James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Once she had them snared, Hepburn outlined her terms: $40,000 for the story and another $60,000 for the shooting script. She asked $100,000 for herself as star (the same fee she had commanded for Philadelphia Story), $10,000 commission on the deal, and an extra $1,000 “for telephone calls and things.” The entire package—Hepburn, original story, screenplay—was valued at $211,000, and she stuck to her guns, rejecting an initial offer from Sam Katz of $175,000 “for the whole business.” Mike Kanin remembered that he and his partner were astonished: “We would have been lucky to get $10,000 for the script under our own names. As it was she got $100,000 plus agent’s fee of ten percent—for herself. I couldn’t say it was all a big conspiracy against Metro, but we were quite breathless with the speed of it. We had nine days in which to finish the script. We holed up, and with the aid of a lot of Benzedrine managed to do it.” It instantly became the costliest original ever purchased for the screen; it was only after the deal had been set that Hepburn revealed its authors as two novice screenwriters whose earnings had previously amounted to no more than $200 a week.2

  With two-thirds of the screenplay drafted, Hepburn took it to George Stevens, who had directed one of her better films at RKO, Alice Adams. “My great buddy George Cukor had to be offered things first,” she said, “but he didn’t know a baseball game from a swimming match, so I thought this picture had to be directed by a very male man, and that’s George Stevens.”

  With a deal at Columbia, Stevens thought Hepburn was bringing him something that could be made there.

  Kate called on me and gave me this script to read. I said, “Kate, this is the only time in my life that I’ve read a motion picture script that I think is ready to go.” [A script] that was excellent in every way. She said, “Well, why don’t we make it?” I said, “What about the last part?” She said, “Well, the boys are working on it.” And it didn’t seem very difficult to finish it. I said, “That’s a good idea. Bring it over to Columbia and we’ll make it.” She said, “I can’t.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Because I promised it to Louis B. Mayer. I thought you’d leave here and make a deal at Metro.” I said, “Things are so pleasant for me I really shouldn’t do it.” So I don’t know what happened, but I agreed to go to Metro and make the picture. And we hadn’t had the last act written.

  According to Lardner, the script was written initially with Clark Gable in mind. (“Because of M-G-M we thought Gable was more likely.”) Hepburn, however, saw an opening when the postponement of The Yearling gave her a shot at Spencer Tracy. She had asked for him when making the deal for Philadelphia Story—Gable and Tracy both—and both, she was told, had turned the picture down. “I knew he was a brilliant actor,” she wrote of Tracy. “And he represented just the sort of American male of that era. That’s why I was anxious to have him do it.” She had first laid eyes on him at the Harris Theatre during a performance of The Last Mile (“a remarkable show”) and had been captivated by him ever since Captains Courageous, a performance she described as “shattering.”

  “I don’t think Spencer had any idea who I was. I don’t think he was that much of a movie fan.” Actually, they already had appeared together in other media, so Tracy was certainly well aware of her. In 1933 they shared a two-page pictorial spread (“Screenland’s Double Honor Page”), Tracy posed with Colleen Moore, Hepburn opposite with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. In 1938 Walt Disney put them on screen together in Mother Goose Goes Hollywood, a seven-minute cartoon which had Tracy fishing Freddie Bartholomew from the ocean while Hepburn, all jaw and cheekbones, circled them with an outboard motor, dressed as Bo-Peep and looking for her sheep.

  Tracy was on vacation when Joe Mankiewicz put the idea to him. Based on what little he had seen of Hepburn, he didn’t think it would work. She could play screwball, as she had opposite Cary Grant, and she could play earnest parts like Terry Randall in Stage Door, but Woman of the Year—Joe’s title—was the sort of comedy at which Carole Lombard and Rosalind Russell excelled. Hepburn, he had heard, was difficult and wore pants all the time. (He thought she was a lesbian, Hepburn would later note with some amusement.) David O. Selznick, who was responsible for bringing her to RKO in 1932, spoke of a “curious kind of masculine drive” that was off-putting to a lot of men. “I never felt she was really unattractive. I think she just appeals to certain people.” It was only after Tracy had been persuaded to see The Philadelphia Story—Hepburn’s first true glamour girl part—that all his reservations fell away and he agreed to the assignment.

