Author Archives: Stan Deaton

Summer Reading

The Light Shines in the Darkness

Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
W.H. Auden, “At Last the Secret is Out”

On a grey Friday, the seventh day of December, 1984, one of my best friends from high school, Chuck Fuller, ended his own life at age 20. Chuck suffered from depression, but none of us knew it. No one saw it coming—not his parents, not his closest friends. All who knew and loved Chuck experienced the gamut of emotions that one feels at the news of suicide: grief, devastation, anger, guilt. If only we’d done this or that, maybe, just maybe, we could have made a difference. We always think that. It shook all of us to the core, and we carry it with us still.

Twenty-five years after Chuck’s death, I wrote his parents a letter to tell them both how much their son meant to me and how his life had touched mine and so many other lives. Chuck’s father told me of the pain of losing his only child, and said this about Chuck’s death and depression: “This life is filled with mysteries and it is not meant for us to understand everything. We would be as wise as God if we did. From time to time each of us has a terrible burden to bear. Burdens of the mind are surely the heaviest. I learned from Chuck’s death that mental anguish is virtually invisible and no matter how deeply we might love and care for someone we often have no idea the burden exists.” The darkness behind the light.

Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.
Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”

I first met Will Brown at the Memorial Hospital gym. Will was a radiologist resident at Memorial and a gym rat like me. The Memorial gym, on the third floor of the Health Institute, has been my home away from home for nearly 13 years, and I’m there a lot. But no matter how much I went, it seemed that Will was there even more. No matter what time of the day or night I went, he was already there. Will riding a stationary bike, reading his Ipad. Will with his retro headphones on, bench pressing nearly 300 pounds. Will doing pull ups with a weighted vest. Will doing sit ups with a 45-pound plate on his chest. Will laughing. Will smiling. Will in the zone. Will being Will.

Like everyone else, I was naturally drawn to him, and we connected instantly. Our conversation and friendship was natural and easy. I learned so many new things to do in the gym just from watching him, but of course we talked a lot too. No matter what he was doing, it was something to see, and I was in awe of him. Will being Will, he’d have none of it. He would invariably say, “If I can do it, you can do it.” I’ve never known anybody who wore all of his accomplishments and talents so lightly, and they were many—champion athlete, musician, physician. And he was right, at least to a point: I tried all sorts of things I hadn’t done before in the gym, and learned that I could do them. And Will being Will, he always acted as if he was in awe of me. He always encouraged me, acted as if he wished he could look like me, and always complimented me. We would see each other across the parking lot, and he’d yell, “Here comes the gun show!” “Stan,” he’d say, “please cover up those arms, you’re putting all of us to shame!” Never mind that he was twice as big as me; that was his way, Will being Will, as I learned very quickly watching him interact with other people.

When he found out that I was 15 years older than he, it just ratcheted everything up a notch. He seemed incredulous. He didn’t just say “I hope I look that good when I’m almost 50,” he would say, “I wish I looked like you right now!” As if he didn’t. With a smile and a body that could conquer cities, he somehow found a way to make you feel like the special one. Will being Will.

One day you’ll look to see I’ve gone
For tomorrow may rain, so I’ll follow the sun
The Beatles, “I’ll Follow the Sun”

Last fall I decided rather late in the game to run the Rock & Roll Half Marathon but didn’t have anyone to run with. Most people who had run it before that I knew would have nothing to do with it again. They had better sense, which is why I of course approached Will one night in the gym and asked him if he’d run it with me. He said, “I haven’t run at all since I ran the Half last year.” I waited. He grinned. “I’d love to run it with you.” That’s the kind of person he was. As far as I could tell, he didn’t train much at all, if any. He even bought a new pair of running shoes the week before the race and planned to wear them, another no-no. The day before the race I drove over to the Savannah Convention Center to pick up my race packet, and as I was walking in, Will was walking out. He was in scrubs, I was in a suit. I realized later that it was the only time I’d ever seen Will when he wasn’t sweating. Will being Will, he gave me a big hug and wouldn’t stop talking about how sharp I looked in the suit. We finalized our plans for the next morning. I would drive to his house at 5 a.m. His friend and fellow doctor, Lee, would meet us there and we’d drive downtown together.

