James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  From the onset, we were all agreed that to make it as overpowering an assault of the risibilities as possible, casting should concentrate on the top comedians of the world—all of whom would play straight parts, not their usual characterizations—to heighten the comedic effects of the script itself. That’s where the trouble started. Nightclub and television commitments usually are arranged long in advance … It became apparent after the first three telephone calls that the only way in which we would get all these people together for the minimum of three months in which each would work, would be to shoot in the summer, when they were free of television commitments and could, hopefully, juggle their nightclub dates … Happily, everyone we approached was tremendously interested. Not in the parts we had in mind. There was a considerable amount of horse-trading before we finally arrived at a completed cast.

  In spite of his obvious affection for Kramer, Tracy wasn’t convinced he belonged in such company and was frankly wary of the entire affair. If the whole point of the movie was a mass assemblage of great comedians, then just where exactly did he fit in? He had, of course, played comedy but never the kind of low comedy that Rose was envisioning. Kramer, however, was convinced a cast of some fifty comics needed the rock-solid core that only Tracy could provide. As he worked to complete his principal cast with Milton Berle, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers, Jonathan Winters, and Terry-Thomas, the title was changed to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to more adequately reflect the overwhelming size and ambitions of the picture. Still, the lack of an ending bothered Tracy, and he was afraid the whole top-heavy enterprise could turn into one impossibly long shaggy dog story. In May 1962, as Kramer was shooting stunt car footage outside of Palm Springs, Tracy busied himself recording a narration track for How the West Was Won.1

  “The script and the casting were completed almost simultaneously,” Kramer recounted. “Bill Rose had come over from England to spend some six months with us and with the actors, as they were hired, delving into characterizations and fighting off the inevitable suggestions for padding of this or that part.”

  The 305-page shooting script was divided into two volumes—one for dialogue, the other for business. First-unit work began on June 1, 1962, with Sid Caesar and Edie Adams trapped in the basement of a hardware store. The individual comedians—Caesar and Milton Berle in particular—were asking for changes, which kept Rose, a notoriously slow writer, grinding out pages just ahead of production.

  “I am eager and needful for the revisions,” Kramer prodded in a memo to Rose on June 14. “I am in complete agreement with all of them as we have discussed and I would particularly need a chance to read the conclusion for Tracy. He is my danger point at this moment and I feel that I must hold him.”

  A month later, with first-unit work having shifted to the desert, the matter of an ending was still to be settled:

  Tracy has never appeared in Palm Springs [to observe the filming and greet the cast] and I have never attempted to force the issue just for my own peace of mind. He has wanted out of the picture several times but finally agreed to go ahead. In regard to the end scene, when you edit it, I would urge that you give some consideration to the most basic, corny idea of all—some big statement on the subject of greed, human beings, and morals. The more I think of the finale the more I believe that the framework you have is correct but it needs a classic statement sandwiched in too for denouement to wrap up the whole sorry plight of these mad people.

  Kramer knew his credibility was on the line, for he had never before directed a comedy and had produced only one—the completely forgotten So This Is New York. He likened the first few days of production in the desert to something out of Alice in Wonderland: “It became a three-day staring contest. I stared at them, waiting for them to start being funny, to display the precision timing and comedy knowledgeability for which they were justly famed. And they were waiting for me to start telling them what to do.”

  In the end Tracy agreed to go ahead with the film, even as Louise—who thought it “too much, too strenuous”—advised against it. (“He wasn’t well,” she explained.) The deal was for $250,000—far more than what anyone else in the picture was getting—and in lieu of his usual percentage, Tracy would be paid another $150,000 at breakeven. As an added incentive—and a sop, perhaps, to Louise—Kramer’s production company agreed, as a signing bonus, to make a $5,000 donation to the clinic.

  Tracy’s first day on the film was July 27, 1962, when he made some police station exteriors in the port city of Long Beach. The real work began August 1 on a private estate at Portuguese Bend, near Rancho Palos Verdes, where several acres had been dressed to suggest a municipal park in the fictional city of Santa Rosita.

