With Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Father of the Bride. (SUSIE TRACY)
Bennett noticed how accommodating Tracy could be to his fellow performers, a trait that had not always distinguished him in the past. “If they wanted to rehearse, much as he disliked doing it, he would go ahead and rehearse with these people, these other actors, so that they could be secure in what they were doing.” Elizabeth Taylor, who had been at M-G-M since 1943, regarded the opportunity to work with him as a master’s class in the art of film acting: “Even at eighteen I learned so much by just watching Spence … it was his sense of stillness, his ability to use economy of movement, vocal economy. It seemed almost effortless. It seemed as if he wasn’t doing anything, and yet he was doing everything. It came so subtly out of his eyes. Every muscle in his face.”
Tracy, in turn, seemed to regard the boisterous Taylor as he might a second daughter, addressing her as Kitten (as he did in the film) and allowing her to call him Pops. “In between takes, he would be Spence … I mean we would really horse around. He’d chase me, rough me up. I’d tease him. But the minute the camera started, except once—I’d been naughty. I’d really been horsing around on the set, chasing him on a bicycle. And it was my closeup, and it was not a very intense moment, but a serious moment between father and daughter. The camera was on his back, and he played the whole scene with his eyes crossed, seeing how great my powers of concentration were. I could have killed him, but I didn’t bust up.” To his aunt Jenny he wrote: “We have been going along pretty smoothly on Father of the Bride—think it will be a nice, harmless movie.”
Tracy’s case of nerves persisted throughout the making of Father of the Bride, and though he merely seemed “more subdued” to Joan Bennett, he was convinced by the end of production that he had stomach cancer. Hepburn was in New York, where she was playing As You Like It, and he made plans to join her there, traveling to Boston for more tests at Brigham Hospital and another consultation with Dr. Gray. One day he surprised Bill Self by asking him to come along.
“Initially we were going to drive,” Self recalled,
and he wanted me to help him drive to New York, which was kind of a legitimate reason. The plan was that I would pack and meet him at Chasen’s for dinner. He had all the maps and was prepared for it. We were going to have dinner at Chasen’s and then we were going to drive to Palm Springs and spend the first night in Palm Springs, then take off for New York. So I arrived at Chasen’s with my bag. (He even made me go out and buy a hat, because I didn’t have a hat. He said, “You can’t be in New York without a hat.” So he gave me some money and I went out and bought a hat.) I arrived at Chasen’s and told the valet to put my bag in Mr. Tracy’s car. I went in and Spence was sitting there. I don’t remember if anyone was with him or not; there might have been Carroll.
He said, “Where you going?” I said, “I’m going to New York.” He said, “Oh, that’s interesting. I’m going to New York, but not tonight.” I said, “Oh? You’re not going tonight?” He said, “Well, I was going to drive to New York, but I’m not going to drive. I’m going to take the train.” I said, “Well, fine. What’s that mean to me?” He said, “You’re going with me. I have your ticket.”
Everybody says it would have been a disaster [to drive], and I have no doubt they were right. So we had dinner. I came home, caught [my wife] Peggy by surprise, and the next day we left on the train. The trip eastward was uneventful; we got along okay. The only eventful thing was that Fred Astaire and his wife were on the train, and that was the first time I ever met Fred and his wife. I didn’t remind Fred of that meeting until many, many years later. Nothing came of it, but Spence was not anxious to team up with them … While on the train, I said to him, “Why am I with you?” He said, “Because if somebody isn’t with me, people come up to me and talk to me. If I’m talking to somebody that I know, people don’t usually come up.” He said, “That’s particularly true at dinner.”
