James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Tracy deflected other offers, eager to be done with the marathon project. He saw Sturges and cinematographer James Wong Howe off for Hawaii on June 9, 1957, and followed on the fifteenth accompanied by John, Larry Keethe, and a new secretary, Jeri Tyler, whose job it would be to keep John entertained. The Kona Inn was a beautiful place with a large pool, and John and Jeri spent their days swimming, sunning, shopping, and practicing tennis. Kona had been selected because there was no current or tide to speak of, the color of the water was right, and it was possible to shoot very close to shore. It was, in other words, a quiet location that could, above all else, be controlled. A rented camera barge called the Julie B. was outfitted as a floating soundstage, with recording equipment, a dressing room for Tracy, a makeup room, a commissary, and film refrigeration facilities. It also boasted a twenty-foot camera boom and a crane for raising and lowering the diving bell used for underwater filming.

  “Although we had powerful generators and scores of reflectors,” Howe later wrote, “we used them as little as possible for the simple reason that the movement on the Old Man’s boat on even the slightest swell would reveal their presence as a fixed source of light. Instead we used only the sun as our natural source of light. An important reason for this was the desire to give the audience the intense feeling of heat from the glare on the water—the intense exhausting heat the Old Man of the story was getting. And without the use of artificial balanced light, it was necessary we keep changing the position of the camera barge to maintain the proper light source angle.”

  Lighting became such a severe problem that filming took more time than anticipated. Tracy’s double, Harold Kruger, typically worked a ten-hour day, while Tracy himself appeared in just two, three, or four setups. “This picture is becoming my life’s work,” he groused to a visiting reporter from the Associated Press. “The book is a masterpiece and should make a great picture. I believe in it. You’d have to believe in it to stay with it after all the troubles we’ve had. By now there isn’t a chance to make back all the money we will spend, so we’re concentrating on making something worthwhile.”

  Shooting The Old Man and the Sea in Hawaii. Cinematographer James Wong Howe is behind the camera. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  He was on his best behavior, but Hemingway, for one, could not be placated. His Old Man still weighed 210 pounds, a fact Hayward confirmed in a phone conversation. “Tracy can make money playing fat men now,” the author thundered in a subsequent letter, “or he can always get by in those toad-and-grasshopper comedies with Miss Hepburn, but he is a complete and terrible liability to the picture and has been since he presented himself out of condition in 1956.” Hemingway was also unhappy that Hayward had asked Paul Osborn to go over Peter Viertel’s latest draft of the screenplay to “make the dialogue more playable.”

  A half day’s work on June 26 completed the water exteriors, and Tracy was able to leave for L.A. via Honolulu several days ahead of schedule. It was 110 degrees in Burbank the day he walked onto Warners’ Stage 7, where a tank held a million gallons of water tinted with candy dye and Jimmy Howe was struggling to duplicate the single-source lighting he had achieved at Kona. Sturges spoke to Tracy “very frankly” and told him that he was still too fat, yet Sturges and Hayward both had to acknowledge that Tracy’s ulcer made it “damned hard” for him to diet as he should. Hayward assured Hemingway they were photographing their star “very, very carefully” and that while they were both fully aware of the problem, no one else would be. Work got under way again on July 5, with Tracy expecting to be another two months on the picture.

  There were camera problems that first day—“par for the course,” as Tracy said—and they got exactly one shot in the can. The following Monday was given over to process work, and the ultraviolet lights needed for Arthur Widmer’s new blue screen effects were so strong (2,300 kilowatts) that Tracy was suffering from eye burn—an injury akin to welder’s flash—by the end of the second day. The doctor gave him drops and ordered him to work only half days in front of the UV lights, a restriction that hobbled the company still further and made the matching shots more difficult.

