James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  The meeting the next morning was little more than a rally, a rousing pep talk orchestrated along the lines of what the Hacketts—Albert and Frances—had recommended when Ephron called them for advice. “Phoebe, Walter, and I said, in as many ways as we could, ‘You’re a great actor. No one else can play the part. Without you the picture is nothing.’ Within an hour he said, ‘Okay, kids. I’m not trying to get votes. Just pay me my money when the picture is over.’ Strangely, Hepburn seemed a little sad. She wanted him in the picture, but she also wanted him to be strong and not so susceptible to flattery.”

  Shooting was set to begin Christmas week in Manhattan, the location work timed to the seasonal look of the city. Told by his friend Denny to take off twenty-five pounds, Tracy committed to dropping thirteen pounds in twenty-four days, putting him at 198 for the formal start of production on January 14. With Bogart’s condition worsening, Tracy feared he would be caught out of town when the end came.

  “Call from Betty Bogart to call [their business manager] Morgan Maree!” he wrote in his book on December 14. “Talk of Memorial Service for Bogie! Deliver eulogy?!? WOW! Could be any day—could be 3 mos? To see Bogie (seemed same??) Betty discuss[es] his death.”

  Reluctantly, Tracy left by rail for New York on the twenty-first, choosing the Hotel Westbury in lieu of the Pierre, the scene of his last bender. On Christmas Eve he dined alone at the Westbury but met Garson Kanin afterward for coffee. On Christmas Day he attended eight o’clock Mass at St. Vincent’s Cathedral—Kate was in Connecticut—and ate dinner in front of the TV set at the hotel.

  A publicity gimmick had Hepburn screening the young New York actresses tentatively selected for Desk Set, some of whom would go on to California for testing. Blond Dina Merrill had trained at the American Academy; Kate and Fox casting director Billy Gordon had seen her on television with Phil Silvers. Sue Randall, likewise trained at the academy, had her own fifteen-minute soap opera, Valiant Lady, on CBS. Ash blond Merry Anders had once been under contract at Fox, while Diane Jergens was something of a TV and movie veteran, a recurring role on The Bob Cummings Show having been her most prominent credit.

  Tracy was taking part in the interviews at Fox’s Fifty-sixth Street offices when a call from the coast advised them both that there wasn’t going to be any location work after all. “It would make the picture too expensive,” Ephron later explained, “and by some crazy rule of thumb they had, no Tracy-Hepburn picture should cost over $2 million.”2 As Tracy noted in his book, the savings to the company could amount to as much as $200,000. “Forget New York,” he told Ephron. “We don’t have to walk down Sixth Avenue to do a scene. We’re getting four hundred thousand for this picture, Kate and I, and if we can’t play a scene in front of a black backdrop and get all the laughs there are, we’re stealing your money.”

  They left New York under the cover of darkness, eluding, in particular, the Kanins. “Does the Westbury know that you have left?” Gar inquired in a note a week later. “They seem to be taking messages ad infinitum.” Back on the coast, they phoned and then again visited the Bogarts—first on January 4, the last time together on the evening of the twelfth.

  “When anyone is desperately ill,” said Kate, “you get a feeling, ‘Oh, dear, it’s going to be soon,’ which struck me. So Spencer and I went to the house, and [Bogart] was sitting in a chair in his bedroom—sitting in a wheelchair—and then we got up to go so as not to exhaust him. And I kissed him goodbye, walked over to the door, and Spencer walked over and patted his shoulder and said, ‘We’re on our way.’ And Bogie reached up with his hand and patted Spencer’s hand, looked at him, and said ‘Goodbye, Spence.’ ” The way he said it that night had special resonance, and they could both tell that he meant it. “When we were downstairs, Spence looked at me and said, ‘Bogie’s going to die.’ ”

  “Very weak—semi-conscious,” was the way Tracy recorded the patient’s condition in his book that night. He spent the thirteenth—a Sunday—on “the hill” (as he referred to the house on Tower Road) dining with Louise, John, Susie. A call came the next morning from Betty Bacall—Bogart, she told him, had died at 3:00 a.m. Work on Desk Set was to begin within hours.

