Kate described the chaotic funeral at Wilshire Boulevard Temple as “something out of the black” with Spence “almost having a fit” while Irene was “lost in the search for simplicity.” Two thousand mourners gathered under the temple’s great vaulted ceiling as another three thousand onlookers crowded outside. From high in the organ gallery Jeanette MacDonald sang “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” Seated below was a veritable Who’s Who of Mayer’s M-G-M family—Robert Taylor, Eleanor Powell, Fred Astaire, Jimmy Stewart, Red Skelton, Van Johnson, Howard Strickling, Clarence Brown, Billie Burke, Jimmy Durante. Great masses of flowers surrounded a casket draped with red and white roses. Tracy spoke of a “shining epoch” that seemed to pass with Mayer’s death, an epoch of which he clearly felt a part. “There were giants in those days,” he said firmly, “and there are giants in these days—but rarely. Louis B. Mayer was a giant. The merchandise he handled was intangible—something that met the primary human need for entertainment. He knew how to take people out of the everyday world and into a dream world. Even those long associated with him marveled at where he found his insight. He did not find it; he earned it by knowing people.”
The deal for The Blue Angel was okayed just after the first of the year, but with stipulations: that Monroe would be the costar, that Tracy would receive first billing, that Adler would personally produce the picture, and that it would be made in color. The drop in price was to be covered with a percentage of the gross after breakeven. Within a week there was “Monroe trouble” and Tracy, by now having heard all the horror stories, told Allenberg he wanted out. Word was passed to Fox’s Lew Schreiber, who felt the studio would probably work out a deal with the actress and then come back. “No soap!” was Tracy’s response.
Hepburn, who thought Ten North Frederick “a big bore,” was instrumental in bringing Tracy’s next picture to fruition. Jack Ford had set up a deal at Columbia to make Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah and wanted Tracy to play the part of O’Connor’s engaging old Irish pol, Frank Skeffington. The story was a natural fit for both men, the passing of an era in American politics in which showmanship and patronage won the hearts and votes of the immigrant poor and the New England bluebloods were the perennial enemies of the people. After a brief flirtation with Jimmy Cagney, Ford set his sights on Tracy for the role and refused to give up.
Kate knew there had been “not too much interest” between the two since Tracy had been unable—or, in Ford’s mind, unwilling—to do The Plough and the Stars in 1936. When Leland Hayward, at Eddie Mannix’s urging, wanted Ford to direct The Old Man and the Sea, he put the idea forth to Tracy, knowing there would be serious reservations. Tracy wired:
BRILLIANT DIRECTOR OF YOUR CHOICE. ONLY FEAR: QUESTION HE WILL SHOOT SCRIPT IF NOT PAPA YOU ME.
Tracy was sent O’Connor’s novel in February 1956, and he devoured it in two days. “Great but NO!!” he wrote in his book. “John Ford?? Told Allenberg no ‘Hurrah.’ ” In September Columbia came back with an offer that was promptly rejected by Abe Lastfogel: $125,000 plus 25 percent of the profits. Being “Irish and smart,” Ford applied to Hepburn for help. One night at her place—the “aviary” on what was once the John Barrymore estate—Allenberg complained that involving her was “unethical” of Ford, a statement that elicited from Tracy a “sharp reminder to him of the facts of life.” The next afternoon Hepburn arranged the first substantive talk between Tracy and Ford in some twenty years.
“Kate ‘Agent’ with Ford for Hurrah,” Tracy wrote. “Met with him. Deal now possible.” Columbia’s Harry Cohn made the same offer as before, then raised it, under pressure from Ford, to $175,000 and 10 percent of the gross after breakeven. Tracy again said no, and four days later Allenberg appeared on the set of Desk Set with word that Ford “wanted a deal” but was still working to bring Cohn around. Subsequently Ford told Hepburn that he would not make the picture without Tracy.