I got up at 4, anxious to get the day started, and left the house at 5. Will lived just minutes away, and I called him to tell him I was on my way. No answer. I got to his street, unsure exactly which was his house but figured it would be the only one with lights on. They were all pitch dark. I called Will again. And again. And again. And again. No answer. Crap, they’ve left without me, and I was only a few minutes late. I’ll never find them downtown and I’ll have to run by myself after all. I was getting a little panicky, driving up and down the street, the minutes ticking by, when I noticed a car sitting in a driveway with someone in it. Taking a chance, I parked and walked up and knocked on the window. “Are you looking for Will?” He was. It was Lee, whom I’d never met. His calls had gone unanswered too. He tried again. This time Will answered. He had not only slept through at least 10 phone calls but through 8 different alarms, having worked late the night before. Nevertheless, Will being Will, he was out in less than 5 minutes, smiling, looking fresh as ever. Off we went.

Lee was a lot faster than both of us, and he was in a different corral. Will being Will, he pumped both of us up as we shivered in the pre-dawn cold, fist-pumping, hugging, high-fiving, “We’re gonna do this!” At the gun, we took off together and stayed together. He kept our time on his watch, and I pestered him throughout: How we doin? How’s our time? After every mile, he’d fist bump, high five, and never stopped encouraging us both: “We’re doing great! You’re awesome Stan! I’m having a hard time keeping up with you!” I’d tell him, “You gotta keep up with the old man!” And he’d just laugh and smile that smile. Will being Will.

At mile 8 the blisters came and I wasn’t sure I could run 5 more miles. Will never stopped encouraging and pushing us. He was in new shoes, for cryin’ out loud. He even took phone calls. Our pace would slacken and then increase. Finally, at Mile 13, Will slowed down. I could sense the finish line was near and wanted to turn it up, but I didn’t want to leave him behind. Will being Will, he could sense that too. “Go on Stan, get your best time! Go!” “No way man, we’ve been together for 13 miles, I’m not leaving you now!” “Stan, go on! Get your best time brother! I’ll meet you at the finish line!” I’ll never forget those words. With a thumbs up, I took off and left him behind. He finished right behind me, just five seconds off my pace, but I felt terrible when it was over. Will being Will, he’d have none of that either. He gave me a big Will hug and told me how proud he was of me. He told me he’d have never been able to finish but for pushing him and keeping him going. We posed together, had our pictures taken together, basked in our collective glory.

I learned so much a bout Will that day, about true friendship. I learned about his loyalty, that he would get up at 5 in the morning—or at least try to—to run with and encourage a friend in a race he’d already run before, a milestone he’d already accomplished; about the sheer physical and athletic skills he possessed that allowed him to do something so grueling without training or preparing, on little sleep, and in new shoes; about his selflessness in encouraging me to go on without him at the very end to achieve a personal milestone. He made me feel that he could have never run and finished the race without my encouragement, when actually the opposite was true. I learned that day about the character of Will Brown. I had always had a sense that he was something special. That day confirmed it. Looking back, every encounter I ever had with him confirmed it. Will being Will. The memory of that November day, of my strong and gallant friend with the heart of a lion, will remain with me when many autumns have become distant, vanished memories.

They say that all good things must end someday
Autumn leaves must fall
But don’t you know that it hurts me so
To say goodbye to you
Wish you didn’t have to go
Chad & Jeremy, “A Summer Song”

It was only fitting that the last time I ever saw Will was in the gym, sweaty as always. He was in great emotional pain following a personal setback the day before, and I sat with him and told him that I was his friend and that I was there if he needed me, and even if he didn’t. He was devastated, shattered. I had never seen him like that. I told him that I would check on him in the days to come to see how he was doing. Will being Will, he thanked me that day and managed to smile, and we said goodbye.

Forever and forever farewell, Cassius;
if we do meet again, why we shall smile;
if not, why then, this parting was well made.
William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar”

The next week, I sent him a text to check on his emotional state: Hey buddy, how you doing? He responded immediately: “Hey Stan! I’d be lying if I said I was doing well. Been praying a lot.” I told him that I was free on Friday night and that we should get together. No response. When Friday night came, I thought about calling him and inviting him out again but decided against it. I didn’t want to bother him; I had offered my company and he hadn’t accepted. I didn’t want to push myself on him.

Will suffered from depression, but I didn’t know it. In talking with his friends and hospital colleagues later, we all had a little piece of the puzzle, but none of us had the whole picture or understood how it all fit together. Later that evening, in the early morning hours of Saturday, May 24, Will took his own life. He was gone at 34.

