* * *
1 The tension between Tracy and Hepburn may have been exacerbated by the appearance of an article in the October issue of Inside Story titled “That Tracy-Hepburn Affair.” Pictures of Spence and Kate were balanced with shots of him with Louise. The text alleged “monumental scenes in the Tracy household” and went further than any previous publication in suggesting a long-standing sexual relationship.
2 Without the location work, Desk Set was budgeted at $1,997,470.
CHAPTER 30
Our Greatest Actor
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If Spencer Tracy considered retirement in the spring of 1958, he could be excused a certain pessimism. His first two films away from M-G-M had been commercial failures; even the potent Tracy-Hepburn combination was no longer considered box office magic. The Old Man and the Sea could never break even, no matter how much the public got behind it. And the grind of filmmaking wore on him as it always had.
“Spence,” said John Sturges, “could have been cast as the leader of the Irish revolutionary group very easily. He was a rebel, and he tolerated—but unwillingly—certain requirements of civilization. Also, he had within him this dynamo of jittery nervous energy, and you can’t carry that around all the time, find ways to express it. You have to wait a while. In a movie, scenes are lit, you have to ride in a car to work, and so on. And I’m sure they chopped away a bit at Spence. He said they did, anyhow.”
He watched his finances carefully; a balance sheet as of May 31 showed assets—cash, stocks, insurance, the house on Tower Road—amounting to $692,000. Expenses were primarily allowances—$2,500 a month to Louise, a like amount divided among others. When Andrew Tracy died in 1955, he took over the support of his widow, Mame. And, of course, there was always Carroll, who had to be provided for even when there was nothing coming in. Charitable contributions—primarily the clinic—amounted to $30,000 or more a year, and gifts accounted for another $10,000 or so. His own expenses were meager in comparison—generally no more than $1,000 a month.
Hepburn was touring Much Ado About Nothing during the early days of The Last Hurrah, but she kept in close touch by phone. The Much Ado company’s stage manager, Bernie Gersten, made the jumps between cities with her, and he would help with the luggage and whatnot at each successive hotel. Gersten reported that the first thing she did after checking in was to make two long-distance phone calls to announce her safe arrival: one to Spencer Tracy in California and one to her father in Hartford, Connecticut. When Hepburn returned from New York on March 10, she brought with her a container of Irish stew. “Dear Katy,” Tracy wrote in his book.
They were by now a familiar sight, as comfortable and inseparable as a pair of old shoes. Some nights they could be observed quietly browsing the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. On studio lots, shielded from the public, they were less circumspect, Tracy playing the role of the alpha dog to Kate’s humble and adoring mate. “She was meek and motherly,” said Sheilah Graham,
and you knew she lived only to please the man she treated as lord and master. He knew the extent of her devotion and played on it to the end. He seemed to delight in bawling her out—no one knew how it was in private. Once she stopped to tie her shoelace and he shouted, “What’s the matter, Kate?”
“Well, I—”
“Hurry up, goddamn it.”
She left the lace untied and ran … At the beach home of their friends [the Erskines] he would sprawl in an armchair like Professor Higgins with Eliza Doolittle and command, “Put another log on the fire, Kate.” And she would jump to attention and say, “Yessir,” like a junior officer to the captain, and get the wood while he watched … She would take anything from Spencer because she admired him so much. She was his slave, and he used his power over her. But he also knew he needed her.
“I think he was utterly dependent upon her,” said actress Betsy Drake, adding that there was a part of Tracy that could be cruel. “Whatever she did, she was vulnerable to him.” Yet Drake’s abiding memory of the two of them was at the “wonderful ritual” of the Sunday screenings at Irene Selznick’s house on Summit Drive, Spence telling his familiar stories, Kate hanging on his every word. “She was abject,” said Sally Erskine. “Abject. It was really lovely to see them together, because she just glowed when they were together. She would sit at his feet, and if he just patted her on the head she reacted as if he had given her the Taj Mahal. Just a marvelous sight. I thought he showed love, I really did. In his face, his attitude. I [just] don’t think he ever said anything.”
