James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  An advance crew was working over the tiny town of Lahaina, the ancient capital of Hawaii, when Tracy received word from his brother Carroll that Emma Brown, their venerable aunt Mum, had died in Freeport at the age of ninety. Famously parsimonious, Emma Brown had sent cash gifts to her nephews every Christmas—as if Spence needed the money. “She could send them a certain amount each year to help keep her taxes down,” Bertha Calhoun recalled. “They sent her fur coats and televisions, all kind of things she wouldn’t buy for herself … Any big thing in the house that you would consider a convenience—she wouldn’t buy that, so that’s what they’d give her for Christmas.” Spence said he wouldn’t come back for the funeral, that it would be a mob scene if he did. “When they buried Emma there were people there at the funeral hiding behind the tombstones because they thought Carroll was Spencer. It was terrible.”

  Upon Carroll’s return to Los Angeles, Tracy withdrew from The Devil at 4 O’Clock, citing a conflict with the scheduled start of Judgment at Nuremberg. In a statement, Columbia’s Sam Briskin said the studio considered the Hawaiian location work “too hazardous” to assure the completion of Tracy’s scenes by December 16, the absolute drop-dead date for Tracy’s release to Stanley Kramer. In the meantime, Kramer was flogging the release of Inherit the Wind, which had its world premiere as a two-a-day attraction at London’s Astoria Theatre on July 7, 1960.

  The early notices were superb, the trades rhapsodizing over every element of the picture—Kramer’s direction, Ernest Laszlo’s evocative black-and-white photography, Ernest Gold’s exquisitely restrained musical score, the stark vocals of Leslie Uggams. “Tracy has the lines, the ringing phrases and sentences, purposely homely at times, the insistence of mind over matter, the shafts of irony by which Bryan and the proponents of ignorance were routed,” James Powers wrote in the Hollywood Reporter. “He delivers them, and a deep humanity, by enormous conviction and force of intelligence.” Variety called Kramer’s pairing of Tracy and March “a stroke of casting genius. They go at each other on the thespic plane as one might imagine Dempsey and Louis would have had time and circumstance brought them to the same ring. Both men are spellbinders in the most laudatory sense of the word. If they aren’t two contenders in the next Academy sweepstakes, then Oscar should be put in escrow for another year.”

  Curiously, the British public didn’t flock to the theater to see the heralded clash of the titans, and Kramer would later talk of forlornly standing in front of the Leicester Square cinema “with reviews I could have written myself” and watching as “no one came.” The American premiere was set for July 21 in Dayton, Tennessee—the site of the original courtroom battle—with several members of the original jury commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the trial. Kramer’s New York press representative, Meyer Beck, got in touch with John T. Scopes, the Louisiana geologist who, in 1925, was the man on trial for the teaching of evolution, and persuaded him to help promote the film, following a “carefully scheduled itinerary” that culminated in Scopes’ return to the town H. L. Mencken once famously dubbed “the buckle on the Bible belt.”

  The mayor, who proclaimed a Scopes Trial Day, called the resulting crowd the second-largest in Dayton’s history. Scopes noted little change in the place—the Butler Act was still on the books and teachers were still required to sign a pledge that they wouldn’t teach evolution—and he said that he was certain the verdict would be the same were the trial to be repeated. “I enjoyed the movie,” Scopes later wrote in a memoir. “Of course, it altered the facts of the real trial. I was never jailed and I hadn’t met my future wife until years later in Venezuela. I didn’t mind such small liberties. They had to invent a romance for the balcony set. Also, Matthew Harrison Brady, the Bryanlike character, died nearer the close of the trial than Bryan had. What was important, though, the film captured the emotions in the battle of words between Bryan and Darrow …”

  The $2.2 million movie generated little heat in its initial openings, despite some of the strongest reviews of Tracy’s career. A boycott active within 17,000 American Legion posts was likely a factor, as actor-screenwriter Nedrick Young had pleaded the Fifth when asked to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953. (Under the pseudonym of Nathan E. Douglas, Young had collected an Academy Award for his work on The Defiant Ones.) Kramer fired back at National Commander Martin B. McKneally, characterizing the Legion’s announced stand against “a renewed invasion of American filmdom by Soviet-indoctrinated artists” as “reprehensible” and “as totally un-American as anything I can imagine.” His principled stand did nothing to win him—or Inherit the Wind—many friends in the heartland, where UA’s flawed release strategy had, unfortunately, placed the picture ahead of its New York and Los Angeles openings.

