted at in public. It’s been said that Spencer refused to divorce his wife, Louise, for Katharine because he was a strict Catholic. Others thought that he stayed married for the sake of his two children and out of the guilt he felt for his son John being born hearing impaired.

“He felt that Louise was like a saint,” Christopher Andersen, author of An Affair to Remember: The Remarkable Love Story of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, exclusively tells Closer. “He didn’t want to put her through any unnecessary scandal or pain.”

Katharine and Spencer lived together but kept separate homes for appearance’s sake. The actress never acknowledged the relationship as more than a friendship until after Louise’s 1983 death.

“It was a unique feeling I had for [Spencer],” Katharine wrote in her autobiography Me: Stories of My Life. “I loved [him]. … I would have done anything for him.”

And she did. Katharine not only nurtured and protected her lover, she also put up with his wandering eye.

“He had a big affair with Ingrid Bergman, and [Katharine] told me she wasn’t fond of Bergman at all,” Christopher says. “She held that grudge forever.”

Katharine Hepburn Was the Keeper of Spencer Tracy’s Flame

In her last love letter to him, which she read for the 1986 documentary The Spencer Tracy Legacy, Katharine recalls fretting over his inability to feel peace in his life.

“No comfort, no comfort,” she said. “I remember Father Ciklic telling you that you concentrated on all the bad and none of the good which your religion offered.”

Spencer self-medicated with alcohol and took pills to help him sleep. By the time that they filmed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, he could only work for a few short hours each day due to poor health. He told visiting journalists that he expected to retire from filmmaking after the movie wrapped.

As much as she loved and respected him, Katharine could never understand Spencer’s self-destructive streak.

“Why the escape hatch?” she wondered. “Why was it always opened — to get away from the remarkable you?”