James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Once Tracy committed to the new picture, which quickly picked up the title Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Stanley Kramer got into the habit of stopping by St. Ives whenever there was news to report. “The anticipation of going to work again was one of the things which bolstered him up a great deal,” Kramer said, “and one of the reasons why I was anxious that he be kept apprised of as much as I knew at the time, because we did not have a script per se.” At first, Kramer left the exact plot of the film murky, positioning it to Columbia management as a “social comedy” while cobbling together all the elements of the package, principal among them assurances that the film would go forward should ill health force Tracy to drop out.

  On September 21, Kramer outlined the specifics of the deal in a memo to Columbia’s Gordon Stulberg: Tracy would receive $200,000—$50,000 at the end of photography, $75,000 one year later, and the balance a year after that. Also $150,000 deferred from profits. Hepburn would get $150,000 and a small percentage of Kramer’s own share of the profits.

  Hepburn will be in the third position behind Tracy and Poitier, but I have agreed to talk to Poitier about letting her split the two men just for balance … No compensation shall accrue either to Spencer or to Katie until they have either completed rendition of their services in the picture … Katie will be covered by cast insurance and will have to take a cast physical. Spencer will not be covered by any insurance. It is understood that if Spencer is unable to finish the rendition of his services because of his physical condition or his failure or refusal to perform, neither he nor Katie will be entitled to any compensation unless the picture is released containing the results and proceeds of his services. In other words, if he should finish 75% of his services and then is unable to continue for health reasons, they would not be entitled to any compensation unless the picture is not re-shot and they appear in the roles for which they are employed in the picture and it is released … Katie would have the option to play the female role if Spencer’s part were recast and re-shot.

  Four days later, Kramer announced the project by way of a press conference held in the studio dining room. Tracy, looking dapper in a blue blazer and gray slacks, was in the best of moods, relaxed and agreeable. How did he feel about going back to work? “I feel great about this one,” he said. “I keep reading about actors who have turned down 30 or 35 scripts. I’ve turned down a couple and they’ve been made … It was just as well I turned them down. But I knew Stanley would come up with something eventually.” What was it like filming with Miss Hepburn? “Gee whiz, I can’t remember. What’s it been? Ten years? Desk Set was the last one. No. We worked well together. We didn’t mind cutting one another off now and then.” He said he rarely saw motion pictures any more, and that “mostly I just stay home and read books.” When pressed, he mentioned enjoying several recent war novels and Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer.

  The news got excellent play in the domestic press, and the accompanying photos showed Tracy looking better than he had in years, robust and smiling. In October, Bill Rose sent 102 pages consisting of “part dialogue, part discussion, and part treatment” that would form the basis of the screenplay. He returned to California in December and completed a first draft in early January 1967. As was his habit of forty years, Tracy gave Rose’s script to Louise for her reaction, and she, in turn, passed it along to Johnny and Susie. Nobody liked it—particularly Louise. (“I had to say I didn’t. I couldn’t say that I did.”) Spence and Louise had always been on opposite sides of the political spectrum, and as the kids had been reared in their mother’s church, so had they also come to subscribe to her political beliefs. “He was a Democrat,” said Susie, “surrounded by Republicans.”

  Weeze didn’t much care for the subject matter, nor did she like Rose’s comedic treatment of it. Yet it was material both Spence and Kate felt strongly about; Tracy, in fact, had personally broken the color line at Romanoff’s in 1954 when he brought Willie Mays to dinner. (“Well, a gasp went up when a black man walked into the room,” said Laraine Day, who was married to Leo Durocher at the time. “Tracy just cut that right off and put him down at the table and pretty soon then everybody was eating again, after they got over the initial shock.”)

  “We were all very taken aback that he was going to do a picture like that,” Susie remembered. “He came up to the house on Tower Road, and we walked around the motor court, all of us … He wanted to do it; I think he was a little testy that we weren’t more for it. My mother said, ‘Would you want Susie to marry a black man?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t care if Susie said she wanted to marry a fuzzy-wuzzy.’ I think he was just annoyed that we didn’t [like it] and that was the tack he took. He just sort of bristled at the whole thing.” Louise advised against doing the picture. “However,” she qualified, “if you must work, you won’t find an easier one, excepting for that long speech [at the end].”

