James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  “It’s a cliché come true,” wrote columnist Sidney Skolsky. “I never believed it before, always smiled when I heard about it. Now I was seeing it with my own eyes. Everybody—Tracy, Lancaster, Widmark, Schell, Kramer, the extras, applauded. When I say everybody, I’m including me.” Said Richard Widmark: “It meant a lot to her. It was therapy and it gave her great confidence.”

  “Wasn’t that a performance!” Tracy marveled. “I don’t object to playing stooge to Judy. She’s a great actress, eh? You know, in all the years Judy and I have been together at M-G-M we never did a movie together. I guess Judy was eleven or twelve when I first arrived at Metro.” Mickey Rooney made his way onto the set, prompting a frenzy of activity with photographers from as far away as West Germany, where there was intense interest in the film and its subject matter. “Mickey knew Stanley,” said Marshall Schlom, “but he had to come in to say hello to Tracy and Judy, and the three of them hugged each other. The photographers went crazy, and it almost brought tears to your eyes. In context, it was just wonderful.”

  It is Rolfe’s badgering of the witness that prompts Janning, the most prominent of the defendants, to break his self-imposed silence. (“Are you going to do this again?”) Said Lancaster, “I am almost a symbol of the dilemma in Germany during the Nazi period. I am the man of good intention who did things of which he did not approve. I am a man who once had a reputation for integrity and honesty; a concern for the law. But I am cynical about this trial. I doubt the ability of the judges. I am a man who has, in a sense, retreated into another world. At the same time I must not be a man in a cataleptic state. I must become involved in the trial.”

  Tracy, who never ceased chiding Lancaster over his billing and his compensation, had become so fixated on Lancaster’s appearance in the picture that his scenes on the stand were the only ones he specifically noted in his datebook. “Lancaster, who was a wonderful actor and a wonderful man, was miscast,” said Abby Mann. “Olivier wanted to do it originally, and Stanley and I went to talk to him about it. He had a very interesting grasp of it. But he was courting his soon-to-be wife, and he didn’t want to play an older guy. At least that was part of what he said. As a matter of fact, a lot of people liked Burt in it, but I didn’t, and neither did Stanley eventually.”

  Tracy’s twitting of Lancaster may also have had something to do with the fact that Lancaster had been nominated for an Academy Award for his work in Elmer Gantry—and that he was the odds-on favorite to win. (The other nominees for Best Actor were Trevor Howard for Sons and Lovers, Jack Lemmon for The Apartment, and Olivier for The Entertainer.) When Lancaster, in fact, did win the award on the night of April 17, he thanked even “those who voted against me” and was careful to bring the statuette onto the set at Universal City the next morning so that he could show it to Tracy. A week later, Tracy committed to playing General William T. Sherman in How the West Was Won, an all-star western to be directed, in part, by John Ford.

  As the various cast members completed their big scenes, attention fell naturally to Tracy as he prepared to deliver the verdict of the tribunal. Dietrich was often with him in photographs taken on the set, sleek in black slacks and top, welcoming his visitors, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas among them. “We laughed a lot together since his sense of humor was like mine,” Dietrich said. On the night they filmed a walk through the rubble of Nuremberg, standing sets on the back lot dressed to suggest bolstered landmarks still erect after the ravages of war, she brought apple strudel for the crew and could be observed huddling with Tracy as they sipped hot chocolate. “You’re really not my type,” he’d tell her. “You’re Continental; I’m just an old fart.” (They were, in reality, a mere twenty months apart in age.) “Spencer Tracy was a very lonely man,” Dietrich concluded, “or so he seemed to me.”

  The morning of the verdict began like most others, the courtroom packed with extras and the principal cast members (Dietrich, this time, included). The core of the scene had timed out at six minutes, the rest—the entry of the judges, the passing of the sentences, the dissenting opinion of Judge Ives (Ray Teal)—brought it to approximately nine minutes, uncomfortably close to the capacity of a single film magazine. “During rehearsals,” said Kramer, “Spence commented on the length of the speech and wondered if there were some way in which he could do it all the way through. We thought about it and finally came up with the solution that worked.”