I never felt as close to Tracy as I felt to Hepburn. With me, Hepburn was very open. She’d say anything. She was just terrific. Tracy was much more reserved. I was careful not to talk about little things. He hated little conversations. “Small talk.” I would have to choose my subjects carefully. He’d rather sit there silently. He once said to me about the New York trip, “You know the real reason I asked you to go to New York? You don’t talk to me. I hate casual conversation. You and I don’t talk about those kinds of things.” I loved to talk about his career, because I didn’t know that much about his career and I was a young actor. I wanted to know more about: How do you do it? And he did talk to me about his career, told me lots of stories about when he got going…
We got to New York. Spence went to his hotel, and I went to mine. Hepburn had borrowed a Rolls-Royce from somebody. The Rolls-Royce would drop her at the theater and then it would drop Spence and me at a different theater. I remember going to see Sir Cedric Hardwicke in Caesar and Cleopatra. Spence always sat in the back row; he would enter the theater late, and he would leave the theater the moment the curtain came down. We dashed backstage to say hello to Sir Cedric Hardwicke, which was kind of interesting to me.
Often, Tracy and Self would walk the theater district after a performance, Kate’s show running later than most. “He told me all these stories about his drinking buddies and what he did and what he shouldn’t have done. We were walking in the Broadway area, and we passed a theater where he said, ‘This is where John Barrymore played Hamlet.’ ” It was the old Harris Theatre, now a Forty-second Street grind house, where Tracy himself had played Killer Mears in The Last Mile.
“Three Guys from Milwaukee” was the original caption for this M-G-M publicity photo. From left: Bill Self, Wisconsin state tennis champion; Tracy; and Frank Parker, U.S. national tennis champion. (WILLIAM SELF)
I said, “Did you ever work with Barrymore?” He said, “No.” And I, being facetious, said, “You would have made a great pair—a couple of drinkers like you.” How stupid can you be? He stopped and said, “What do you mean by that?” I said, “Well, Spence, you know you’re always kidding about the amount of drinking you did …” He said, “I don’t kid about my drinking.”
One evening we went back to Hepburn’s theater and picked her up—or she picked us up if she had the car—and we went to the Pierre. We talked for hours. It was a terrific evening, because I was hearing two giants tell their stories. They talked about George M. Cohan … We talked until two or three in the morning. Earlier, Spence had said, “Call me at eight o’clock and we’ll do something. Sightsee or something.” I said, “Great.” Then we talked much later than I expected. Spence said, “You take Katie back to her home.” So I went with her, and I did that, and then the car dropped me off. The next morning at eight o’clock I thought, Well I can’t call Spence at eight o’clock; we were up till four. I’ll wait a little while. Nine o’clock I called, and he said, “Where the hell have you been??”
I said, “Well, Spence, I thought we were all up so late that I would hesitate to call you at eight o’clock.” And he said, “Well, Bill, people who get along with me do what they say they’re going to do.” And he hangs up.
I had no money; he had been paying the bills. A few minutes later, Katie called and said, “What happened?” And I said, “Well, Kate, I was reluctant to call—you know how late we were up and I was concerned about calling him.” She said, “Well, he’s upset. Let him alone. I’ll fix it up. Don’t call him, don’t bother him. Just stay put.”
So I would say two or three days go by and I don’t hear a word from him. She called me and said, “I’m working on it.” I’m wandering around New York. I have no business there, no money, no nothing. I knew they were going to pay the bills. I wasn’t worried about that. I just didn’t know what to do. And then she called and said, “You’re going home tomorrow, and you leave at such-and-such a time from Penn Station (or whatever it was) and don’t be late.” I said, “I’m not going to be late. Not after this.”
So I met hi
m at the station, and he was cool. Very awkward. My sole purpose for being there was to please him, and here I was and he wouldn’t even talk to me. So we got on the train and we had to change in Chicago, and he warmed up. That was when he told me that he thought he had stomach cancer, told me about his doctor in Boston. And he excused himself for being so touchy, I guess by virtue of having this on his mind. So we got friendly enough. We got to Chicago, and we were met by the M-G-M representative, limousine and all that, and he had booked a suite for us at the Blackstone Hotel. When we got to the suite there was liquor in the room. He said, “I could get this guy fired for that.”
