M-G-M always resisted per-picture agreements, nurturing instead a dependency on the narcotic of a weekly paycheck. Benny Thau countered with an offer to cancel paragraph 26 of Tracy’s contract, which would mean that, were the agreement to be terminated, Tracy would not be obligated to repay any monies that he had received in excess of $110,000 per picture. The matter was allowed to lie dormant, and Tracy did not respond to Langner until July, when he apologized for not answering sooner and said that he was expecting to come east so they could “have a chat” around September 1. “The picture has been going very well,” he added. “Kazan lives up to your recommendation.” A week later, Guild records show he turned down Damien by Samoan playwright John Kneubuhl on the grounds that he “did not want to play another priest.”
What happened next is unclear, but in proposing to go east and work in partnership with Hepburn on the New York stage, Tracy was changing the dynamic of his twenty-three-year marriage to an unprecedented degree. Tina Gopadze Smith, Dorothy Griffith’s daughter, remembered her mother’s account of a conference in Louis B. Mayer’s office, sometime in the latter forties, in which Louise and, most probably, Spence participated (since it was Miss G.’s job to take down everything that got said). Was Mayer urging a reconciliation, as he so often did when the domestic lives of his players threatened the tranquillity and well-being of the studio? Or was he engineering a quiet separation, perhaps even a divorce, since one of the parties involved was Katharine Hepburn, one of his favorite people, proof positive, he once told his daughter Irene, that one could have “talent without temperament”?
The Tracy-Hepburn combination was a powerful draw at the box office, and it was generally known and acknowledged that Kate had played an important role in keeping Spence on an even keel. Louise, as the innocent party, would have to consent to a divorce under California law and agree to either adultery or extreme cruelty as specific grounds, thus risking adverse publicity that could affect Tracy’s standing with the public. Did Mayer offer the use of his personal attorney? Help with a monetary settlement? Money, perhaps, for the ongoing maintenance and expansion of the clinic? No record now exists of that meeting, and Tina Smith could only remember, by her mother’s account, what Louise said in shutting down the discussion: “I will be Mrs. Spencer Tracy until the day I die.”
Was the clinic a factor in Louise’s gravitational pull? Was it possible that, through the funding he provided, Spence had at last been given a way to respond to the deafness of their son that wasn’t born of guilt and self-recrimination, something that was so thoroughly redemptive that it was to be preserved and fostered at any cost? Never a strong proponent of marriage, Kate was philosophical, if not completely aware of what was happening. “I can’t live with Spence,” she told their friend Bill Self, “and he won’t live with Louise.”
When The Sea of Grass wrapped on August 6, 1946, Tracy made a surprise announcement to Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times. “I think we should appear in a film about two years hence,” he said of the Tracy-Hepburn team,
and then I should play the father of Miss Hepburn. I can’t stay young and act romantic heroes forever. Actually, a critic in the east who praised very highly our work in various pictures together also indicated that he hoped the matching of our personalities would not be carried to the point where audiences might ever weary of us. Therefore, I believe that it is safer that we should rest on laurels gained, rather than try for new ones, and that probably Sea of Grass, which I believe will be a very great picture, should be the final one for a time. It has been a pleasure to work in various pictures with Miss Hepburn. Her honesty in her acting is a remarkable thing. She is the tops.
According to Schallert’s report, which was picked up by the wire services and carried nationally, Hepburn had agreed to a new term contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer “which still permits her to return to the stage.” Langner had advised so strongly against such a commitment that either Tracy, or money, or both were likely factors in her decision. Certainly the quality of the material wasn’t a major consideration; since Woman of the Year Hepburn had appeared in one troubled M-G-M production after another, and her next, A Love Story, in which she was to play Clara Schumann, would be yet another missed opportunity. When the contract was formally signed on September 15, 1946, it specified a term of three years at $4,792.33 a week, a bump in compensation of more than $1,200 a week from what she was paid for The Sea of Grass.
