AMANDA
You were making some noises in the night.
ADAM
(immersed in his paper)
I always do. Don’t I? At least you always say I always do. How do I know?
AMANDA
(without looking up)
You do, but not this kind.
ADAM
What kind?
AMANDA
Can’t remember exactly, naturally, but sort of like ooooo-eehah! ooooo-eegah.
(She emits a series of strange groans and grunts and whistles and wheezes.)
Like that, sort of.
ADAM
You don’t say.
AMANDA
Yes.
ADAM
Fascinating.
AMANDA
(She looks at him.)
What?
ADAM
I say I sound fascinating.
AMANDA
(her lovely smile shining)
You’ll do.
“I think,” said Katharine Houghton,
that the film represents a fairly accurate dynamic—for one aspect of their relationship, anyway. The banter and the flirtation seem very genuine. I don’t know that Spencer ever slapped her on the rump or pointed a licorice pistol at her as he does in the film, but the essence of the Bonner relationship seems right on. Yet Kate, especially in the early years of their relationship, was never confident that she was good enough or beautiful enough to keep Spencer’s interest. Who knows why she felt that way, but she often agonized over that. Amanda is more confident than Kate of her spouse. I doubt that Kanin or Gordon ever suspected the depth of Kate’s insecurity, or maybe they simply chose not to address it. One could say that the Bonners represent Tracy and Hepburn at their best with each other. They certainly seem to be comfortable playing those roles, and I doubt that they would seem so comfortable if it weren’t natural to them. Perhaps one could say that the Bonners were a couple they would have liked the world to think they were.
Sharing an intimate moment in Adam’s Rib. (SUSIE TRACY)
As Hepburn told Kenneth Tynan in 1952: “Spence and I have an agreement when we’re working. If we fluff a line, we won’t stop. In Adam’s Rib, there was a scene with us dressing to go out, and I had to put on a hat and say, ‘How do I look?’ and he was supposed to say something good and flattering. What happened was, he stepped back and said: ‘You look like Grandma Moses!’ I stamped my foot and sort of yelped—but they printed it.”
The youthful supporting cast brought out the paternal instincts of the veteran filmmakers—Cukor, the Kanins, Tracy and Hepburn. “In the course of the shooting of Adam’s Rib,” Kanin wrote, “Kate and Spencer involved everyone necessary in our master plan: the costume designer, Orry-Kelly; the hairdressers; the make-up people; the cameraman Joe Ruttenberg; the supporting players; everyone and everything was aimed toward Judy’s making a hit.” When it came time for Holliday’s big scene, Amanda’s jailhouse interview of the would-be murderess, Hepburn asked that Cukor set it up so that it showcased Judy, she in profile, framing the left edge of the shot, Eve March, her secretary, to the right, the whole thing played in one continuous five-minute take. “She was wonderful with Judy Holliday,” said Tom Ewell. “She worked like a dog to throw the emphasis on her with extra lines and closeups. No other star ever did that.”
The cast’s crisp ensemble playing gave the film a tart, noirish edge suited more to the stark independent productions of the time and not the ultra-glossy tradition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. One day on the set, Tracy gave Cukor a mock scolding: “Damn it, George, why did you hire all these young actors from New York? They’re acting us old timers right off the picture!” The casting, though, was as much Hepburn’s doing as Cukor’s, as she could take credit not only for Holliday’s presence in the picture, but also Tom Ewell’s, Eve March’s, and Marvin Kaplan’s. “Hepburn called me personally in New York,” Ewell recalled, “and said, ‘Look, if you do this film, I’ll do everything I can to be your press agent.’ She kept her promise.” Kaplan’s soft-edged Brooklyn drone caught Hepburn’s attention at a performance of L.A.’s Circle Players, and she referred him to George Cukor for an interview. (“Katharine Hepburn’s your agent,” Cukor told him.) Freshly graduated from USC, Kaplan made his film debut as the court reporter in the picture.
David Wayne, on leave from Broadway’s Mister Roberts, thought Tracy “the greatest motion picture actor that ever was” and observed his work on the set “in a kind of wonderment.” Tracy’s technique, Wayne decided, was indiscernible: “I tried to measure why he was so right in the part each day. I never knew him to not know every word of the script. I never knew him to not be exactly right in every word and move the director suggested, but in addition to that he brought a mental aggrandizement to the scene that had not been hinted at by the authors.”
George Cukor directing Adam’s Rib. Note the dubious look on Tracy’s face. (SUSIE TRACY)
The company spent two solid weeks on the courtroom set on which the Bonners’ battle of wits takes place, the principal cast, excepting Wayne, gathered together under Cukor’s watchful eye. Tracy was in his element, comfortable, in full command of the character and not particularly interested in the few things Cukor had to say to him. “Sometimes he would just say, ‘Yes, George,’ ” as Marvin Kaplan remembered it. “I don’t think he liked to be directed. But at the end of the day, when everyone else was tired, Hepburn could wrap her legs, her whole body, around this pole in the courtroom and watch and absorb like a sponge exactly what Mr. Cukor wanted her to do in the next day’s shooting.” Tracy would watch quietly, a mildly skeptical look on his face. “I don’t think he was one for working out a lot of stuff,” Hepburn said. “I think he knew it, then he was it.”
