Back at the studio, Tracy ran On the Waterfront and became enthused at the idea of Eva Marie Saint for Jeremy Rodock. (“Wonderful,” he wrote in his book.) Wise and Zimbalist were equally high on the idea, but Saint turned the part down within a matter of days. (“Par for the course,” said Tracy.) They tested Constance Collier’s latest protégée, Marjorie Steele, the wife of A&P heir Huntington Hartford, but the test was weak and Steele had little experience. By the time David Selznick turned it down on behalf of Jennifer Jones, pointing out how similar the role of Rodock was to that of Devereaux in Broken Lance, Tracy was having serious qualms about doing the picture.
“I talked to Spence,” Collier wrote Hepburn on the sixteenth. “He is very unhappy and feels your leaving him for so long and doesn’t seem to understand why you do it—but he calmed down—and I think will come on [to New York]. He is to call me tomorrow and we will make arrangements. You must keep him happy until you go and the time will not seem so long.7 I hope everything will be alright over there and you will get things straightened out. Don’t let anything delay your return if Spence come[s] on.”
The growths removed from his face in London, Tracy learned, were malignant, and it was recommended that another spot on his face be tested. The biopsy was set for April 25 in Los Angeles, which turned out to be a bad day all around. He awoke with stomach cramps and a mild temperature and was attempting to sleep them off when he got the news that Constance Collier had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of seventy-seven. She had been like a second mother to Hepburn, a personal as well as a professional mentor, and it fell to Spence to phone Kate in London and break the news. A week later, he motored to San Francisco in a driving rain to meet her as she prepared to leave for Sydney on Qantas. He had Carroll with him, and the two of them attended Mass together at Old St. Mary’s.
The day Hepburn departed, he learned he had yet another malignancy and that surgery would be necessary. He was up at 3:00 a.m., on the road at 5:30, back home again by two in the afternoon. He dined alone that night and needed the help of six Seconals to get to sleep. The surgery took place at St. Vincent’s Hospital on the morning of May 12, 1955. The doctor had to go in deeper than he expected, and while all basal cell eruptions were removed, it was feared there would be scarring that could delay the start of the picture. The matter of casting the girl had become a dispiriting problem; nobody seemed to want the part. Schary may have thought it had something to do with the title, for he changed it to Tribute to a Bad Man, one he had a particular liking for, having previously hung it on one of John Houseman’s pictures.8
After both Eva Marie Saint and Jennifer Jones turned it down, the studio put forth a Greek girl named Irene Papas, who had made what Benny Thau termed an “exciting test.” Papas was in Rome, but could be in California on a few days’ notice, having been put under contract with virtually no vetting of any kind. Sam Zimbalist talked of putting a new writer on the screenplay, but then nothing happened, and when Tracy asked to see the test of the new girl, he was told they were going to shoot one specifically for Tribute.
Nothing seemed to be going right. When the stitches from the surgery came out, the scar was nastier than expected, a sort of upside-down Y on the left side of his face. Despite repeated fittings, his wardrobe for the picture was too tight. The script still needed work—more than they seemed to think—and on the twenty-third he told off Zimbalist. (“Moron!!!” he wrote in his datebook.) The following day he was shown the new test of “the Greek” and thought it horrible. “Zimbalist—Wise BLOW UP,” he recorded that day. “Girl simply awful. Schary & I agree, others no. Schary suggests Dorothy McGuire.” When Tracy finally met Papas, an austere woman with jet-black hair and bushy eyebrows, he could scarcely contain himself. “Boy or girl???” he wrote in his book. “The Greek it is,” he conceded. “[V]ote of Schary, Wise, Zimbalist against me (Dorothy McGuire).”
The casting of Papas brought Tribute to a Bad Man still closer to Broken Lance—Papas essentially repeating the Katy Jurado role—and whatever enthusiasm Tracy retained for the project quickly boiled away. In a conciliatory gesture, the studio took out a full-page ad in the trades, formally congratulating him for having been named Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival (for Bad Day at Black Rock) and “Outstanding Western Star” (for Broken Lance) at the Silver Spur Awards in Reno. “Wear your ‘Silver Spurs’ in health and happiness in your new picture Tribute to a Bad Man,” the copy chirped, but if Tracy was in any way mollified, it didn’t show. The day after the ad appeared, he had a blowdown with Larry Keethe when his pants still wouldn’t fit—after five tries—and Keethe, after nearly twenty years on the job with Tracy, tendered his resignation.