  Felipe Pazos, now twelve, was brought to California for interiors and had to be photographed just as carefully as Tracy to keep from jolting the audience with a year’s growth. “This time we are going to rehearse with him carefully,” Hayward assured a dubious Hemingway, “and try to treat him with some kindness and understanding which he never had before.” Tracy played the film’s first dialogue scenes with young Pazos, still not sure how the narration would work in around it. Reshot by Sturges were Zinnemann’s scenes at the terraza, where the boy buys the Old Man a beer after eighty-four days without a fish, and a lengthy exchange in the Old Man’s shack, where Santiago talks hopefully of the work ahead. (“Tomorrow is the eighty-fifth day. Eighty-five is a lucky number.”) Paul Osborn always felt the core of the picture was the relationship between the Old Man and the boy, and now their love for each other was finally coming across. “He is very appealing and very touching,” Hayward said of Pazos. “The fact that he is little and has that serious face has been greatly utilized by John Sturges, and he comes out of it like a little boy who is trying very hard to be a grown up and like a man. Sturges has done an extraordinary job with him.”

  They finished with the boy on August 6, leaving the balance of the work to be done on the process stage and in the tank. Howe created the glare of the tropical sun with a blazing bank of photo floods that pulled sixty thousand watts of electricity when fully illuminated. Bob Thomas visited the set to do a piece on why the film had taken so long and found Tracy in his dressing room.

  “Maybe Zinnemann couldn’t stand to see my face every morning,” Tracy suggested. “I don’t know. Anyway, he finally quit.” The company, he said, burned through $3 million in Cuba, yet the Cuban footage would comprise only 20 percent of the movie. By then Jack Warner figured he was in too deeply to scrap the thing and approved another $2 million to get it completed. “Luckily,” said Tracy, “they had an actor who was stupid. I put off other pictures to remain available for this one. I’ve got Ten North Frederick to do at Fox and The Last Hurrah at Columbia, and I didn’t know if they would wait for me. Fortunately, both schedules have been pushed back … Yeah, I really wanted to do The Old Man and the Sea. But if I had known what trouble it was going to be, I never would have agreed to it. This is for the birds.”

  It was when floating alone in the tank on Stage 7 that Tracy’s value to the troubled company became most forcefully apparent, for he had nothing other than the Old Man’s words and his wits as an actor to carry the picture. The quiet routine at sea, the flying fish, the man-o’-war hovering overhead … and then comes the first tentative tugs at the line. “Never have I had such a strong fish,” he speaks wearily, “or one that acted so strangely … Maybe he’s too wise to jump. He could ruin me with a jump … or one quick rush … Maybe he has been hooked many times before and he knows this is how he must make his fight.” And then the resolve that comes when, rising to the night sky, the line clutched powerfully in his hands, he pulls at it with all the strength that is in him. “Fish,” he declares, his jaw set for battle, “I love you and I respect you very much—but I will kill you before this day ends!”

  As Hayward wrote Hemingway, “The difference in Tracy’s performance is amazing. Freddie kind of played him like he was a senile old man tottering around barely able to walk or stand up. Sturges has directed him obviously like he is an old man but still with great virility and great strength still in him. Obviously unless he did have these qualities it would be impossible for him to go through the ordeal that he had to. Spencer is deeply moving in the picture and very believable.”

  By August 9 they had roughly two weeks of work left to do, yet they still had not resolved the problem of narration. Knowing Tracy did not feel that he could play the part, say the dialogue, and do the voice-over as well, Hayward had actor Joseph Cotten record a scratch track that could be used for cutt
ing purposes. He then proposed that Hemingway himself do the narration—a job Hemingway said that he “could not and would not do.” On August 30, Tracy marked his fifty-first and final day on the film, bringing an end, nine days behind schedule, to a project that had been foremost in his mind for nearly five years. The following day he shaved off the beard he had grown for the role and rewarded himself with a TV dinner.

  As his father was making the final shots for The Old Man and the Sea, John Tracy was on the witness stand in Los Angeles Superior Court, giving testimony in the divorce action he had brought against his estranged wife, charging her with mental cruelty and seeking custody of their child. Nadine Tracy testified that John had treated her as a servant and that he had repulsed her after the birth of their son. “If I put my arm around him he would say, ‘Let me alone.’ ” She told the court that on the day they separated, she took the baby with her on a shopping trip and returned to find that John had cleared out. A custody agreement had already been arrived at, leaving only the financial issues to be resolved when they met in court on August 28.

