James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  She leaped at the part and the opportunity of working with both Tracy and Cukor. Dore Schary, who had resisted the change from Debbie Reynolds, acknowledged that Simmons was more interesting, more ambiguous in her gifts, more likely, in terms of her looks, to grow into the woman who was to become Ruth Gordon. As Ruth herself wired on the twenty-seventh:

  MAD ABOUT JEAN SIMMONS. SHE WILL BE ABSOLUTELY GREAT.

  With Simmons set, they turned to the matter of casting the mother, a part nearly as vexing as that of Ruth. Early on, the Kanins had mentioned the possibility of doing the picture to Helen Hayes, who seemed “extremely interested” and dubious as well. “But would Spencer want me in the picture?” she asked. “He usually prefers younger girls.” They later talked of Shirley Booth, but Booth was in rehearsals for Time of the Cuckoo and unavailable. Tracy liked Dorothy McGuire, but the studio thought the $75,000 she asked excessive. Her agent, Kurt Frings, suggested Teresa Wright, whose salary was more in line with what Metro was willing to pay. Cukor said he liked Wright well enough but thought her a bit on the dreary side. Maureen Stapleton and Jane Wyman were mentioned, as was Uta Hagen (whom Garson Kanin considered “one stunning actress”). In the end they settled on Wright, Cukor having decided she didn’t have to be dreary: “I think she can have some edge and get the comedy out of the part. At least we’ll see.”

  Particular care was given the design of the sets, which were as true to the original rooms of the Jones house as humanly possible, given the demands of the camera crew and the staging of the action. Cukor and Ruth Gordon made a trip to the Wollaston neighborhood where she grew up, and where there were still neighbors who remembered her. They ended up, he noted proudly, with six volumes of reference—snapshots, interiors of Mellin’s Food Company (where Ruth’s father worked), dressing rooms, hotel interiors, etc. “There was,” said Teresa Wright, “a lot of talk about the preciousness of the research.”

  Filming was set to begin on December 15, 1952. There was concern over the title—Years Ago implying a nostalgic riff for the elderly—and the Kanins suggested Fame and Fortune as a substitute. With the sets already standing and the film comprised mostly of interiors, Cukor insisted on two weeks of rehearsal, after which he proposed to shoot the entire picture in just three weeks.3 It was, as Jean Simmons later noted, “most unusual” but the ideal way of getting such an intimate production up on its feet. Mastering the American accent was the most difficult part of the job for the London-born actress, and she worked with a coach over the entire course of production. “There was a wonderful woman,” said Cukor, “who was a most distinguished voice production teacher, Gertrude Fogler, and Jean is a very talented and accomplished actress, and within a week she sounded exactly like an American girl of that period and of that class and did it very subtly.”

  After six days of rehearsal, Tracy wrote Garson Kanin in Paris: “We are going along well with the work. The girl ‘Ruth’ is, I venture to say, just about the greatest talent these old misty rum-soaked eyes have seen! ‘Pipe’ and very short haircut—characterization for Clinton—hair short for ‘youth,’ so they told me, since mother is played by Shirley Temple.4 Otherwise, same old fellow as in Plymouth Advent[ure], which is playing to the worst business since they took the hay out of the balcony.”

  June Dally-Watkins, meanwhile, was back in Los Angeles after her grand tour of Europe, gathering marriage proposals as she went and expressing “pretty deep stuff” (Kanin’s words) on the subject of Spencer Tracy. In Rome, however, she had become involved with actor Gregory Peck, who was much closer to her own age, and who invited her to accompany him to Paris, a proposal she fearfully and foolishly—as she later acknowledged—declined. By the time she got back to California, she was homesick and eager to return to Sydney. Tracy had a car and driver meet her at the airport.

  “He had also organized my hotel accommodation and began to turn up his efforts to seduce me: ‘Why stay at the hotel? Move in with me while you’re in town.’ Maybe Spencer would have cherished me, but I wasn’t about to take the risk of finding out. By now I knew of his relationship with Katharine Hepburn and was curious as to why she never appeared or attended any of the social gatherings that I went to with Spencer.”

