Katharine Hepburn’s Heartbreaking Letter to Spencer Tracy Still Moves Fans Decades Later

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The love affair between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy was passionate, torrid and tragic. For decades, their romance was an open secret in Hollywood, but only hinted at in public to protect Tracy’s career as he was a married man.

Some believe he refused to divorce his wife, Louise, because he was a strict Catholic, while others think there was no divorce for the sake of their two children, including son John, who was born hearing impaired.

“He felt that Louise was like a saint,” says Christopher Andersen, author of “An Affair to Remember: The Remarkable Love Story of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.”

“He didn’t want to put her through any unnecessary scandal or pain.”

Although they were madly in love, Hepburn agreed with Tracy they could live together but keep separate homes for appearances’ sake. Only after Louise’s 1983 death did Hepburn write in her autobiography, “I loved [him]. I would have done anything for him.”

Hepburn, too, had to put up with Tracy’s 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.”

Meanwhile, Tracy hit the bottle hard and popped pills to help him sleep. By the time he and Hepburn filmed “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” in 1967, he could only work a few short hours a day. He died weeks later at age 67.

Years after Tracy died, Hepburn wrote him a touching love letter. In it, she recalls that one night a few days before he passed, “I lay there watching you and stroking Old Dog. 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.”

In the letter that she read for the 1986 documentary “The Spencer Tracy Legacy,” Hepburn noted his tortured soul and his acting greatness, “You couldn’t enter your own life, but you could become someone else. You were a killer, a priest, a fisherman, a sportswriter, a judge, a newspaper man. You were it in an instant.”

She also recalled worrying about his inability to find peace in his life. “No comfort, no comfort,” wrote Hepburn. “I remember Father Ciklic telling you that you concentrated on all the bad and none of the good which your religion offered.”

Finally, Hepburn wrote that she couldn’t understand Spencer’s destructive streak: “Why the escape hatch? Why was it always opened — to get away from the remarkable you?”