Hemingway urged Tracy to come to Cuba so they could “talk things over” and so that Tracy could see some of the old fishermen “before they die so that he will know things that cannot but be helpful to him when he takes it on the road.” With Flight to the Islands set to start on June 4, Tracy traveled to Havana on April 3, a turbulent and unnerving flight that abruptly terminated when a typewriter fell from overhead storage, injuring a passenger and smashing into Tracy’s leg. The plane made an emergency landing at Miami for x-rays, which showed that while the leg was swollen there were no breaks. The flight resumed at 4:00 p.m. “Rough to Havana,” Tracy wrote in his datebook. “Ernest Hem[ingway] worth it.”
Havana was sunny and hot. They visited Cojímar (the “Old Man’s town”), did some fishing and swimming, and talked business with Hayward on the last day. Tracy reiterated what he had said before—that he was committed to filming the book and nothing more. “Hemingway,” he said, “was afraid of having the book cluttered up with a commercial love story.” On Easter, Hemingway inscribed for Tracy a copy of The Old Man and the Sea, “To Spencer Tracy from his friend Ernest Hemingway.” He added: “Looking forward to the long fight we’ll win together.” He wrote to Alfred Rice, “We are in a big fight from now on in and can make a terrific killing if we make a great picture. But there won’t be any great picture nor nothing unless Tracy and I carry the ball most of the time. He knows it and I know it. Everybody is going to have to work like hell and we are going to have to do the miracle stuff.” In his summary to Leland Hayward, Hemingway said: “Had a very good and practical time with Spencer. We understand each other and get along fine. I feel like I’d known him about 150 years.”
Tracy was back in New York only a few days when Louise reached him—very late at night—with word that their son John had eloped with a neighbor girl named Nadine Carr. The news didn’t come as a complete surprise, as John had already come out with plans to be married, having raised the subject over dinner with his father as early as December 1951. “Din. John—Valley—John’s Wedding!” Tracy wrote incredulously in his datebook. A few days later: “Din. Valley—John’s Marriage Plans!” Neither he nor Louise was happy; the bride-elect was seventeen, a junior at Van Nuys High School, and scarcely mature enough for marriage. Neither, for that matter, was Johnny, who, at age twenty-eight, reflected the sheltered nature of his upbringing. “He believes that he lives in a world of peace and dignity and quiet, of gentleness and kindliness and smiling faces,” his father once said of him. “Well, he is going to continue to believe that, so far as it is in my power.” And Johnny did, naive as to the ways of the world, sunny and worry-free and as willful, at times, as a petulant six-year-old. “I think people thought, ‘Well, for goodness’ sake, let him do things himself!’ ” Louise mused in 1972. “I think I probably at times did much more for him than I should have. I went out of my way. He had so many troubles when he was little. He had such a difficult time that you just felt you had to [help] in any way, and while I don’t think doing things for him … really did any good, sometimes it’s all you know to do.”
Spence’s views were similarly conflicted, informed as they were by his own deep feelings of responsibility. “I only saw him and his son once,” said Seymour Gray. “And his reaction—he sort of laughed, he was laughing at himself. He said, ‘Oh my God.’ He looked at the sky and all that. [I said,] ‘What’s the matter with you? This is a handsome, well-adjusted boy. What difference does it make?’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. It’s my fault. I did it.’ Yeah. That set him, made the drinking even worse, because he had tremendous guilt related to this boy.”
John’s first view of Nadine was on horseback, and they were soon playing foot polo on Sundays, recruiting Nadine’s half-sister, Eveline, and a neighbor boy, Don Elderson, to create a foursome. On December 20, 1951, the bride’s family went ahead with a prenuptial compliment at the Carr home, twenty guests celebrating the prospect of a June wedding. Louise was aghast, unable to prevent her adult son from marrying, Joe Carr and his family seemingly happy to facilitate their daughter’s entry into a rich movie star’s family, even though she was underage and had yet to finish her schooling. When June came and went, Louise hoped the matter had blown over.
“I went to Las Vegas with them,” Susie Tracy recounted.
