June 29 — Hepburn’s perverse sense of fun, it has been suggested, compelled her to wear high heels the day she first set eyes on the rumpled forehead of Spencer Tracy. Perhaps so. She and the co-star she had selected for “Woman of the Year” met in an MGM corridor, and the problem was readily apparent. “I’m afraid I’m a little tall for you, Mr. Tracy,” she remarked coolly.

The next line is usually credited to Tracy, but it was really their producer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who interceded with just the right retort: “Don’t worry, Kate. He’ll cut you down to size.”

In that brief, sparky encounter is the stuff of which myths — and at least nine movies — are made, for it capsulizes the kind of affectionate tug-of-war that Tracy and Hepburn were to wage for the next 25 years.

As screen teams went, there were none better.

Ring Lardner Jr. had brought to writer-director Garson Kanin the outline for a screenplay based on the rocky relationship of Lardner’s sportswriting father and Dorothy Parker. Kanin had a pressing engagement with Uncle Sam at the time — it was late 1941 — so he set up his younger brother, Michael, as Lardner’s collaborator; he also alerted Hepburn that this script might just be the strong follow-up to “The Philadelphia Story” that she needed to fortify her return to public favor. The two of them then went calling on MGM chief Louis B. Mayer.

Drove a hard bargain
Hepburn drove another of her hard bargains. For “only” $211,000 ($50,000 each for the unknown writers, $100,000 for herself, plus $11,000 commission and agents’ fees), she wangled herself an MGM contract that included director and co-star approval. The men she had in mind for this original screenplay were George Stevens (her “Alice Adams” director) and Tracy.

The subsequently Oscared “Woman of the Year” operated on the opposites-attract principle (“international commentator” Tess Harding vs. sports columnist Sam Craig), and it made some memorable merriment out of this clash of different worlds. But quite apart from its stylish comedy, the film boasted romantic scenes that seemed effortless. More than a winning formula had been struck.

Tracy was married (albeit, estranged from) Louise Treadwell, an actress from his early stock days. (A Catholic, he stayed married to her until his death.) Hepburn had been through a brief marriage (1928-1934) to Ludlow Ogden Smith, a rich Philadelphian socialite (she could not abide being known as “Mrs. Smith” and had him trim his name to Ludlow Ogden); also, there were romances with her agent, Leland Hayward, and that kindred eccentric-spirit, Howard Hughes. But once Tracy entered her life, Hepburn had met her match — and their affair quietly became one of Hollywood’s most open (and most unreported) secrets.

Betrayed by best seller
“My privacy is my own, and I am the one to decide when it shall be invaded,” she always contended. For this reason, she felt betrayed by the best-selling “Tracy and Hepburn” and stopped speaking to its author, Garson Kanin, who had instigated the teaming in the first place and who helped it flourish by scripting two of their subsequent hits, “Adam’s Rib” and “Pat and Mike.”

On the relationship Tracy and Hepburn shared on camera, she was quite vocal: “I think on film we came to represent the perfect American couple. Certainly, the ideal American man is Spencer; sports-loving, a man’s man. Strong-looking, a big sort of head, boar neck, a man. And I think I represent a woman. I needle him, I irritate him, I try to get around him, yet if he put a big paw out he could squash me. I think this is the sort of romantic, ideal picture of the male and female in the United States. I’m always skitting about, and he’s the big bear, and every once in a while he turns and growls and I tremble. And every once in a while he turns and says some terrible thing and everybody laughs at me and I get furious. It’s very male-female.”

The trick became how to keep the magic. “Keeper of the Flame,” a wartime effort, kept only the thought, and it was buried under a heap of melodrama in which Hepburn tried to conceal her late husband’s fascist past from reporter Tracy.

As a general rule for Tracy-Hepburn outings, the more sombre the circumstance, the less they had to show for their labors. Their most sombre teaming was their most unsuccessful: “The Sea of Grass,” a windy Western awash in suds. Elia Kazan, in his film-directing debut, was of no help to the stars who were saddled with a protracted unhappy marriage.