The saviors come not home tonight,
Themselves they could not save.
A.E. Housman, “1887”

Memorial Day in Savannah was dark and rainy, as if the heavens themselves were weeping. It was for me a day of profound sorrow and mourning, of feeling what I felt for Chuck all over again, nearly 30 years later—grief, devastation, anger, guilt. But this time I knew and accepted the fact that I had reached out to Will in his last days and that he chose not to accept the lifeline that I and undoubtedly so many others had extended. Will had many friends who loved and cared about him, and he was gone by his own choice. It was a journey that none of us could have prevented. The darkness behind the light had finally overtaken him, and most of us never even knew it was there.

And in the streets the children screamed;
the lovers cried and the poets dreamed;
but not a word was spoken.
The church bells all were broken.
Don McLean, “American Pie”

The following Friday I drove 500 miles across the Florida panhandle to attend the memorial service in Will’s hometown of Gulf Breeze, Florida. The small Episcopal Church there was packed to overflowing, as was the service at Memorial Hospital here in Savannah the following Monday, at which I was privileged to speak. The Rev. Christie Olsen led a beautiful service in Gulf Breeze. The connecting theme, repeated over and over again by all who spoke at both services, was that this remarkable young man touched so many lives and, as one of his friends said, his soul was as bright as his smile. He was the real thing. We all struggled to reconcile the Will we knew with the Will who felt compelled to take his own life. Afterwards, I met his parents, Tom and Lita Brown, and his three brothers, Tad, Alex, and David, at the home where, as his father put it, Will was conceived, born, and raised, and to which he returned all his life to reconnect and renew his spirit. His father Tom and two older brothers, Tad and Alex, all are doctors. His younger brother David is a paramedic. Extraordinary children come from extraordinary parents and families. To the Browns, I say thank you for the wonderful gift you gave the world in Will. He touched and changed our lives in ways that none of you—nor he—could imagine.

Friendship is hard work. All things in life that are worthwhile are. Friendship has to be cultivated, maintained, refreshed, renewed. We all get busy and we lose touch. It’s hard enough sometimes just getting through our own day and dealing with our own troubles. We’re all too busy trying to shove our own rocks up the hill every day. Paying attention to other people’s moods or problems, no matter how much we may care about them, is often just too much work, too heavy a load. But in the wake of Will’s death, I hope now that I pay more attention to those around me and to the burdens they carry within them. Take the time to ask people how they’re doing, and really mean it when you ask. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: be kind to all those you meet, because we really don’t know the silent struggles within or the dark but quiet battles people are fighting. Even in the midst of all the hurries and bustles of modern life, I hope I can stop long enough to pay attention to those around me, and that somehow, some way, next time I can better see the darkness behind the light.

When he shall die, take and cut him out in little stars;
and he shall make the face of heaven so fine
that all the world shall be in love with night.
William Shakespeare, “Romeo & Juliet”

As Mr. Viviana said to Sherlock Holmes in “The Abbey Grange,” there are those in this life who are what you might call large-souled, who are a privilege to know. Will Brown was one of those. Will didn’t just make those around him better, his friends and colleagues, though he certainly did that. He made the human race better, and the world desperately needs more people like him. Will wasn’t a saint, nor was he perfect. None of us is. But he was a good and compassionate friend who always worried more about other people than himself, who invariably made everyone feel better and more cheerful after having spent just a few moments with him. I will struggle all of my life to keep faith with Will and all that he was, but I am so grateful for the privilege of having known him, for all that he taught me and gave me in so short a time.

One thing I know as I stand on the threshold of 50: real friendship is a rare and fleeting thing. I grieve the loss of this special friend. I am angry and heartbroken that there will be no more of him and all that might have been—no more learning from him, connecting with him, running with him. There should have been years and years and years left for this friendship to grow and for it to nourish us both.

But ultimately, the light that shined through Will—and that now shines through all who knew him—was much more powerful and lasting than the darkness behind the light. All the good that Will did and the joy he brought to so many others will far outlive the darkness that ultimately took him from us. And I realize now that Will needed to finish the race before me. As I left him behind on that November day—however briefly—so has he left us. Go on Will; get your best time. Will being Will, he’ll be waiting for me—for all of us—at the finish line. Godspeed my beautiful friend.

