James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  He told Martin that Olivier had dropped out of Judgment at Nuremberg, tied up as he was in New York with Becket.2 In replacing him, Kramer had gone to Burt Lancaster, whom Abby Mann thought all wrong for the part, but who was just about the screen’s hottest star. “I admire Kramer,” Tracy said. “I don’t know how the hell he gets the money to put on these shows.”

  “He says, ‘The way I get these people is I don’t take the money myself.’ ”

  “That’s right,” Tracy said. “He’s telling the truth, because I had the percentage and I get the figures and you’d be amazed to know what Stanley Kramer takes out of a picture.”

  With Lancaster’s addition to the cast, Tracy’s percentage was adjusted to make room for Lancaster’s. “Joe Hyams came in here,” Tracy told Martin,

  and said he talked to Lancaster. Then Stanley called me up to tell me that Dick Widmark was going to do the picture, which pleased me mightily. You know he’s paying Lancaster a tremendous amount of money—much more than he’s paying me or anybody else. And a big percentage. I said, “I think I should tell you, Stanley, that Lancaster told Joe Hyams he would have done the picture for nothing. I think it’s always nice to know these things. He also said that there would have to be a little rewriting done.” And I said, “I would like to know if Lancaster is going to rewrite the script or if Abby Mann is going to rewrite it. Because if Lancaster’s going to rewrite it, I might have to read it over a little more carefully.” That’s when he said, “Geez, you’ve got a needle that long and you’re sticking it in. Go ahead, turn it around.” I said, “Well, I’m just telling you Kid, you could have gotten him for nothing apparently. Also, Burt says he’s playing a ‘bit.’ He’s playing the part Larry Olivier was going to play.”

  “How much does he get?” Martin asked. “A quarter of a million?”

  “Well, I’m not going to quote this …”

  “I’ll see him myself. I’ll find out.”

  “How much did you say?”

  “A quarter of a million? A picture?”

  “Oh, come now.”

  “You mean a lot more than that?”

  “Twice that. Twice that. And against ten percent of the gross. The Other Fellow gets twice that! Or seven-fifty or something.”

  “I did Lancaster when he was working for Mark Hellinger and wasn’t even doing anything.”

  “Now he gets half a million,” Tracy said. “I shouldn’t tell you—don’t tell him. I only know that because …”

  Tracy was called for more of Bernie Hamilton’s death scene, a quick reaction shot, a couple of lines called up to where Sinatra should have been standing. “Frank wasn’t there. A fellow came down and said to me, ‘That’s the best scene you’ve ever played in your entire career.’ And I was looking at a stick. So I said, ‘Well maybe I should have played the whole thing to a stick.’ ” When he returned to his dressing room, the shot in the can, Tracy had scarcely been gone ten minutes.

  “Well, that didn’t take long, Spence,” Martin said.

  “Well,” said Tracy, deadpan, “I’m awful good … No, the truth is they shoot it once with me and they figure, well, we can’t get any better from the son of a bitch. It’s like trying a suit on me. You know it’s only so far you can go.”

  * * *

  1 The schedules show that March had a 7:00 a.m. makeup call, while Tracy was given a 9:00 a.m. call.

  2 Actress Joan Plowright, whom Olivier was soon to marry, was also in New York, appearing at the Lyceum in A Taste of Honey.

  CHAPTER 31

  The Value of a Single Human Being

  * * *

  Frank Tracy sat in his Florida apartment and contemplated the spectacle of Dorothy and Louise Tracy. “Dorothy and Louise were two very different kinds of people,” he said. “Dorothy and Louise, my God. Nothing wrong with Dorothy morally or whatever, but she was a chatterbox. Never stopped talking. Drive you right out of your mind. My dad used to say, ‘For Chrissake, is she coming over here? God, as soon as she hits the door, that’s it.’ Never had anything to say. Nothing was ever amusing, informative, nothing. Carroll would just sit there and smile.”