  With filming set to begin in March, only the role of the daughter was left to be filled. Kramer had decided that he didn’t need a big name in the part and was on the verge of giving it to Hepburn’s twenty-one-year-old niece, Katharine Houghton. In May 1964, when Houghton was still an undergraduate, Kate had sent over some pictures when Kramer was casting Ship of Fools. The following year, while passing through New York, Kramer caught Houghton in Garson Kanin’s staging of A Very Rich Woman at the Belasco. “She had a small part,” he remembered, “but she impressed me.” About the same time Carl Reiner read her for a part in Enter Laughing. “We had a wonderful time together,” Houghton recalled. “He was very funny about saying I was a good little actress but not a good Jew.” It was Reiner who reminded Kramer that Houghton was Hepburn’s niece.

  In the fall of 1966, Kramer was bound for New York to see “many young actresses” when Hepburn told him, “You must see my niece.” Said Kramer: “I went, I saw her, and I was completely intrigued.” In California he asked Hepburn if she thought young Kathy was up to the role. “We discussed my trepidation that if it were not played very carefully it might be thought to be very silly, could go overboard very easily, but we wanted to maintain this attitude of almost never-never land despite everything.” Houghton, who turned down a role on TV’s Peyton Place to remain available for the film, met Kramer in New York for a formal audition. “I asked him what he wanted me to read and he said, ‘Start at the beginning and read all the parts.’ So I did. I was particularly good as Poitier.”

  Actress Karen Sharpe, who had recently become Stanley Kramer’s third wife, recalled that the choice came down to Mariette Hartley, who, at twenty-six, was in the proper age range, and Katharine Houghton. “I said, ‘What does she look like? And can she act?’ He said, ‘Well, she looks a little bit like Kate.’ I said, ‘Take her. Use her.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because she’s her niece. It’s great for the film; it’s great publicity. Why not do it? She’s got Kate and Spence, and she’s got you. You’re the director—do it.’ ”

  Houghton was set for the film in late January 1967. According to Abe Lastfogel, her aunt reviewed and approved her deal, which included options on four additional pictures. “She’s a bloody lucky girl,” Hepburn said, “to be starting with Spence.”

  The screenplay had been finalized and Kramer’s production manager, Ivan Volkman, was working out the shooting schedule when Tracy suffered another attack of pulmonary edema on the morning of February 19. “He’d been pretty well controlled with his heart medications and his diet,” Dr. Covel said, “[but] he’d been off his diet, had been taking an extra amount of salt, which helps to precipitate heart failure. You take an overload of salt. Part of the treatment of heart failure is to restrict the salt and get rid of the extra salt in the body with diuretics. He’d go off his diet and eat something he liked … He awakened with shortness of breath … took some coffee and went back to bed and was again short of breath. He called his housekeeper for oxygen. She was unable to start it and he panicked and became severely short of breath. The rescue squad was called, and I was called … He was tre
ated with morphine intravenously, and by twelve noon he was back to normal.”

  The episode made the papers on the twenty-first, prompting Tracy to call the doctor, worried he was putting Kramer and the studio at too great a risk. “I went over to the house to see him. He was fine … I thought he could work if it could be properly controlled.” At first Kramer assumed Tracy to be uninsurable. Then two insurance doctors consulted with Dr. Covel and it looked as if he could be insured, but at the astronomical premium of $71,000. (By comparison, the cast insurance premium for Mad World, covering thirteen artists, including Tracy, was $193,820.) With insurance and neither Tracy nor Hepburn accepting compensation until their scenes had been completed, Frankovich and Stulberg were willing to take the risk.