The light shines in the darkness,
And the darkness could not overcome it.
The Gospel of John, 1:5

The Kids Are Alright

“I Miss Her If She Goes to the Bathroom”: The Richard Burton Diaries

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The Richard Burton Diaries. Edited by Chris Williams. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. $35.00. 693 pp.

“Do you really keep a diary? I’d give anything to look at it. May I?” So asked Algernon, to Cecily, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Reading someone else’s letters and diaries can be a great guilty pleasure. What people choose to say about themselves in their diaries can tell us a great deal about who they thought they were and, usually, what they wanted the world at large to know about them. Because let’s face it, everyone who keeps a diary knows that at some point someone besides themselves is going to read it. So one chooses very carefully what to put in and what to leave out. The very act of keeping a diary or a journal is an act of self-selection, self-editing, and self-censorship.

Richard Burton was one of the most gifted actors of his generation. He was born in Wales in 1925 and died in Switzerland of a stroke at the age of 58 in 1984. Years of hard living, primarily booze and cigarettes, took their toll. He was one-half of one of the most famous Hollywood couples in history, having been married—twice—to Elizabeth Taylor. And he had a reputation of being an enormously talented artist who squandered that talent on lesser roles because of alcohol, women, laziness and lack of ambition. Why, one might ask, would anyone publish his diaries 30 years after his death, and why would anyone want to read them?

Because they are absolutely fascinating. Most good diaries are. Samuel Pepys was a government clerk, but his diary is still widely read 300 years after his death (“I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; he looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition.”) James Boswell’s journals—the famous biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson—were long thought to have been lost but were rediscovered at Malahide Castle in Ireland in the 1920s 150 years after his death, and they are still being published. When Boswell’s London Journal was published in 1950, it became an immediate world-wide best seller, much to the surprise of the publisher and editor. There’s something voyeuristic about us, and reading other people’s diaries, letters, or emails is almost irresistible, particularly when the juicy parts are left in, as when Boswell accused his mistress Louisa of giving him gonorrhea: “Madam, I have had no connection with any woman but you these two months. Such a thing in this case is worse than from a woman of the town, as from her you may expect it. You have used me very ill. I did not deserve it.”

Richard Walter Jenkins was born November 10, 1925, at Pontrhydyfen in the Afan valley of Wales to a family of coalminers. He took the surname of his legal guardian Philip Burton in 1943. Burton was nominated for seven Academy Awards but never won, and was best known for playing Mark Antony opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963), Thomas Becket in Becket (1964), Henry VIII in Anne of the Thousand Days (1970) and O’Brien in 1984 (1984). His family deposited his personal papers, including his diaries, at Swansea University in Wales in 2005. The Burton Papers now are a central part of the new Richard Burton Archive facility, which was formally opened in April 2010.

Burton began keeping a diary as a teenager in 1939 and sporadically kept up the practice until his death 45 years later. There are enormous gaps in the chronicle, but what’s here makes for wonderful reading. Burton was a gifted writer, and I found myself underlining and underscoring passages throughout. He had a keen insight into human nature and character and was remarkably honest about his own talents and foibles.

Two things stand out above all else in these pages, one a surprise, the other not. The surprise: Richard Burton loved books more than anything else in the world and would rather spend his time reading than acting, drinking, or chasing women. Books remained the one constant in his life from childhood to death and he read constantly, widely, voluminously. Who knew that Burton and Taylor read the Encyclopedia Britannica together?

Second—not so surprising—he was infatuated with Elizabeth Taylor. Everything about her—her acting ability, her brain, her conversation, but above all else, her beauty, captivated Burton, and some of the most stunning passages in his diaries are about her. His descriptions of her physical attributes and his attraction to her make the book worth reading all by itself.

In these pages, Burton is amazingly self-effacing. He often thinks that acting is a silly way for a grown man to make a living, and he says so. He loathes so much about his profession and he grouses constantly about it: “One of those days when acting seems peculiarly silly. What a sloppy job to have.” For him it was a means to an end: good books, good food and drink, good living, great women. He dreads having to go to work, hates reading scripts and trying to memorize lines. There is a lot of small talk and gossip here about other actors and their faults and failures, but he is equally unsparing about his own.

