James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Unable to match Morley for dexterity and accent, Tracy delivered a performance so intense that he rendered the character, in George Cukor’s words, a “cold-blooded monster” who cloaked a string of petty crimes in an obsessive concern for the well-being of his wastrel son, the unseen but ever-present Edward of the play’s title. “It’s rather disconcerting to me to find how easily I play a heel,” Tracy remarked to Cukor. “I’m a better actor than I thought I was. When I was doing Father Flanagan, that was acting. This is not acting.”

  Hepburn arrived on June 10, registering at Claridge’s and generally keeping a low profile. There was a vogue for extended takes, spurred by word of Alfred Hitchcock’s use of nine- and ten-minute takes in his recent production of Rope. They were, however, making excellent time—three or four days ahead on a particularly tight schedule—and had some forty minutes in the can by the end of the third week. “It is very largely Spencer,” Cukor acknowledged in a letter to a friend. “He is such an accomplished actor, works with such ease and surety, that we are able to do long, long scenes—five pages, in fact, which not only makes for speed in shooting but for fluency and flow in the scenes.”

  “The long takes didn’t trouble him at all,” said Freddie Young, the cinematographer on Edward, My Son. “If he couldn’t remember his lines he’d just rub his nose and say something that seemed to make sense. He never dried up.” Deborah Kerr recalled him as unfailingly helpful, and her Grand Guignol descent into drunkenness and old age brought her an Academy Award nomination. “George, do you mind if I tell her something?” Tracy asked one day as they were in the middle of a scene. Kerr was done up as a woman of sixty, gingerly sipping a drink. “You know, darling,” he said gently, “when you’re an alcoholic, you don’t sip, you just throw the whole thing down.” As Kerr later remarked: “Being young and not alcoholic, I didn’t know that.”

  The pace of European production being considerably slower than in Hollywood, Cukor found himself adopting Tracy’s way of working, trying fewer angles and making fewer takes. Exteriors shot at The Mall, Hammersmith, went so smoothly the company was in and out before most residents had a chance to notice. If Kate had come to London simply to provide moral support, she was doubtless relieved to be on hand when Under Capricorn began shooting on another stage on July 19. Starring opposite Joseph Cotten and Michael Wilding in Hitchcock’s Technicolor production was Ingrid Bergman, who was promptly photographed alongside Tracy, smiling broadly, only months from her historic meeting with Roberto Rossellini.

  They completed Edward, My Son, on July 30, 1948, but waited until after the Bank Holiday to have the wrap party in the studio’s cafeteria, where the company presented Tracy with an autographed cricket bat (so amused he was by the terrible importance attached to the test match) and the studio sports club contributed a ball and a cap adorned with the club badge. Kate was “thrilled” with what she had seen of the picture but worried it might be “too long to keep the terrific punch going.”

  Tracy returned stateside on the Queen Mary, the Stricklings again accompanying him. Hepburn followed on the S.S. New Amsterdam, where she found herself quartered next to Paul Muni and his wife. The weather was dismal, communication between the two ships spotty at best. (She learned Clark Gable and Charles Boyer were aboard the Queen but complained that reception was so poor she “couldn’t get any real dirt.”) When the ship docked at the port of New York on August 12, photographers snapped an illustrious cluster of arriving passengers—Gable, Tracy, and a beaming Boyer—all, of course, under Strickling’s watchful supervision.

  Tracy was at the River Club into September, Hepburn alternately in Hartford and nearby on Forty-ninth Street. Metro had a new production chief in Dore Schary, the onetime actor and screenwriter who was being talked up around town as the “new” Thalberg—a dangerous appellation. Schary had played a minor part in The Last Mile and seemed a bit fixated on Tracy. Their first meeting in Schary’s new suite of offices took on the tone of an amateur theatrical as Tracy, rubbing his hands in a dry wash, assumed the groveling posture of Uriah Heep. “I don’t know if you remember me,” he said in his very best Roland Young. “My name is Tracy … Well sir, you may remember that I was in a play with you called The Last Mile…Well, believe me, Mr. Schary, you can ask anyone in that play—I told all of them—just keep your eye on that young fella who plays the reporter—one day he’s going to be head of M-G-M.” Then, dropping the character, he added: “And so you are—you son of a bitch.” Tracy told Schary he had no gripes, no complaints, that he was on the wagon and that he felt pretty good. “Just send me the stuff you want me to do. If I like it, I’ll do it. If not, I’ll tell you to get another player.”