  Following the film’s completion, Kramer, with a publicist’s zeal, gave the length of the speech as thirteen minutes and fourteen seconds and claimed that he had used two cameras to capture it—one starting at the beginning, the other starting at the seven-minute mark. Marshall Schlom remembered it differently: “Stanley had asked me to get the verdict, type it, capital letters, triple-spaced. He had told me, ‘I’m going to take your typed verdict, I’m going to put it in a folder, and I’m going to tell him just to read it.’ I was standing there when he went up to Tracy and said, ‘Spencer, here’s your folder. You can bring it in with you. Just open it up, and all you have to do is read it. Marshall has typed it out, it’s in capital letters, it’s triple-spaced. You shouldn’t have any problems with it.’ Tracy said, ‘Okay.’ He had no intention of doing that, not one. But we had no inkling of that.”

  Tracy entered with the folder in hand, sat, opened it, and, without looking down, began to speak:

  The trial conducted before this Tribunal began over eight months ago. The record of evidence is more than 10,000 pages long and final arguments of counsel have been concluded. Simple murders and atrocities do not constitute the gravamen of the charges in this indictment. Rather, the charge is that of conscious participation … in a nationwide government-organized system of cruelty and injustice in violation of every moral and legal principle known to all civilized nations…

  As he spoke of the evidence, how it supported the charges against the defendants and how the “real complaining party” at the bar was civilization, Kramer’s camera trucked slowly to the right, catching the back of Lancaster’s head in the prisoners’ dock.

  Men who sat in black robes in judgment of other men. Men who took part in the enactment of laws and decrees the purpose of which was the extermination of human beings. Men who, in executive positions, actively participated in the enforcement of these laws—illegal under even German law.

  He spoke of Janning as a tragic figure. “We believe he loathed the evil he did.” Yet compassion for “the present torture of his soul” should not “beget forgetfulness of the torture and the death of millions by the government of which he was part.” He spoke also of how the trial had shown that “under a national crisis” ordinary and even “able and extraordinary men” could delude themselves into the commission of crimes “so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination.”

  Marshall Schlom recalled looking over at Kramer and seeing that he was “getting a little itchy” as the scene progressed. “I think he was a bit worried that maybe Tracy wasn’t going to finish before the camera ran out of film.” Tracy continued, his voice at times betraying the emotional weight of the words he was saying.

  No one who has sat through the trial can ever forget them. Men sterilized because of political belief … A mockery made of friendship and faith … The murder of children … How easily it can happen … There are those in our own country, too, who today speak of the protection of country, of survival. A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient, to look the other way … Only the answer to that is: Survival as what? A country isn’t a rock … it’s not an extension of one’s self—it’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult…

  Before the people of the world … let it now be noted … that here in our decision, this is what we stand for: Justice … Truth … and the value of a single human being
.

  Facing the four defendants in the dock, he then proceeded to pass life sentences on Emil Hahn, on Friedrich Hoffstetter, on Werner Lammpe, and, finally, and with difficulty, on Ernst Janning.

  “Tracy didn’t read it,” said Marshall Schlom. “Tracy had memorized this whole thing, which was ten minutes long. It was one reel of raw stock going through the camera. He did the wider shot first, take one, which was a print, and then we did his close-up, and take one, and it was a print. And he was just as sly as a fox, because now he had his day in court. He had trumped all the other suits, and it was wonderful to see because he didn’t make anything out of it. But he was lying in wait, he was gonna get everybody. Of course, each one of these people on the stand had done their part, and, sporadically, there had been some applause. But when it got to Tracy, everybody—the entire crew and cast and two hundred extras—were sitting and watching this and when he did take one, letter perfect, without reading it, the applause was thunderous.”

  When Kramer felt he had everything he needed—well before noontime—he wrapped the company for the day. “Let’s all go to lunch,” he said, “and then we can go home.” It was at that point that Burt Lancaster approached Tracy. “How did you do that so easily?” he asked.

  Tracy took the question in stride. “You practice for thirty-five years,” he said quietly.