  “We didn’t know how sick Spencer Tracy was,” Buddy Hackett later said, “but he came in late the first day. We had broken for lunch when he came in. Now we’re sitting around after lunch, talking like comics do, and Spencer Tracy says, ‘Well, are we going to get started?’ And Phil [Silvers], who had never known him, said, ‘Spence, you’ve never worked with guys like these. They’re all richer than you are.’ ” The boys, Silvers explained, had waited for him a good while, and now they figured that he could wait a little. “So we all went out, did the first shot, then [the next day] we found out he was ill. Even though he was ill, he’d show up on days he didn’t have a call.2 I’d sit down at his feet and he’d ask questions about how we started.”

  “The comedians,” said Marshall Schlom, “treated him as if he were God. When he came on the set, it was: ‘Do you want a glass of water?’ They valued his being there, and maybe that all paid off for Stanley. The only [other] one who got that kind of respect was Buster Keaton. When Buster worked, the comedians were toast. They fell apart.” Sid Caesar, the quietest of the principal comics, was also the most awestruck: “Seeing [Tracy] made me flash back to Loew’s Proctor Theatre in Yonkers when I saw him on the big screen in Captains Courageous with Freddie Bartholomew. Tracy kept to himself during most of the shooting. Every morning he would say, ‘Hello, Mr. Caesar,’ but we hardly ever spoke.”

  On location, Tracy seemed to favor the women, particularly Edie Adams and Dorothy Provine. To Adams, who hadn’t done much movie work, he offered words of encouragement. To the twenty-seven-year-old Provine he seemed very much like her own father, and he would sit with her at lunch. “Everyone knew that he was not very well,” she said. “He’d say, ‘What time is your call tomorrow?’ I’d say, ‘Six o’clock.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, well, we’ll change that.’ So then he’d change his own call to later.”

  The fact that Tracy looked old and diminished on camera wasn’t helped by his refusal to wear makeup. He was aided in his early scenes by the trademark hat he wore cocked over one eye, a show of bravado on even the toughest of days. He often arrived late and left early, laid low by bladder troubles, his own chronic sleeplessness, and the continuing loss of his friends and contemporaries. “We got to the set one day,” Caesar recalled, “and heard that Marilyn Monroe had died. Tracy was real broken up about that. He turned to me and said, ‘You think they would have stopped shooting for a minute out of respect.3 A star dies and the studio doesn’t stop for a minute. Clark Gable brought so much money into M-G-M and no one stopped when he died. There was no respect.’ ”

  He got winded easily during the chase scenes through the back alleys of Long Beach, and the shots were mostly of his double, Tracy only breaking into a run for a few feet at a time. “During the filming of Mad World with all the comedians,” said Kramer, “I think that Spencer Tracy was in poorer health than I could remember: he had bad color and no stamina whatsoever. But then, even though this lack of energy showed, I think he had his best time ever during the making of a film.”

  Off camera Tracy sat watching the comedians work, clearly fascinated at how they differed from actors. “The people whose memories have lived are entertainers, not actors,” he once observed. “Bert Williams, Al Jolson, Jack Benny. They’re entertainers and they’re allowed their wonderful i
nstincts without any cages or anybody telling them, ‘No, stop there.’ Now some of them, of course, go way over and have to be held down. But great artists like Benny and Williams and Jolson—Gee, I want to tell you, when I watch a fellow like Bob Hope do a monologue, or Benny, the timing is something to behold.” Said Buddy Hackett: “He just loved watchin’ the guys.”

  Kramer was under terrific pressure to bring the picture in on budget, and it took all his considerable skills as a producer to bring the thing off at all, let alone well. Despite the controls he had in place, the stunt-flying sequences nearly wrecked him. “It had been budgeted at $6.3 million,” Marshall Schlom remembered,

  Two old masters: Tracy briefly shared the screen with Buster Keaton in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. (SUSIE TRACY)

  but Paul Mantz was draining the budget with overages. His deal was that he and Frank Tallman, the two partners in Tallmantz Aviation, were budgeted at $1 million, [but] Stanley was so frustrated with Mantz he was ready to choke him. Paul drained him.