The back-and-forth continued into March 1957, when Tracy made the decision to keep his schedule open for The Old Man and the Sea. Kate notified Ford—who wanted to start May 1—and Ford, not wishing to wait any longer, said in a fit of pique that he would move ahead with Orson Welles in the role. “End of Hurrah!!” Tracy wrote. Eight days later, “Pappy” was once again on the phone to Hepburn; Columbia had upped the offer to $200,000 but said they wanted to start June 1. “Par!” Tracy responded. “NO!” The deal wasn’t settled until May, when the producers agreed to push the start of production back to January 1958. Tracy went off to Hawaii to do Old Man and the Sea, and Ford lined up a picture in London to fill the time.
The Last Hurrah was not without controversy, the character of Skeffington having been modeled on Boston’s legendary mayor (and onetime Massachusetts governor) James Michael Curley. As the story goes, an enterprising newspaper editor sent the eighty-one-year-old Curley a set of galleys with the hope that Curley would file a review of the O’Connor book. Curley took little more than a fleeting glance at the galleys before returning them to the paper with a terse one-line notice: “The matter is in the hands of my attorneys.”
His outrage was short-lived. O’Connor painted Skeffington with obvious affection, saving the sharp edges for the rogues, bigots, and hypocrites who opposed him on the battlefield of public approbation. In a time and place where Irish political operatives did what they felt they had to do for the advancement of their people, Curley was a hero to the men and women of South Boston, a fierce and colorful advocate for the disenfranchised. In time, he began referring to himself as “Skeffington” and was heard to have said on at least one occasion, “I like best the scene where I die.” Despite the apparent change in Curley’s attitude toward the book, Columbia took the precaution of paying the former mayor, governor, and convicted felon $25,000 in exchange for his signature on a release shielding the corporation from any legal action that might otherwise result from the production and exhibition of the movie.
After striving for more than a year to get Tracy committed, Ford set about creating the most comfortable of working environments. The script, written by Ford’s frequent collaborator Frank Nugent, was such a faithful job of adaptation that it was scarcely mentioned in the few meetings between Tracy and Ford that led up to production. Surrounding Tracy in the film would be, as Ford put it, his “ex-pals and ex-playmates”—Jimmy Gleason, Wallace Ford, Frank McHugh, and, making his first major studio appearance in six years, Pat O’Brien. Ford filled out the cast with a sterling collection of character people, Basil Rathbone, Donald Crisp, Edward Brophy, John Carradine, and Jane Darwell among them. Jeffrey Hunter was borrowed from Fox to play Adam Caulfield, the pipe-smoking sportswriter invited to follow one last campaign by his uncle Frank, and the cast was completed with such vintage names as Ricardo Cortez, Basil Ruysdael, Edmund Lowe, Anna Lee, Ruth Clifford, Hank Mann, Tom Neal, Mae Marsh, and Julius Tannen.
A wardrobe fitting on February 13 gave Ford an opportunity to stress the importance of Tracy’s performance in the film. This was a big picture, Ford emphasized, with a budget of $2.5 million and an aggressive thirty-five-day schedule. Tracy would have a wonderful line of support, but in the end it would be up to him—and him alone—to carry the picture. Tracy spent the next few days at home, studying the script, honing his characterization. From the book he knew Skeffington as a vigorous seventy-two-year-old, a man of thoroughgoing cynicism who nevertheless made himself the most accessible of public figures, comfortable in the knowledge that all successful political activity harbored an element of quid pro quo.
“I’d like to say that I have a theory about acting,” Tracy had said at the time of The Mountain. “But I don’t. It’s just that I was born a sentimental Irishman, and I play the parts the way they react on me.” The way the part of Skeffington reacted on him was a constant source of delight to John Ford. He was, Ford later said, a “wonderful guy” with whom to work. “When I say Spencer Tracy is the best actor we ever had, I’m giving you something of my philosophy of acting. The best is most natural. Scenery never ge
ts chewed in my pictures. I prefer actors who can just be.”
Filming began on February 24, 1958. Returning to Gower Gulch for the first time since Man’s Castle, Tracy marveled at the span of time. “John Ford—after 28 years—!” he wrote in his datebook. The first scene that morning had Skeffington descending the staircase of the mayoral mansion, the usual crowd of supplicants gathered outside the gate. Pausing on the landing before a portrait of his late wife, he gently removes the single rose at its base, as he has done every day since her death, and replaces it with a fresh one. He then pauses to gaze up at her, warmed by her memory. The moment is as brief as it is heartfelt, and it energizes him for the day ahead. “Well, Winslow,” he says, resuming his descent, “is the lark on the wing this morning?”