Here we see Richard Burton stripped of much of his glamor. He watches his weight and his waistline, usually complaining about both. He tries to cut down from as many as 100 cigarettes a day. He drinks too much—at one time apparently 3 bottles of vodka a day: “I became very drunk later and shouted a lot. At E. I don’t know what about. Just plain sloshed…I have been more or less drunk for two days. I don’t know why but I enjoyed it thoroughly.” He quarrels too often with fellow actors, strangers, and especially with his four wives through five marriages. He feels old and out of shape and can’t sleep. He falls behind in his diary and chastises himself for it. He wishes he could stop working so he could spend all his time reading, drinking, playing Yahtzee, and doing crossword puzzles: “Both Eliz and I agreed that we never want to work again but simply loll our lives away in a sort of eternal Sunday. We are both bone lazy. And enjoy it.” “I wouldn’t object to having the whole year off. I could write a book, or dream a lot, or get fit or fat.” He wishes people would leave him alone: “I have one disease that is incurable, that I am easily bored.”

And why did he keep these diaries? As editor Chris Williams points out, Burton never laid out a rationale, he “just got on and did it.” For all of his reputation for laziness, Burton wasn’t intellectually lazy. He read constantly and wrote long thoughtful passages in his diaries about politics, world events, and history. It seems he believed that a well-rounded, educated gentleman should keep a daily account of his thoughts and deeds, and should try as best as one could to do so honestly. This Burton tried to do when his drinking and other distractions didn’t get the better of him, which they did for months at a time:

“I woke to my astonishment at 11:00. How late. I would like to awake, until my death, about 6 or 7 in the morning, but life and nerves being what they are, one is lucky to be up and shouting at 4 in the afternoon. There is a kind of lethargy, induced only by vulgarity, which prompts late rising. I remember the days when to sleep more than 5 hours a day was considered self-indulgence. And I am now self indulgent. It must be booze and age.”

Elizabeth Taylor is the co-star of these diaries, and she comes off as being lovely, talented, and long-suffering at the hands of Burton, who could be an absolute load to have around. He was by turns loving and hateful, broodingly silent and mentally cruel, and an alcoholic, who, by his own admission, had a hard time expressing affection or sympathy for other people’s suffering. But he loved her beyond all telling, and several of the lines on E, as he called her, are worth quoting at some length:

“I am madly in love with her at the moment, as distinct from always loving her, and want to make love to her every minute.”

“E has become very slim and I can barely keep my hands off her. She is at the moment among the most dishiest girls I’ve ever seen. The most. I mean dishiest.”

“After 7 or is it 8 years I still miss her if she goes to the bathroom.”

“My God she’s a beauty. Sometimes even now, after nearly 8 years of marriage I look at her when she’s asleep at the first light of a grey dawn and wonder at her.”

“Elizabeth. . .asked if I would stop loving her if she had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I told her that I didn’t care if her legs bum and bosoms fell off and her teeth turned yellow. And she went bald. I love that woman so much sometimes that I cannot believe my luck. She has given me so much.”

“I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth. She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody’s fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and wilful, she is clement and loving, she is Sunday’s child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her and she loves me! She is a prospectus that can never be entirely catalogued, an almanack for Poor Richard. And I’ll love her till I die.”

Burton and Taylor fought as passionately as they loved and finally divorced in June 1974. Less than sixteen months later they married again, though the second time lasted less than a year. Still, it’s clear in these pages that he loved her as he never loved anyone else: “I miss her like food.”

His love of reading is noted almost every day: “Maybe I’ll just read and read and read…Sunday papers arrived and I settled down for the day…spent the afternoon browsing through Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. . . new bookcase arrived and I had it fixed next to the bathroom in guest bedroom and suitably filled it with books. Will have to order another bookcase. . .Looking forward to Switzerland and books and peace.”

Burton is self-effacing but he could be wickedly, bitingly funny and sarcastic about other people as well. A few of his bon mots: “She was as mini-skirted as a California palm tree. The hem was only slightly below the neck.” Pop singer Gordon Waller was “suffering from a bad attack, which may be permanent, of refusing to be impressed. I feel sorry for the poor bastard. He was one of those pop singers who didn’t survive his first success.” Writer Roddy Mann “fairly bristles with insignificance.” On Charles de Gaulle: “I’d kick him in the arse if I could reach that high.” Frank Sinatra was “a petulant little sod.” Eddie Fisher, one of Elizabeth’s ex-husbands, was “a gruesome little man and smug as a boot.” And then there was this, on fellow actor Rod Steiger’s facelift: “it makes him look like one-half of a naked asshole. He says he can’t get any jobs and will soon be broke. It might be because people don’t want to be looking at a talking asshole.”