When Hepburn went off to Greece in May 1958, it was in advance of Tracy’s own planned arrival in Italy, where he would again visit the works of Michelangelo and the sites associated with the life of the great artist. During the course of Last Hurrah, Tracy and Jack Ford had talked of filming the life of Il Divino, and Tracy thought some time in Florence and Rome and particularly Carrara would serve as inspiration. As soon as Kate was gone, though, he seemed to lose his focus, loafing at home and occasionally driving out to the beach.
“Spence was down with us Saturday and Sunday,” Chet Erskine reported in a letter to Kate on May 27, “and, the weather being beautiful, we had a marvelous time. The sea was calm but cold, as usual, and the swimming grand. Spence went in with me, and afterward we toasted in the sun and gossiped in our customary manner. He read parts of your letter concerning the wonders of Greece and we pondered the possibility of bringing the Acropolis over here and setting it up in the hills behind our houses where we could enjoy it without the inconvenience of travel …”
Eddie Lawrence, who also owned a house at Malibu, remembered Tracy from this period: “He would come up every once in a while. I really think he was lonesome.”
Tracy’s favorite thing in the world was to drive up the coast, the top down on his Thunderbird, the wind blowing through his hair. Occasionally he’d take Sally Erskine with him, driving as far as they could and then stopping for lunch. She never saw him take a drink, but he would talk about it. “He would say, ‘Oh, Sally, I used to be in the gutter.’ He told me the most horrible things about himself. I was somebody new to confess to, perhaps—I don’t know what it was, perhaps younger.”
Tracy’s spirits were buoyed somewhat by the trade reviews for The Old Man and the Sea, which were extraordinary by any standard. Jack Moffitt, weighing in for the Hollywood Reporter, called it “a beautiful piece of visual poetry” and averred that Tracy’s work as the Old Man was “so intimate and revealing of universal human experience that, to me, it almost transcended acting and became reality.” Variety went further, labeling the picture a screen classic: “One of Tracy’s remarkable achievements, adroitly guided by Sturges, is almost a negative one, but actually the most important. Despite that he is on the screen fully three-quarters of the picture, much of it by himself, his presence does not become oppressive. He has no one to play off of, no other actor by whose presence he can achieve contrast or relief. Within the limitations of the role he can only strive for minute shadings. He does this to create one of the screen’s memorable roles.”
In June the movie was screened at the Venice Film Festival and Expo 58 in Brussels, and it was requested for fests in Brazil and Canada. Tracy was still in town on June 12 when Kate called from Rome to say that she would be returning to New York in a few days. He wired the Kanins in Paris to expect him after a “short stay” in Manhattan, but he was still in California when Hepburn touched down at Idlewild. She was back in L.A. on the seventeenth, back preparing his dinner, back snuggling at his side for TV, back being all that she could be for him. There would be no trip to Europe, though he would continue to think and talk about it well into the fall.
When Stanley Kramer started working in the property department at Fox, moving furniture on and off sets, the year was 1933 and Spencer Tracy was one of the twelve name attractions on the company payroll. It’s conceivable Kramer worked on one of Tracy’s early pictures, but the divide between the grips on the swing crew and the on-camera ta
lent was considerable, and the two men never crossed paths.
Both jumped from Fox to M-G-M, Tracy as a featured player on the studio’s fabled talent roster, Kramer as a researcher for the costume department. After a few weeks Kramer was transferred to Editorial, where he apprenticed and eventually became a cutter’s assistant. (“The pay was low, the glory was small, but it was a good place to learn how to put a movie together.”) Through an uncle who happened to be a talent agent, Kramer found work writing for radio—guest shots for The Chase & Sanborn Hour and Rudy Vallee, episodes of Big Town starring Edward G. Robinson. He sold a spec script to Republic and eventually joined Irving Briskin’s B-picture unit at Columbia.
In 1940, at the age of twenty-seven, Kramer was hired as casting director, story editor, and general factotum by Albert Lewin, the producer who had at one time been his boss at M-G-M. It was Kramer’s doing that a relatively unknown Glenn Ford played the juvenile lead opposite Margaret Sullavan in Lewin’s first United Artists release, So Ends Our Night. On their second picture together, The Moon and Sixpence, Kramer was elevated to the position of associate producer. The film, lacking marketable stars, wasn’t a success, and Kramer was working for producer Val Lewton when he was drafted in 1943.
