And so she began her book with these words: “He was sleeping late that afternoon, too late. He probably would not want to go asleep again that night until long after he should. I would waken him. I went out onto the porch where he slept, and as I went, I called ‘Johnny, Johnny, time to wake up.’ He did not move.”
Woman of the Year took almost nine weeks to shoot, finishing on Saturday, October 25, 1941. Louise was vacationing in Arizona, but if Spence was involved with Katharine Hepburn he didn’t note anything about it in his datebook. He was still seeing Ingrid Bergman—had dined with her on the sixteenth—and it was about this time that Bergman’s husband, Petter Lindstrom, prevented his wife from returning with Tracy to San Francisco to discuss “future roles.” When Louise did get back from Phoenix, Spence drove her down to Balboa, and they spent the day looking at houses and boats. That evening they dined at Carroll’s, where a frail Mother Tracy celebrated her sixty-sixth birthday.
Louise was in Palm Springs when Woman of the Year had its first preview on November 14. In the movie Tess and Sam are wed at a perfunctory ceremony, but the marriage veers spectacularly off course when she asks him what he’d think about having a child. He thinks, of course, that she is pregnant, only to discover that she’s adopted a Greek orphan. “Two weeks ago they made me chairman of the Greek Refugee Committee and I accepted without thinking much about it. And then while you were away they held a meeting and some idiot suggested that I should take the first one.”
The boy is already lost in the whirlwind of Tess’ life, and Sam takes pity on him when there’s no one to babysit on the night Tess is to be named America’s Outstanding Woman of the Year over a nationwide radio hookup.
“Well,” she says dismissively, “Chris will be all right, Sam. He’s old enough and, besides, we’ll be home before midnight.”
“He can do a lot of crying in four hours,” Sam shoots back.
Tracy’s “business,” Stevens observed, “is always behind his eyes. Whatever Spence does behind his eyes—if he thinks the audience should turn to his character, something takes place behind his eyes. You hear it in the sound of his voice. You see it in the direct look in his eyes. You know he’s on and he’s the man to be heard … It’s just as authoritative as if he rapped on the table with a gavel.”
Tess goes on to the banquet alone, and Sam, having made his stand, calmly returns the boy to the orphanage, where other children speak his language and he won’t be trapped in an empty apartment. Sam completes the paperwork while the broadcast is on in the background, and when Tess returns to the apartment, her plaque under her arm and the press in tow, he is nowhere to be found.
Hepburn, during the writing of the script, suggested the climactic sequence the preview audience saw that night: Tess covers an upcoming prizefight for the missing Sam, while Sam can be found, in a game attempt at meeting his estranged spouse halfway, studying French and Spanish at Mademoiselle Sylvia’s, a language parlor that Sam’s friend Pinkie takes for a bordello. When he learns he’s picked a washed-up fighter named Dunlap in the column Tess has so obligingly ghosted, Sam sprints from the building in a panic. (“Who did it? Who wrote that tripe?”) At the fight, Tess materializes directly behind him and fesses up to the writing of the column. “We didn’t know where you were. It had to be written.” And then she tells him she hasn’t been a woman or a wife or anything to him.
SAM
(with heavy skepticism)
And now you know just how to go about it?
TESS
(enthusiastically)
Yes, Sam … we’ll move out of the apartment, get a little house out of town somewhere. I’ll make it a real home, honest. I’ll learn how to take care of it … and you.
SAM
And you’ll cook, sew, and order the groceries? Drive me to the station every morning?
TESS
(exultant now in the picture)
Yes, Sam—!
SAM
You’re not making sense.
It was, said Ring Lardner, “one of those kind of it’s-all-starting-over-again endings.” The picture got over at preview, but only to a point. “And there was a lot of confusion,” Hepburn admitted, “and a lot of slight—shall we say—unpleasantness. Anyway, they shot my end. And the minute my end came up at the preview, the interest dropped dead. So Mayer came to me and said, ‘It was a wonderful preview.’ And I said, ‘Mr. Mayer, it was a great preview up to such and such, and then, at the end, which I’m totally responsible for, [it] laid an egg.’ And he said, ‘How much to fix it?’ And I said, ‘About two hundred thousand dollars.’ And he said, ‘Go ahead.’ So I rushed back, and everyone was, you know, suggesting ends, ends, ends.”