  There was this flying unit which Paul and Frank were doing, and they were supposed to supply stunt flying and process plates and points of view, things like that, but they found a gravy train in Stanley. There was a unit manager assigned to this unit, Austin Jewell, an old-time unit manager from M-G-M, but he was ineffectual … No wonder Stanley was running out of money. The flying stuff was supposed to take a couple of weeks, and it was taking a couple of months … Mantz kept piling on the bills, the accountant would pay them. Two-thirds through the picture, no money. Stanley went to United Artists to get the extra money, and UA wouldn’t give it to him. UA said they would scrap the picture.

  Kramer’s patron at UA had always been Max Youngstein, the onetime partner and vice president of the company who had backed Kramer when he first said that he wanted to direct. But Youngstein had retired after the Berlin premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg, and the remaining management at UA seemed to regard Mad World as another surefire money loser, outsized and unfunny. Kramer eventually had to raise outside capital to complete the picture, even putting in some of his own. Meanwhile, he was struggling to finish with Sid Caesar by Labor Day, when Caesar was due to begin rehearsals in New York for Little Me. By the time they retreated to the studio in early November, the pressure was off. “They had to get rid of the comics because they all had other dates,” Tracy explained at the time. “They let me go to the end. The hell with me.”

  Tracy’s principal scenes took place in Culpepper’s office, which had been constructed on Revue’s Stage 29. The cast had been winnowed down to just Tracy and his police station colleagues: Alan Carney, William Demarest, Charles McGraw, Zasu Pitts, Madlyn Rhue, Ken Peters, and Harry Lauter. Concurrently, a second unit was assembling the slapstick finale in which the cast finds itself trapped on the collapsing fire escape of an abandoned high-rise, a sequence accomplished with composite elements and the integration of miniatures.

  For Tracy, whose comedy had always grown from character, Culpepper, like all the characters in Mad World, was pretty much a cipher, as one-dimensional as a cartoon. Rose gave him a bit of a backstory, saddling him with an unhappy marriage, a whining daughter, and a pending retirement that looked anything but cushy. It wasn’t much for him to go on, and with nine days of work ahead of him, Tracy made use of a device he had never before needed in his long career—an “idiot board” (as John Barrymore used to call it). “We’d have to set up a cue card here and there—not word for word, but just reminders of little things,” said Marshall Schlom. “And he asked for it.”

  Whatever real playing Tracy did in the picture was confined to these Greek chorus scenes, mostly opposite Bill Demarest, who had been with him as far back as The Murder Man and was an old hand at playing cops. It’s Culpepper’s fifteen-year obsession with the Smiler Grogan case that animates him, the buried loot he’s sure is right there under their noses. Cracking the case should be reflected in the size of his pension, Culpepper argues, his pliable face a spectrum of emotions. (“Now come on, Aloysius, get in there and pitch a little for me, will ya? Now you know, you know Al, I got it coming …”) It was a tough part, tougher than it looked, and the scenes on Stage 29 didn’t go as smoothly as they might have at an earlier time, when he wasn’t as drained of energy and stamina. “When you get to my age,” he told a visiting newsman, “you want to do a picture that’s about something—Judgment at Nuremberg, Inherit the Wind. I don’t know what the hell this picture’s about. But I like to play comedy. It’s hard to explain. There’s a lot more joy connected with it. This picture has been an experience.”

  Did he have any regrets? “No,” he said, his thoughts turning to the clinic. “I have a project in life, and the acting money has provided for the project to a great extent. So when I cool at least I will have done that. I didn’t do anything about it; Mrs. Tracy did. But the movie money helped when it was needed. But I don’t like to talk about it. It was a little thing started with one little house and now it’s all over the world.”

  Tracy had finished his scenes for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and was looping dialogue for Kramer the day Kate’s father, Dr. Thomas Hepburn, died at the family home in West Hartford at the age of eighty-two. His death was not unexpected; he had been in failing health for nearly a year, enduring gallbladder and prostate surgeries and growing progressively weaker. Kate remembered that he seemed to be “just quietly leaving” this world: “He smiled—he looked at us and he just slowly stopped breathing. His chin fell. He closed his eyes—he was gone—just gone. [My brother] Bob and I sat there. Such a remarkable man Dad had been. So strong. So definite. So tough and funny.”

