Hepburn’s input was sharp and detailed; Tracy’s was more tempered and generalized. The material, Kate remembered, was “very intimately discussed between us all, which I think was an enormous help to everyone concerned. It was very ‘ensemble’ in spirit. And things we didn’t like, or which irritated one, or you didn’t understand, you were able to state it, which one doesn’t always get an opportunity to do in this business. It was not just friendship, but an artistic collaboration.” In the space of a few hours, they began to move the story toward the form it would eventually take.
Kate had to fly back to London on the sixth, leaving Tracy to a city shimmering with neon and light rain. It was a place he could only truly enjoy at sunrise and sunset, when he could go out in public and was less likely to be recognized. He and Ruth discussed Years Ago—she was writing the screenplay—and one night he was coaxed out of his room and his daily routine for a walk along the Champs-Élysées, a stroll that ended abruptly with a ringside table at the Lido. He appeared to be enjoying himself, a Coke conspicuously at hand, when a band of American acrobats pulled him up onto the stage and proceeded to make him part of a human pyramid. He was furious, reducing the check to confetti and threatening the manager with a bill from the William Morris Agency. Flash photos had been taken, and all he could think about was the impression they would make. (“Boy! That’s all I need. Nightclub hi-jinks pictures plastered all over. They’ll think Tracy’s on the ol’ heimerdeimer again.”) Gar Kanin had the help of the M-G-M press department in confiscating them, and Tracy later claimed to have destroyed them all, although at least one print managed to survive. When Kate came to town again the following weekend, she refused to believe any part of the story until shown the evidence.
Tracy and the Kanins dined at Maxim’s one night toward the end of his stay, and the party of five included actress Gene Tierney, who was in the process of divorcing her husband of ten years, the French-born fashion designer Oleg Cassini. Tracy seemed uncommonly interested in the green-eyed beauty, who had been in pictures since 1940 and spoke French like a native. Having made a film on the Argentine pampas that previous winter, Tierney said something to the effect that she was eager to work again in the comfort of an American studio.
Tracy rose to the bait with the subject of Plymouth Adventure: “He asked me if I were interested in doing the role [of Dorothy Bradford],” Tierney said, “and that led to the commitment.” Two nights later, Tracy and the Kanins were back again, this time with Tierney alone completing a foursome.
“Pat and Mike with George Cukor was an agony to me,” Katharine Hepburn admitted. “He kept saying, ‘Sink the putt, Kate.’ Well, the putt was thirty feet on a sloping green. ‘Sink it. Sink it.’ And Babe Didrikson was in that picture, and she finally taught me how to sink that putt. When I sank that putt, I really just jumped up and down for joy. But George never realized how difficult anything was. At all. He was the funniest director in the world to have direct that picture.”
Tracy unwillingly joined a band of American acrobats onstage at the Lido in Paris. He later claimed to have destroyed all the photographic evidence, but this shot survived. (SUSIE TRACY)
Cukor was, of course, on the show because he had directed all the previous films the Kanins had written—three so far. He knew nothing of sports, had no interest in such matters, but thought of such a deficiency as a positive. “Too many pictures dealing with golf have been approached from the expert’s point of view,” he reasoned. “Nine hundred and sixty-five out of 1,000 moviegoers don’t know anything about the fine points of the game either. Therefore, if I can stage a golf match in a way that will interest me, then I’m pretty sure it will also look good to those 965.”
The screenplay revision of October 5 recast Pat as a basketball coach at Southern Tech, engaged to Alan Fletcher, who also works at the school. She enters a golf tournament, but her confidence in herself is undermined by Alan’s presence in the gallery. Mike sees her, gives her his card, and the script begins to crackle. Accompanied by the Kanins, Hepburn arrived in Los Angeles on October 10 so that talks with Cukor could begin. “Spencer,” she said, “never used to join those conferences we had, George and Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon—who wrote the scripts. We’d meet on the weekends, and Spencer would make a general comment on what he’d heard. During the reading of Pat and Mike, Spencer sat in a corner of the room when we had a reading of the script one night at George’s house.”