  In particular, Frank recalled a time when Carroll and Dorothy Tracy were visiting Freeport. “I was home for a weekend or something, and I remember sitting in the living room talking about Spence and Louise. My mother or father said, ‘Well, they never got divorced. That’s a plus.’ And Dorothy said, ‘Well, of course not. She’s not going to give up being Mrs. Spencer Tracy. She’s never going to give that up.’ They seemed very … the word isn’t bitter … critical maybe. I was very surprised.”

  Dorothy’s perception of Louise and her use of the name was more widespread than Frank could have imagined. Many in Spence’s circle felt the same way, though Kate herself never said a word. “Being Mrs. Spencer Tracy publicly was more important than being the wife of Spencer Tracy,” George Cukor said of her, but it was simplistic to assume that Louise somehow needed to bask in the glow of her husband’s celebrity. “She was certainly a saint,” Jane Feely said, “but in the very best sense of being a saint. She was a true servant of God and a true carrier of the cross, but in a very human way, which is what a saint is. She grew and grew and grew, that woman … Especially as she grew in stature with the Clinic, she became a person of whom she could be very proud, and of whom Spencer was very proud. Whatever she may have felt, whether she knew or she didn’t know, she knew who she was. Maybe better than he knew who he was. And I think he envied that. She had found herself in that.”

  Louise was now sixty-four, as white-haired as her husband and no longer able to manage an enterprise that had grown beyond her wildest dreams in size and complexity. “I am trailing the Clinic by many lengths,” she wrote her friend Mary Kennedy Taylor in 1958. “I would be, even if I had plenty of time. It has grown too big and too involved for my simple mind. Thank goodness we have a good administration and staff—over 30 of us now.” The original building was expanded in 1956 with a two-story wing and basement, increasing the overall floor space on the new campus to some thirteen thousand square feet. By 1960, families in fifty-six countries were enrolled in the clinic’s yearlong correspondence course, the newest translations being in Croatian and Serbian.

  “She would say, ‘I am so tired,’ ” Jane remembered. “She was overwhelmed with how big the institution had become. I think she felt inadequate to it because she hadn’t had a formal education. She had had to not only establish and work on this clinic, she had to educate herself in this field and she had become an expert, but it had taken a lot out of her. A lot more than I think anyone, maybe even she, realized.”

  In 1954 Dr. Edgar L. Lowell was recruited from Harvard to assume the role of administrator, freeing Louise from the day-to-day responsibilities of management. As director in charge, she still oversaw the clinic’s core services—consultations, hearing tests, parent classes, the demonstration nursery school, the correspondence course, and the summer sessions—while Dr. Lowell started research and teacher-training programs. From everything he had heard, Edgar Lowell was surprised to find that Spencer Tracy was as interested in the clinic’s business as he apparently was.

  “I was always very gratified,” he said,

  that he read my reports. I’m a great one for writing things out. Numerable times Mrs. Tracy would say, “Mr. Tracy would like to know what did you mean by that?” I said, “Well, at least I know someone is reading my report.” I remember one time when he was in France making The Mountain we had a series of delayed conversations because he would call one night and I would get the message the next time I saw her…[W]hen we had the first big league ball game in Los Angeles, a benefit for the Tracy Clinic at Wrigley Field, Baltimore and Chicago played the first big league game. Mr. Tracy showed up, but he showed up about the second inning, when everyone was looking straight ahead, and left about the eighth inning so there wasn’t a big spotlight on him in their box that would detract from her.

  There were the tentative overtur
es Spence would make to become more involved with the clinic, but Louise held him at a careful distance, the clinic being the one distinct thing in their lives that she could genuinely call her own. “He felt it did absorb my life,” she said,

  and it did. Once you got into it, it was so big and it was so demanding…[T]wo or three times he said, I think sincerely, “Could I learn enough about that clinic that I could go out and talk some about it?” He said that many times. “Could I?” he said. “I would like to do that.” “Well,” I said, “you have to really work, you have to have learned an awful lot—much more, you know. A lot of work goes into it. You don’t know why, you don’t understand this and that. You really have to study…[T]hey ask you questions and you can’t get up before people and not really know.” “No,” he said, “I suppose not, but you know, I’d like to do that.” [He] could never get down to all the little things about the details.