On August 29 Tracy responded to a note from Langner by saying that it seemed “impossible” to find out “anything definite regarding my plans for the full year” but that he was keeping at it and would know something shortly. Kate was going east for the month of September, and Tracy was due to start a six-week vacation himself, after which he was committed to Cass Timberlane. He was back in Los Angeles in time for a clinic board meeting on October 1—his seventh in the space of three years.
In August Louise had unveiled plans for a $500,000 fund-raising campaign to cover the cost of a new building to “meet the needs of the constantly expanding program.” The clinic also obtained the services of a full-time psychologist, Mrs. Alathena Smith, in order to offer psychological counseling, group therapy, and psychological testing for children—a big step in rounding out the program. Another meeting on the eighteenth further clarified the future included a wealth of new programs, extended outreach on an international level, and ongoing refinement of the JTC correspondence course. It was more than one man could ever hope to support, and fourteen new members were added to the board. It was time to bring the public, the community at large, into the grand scheme of what John Tracy Clinic was to become.
Spence took off for Arizona as Kate began filming Love Story1 at M-G-M, but was back before long and present on the lot for much of its production. “He would come on the set every morning,” recalled Paul Henreid, Hepburn’s costar on the picture, “say hello, and then, with a half-smile, ask me, ‘Is she behaving herself?’ Without smiling, I’d say, ‘Oh yes, Spence. She’s being marvelous.’
“ ‘Good, good.’ He would turn to Hepburn. ‘Now Kate, have you learned your lines?’ Rather demurely, she’d say, ‘Yes, dear.’ He’d go on: ‘Now don’t forget. Say the lines loud and clear. Don’t grin and make faces—just say the words.’ And, grinning at him like a child, she’d say, ‘Yes, Spence, I will.’ ”
Observing all this, Clarence Brown, who was directing the picture, once asked her, “Why the hell don’t you find a guy you can marry and raise a family? Otherwise, one of these days when you’re older you’ll be all alone.”
“Yes,” she replied, “and I’ll look back at all the fun I had.”
With the exception of a trailer for the American Cancer Society, Spencer Tracy was entirely offscreen for the year 1946 and his popularity with the public plummeted. End-of-year surveys placed him well out of the top ten, the Motion Picture Herald having fixed him at number twenty-two, behind Van Johnson, Bob Hope, Humphrey Bogart, Margaret O’Brien, Roy Rogers, and Cornel Wilde, among others. (Bing Crosby again came in first.) It was as if the results underscored the precarious situation in which Tracy and a number of his contemporaries now found themselves, slipping in the marketplace as newer, younger personalities moved up. Gable placed thirteenth, Bette Davis fifteenth, Claudette Colbert nineteenth in a tie with Gene Tierney. Mickey Rooney, who had equaled Crosby’s achievement by placing first for three consecutive years, failed to make the list at all.
M-G-M’s new year was awash in Technicolor and all-star casts, the few genuine vehicles on the schedule relegated to B-picture status, the studio settling into a new epoch as the leader in glossy musicals and little else. As a nod to the tastes of prewar audiences, there was still Andy Hardy, still Wallace Beery, still Lionel Barrymore and Robert Montgomery, Ann Sothern and Myrna Loy, but their appearances were fewer, their aging audiences now staying home more with the radio and, in a few cases, the TV set, leaving the neighborhood theaters to changing tastes and kids who wondered what the big deal was
over someone like Gable. The Sea of Grass was tossed in with the other black-and-white features, a major attraction but not the event it might once have been. Set to open at Radio City Music Hall, its initial success was virtually assured, given the receptions accorded the three previous Tracy-Hepburn collaborations. The big question was whether Middle America would embrace a western so insistently artificial at a time when even Roy Rogers shot his pictures out of doors.
“I find my feeling for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn is a mixture of personal respect and professional regret,” Shirley O’Hara wrote for the New Republic.