George Stevens had returned to Columbia, and it was Joe Mankiewicz who figured out what the picture needed. “Philip Barry wrote the definitive play about Kate,” he said.
About Kate. For Kate. Philadelphia Story. In which [there was] a woman so superb, so elevated in class, so intelligent, so accomplished, so everything, that she antagonized every woman in the audience, because this is superwoman. Philip Barry wrote the play in which she got her comeuppance, and the audience loved a comeuppance, loved her for taking it, and this was the start of Kate’s second career. That formula, that needed element, in what was otherwise a woman so perfect that she could not be tolerated by the mass female audience…
I called John Lee Mahin, who was a very good writer, and he and I and George Stevens, the director, sat down and I said, “Look, what I think this needs is what Phil Barry discovered …” and I devised this new ending in which she tries to make breakfast. This was a retake. And it was the equivalent of her being taken apart in Philadelphia Story.
Tracy was present at the November 14 preview but wasn’t quite sure what to make of the audience’s reaction. “Good, I think,” he wrote in his book, a question mark accompanying the comment. Lardner, who wasn’t there, thought the ending “too feminist” for Mayer and the studio brass. “The executives at M-G-M, including Joe Mankiewicz, supported by George Stevens, felt that the woman character, having been so strong throughout, should be somehow subjugated and tamed, in effect.”
Hepburn, who had been in on the development process almost from the beginning, wasn’t happy with the new ending and wasn’t shy about saying so. “Mayer was away,” John Lee Mahin remembered, “and Sam Katz was in charge of the studio. Hepburn came into Sam’s office; wham, she threw what I had written on the desk and said, ‘That’s the biggest bunch of crap I’ve ever read!’ Sam was bewildered; he was looking at Stevens. Tracy was stuck on her, but he knew this ending was for him and not for her, so he was sitting there and he wasn’t saying a word. Finally, Sam said, ‘George, what do you think?’ George didn’t even answer. ‘Sam,’ he just said, ‘why don’t you put [up] that apartment on Stage 3, we’ll shoot it in the morning.’ And Sam said, ‘Oh, that’s fine, that’s fine.’ ”
Stevens, whose career began with two-reel comedies, envisioned a sequence devoid of dialogue, Tess managing her kitchen duties with clattering incompetence, Sam looking on with scarcely a grimace, toast shooting skyward, the coffee boiling over, an innertube of a waffle threatening ominously to burst. “Now there,” commented Tracy, “is a real meaty hunk of business. I look.” Hepburn was similarly bewildered: “I’ve never done anything like this in my life. Honestly, George, I don’t know a thing about gag comedy.” Stevens remained adamant, promising his two leads the revised sequence would never be shown if it wasn’t any good. “The first ending we shot was wrong,” he told them. “Why? Because it didn’t put over the idea we were shooting for. Kate talked about being a good wife. Audiences don’t want talk. They want action. In this new finish, Kate doesn’t talk. She acts like a good wife as nearly as she can. She tries to cook. To the point of being ridiculous. But she’s trying.”
The new material took eleven days to shoot, Stevens, formerly a gag man for Laurel and Hardy, having worked out an array of mechanical gags that were, he declared, “
foolproof.” He gave Hepburn what he called “W. C. Fields business”—trying to button her dress, struggling to keep her straps from slipping, juggling the various kitchen gadgets. But what really made the scene work, Mankiewicz said, were “the kind of looks, or non-looks, of Tracy. The other directors would have had Tracy react. Instead of which, George had Tracy play it the way George would, gives this quiet look, that Indian impassivity, while Kate made a ninny of herself making toast. That’s George.”
