The next day was a different story. Invigorated by the work, Tracy stayed until three, completing the first part of the lengthy scene in which Matt meets John Wade Prentice for the first time. The next day he remained until 4:15, and the day after that until 4:50. Nine days into filming, Sidney Poitier had a critical scene to play with just Tracy and Hepburn in Matt’s study, where Prentice tells Joey’s parents there will be no marriage unless they unequivocally approve of the union.
“I had all the words,” Poitier said. “Very well written scene too. And came time, and I’m thoroughly rehearsed. I knew everything I wanted to do. I was prepared to do my shadings, had little nuances here and there, was ready I thought. The quiet came on the set, as usually it does just before they roll. They rolled the camera, and I’m ready to start the scene and I started the scene. And suddenly into my mind came the realization that I am working in concert with these two people. I went up. I couldn’t remember a word. I blew every line for at least 45 minutes. I couldn’t—I couldn’t work. I was awestruck, actually. Simple as that.”
Hepburn said:
[H]e had played quite a few scenes with me first, which didn’t discombobulate him at all. He just was Sidney Poitier, a good actor. But when he first met Spencer, Spencer was sitting in the foreground … I was standing back … and Poitier comes in from the side to ask Spencer for his daughter’s hand in marriage. And Poitier came in and looked at Spence and couldn’t think of a word. Not a word. Just blank. So, Kramer said, “Well, let’s try it again.” And the same thing happened. He got about one line out and dried. So this was a rather serious situation. Kramer said, “Well, let’s do it tomorrow morning.” [The next morning] I said to Spencer, “I’m on my way. What time are you going to leave?” And he said, “I don’t know what time I’m going to leave. I may not go at all.” I said, “What the hell do you mean, you may not go at all? It’s Poitier’s big scene.” And he said, “Yes, that’s what I mean. I think he might be happier without those two old owls staring at him.”
So he didn’t go—I went. I thought, “Well, he’s just wrong.” But I thought, “Well, he’s pretty sensitive,” on my way down. So I went to my dressing room, and I wrote a note to Stanley Kramer and sent it over to him on the set. I didn’t appear. I said, “I’m here in case you want me.” And he had someone rush back and say, “Please stay where you are.”
Tracy began work on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in high spirits. (SUSIE TRACY)
With the picture under way, Hepburn did her best to manage the working environment at the studio as thoroughly as she controlled the living environment at home. “She wanted us all to learn how to play tennis at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Leah Bernstein, Earl Kramer’s secretary, remembered. Nothing and nobody escaped her attention, and she weighed in on matters of wardrobe, lighting, and camera angles, as well as the fine art of washing one’s own hair. She called it “keeping the set alive so everyone won’t go to sleep,” but she also admitted to a long-held ambition to direct a picture. “She and I had a strange relationship,” Kramer reflected, “because I loved Tracy, and I think he loved me, and, in a way, I felt for a while that Kate and I were rivals. Isn’t that a peculiar way to feel? Of course, we weren’t. But he’d keep saying to Kate, ‘Don’t bug him, don’t bother him. Jeez, he’s worked it out, for Christ’s sake.’ ”
Little escaped Kate’s notice. She was a constant presence on the set when Tracy was working. (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy worked a full day on his sixty-seventh birthday, playing his first scene with veteran actor Cecil Kellaway, who, at seventy-three, was having trouble mastering his lines. Tracy and Hepburn assured him it was “just one of those days” and stayed with him as Kramer made multiple takes, literally piecing his performance together line by line. That evening was like any other, dinner in the living room at St. Ives, Tracy in his horsehair chair, Kath to his right on the couch. “Your job is to entertain Spencer every time I go out of the room,” her aunt had told her, and Tracy, it seemed, was only too eager to engage her.
“Kath,” he said to her one evening, “you studied philosophy?”
“Yes.”
“Now, if your aunt comes back in the room, change the subject.”
“Okay.”