Tracy resisted The Last Hurrah because of John Ford’s involvement, but the experience was a pleasant surprise for both men. (SUSIE TRACY)
Surrounded in this initial scene by Gleason, Brophy, O’Brien, others, Tracy’s natural charm and authority took hold, and he was at once the wily politician of O’Connor’s famed novel. Regarding the stack of wires on his desk—the result of his announcement that he will run for reelection—he says wryly, “We should be getting a kickback from Western Union.” To which one of his henchmen responds, “I spoke to them about it last year—negative.”
Though envisioned by Ford as a character study, much of The Last Hurrah was played as broad comedy, the humor rooted in the reality of the Irish-American experience. When Skeffington storms the restricted battlements of the Plymouth Club, he does so with a Jewish ward healer in tow. When a prominent banker blocks a slum clearance project, Skeffington appoints the man’s wastrel son to the post of fire commissioner and then uses the resulting photographs as blackmail.
When it came time to shoot Knocko Minihan’s wake, Ford told a visitor it was probably the “most hilarious episode” in the entire story. “The wake is as obsolete as a dinosaur today,” Tracy explained, “but in the old days among the Boston Irish they were practical and often enjoyable affairs. They allowed neighbors and friends of the deceased to get together as a kind of relief from the grimness.” There was also, added Jimmy Gleason, a serious side to the mayor’s presence at such an event. “In those days in Boston, an elected official was a tribal chieftain as well, the tribe, of course, being the Irish. So it was incumbent upon the elected official to attend those affairs, it was he who took care of the financial burden of the widow.”
Thirty days into production, Tracy wearily commemorated his birthday. “58 years old,” he said in his book, “and feel 90.” He dined that evening with Louise and the kids, Kate typically making herself scarce. On April 7, work shifted to the Columbia Ranch in Burbank, where Ford began shooting exteriors.
Tracy plainly had fun making the picture, and the fireworks many anticipated between him and Pappy Ford never came. “[T]hey were both, shall we say, gentlemen of very strong habits,” Hepburn said, “and Spencer liked to take a nap in the afternoon. He could get up early and go to work, but just absolutely would wilt. So [John], instead of making a problem of this, used to say, ‘God, I’m exhausted. You know, I think we’ve done a full day’s work and I don’t know why the hell you don’t go home.’ And there were two enormously talented people sort of stalking around like prize bulls in the ring, having a deep understanding of each others’ wickednesses. It always used to entertain me.”
Night work on the ranch captured the events that follow Skeffington’s defeat at the hands of a telegenic Republican, the wooing of the electorate having evolved from hand-to-hand engagement to the sterility of the electronic age. The old line’s frustration with this turn of events is seen in the great pumpkin face of Ditto Boland, Skeffington’s loyal lieutenant, who is not quite so button-down as the others. Ed Brophy, making his final appearance in a feature picture, pulled out all the stops that night, racing up to his boss’ limousine and throwing his overcoat and his prized homburg to the sidewalk, stomping on them as he sputtered threats of physical violence. “I’m on my way over to that McCluskey’s headquarters! I’m gonna step right up and poke him in the eye! I’m gonna tell him to his face—”
As they rehearsed the scene, Tracy calming him and telling him to get ahold of himself, retrieving the hat (his “hamburger”) from the pavement and carefully pressing it back into shape, Ford eyed the plate glass storefront adjacent to campaign headquarters and decided to have Brophy let fly with a brick once Tracy’s car had cleared the shot. The sixty-two-year-old actor had just one chance of hitting the window dead square, and in the end it broke clean, the shattering of one generation’s traditions in service of another’s.