  Schary’s first production for M-G-M was to be William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, and it had already been announced that Tracy would play lawyer John Gavin Stevens with Claude Jarman, Jr., the eventual Jody of The Yearling, as his nephew. Within a month Intruder had been supplanted by Robinson Crusoe, a story that had been in and out of the columns for at least three years. Tracy disliked the prospect of traveling to Jamaica, where the exteriors were to be shot, and began making noises once again of wanting out of his M-G-M contract. In New York, Lawrence Langner pressed for word on Touch of the Poet and suggested to Kate that she arrange for Captains Courageous to be shown in Salem so that O’Neill and his wife Carlotta could see it.

  By the first of the year, Tracy was set to do a different picture for Schary, the somewhat true story of how an itinerant newspaperman working for the American government partnered with a convicted smuggler to get much-needed rubber out of the Jap-infested territories of Southeast Asia. Called Operation Malaya, it had been set for Schary to do at RKO, where he had planned to star Robert Mitchum and Merle Oberon. When Howard Hughes, more interested in the growing Communist threat than wartime Axis enemies, pulled the plug on it, Schary arranged to have the material, which included a full screenplay by novelist Frank Fenton, brought to M-G-M. As his inaugural project for the studio, Operation Malaya was fast-tracked on the production schedule, a start date aggressively set for mid-February 1949. Tracy had just read Fenton’s script, filled with the florid dialogue typical of Fenton’s B-picture output, when he learned, over dinner at Romanoff’s, that Victor Fleming had died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine.

  Tracy had not seen much of Fleming in the four years that had passed since the completion of A Guy Named Joe, the last of their five pictures together. In the interim, Vic had directed just two additional films—Clark Gable’s ill-fated return to the screen, Adventure, and a top-heavy version of the Maxwell Anderson play Joan of Lorraine, for which he had partnered with Ingrid Bergman and producer Walter Wanger. The epic film had recently had its New York and Hollywood premieres to very mixed reviews, and Fleming was reported to have been “exhausted” after the nearly two-year ordeal of getting it made. (“Vic Fleming wore himself out on that picture,” Bergman later wrote. “He was here, there, and everywhere.”) Fleming was vacationing in Arizona with his wife and two daughters when he began complaining of chest pains at the Beaver Creek Guest Ranch, about twenty miles east of Cottonwood. He died en route to the hospital.

  “Mike Romanoff,” remembered Susie Tracy, “was the one who told my father that Fleming had died. He came over to the table and very quietly said, ‘Did you know about …’ My dad was utterly stunned. He really couldn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. Finally he said, ‘Go ahead with your meal, but you’ll have to excuse me. I can’t stay.’ And it was clear that he was very upset about it.” Tracy attended the Fleming services on January 10, 1949, at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, as did Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, L. B. Mayer, Van Johnson, Ingrid Bergman, and a number of others.

  With the deaths of Dick Mook, Father Flanagan, and now Fleming coming within such a short span of time, Tracy found himself drawn closer to Gable, who was, as they both approached fifty, a touchstone to earlier and happier times. Schary’s arrival had given the studio an atmosphere of uncertainty,
for Mayer, Mannix, and Thau were no longer the triumvirate in charge of production, and all the producers on the lot had, for the first time since the heyday of Irving Thalberg, been consolidated under one man. Gable had come onto the set of State of the Union to be photographed with his old friend and costar, the two men grayer and heavier than they had been only a few years earlier but letting fly with the same good-natured insults. Not long after the Fleming funeral, at which Gable was a pallbearer, Tracy returned the favor by walking onto the set of Any Number Can Play.

  “He and Gable went into Gable’s dressing room,” Darryl Hickman remembered, “and they laughed—I never heard two men carry on like Gable and Tracy carried on. They had a great relationship. They laughed and told old stories, and everything just shut down for about an hour while Gable and Tracy sat in that dressing room, and it shook with them having a ball. It was just a delight to sit there and listen to them do it.”