“What do you think happens when you die?”
Houghton recalled:
This was a conversation that had no end, a metaphysical conversation, but I didn’t have my aunt’s attitude that it was not something intelligent people talked about. She would be happy to talk about sex or vivisection or anything you wanted to talk about, but you couldn’t talk about anything to do with life after death. Spencer would say, “She thinks that when you die you just rot in the ground.” So he wouldn’t talk about it in front of her. There were a few priests that he was friendly with, and I know he talked with them about metaphysics, so I was sort of a poor substitute for a priest when they weren’t around.
I said, “Well, I can tell you what I don’t think happens.” He said, “What?” And I said, “I don’t think you go to Hell or Heaven.” He said, “You don’t think I’m going to pay for my sins in Hell?” I said, “No.” He said, “What do you think is going to happen to me?” I said, “I think that your spirit will live on and that all kinds of wonderful and mysterious things will happen to you.”
What he was really thinking when he would ask me these questions, I don’t know. But he did say to me, “I’m going to pay for my sins. I’ve not been a good person, and I’m going to pay for it.” I would say, “I think you have paid for it. I think you pay for your sins on this earth, in this life. I don’t think it’s going to happen after you die.” He’d say, “Shhh—here she comes.” So then we’d talk about something else. And then she’d go out of the room again.
I’d say, “Come on, Spencer. You’ve been a wonderfully positive influence in this world on millions of people whom you don’t even know. You can’t just discount that.” And he would say, “I haven’t done anything worthwhile except for the John Tracy Clinic.” So all the peccadilloes, the other women, the fights, the binges—whatever it was that was going through his mind as his litany of sins—haunted him.
Production moved ahead fitfully, Tracy channeling all the energy he could muster into his time before the camera, brightening and then fading again like a manually powered lightbulb. “I think,” said Marshall Schlom, “he was embarrassed that it got down to this, that his career ended up with his not being able to act the way he normally would act. We were all pulling for him, obviously, [but] in Judgment at Nuremberg he was a vital man. He wasn’t vital on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner at all. We supported him, and we felt badly for him. And it was as if he was thinking, ‘Okay, you’re sensitive and I’m letting you down.’ I think he was that kind of a man, that he had that kind of integrity. I personally felt very badly because I had to stand there and say his words for him. And I know how he must have been embarrassed about that.”
By the middle of April, Tracy’s energy was flagging, and Kramer reverted to his original plan. Each day Tracy would arrive on the stage at ten o’clock, made up and ready to work, and the filming of the master shot would generally be the first order of business. Kramer would move in for Tracy’s close-ups, the few over-the-shoulder shots that were deemed necessary, and then he would leave for home when the company broke for lunch.
“Kramer tried to work him as little as possible,” said Katharine Houghton, “and when he did work, almost always only his shots were done. He was always letter perfect, and sometimes improvised some amusing dialogue. It was a big thing every time he did a scene and it got in the can.” More acutely aware than anyone of what was riding on the picture, Tracy took to calling out to Sam Leavitt, Kramer’s director of photography, “Did you get any of it, Sam?”
Between shots he would sit calmly drinking from an ever-present glass of milk, an ice cube bobbing on its surface. (“Milkman, milkman!” he would call. “If I couldn’t have my one glass of beer at night, I’d really be
through.”) Jack Hamilton, a senior editor from Look, came to the set and was surprised by Kate’s almost conspiratorial welcome, due in part to the presence of actor Roddy McDowall, who was serving as photographer for the magazine. “I know what you fellows are after,” she told them. “I’ll try to give you something interesting.” Later, Hamilton was plopped down next to Tracy, and eventually Hepburn marched off. “Do you notice she’s the same with everybody—how she always tries to help people?” Tracy mused, regarding her affectionately. “She helps little Kathy, she helps Cecil Kellaway in his long dialogue, she helps me, she helps you …”
George Glass, Kramer’s associate producer, began allowing selected journalists to visit what was otherwise considered a closed set. UPI’s Vernon Scott observed a scene being made and spent a moment with Tracy and Hepburn between shots. “He is the best actor I’ve ever seen or worked with,” Kate said in a familiar refrain. “I’m still learning things from Spence.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Tracy grumbled, clearly pained at such hyperbole.