Tracy had already absorbed the words—which were not always easy to say in Mike’s particular brand of “left-handed English”—and the character had been rolling around his mind since those conferences in Paris. Gradually, he had worked out a manner of speaking, a way of seeing things that brought the character to life, a minor-league sporting man “far more real and complex” than the person the screenwriters had imagined. “Spencer,” said Cukor, “put his glasses on—we thought he would simply read the words—but suddenly he had departed and instead there appeared in his place this crude prizefighting manager of Pat and Mike. There was no sign of the Spencer Tracy we’d just seen there a minute before.”
In time, Pat Pemberton became a widow, engaged to Collier Weld at a college in Gross Point, but Tracy’s character remained essentially as he read it that first night, so vivid was the personality he brought to the role. As plans went forth for the picture, the seventh Tracy-Hepburn teaming in the space of a decade, Walter Winchell led his column of November 6 with a calamitous item: “M-G-M is sitting on an atomic bomb—trying to keep Katharine Hepburn’s Greatest Romance sotto voce. Both stars are tired of Keeping It Quiet.”
No one at the studio mentioned it, and if Louise saw it, she didn’t say anything over dinner at Chasen’s or during tennis with Bill Self and the kids. Spence drove up the coast to “paint the sea,” contemplative as the start date for the picture grew near. Kate had committed to playing The Millionairess in England, her mother having “worshipped” every word the late George Bernard Shaw ever wrote. The engagement would require her to leave as soon as the picture for Metro had wrapped, and she would be overseas for much of the new year while Spence remained stuck in California with Schary and Plymouth Adventure. It didn’t make for a happy time, and when the tests for Pat and Mike came back, the studio decided that Kate looked too thin and postponed the film three weeks while she fattened herself up. Spence, conversely, was too heavy and began popping a Dexedrine each morning to control his appetite. The goal was to lose twelve pounds by the start of production, bringing him to a trimmer 190.
Tracy and Hepburn with Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, screenwriters of Pat and Mike. (JUDY SAMELSON COLLECTION)
With the picture temporarily on hold, Tracy turned his attentions to his new home on the Cukor property, which had been completed and would soon be ready for occupancy. Cukor seemed truly excited at the prospect of having such an illustrious tenant and involved Tracy and Hepburn in all the stages of design and construction. The plan had been to carve two homesites from a service yard at the very bottom of the director’s somewhat kidney-shaped parcel, which was bordered on the west by Doheny Drive and on its southern end by St. Ives, a narrow and winding roadway that became almost impassable at times of heavy rain. He commissioned architect John Wolfe to design the two simple structures—the floor plan of the Tracy cottage forming an extended H, the master bed- and dressing room separated from the rest of the house by a recessed entryway and an outdoor patio—and had the plans sent for Spencer’s perusal to the Arizona Inn, promising, in an accompanying letter, to drain the malarial swamps “to satisfy a certain touring actress” and assuring him that the sun regularly hit the property “once a week.”
The living room was done in planks of wormy chestnut, an accent of used brick, painted a creamy white, framing a small fireplace. There was a pegged hardwood floor, cut on the bias, with French doors leading out onto the patio. Kate took charge of decorating the place, having purchased an old horsehair rocker—a naked frame, really—on Olvera Street and gotten it uph
olstered as a first step. An oak gateleg table, a basket base lamp, a desk fashioned from the valances of the apartment on Beverly. The colors were all subdued, the look warm and comfortable; it was a terrific contrast to the chichi of the main house. She saw to air conditioning, the fitting of the kitchen, shutters, towels, carpeting, draperies, a new vacuum cleaner, and had a corner cupboard and two pickled pear tables shipped out from the East.
Spence had been a renter for so long he had virtually nothing apart from his books and his things out at the ranch—and most of those would have to remain where they were. Kate finished with the furnishing of the cottage at 9191 St. Ives on December 12 and promptly left for New York and Connecticut to spend Christmas with her family. Tracy took occupancy six days later—on December 18, 1951.