To make the retakes for Woman of the Year, Tracy broke off from shooting Tortilla Flat, his first picture for Victor Fleming since the Yearling debacle. Tracy’s relationship with the book’s author, John Steinbeck, dated from a late-night encounter at Chasen’s in the early summer of 1939, when Steinbeck was reeling from the uproar created by the publication, just two months earlier, of The Grapes of Wrath. The men talked until 2:30, comparing notes on the odd burden of fame and parting with the hope they would soon work together.
That fall, as Tracy was preparing to play Thomas Edison, he and Fleming approached Steinbeck with the notion of filming The Red Pony at M-G-M, an idea to which the author, now flush with royalty money, was decidedly cool. Steinbeck was suspicious of Hollywood in general and Metro in particular, having just seen the first screen adaptation of one of his books, Of Mice and Men, spectacularly filmed by director Lewis Milestone at the tiny Culver City studio of Hal Roach. “There was great unity,” he wrote, “because only one man touched it, and that was Milestone.” That sort of unity, he argued, was impossible at the producer-dominated mechanism that was M-G-M.
A subject far closer to Steinbeck’s heart was a six-week collecting trip to the Gulf of California he was planning with marine biologist Ed Ricketts. He described their plans to Tracy one night over dinner, saying they planned to write a book to pay for the trip and invited him along.3 Having just started I Take This Woman for the third time, Tracy was in the mood for a long break and volunteered to secure a boat for the expedition. Three days later, he drove Steinbeck, his wife Carol, and Louise to San Pedro to see the We’re Here, which looked to be ideal. Then the owner wanted too much money and the deal collapsed. “I look on you with peculiar and strong affection,” Steinbeck wrote Tracy, “which must be the result of some profound recognition. I hope it will remain like that. Meanwhile, think about joining us at Guaymas.”
Louise was all for it, but Spence, as it turned out, could manage only four weeks between the finish of Edison, the Man, and the start of Boom Town and had to settle for a short trip to Phoenix instead. In September 1940 Steinbeck had Tracy to the house he had built at the Biddle Ranch, Los Gatos, where he was preparing the narration for a documentary that had been shot in Mexico over the spring. Codirected by Herbert Klein and Alexander Hammid, The Forgotten Village told the story of a cholera outbreak in the rural village of Santiago and the clash that takes place between the healing traditions of the village elders and modern medical science. Steinbeck asked Tracy if he would narrate the completed film and was delighted when he said that he would. “He has a great heart,” Steinbeck wrote his friend, actor Max Wagner. “I knew he would want to do it.”
Tracy had just started Jekyll and Hyde when he saw a rough cut of The Forgotten Village in a screening room at M-G-M. He professed to like the film but was guarded and, Steinbeck thought, “a little afraid” of Herbert Klein’s direction. Steinbeck came down to Los Angeles, but by the time he arrived, Klein was ill and in the hospital and Tracy had been told he couldn’t do the narration, suggesting to him that the studio had played along just long enough to get Jekyll and Hyde under way. Steinbeck blamed Eddie Mannix for the double cross and briefly plotted revenge, intending to “blast” Metro’s forthcoming production of Tortilla Flat and wondering in a letter to his agent if they couldn’t make trouble over the similarities between The Red Pony and The Yearling, which extended to the name of the boys (which in both cases was Jody). “If we don’t want money we might easily get a court order,” Steinbeck suggested. “And I want to plague them as much as I can.”
The flap over Forgotten Village was allowed to die down—Burgess Meredith replaced Tracy as the film’s narrator—and an olive branch was extended in the form of an offer to adapt Tortilla Flat to the screen. “I had a letter yesterday from your charming bosses asking whether I would like to collaborate on Tortilla Flat, in which, it was said, you were to be,” Steinbeck wrote Tracy in mid-June. “I replied that I would like to very much if I could be happy doing it—my happiness requiring control of the script, a lot of money, and the right to work somewhere but Hollywood.”