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“Without Love,” based on a medium-grade Philip Barry play which Hepburn did on Broadway, brightened on film with Tracy playing the scientist who attempts a platonic marriage with a Washington widow. Still, coming from Barry, it was yesterday’s champagne.

Director Harold S. Bucquet, who did the pouring, observed: “Directing Mr. Tracy amounts to telling him when you’re ready to start a scene. He hasn’t let me down yet, and when he does, perhaps we’ll get acquainted. Directing Miss Hepburn is an altogether different matter, for you have to tell her when to stop acting instead of when to start. She is much less economical than Mr. Tracy — but his style is now rubbing off on her.”

Whirl around Washington
Broadway also provided Tracy and Hepburn with another whirl around Washington, although this one came about by accident. Claudette Colbert was originally set to play Tracy’s estranged wife in the movie version of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s “State of the Union,” but when she and director Frank Capra had a falling-out days before shooting was to start, Tracy was quick to suggest Hepburn, who had been helping him with his role of a presidential contender anyway. And she was game enough to jump into a role Colbert was better suited for.

The last two Hepburn-Tracy outings at MGM benefited immensely from delightful, Oscar-nominated scripts by Garson Kanin and his actress-wife, Ruth Gordon. In “Adam’s Rib,” Tracy and Hepburn played married lawyers who meet on opposite sides of the courtroom in a husband-shooting case. “Pat and Mike” was designed to show off Hepburn’s athletic prowess, and Tracy was the gruff sports promoter who summed her up perfectly with “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce!”

In her other films at MGM (“Undercurrent,” “Dragon Seed,” “Song of Love”), Hepburn often sank without a trace. It wasn’t until her MGM contract expired that the Tracyless Hepburn really got interesting.

“The African Queen” provided her with her very best role since “The Philadelphia Story” — a prim spinster missionary who badgers a gin-swilling riverboat pilot (Humphrey Bogart, who won an Oscar for his performance) into chasing the World War I Germans out of the Congo. At the outset, she was playing her scenes with Bogart too democratically, threatening the film’s balance, but director John Huston brought her around with five magic words (the best direction Hepburn said she ever got): “Play her like Eleanor Roosevelt.”

There were more spinsters-transformed-by-love where that came from (the ravishingly romantic “Summertime” and “The Rainmaker”), and all three got her into the Oscar running — as did the twisted mother she played in Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly, Last Summer.”

In the mid-’50s, Tracy’s career at MGM came to a messy end, and he was unceremoniously canned from “Tribute to a Bad Man.” But Hepburn instantly secured him a co-starring role opposite her in “Desk Set” at 20th Century-Fox. (He plays the efficiency expert who challenges her library skills. The role was built up for him.)

She almost talked him into doing “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” with her in 1962, but he couldn’t see himself as a former matinée idol and passed. The role went to Ralph Richardson, but Hepburn stayed in the picture and won an Oscar nomination for her tragic, morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone.

Career on idle
The following summer, while picnicking with Hepburn, Tracy was stricken with a congested lung problem and had to be hospitalized. When he was well enough to work again, he couldn’t, because studios considered him “uninsurable” — a situation that kept him off the screen during the last five years of his life. Hepburn, as well. She left her career on idle to take care of him.

It wasn’t until she and producer-director Stanley Kramer promised Columbia Pictures to forfeit their salaries if Tracy didn’t survive the filming of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” that he was granted his last hurrah.

They won the bet, but just barely: Ten days after completing the picture, Tracy’s heart gave out. The film, a dated but diverting “social comedy” in which they were faced with the prospect of Sidney Poitier as a son-in-law, went on to become very popular. And, for their last team effort, both Tracy and Hepburn’s performances were nominated for Oscars.

She was on location in Nice, filming “The Madwoman of Chaillot,” when her housekeeper phoned to inform her that she had won her second Academy Award.

“Did Mr. Tracy win it, too?” Hepburn asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, that’s OK,” she responded, “I’m sure mine is for the two of us.”

Continue to Part 3

Harry Haun is author of “The Cinematic Century: An Intimate Diary of America’s Affair with the Movies.”