Burton would have no doubt been pleased, if not a little amused, to see his own diaries in print. He was approached about it during his life: “I have been offered a million dollars for one month of this diary. Somebody is mad. And I is not it. But I wonder if it would be interesting. I would, after all, like to read the diary of an office-worker. Might people be interested in reading a month in the life of an actor, especially one married to such an exotic wife as mine?” Indeed they would.

As to life beyond death, he didn’t expect it: “I wish I could believe in a God of some kind,” he offers at one point, “but I simply cannot. My intelligence is too muscular and my imagination stops at the horizon, and I have an idea that the last sound to be heard on this lovely planet will be a man screaming. In fear and terror. It might be me.” Needless to say, it wasn’t. Burton suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in August 1984 and is buried in Switzerland. Elizabeth Taylor outlived him by almost 27 years.

As writer Jessamyn West wrote, “people who keep journals have life twice.” Thanks to Chris Williams and Yale University Press, Richard Burton in these pages has achieved a kind of immortality that a lover of the printed word like himself would have prized far beyond the afterlife he has long enjoyed for being—one can almost hear Burton yawning—an actor. “My first love,” he said, “is not the stage. It is a book with lovely words in it.” A man after my own heart.

Worth Reading: Spencer Tracy: A Biography

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Spencer Tracy: A Biography. By James Curtis. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, 1,001 pp. $39.95

He’s the kind of actor who makes it look so easy and you think to yourself, I can do that. Go ahead and try it. It’s not easy and you can’t do it.

Spencer Tracy is widely considered to be the greatest film actor of the 20^th century. Perhaps even the greatest actor of all time. Clark Gable considered him untouchable. “The guy`s good,” Gable famously said. “There`s nobody in the business who can touch him, and you`re a fool to try. And the bastard knows it, so don`t fall for that humble stuff!”

Having recently plowed through mammoth biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Walter Cronkite, two of the seminal figures in the second half of the twentieth century, I decided to complete the triumvirate by reading James Curtis’s recent biography of my favorite actor. At almost exactly 1,000 pages, it’s not a fast read, but it’s a wonderful journey.

I first encountered Spencer Tracy as a college senior at the University of Georgia in 1986. As a journalism major focusing on radio-TV-film production, I took the late great Barry Sherman’s class on journalism and broadcast history, and he challenged us to become familiar with the great movies and actors of the past, in the same way one reads “classic” books and authors to become more “well rounded.”

To help us along on that quest, he screened Citizen Kane in class, and before long I was haunting the student center theater for any classic movies that showed up. It was there that I first saw Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, both on the big screen. I was hooked.

Pretty soon I was wearing out my VCR, recording old movies on TBS and AMC (back when they showed old movies on either of those stations), anything that featured Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. Arsenic and Old Lace led me to Cary Grant, other movies to Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Edward G. Robinson, Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, and Katharine Hepburn. I watched Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch, and other directors. I bought a copy of Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion and read it to tatters, all 1,200 pages.

James Cagney died that spring and I became interested in his work, watching and studying everything of his that I could find. Nobody then or now could dance like him, and when he was on screen, you couldn’t watch anybody else. As one critic wrote about Cagney, “He can’t even put a telephone receiver back on the hook without giving the action some special spark of life.”

About that time, PBS aired a documentary on Spencer Tracy. He was in a class all by himself. I had heard of him, of course, and was familiar with the names of some of his movies like Bad Day at Black Rock, but I’d never seen him on the screen. He was so good that he didn’t seem to be acting; as his fellow actors say, you never saw the mechanism at work. One reviewer watching him on stage in 1929, before he ever set foot in front of a camera, captured his style perfectly:

“No makeup—none to speak of—no tricks whatever; just an unassuming, easy manner that gets him about the stage without your quite knowing how he does it. He belongs to that school of acting—if it is a school—which doesn’t want you to think it is acting. It is acting, though, of a very high order, forceful, reserved, artistic.”