  As originally scheduled, The Devil at 4 O’Clock would have prevented Tracy from actively promoting the picture, which, surprisingly, he told Kramer he would do. Then Sinatra, alarmed at Tracy’s withdrawal, went to work on him, as Tracy was, in effect, the only reason Sinatra was doing the picture. Kramer pushed off the start date of Nuremberg, hoping to free up Tracy for a round of promotional appearances, and Tracy left for Hawaii two days later.

  Kate, who thought Liam O’Brien’s screenplay a bore and wasn’t overly fond of Sinatra, went under protest, having finished at Stratford only a week earlier. Actor Kerwin Matthews, cast as a young priest sent to the island to take over for Father Doonan, could vividly remember the malevolent glint in her eye: “The first day on location on Maui—standing exactly where the first pilgrims landed on a Hawaiian island—I met the Hepburn thing. I had a present for her—a book to read, Hawaii, which would explain so much about the islands. I gave it to her. She walked out on a pier and threw the book in the ocean, saying, ‘Who wants to know anything about this awful place?’ Because she was always next to Spence, no one had a chance to talk to him. No one got a chance to know him, even though I tried constantly.” Hepburn, said Mervyn LeRoy, kept a wary eye on Tracy at all times. “She never interfered with us in any way, and never tried to offer any suggestions. She just watched Spence.”

  Actor Gregoire Aslan, who had worked with such heavyweights as Alec Guinness, Orson Welles, and John Huston in a career spanning two decades, was nonplussed at the prospect of making a picture with Tracy. He recalled that he was visiting his sister and her family in London when he caught Inherit the Wind at the Astoria. “Well,” he said, “I thought it was near perfect. And I came back shaking and saying to my brother-in-law, ‘I have just witnessed the greatest performance, and I wonder if I’m not going to act with the greatest actor in the world?’ I was terribly moved. I try to be the character myself when I’m playing something, and when I play with him I have not an answer but I get the answer from the Catholic priest he’s playing. So it’s not a surprise it’s just so easy.” Kerwin Matthews concurred: “Our working together was magic—he was always patting me on the shoulder at the end of each take. We could have been good friends; [he could have been a] ‘father figure’ to me, as was Lee J. Cobb.”

  A highlight of the four-week trip was the celebration of Mervyn LeRoy’s sixtieth birthday on October 15. More than seventy people attended the party, which was organized by LeRoy’s wife Kitty and held at Kula Lodge, 3,200 feet up the slopes of Maui’s Haleakala volcano. Smoked black wattle steaks were served, and Sinatra sang the lyrics to four songs written expressly for the occasion by Sammy Cahn.

  “When it came Tracy’s turn to give his talk,” publicist Bob Yager remembered,

  he got up there and he said that he wanted to welcome Mervyn LeRoy into the Sixty Club. LeRoy was sixty years old, and Spencer is sixty years old, and he said he has welcomed James Cagney, he has welcomed Pat O’Brien into the club, and that soon he would be welcoming his very dear friend Clark Gable into the club … And then he looked toward Sinatra and he got that Irish pixie look and I knew immediately something was going to come out. He said, “And Frank, I would like to welcome you to the Sixty Club, bu
t, unfortunately, I can’t. It is not enough to LOOK sixty, you have to BE sixty to get into this club.” Well, it wrapped up the whole evening. There was a tremendous roar, and Frank laughed the loudest…

  Sinatra got itchy as filming progressed; occasionally he would refuse to do a close-up or make an additional take, and on one such occasion, apologized to the cast and crew by cooking a spaghetti dinner.

  “The problem,” said Jean-Pierre Aumont, “was that Sinatra would only work in the afternoon. In the morning he hired a private plane and hopped from island to island trying to convince the startled inhabitants to vote for Kennedy in the next presidential election. Around two o’clock he returned, exhausted, at the precise moment when Tracy was retiring for the day to his rooms. How, in these conditions, the scenes between Tracy and Sinatra were shot is a mystery to me.”