They asked me to go and I thought, “Well, I would rather be with them than to be here when they call to say what they’ve done.” Because I knew that my mother was going to be upset, to say the least. So I thought I’d better be there. I went also because I wanted to be sure that everything went the way it should. And that I thought I should be there in order to send them off … I think she was pushing for it, because he went back and forth about it—“Shall I, shall I not?” John’s friend Jim Marsters, who had been with him at Wright Oral School, tried to talk him out of it, and our cousin George Payson said the whole idea was “ludicrous at best.” I felt they should have at least waited until she graduated—April to June isn’t so very long—but, you know, we were kids. We didn’t know what we were doing…
Nadine called [my mother], I remember that, and then she put me on the phone. Thanks a lot. I mean, my mother was not happy from the very beginning. I don’t know what I said to her. She wanted to know why I didn’t stop it, and why I ended up going with them. Later, I wondered if they would have gone through with it had I told them I wasn’t coming … Then they were married legitimately—legally—at the church the following day. We drove to Las Vegas, came back, and then they were married again the next afternoon. We were crossing the parking lot, going into the Episcopal church in Encino, and that was when my uncle Carroll made the classic line: “Well, Suze, never a dull moment in this outfit!”
John’s father wasn’t any happier than his mother, but what he had to say on the matter was never set down anywhere. His notes in his date-book abruptly stopped a few days before his son’s wedding, but his agitation was on full display in an April 13 telegram he sent from New York to Ruth Gordon:
STILL HERE. LEG NEEDS WATCHING. SHOULD FLY COAST FAST. FROM CUKOR TODAY WORST NEW TITLE: FATHER AND THE ACTRESS. THIS, RUTH, I PROMISE [I WILL] FIGHT WITH LIFE’S BLOOD. THAT MAY BE THE LAST PICTURE I EVER MAKE THERE, BUT IT WILL GO OUT [UNDER] THAT TITLE AND BAD DUBBING GEORGE DESCRIBES OVER L[ARRY] W[EINGARTEN]’S DEAD AND MY TORN BODY.
Gottfried Reinhardt returned from Paris infinitely more enthused about Flight to the Islands than when he had left, Kanin practically having written a whole new script. But Tracy had always been the one pushing it, and most of the work and money put into it had been at his behest. It was difficult stuff, a drama of the mind, an excursion from within, and breaking the back of the story, figuring out how it could be done in filmic terms, was no easy matter. Tracy’s faith in Kanin, his ability to somehow do the impossible, was boundless, and he told Reinhardt on his last day in Paris that the only thing that really worried him was that Reinhardt wasn’t as enthusiastic about the thing as he was.
When Reinhardt handed him the revised screenplay in New York, he was 100 percent certain that Tracy was bound to love it. And then it was Reinhardt who was dumbfounded when Tracy said after reading it, “This is not for me.” Said Reinhardt: “I first thought that he was joking, but then I realized that I was to witness this strange mind pulling the final switch on me. His actual objections were, incidentally, of a very minor nature … What shocked me most, however, was that he suddenly seemed concerned about Dore’s reaction. He kept saying, ‘I think Dore will be disappointed.’ And ‘after all, Dore’s suggestions have been more or less disregarded.’ ”
Back at the studio, both Schary and Mannix dismissed Tracy’s behavior as typical of his preproduction jitters. “I remembered Spence’s original attitude toward this project when we were still on our way over,” Reinhardt said in a letter to Kanin. “I could not rid myself of the impression that what he uttered in Paris was mostly lip service and that he never really wanted to make this picture, at least not now.” Schary thought the
script much better than it had been, but he still had serious doubts about the “clarity of the theme.” Charles Schnee, the line producer on the project, liked it very much. Mannix, too, thought it much improved, while Kenneth MacKenna, the studio’s story editor, expressed disappointment. All had considerable doubts about the commercial potential of a film so intimate, so lacking in romance, spectacle, excitement. When Tracy delivered the death blow over lunch with Schary, he spoke “purely as an actor,” presumably with serious doubts about carrying so much of the load. After nearly a year’s work, the plug was unceremoniously pulled on Flight to the Islands just six weeks before it was set to go before the cameras. Tracy never addressed Kanin directly on the subject, and Kanin never let on that he knew from Reinhardt exactly what had happened.