Shooting began at Montrose, Colorado, on June 1, with Irene Papas and actor Robert Francis (The Caine Mutiny) filming scenes for which Tracy was not required. Tracy departed for location that same day, arriving with Carroll early the next evening. According to Tracy’s datebook, Wise was “shocked” at the scar on his face and ordered camera tests to see if it would show. The following morning they all drove up to the Rodock Ranch. “Wonderful set built upon mesa [at] 8700 ft. elevation—surrounded 14,000 or [so] over Rocky Mts.—snowcovered peaks.” The weather was beautiful and clear, and the company, bedeviled by bad weather, got in a full day’s work for a change.
Tracy had been set to start shooting on the sixth, but with all the weather delays, Wise thought he might not actually be needed for another week. He spoke by phone with Schary and decided to go back to L.A. to have the scar examined by his doctor. With Wise’s blessing, Tracy left Montrose on the morning of the fifth, took the short route through Cedar City, and was in Las Vegas by 7:30 p.m. Wise called him in Los Angeles the next day to tell him that the tests made of the scar had come out okay.
Privately, Tracy asked Bert Allenberg to explore the possibility of starting the picture in Culver City and leaving the location work until last, but the studio just as privately nixed the idea, as none of the interior sets had yet been constructed. He was up at 3:30 on the morning of the tenth to place a call to Australia. “[T]alked Old One,” he noted in his book. “Wonderful connection. Dear Old One.”
Kate thought Tribute “a story with no merit whatsoever.” At her suggestion, Tracy met with Benny Thau and asked that the film be postponed. Thau said it couldn’t be done, then Allenberg pointed out that Tracy was supposed to start The Mountain for Paramount on August 1. “Allenberg gibberish threat of ‘suit by Paramount’ etc. etc.,” Tracy wrote. “What hogwash—lies, deceit, sickened by it all.” Then Howard Strickling called to advise him that there was a “plot” afoot to have Strickling go back with him to Colorado.
There was no word from the studio after that, and on June 13 there were discussions between Floyd Hendrickson and George Cohen as to how best to serve notice on Tracy that he was liable for damages if he failed to report for work. “[M-G-M counsel Saul Rittenberg] and GC both feel that we are in a better position to give oral notice to Bert Allenberg rather than formal written notice,” Hendrickson wrote, “because in this way we are simply advising what is going to happen and, therefore, doesn’t sound legal or like an ultimatum but still has legal effect.”
That evening, Tracy boarded a United Airlines flight for Denver, arriving back in Montrose on the morning of the fourteenth. The weather was bad—Wise got only one scene in the can—and Tracy wasn’t called for work at all. The next day was sunny and clear, and Tracy shot his first scene for the picture, Rodock’s entrance to the ranch. The company finished the day with a barn interior. “[G]ood day’s work,” Tracy wrote. “Bob Wise agrees with foregoing.” That evening, assistant director Arvid Griffin barbecued steaks and tomatoes for everyone on an outdoor grill.
“We arranged our shooting up at the ranch,” said Wise,
in a way that [Tracy] could come up for only an hour or two the first couple of days to get acclimated because it was much higher than the town we were staying in. After that, I still took it very easy—just two or th
ree hours a day. He was being a little irascible with both Bob Francis and Irene Papas, but I attributed that to the altitude. He kept complaining about shortness of breath and suggesting that we move the location to a lower altitude. Finally, about the fifth day, he had a bit of action where he had to bend over and pick up a horse’s hoof and examine it. When he came up, he kind of gasped and said, “Bob, you better get someone else to replace me. The only way I can finish this film is if you can scrub this location and we go down to a lower place.” I just about had it up to my eyeballs by that time. I said, “Okay, Spencer, we go down the hill and talk to the studio.” I called Sam Zimbalist, who knew of the problems I was having, and told him I couldn’t continue with Tracy. An hour later he called me back and said that Tracy was out of the picture.