  Tracy returned to the studio on a hot and humid August day, still smarting from the Jekyll and Hyde notices and eager to see the picture cut as drastically as possible. He and Mankiewicz were exiting the Thalberg Building—which Joe had dubbed the Iron Lung, the air-conditioned administration building where “paralytic minds were at work”—when they encountered Hepburn on her way in. “I have no idea where she might have been going,” said Mankiewicz. “She stopped as we stopped. I said, ‘Well, it’s certainly high time you two knew each other.’ ” Hepburn was in slacks, wearing no makeup, her angular architecture—which caused one detractor to remark, “Throw a hat at her and wherever it hits it will hang”—on full display. Her eyes were a pale, nearly colorless blue-gray, her skin drawn tightly across her freckled face. She affected an illusion of height, which gave her a psychological advantage over a lot of men, not simply her costars. “Spencer was five-eleven, I was five seven and a half,” she said. “I wore very high heels.” She always disputed what Joe Mankiewicz remembered her as saying as they stood on the landing that led to the guard’s gate and the lot beyond: “I might be a little tall for you, Mr. Tracy.”

  “I wouldn’t have been dumb enough to say what I [supposedly] said to him,” she asserted decades later—and she had a point, given how badly she wanted Tracy to be in the picture. According to Hepburn, there was instead an awkward silence. “I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said, ‘Sorry I’ve got these high heels on. When we do the movie, I’ll be careful about what I wear.’ ”

  It wasn’t quite the wholesale emasculation Mankiewicz recalled, but it had much the same effect. “And Spencer’s just sort of eyeing her. He did that, and she didn’t know at the time that he was going to pay her back. But I spoke up and said, ‘Don’t worry, Kate. He’ll cut you down to size.’ And she smiled and walked on. And we walked on.” Said Hepburn, “I think he thought I was awful. And he said [to Joe], ‘She has dirty fingernails. Her hands are dirty. And she’s bossy.’ That was his impression of me. Not that I was too tall. I think he just found me rather unattractive and disappointing. And thought: ‘My God, what am I stuck with?’ ”

  They proceeded, said Mankiewicz, to study each other’s pictures, and Stevens’ first rushes betrayed a softening in Hepburn’s normally strident delivery, while Tracy seemed to be upping his energy level a notch. “There they were,” said Mankiewicz, “imitating each other.” At first Hepburn fretted she would be “too sweet” in the part. “Katie,” said Stevens, “you get out there and be as sweet as you can be. You’ll still be plenty nasty.” Then she objected to Stevens’ introductory image of her, a generous sampling of leg from Tracy’s perspective, the first genuine cheesecake shot of her career. “It’s not like crossing your legs in front of a man,” Stevens argued, painfully aware of her lack of credentials as a movie sexpot. “You don’t know your leg is showing. But he sees it. And the audience sees it. And everybody remembers it and forgives you when you are not being feminine.”

  Hepburn was not an instinctive actor. She questioned everything, debated everything, would happily have rehearsed the same scene all day if she could. The director’s guidance—the director’s discipline—was essential to her delivering her best work. Tracy was just the opposite. He talked very little about the character he was playing, did his scenes, and rarely, if ever, relied on the director. Where Hepburn was constantly leaping into the void, Tracy was watching, observing, taking in what she and the other members of the cast were doing. “Actin
g to me,” he once said to Sylvia Sidney, “is always reacting.”

  “We never rehearsed together,” Hepburn said. “He hated to do more than one take. I never cared how many takes I did. That was curious. But Spencer’s peak concentration was the first take. And it was usually the best.” She could remember an early scene in the back room of Pinkie Peters’ tavern—modeled on Bleeck’s, the famous newsmen’s hangout underneath the Herald Tribune building in New York—where Sam and Tess are getting to know one another. “Spencer had the most extraordinary technique. I mean, he was so natural you thought he’d blown. And I was hoping he’d like me. So I was struggling to be very easy and very with it, and I knocked over a glass of water. And I saw him take his handkerchief out of the pocket and start to dry it up. So I took the table napkin and dried a little bit off, and then disappeared under the table to dry the rest of it. I thought: The old son of a gun. I’ll show him. I’m not really as silly as I look. So we went right on playing the scene.”