Besides, Kanin had other projects before Tracy: an idea for a picture based on Benjamin Franklin’s years in France, to be written in collaboration with either Thornton Wilder or Bob Sherwood. Then another for him and Kate, to be made in Europe and known, at various times, as Cat and Mouse and It Takes a Thief. Kanin wrote the opening, which George Cukor described to Gavin Lambert:
You were on a European train and you saw a lady in black sitting in one corner of a compartment, all alone. The camera moved very slowly up close to this lady—and it was Spence dressed as a widow. Then you discovered he was the head of a currency-smuggling gang based in Zurich. Spence was going to appear throughout the picture in different disguises. People in the State Department knew this chicanery was going on, and they got the best T-man from the Treasury—and it was Kate. She had this ruthless drive and purpose, and she was going to track him down and bring him to justice, like whoever-it-is pursues Valjean in Les Miserables. Then halfway through the picture she realizes she’s stuck on him.
Tracy, Cukor suggested, may simply have felt that he and Hepburn were “getting too old” to do that sort of a film, but he just as likely was in no mood to make another picture with her, and neither, it would seem, was she in any hurry to do another with him. It appears she knew of his affair with Gene Tierney—Katharine Houghton believed so—and may well have been aware of the Kanins’ role—particularly Gar’s—in abetting it. Tracy, moreover, was wild at the prospect of doing The Old Man and the Sea—Pulitzer and, as it would turn out, Nobel Prize–winning material—and nothing else could be nearly so attractive. He acknowledged to Leland Hayward he was “perfectly willing” to make a comparatively “bum” movie in order to get sprung from M-G-M to make Old Man, but instead he made a handshake agreement with Eddie Mannix, promising, in effect, to make two pictures for the studio during the second year of his contract, bringing them current with three pictures for the first two years of the deal. Metro, in turn, would distribute the Hemingway subject but would otherwise have no direct participation in the project. And so, one by one, the stories Kanin proposed for Tracy all faded away.
Tracy began a sixteen-week vacation on June 16, traveling to New York to meet up with the Hemingways, who were preparing to sail for Europe, and to undergo what had become his annual checkup routine at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. He considered doing The High and the Mighty, an original story for the screen about a seemingly doomed airliner for Duke Wayne’s production company, Wayne-Fellows, but was put off by the knowledge that Bill Wellman would be directing the picture. “It’s a real, honest story, just full of enthusiasm,” Wellman said. “And Tracy read it and thought it was lousy, wouldn’t do it.” Reluctantly, Wayne ended up playing the role of the pilot himself and the picture became one of the outstanding commercial hits of 1954. It also garnered six Academy Award nominations, including one for Wellman as Best Director.
Tracy, it seemed, wasn’t much interested in doing anything other than The Old Man and the Sea, and due to Hemingway’s travel schedule—which pretty much obliterated the rest of the year—that wasn’t going to be possible anytime in the immediate future. Kanin, who with Ruth was spending the summer on the French Riviera, implored him to come join them at Cap Ferrat: “I am absolutely convinced that you would love it here, and that the climate and atmosphere would be highly beneficial. Good food and pasteurized milk abounds, and what you would love most of all would be the peace of it.”
On August 1, Tracy compliantly notified Metro that he was going to Europe, first to Cannes to see the Kanins, then on to Paris and London. Ten days later, with Tracy already in France, Louella Parsons phoned Eddie Mannix to check the persistent rumor that M-G-M was buying out Tracy’s contract. “Far from it,” Mannix told her, confirming instead that Metro would be releasing Old Man as Tracy’s picture to follow The Actress (as Fame and Fortune had come to be titled). Parsons, however, was aware of Tracy’s growing disgruntlement with the studio and went on to report that he and M-G-M would be ending their “long and happy association of over 18 years” after he completed the two remaining pictures on his contract. Hedda Hopper, apparently noting the Parsons item, mentioned Bad Day at Honda as a story purchase for Tracy, naming Sam Zimbalist as producer and George Sidney as director. “Looks like Spence’s co-starring days with Katharine Hepburn are over,” she wrote with obvious satisfaction.
