Is this bit of information, and the way that it seems to victimize Hepburn, the reason that Tracy leaves me cold? Or is it that he’s too Country Club Dad? Is it the gruffness? Is it the simple and stunning fact that he is not Cary Grant? Or somehow not equal to Hepburn? Because here’s where my desire to hold Hepburn as a paragon of feminist self-respect runs into a roadblock: how could she do this to herself? It sticks in my craw that Tracy was too bound by religious ideologies to divorce his wife and publicly own his relationship with Hepburn. Not because religious ideology is necessarily stupid, but because Tracy was so flagrantly breaking the spirit, if not the letter, of his religion’s law. Am I assuming that Hepburn was blinded by love, and thus put up with the shit that Tracy brought her way? That she settled?
Recent biographies make clear that (a) Tracy was gay, tormented by it because of his Catholicism, loved Katherine, but they probably weren't having the passionate sex all the time; and (b) she was having liaisons with woman, and also propping him up. They had a complex relationship. Loved each other, but being lovers in the conventional sense probably wasn't at the core of it. More that they were very simpatico, trusted each other and could be themselves in the relationship.
They weren't the only Hollywood couple to do this trick, Barbara Stanwyck's marriage to Robert Taylor was built along the same lines.