They began shooting Pat and Mike on January 2, 1952, Ruth and Gar having, by then, returned east, where they could confer with Cukor via mail and by wire. The pressures on Hepburn were extraordinary, not just in the early golfing scenes, where she had to be even better than she was in real life (which was pretty good), but in the tennis scenes, where she would be partnered with stars like Don Budge and Frank Parker and pitted against Wimbledon sensation Gertrude “Gussie” Moran. Parker, who started in the days when men still played in flannel trousers, doubled as Kate’s tennis coach, teaching her tournament form for the failed match against Gorgeous Gussie, when Collier’s mere presence in the stands is enough to cause Pat to fumble the match.
The early material didn’t involve Tracy at all, and his character didn’t make his appearance until the second reel—long after the picture had been established in the audience’s collective mind as Hepburn’s. But where in the past she might already have started to grate on the crowd, her aloofness and self-assurance putting them on edge, she showed a winning vulnerability in Pat and Mike that was unlike anything else in her catalog. It comes as no surprise when she declines to throw a tournament at Mike’s not-so-subtle suggestion. (“You see her face? A real honest face. The only disgustin’ thing about her.”) And she’s plainly chagrined when she falters in the final moments of her match with Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
Tracy played with the cadences of the dialogue, the words having been arranged as they might form in the mind of a person like Conovan, ill educated but streetwise, a man within whom both wisdom and larceny collided in a jumble of syntax. “You see what happened anyway if youda been willing to happen on purpose you coulda been walking outta here with a nice bundle, with a bushel basket like I said? It just goes to show.”
And when he admires Pat’s retreating form in his Broadway vernacular, telling his diminutive associate, “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce,” he not only reveals the early depth of his feelings for her but delivers one of the most warmly remembered lines in the history of the movies.
“Gar had written a line,” said Larry Weingarten, “in which Spencer said of Kate, ‘She’s pretty well stacked.’ I said, ‘Do you know the meaning of this word? Kate is not well stacked. She has a small bust.’ I pressured him, Cukor pressured him, and he came up with another line, ‘There ain’t much meat on her, but what there is is cherce!’ It got the biggest laugh in the picture.”
Kanin himself remembered writing the line as “choice” and that it was Tracy who insisted on delivering it as “cherce.” Cukor, he said, made two takes, Tracy stubbornly sticking to the same reading for both. Mindful that Tracy “just flattened out” after the third or fourth take, Cukor obviously chose not to push it. “You’ve got to know that in directing … when to shut up, when to press.”
For his part, Tracy liked to recall what George M. Cohan once told him: “Whatever you do, kid, always serve it with a little dressing.” And so he took a perfectly serviceable line and, by filtering it through the prism of character, made it genuinely memorable. It was, as Bill Self learned, a process of refinement that never let up when he was shooting a picture. “Spence would say to everybody, ‘Oh, I didn’t sleep last night. I don’t know what scene we’re doing. Can I see the pages for a minute?’ All nonsense, according to Hepburn. He was up all night running his lines. I know in the few little scenes I was in with him, or any scene where I was on the set when they shot it, God help you if you blew a line or missed your mark. He was very intolerant of other actors not being totally professional.”
The sparring between Tracy and Hepburn lacked the sharp edges of Adam’s Rib, Cukor achieving a gentleness and a lightness of tone that made the comedy seem effortless. The reason it worked, the director maintained, was that none of them took themselves very seriously. “We batted ideas around like tennis balls, we all felt the lines and situations without any kind of ghastly solemnity. If we all laughed, a line went in.” And, as with Judy Holliday on their previous picture together, both took a paternal interest in Aldo Ray, the ex-navy frogman whom Cukor had starred alongside Holliday in The Marrying Kind and who was now playing Mike’s dim-witted prizefighter, Davie Hucko.