Tracy tersely recorded the events of the day in his datebook: “Wise and Griff[in] talk to Strickling—all feel cannot go on in altitude…[C]all to studio. Replaced.”
Said Wise: “I went over to see him. I was so angry at this man because of the mess he caused, but he was so emotional about it.” Tracy, he recalled, was almost in tears. “It’s the end of my career,” he told the director. “I’m finished. I’ll never make another picture.” Wise, at first, could muster little sympathy for a man who had given him such fits. Like everyone else, Wise thought Tracy had conspired to make The Mountain during the time it would have taken to rebuild the sets at a lower elevation. “After one hour of this, as mad as I was, I was also feeling sympathy and sorrow for him. Tracy always came on the screen like the Rock of Gibraltar, yet he was actually the reverse of his screen image.”
That night, Tracy made a one-word entry in his datebook: “Gin!” He caught an 11:00 p.m. flight out of Grand Junction, arriving back in Los Angeles at three in the morning. Tom Pryor of the New York Times got hold of the story and ran it as an eight-inch item on the twenty-first:
This morning the studio publicity department said Mr. Tracy had experienced difficulties working in a high altitude. Montrose, on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, is 5,820 feet above sea level. Later, a studio executive acknowledged that the altitude was not the only cause of Mr. Tracy’s return. “Spencer is very exacting about everything he does,” the executive said, “and he is unhappy about several things. The studio has to determine if it wants to give in to him on some points.” Metro executives are meeting with the actor’s agent, Bert Allenberg of the William Morris agency, and it is expected that a decision about Mr. Tracy’s continuance will be made within forty-eight hours.
Had Eddie Mannix been on hand, had Kate been there, had Tracy had the kind of gentle handling and reassurance he always needed at the start of a picture, the outcome might have been different. Mannix, however, was recovering from a heart attack, Hepburn was eight thousand miles away with her own set of responsibilities, and Dore Schary could never justify to the New York office the moving of an outdoor set while a company of 110 sat idle on location.
There was a time, back in the heyday of the studio, when such a move might have been possible, particularly for a star of Tracy’s magnitude. But 1955 wasn’t 1940, M-G-M no longer dominated the world entertainment landscape, and the economics of picture making had irrevocably changed. The men who had come up in the time of Mayer and Thalberg, of block booking and studio-owned theater chains, were having to reorient their thinking to the new realities of the marketplace, where flickering black-and-white pictures on a home TV set generally trumped the big screen as long as those flickering pictures were free.
Dore Schary was troubled in later years by the widely held presumption that Tracy had been fired from M-G-M. “That’s crazy. That’s crap. Total crap,” he erupted when asked about it in 1978. “A stupid story. A ridiculous, stupid story.” Tracy had completed three of the four pictures required of him under his contract, and the contract was up as of August 1, 1955. “I would never have fired Spencer Tracy,” Schary insisted. Might he simply have been at the end of his rope? “I would never have been at the end of my rope with Spence. He was always worried whether a picture was good for him, whether he wanted to do it. Back and forth. But that is not true … Just … not … true. And I would know that.”
Schary thought that maybe Robert Wise was part of the problem, that he had no real knowledge of the culture at M-G-M. Years of coddling on the part of the studio had created a dependency that Wise couldn’t possibly understand. “He just got scared,” Schary said of Tracy. “He began to get short of breath. A guy like Tracy needed a father [in a director]. He needed someone around to kind of look after him. And I don’t think Wise gave him that. I think another director might have solved that problem, pulled him through the picture. But Spence was by then pretty well convinced that he was very sick.”
On June 25, 1955, Tracy made the following entry in his datebook: “Finished at Metro! June 18 last salary day. Phone by Allenberg to Thau. Eddie M. away!!! The end of 20 years. Feel I did my best for last pic.”
Eddie Mannix was stunned when he returned to the studio and was briefed on what had taken place in his absence. “Well,” he demanded, “why the hell didn’t you take it down to three thousand feet and do the picture?”