The rest of the night was spent setting up and staging a midnight victory parade for the opposing candidate, Skeffington making his way home on foot, a solitary figure in the foreground, the clamor and fire of a newer—if not necessarily better—administration fading off into the distance. It was a particularly long and complicated tracking shot, requiring the services of eight assistant directors and hundreds of extras, two hundred lighted torches, lapel pins as big as silver dollars. They didn’t finish until 5:00 a.m., but the resulting shot became one of the most prized in the Ford catalog.
The Last Hurrah didn’t finish in thirty-five days—Tracy never thought it would—but it did come in $200,000 under budget. Ford printed so many first takes that the final shooting ratio was just six to one—almost unheard of on a major feature. Tracy completed his final scene—Skeffington casting his vote on election day—at 4:10 p.m. on April 24, 1958. “Happy picture!” he wrote in his book. “Ford great!”
Just prior to finishing up The Last Hurrah, Tracy had a call from John Sturges: Ernest Hemingway had run The Old Man and the Sea and said that he liked it very, very much. Tracy was astonished; he himself wasn’t happy with the picture. Since shooting had wrapped at the end of August, he had been locked in an ongoing battle with Hayward over the handling of the soundtrack. Tracy’s preference had always been to play the Old Man silent and speak his words in voice-over, the same approximate technique that had been dubbed “Narratage” for The Power and the Glory. But nobody liked the idea of a $5 million silent movie, and he dutifully made a preliminary narration track for editing purposes, a dubbing job that took three days. In October, the film cut, he went back and did the final voice-over, which involved his speaking the narrative as well as the words and thoughts of Santiago, the latter in the voice of the Old Man. It was a technique that worked, despite all the hand-wringing that led up to it, and by the middle of November, Hayward could report to Hemingway that the picture was entirely finished “with the exception of a couple of minor inserts.”
On January 9 they had taken it to Riverside, where the reaction of a near-capacity house—which had come to see A Farewell to Arms—was so good the studio people were a little surprised. “Worth all the agony everyone went through—I think,” Louise reported in a letter to a friend. “Whether it is worth the ulcer Spence wound up with is a question. But it is a fine, fine picture.” Even Tracy thought the reaction good. “ ‘Old Man’ seemed to go well,” he wrote in his book the next day. “Think excellent, true pic. Should get good reviews. Business??? Very dubious.” He made some minor suggestions—things to cut—but when he ran the picture again in March, he found that not one of his changes had been made and his mood soured again. “[N]o suggestions followed—stinks!—will get panned.”
According to Hayward, Hemingway said the picture had “a wonderful emotional quality and is very grateful and pleased with the transference of his material to the screen. He thought Tracy was great (in light of his quarrels with him this is quite a compliment)…the photography was excellent … the handling of the fishing and the mechanical fish very good. Had some minor dislikes…[B]ut all in all he was terribly high on the picture and very pleased with it.”
For a second preview in May, Tracy wanted Betty Bogart to see it. “I went to the preview with Carroll Tracy,” she recalled, “and he was waiting
for me at his house afterwards for the full report. Things like that meant something to him.” Her reaction was so positive it threw him, and he thought for a moment that he might be overreacting. “Is it great???” he wondered. A few days later he phoned Sturges about the changes he wanted. He was unhappy with the ending, the titles, and the scene toward the end with the tourists, which he thought out of tone with the rest of the sequence. Two days later, he had his answer: Warners refused to make any of the changes he wanted. That day he suffered the “worst ulcer pains yet” and the upset continued into the evening hours, when he irritably dined at Romanoff’s with the Durochers, the Wagners (Bob and Natalie), and Betty Bogart (with whom he gratuitously picked a fight). He was chronically tired, unhappy, ill, and uninterested in work.
When Tom Pryor of the New York Times visited the set of The Last Hurrah, it was, in part, to check a report that Tracy was looking upon the picture as his own professional swan song. “Well,” said Tracy, “twenty-eight years is a long time. I started with John Ford and it has been suggested that since he is directing this film it might be an appropriate time for me to call it quits. You know, the beginning and the end with Mr. Ford.” Asked who had made such a suggestion, Tracy took on a sardonic smile.
“I have heard the suggestion,” he replied. “In fact, I have been told that the people have voted for it.”
James Curtis Page 97