  When Judgment at Nuremberg finished in California on May 4, 1961, Kramer still had a week’s worth of location work to do in Germany. Tracy wasn’t happy about going. (“He urgently didn’t want to do that,” said Philip Langner.) Then Kate said that she would go along, and the plan suddenly became more feasible. Tracy flew to New York on May 7—“loaded,” he later wrote in his book—and was met at the airport by Hepburn, who, according to Dorothy Kilgallen, “almost conked a cameraman when he focused his lens at the reunion.” In town, she registered him at the Plaza Hotel, a curious event witnessed, coincidentally, by their friend Bill Self.

  “I was with a friend of mine,” Self recalled, “and I said to my friend, ‘If Kate’s here, chances are Spence is here.’ So we went around to the back of the Plaza where the elevator is, and I saw Spence over in the corner with his collar up and his hat pulled down, standing in the shadows.” Their eyes met, but Self, who hadn’t seen Tracy in years, kept his distance. “My friend said, ‘Oh, there’s Spencer Tracy. Go say hello to him.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t go near him with a ten-foot pole.’ He said, ‘You’re kidding. I thought you knew him.’ I said, ‘I do know him, but he’s hiding, and I’m not going to reveal his hiding place.’ I wouldn’t go near him … I never said a word to him, never acknowledged him or anything.”

  Tracy boarded a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt on the evening of May 9, arriving in Germany the next morning, again, as he noted in his book, “loaded.” The five-hour drive to Nuremberg was followed by a day’s rest, after which he and Kramer and his crew got to work, capturing street scenes and generally opening the picture up as much as possible. On the sixteenth the company moved to Berlin, where a press conference took place. Additional exteriors finished the picture on May 20, exactly on schedule. The same day, Tracy received Roderick Mann, film columnist for the Sunday Express, in his suite at the Berlin Hilton. Sipping coffee, he told Mann that he had just been reading a piece on Gary Cooper, who had died of cancer the previous week: Was he really an actor? Or just a personality?

  “What a bore those arguments have become,” he moaned. “I thought Cooper was great. I hardly knew him, but I always admired him. What could he have done better in a film like High Noon? Played it with a broken arm or an accent? Cooper used to be very proud because John Barrymore once said of him: ‘He never makes a wrong move on the screen.’ The truth is Cooper hardly ever made any move. He didn’t have to, he was so good … I remember Garson Kanin, the playwright, once asking me what I thought was the most important thing about acting. ‘Learning the blasted lines,’ I said. Another time someone asked me what was the first thing I looked for in a script. ‘Days off,’ I said.”

  He finished his coffee and carefully put the cup down on the table. “I never watch my old movies on TV,” he continued. “Or any old movies, come to that. Too many of my friends are dead. I don’t want to be reminded. How can I watch an old Bogart film? Bogie was a friend of mine. I saw a lot of him before he died. I can’t watch him now; I switch the set off. In Hollywood, where you’re dead you’re very dead. Sometimes you’re even dead before you’re dead. They’re always happy to give you a boost on the way. Like that special Academy Award for Gary Cooper. Until they did that nobody even knew he was ill. Why couldn’t they have left him alone? Bogie, Gable … now Cooper. All my contemporaries are going. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be my turn to bat next.”

  With Judgment at Nuremberg out of the way, Tracy and Hepburn returned to Frankfurt, where they spent two days driving along the Rhine and taking in the countryside. From there they traveled to Paris, an eight-hour trip, stopping once again at the Raphael and meeting up with the Kanins for dinner. The next two weeks were idyllic—rising early, walking the city, eating elaborately. A toothache put an end to it all on June 10, complicating Tracy’s last days in the city with dental appointments. They boarded the Queen Elizabeth in Cherbourg on the fifteenth, taking adjoining staterooms for a five-day voyage that was foggy and unusually rough. (When advised, upon arrival, of the proximity of his frequent costar, Tracy feigned surprise: “If she’s on the ship I wouldn’t know it.”) In New York he was trapped by autograph seekers at Fiftieth and Park Avenue, had dinner with Abe Lastfogel, went to Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and bought a new Lincoln Continental to take back to Louise. He tooled out of Manhattan on the morning of the twenty-ninth, passing through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Missouri, stopping at motels along the way.