I’ve admired them for years, and would still rather watch them than any other team on the screen, but in The Sea of Grass it seems wasteful to let two such good, attractive actors wander through a lavish production like thoroughbred somnambulists. Hepburn of the beautiful bones is more polished than ever; Tracy, though he is no longer a priest—here he is a colonel and what the press has called a Cattle Baron—is still playing Father Tracy and is getting more pensive and solemn and good every day. I think back to when he was just Spencer Tracy and an exciting actor, though I minded his always wearing a gray felt hat, and those days are like a noisy picnic remembered in church. His playing has always been on the quiet side, but now that former underacting seems like a wild romp in the sun. And yet I’m sure there is still fire and magnetism behind his strength. It must be some mistaken actor’s mold he has made for himself (or his reputation), and the story chosen because of it, and the awed direction, that give his performance a static quality.
In Los Angeles, Louise and Jane Feely (in town for a job interview) went to a sneak at Spence’s behest. “It was one of those performances that was not all great on his part,” Jane recounted. “Louise said to me, ‘This is her picture.’ I said, ‘Sure is.’ When we came home, the phone rang. She said, ‘Uh oh, there he is. That’s Spencer.’ On the phone she was a good hour. She had to answer all the questions—Which scene? What scene? What did you think? She was in the other room and I kept hearing her say, ‘Well, it was her picture, Spencer. You let her have it. It was HER picture.’ When she got off the telephone, I said, ‘Was he not so happy with it?’ She said, ‘Well, it’s his own fault. She walked off with scenes.’ ”
Remarkably, The Sea of Grass did more than $3 million domestically and another $1.5 million in foreign billings, making it the most popular, commercially, of all the Tracy-Hepburn features. It now remained for Tracy to see if he had the same kind of commercial appeal without Hepburn, given that he hadn’t made a film without her since 1944. Starkly subtitled “A Novel of Husbands and Wives,” Cass Timberlane, with its Book-of-the-Month Club cachet, its serialization in Cosmopolitan, and its rumored advance that ran well into six figures, seemed the perfect vehicle for an aging, albeit reluctant, matinee idol of Tracy’s stature, its sedate, flute-playing judge a meaty counterpoint to any one of a dozen of the industry’s livelier young actresses, a “half-tamed hawk of a girl, twenty-three or -four,” in author Sinclair Lewis’ words, “not tall, smiling, lively of eye …”
Metro paid $150,000 for the picture rights, Tracy involving himself in the development process to an unusual degree. As early as December 1946 he could be spotted in Superior Court alongside director George Sidney, dark glasses in place, observing a divorce action and drinking in the procedural atmosphere of the place. Treatments were commissioned from Sonya Levien and the novelist John O’Hara, who, according to producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr., wanted to “show Sinclair Lewis how the story should really have been written.” O’Hara produced a series of “character portraits” and managed to collaborate with Levien on a draft that was, said Hornblow, “such an unsuccessful screenplay (unsuccessful in terms of the way we all felt about it) that we couldn’t even produce it.” When Tracy returned from New York and the debacle of The Rugged Path, playwright Sidney Kingsley was at work on a script that ultimately “stank” in the collective opinion of Tracy, Hepburn, and Elia Kazan.
Before the completion of Sea of Grass, Donald Ogden Stewart was summoned to the coast, where he and his wife, Ella Winter, established themselves on a corner of Salka Viertel’s Santa Monica property, happily gardening in the Mediterranean climate and dining most Sundays at Kate’s rented place on Beverly Grove Drive. Stewart thought the job “one of the most interesting and difficult” of his Hollywood career, since Cass, as portrayed in the novel, wasn’t a very good part. “He falls in love with Jinny, a lively and mad younger girl from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ and marries her against the opposition of his upper-class neighbors on the exclusive Heights. O.K. so far, but not particularly original. And for the rest of the novel, Cass sits around with what in show business we call ‘egg on his face’ while Jinny takes over.” Stewart considered the problem and came up with a subplot, the kind of social content usually present in a Lewis book but somehow missing in the case of Cass Timberlane. “Cass was a judge, born into and surrounded by the upper class of his home town. Supposing that problem were to enter the picture? Supposing a judge had to fight for his judicial integrity and his self-respect against a danger of which he was only dimly aware—his affection for and belief in his best friends.”