* * *
1 News photos of the two seated together at Santa Monica’s Club Del Mar, where the event took place, were enough to prompt the following item in Dorothy Kilgallen’s column: “Lovely Grace Kelly’s newest admirer is a Hollywood star who has been Katharine Hepburn’s close pal for years.”
2 Cooper’s trouble was due to a bad back.
3 Claridge’s had requested that Hepburn not wear trousers in the “public rooms” of the hotel, which, of course, included the lobby. Hepburn’s solution, rather than to wear a dress when visiting Tracy, was instead to come up in the service elevator. Management at the Connaught imposed no such restriction.
4 Kate later admitted that she, too, never cared much for Black Rock.
5 One of Schary’s signal achievements at RKO, Crossfire (1947) was based on Richard Brooks’ 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole.
6 According to Millard Kaufman, the Breen office restricted the use of karate chops “because it wasn’t fighting heroically. Dore said, ‘What the hell? The guy’s got one arm.’ And so they let it get by.”
7 Hepburn once told David Lean she was “almost certain” that if she and Tracy had married, it wouldn’t have lasted. “She was saying that it’s almost impossible to hope that anyone, husband or wife, can understand what it’s like when this creative thing takes hold and they find themselves suddenly pushed aside into fourth or fifth place.”
8 The release title was The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
CHAPTER 28
The Mountain
* * *
Tracy’s removal from Tribute to a Bad Man eliminated any conflicts with Paramount and the anticipated August 1955 start of The Mountain. He focused on family matters: his month-old grandson, Joseph Spencer, John’s thirty-first birthday, Susie’s twenty-third birthday, Louise’s hunt for a new house.
“I bet I looked at 150 houses,” Louise said. “I looked at every house in Beverly Hills that came on the market. I got so discouraged; there was always something wrong.” The house she finally settled upon was a gated two-acre estate on Tower Road—three bedrooms, four baths, a vast lawn sloping down to the pool. “It was so quiet and lots of birds and trees,” she said. “I felt it would be the closest thing to the country. That was the big point. Then it had a lot of little points. It had a three-car garage. We had this beautiful piece of furniture, my great-grandmother’s secretary, and we had to have nine-and-a-half-foot ceilings to get this thing in. The ceilings were very high … It was a beautiful house.”
There were, of course, calls to and from Australia and meetings with Leland Hayward. In from New York, Herman Shumlin tried persuading Tracy to join the cast of Inherit the Wind for four weeks, long enough to give the play’s star, Paul Muni, a rest. Then Tracy had a courtesy call from Benny Thau, the last official interaction he was to h
ave with M-G-M. Eddie Mannix had held up his pension payout—a sum amounting to $221,000 and change—until he had extracted an oral agreement from Bert Allenberg that Tracy would “sometime” do another picture for Metro at $150,000. (“No one but Mannix wants it,” Allenberg told his client, but since Tracy was technically one film shy of his contractual commitment, he was advised to go ahead and accept the provision.) Now, after much talk of shelving Tribute to a Bad Man—and turndowns from both Clark Gable and Gregory Peck—Thau wanted Tracy to know that Jimmy Cagney had agreed to do the picture after Nicholas Schenck had called him at Martha’s Vineyard and put it on a personal basis, asking him to “jump in” for his old friend. Said Cagney, “I was about as interested in working as I was in flying, which means a considerable level below zero, but after much gab, I agreed. I specified that I would need at least two or three weeks between jobs, and then I would come out and do it.” Tracy’s reaction to the news: “Who cares?”
In Australia, Hepburn had drawn unwanted attention of her own from a celebrity-starved press. “Is there a romance in Katharine Hepburn’s life?” asked the Sydney Sun. “We will say that there is. It’s Spencer Tracy. He loves theatre, watched all the rehearsals at the Old Vic Company, and flew back to New York in the plane with Katharine.” Hepburn did her best to deflect such items, consenting to a joint news conference with Bobby Helpmann where she batted back questions she considered too personal. “I saw a report where Spencer was said to have flown from London to see my rehearsals,” she said. “That’s not true because there was no one at the rehearsals. But, yes, Spencer was in London at the time. He joked that they wouldn’t let him in. ‘I was too lowbrow,’ he said.”
James Curtis Page 90