On the day actress Hope Emerson—six feet two and 240 pounds—was to hoist him into the air (in support of Amanda’s contention that “woman can be quite the equal of man in any and all fields”), Tracy was particularly boisterous, recalling the specialty acts and the tumblers he had seen in vaudeville as a kid.
“Hope Emerson was a very sweet woman who was not half as strong as she looked,” said Kaplan. “Tracy was attached by wires, so he could sit in the air and it would look like she was holding him.” Emerson was posed grasping Tracy’s left foot, her enormous right hand supporting his rump like a bicycle seat. “He said such terrible things to her during the take— ‘Watch it! Watch it! What are you doing down there?’ The woman started to blush and then she put her hand down, and there he was left hanging in the middle of the air with no support whatsoever.”
Edward, My Son had its New York opening during the making of Adam’s Rib, and Tracy, as he had feared, took a drubbing from critics familiar with the wit and precision of Robert Morley’s performance (which had just closed on Broadway). Bosley Crowther lamented the play had been “drained of its most trenchant poison” in its transfer to the screen, the “plainly un-British Spencer Tracy” acting the principal role. “Apart from the hopeless miscasting of Mr. Tracy,” the New Yorker added, “the picture is fortunate in its acting.” Morley himself thought the criticism unfair in that Tracy had been slammed for playing it too straight. “I’m not sure there was much alternative,” the actor said in his autobiography. “When some years later I did it myself on television in the States, it was not very successful. It was much easier to play on the stage with scenery than it was to act in the more realistic settings which are necessary on the screen. A great deal of its initial success depended, too, on my speaking direct to the audience, and this device loses its spontaneity when attempted in the cinema.”
Edward, My Son performed acceptably in New York, but with overhead loaded into its already inflated cost, the film became Tracy’s biggest money-loser at M-G-M, and his first since Northwest Passage. His star was plainly fading, his future well and firmly fixed on a return to the stage. With the kids now grown and the clinic no longer dependent solely on his support for its survival, he seemed more comfortable w
ith the natural arc of an actor’s career, the inevitable easing into mature roles, the passing of the commercial mantle to a younger generation. Upon his arrival in England, fully aware that he was being led to the slaughter, he had noted that he had made “nearly 40 films” since 1930. (The number was actually forty-five.) “No matter what anyone says, I have been bad in about 30 of them. The fault has been my own.”
Then he smiled, stuck out his jaw as if inviting somebody to take a poke at it, and strolled off, seemingly comfortable, at least for the moment, in his own skin.
* * *
1 The agreement between the Motion Picture Association of America and the British government, which went into effect June 14, 1948, limited remittances to the United States to $17 million a year, plus an amount equal to the earnings of all British product released in the United States. The excess revenues, as much as $15 million annually, could be used in Britain for the production of American films with British personnel. In the ensuing two years, more than $10 million in frozen sterling was expended on film production and story acquisitions by five major American studios, M-G-M included.
2 The change of title—the Kanins’ original Man and Wife being deemed “dangerously indiscreet”—was the only executive mandate that stuck.
3 As it turned out, “Farewell, Amanda” was a trunk item, and Porter’s insistence on the change of name was simply to facilitate its use.
CHAPTER 24
Father of the Bride
* * *
I had been acting in Hollywood since 1944,” said William Self.
Soon after I got out here, I entered the Motion Picture Tennis Tournament, which was an annual event in those days, and I won it. All of a sudden, people knew in a vague way that there was a fellow named Bill Self who was an actor—or said he was—and a tennis player. Tim Durant called me up one day and said, “Would you like to play tennis with Charlie Chaplin?” I said, “Of course I would.” So we started doing that. And then one day Tim called and said, “We’re going to play across the street from Charlie’s at Irene Selznick’s tennis court with some mystery guests.” I said, “Okay.” I didn’t have a car in those days, so Tim had to pick me up. We went to Irene Selznick’s, and on the court hitting some balls were Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Alfred De Liagre, Jr., the Broadway producer, and Oscar Hammerstein II. Not bad company.
I was introduced and we played some mixed doubles. Tim was a pretty good player. I was by far the best player and, therefore, everyone wanted me as a partner. Tracy was the worst player; he was not too bad at hitting the ball, but he was the worst at moving. So Tracy and I became partners. Later in the day, when we all sat around after we played, Hepburn was very aggressive: “So you’re an actor. What have you done?” And then: “How can we help you?” Spencer was more laid back—I suppose he couldn’t have cared less about meeting another actor—but Hepburn kind of went to bat for me, and almost immediately at M-G-M she got me something.1 That group continued, I would say, for at least three or four months. I’d see all these people two or three times a week, and got to know them very well. At some point, Spence got very interested in me as someone who could play tennis with John. John, with all of his handicaps, was a pretty good player. Even with his bad leg, he moved remarkably well. So I started going to the ranch they had on White Oak Avenue to play tennis with John. And I played with Susie, and I played with Mrs. Tracy, who wasn’t a bad player.