  The black car with the creamy interior was completely unexpected, though Tracy often impulsively bought things for his wife. (“Weeze, I thought you’d like that.”) Usually he gave her jewelry; occasionally paintings. “He said once, ‘Let’s go over and look at these pictures’ in some man’s house,” she remembered. “We went over and he had some very nice things. There was this darling little Grandma Moses and he said, ‘Wouldn’t you like this?’ Well, he got it right there.” He once bought her a Paul Clemens oil in much the same manner. “He would pop up with things.”

  Tracy was still making his way across the country when Abby Mann viewed a rough cut of Judgment at Nuremberg. A letter was awaiting him when he returned to St. Ives: “Every writer ought to have the experience of having Spencer Tracy do his lines. There is nothing in the world quite like it. You are, in a way, the Chekhov among actors. Your work is honest, clean, simple, and enormously meaningful.”

  Gratified, Tracy responded via his favorite mode of communication, a telegram:

  AFTER FINISHING NUREMBERG THE HARD WAY DRIVING ACROSS THE COUNTRY I FOUND YOUR OVERWHELMING MESSAGE. ALL I CAN SAY AFTER READING IT IS IF THE LIGHTS GO NOW I STILL WIN. PLEASE DO NOT FORGET IT WAS A GREAT PRIVILEGE TO SAY THOSE WORDS.

  With the general euphoria that attended the completion of Judgment at Nuremberg, it was easy to forget that The Devil at 4 O’Clock was still in production. The effects work—primarily the volcanic eruption at the film’s conclusion—took months to complete. (The island miniature alone took four months to build.) Then in July, just as Tracy was arriving back in Los Angeles, a camera crew was hastily dispatched to Hilo to shoot the eruption of Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. (An extra crew had been stationed at Kilauea during the film’s location work on Maui, but nothing had happened.) Minus its final pieces, the picture was previewed on July 13, where 354 out of 385 cards rated it either good or excellent. Emboldened by a second, equally successful preview in Pasadena, Columbia set a budget of $1,700,000 for global advertising and promotion, prompted, in part, by the record business being done by The Guns of Navarone. Cosponsoring with Squibb, the studio committed to a month of ABC’s Evening Report—a buy alone valued at $100,000—and set mid-October openings
for the picture at New York’s Criterion Theatre and the Stanley Warner in Beverly Hills. At a negative cost of $5,721,786, The Devil at 4 O’Clock was the most expensive picture Columbia had ever made.

  Hepburn, meanwhile, had committed to one of the most demanding roles she would ever tackle, that of the drug-addled Mary Tyrone in Ely Landau’s production of A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Director Sidney Lumet wanted Tracy to play Mary’s husband James, a role modeled on the author’s own father, but Tracy resisted the suggestion, even when Kate thought that he might be talked into it.

  “Look,” Tracy said to Lumet, “Kate’s the lunatic, she’s the one who goes off and appears at Stratford in Shakespeare—Much Ado, all that stuff. I don’t believe in that nonsense—I’m a movie actor. She’s always doing these things for no money! Here you are with twenty-five thousand each for Long Day’s Journey—crazy! I read it last night, and it’s the best play I ever read. I promise you this: If you offered me this part for five-hundred thousand and somebody else offered me another part for five-hundred thousand, I’d take this!”

  Kate exclaimed, “There he goes! No! It’s not going to work!” and the three proceeded to have what Lumet later remembered as “a charming breakfast.”

  While Hepburn went off to make the film in New York, Tracy remained in Los Angeles, watching television and weighing offers he had little interest in accepting. He had agreed to play Pontius Pilate in George Stevens’ much-delayed version of Fulton Oursler’s best-selling novel, The Greatest Story Ever Told, but it was an all-star affair, a “cut rate deal” as he described it. There was also talk of him doing The Leopard in Sicily for Luchino Visconti, but the choice had been somewhat forced on Visconti by Fox, which had specified one of four American box office stars as a condition of financing the film. (Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, and Burt Lancaster were the others.) Although he agreed to read the script, Tracy balked at spending five months on location or submitting to an interview with the director, and Lancaster wound up playing the part of the autocratic Prince Salina. Tracy was, in fact, settling into a pattern where he would work only for certain directors—Ford, Stevens, Stanley Kramer—and otherwise considered himself retired. That he was soon to be seen in two of the biggest films of the year scarcely seemed to matter, and he and Kate spent much of the remainder of the year apart.