  Then came the matter of billing. Tracy would, of course, be billed first above the title, but for the first time in their nine pictures together, Hepburn’s name would not be next to his—Sidney Poitier’s would. Graciously, the younger man had ceded first position to Tracy but held firm to second billing, despite Kramer’s having spoken with him, at Kate’s insistence, about letting her split the two men “just for balance.” Aside from being Hollywood’s only black leading man, Poitier was also Hollywood’s only black movie star. Arguably, he was a bigger draw at the box office than either Tracy or Hepburn. Kate, however, thought it only appropriate, given their history, that she and Spence be billed side by side and was likely nursing a grudge the day the forty-year-old actor was brought to the birdcage for an initial meeting.

  “When I arrived at her door and that door opened, she looked at me and didn’t say a word and didn’t crack a smile,” Poitier recalled. “But that was her M.O. After the longest while she said, ‘Hello, Mr. Poitier,’ and I said, ‘Hello, Miss Hepburn,’ and the conversation began. I could tell I was being sized up every time I spoke, every response I made. I could imagine a plus and a minus column, notations in her mind. That’s how big a step this was for her, at least to my mind.3 After that first meeting, Stanley took me to Tracy’s house [off] Doheny Drive for a little dinner party with the two of them and some other guests. This time Miss Hepburn was much more natural and at ease, but it was still obvious that I was under close observation by both of them.”

  Poitier wasn’t a man with a chip on his shoulder, but he was sensitive to whites who may never have encountered blacks who were doctors, teachers, lawyers … or actors. “I must say I haven’t known any colored person particularly well,” Hepburn freely admitted at the time. “I’ve never had one as a friend. But I can’t see any difference and I’m sure there isn’t any difference. It’s all a question of a man is a man is a man.” Bill Rose’s script was as much about the generational divide in families as it was about race, all the parents in the story having presumably been born between 1900 and 1910, when the racial equation in America was vastly different. Poitier gave them the benefit of the doubt: “I looked at them as ordinary, decent folks. And in fact they turned out to be that—and a hell of a lot more. But they were anxious early on, for good reason, and they simply had to find out about me.”

  It was, Poitier said, some evening.

  When the delicious meal was over and the after-drinks had been served, Miss Hepburn encouraged Mr. Tracy to entertain us with some of the classic stories he had a reputation for spinning. They were delightful stories, beautifully told, but more arresting than the stories was Miss Hepburn’s reaction to them. Although she must have heard them dozens of times, she listened to each one with wide-eyed fascination, as if she were hearing it for the first time. It was heart-warming to see how much affection flowed between that man and that woman. He treated her with an offhand appreciation, but at the same time he obviously loved her. “Oh, Katie, just shut up and let me tell the story,” was one of the ways he showed her who was boss. And I got the impression that was the way she liked it.

  Preproduction on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner began on March 6, 1967, when Kramer began making process plates and shooting car run-throughs at San Francisco International Airport. Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton, dressed to work, flew in the following morning to film exteriors at the airport and on the sidewalk outside the art gallery owned in the movie by Hepburn’s character, Christina Drayton. When, at the end of a long day, Houghton got to her room at the St. Francis Hotel, there was a message to call Kate.

  “The film’s going to be canceled,” Hepburn told her niece. Spooked by the news of Tracy’s most recent edema attack, the insurance company had backed away, declining, in effect, to shoulder the risk of Tracy’s illness or death at any price. Working the phones—and unwilling to settle for another actor in the role of Matt Drayton—Kramer struck an eleventh-hour bargain with Frankovich and Stulberg, agreeing to defer his own $300,000 salary until the successful completion of Tracy’s scenes. “My head was on the chopping block,” he said. “Spencer was shot to pieces by all those years of drinking. If he died, I’d be ruined.”