  Hepburn, of course, was still in New York, finishing up her run in The Millionairess. Tracy took June to the Bogarts’ annual Christmas party on the twenty-fourth, and to Cukor’s another night for dinner. “After I rejected Spencer’s advances, he continued to treat me well and respect me. He even arranged for one of his cars to be at my disposal. It was the first time I had driven an automatic car, and it came with a remote control to open his garage door. I’d go around the block to his house again and again to test the remote control, such was its novelty value.” Benny Thau invited her to the M-G-M lot and suggested the establishment of a personal development school for the studio’s starlets. Arthur Loew was smitten as well and mounted a campaign to keep her in Hollywood. Kate arrived back in California at just about the time Dally-Watkins left for home, but she didn’t stay for long.

  “One time I was playing a scene,” Jean Simmons recalled. “I was having a bit of trouble, and she sort of put her head around the corner. I heard him say, ‘Get out of here!’ I thought, ‘My God, you can’t talk to Kate Hepburn like that!’ But I knew she was there, and I think that’s why I was getting nervous.”

  The actual filming of Fame and Fortune got under way in January 1953. Tracy had lost weight and was in a far more agreeable frame of mind than for Plymouth Adventure, where his moodiness and his baiting of Dore Schary had been the talk of the studio. “He didn’t seem intense at all,” said Jean Simmons. “It just seemed like rolling off him, easy. Obviously, he’d be up half the night—working, working, working, and then would come on totally prepared. He would say to me, ‘Listen, kid, just know your lines and get on with it.’ No silliness or temperament—anything like that. Just get on with it.”

  Cukor was skilled at creating a comfortable work environment—a necessity when shooting in tight spaces—but had the annoying habit of telling actors how to say their lines. Simmons had never met Ruth Gordon, so she looked to him for the proper cadence of speech. “I had to rely totally on George Cukor, who was so funny because he would get up and play my character—and it was oh so much better than I could possibly do … George would say, ‘This is how you do it.’ And then he would go up to Spence—and they were great friends—and start to do it and Spencer would just walk away. He’d say, ‘Shut up, George!’ ”

  Clinton works himself into a state over money, the cost of food, the perpetual poverty he sees for himself. “I live on hash and stew and Louisiana cat meat, for all I know, and I got a taste for oysters and curry the way they used to fix ’em in Bombay.” When he discovers a thirty-five-cent theater magazine in his daughter’s room, he is apoplectic. “Thirty-five cents! Did you get stung thirty-five cents for this thing?” Cukor was struck by Simmons’ response to the force of Tracy’s fury: “Talk about people who can be scary. Spence could be scary. He and Jean Simmons adored each other, but when we rehearsed the scene his anger was so real that she started giggling. ‘I know I’m old and not much good,’ Spence said, ‘but does this broad have to laugh in my face?’ ‘No, keep it in, Jean,’ I said. ’When you’re absolutely terrified you piss yourself with a kind of laughter. It’s real.” Said Simmons of Tracy: “I was fortunate enough to have known him before I worked with him, and he was oh such a help to me because when you saw him work, it didn’t seem like acting at all. He just was. He was the most truthful actor I ever worked with.”

  When Ruth rebels at her father’s dictum that she become a physical culture teacher, she sits her parents down and proceeds to assault them with recitation and song. “He loved and respected Jean Simmons,” said Cukor,

  who gave a wonderful performance, and there was a scene when she wanted to be an actress and she stood on the steps in their house [and sang] and she was starting things off rather badly. And Spencer looked at her and he
did something very funny: for no reason at all, he looked at the mother as though she had talked this girl into doing something. But then he looked at her with this eloquent face of his and his face changed color. And I said, “That was lovely.” He said, “Well, I remember when I told my father that I wanted to be an actor and he looked at me, this skinny kid with big ears, and he said, ‘Oh that poor little son of a bitch; he’s going to go through an awful lot.’ ”

  As Tracy told it, it wasn’t the disappointment his father felt at his son’s not coveting a career in business, but rather concern the boy seemed to have so few of the essential gifts of an actor. “In the play it is so interesting,” said Cukor, “that both Ruth and her mother are scared to tell the father about her ambitions because they think he would object on purely conventional grounds, that she would become ‘fast,’ etc. They under-rate him. He has none of those conventional scruples, he’s just concerned that she be spared the disappointment and heartache in undertaking something for which she has no obvious qualifications.” Tracy also recounted how hurt he was when he told his girl of his ambitions. “She all but laughed at him,” Cukor related, “and it almost killed him when he overheard her making some cracks to her girlfriend. He must have been completely unlike her idea of what an actor should be, nothing like the leading man of the Milwaukee Stock Company—Bert Lytell, or a real matinee idol type.”