  Sinatra’s shifting moods were well known within the industry. According to his longtime valet-aide George Jacobs, the singer developed a serious fixation on Kate when he saw her in the see-through tank suit she wore during her sunrise swims in the ocean. One night toward the end of the shoot, Jacobs was called upon to cook dinner for Tracy and Hepburn as Sinatra’s guests for the evening. “It could be that Mr. S was feeling particularly horny and frustrated, because he was extra edgy that night. When I served the spaghetti marinara, which I had made a million times for him, he tasted it, started raving that it wasn’t al dente, and picked up the bowl and threw the pasta all over me and my white jacket. This was the only time he had ever abused me, but once was enough. Tracy and Hepburn were so appalled that they left immediately, while Sinatra cleared the table by smashing all the dishes.”

  When the company returned to Los Angeles, another eight weeks of shooting remained—far more than anyone, particularly Sinatra, had anticipated. Tracy’s promotional plans for Inherit the Wind got scuttled, and the film had to make its New York and L.A. debuts with just Kramer and the UA promotions team in support.

  In Manhattan, it opened to solid business at the Astor and the Trans-Lux on Eighty-fifth Street, but neither venue was at capacity, despite another round of exceptional notices. (Bosley Crowther called it “one of the most brilliant and engrossing displays of acting ever witnessed on the screen.”) Said Kramer, “[I]n many of the first run houses, in order to get the terms we wanted, which I think was, let’s say, above average, I had to run sneak previews in order to show theater managers how an audience would react to these fellows going at it, and the audience reaction was so marvelous, in a matter of seconds so much better than any other picture I’ve ever been associated with. I mean by an audience reaction that upon eight or ten occasions breaking into a wild applause during the film.”

  Yet the film failed everywhere—a bitter disappointment. “It was a double disappointment because United Artists had said, ‘Look, we don’t want you to make this film. You’re making it with two old men—Tracy and March—nobody wants to see them. You’ll never get a woman in the theater. You’ll never get any feminine audience whatever.’ ” By the time the picture had its Hollywood opening at Grauman’s Chinese, the industry had written it off as a flop.

  The cornerstone of Tracy’s anticipated campaign on Kramer’s behalf was an interview with a feature writer for Look named Bill Davidson. Tracy didn’t know Davidson, hadn’t seen his work, and only agreed to sit for him at Kramer’s request. According to Joe Hyams, Davidson was “a good reporter,” but when Inherit the Wind failed to generate any heat at the box office, it looked as if the magazine would kill the story, holding Davidson’s material in abeyance until another picture came along.

  Others made their way to the supposedly closed set of Devil at 4 O’Clock—Jack Bradford of the Hollywood Reporter, Murray Schumach of the New York Times, Neil Rau of the Los Angeles Examiner, Lee Belser of the Mirror. To Schumach, Tracy denied the occasional rumor that he intended to direct: “I have thought about directing. I don’t know enough about directing. I could never stand some of the things I have seen directors put up with from actors. I would kill the actors. Not to mention some of those beautiful actresses.” To Rau he explained the volcanic lava on the set was really Hollywood snow—shredded plastic—sprayed gray to look like ash. To Belser he mourned the deaths of Whitey Hendry and Clark Gable.

  Gable’s death at the age of fifty-nine came as a terrific shock, as King had just finished a picture with Marilyn Monroe and was expecting a child by his fifth wife, the former actress Kay Williams. To UPI’s Vernon Scott, Gable had acknowledged that he was transitioning to character parts but said he wasn’t so sure he could do it with the success that Tracy had enjoyed. “Tracy is that rare exception,” he said. “He completed the transition beautifully. Spencer can play anything he wants except young men. I hope I can do the same thing.”

  On November 6, 1960, two days after finishing the Monroe picture, Gable suffered a heart attack. He was hospitalized and seemed to be recovering when he was killed by a second thrombosis on the evening of November 16. The funeral three days later was a simple affair, mirroring the rites for Carole Lombard eighteen years earlier. Tracy, who served as a pallbearer, arrived alone, sunglasses shielding his gaze from reporters and fans, his white hair glistening in the morning sun. “I’ve known a lot of wonderful people in this business,” he said. “They’re just about all gone now.”