  Soon after, Gable ambled onto the stage where Operation Malaya was shooting, planted himself in a comfortable chair, and greeted the unlikely sight of Tracy, in white linen suit and Panama hat, gingerly making his way through a stand of jungle growth with a tremendous peal of laughter. “That’s all right,” shouted Tracy. “This time, I get the girl.” Gable returned: “That’s just because I’m not in the picture!” Later, when Tracy wandered onto the set of Gable’s next film, the King showed him a framed clipping from a Shanghai newspaper naming Parnell the best picture of the year. “Looky here Spence,” he said, “and admit defeat.” Underneath the yellowing review were scrawled the words “50 million Chinese can’t be wrong.” Tracy scornfully studied the display, then handed it back. “Well, King, now I know where you belong … in China.”

  With Clark Gable during the filming of Gable’s picture Homecoming, 1947. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  Collegial and sweet-tempered, Dore Schary was sincere in his desire to raise the tone and profitability of the M-G-M program, taking personal responsibility for an announced slate of sixty-seven features for the 1949–50 season. Heading the list, Operation Malaya had the advantage of a short schedule and, given its cast and pretensions, the relatively modest budget of $1.3 million. Tracy took the role of Carny Carnahan, submitting to a prison buzz cut that had the effect of aging him ten years. Jimmy Stewart, playing the newsman, would share the screen with Tracy for the first time since The Murder Man, when he was, as he once remarked, “all hands and feet and didn’t seem to know what to do with either.” Sydney Greenstreet, John Hodiak, Lionel Barrymore, Gilbert Roland, and Valentina Cortese, borrowed from Fox, rounded out the principal cast.

  A genuine potboiler, turgid and obvious, Operation Malaya was difficult to take seriously, and Tracy and Stewart played their parts as if they were making a “Road” picture rather than an exotic adventure yarn. “This normally would be a Gable-Tracy picture,” Tracy told a visiting columnist who was somehow able to get on the set, “but Gable isn’t available, so I am playing his part.” Added Stewart: “Yeah, and I’m playing Tracy.” Questioned about his next picture, Tracy said it was called Love Is Legal. “Naturally, I am playing MY part in a Katharine Hepburn picture.”

  Moments later, as if on cue, Hepburn came sauntering onto the set in a white flannel pantsuit, George Cukor at her side. “We want to talk to you,” she said, ignoring the fact that director Richard Thorpe and the assembled cast and crew were ready to make a scene. “Well, fine,” said Tracy, gesturing grandly toward the bustling set, “we’ll call off all this.”

  Love Is Legal, of course, became known as Adam’s Rib, possibly the best of all the Tracy-Hepburn pictures and certainly one of the sharpest romantic comedies ever to come out of Hollywood. Significantly, the idea, and the script that evolved from it, owed nothing to the development process that put producers in charge and rendered writers as interchangeable as transcription typists. Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin had authored exactly one original screenplay, an uncommonly intelligent backstage drama called A Double Life. Written entirely on spec, it went on to earn Academy Award nominations for the Kanins and for George Cukor—who directed the film on loan to Universal—and a late win for Ronald Colman as Best Actor. Kanin described motoring through Connecticut on a dreary winter afternoon when he asked his wife to tell him “something interesting about Connecticut.” She responded with the story of two couples who had divorced and intermarried after a week’s vacation together in England. One couple was actor Raymond Massey and his wife, the actress Adrianne Allen. The other was William Dwight Witney and his wife Dorothy, both of whom, as it turned out, were successful New Haven attorneys.

  “Can you see it as a movie?” Kanin asked excitedly.

  “Not really,” said Gordon. “Unbelievable. Too pat. Like life.”

  “What about just the first half then? Two lawyers. Married. And they get onto opposite sides of a case.”

  They began spinning the idea, and the obviousness of the casting hit them both like a bolt of lightning. “Kate and Spence!” they erupted in unison.

  The screenplay, tentatively titled Man and Wife, came together with remarkable speed, and a first draft was back from the steno bureau on November 10. Following consultations with both Tracy and Hepburn—Kate in particular—a revised 152-page version was submitted to Dore Schary via Hepburn and the William Morris Agency on January 27, 1949. Three days later, a deal was closed for $175,000, which included the authors’ services should any rewrites be necessary.