When Malaya started in February 1949, Bill Self had a bit as one of Sydney Greenstreet’s henchmen. Later that spring, Self was cast as Klausner, the jury foreman, in Adam’s Rib, giving him a box seat for the filming of the courtroom scenes. “The affection between Tracy and Hepburn was rather obvious,” he said.
He would touch her, or they’d laugh about an inside joke of some kind. Stuff like that. It was all great for me, because they would reminisce a little bit about their early careers. I think that if you were around them, as I was day after day after day, it was evident that they cared for each other a great deal. And then people began to tell me things. Tim Durant would tell me what he knew about them, and so forth. I didn’t know, when I was twenty-something years old, whether they were lovers or not, but I knew they cared a great deal about each other.
Then one day Hepburn talked to me about Spence—this was fairly early—and she said, “You know, Bill, Spence and I can’t live together. We are together, but we can’t live together.” She was concerned about what I would think about Louise and the children, I guess. I think Spence was a little concerned about my seeing him one day, and then on the next day I was seeing Louise and John and Susie, and he wanted to be sure our stories were straight. We cooked up something so that if I did say that I had seen him, it was always that we had played some tennis at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Actually, I played tennis at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Kate. I never played there with Spence that I remember, but that was the cover story … Spence absolutely felt that Louise didn’t know.
On the tennis court, circa 1944. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Kate played along, aware that Spence had a real need to believe that Louise didn’t know, but she realized, of course, that Louise couldn’t possibly have been so clueless. “She’d have had to have been so dense, which she wasn’t. Smart woman. Unsensitive. What shall I say? I think she had no sense of magic, she had no sense of the enormous complication of an Irish drunk.”
Chuck Sligh could remember a brief exchange with Louise while visiting Los Angeles in the early fifties. The kids were out on their own, and she was alone at the ranch in Encino.
Louise would round the three up so that we could all be together. This one time she called each of the children and Spence. Then she took me down to Chasen’s and each of the others came in their own car, so we had five people and four cars. We had a nice dinner, friendly. Spence was, of course, always fun to listen to. Finally, somebody said, “Well, I guess we’ve got to be going.” And each of them went out and got in their own car and went. Louise and I drove back to the house, and on the way out I said, “Louise, how come you and Spence are still married? I’m surprised you haven’t divorced him. I know he’s a Catholic, but—”
She said, “Well, he is a Catholic … and I thought at first this would all just … blow over … but it didn’t … Now … I think it would be sort of silly after all this time to divorce him.” And that was the end of that conversation.
In April 1949 Kate was finally ready to do As You Like It for the Theatre Guild, and it became a source of some tension between her and Tracy. For most of the time she had known him, she had made it her business to be where he was, to do what he wanted. “He couldn’t have left me,” she said. “I was too adorable—and sensible. I loved him and made a life for him that was irresistible to him. Otherwise, I think he would have wandered off.”
Eight years into the relationship, with her Metro contract having lapsed and her only work being pictures in which she was costarred with Tracy, she needed to get away, to go back to the stage, to stretch herself and try something different. Over the summer of 1949 she worked with actress Constance Collier, whose roles had included Juliet and Portia and Lady Macbeth and who had excited her interest in Shakespeare after years of prodding on the part of Lawrence Langner.
Retakes for Adam’s Rib finished the last week of August 1949. Hepburn staged the company wrap party and then headed east to Connecticut. Tracy followed shortly thereafter, installing himself at New York’s Pierre Hotel. He was back in New York in October, beset by stomach troubles and headed for Boston, where he checked into Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for “the works.”
As Kate could never be a part of the Tracy family, neither could Spence ever fit in with the Hepburns. “I think,” said Kate, “he was embarrassed with Mother and Dad because he was married and because it had gone on so long. I didn’t blame him, in a way.” Still, she never really left home, went back most weekends when she was in New York. “And when I went back there, I didn’t go to my atmosphere; I wen
t to their atmosphere—of which I was a part.”
Tracy always portrayed Kate’s family as if they were Old Man Vanderhof’s clan from You Can’t Take It With You—strident, self-righteous, a little nuts around the edges. He loved twitting her about her “sacrosanct goddamn family” (as Katharine Houghton so aptly put it), throwing asides into master takes with the hope of sending her up. Shooting State of the Union on the set of a Detroit hotel room, his character was attempting to get a haircut when actor Frank Austin burst in through a side door, a pamphlet-wielding crackpot claiming to represent the eight hundred members of the League for the Abolition of Taxation. “The government should earn its own money like the rest of us!” he declared as Van Johnson hustled him from the room, “Abolish taxation!” Tracy, with an impish grin on his face, said to Hepburn. “Looks a little like your brother Dick,” to which she laughed and then, almost as an afterthought, kicked him sharply in the leg.2
In five days of tests and x-rays at Brigham, nothing proved conclusive. On Saturday, October 22, Tracy made the two-hour drive to Old Saybrook, where the Hepburn family’s summer estate, Fenwick, stood on three acres fronting Long Island Sound at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Katharine Houghton (née Grant, daughter of Kate’s younger sister, Marion), age four, was there with her parents and older brother.
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