The Kanins were waiting when Tracy stepped off the boat at Cannes, and they all drove back together to Cap Ferrat. Tracy fell in love with the place immediately, and they were all splashing around in the Mediterranean before noon. “It’s no more than what we deserve,” he said contentedly, settling in for a stay of indeterminate length. Home was Les Rochers, the villa that Paris Singer, an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, had built for dancer Isadora Duncan. The food gave him trouble at first—his ulcer was acting up—but the next morning he was up early and off to Mass. “He didn’t speak one word of French,” Kanin commented, “but, still, he went to church that morning and came back quite happy.”
Tracy mailed an oversized picture postcard of the historic village to Louise in California. “This is it,” he wrote. “Old Florentine, brought piece by piece. Fabulous swim Mediterranean outside door. Good trip. Present fighting pylorics, etc., but have hopes for this. Swim, long walk yesterday.”
He seemed to be having such a marvelous time that Gar gingerly raised the possibility of his ending the “shocking routine” of too much coffee, Dexedrine, and sleeping pills at night. He wasn’t defensive, as Kanin might have feared, and promised to make a real stab at cleaning himself up. They talked about Flight to the Islands and Cat and Mouse, and then Tracy noticed a little rash on his side. Gar and Ruth tried telling him that it was nothing, but a doctor promptly diagnosed it as shingles (zona in French). As the doctor began treating the condition, his patient “suddenly got worried” about an operation that Kate had undergone. Spence hadn’t known about it but apparently found out after the AP picked up on the news and the New York Times printed it. By then, France was paralyzed by a general strike, almost all of the nation’s two million public workers having walked off their jobs, and it was impossible to phone or telegraph. With Tracy increasingly anxious, the inflammation plaguing him stubbornly refused to clear up. Finally and reluctantly, the Kanins drove him to Nice, where they put him on a plane bound for London. He kept promising to come right back, but they somehow knew that he wouldn’t.
Kate, whose surgery had been for skin cancers, flew to be with him in England, and it was there that they enjoyed a reunion, having had only minimal contact with one another since the completion of Pat and Mike. However good it was for Tracy and Hepburn, who were still in London together a month later, Kanin lamented the event as an opportunity lost.
“It was very, very sad,” he wrote. “The main reason for the sadness was that if only everything hadn’t gone wrong, that place would have proved a godsend to Spence. I think he would have piled up years of health, and I know that he would have wanted to stay quite a long time.”
* * *
1 It is unclear whether Tracy sent Schary a translated copy of Alf Sjöberg’s screenplay for a Swedish-language film of the same title, or Lagerkvist’s own two-act
play based on the book.
2 As her early stand-in, Adelaide Doyle, recalled, “She was very close to her family and she called her mother all the time—maybe every day.”
3 The official schedule was twenty-four days.
4 Teresa Wright’s early movie roles were as a young girl, even though she was in her twenties. Born in 1918, Wright was thirty-four years old when she played Annie Jones.
CHAPTER 27
A Granite-like Wedge of a Man
* * *
That film … got more critical acclaim from the critics than any film I ever made in all the years,” said Larry Weingarten, reflecting upon the curious commercial fate of The Actress, “and we didn’t make enough to pay for the ushers in the theater … I like to think that that very week this picture was produced, color came into full bloom and CinemaScope. And we were black and white on a little screen.”
The industry was indeed awash with new technologies: widescreen, 3-D, stereophonic sound, and a whole host of new color processes, all employed with the intent of providing audiences with an entertainment experience they couldn’t get from television, where old movies were quickly becoming a programming staple. Dore Schary refused to be part of the panic, assuring a conference of exhibitors that “television will start to worry about us” if new pictures were good enough. “I have a hunch … people will ultimately accept television as something they can use when they choose to. I don’t believe that singing commercials, quiz shows, and 20-year-old potboilers will ever take the place of movies and other healthy diversions.”
James Curtis Page 85