  “I originally wanted him to deliver the eulogy,” Bacall remembered. “He called me up immediately and said, ‘I’d never get through it.’ It was just too emotional.” He told her he could have done it for someone he wasn’t as close to, but not Bogie, dear Bogie. “I remember when he delivered the eulogy at Walter Huston’s memorial. He was brilliant, but shaky.”

  The mood on the set was somber as Tracy played his first scenes in the reference library of the Federal Broadcasting Company, initially with Dina Merrill, Joan Blondell, and Sue Randall, soon with Hepburn, who marches in with a box from Bonwit Teller under her arm.

  “My name is Richard Sumner,” he says pleasantly, emerging from her office.

  “Well, numerologically that’s very good,” she smiles, taking the advantage and offering her hand. “There are thirteen letters in your name.”

  “You calculate rapidly.”

  “Up to thirteen anyway.”

  The verbal jousting in Sumner’s introduction to Bunny Watson followed the familiar Tracy-Hepburn pattern. “They did all their own blocking and rehearsing before they came on the set,” said Dina Merrill. “They knew exactly what they were going to do. All the director did was tell them where the camera was and work the other actors into the scene.”

  There were no calls on the fourth day of production, as Tracy and Hepburn were freed to attend the memorial service at All Saints Episcopal Church. Tracy arrived, according to the Los Angeles Times, “grief deep-etched in his broad face.” Hepburn, the paper reported, was already there. “Katie,” said Bacall, “managed to get into the church before anyone else did, and she was sitting there when they came in.” As the service began at 12:30 p.m., John Huston reading the eulogy, a minute of silence was observed on the nearby Fox lot, where together Bogart and Tracy had made their first feature, Up the River, twenty-seven years earlier.

  It was Walter Lang’s idea to stage the questionnaire scene—the one originally set to be done on location—on the roof of the network’s building some forty flights above Midtown, Sumner brown-bagging their lunches, pigeons everywhere, the spectacular New York skyline serving as backdrop. Sumner sets out coffee, sandwiches, takes out a notepad and a pen.

  “Often, when we meet a person for the first time,” he begins, checking his notes, “some physical characteristic strikes us. Now, what is the first thing you notice in a person?”

  “Whether the person is male or female,” Bunny replies.

  Stifling a grin, he makes a note. “Now this is a little mathematical problem…,” he continues, catching himself and picking a cup up off the table. “Celery or olives?” he offers.

  She peers inside. “Four olives, three pieces of celery.”

  Withdrawing the cup, he glances inside. “Right,” he says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That doesn’t happen to be the question.”

  “Oh.”

  He reads: “A train started out at Grand Central with seventeen passengers aboard and a crew of nine. At 125th Street, four got off and nine got on. At White Plains, three got off and one got on. At Chappaqua, nine got off and four got on. And at each successive stop thereafter, nobody got off and nobody got on until the train reached its next to the last stop, where five people got off and one got on. Then it reached the terminal.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” she smiles. “Eleven passengers and a crew of nine.”

  “That’s not the question.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “How many people got off at Chappaqua?”

  “Nine.”

  He stops short of biting into his sandwich. “That’s correct,” he says.

  “Yes, I know.”

  A bemused look comes over his face. “Would you mind telling me how you arrived at that?”

  “Spooky, isn’t it?” she says
, shivering in the cold. “Do you notice that there are also nine letters in Chappaqua?”

  Hepburn later characterized the eight-minute sequence as “a remarkable example of comedy acting between two people who really, more or less, knew what they were doing.” Fiercely proud of the work she and Spence were doing together, she scolded him when he branded a scene lousy (“You don’t know what you’re talking about—the director knows what he’s doing”) and demanded the full attention of the cast and crew when the two of them were at work.

  “Kate saw me reading a magazine one day on the set,” Dina Merrill recalled, “and she came over. She said, ‘Dina, what are you reading?’ I said, ‘Oh, just an article in this magazine.’ She said, ‘I don’t want you ever to do that again. You’re a beginner here. You should watch Spence and me.’ Yes, ma’am! That was the last time I brought a paper or a magazine or anything to the set—and she was right.”

  Tracy, who was averaging just three hours of sleep a night, was “dead tired” and irritable, certain Desk Set would be another clunk of a picture. “Lang is nice man,” he wrote on the sixteenth day of production, “but childish director. Ephron—producer—dumb. Bad pic[ture]. K. bad. Me bad.”