  Tracy and Hepburn got to know each other in much the same way, having dinner one night ten days into production. The conversation came around to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which Hepburn had made a point of seeing.

  “Very interesting,” she said.

  “Oh no—no—nothing—rotten,” he said. “I just can’t do that sort of thing. It’s like constructing a dummy and then trying to breathe life into it. I like to be the dummy myself, and then make people—force people—to believe that I’m whatever I want them to believe. Inside out—instead of outside in. No makeup.”

  She studied his face. “His ears stuck out. And he had old lion’s eyes. And he had a wonderful head of hair. And a sort of ruddy skin, really like mine. I mean, he was not as freckled as I am, but he was ruddy. And…[a] nice mouth.” Both were at loose ends in terms of relationships. Ring Lardner knew that Gar Kanin was “kind of in love” with Hepburn and remembered her once asking whether she should marry him. “I think he probably realized it was a very unlikely thing with Kate. Although, as I said, she did say to me, ‘What do you think?’ I don’t think she ever took it too seriously or that she was in love with him.” And Tracy had been to San Francisco with Ingrid Bergman not long before the start of the film, but now Bergman was off in New York with her husband and daughter.

  There was a surprising amount they had in common. Both had thought about careers in medicine, and both had influential fathers who didn’t take the theatre seriously as a vocation. As kids, both loved movies—westerns in particular—and both staged amateur performances for the neighbors. Hepburn displayed real talent as an actor at Bryn Mawr, just as Tracy had at Ripon. Both got their professional starts in stock, and both came to Hollywood expecting to go back to Broadway. Hepburn did, disastrously in The Lake, spectacularly in The Philadelphia Story. Tracy, of course, never had. The Theatre Guild still wanted him for The Devil’s Disciple—and there was talk of Eugene O’Neill’s new play, The Iceman Cometh—but Metro complicated things by insisting on first refusal and the right to put in money. Similarly, Hepburn was aiming to do Saint Joan for the Guild and wanted Orson Welles to direct. Within days, Philip K. Scheuer’s column in the Times carried an item: “Katharine Hepburn, a lady who wastes no time, has apparently communicated her enthusiasm for the stage to Spencer Tracy … Now he says he may appear in a play with Katie.”

  Katharine Hepburn’s attraction to him was immediate and intense. Director George Stevens takes note. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  They settled into a comfortable pattern of working with one another, Hepburn considering every possible nuance of a given scene while Tracy gently heckled her from the sidelines. “I think he was so steady,” she said, “and I was so volatile, that we exasperated each other. And we challenged each other, and that was the fun of it.” When John Chapman visited the set on September 12, Hepburn was at a rostrum rehearsing a speech, while Tracy was sitting out in the audience, haw-hawing loudly and doing his best to throw her off. “We are told that this is the big new friendly feud. Spence and Miss H. had never worked together before, and each at first was a little in awe of the other; but now they are in the happy Hollywood state of amiable insult. ‘We will now pause,’ announces Tracy, ‘while Miss Hepburn rewrites the script.’ ”

  George Stevens, meanwhile, was demonstrating a bit of wordless business, Tracy’s character having happened onto the speaker’s platform, unsure of where he was and unable to get off. Tracy, Hepburn soon decided, was modeling his performance on the deadpan mannerisms of their esteemed director.

  “I never met a man I knew as quick as I knew Spence,” Stevens commented.