  In the end, Tracy’s participation was limited to the funding he could so readily provide. “They used to call him and tell him how much it was,” Dr. Lowell said, “and he would write the check for that amount.”

  In December 1960 writer-director George Seaton and a group of supporters gave a recognition dinner in Louise’s honor at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Y. Frank Freeman, the retired president and chairman of Paramount Pictures, served as chair of the sponsoring committee, which was comprised of a number of civic and business leaders, Mr. and Mrs. Justin Dart, Dr. and Mrs. Norman Topping, Leonard Firestone, Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, and Walt Disney among them. Close to one thousand guests jammed the hotel’s International Ballroom to hear keynote speaker Billy Graham, and thousands more watched the event, hosted by Robert Young, on TV. Dr. Graham gave a generic forty-minute talk on the challenges of communication, gearing his remarks to a largely Republican crowd still smarting from the narrow defeat of Richard Nixon at the polls.

  When it came time for Louise to speak, her wavy hair dyed a silvery blond, she talked of the original twelve mothers at the clinic, how they made curtains and re-covered furniture while their husbands plastered the walls. “The first person I would like to mention,” she said, “is my husband. Without his interest, without his support, moral as well as financial, there would never have been a clinic.” Tracy, of course, was nowhere to be seen on the dais. “I assumed that he would be up on the front table,” said Dr. Lowell. “He had a table in the very back.” Louise gave an impassioned talk, her voice quivering at times, and was accorded a five-minute standing ovation at its conclusion. “I have never been so moved by anything in my life,” she said. Over the course of the evening she kept an eye out for Spence, who was pacing, ducking in and out of the ballroom. “Sometimes he would go to the back and you could see him in a little cubby hole there. He was embarrassed. He always said, ‘It’s your show.’ ”

  As the clinic’s namesake, John Tracy was present that night, beaming out over the room even as he faced yet another challenge in a life overwhelmed by them. Having been fitted with thick glasses at the age of seven, he was diagnosed in 1940 with retinitis pigmentosa, a narrowing of the field of vision that can end in complete blindness. Apart from early problems with night vision, John functioned fairly well, driving his own car and attending classes, first at Pasadena, later at UCLA and Chouinard Art Institute. In 1952 he was hired briefly as an assistant art director when Bill Self began producing The Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. “I had an art director, Serge Krizman, and he needed some help. I said, ‘I’d like you to try John, because he’s a good artist.’ After a couple of weeks, Serge came to me and said, ‘Bill, he’s not a help, he’s a hindrance. He’s a good enough artist, but I can’t communicate with him. It’s very embarrassing.’ So I had to let John go. It was very hard to help John.”

  In 1957 Walt Disney found John a job at the studio, where he was eventually put in charge of the cell library. “He did a lot of things,” said Ruthie Thompson. “He started out in the art props. He was such a nice guy. He said, ‘God put me on this earth for a purpose. I just hope I’ve fulfilled it.’ ” John left Disney when his eyesight got so bad that he could no longer drive. At the age of thirty-six he began to learn sign language. “He decided that after his eye trouble began to become pronounced,” said his mother. “He said, ‘I think maybe I would like to take some lessons.’ In the early days we were never exposed to it.”

  The Devil at 4 O’Clock finished on December 29, 1960—two weeks over the guaranty period specified in Tracy’s contract. The William Morris office contended he was owed another $50,000 by Columbia Pictures, but the studio disputed the charge, pointing out that he had been sick five days on the picture. Production never stopped, however, and Tracy had worked to get rid of Sinatra, who finished two weeks ahead of schedule. After a call from Abe Lastfogel, Columbia coughed up $25,000, agreed to another $15,000, but disputed the final $10,000. “Par for the course!” said Tracy.