It is in Mike’s relationship with Hucko—“heavyweight champion of the world … in a couple of years”—that the true nature of his character emerges: small-time operator, disciplinarian, hustler, and patron to numerous hangers-on. When he comes down on Davie, he does so by demanding the answers to the Three Questions:
“Who made you, Hucko?”
“You, Mike.”
“Who owns the biggest piece of you?”
“You, Mike.”
“And what’ll happen if I drop you?”
“I go right down the drain.”
“And?”
“And stay there.”
Pat signs a contract with Mike and his mysterious partners and is immediately put into training: no martinis, Mike tells her, no smoking, no late hours, no men “in any manner, shape, or form.”
“What’s to prevent me from smoking when you’re not around?” she asks.
“When am I not around?”
“You don’t expect to be watching me every minute … out of every … twenty-four hours … out of every day … do you?”
“If I have to, sure.”
“Not sure I’ll like that.”
“Not askin’ you to like it. But you’ll see pretty soon I’ll trust ya. Because you’ll trust me. Because what’s good for you is good for me and you for me, see? We’re the same, we’re equal, we’re partners, see? Five-oh, five-oh.”
Despite all this enforced intimacy, there is little to suggest the budding romance between Pat and Mike other than the care on his part, the glances on her part, the underlying attraction between the two actors playing the roles, the times again when their eyes locked, even when there was nothing more than a kiss on the cheek (“for luck”) to suggest Pat’s growing affection for her rough-hewn manager.
“I remember there was a scene in which Spencer massaged Kate’s leg,” George Cukor said. “No sex implied, but it was very sexy. You sensed the empathy between these two.” Kate was stressed throughout the filming, being coached as she was in golf, tennis, baseball (the latter by Pinkie Woods, star pitcher of the Hollywood Stars, for scenes that were ultimately cut from the film), basketball, boxing, and judo (for a shot in which she clobbers two of Mike’s “investors”). She was pushing herself—fear of mediocrity, fear of being only half good—and was battling to keep her weight up. It fell to Cukor to keep the production—as well as the strained relationship between his two stars—on an even keel. “George was like a big brother to Kate and Spence,” Aldo Ray observed. “He was mother hen, nurturing them, holding them together.”
With all the exteriors called for in the script, Pat and Mike was plagued by rain delays and ran over schedule. The company moved to Ojai in mid-February, finishing up there on the twenty-first. Hepburn was worn out, unsure of how the film would piece together, and had only a few weeks before she was due to leave for England and the start of rehearsals for The Millionairess. When she left California, it was for Connecticut and Fenwick, and she would not return until summer at the earliest. Once
again, she was putting a continent between the two of them, driving herself in a way that was extraordinary even for her. Tracy approached the filming of Plymouth Adventure with a renewed sense of dread, not only for the quality of the material he was playing, but for the time he would be trapped in Los Angeles when all he longed for was to be in London with Kate.
Tracy clowns with Hepburn while cinematographer William Daniels takes a reading. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Gene Tierney wasn’t a lock, at least initially, for the female lead in Plymouth Adventure. Schary resisted casting someone who wasn’t an M-G-M contract player, and originally the talk had been of June Allyson doing the part. The film was populated with a number of British actors, Leo Genn and Barry Jones most prominent among them. With Hepburn gone, Tracy became almost unbearable to be around, sulky and petulant. When actress Dawn Addams, relatively new to Metro, was awarded the secondary role of Priscilla Mullins, the obligatory love interest and future wife of John Alden, Tracy could scarcely contain himself.
“I was having dinner with Spence at Chasen’s,” Bill Self remembered,
and Clark Gable came in and sat down for just a talk. Spence said, “What do you know about an actress named Dawn Addams?”
Gable said, “I don’t know anything about her much. She’s a young contract player.”
“She’s playing Priscilla. She looks like she’s made the voyage before.”
“I don’t know anything about her.”
“Well, she’s sleeping with someone. I have to tell you, this girl would not be in this movie if she wasn’t sleeping with somebody.”
Gable left, and a few minutes later Benny Thau came in. Spence called him over to the table. Thau sat down and Spence said, “How’s everything?”
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