He spent the rest of the war in the Signal Corps, working out of the former Paramount studio complex on Long Island. Energetic and resourceful, Stanley Kramer returned to Hollywood at a time when independent production was remaking a landscape once dominated by the major studios. Setting out to do what Lewin and his partner David Loew had done on a smaller scale, Kramer optioned two of Ring Lardner’s better-known works, The Big Town and Champion, and went looking for a deal.
Big Town, retitled So This Is New York, was set up at Enterprise, but the film flopped commercially. Rebuffed by the banks, Kramer sought private capital for Champion and eventually secured it from a retired garment manufacturer living in Florida. Guaranteed with lettuce money from central California, Champion turned out to be a huge success. It made a star of Kirk Douglas and set Kramer on his way. There followed a series of productions, all financed with money from “drygoods manufacturers, wildcat oil operators, and all sorts of people.”
A graduate of New York University, Kramer had a taste for class material—often plays that had proven themselves on Broadway. As a producer he amassed one of the industry’s most impressive postwar résumés: Home of the Brave, The Men, Cyrano de Bergerac, Death of a Salesman, High Noon, The Member of the Wedding, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, The Wild One, The Caine Mutiny. He put Marlon Brando onscreen before anyone else, hired Eddie Dmytryk straight out of prison, filmed original screenplays by Carl Foreman, Michael Blankfort, Edward Anhalt, and Dr. Seuss.
In 1955 Kramer began directing and, after a shaky start, landed a six-picture deal with United Artists. His first film under the new contract, The Defiant Ones, was finished and awaiting release when he approached Tracy about playing a role he had rejected on two previous occasions—that of Henry Drummond in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s enduring stage hit, Inherit the Wind. Herman Shumlin had been the first to come calling, thinking he could get Tracy for old times’ sake and the promise of a limited run. Tracy, of course, had other commitments, and Shumlin got a similar turndown from Fredric March, who was vacationing in Europe with his wife, the actress Florence Eldridge. Later that same year, Burt Lancaster’s partner, Harold Hecht, optioned the play and offered to set the deal up anywhere—M-G-M, Paramount, Fox, Columbia, Universal—if only Tracy would play the lead. Again, the timing wasn’t right.
Tracy went on to do The Old Man and the Sea and forgot all about Inherit the Wind until Kramer nabbed the rights for $200,000 and a percentage of the gross. Like Hecht, Kramer had Tracy in mind from the outset, but first he went to March—whom he knew from Death of a Salesman—and got his commitment to play Brady, the Gilded Age orator modeled on William Jennings Bryan. The people at UA were wary of the material—based on the storied Tennessee trial over the teaching of evolution in the public schools—and feared a backlash from Christian fundamentalists. “You’re going to have enough trouble with the subject matter,” one UA executive warned Kramer. “Why take on Tracy? How can you take a chance?” Kramer consulted with March, who said simply, “He’s a great actor. Let’s go.”
Kramer had been nursing a fascination with Tracy since his days at M-G-M, where, as a lowly cutter’s assistant, he had once introduced himself to his idol. “Everyone identified with Tracy from the time he started, when he was a redheaded tough guy—drunk, breaking the windows of cafes and being picked up by the police. Even in those early days nobody could really explain why it was that up against Mr. Movies—Clark Gable—everybody always wanted Tracy to get the girl. He was stocky and he underplayed it. He was kind of the good guy, full of sacrifice, the clichéd character. But, by gosh, he gave it so much more, and somehow you never wanted to see him go. Then, as his stature grew and he became the premiere character actor of his day, he had what a lot of fellows just dream about.”
Bert Allenberg drove a hard bargain. Sensing Kramer’s resolve, he held firm to a fee of $250,000. Tracy hadn’t had a hit since Bad Day at Black Rock, hadn’t made the top ten since Father’s Little Dividend, but he was still widely regarded as the gold standard among American film actors, the best Hollywood had to offer. “Kramer said that he wanted to direct it,” Tracy later recalled, “but that if I’d rather have another director he’d try to get whoever I wanted—Gar Kanin or whoever. But I’d seen the job Kramer did on The Defiant Ones and I told him that was good enough for me.”