Tracy was born in Milwaukee in 1900, served in the Navy in World War I, and made his stage debut as a student at Ripon College in 1921. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (where he learned, he said, “the value of sincerity and simplicity, unembellished and unintellectualized”) and mastered his trade for 10 years in the daily grind of a stock company. The legendary George M. Cohan called him “the best goddamned actor I’ve ever seen.”

He hit it big on Broadway in 1930’s The Last Mile, and Fox Studios in Hollywood signed him to a contract that same year. He made his big screen debut in Up the River, directed by John Ford. Unlike most actors trained on the stage, Tracy was subdued, letting the camera come to him. It was inauspicious debut to the 75 films he would eventually make and that would establish him as the best screen actor in history, with nine Academy Award nominations and two Oscars for best actor.

For all his acting talent, Tracy was the stereotypical “tortured” artist. He was as well known for his long-standing relationship with Katharine Hepburn, his moodiness, and his alcoholism as he was for his acting. After his first-born child, John, was born deaf, Tracy for the rest of his life blamed himself and his sins for his son’s affliction and it ate at him like a cancer. He suffered from chronic insomnia and took mouthfuls of pills just to catch an hour’s sleep. Tracy had multiple affairs with other actresses long before he met Hepburn—most notably Loretta Young and Ingrid Bergman–and his marriage to actress Louise Treadwell had settled into an awkward, platonic partnership by 1940.

Tracy and Hepburn first met filming Woman of the Year in 1942 and were together until his death 25 years later. I had always assumed it was an open secret, but Curtis tells us that was not the case. They were finally outed in several high-profile national magazines in the mid 1950s. Tracy had been married to Louise Treadwell since 1923, and they never divorced. After discovering their son John was deaf, Louise founded the John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles and used her celebrity status to ensure its eventual success. Tracy’s staunch Catholicism and Louise’s insistence on remaining Mrs. Spencer Tracy until her death combined to keep them in a relationship that was unusual even in Hollywood. Despite their estrangement, they were still married at Spencer’s death in 1967, still respected each other, valued the other’s advice, and maintained a semblance of family with their two children. Curtis deftly details the finer points of their shared and singular history.

Hepburn’s attraction to Tracy was immediate and intense. But what did Tracy see in Hepburn? We’re never quite sure, and Curtis lets the reader fill in the blanks on this particular subject. According to Hepburn, she never knew exactly how he felt about her. That he loved her is beyond doubt, but he apparently never told her, which is hard to believe. They appear to have been intellectually suited and admired each other’s acting ability enormously. They were undoubtedly lovers, though one wonders how much that ever entered into the equation, as Tracy was 42 when he met Hepburn and looked and acted 10 years older. She helped him through his insomnia and alcoholism, though the evidence points to the inescapable fact that he physically abused her on more than one occasion. They didn’t share a home until the last 5 years of his life; “I love him but I can’t live with him and he won’t live with Louise,” Hepburn said. In the end, it’s clear they were best friends, in the truest sense of those words, and enjoyed each other’s company and companionship. They made each other contented and happy.

At least as happy as anyone like Tracy could ever be. Alcoholism nearly ruined him. Several times in his career he would go on 10-day benders and wind up in hospital detox centers, bringing to a screeching halt whatever picture he might be working on or about to start, holding up production and costing the studio millions. His father and grandfather were alcoholics, and his working-class Irish Catholic upbringing in Milwaukee did nothing to dissuade him from seeking solace in a bottle. He went through long periods of sobriety, most notably after meeting Hepburn, but never really sought professional help. Alcoholism was more often seen as a moral failing than a disease during his life, a view to which both Hepburn and Tracy partially subscribed. He eventually brought it under control himself, though he never fully mastered it. He would go on and fall off the wagon with excruciating regularity all of his life.

Curtis chronicles all of this in wonderful detail, but the heart of the story—as in Tracy’s life—was his work before the camera. Tracy labored in obscurity at Fox Studios through 5 years and 19 films before moving over to MGM and stardom in 1935. If you’ve never seen him on screen, go on Netflix right now and queue up any one of a dozen of his best pictures: Inherit the Wind (widely acclaimed as his best work), Judgment at Nuremburg, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Father of the Bride, Boy’s Town, Fury (his 1936 break-out role), Captains Courageous, San Francisco, The Old Man and the Sea, Bad Day at Black Rock.