  On the stand, Johnny’s excellent lipreading skills failed him and he struggled to make himself understood. Louise volunteered her services, relaying questions in a way he could easily read and “interpreting” the answers he gave. He told the court that he had never been employed but that he hoped to become an artist. He said that his income came primarily from a trust left by his maternal grandfather, and that during the marriage his father had made him an allowance of seventy-five dollars and then later one hundred dollars a month. He indicated that he would not oppose Nadine’s being granted the divorce on her cross complaint, and the judge directed him to pay seventy-five-dollars’ monthly alimony and one hundred dollars in child support, less than half the $472 Nadine had sought. Spence took the family to dinner at Romanoff’s that evening, noting ruefully in his book that John had dropped ten pounds over the course of the ordeal.

  Kate, meanwhile, was in Stratford, fulfilling the commitment to the American Shakespeare Festival she had originally made for the 1956 season. Under Jack Landau’s direction, her fiery Portia, first seen on the Old Vic’s Australian tour, was a sensation—eloquent and graceful and enthusiastically received by most of the morning papers. When Spence promised to come back for Much Ado About Nothing, she was giddy with excitement.

  “She spoke of him openly,” the festival’s artistic director, John Houseman, remembered, “and always with a mingling of loyalty, tenderness, and admiration. We all shared this admiration and hoped that he would presently appear among us. Several times that summer, Kate joyfully announced his imminent arrival, then reported that he had been detained or prevented. Finally, during Much Ado, the great day came when Kate, with a young girl’s enthusiasm, proclaimed that this time Spencer was really coming. His plane ticket was bought and all the arrangements were made. On the evening of his arrival—carefully chosen as an Othello day—she drove off alone, in a state of high excitement that she made no attempt to conceal, to [Idlewild] Airport to meet him.”

  Tracy’s datebook shows that he made an attempt to talk to John on September 13. (“Out of it,” he recorded, “no luck …”) He boarded an American Airlines flight for New York the next morning, arriving on the East Coast at five o’clock. His entry for the day includes a word that suggests the scene Kate must have encountered upon her arrival: “Load.” He was bundled off to the Sherry-Netherland, where the room, he noted, was air-cooled. His entry for the next day, September 15, contains just three words: “missed Stratford” and then again the word “load.” Humiliated, Hepburn told the company that Tracy had missed his flight.

  “He never did appear,” said Houseman.

  Officially, Tracy was in New York on the first leg of a publicity tour that was to take him to Europe in advance of The Old Man and the Sea. The Kanins, who were to accompany him to Montecatini, found it impossible to book space on the S.S. Independence but promised to follow in a few days aboard the Île-de-France. Tracy himself noted three continuous days of drinking at the Sherry-Netherland, having placed himself in Dr. Stock’s expert care. He slept most of September 18 and 19 and until noon on the twentieth. Rousing himself, he spoke to Louise by phone and had calls from Hayward and Bert Allenberg. He dined with Kate at the hotel that evening, took all three meals in her company the next day, and was well enough for a drive on the twenty-second.

  Warners’ New York office finally caught up with him on the twenty-fifth. Tracy told them he had the Asiatic flu and would not be meeting with the press at all. He thought he might still go to Europe and was looking at cars for the trip as late as the twenty-eighth. At 2:30 the following morning he abruptly decided he wanted to go back to California. Kate made the flight on two hours’ notice and was there on St. Ives with him that night to serve dinner.

  As The Old Man and the Sea inched toward completion, Tracy faced a logjam of properties vying for his attention. The most promising of these, however, went away within days.

  Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had acquired the rights to the two Terence Rattigan one-acts known collectively as Separate Tables, and the offer had been made for Laurence Olivier to direct and star in the picture. Olivier and Vivien Leigh traveled to Los Angeles to finalize the deal. Spence, of course, had known Vivien since 1940, when he presented her with the Oscar for Gone With the Wind. Later, he helped Larry master his Midwestern accent when Olivier was preparing for the part of the tragic Hurstwood in William Wyler’s production of Carrie. The two men were subsequently photographed together on the set of Father’s Little Dividend, but their paths seldom crossed. “I have often thought we both sensed an affinity in our fates,” Olivier wrote, “as people well might who felt that their lives are a bewildering mixture of incredibly good and incredibly bad fortune.” It was over dinner at George Cukor’s that Olivier was seized with the notion of adding Tracy to the cast as the hard-drinking writer John Malcolm. He put the idea to Tracy as a sort of fait accompli.

  “Won’t Burt Lancaster want the part?” Tracy asked.

  “No,” Olivier assured him. “He’s agreed that you do it.”

  What Olivier didn’t tell Tracy was that he had put the request forth in the form of an ultimatum and that the reaction of the “Young Duke” was sharper than anyone expected. “We had a party to celebrate,” Tracy remembered, “and then the Oliviers flew home. When he arrived, a call was waiting from Hollywood. Lancaster had decided he wanted the role. ‘Either Tracy does it or you can’t have us,’ Larry said. But Lancaster was determined. Larry rang me that night. ‘Well, old cock,’ he said, ‘we’ve all been fired.’ I said, ‘That’ll teach you to ask for me.’ ”

  Far more resilient as a pending project was Ten North Frederick, from the best-selling novel by John O’Hara. Tracy was first sent the book in February 1956, with Fox saying they’d buy it if he would agree to do it. As with The Power and the Glory, O’Hara began the novel with a corpse and then unfolded the story of Joe Chapin in flashback. Trapped in a sterile marriage, Joe falls in love with a younger woman named Kate. Hemmed in by social convention, he decides that he must remain with his wife. “The practice of love had gone out of their life together; they continued to live in the same house, eat their meals together, expose themselves to the intimacies of living together; and Edith could count on Joe to pay the bills … There was nothing, certainly in the public prints or in the public view that could be inferred to be proof or hint of a change in their relationship … they behaved toward each other with the same precise politeness they had observed all their lives.” Meanwhile, unable to marry Kate, Joe Chapin methodically drinks himself to death.

  With Laurence Olivier on the set of Carrie (1952). (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  “WOW!” Tracy wrote in his book. “Not for me!”

  Nothing more was said about Ten North Frederick until Buddy Adler showed such an unbridled enthusiasm for Desk Set. He called Tracy one day in March 1957 and expressed hope that something could be worked out for the O’Ha
ra story, which was being developed by Charles Brackett and writer-director Philip Dunne. Where Tracy saw a character and a plotline that hit far too close to home, Dunne saw one of the greatest of all modern novels: “It is the story of the first citizen of a representative American city, of his wife, his son and daughter, and of his brief political career. Above all, it is the story of the girl who brings him happiness too late. It is a touching story, both realistic and intensely dramatic.”

  Tracy relented, and in April a deal was struck for the same money and percentages as for Desk Set. He briefly tried getting out of the commitment in June, pro forma, but the real trouble over Ten North Frederick didn’t start until Adler began pushing a protégée, actress-model Suzy Parker, for the role of Kate. Tracy didn’t think Parker could act, and there followed a flurry of tests—Dina Merrill, Marjorie Steele, Inger Stevens. According to Merrill, Adler “had the hots” for Suzy Parker, and in the end no one else would do for the part. Tracy told Allenberg to get him out of the picture, and there was a momentary threat from Fox of a lawsuit.

  Adler backed off, convinced he had an even stronger use for Tracy—as Professor Unrat opposite Marilyn Monroe in a modern remake of The Blue Angel. There was no director yet attached, but the plan was to do the film that summer in Europe. Tracy was intrigued enough to have a look at the 1930 original with Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich. “Fabulous pic[ture] & part,” he wrote in his book. “O.K. if right director.” By the time the deal was made, however, Desk Set had proven a failure, reporting domestic rentals of just $1.7 million. The best Adler could do was a straight salary of $200,000. The deal was still hanging fire on October 29 when Louis B. Mayer died of leukemia and Irene Selznick asked Tracy to read the eulogy.