  Stanley Kramer, meanwhile, was readying Judgment at Nuremberg for the cameras, affording Tracy a minimal six-week break between pictures. “There was so much distribution objection at United Artists to this downbeat, uncommercial subject,” Kramer said, “that the only way to get it made was with an all-star cast.” An old hand at candy-coating difficult material, Kramer loaded the first film he ever directed, Not as a Stranger, with six major names. For Judgment he loyally insisted on Tracy’s casting as Dan Haywood, even as United Artists pressured him to use Jimmy Stewart instead. “Tracy’s no lodestone,” one of the UA executives declared. “I remember listening to the conversation,” said Abby Mann, “and Kramer was upset. He said, ‘What do you mean he’s no lodestone?’ He just wouldn’t desert a friend.”

  Kramer soothed the management at UA with the casting of Burt Lancaster, who, with the release of Elmer Gantry, was in line for an Oscar nomination. Artistically, he justified the move with the reasoning that Lancaster was not the “obvious choice” for the part. “His character was guilty and he was aware of it—that gave him a hook and I think he grabbed it.” The Austrian actor Maximilian Schell was retained from the TV production, and Kramer filled out the cast with Richard Widmark, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, and Marlene Dietrich.

  Dietrich’s character provided a compelling counterpoint to the Germans on trial. “We thought there should be a woman, or a romance,” said Abby Mann,

  and, at the time, Stanley said to me, “I’d like to use Paul Newman and his wife [Joanne Woodward] in the film.” He said, “Supposing [Haywood] has a daughter, and the daughter has an affair with Newman?” I tried it, but it didn’t seem to work. Then [in Berlin] I met a woman who was the widow of a general. She was talking to me about herself, and she was saying, “My husband was a soldier. I didn’t want him to be hanged, but to be shot. I wanted a soldier’s death for my husband, and I hated the Americans for not permitting it.” She said, “I’m writing a book about it,” but I could sense that she would never finish the book because she didn’t want to tell how much Germans were really involved with what happened. So I came back, and I met with Stanley in a Chinese restaurant. He said, “How’s the Newman part coming?” “Well,” I said, “you know …” And I told him about this woman. I said, “I wonder whether Dietrich might do this?” He said, “That’s a good idea!” That was the major difference between the TV version and the film. And I must say Marlene was wonderful.

  Clift agreed to do the film for expenses, as Kramer needed the name value but couldn’t afford the actor’s usual salary. “Since it’s only a single scene and can be filmed in one day,” Clift told the New York Times, “I strongly disapproved of taking an astronomical salary. But in the business I felt it was more practical to do it for nothing rather than reduce my price or refuse a role I wanted to play.”

  Garland was the last major figure added to the cast, having not appeared in a movie since A Star Is Born in 1955. Her part, like Clift’s, was that of a prosecution witness, but she could ill afford to play the role for free. Her deal was for a flat $35,000; Kramer made the surprising anno
uncement in New York, garnering considerable publicity for the picture.

  “We call these ‘pace-setting performances,’ ” Kramer said. “Their function is not unlike those of the runner who sets the pace in a key race for the man who is out to set a record. These are speaking roles that last up to seven minutes on the screen. They have an explosive quality—that is, a beginning, a middle, and an end—and are pertinent to the main theme. Unlike cameos, they don’t simply drop an actor in front of some scenery for the value of his name on the marquee; they utilize his talents in more than one scene and in a developing type of characterization.”

  Kramer followed up with a full-page ad in the Times, committing to a December 14 premiere at Kongresshalle in Berlin, the scene of the first public screening of Inherit the Wind. Immediately following the premiere, Judgment at Nuremberg would open in the major European capitals and in reserved seat engagements in six U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The failure of The Diary of Anne Frank as a roadshow attraction didn’t faze him, and he pointed instead to the record advance that had greeted the benefit openings of Otto Preminger’s Exodus. “It’s our intent to go hard ticket, but I wouldn’t want to book 45 theaters now.” The setting of a target date (der Tag) would serve as a “tremendous psychological drive” for everyone connected with the picture.