  Tracy remained in California but stayed in close touch by phone and by wire. Katharine Houghton, then a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College, remembered taking the train home and going with her parents to the house on Bloomfield Avenue where Dr. Hepburn was “lying in our version of a wake and my step-grandmother, who was Italian, was making a great holler and fuss appropriate to her tradition.” Although the family was observing its tradition of deeply suppressed grief, it was clear to Katharine that the loss of her grandfather had left her eldest aunt devastated.

  Although I have no specific memories of Kate’s grieving process at the time, from things she said to me over the years, I know that this death was the most poignant in her life to date … Not only did she have an unusually profound father-daughter relationship with her dad, brimming with mutual love and respect and, to a certain extent, a shared viewpoint on life, but his presence gave her a powerful position in the family and (in her mind) in the world at large. I’ve no doubt she focused more completely on Spencer after Hep’s death because he was now her only lifeline to herself … Tears, public moaning and groaning about death was never the Hepburn way, but that doesn’t mean her grief was any less poignant.

  Long Day’s Journey into Night would be the last audiences would see of Katharine Hepburn for five years. Once the house on Bloomfield was cleaned up and vacated—it was donated to Hartford University—she flew west to California to be with Spence, and that year—atypically—they spent Christmas together in Palm Springs, “enjoying the rain.”

  For the first time in memory, both Tracy and Hepburn saw a clear horizon—no commitments of any kind. (He was forced to pull out of The Greatest Story Ever Told when it looked as if production in Utah would conflict with the filming of Mad World.)4 Kate settled back into what she referred to as “Jack Barrymore’s birdcage,” the sparsely furnished aviary on Tower Grove where a stained-glass image of actress Dolores Costello dominated the living room. She did some minimal press to support Long Day’s Journey—even welcoming Hedda Hopper into her home—but was typically dismissive of a ninth Oscar nomination, which would, in fact, come in March.

  The Academy Awards ceremony on April 8 brought David Lean to town, his Lawrence of Arabia having received ten nominations. Lean dined one evening with Tracy and Hepburn, neither of whom he had seen since the casting of The Bridge on the River Kwai, wh
en he and producer Sam Spiegel had come to Kate’s New York home to try to persuade Tracy to take the part of Colonel Nicholson.

  “Spencer, who read a great deal, had read the book Bridge Over the River Kwai and said, ‘I can’t do that part,’ ” Hepburn remembered. “And the first evening, he wouldn’t say yes. Then they said, ‘Can we come to dinner tomorrow night?’ And I said, ‘Fine, come on.’ So they came the next night, and he said, ‘You can’t. It isn’t right. You should have Alec Guinness play that part. He’s the only person whose personality is really suited to it.5 I’m not English.’ ” In declining the picture, perhaps Tracy was remembering his discomfort over Edward, My Son.

  Lean was pleased to find Hepburn “greatly calmed and more tolerant” than she was during the making of Summertime. “Kate,” he wrote, “amazed me by saying she thought that monogamy and marriage as we know it is all wrong. (This is a reaction to all the guilt she used to carry around about her love affair with Spence.) As we agreed, if society suddenly changed and it was alright to have free love we wouldn’t all be dancing into any more beds than we do at the present. Even less perhaps … Kate says she finds it damned difficult to live in the same house as a man. Not, I presume, that she doesn’t spend a lot of nights up with Spence … She makes me laugh like mad because she’s part schoolgirl, part very logical man, and part straight as they come woman.”

  There was some talk of work—Seven Days in May, briefly, playing the president, and an offer from Dino De Laurentiis to do Abraham in a film based on the Holy Bible. Louise didn’t think he should work at all. “He should have quit after Mad World. That took a great deal out of him.” Kate also knew the strain of a role on him, the toll that it took: “It was so hard for him to get to sleep. He was a real artist inside, that’s where he did his work, preparing for a role, you couldn’t see it, just as you couldn’t see it in his acting.”