  Rehearsals began the following Monday on Columbia’s Stage 9, where the entire ground floor of the Draytons’ French Colonial home—entry hall, living room, study, sewing room, dining room, pantry, kitchen—had been erected. Designed by Robert Clatworthy, the set included a terrace and garden area, and a panorama of the city below. A conference table and ten chairs had been set up on the terrace, with floor heaters scattered about and six stage dressing rooms off to one side. Kramer got the cast on their feet the next day, working through the early scenes involving Houghton, Poitier, Hepburn, and actress Isobel Sanford as the family’s longtime housekeeper, Tillie. Tracy wasn’t required that day, and it was then that Kramer outlined his plan for getting the picture made.

  “His idea,” said Marshall Schlom, “was that we would shoot up to about four or four-thirty, light for the next morning, and then, because of Tracy’s health, bring Tracy in at ten o’clock, do all of his work, and then he’d go home and then I would play Tracy offstage. Stanley pitched this at the reading, and they all said, ‘Absolutely.’ I said, ‘I’m not an actor, but I will study his delivery and I’ll try and do it as best I can.’ Poitier was great. He put his arm around me and said, ‘I have faith in you.’ ”

  Tracy appeared the next morning for a makeup test, as the Caucasians in the cast had to wear a dark base to narrow the contrast, for photographic purposes, between their skin tones and those of the African American actors. He then joined Kate on the set to rehearse his first scenes in the picture, the ones in which Matt hears for the first time of Joey and John’s plans to be wed. It would, in some ways, be the most intense three days of rehearsal Tracy had ever endured for a picture, taking his character up to the point where he comes out against the marriage. “In the rehearsals,” Kramer said, “I drained Kate and Spencer. I made them simply give out every single idea, every concept they could. Once I came to shooting, I’d exhausted all the avenues and that was going to be the best I could do.”

  “We had some tensions on the picture,” Kramer acknowledged.

  I was irritated by [Kate’s] fear over her so-called “ugly neck”—she wore scarves and high collars, and “played low.” Many times she would come in a room and kneel, or sit down at once, so people wouldn’t be aware of her neck. During rehearsal, Tracy would be sitting there; suddenly she’d come in and she’d kneel. He’d say, “What the hell are you doin’ kneeling?” And she’d say, very grandly, “Spencer, I just thought it would be appropriate,” and he’d mock her highfalutin’ accent, saying, “Spensah! Christ, you talk like you’ve got a feather up your ass all the time! Get out of there, will yah?” And she’d start to say, “I just thought that—” and he’d snap out, “Just do what the director guy tells you, will ya?” and she’d reply, humbly, “All right.” She’d take anything from him. She’d take nothing from anybody else, from him everything.

  Filming began on March 20 with Joey and John’s arrival at the house and continued chronologically for the balance of the week. Tracy remained sequestered in his home on St. Ives, studying the script and con
serving his energy. At night he would enjoy the single Danish beer he permitted himself—“I’m having my one beer,” he would say—and eat supper with Kate and Katharine (whom he called Kath or sometimes “the kid”).

  “My aunt had no desire to be a wife,” Houghton remarked. “That was something almost repellent to her. But I think the role of helpmate and companion and ‘significant other’ (or whatever you want to call it) was something she took great pride in. She was very proud of Spencer. She adored him. And she also thought that he was a consummate artist. If she hadn’t felt he was a consummate artist she wouldn’t have been interested in him. It far outweighed any of his other peccadilloes … She always felt that he was a better actor than she was, and she liked that. It comforted her to feel that she was in the presence of somebody who was superior to her.”

  Tracy’s work on the picture began with a ten o’clock call on Monday, March 27. Matt enters the house through a side door and encounters Tillie, who, arms waving, tells him, “All hell’s done broke loose now!” In Rose’s script, Drayton bolts through the living room, banging his knee on a table and noisily knocking over some bric-a-brac on his way to the terrace. Tracy eschewed the cheap slapstick for subtler business, playing the scene as a concerned father, slightly befuddled when told an unfamiliar doctor is on the premises. (“The key to Spencer is that he plays with humor always,” said Hepburn. “He sees the ludicrous side to everything.”) He finished at 11:30 and left for the day, leaving the reaction shots and close-ups of the other actors to be played with Marshall Schlom.