  As Clinton speaks of his own wretched childhood, his mother’s suicide and workhouse conditions, he punctuates the scene with the building of a sandwich—slicing the bread, spearing the meat, retrieving the ketchup from the pantry, chewing and talking, chewing and talking. Actor Richard Burton had read the speech and was observing on the set that day. “He was devastating,” Burton emphasized. “Devastating.”

  Tracy made it so eloquent, said Cukor. “He was funny and he had the authority to switch from comedy to rather serious [material] and did it wonderfully.” And in the end, after promising to stake Ruth to a spell in New York, he loses his job and can no longer count on the bonus that was to have, in part, funded the trip. She can’t go, he tells her, but her determination is fierce, and he listens with a growing sense of admiration and pride. (“He never acted listening,” Simmons commented, “which is what a lot of actors do—they ‘act’ listening.”) It awakens in him a realization that maybe she does have what it takes “if it’s gumption that it takes to be an actress.” He removes his cherished spyglass from the mantel, wraps it carefully in newspaper, and presents it to her as the most precious of commodities—a chance to do what she knows that she must.

  In the hands of a lesser actor, Clinton Jones would have been a one-note performance, all bluster and broad takes, but in Tracy’s care he became an amalgam of all the fathers of the world who want something more for their children than what they had for themselves—an education, a place to live, good food on the table, and a chance to do the work they love best. “When he sold that spyglass,” Jean Simmons said, “it broke my heart.”

  Cukor completed Fame and Fortune a few days over schedule. Larry Weingarten thought it too long and was talking eliminations before they had even finished. Garson Kanin, meanwhile, was in Europe with his wife, urging Tracy to join them and plying him with news of available women. (“Do you know Evelyn Keyes? Ruth and I think her a charming girl …”) While the deal for Flight to the Islands had been finalized, the script was “pretty stinkin’ ” (Tracy’s words), and he was told that if he wanted to do it—since he owed the studio a second picture in the first year of his new three-year contract—he and Gottfried Reinhardt, who was set to direct the picture, would have to go to Paris to meet with Kanin and see if it could be whipped into shape.

  Tracy wanted the trip “like he wanted a hole in his head” but he also wanted to clear his schedule for an outside picture and had few other immediate options—a “lousy” book called Jefferson Sellick and a story titled “Bad Time at Honda.” Hepburn was in New York, catching the new shows with her Millionairess costar, actor-dancer Robert Helpmann, but her relationship with Tracy was at its nadir—her chronic absences having taken their toll—and she left for Jamaica with Irene Selznick before he arrived in town on February 23. Tracy and Reinhardt set sail aboard the Queen Mary on the twenty-fifth, arriving in Cherbourg on March 2. They dined with the Kanins the following night and connected with George Cukor on the evening of the sixth.

  The topic of conversation wasn’t so much Flight to the Islands as Fame and Fortune, which had been previewed to mixed results. Length was a problem—easily correctable in Larry Weingarten’s estimation—but so was some of the throwaway dialogue Tracy permitted himself in the early reels. “I knew this would be a disturbing element,” Weingarten reminded Cukor, “and, of course, there is no way to cure it. Audiences insist on hearing every word and understanding it, otherwise they are annoyed and the very thing you strive for is lost.” Weingarten wanted to make some cuts that Cukor was resisting, but the quality of Tracy’s performance was never in question. “The comedy, of course, played brilliantly, and Spence’s scene at the table—where he speaks of his childhood—was applauded.”

  There was a lot of tweaking of the sound, and the picture had to be redubbed because Sidney Franklin thought Jean Simmons’ voice “irritating if she uses the higher register.” At Weingarten’s urging, the sound department leveled out everyone’s dialogue to the extent of distorting the performances, and Cukor and the producer clashed bitterly over it. Finally, Dore Schary allowed the whole movie to be remixed after diplomatically permitting the two men to agree on the balancing of certain scenes. In addition, there was trouble over the title—practically no one liked Fame and Fortune—and somebody suggested Father and the Actress in a wan attempt to tie the film to the Father of the Bride franchise.