“Oh, yes I do. He can focus on a line or an expression thoroughly. His mind seems absorbed totally by what he’s doing. I’ve never seen anything like it. I try, but it’s not the same.”
Rehearsing a scene for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Left to right: Sidney Poitier, Tracy, Katharine Houghton, Katharine Hepburn, and Stanley Kramer. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Columnist Dorothy Manners came the following week and had her moments with Tracy completely apart from Hepburn. “This is absolutely my last picture,” he said flatly. “I’ve had it and I feel my fans have had it. From now on I hope to spend my time catching up on the places I’ve wanted to go, the books I’ve wanted to read, the people I want to know better.” Manners wondered if the state of his health had something to do with his determination to retire. “No, I feel well. I’m just too old to go on. I don’t talk about my birthdays. I had one right on this picture, but no one came around with a cake. I would have thrown it right in his kisser.”
The most lengthy interview Tracy gave on the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was to journalist Roy Newquist, who was compiling material for what was to become a book on the making of the film. Tracy talked of his early days in the theater, Kate seated at his side, urging him on. (“Well, tell him how you got the job with George M. Cohan—that’s a good story.”) He sounded tired, displaying none of the vigor he showed on camera. “I miss M-G-M,” he said at one point, “but all the people I really knew there are gone. Scattered or dead. There’s hardly anyone I know there, now. I’m the last of the tribe.”
One figure from his M-G-M days, now in his mid-thirties, was sneaked onto the set one day by a friend of his, a studio plumber, “literally through the back door.” He found Tracy sitting alone.
“Uncle Spencer?” he said, walking up to him.
Tracy’s eyes shot up, regarding him warily.
“I’m Bobs Watson. I played Pee Wee in Boys Town.”
“Oh my God! Bobby!” Suddenly he was full of life. “Bobby, how are you? What are you doing?” Watson had been working as an actor, taking occasional roles on television.
“I’m going into the ministry,” he said.
Tracy froze a moment, a bit shocked, and then he said with a smile, “That’s just fine … That’s marvelous! I’m happy for you. I’m really proud of you.”
“And I wanted to tell you that though I know it was a role, the way you were as Father Flanagan—the warmth and loving and caring I felt—was a major influence on my decision to enter the ministry.”
When Bobs Watson recalled the encounter in 1991, he had been a Methodist minister for twenty-two years. “I could tell that he was very moved, that it made a profound impact on him.” Had he gone through channels, Watson would never have gotten on the set, as Hepburn routinely discouraged guests. “I was going to go visit him,” Jean Simmons said, “and I was told that it was better not to because he was not well. I should have insisted, and I regret that I didn’t.” A. C. Lyles, who was based nearby at Paramount, called and Kramer asked that he delay his visit. “Please wait until we call you,” he said.
Hepburn was busy crafting her own performance while seeing to Tracy’s health and well-being, knowing he could suffer a serious setback at any time, delaying the picture or shutting it down entirely. “She was under more pressure than anybody,” said Katharine Houghton. “To see the love of your life fading before your eyes—she was extremely tense through the whole picture.”
As bossy and insufferable as she could be under normal circumstances, Kate grew even more controlling as the film progressed, desperate to see Tracy through what would likely be his final role. “One night—it was a Saturday night—I said I was going to go out with friends,” Houghton remembered.