Stewart’s work went a long way toward strengthening the character of Cass, but at the cost of leaving the character of Jinny underdeveloped, a point hit home in December when David Selznick refused the loan of Jennifer Jones for the role. Without Jones, Hornblow was at a loss over whom to cast in the part, having tested “virtually every young actress at the studio.” He told the New York Times he was prepared to delay the picture until the proper woman could be found, and soon Sonya Levien was back at work on the screenplay, charged with punching up the character of Jinny. When Stewart got wind that much of his material had been cut in favor of Levien’s new scenes, he was understandably miffed at being left out of the loop, communicating his upset to Hornblow through his wife, Ella. Filming began on March 29 with Lana Turner—George Sidney’s idea—in the part of Jinny and nobody particularly happy with the script or the way the various drafts had been stitched together like a patchwork quilt.
Production limped along for nearly two weeks, at which point agent Harold Hecht advised Stewart that Tracy was “evidently upset about [the] present script.” Two days later, Hecht informed his client that a letter from Arthur Hornblow was en route to him, asking that he return to California. “Tracy wants [you] to know that he feels all of it is [of] vital importance to him for you to do this and will regard it as [a] mark of your friendship for him.” In his letter, producer Hornblow explained that despite the fact that both he and Tracy liked Stewart’s script, it became clear after his departure for New York that “no likely actress for Jinny wanted any part of it.”
“Tracy,” said Ella Winter, “had refused to make a Judge-Meets-Girl picture with Lana Turner, and his refusal had been accepted as final by [the] producer and studio.” Getting back to the “Wargate matter”—the ethical dilemma that confronts Judge Timberlane as his marriage is crumbling—was no easy thing, as about a quarter of the picture had already been shot. Filming resumed with a greater sense of mission, if not necessarily the wherewithal to accomplish it, and Stewart’s changes, such as they were, came in the form of retakes about halfway through the course of production. “In the book,” said George Sidney, “the judge is supposed to be 41 but he acts 65. We’ve tried to straighten that out. The story is really about two people who haven’t sat down and thought out what their marriage means to them. Each has a different idea about it. The judge wants honesty, integrity, a marriage on his own terms. The girl wants freedom. She wants to go to New York, maybe to a cocktail party in the Waldorf Towers, all the things a small town girl dreams about.”
The son of an M-G-M executive, Sidney, thirty, had been around the studio all of his adult life, initially as a director of Our Gang comedies. “I’d played polo with Spence and he called me ‘Kid.’ He came to my office for the first conference, full of his usual doubts, and asked, ‘Kid, c
an you handle me?’ Getting the fix on a character was agony for him … But once we started, and he had found the motivation, he was marvelous.”
As with the previous picture, Tracy was surrounded by a cast of seasoned character people, among them Mary Astor, Albert Dekker, Margaret Lindsay, Rose Hobart, John Litel, Mona Barrie, Josephine Hutchinson, and John Alexander (who was known to both stage and screen audiences as the boisterous Teddy Brewster of Arsenic and Old Lace). From a publicity standpoint, the most fuss was made over Selena Royle, who had signed a term contract with M-G-M in 1943. Tracy had created a stir by coming onto the set of her first picture on the lot, Mrs. Parkington, and telling Sidney Skolsky she was “one of the few people, when I was in stock, who thought I might someday amount to something on the stage.” Apart from running into him at the studio, however, or into Louise at a premiere, Selena never saw either of them. Not knowing their situation at home, she was plainly bewildered by their seeming aloofness.
“I had pushed their baby’s perambulator along the streets of Brooklyn while we both were playing there,” she said. “We had worked together for months at a time, year after year. I had dined with them, they with me. We had shared a small amount of success together, and we always had been there to console when the going got tough for any one of us … I was never asked to their house, nor was my presence in Hollywood acknowledged in any way.”
Selena was in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, playing Phyllis Thaxter’s mother in the final minutes of the picture, and she was considered part of the M-G-M stock company when she was selected to play Louise Wargate in Cass Timberlane. It wasn’t a big part, and she wasn’t even sure at first if Spence knew she was in it.
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