  A preview at the Fox Theatre in Inglewood played better, with men and women liking it equally and 105 of 160 cards rating it very good or better. It had, Cukor observed, a curious effect on an audience: “At first they think they’re seeing a ‘homey’ sentimental comedy. They dote on Spence, laugh at his jokes. Then they’re taken aback by the strength of his feelings and his occasional bursts of violence. They’re gradually forced to the realization that he isn’t quite the old peach they’d first taken him for. But when the picture is over, the audience feels that they’ve met an extraordinary human being.”

  When Tracy docked at New York on March 26, 1953, he didn’t return directly to the studio, as originally anticipated, but instead boarded a plane for Cuba, where he was to meet for the first time with Ernest Hemingway, whose novella The Old Man and the Sea was to be the first outside picture allowed him under his new deal with Metro. Life had published the story in a single installment in its September 1, 1952, issue, an event in American literature that moved more than five million copies in the space of two days. Scribner followed with its hardcover publication, selling out on an initial print run of fifty thousand copies.

  Hemingway’s agent, Leland Hayward, was bombarded with calls from Hollywood—Bogart, Tracy, Jimmy Stewart. Alexander Korda phoned from London. Hayward referred them all to Alfred Rice, the author’s lawyer, convinced it could never be filmed without destroying the honesty and simplicity of the original. It wasn’t until Hayward connected the material to the popular stage readings of Don Juan in Hell and John Brown’s Body—in which the actors worked in evening clothes—that he saw the performance of The Old Man and the Sea as a genuine possibility. He called Tracy, who was smarting from the tepid reception of Plymouth Adventure and squabbles over the fate of Fame and Fortune, and put the idea to him. The following day he wrote Hemingway: “Of all Hollywood people, the one that comes the closest to me in quality, in personality and voice, in personal dignity and ability, is Spencer Tracy.”

  Tracy thought it “a tremendous idea” and said, “What about the motion picture rights? Why can’t we do this lecture idea, and after that do it as a motion picture?” Hayward detailed the problems he saw in filming the thing, of preserving the integrit
y of it. Said Tracy, “Let’s make the picture absolutely as simply and honestly as we can—make it actually in Cuba—make it silent—and I will commentate the whole motion picture.” Hayward thought it a wonderful idea and told Tracy that if he wanted to do it, he would come on as producer—assuming they could make a deal with Hemingway.

  Just after the first of the year, when Tracy was deep in the shooting of Fame and Fortune, Hayward came west, meeting with Bert Allenberg and, later, with Tracy himself. A fundamental misunderstanding arose: Tracy assumed that he would be playing the Old Man as well as speaking the voice-over. Hayward, on the other hand, assumed they would use another actor, maybe a Cuban, in the part. He wrote Hemingway at Finca Vigia, fearful the prospect of seeing Tracy in the role would “destroy the appeal of the venture” for him. “I can only tell you that he looks great—is as enthusiastic as a human being can be about doing anything—and is one of the biggest and most important stars in the motion picture business. He understands all the hardship he may have to undergo to make it—has no star-like ideas or theories—and in my own mind I feel he would probably be very believable as the Old Man—providing we could make him lean and hungry looking.”

  By February 1953 Hayward was talking widescreen and Cinerama and whether shooting the picture in Ansco Color would be preferable to Eastman. Eddie Mannix told them they were crazy not to make it in 3-D, and Fred Zinnemann, now a hot commodity with High Noon and Member of the Wedding to his credit, expressed a keen interest in directing it. The deal, as outlined by Hayward, called for a ten-year license on the rights for a price of $150,000, plus an additional $100,000 to be paid Hemingway for his services as screenwriter. Tracy would receive $150,000 as star of the picture, and Hayward $50,000 as producer. All three would split the net profits on an equal basis, with the film reverting to Hemingway at the end of the license period. The partners were looking at filming it in September and October, when, according to Hemingway, the weather would be at its “loveliest” (provided there were no hurricanes) and when both Tracy and Zinnemann would be available.