  Owing to Tracy’s presence, Hepburn monitored every aspect of life on the set, even to the point of bringing props in from her own home. “She was a mother hen,” Merrill said, “worrying if he had a cold, or might catch one. It was like he was her child.” Her constant hovering irritated him, and he seized on every possible opportunity to put her in her place. “Shut your mouth,” he’d tell her. “Go back where you belong in vaudeville and keep out of here.” Dina Merrill found him “just as sweet as he could be” but full of hell: “He gave it to her pretty good; one day she came on the set with her hair pinned up in a horrible bun—she always looked like an old shoe anyway—and he was giving an interview. He stopped what he was saying, gestured at her and said, ‘And that, gentlemen, is our star!’ ”

  Henry Ephron, fascinated by the obvious bond between them, haunted the set like a stagestruck teenager. “Tracy, we discovered, was incurably a mischievous kid. Once, when Hepburn left to go on the set, leaving me and Tracy together, he whispered, ‘She’s never forgiven me for Bergman.’ He said it affectionately … She must have loved him terribly. Phoebe once asked Kate what it was about Spencer that fascinated Kate. She said, ‘I’m like a little fly that buzzes around him all the time, and every once in a while he gives me a good swat.’ ”

  When the AP’s Bob Thomas visited the set, he congratulated Hepburn on her Academy Award nomination for The Rainmaker and asked if she’d be attending the ceremonies. “Of course not,” she replied. “I didn’t even go when I won the Oscar for Morning Glory.” Tracy furled his brow as if trying to recall a past life. “Let’s see,” he said. “That was back in 1902, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she returned, “and you won in 1901 and 1906.”

  “These awards,” he said, waving off the subject, “don’t mean a damn thing. They may add some dough to a picture’s gross, but they don’t do anything for actors. The big names out here aren’t actors anyway. They’re personalities. I know of only one great actor and he’s coming out here soon. Guy named Laurence Olivier.” Thomas thought Hepburn had a good shot at the Oscar, but Tracy disagreed. “Naw, I don’t think so. Bergman will get it.” Ignoring the obvious jab, Hepburn went on to praise the Mexican comedian Cantinflas, who had made an international hit for himself in Around the World in 80 Days. “Such style! Such wit! He is simply sensational.” And he was not, she was quick to add, nominated for anything.

  When Walter Lang called them to the set, Hepburn slipped out of the white slacks she was wearing and back into Bunny Watson’s prim business suit. The set, an almost exact copy of the Broadway original, was crowded with the steel-gray console, whirring processing cabinets, and flashing display screen of Emmarac, the enormous job-killing computer Sumner has installed on the main floor of the library. Scene completed, she changed back into her slacks and blouse and greeted Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, visiting from an adjacent stage where Leo McCarey was shooting An Affair to Remember. They launched into a spirited discussion of Kate’s decision to do The Merchant of Venice at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford. (“It’s better to try something difficult and flop,” she said, “than to play it safe all the time.”) When Lang again wanted them, Hepburn had to be bodily dragged away by Tracy, who added a small kick for good measure.

  On the thirty-third day of production, they played their longest scene in the film together—eight pages of material in which Bunny and Sumner dine on fried chicken in Bunny’s apartment. Gig Young, playing her boss and longtime boyfriend, comes in on the exchange and finds both of them in bathrobes, Sumner having gotten drenched in a cloudburst. Then Joan Blondell arrives, adding a note of farce to the sequence and giving Tracy an audience for an improvisational exit, a Skeltonesque turn as a drunk that left the atmosphere giddy.

  “2 days scheduled—done by 2:30—Katie wonderful,” he noted proudly in his book. They finished interior work on the picture two days later, the final shot featuring the trademark Tracy-Hepburn kiss, Kate with her back to the camera, Spence drawing her to him in perfect symmetry with their first screen embrace sixteen years earlier. It would be, Tracy had said, their last picture together. “Who is going to hire us after this?” he asked, acutely conscious of his age, his white hair, the ever-deepening lines in his face. “He felt he was too old for the part,” Lang remembered, “and he was; but Katie wanted him and I wanted him. We all wanted him, so he did it.”