In my opinion all nine of his movies with Katharine Hepburn are good but especially watch Woman of the Year, Keeper of the Flame, State of the Union, Adam’s Rib, Pat and Mike, and Desk Set. The latter movie is little regarded among movie critics, but two scenes in it are worth studying in some detail: when Tracy quizzes Hepburn about her memory over lunch on the rooftop of their office building, and later when Tracy gets caught in the rain on the way home and Hepburn invites him in for dinner. Both scenes feature two movie legends at the top of their game, with a natural affinity for their work and for each other that comes through brilliantly on screen. I particularly like him in Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, because he’s as superb a comedian as anyone else in that picture. Bottom line: if he’s in it, watch it. You will never be disappointed.

There are many actors, then and now, who never convince you they’ve done anything more than memorize lines and pretend to be someone else. For all their matinee idol appeal, I’ve always felt this way about Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise; you can tell they’re performing. Even some of Hollywood’s greatest legends, like Clark Gable, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Errol Flynn, were always accused of just playing themselves, that they weren’t really actors. As John Wayne famously said, “I don’t act, I react.” (Tracy once told the Duke, “It’s a good thing you’re so good looking, because you can’t act your way out of a paper bag.” Of Gable, whom he loved, he said, “Can’t act, doesn’t care, and everybody loves him better than any actor that was ever born.”)

Tracy, as one critic wrote, did not act, he was. It never seemed as if he was trying to perform. He belonged to a school of acting “which believed in selection—not how much the actor could do in any given scene, but how little he had to do to make the point, using the minimum to make the maximum.” Tracy understood the power of silence, of scarcely moving; it was all in his eyes and face, and the way he held himself. As Curtis writes, he demanded the audience’s attention in a natural and subdued way, dared them not to feel what he was feeling, not to think what he was thinking. To my mind, Tom Hanks is the living embodiment of Spencer Tracy: they both underplay to enormous effect what others would turn into farce.

How did he do it? What was his technique? No one really knows, because he never really shared his secret, a legacy, perhaps of his days working as a magician as a boy. Gene Kelly, who starred with Fredric March and Tracy in Inherit the Wind, described it thus: “I could understand and see what March was doing. He was like Olivier. A wonderful technician. You could see the characterization taking shape—the cogs and wheels beginning to turn. If you studied his methods closely, it was all there, like an open book. But with Spence it was just the reverse. He’d play a scene with you, and you’d think nothing much was happening. Then, when you saw the rushes, there it all was—pouring out of his face. He was quite amazing. The embodiment of the art that conceals art. It was impossible to learn anything from Spence, because everything he did came from some inner part of himself, which to an outsider anxious to learn, was totally inaccessible. All you could do was watch the magic and be amazed.”

Part of it, of course, was his natural talent and ability. When other actors asked him for advice, he would invariably reply, “There’s nothing I can teach you. Your either are an actor, or you’re not. And you are.” But though he made it seem effortless, it wasn’t. He did have a photographic memory, a gift for any actor, but he worked hard at making it seem as though he wasn’t doing anything at all. He spent long hours alone in his room at night preparing himself for the next day’s work.

Watch him read the verdict in Judgment at Nuremburg (over 10 minutes, done in one take): “Before the people of the world . . . let it now be noted . . . that here in our decision, this is what we stand for: Justice, truth, and the value of a single human being”; watch him cross examine Fredric March in Inherit the Wind, or give the final speech in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: “Old? Yes, Burnt out? Certainly. But I can tell you the memories are still there—clear, intact, in destructible. And they’ll still be there if I live to be a hundred and ten.” A cough here, a lowering of his voice mid-sentence there, a catch in his throat as he described his love for Christina (Hepburn): Small, subtle things, that make his performances seem wholly natural, but nearly impossible to replicate. As Stanley Kramer, who directed all three movies, said: “Tracy reduced everything to a fine powder of simplicity, and that takes hard work, it takes a lot of hard work. ‘Improvisation,’ Tracy always said, ‘is perspiration.’”

It wasn’t unusual for his fellow cast and crew to burst into applause after one of his scenes. Fellow actors on the set or movie lot would stand offstage just to watch him work. The three movies cited above contain his best work, superb, flawless performances. If I ever aspired to act, I would study them until my eyes blurred. Burt Lancaster, following the verdict scene in Judgment at Nuremburg, asked Tracy, “How did you do that so easily?” Tracy quietly replied, “You practice for 35 years.” The art that conceals art, using the minimum to make the maximum. There was nobody better.