  And he felt the same about me. So he’d come in a little early, and he’d come over in my little office and sit down and we’d talk, or I’d go in his dressing room. And all of a sudden I hear a knock on the door, and the door opens and it’s Katharine. She says, “What are you two conspiring about?” “Well,” he says, “you know, Kate, I like guidance on things … And this man is our director, and I’d like to get some guidance from him. And I asked him a question: How can I be such a damn fool to get into a picture with a woman producer and her director? How can I be such a dumb bastard as that, Katharine? And you know what he tells me? He says, Well, Spencer, I can’t understand it. That sounds pretty stupid to me. How can you do it? Can you give me a good reason? he says. No I can’t.” It took me a long time to get the answer: He wanted to make a picture with Kate Hepburn.

  In Woman of the Year, Sam Craig and Tess Harding start out as rivals, sparring with each other in their respective columns. The publisher of the paper calls them in to make peace, and Sam is startled by the cool, determined beauty of his adversary. Out of earshot, he asks her to a game at Yankee Stadium—her first—and patiently explains the ins and outs of baseball. She reciprocates, and he walks into a postbroadcast cocktail party in which none of the distinguished guests appears to speak English. Awkward and uncomfortable, Sam makes the best of it, then slips out the door. The next day, she asks him to drive her to the airport, and he finds himself onstage as she’s delivering an address before a hall full of women. Their snatches of time together don’t add up to much, and Sam can’t tell what she’s up to. As they reach LaGuardia, his dissatisfaction, as the script put it, “oozes out of every pore.”

  “What’s the matter, Sam?”

  “Nothing,” he says.

  “Sure?”

  “Well, I dunno. I can’t quite figure you out. What are you trying to prove? Why am I here?”

  And when she catches her breath and says, “I thought you might want to kiss me good-bye,” Tracy calmly takes it in, processes it, then turns himself away from the camera, ostensibly to glance down the terminal corridor, but also to make sure the most significant kiss of his entire career takes place completely out of sight of the audience. The camera moves in, Hepburn in profile as he draws her toward him, her lips apart, the moment of contact perfectly obscured by the brim of his cocked hat. It is brief but heartfelt, passionate and completely unencumbered by concerns of lighting, position, focus. It’s the back of his head, her chin, the muffled soundtrack, their eyes laser-locked on each other as he releases her. It’s as real as any kiss in the history of the medium, the look of astonishment on her face, the deadly serious look on his, screen acting at its finest … if it was acting.

  “Mike Kanin and I were frequent visitors to the set,” said Ring Lardner, “and what we saw happening there was the final blessing on the venture. When you write a love story, you hope that the actors will make it seem convincing, but you scarcely expect them to actually fall for each other. A familiar sight on a movie set comes when the director calls ‘Cut!’ and the two lovers withdraw abruptly from a tight embrace, briskly heading off in separate directions as if to emphasize the nothing-personal aspect of their physical contact. Kate and Spence wanted to be together off camera as well as on.”

  With Johnny attending school in Manhattan and Susie, now nine, still at Brentwood, there was little to occupy Louise beyond
the running of the house. It was a gilded but solitary existence, broken only by her occasional visits with Audrey Caldwell, the former actress from Australia who was her closest friend and only true confidante. Spence was living at the Beverly Hills Hotel, making the picture, home Sundays and holidays. Carroll Tracy slipped quietly into the role of liaison between husband and wife, scheduling their times together as one might arrange meetings and conferences. With so much time on her hands, Louise began writing a book about her struggle to rear, educate, and mainstream a boy who was profoundly deaf, its purpose to give “a complete account of one family’s experiences with a deaf child, to the end that other deaf children may prosper.” The title she gave the book was The Story of John.

  Louise Treadwell Tracy was a skilled and facile writer, and her words flowed with the same candor that distinguished her infrequent talks with the press. With her background in journalism, she was incapable of portraying an event inaccurately, nor could she temper her opinions in the name of diplomacy. She could avoid a subject altogether—Spence’s infidelities, for example, even though the Loretta Young affair was a matter of public record—but once she chose to tackle something—public school administrators, clueless doctors, antique attitudes on the part of the public, and baseless misconceptions—she did so with a sharpness and conviction that were startling. “Unless I write as fully, as clearly and as honestly as I am capable of doing,” she said, “my purpose has no hope of accomplishment.”