  “It was the first time in thirty years the studio had ever seen a screenplay that was ready to shoot immediately, without changes,” said Larry Weingarten, who was assigned to produce the picture with Cukor directing. So when Kate appeared with Cukor on the set of Operation Malaya and said to Spence, “We want to talk to you,” it was not simply a social call she had in mind but an impromptu script conference.

  Man and Wife grew expressly from the Kanins’ intimate knowledge of the Tracy-Hepburn relationship, but putting that relationship on screen in all its tones and colorations was risky business, given how fiercely private the two people in question were. “Their on-camera relationship reflected both the easy intimacy they shared in the off-camera relationship and much of my own marriage to Ruth,” said Kanin, who came west with his wife. “They were easy to write for.”

  That Cukor was assigned the project made perfect sense, as he too had observed Spence and Kate at close range over a number of years. Moreover, as an actress, Ruth Gordon had been directed by Cukor and knew his strengths. Their collective experience on A Double Life had been pleasant and rewarding. With Weingarten producing and, in effect, shielding the company from front-office interference, the package proved the perfect incubator for a well-crafted movie.2 “The Kanins would do certain scenes,” said Cukor, “and we would go to my house and read them and hear how they sounded aloud, then go to the studio where I would stage them kind of roughly with a camera and see how they worked.”

  The shooting final was dated February 24, 1949, with a start date set for late May. Tracy finished with Operation Malaya on March 24, and began his customary six-week vacation on April 4. Knowing the caliber of material he had to work with, Cukor lit into preparations and arranged to shoot the setup—an attempted domestic homicide—during two weeks of gritty location work in New York City. Performing these early scenes would be a quartet of young Broadway stage actors, all of whom would be playing their first substantial parts on screen—Tom Ewell, David Wayne, Jean Hagen, and, in the role of the earnest Doris Attinger, the rattlebrained defendant who pulls a Frankie-and-Johnny on her philandering husband, singer-actress Judy Holliday. Gar Kanin had brought Holliday to prominence in his play Born Yesterday (where she replaced, out of town, the show’s original star, Jean Arthur) and was on a campaign to have her re-create the role of Billie Dawn in the film version. Columbia studio head Harry Cohn had already rejected the idea—even the making of a screen test—so it became Kate’s idea to make Love Is Legal the test Cohn denied her by custom-tailoring the role of Doris to
Holliday’s very considerable talents.

  When Tracy returned to Culver City on May 16, Hepburn was attempting to persuade Cole Porter to write something original for Kip Lurie, David Wayne’s wisecracking songwriter, to sing to her character in the picture. (Kanin had written one, which everyone agreed was lousy.) Porter, at first, declined, maintaining the song’s intended target, Madeline Bonner, had a name he could neither abide nor rhyme. Later, he agreed so long as the name of the character was changed from Madeline to Amanda.3 (“Some of the things Kate goes in and demands!” marveled Cukor. “The Cole Porter song, for instance. Not the crappy sort of star demands. She always wanted something for the show.”) The name of Tracy’s character was similarly changed from Ned to Adam, and soon after the start of production the picture became officially known as Adam’s Rib.

  Filming began on May 31, 1949, Tracy and Hepburn settling into their roles with an effortless grace, their ad-libs, their intimacies and parries those of genuine lovers, not actors or movie stars, their scenes together a deft embodiment of what Kenneth Tynan called “a whole tradition of American sophistication,” Tracy, the “placid, sensible panda,” Hepburn, the “gracious, deadpan albatross,” replacing “the crude comedy of flirtation” with the subtler, warmer comedy of marriage as practiced not by ingenues but by seasoned artists well into their forties. The home movie horsing around on the Kanins’ Connecticut farm, the droll courtroom flirtations, the off-screen kiss (by now a trademark of the Tracy-Hepburn combination), the wordless looks.

  Cole Porter plays “Farewell, Amanda,” as Tracy and Hepburn listen on the set of Adam’s Rib, 1949. (SUSIE TRACY)

  “It was human,” said Cukor. “Comedy isn’t really any good, isn’t really funny, without that. First you’ve got to be funny, and then, to elevate the comedy, you’ve got to be human.”