She absolutely hit the ceiling. I can understand she might be worried that I’d get in a car accident or something, but it was also an extraordinary way to behave to a younger woman who was in her twenties. If I had been in my teens, I could see her saying, “Who is it?” and “Where are you going?” But she also knew me well enough by now to know that I was not a drinker or high-liver. I certainly wasn’t going to jeopardize my work. I was very, very disciplined. So she blew the whole thing up into a great brouhaha that then became Spencer was angry with me. Phyllis Wilbourn called and said, “Your aunt is very upset with you. And not only that—Mr. Tracy is very upset with you.” That really bothered me, because I didn’t want him to be angry with me.
Before I went out with my friends, I stopped at the house and she came to the kitchen door. I said, “I want to speak to Spencer.” She said, “You can’t. He’s in bed.” As if I’d killed him. I said, “Well, I’m going into the bedroom.” So I walked into the bedroom, and there he was in bed with his pajamas on. I was very upset, and I sat down by his bed and I said to him, “Spencer, I don’t want you to be angry with me. I’m sorry that I caused all of this trouble, but I’m just going out with my friends. We’re going to dinner at one of their homes in Pacific Palisades. They’re very nice people, and they don’t misbehave. They don’t do drugs.” (I didn’t say “drink” because I didn’t want to offend him.) “I’ll be back early …” He said to me, “Don’t worry about it, Little Kath. Your aunt is just a big fuss.”
He knew her game, but I think she also had gotten him upset. I think she had gotten him into a kind of How dare she? frame of mind. Then Kate lit into me later: “Spencer thinks you’re the most ungrateful person in the world. Here I have done all of this for you and you’re so ungrateful.” Her way of talking to me was one of the reasons I left Hollywood soon after the film was over. It did not impress me as the right way to behave. If she was doing that to me, I have to assume that she did it to other people, and maybe, to a certain extent, she was manipulative with him too.4 After that, he seemed to forget about it, but she hung onto it. And she told me persistently, and other people too, that Spencer didn’t like me. And I don’t believe that was true. I don’t know that he had any wild feelings about me one way or the other. There was never any unpleasantness between us. He was always very good to me, always very protective of me.
The element of the film that concerned Tracy the most was the climactic speech he had to make to the assembled members of the Drayton and Prentice families. With stage directions, it took up nearly five single-spaced pages in the script. He brooded over it, practicing the scene around the house. One evening, when Katharine Houghton was sitting with him at St. Ives, he turned to her and started to tell her something. “The moment I walked into this house this afternoon, Miss Binks said to me, ‘Well, all hell’s done broke loose now.’ I asked her, naturally enough, to what she referred, and she said, ‘You’ll see.’ And I did. After some preliminary guessing games, at which I was never very good, it was explained to me by my daughter that she intended to get married …” At first Houghton thought he was talking about Susie, and then it dawned on her that he was speaking to her in character.
it was the summation of everything he felt. What everybody else felt. What they should feel. Et cetera, et cetera. “And don’t interrupt me!” That sort of thing. So it had to be made to feel like one. My own experience as an editor helped some, because I broke it into five sections, so that he only had to do one page per day. Maybe one day was one-and-a-quarter pages and the next day was three-quarters, depending upon where it ended. But it always ended on a turn and an exit, so that it could be picked up on the next day. Or on a close-up, so it could drop back to a [wider] shot the next day. And it was all plotted out, rehearsed, reviewed with him how he would do it. And he was such a consummate artist that it [just felt] as one.
Kramer scheduled a private rehearsal—only the two of them and Marshall Schlom—for Saturday, May 6. There would then be a full rehearsal with the cast on Monday morning. Then the actual filming of the scene would begin, five days in all.
Tracy worked as usual on May 4, then was caught short of breath while Kate was still at the studio. “He was sitting in a chair hyperventilating,” Dr. Covel remembered. “Over-breathing out of anxiety.” He had no call for Friday, and Hepburn thought it best to forgo the Saturday rehearsal Kramer had scheduled. The rehearsal for Monday had to be scratched as well, and Kramer was forced to substitute a San Francisco bar scene with Poitier and Houghton for Tuesday’s scheduled work on the summation.
James Curtis Page 111