The deal was settled just as The Old Man and the Sea and The Last Hurrah would again be putting Tracy’s drawing power to the test. Old Man came first, with a gala world premiere on October 7, 1958, to benefit the March of Dimes. Kate braved the crowds at New York’s Criterion Theatre, something she was ordinarily loath to do, trying her best to distract from advance press clouded with news of the picture’s troubles and its $5.5 million price tag. The notices were mixed, the critics admiring the filmmakers’ guts more than their results, but there were still some who applied the word “masterpiece” to the picture and none at all who mentioned the matter of Tracy’s weight. The first week’s take was surprisingly good—$32,000 for fourteen showings—and the picture continued to draw well into November. The pattern repeated itself in key cities around the country, intense interest in the first two or three weeks, then a precipitous dropoff that was both startling and ominous.
Columbia moved The Last Hurrah into the Roxy on the twenty-second, timing its appearance to the midterm elections, and the picture went over big despite heavy rains that, according to Variety, clipped as much as $20,000 off the first week’s gate. Metro’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was the town’s big winner in the comparably sized Music Hall, but Hurrah, helped by strong notices, held firm in its second week, bettering its first by some $15,000. It continued into its third and fourth weeks, falling off in much the same manner as Old Man and the Sea. In the end, neither film was a success, The Last Hurrah posting a loss of $1.8 million.
As both films were playing themselves out, their star was at Harkness Pavilion, where he had gone for a checkup, some forced dieting, and the removal of a basal cell eruption on his nose. He spent nearly two weeks at the exclusive facility, enduring a battery of tests and a series of cardiograms that showed, much to his dismay, no trouble at all. All the dieting, he decided, was at the expense of his ulcer, and he was still only three pounds to the better. “Out!” he wrote at the end of thirteen days, and he promptly fled to the Gotham Hotel.
Tracy was back in Los Angeles on November 25 when Bert Allenberg suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at the home of client Danny Kaye. Allenberg lingered two days at Cedars of Lebanon and died without regaining consciousness. Tracy was an active pallbearer at Sinai Temple on the twenty-eighth, as were Joel McCrea, Edward G. Robinson, Stewart Granger, Benny Thau, Leo Durocher, and Frank Capra.
It had been a lousy year, rife with disappointment, a
nd being named Best Actor by the National Board of Review did little to bolster his spirits. He considered the Old Man far and away the toughest part he’d ever played and resented all the press about the tank and the phony marlin and such. (“Unless you can arrange for someone to deliver a live 3,000-pound marlin to you once a day for the sharks to chew up, how are you going to do the story?”) He also thought parts of The Last Hurrah overcooked—particularly Minihan’s wake and the death scene in which the cardinal comes to call.
“You liked all that schmaltz,” he said accusingly when his cousin Jane told him she loved the film. “Yes, I did,” she insisted. “That’s where we were all from.” And then there was that line she thought so marvelous: “We’re not all descended from kings, you know.”
He saw Ethel Barrymore, who was twenty-one years his senior, and said gloomily, “Ethel, I’m getting old.”
“Yes,” she said, “just like Jack and Lionel and me …”
When Tracy hit his blue moods, Hepburn redoubled her efforts to look after him. Dina Merrill recalled a day in March 1959 when she saw Hepburn standing in line at the airport. “I said, ‘Kate, where are you going?’
“ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Spencer is going to make The Devil at 4 O’Clock in Martinique, and I’m going down to find him a house to live in.’
“As if nobody else could do that!” Merrill exclaimed. “She wasn’t even in the picture!”
The Devil at 4 O’Clock promised to be yet another rough shoot, the sort of location picture Tracy hated to do. It was the last deal Bert Allenberg had set up for him, and he stuck with it despite learning, just after the first of the year, that producer Fred Kohlmar had no script, no director, and a projected start date of April 15. It was, Tracy told Abe Lastfogel, impossible, and he was no less dubious when he learned the West End’s Peter Glenville would likely direct the film. He finally saw forty-two pages of script on January 21 and thought them terrible. He sent Lastfogel back to Columbia’s Sam Briskin and asked that production be postponed until an entirely new script could be developed. A subsequent meeting with Glenville revealed the new writer to be Bridget Boland, the woman who had written The Prisoner, the first of only two movies Glenville had ever directed. “Start June 1???” Tracy wrote in his book. “I doubt!!”
James Curtis Page 98