They cleared the room of liquor, and Spence said that he was going to take a nap. He said, “You want the car?” I said, “Well, I went to the University of Chicago, and if I had the car I would go out there to my fraternity house and say hello to some of the guys. I would enjoy doing that.” He said, “Go ahead, take the car. We’ll leave here at such-and-such a time.” I said, “Great.” So I took the car, and I went out there and I bummed around. I was back well ahead of when I was supposed to be back, and I opened the door, and there was Spence sitting in a chair facing the door saying, “Where in the hell have you been??”
I said, “You know where I’ve been. I went out to the University of Chicago.” He said, “Bill, I couldn’t sleep. I can’t go out for a walk. You know that. I’m stuck in this room. You’ve got the car.” And he bawls hell out of me. Much to my surprise, I took him off. I said, “Mr. Tracy, you are too tough for me. When we get back, I never want to see you again. I don’t want anything to do with you.” I was amazed with myself for saying that because I thought, “I’m ruining my career. I’ll never work at M-G-M again.” He was shocked. He was shocked, and I was trembling, I was so angry. I don’t mind being accused of something if I’m wrong, but I was so right. And on top of the other thing, which I was trying to do the best I could. This was totally uncalled for, and so we just gathered our belongings and went to the station and got on the train.
And then he came around and literally apologized to me. He said, “Bill, this whole cancer thing scared me and I’ve been very tight and I’m sorry.” I said, “Well, that’s fine. I just hope I haven’t done anything wrong,” and he said, “No, you haven’t done anything wrong.” In fact, when we got back to Los Angeles, the first thing he did was to take me to Palm Springs with his family, down to the Racket Club to play some tennis and make amends, I guess. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever been to the Racket Club. So everything seemed to be smoothed over. I never totally trusted him again, though. I just realized that I was dealing with a guy who could be pretty tricky.
Tracy observed his fiftieth birthday on April 5, 1950. Already assembled and previewed, Father of the Bride garnered 149 cards rating it outstanding or excellent and another 47 judging it to be “very good.” The audience at the Bay Theatre in Pacific Palisades was split evenly between males and females in the eighteen-to-forty-five age group, and both Berman and Schary were instantly convinced they had a big hit on their hands. Schary, in fact, already had the Hacketts sketching out notes for a sequel.
“I know you will realize with what horror we went into such a venture,” Frances Goodrich apologetically said in a letter to Ed Streeter. “But the studio felt so encouraged, after the very first days of shooting, that they wanted to be prepared … We feel like orphans on this one, sailing on uncharted seas … it is really terrifying. But we go on with our fingers crossed. We are doing, as you probably know, Kay’s first baby. Are you puking already? Don’t sue us.”
As You Like It closed on June 3, the colorful production having received better overall notices than Hepburn herself, even as her infrequently seen legs were widely—and favorably—remarked upon. (“She has the greatest set of legs I ever saw on a woman,” Tim Durant once said.) “They thought I was O.K.,” Hepburn said in her autobiography. “Sort of half carps and half praise. Looking back on my notices which I did not read at the time, I have the impression that I was irritating to the critics. They liked me in The Philadelphia Story, but in Shakespeare—well—it was sort of ‘she has a nerve to be doing this.’ Well I don’t know … At least I enjoyed it.”
She was back in California when Father of the Bride was released nationally on the sixteenth. Already in the midst of a six-week engagement at the Radio City Music Hall, the film surpassed any of Tracy’s previous features, bringing in more than $6 million in worldwide rentals and showing a profit of nearly $3 million on a cost of $1.2 million. From New York, where he had witnessed an advance screening on May 2, Edward Streeter wrote Tracy: “No one who ever sees the picture will be a more severe critic than I was last night in view of the fact that you were portraying ME. All I can say is that you have given me much to live up to, although it is more or less wasted in one sense of the word as I have no more daughters to marry off.”