  With actor Robert Taylor at the funeral of Clark Gable, November 19, 1960. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  With John F. Kennedy’s narrow victory on November 8, 1960, Sinatra lost what little interest he retained in The Devil at 4 O’Clock and the gulf between him and Tracy widened. “By the end of Devil at 4 O’Clock,” said Kerwin Matthews, “Tracy was barely tolerating Frank.”

  “He’ll call Frank Sinatra ‘The Other Fellow,’ ” Bob Yager said at the time. “He’ll come on the stage and say, ‘Where’s the Other Fellow? Where’s the star of this picture?’ He’ll be needling Sinatra, and he’ll keep saying, ‘I know I’m not the star of this picture. Sinatra is the star. After all, my last picture wasn’t a success, and they’ve got Sinatra in this picture to insure its success.’ ” When not in front of the camera, Sinatra was on the phone arranging entertainment for Kennedy’s inaugural ball. Since he was always referred to as “Mr. S” around the set, Tracy began referring to himself in the third person as “Mr. T.”

  Well over $1 million had been spent on sets—a record for a Columbia picture. The figure included $500,000 for Hawaii alone. (“We built,” said Mervyn LeRoy, “a lovely set there—an entire village, complete with a street, a church, and even a jail.”) It reportedly cost another $500,000 to create a miniature of the island on a farm outside of Fallbrook. They spent $150,000 to build a hospital on the back lot at Fox, $100,000 to replicate the lush Maui vegetation on Columbia’s Stage 8. Given the money riding on the picture—more than $5 million—Tracy plainly regarded Sinatra’s behavior as unprofessional.

  Stanley Kramer, eager to start Judgment at Nuremberg, was monitoring the situation: “I called him one morning and said, ‘How’re things going?’ He says, ‘Well!’ Just like that, but I can’t use the language he used. ‘I’ve been in this business ONLY thirty years. Just thirty years, that’s all, and you know what I’m doing? I’m playing scenes with a double. How do you do that? Now tell me, am I a goddamn fool or am I a goddamn fool?’ He just told them [the double] reads Sinatra’s lines better than Sinatra does. Sinatra had said, ‘Hot or cold, I’m leaving on Thursday.’ And Spence said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on. I just don’t know what’s going on.’ He’s really funny about it; burned up too.”

  With Sinatra’s departure, Tracy was left to finish the picture by himself. When Pete Martin of the Saturday Evening Post came calling, he was shooting actor Bernie Hamilton’s death scene and unhappy the interview had been scheduled for such a crucial day. “This is the boy’s big chance,” Tracy said of Hamilton. “I remember these scenes. I used to play them. Now he plays it in my arms, you know, he dies, and if he’s good as he is … this kid’s g
oing to steal this picture. So we want to do it well, you know, as well as we can.”

  They quickly got onto the subject of Martin’s recent appearance on David Suskind’s show, a panel discussion that included the aforementioned Bill Davidson. Martin said of Davidson, “He kind of came through in his true colors the other night—a sneering son of a bitch … You’re in for a surprise, Spencer, I think.”

  “Going to be a blast, eh?”

  “Well, he may be nice to you, but …”

  “I don’t think so … He can say I used to get drunk. He could bring up some of these old things—I couldn’t care less. I don’t think he’ll let himself in for libel … He seemed such a nice guy and I think, you know, he liked me. Yet remember he said he doesn’t like any actor.”

  Tracy was in and out of the dressing room all morning, Martin getting his questions in between setups. A range of subjects got touched upon, though none very deeply. The talk was liveliest when Tracy spoke of Judgment at Nuremberg. “I’ll tell you Nuremberg is the best script I’ve ever read,” he said.

  Inherit the Wind I thought was a great script. I’ve made two or three pictures in my time that I thought were good: Captains Courageous, Inherit the Wind. Why, [if it was] just a job, I couldn’t function that way—without thinking, without thought. That I’d come here in the morning like a mechanical toy. Jesus Christ, I don’t do that! I don’t look at every script. I know sometimes scripts are bad. I don’t think this [one] is any great shakes … I’m getting more choosy. The Old Man and the Sea, even though it was not a great financial success, when you do things like that and Inherit the Wind, Nuremberg—you know, it’s hard to turn around and put on the sheriff’s suit again. But they don’t come. Fortunately, I don’t have to work. I don’t have all the money in the world. If I live too long I’d have to worry. My family would have to worry if I lived too long, but I don’t like to figure that way.