Steinbeck couldn’t see how anything more than a series of blackouts could be made from his tales of idyllic poverty in the hills above the California coast. He had already seen one failed attempt at dramatization—a Broadway play that lasted all of five performances—and doubted anything better could come from a film version. When he sold the screen rights to Paramount in 1935 he needed the money, and he wasn’t kidding when he offered Metro, which acquired the rights in 1940, $10,000 to simply take it off the market. Producer Sam Zimbalist put John Lee Mahin on the script, and the two men were in Monterey, soaking up the local atmosphere, when they encountered Steinbeck at a local bar where the fishermen and soldiers drank.
“What are you doing to my story?” the author demanded.
“We’ve butched it up plenty,” came the reply.
What they had done, other than to remove a lot of the sex, petty theft, and drunkenness of the book, was to change the ending, focusing on the “poison of possessions” and letting Steinbeck’s romantic hero, Danny, live only to have him married off—another form of death among the paisanos of the novel. Much to everyone’s surprise, Steinbeck asked to see the script and actually liked it, telling Mahin that he’d made the story “a hell of a lot more fun” by taking all the “drama and message” out of it. Over a midnight session at Chasen’s, Steinbeck told Tracy much the same thing and blessed the making of the film, at least to the extent that he could approve of anything Metro did with his material.
Steinbeck’s conniving Pilon was not unlike Manuel in that the role required both makeup and an accent (not to mention singing), but Tracy never resisted the assignment as he had Captains Courageous and had, in fact, been linked to the project for more than a year. The accent seemed to flow naturally from the script’s Runyonesque dialogue, suggesting the mixed blood of the paisanos and the notion they spoke both English and Spanish in an equally unique manner. His skin was darkened as it had been for Manuel, but his hair was left uncurled, hidden as it was under a battered hat with a white poppy poked carelessly into its band.
Victor Fleming exuded an unquestionable authority—Tracy always addressed him as “Mr. Fleming” in front of the cast and crew—and the decorum on the set was exemplary. The shoot was confined almost entirely to indoor sets, the largest, on M-G-M’s Stage 3, being a fanciful exterior designed by Paul Groesse, weedy yards and rickety fences and a dirt road leading off to a panoramic view of Monterey and the ocean beyond.
In a rare stab at ethnic fidelity, Zimbalist tried borrowing Rita Hayworth to play Dolores Engracia “Sweets” Ramirez and then, failing that, dropped Hedy Lamarr into the part about the same time John Garfield was secured on loan from Warner Bros. for the role of Danny. Once Lamarr was set for the picture, Tracy conspired to stash his ever-present box of chocolates—which usually occupied the third drawer of his dressing room desk—in her dressing room instead, figuring that casual visits to a frequent costar would not be nearly as scrutinized as trips to his own on-set trailer, where his weight was carefully monitored and he endured a constant razzing from the crew over his addiction to sweets.
“I can see,” said John Erskine, “that the kind of truth which only the actor can convey is something the audience will recognize out of their experience. But, to secure this effect of convincing reality, should pictures give us any particular kind of story or character which we don’t get now?”
Tracy thought a mo
ment. “I doubt it,” he said finally. “We get all kinds of characters, don’t we? The only restriction is in what we are permitted to say about them.”
“But that’s the same thing as not being allowed to portray them.”
“Not quite the same thing. If all types of characters are already permissible on the screen, we shall gradually win the privilege of understanding them.”
“You’re not interested, then, in people of any particular economic group?”
He looked surprised. “Why should I be? I am interested in people. They may be in one group today and in another tomorrow.”
Still, Erskine thought Tracy was interested, more than he realized, in characters rising “from a lower to a higher condition” and that, from talking to him, he would always prefer people who could survive their successes and “bear their weight of human sorrows.” He was also sure that although Tracy was more interested in interpreting people than in putting over any social or economic theories, his interpretations suggested a politically liberal point of view, something that was implicit in the generosity of his own spirit.
“But,” said Erskine, “the films which we seem to demand cannot possibly cover the whole range of a mature person’s experience. Our pictures must be growing toward a real presentation of life, but only a small part of our life is presented.”
James Curtis Page 58