Tracy replied:
It is utterly impossible for me to express to you the pleasure your letter has given me. The fact that I admired your book so much has a great deal to do with this, plus, I suppose, the fact that this is the first time an author of a book in which I was part of the so-called movie version has ever written me except to warn me that it might be in my best interests to avoid him. Sinclair Lewis, whom I knew well enough to call “Red,” has not spoken to me since the “version” of Cass Timberlane, and Kenneth Roberts, whose Northwest Passage I thought we did a pretty fair job [on], I understand has gone so far as to threaten bodily harm if I so much as entered the state of Maine. Since I had heard that you did not particularly like the script, I was doubly pleased to get your favorable reaction. Had I known this, I should certainly have called upon you last week when I was in New York, and now that I know you are not armed, I shall do so on my next visit.
The picture’s notices were wildly favorable, coming as they did just six months after a similar embrace for Adam’s Rib. (As Variety noted, “It’s the second strong comedy in a row for Spencer Tracy, doing the title role, and he socks it.”) Terms like “glamour-packed,” “rich in comic invention,” and “charming and refreshing” littered the reviews. Bosley Crowther used the first paragraph of his notice in the Times to heap praise on the book and then went on to say the movie was “equally wonderful … Mr. Tracy conducts himself with precisely the air of self-importance that a bride’s father likes to think he has, coupled with the mingled indignation and frustration that he is sure to acquire. Further, he has a capacity to show that warmth and tenderness toward his own which flavors with universal poignance the irony of the joke on him. As a father, torn by jealousy, devotion, pride, and righteous wrath, Mr. Tracy is tops.”
The pressure to do a sequel only increased with the film’s commercial success, but given that Tracy’s only experience with sequels had been the execrable Men of Boys Town, he resisted the idea. “Tracy didn’t want to do the second picture,” Pan Berman remembered. “What actor wants to do it again? I hated the sequel. I didn’t want to do it, but knew money. You know the sequel isn’t going to do as well.” According to Minnelli, it was Hepburn who stepped in once again, perhaps as a favor, as Berman believed, for either Benny Thau or L. B. Mayer. “In her practical way, she convinced Spencer that he owed it to the studio to do the film. Movies were a business, after all, and the first picture had been such a huge success that this one couldn’t fail either.”
A draft screenplay was completed in April, but Tracy held out until plans for Father’s Little Dividend collided with Minnelli’s next project, an elaborate musical based on the works of George and Ira Gershwin titled An American in Paris. Tracy went east on September 2, joining Kate as she began rehearsals for the national touring company of As You Like It, declaring he would take the rest of the month off before starting the new picture. On the thirteenth he received a telegram from Pan Berman confirming an official start date of October 9. “Am very happy,” Berman wrote, “because neither you nor I are getting any younger so we’d better get it made.” When Hepburn op
ened in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on September 22, Tracy was back in Los Angeles. He wired:
YOU MAY FORGET ALL THEM THINGS I LEARNED YOU ABOUT UNDERPLAYING BUT PLEASE REMEMBER THE REST. THE NEXT VOICE YOU HEAR I HOPE WILL BE MINE.
He signed the communiqué “Ever – Old Pot,” a likely reference to all the coffee he guzzled.3
According to Buck Herzog of the Sentinel, Tracy turned up in Milwaukee about a week later, completely unnoticed and making the rounds with Gene Sullivan. It was at the height of widespread rumors that Tracy and Hepburn were “more than just good friends,” and both were fuming over a splashy article by Richard Gehman in the high-end arts and fashion journal Flair that helped fuel such talk. Profiling Hepburn, Gehman essentially outed the relationship, suggesting their devotion to each other was an established fact: “They are together whenever professional commitments permit: Tracy turned up in Boston when As You Like It was there, and in 1945 when he was playing in Robert E. Sherwood’s The Rugged Path, Hepburn followed him about and, on one occasion, reportedly scrubbed the floor of his dressing room. They have often been seen riding in Hepburn’s black Lincoln convertible (Connecticut license KH-6), but they have never furnished column material by appearing in a public place.”
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