  Included in the principal cast and crew of Desk Set were three notorious drinkers—Tracy, Gig Young, and cinematographer Leon Shamroy. “Shammie” was by far the most practiced, a brusque, cigar-chomping raconteur who played the horses prodigiously. “It was obvious that Katie really had kind of a schoolgirl crush on Shamroy,” said Henry Ephron, “and Phoebe said, ‘Katie, what do you see in Shammie?’ She said, ‘He’s a rascal.’ ” On their last night of shooting they were on the Fox lot’s New York street, where Bunny and Sumner catch a ride with a coworker and his quarrelsome family. Staged in a driving rain, the scene took from midnight to 5:30 in the morning to complete. “Shammie had a bottle of whiskey. Spence said, ‘Goodbye, everyone!’ grabbed the empty bottle of whiskey, and said, ‘See you in June!’ and took off.”

  Desk Set closed four days under schedule and $131,800 under budget. Buddy Adler was so pleased he phoned Fox president Spyros Skouras from the projection room. (“Good news was so scarce around the studio those years,” commented Henry Ephron.) When a preview was set for Pasadena, Ephron called Hepburn and extended an invitation. “Thank you,” she responded, “but we never go to previews.” Tracy took the phone: “Henry, would you send a script to my son John? Send it to the Tracy Clinic. His mother will take him to the preview, and if he’s read the script beforehand, he’ll have no trouble following the picture.”

  With Jesse L. Lasky during the making of Desk Set. (BETTY LASKY)

  After the preview, Louise, who could be excused for detesting the movie, came over to the Ephrons in the lobby. “It’s wonderful,” she said graciously. “We’re going to call Spencer as soon as we get home.”

  Work on The Old Man and the Sea had resumed on July 2, 1956, but the Nassau expedition was, by and large, a failure. They got some long shots of the boat with the fish lashed alongside, they got some backgrounds for Tracy, some sunrises and sunsets, and some usable shots of shark fins racing through the water. There were, however, no live sharks to be photographed—at least none that would respond to direction or appear in numbers large enough to make an impression on screen. The artificial fish, they found, was completely unphotogenic, and it was subjected to repainting after some tests were made. Carefully posed, the fish would be convincing enough dead, but as a living thing it was pretty much hopeless. Nassau was a costly location, even without Tracy’s participation, and production was suspended again on July 28, John Sturges w
anting to rethink every aspect of what had been done so far. Soon he found himself at odds with Ernest Hemingway’s mania for realism.

  “They got mixed up with reality and film,” he later said.

  The fact that the story takes place in the Gulf Stream off Cuba doesn’t mean that that’s the right place to shoot it. It isn’t. The Gulf Stream goes at 12 miles an hour and it’s rough. They took a very realistic approach to the film. And if you’re going to do that, then I don’t think Spencer Tracy was a good choice. He’s an actor of obvious skills and emotional power and all the things that make him such a great actor. But he’s certainly not a starving Cuban fisherman. I think if you attack the picture that way, you’re in trouble. The plans they had to get the shark, the plans to get the fish, got all scrambled up and 50 sets of people came up with 50 sets of solutions and the first thing they knew was that they’d spent $3,000,000. Why I took it on I’ll never really know. I knew Tracy well. The idea intrigued me, to play it as an exercise in imagination and emotion. A theatrical approach. Now if anyone objected to that, the hell with them—they weren’t going to like the film. This approach I found interesting and I felt I could profit by the mistakes they’d already made.

  At Warner Bros., Leland Hayward had Zinnemann’s footage cut together. In early July he and Tracy ran the material—opening with the Old Man coming into the harbor and continuing through to his leaving at dawn—and thought it all quite beautiful, some of it breathtakingly so. They talked of where the narration should go and how it might conflict with the scripted lines of spoken dialogue. They decided it would be almost impossible to mix the two on shore, and Hayward suggested that the voice-over carry the story until the Old Man found himself alone out at sea. “He didn’t remember when he first began to talk aloud when he was by himself,” the narrator would say. “If the others heard me they would think I was crazy,” the Old Man would then say aloud, “but since I am not, I do not care.” Whether Tracy could take both roles—that of the narrator as well as that of the Old Man—was still undecided.