I’m afraid you’re going to have trouble finding anything to photograph,” Louise Tracy told the photographer accompanying Dick Mook. “You see, we wanted a house that would be a home—a place that would be comfortable to live in rather than one that would look well in pictures but which would be depressingly formal. As a matter of fact, we have hardly any really good pieces.”
There was the little tilt-top table that had belonged to Louise’s great-grandmother, as had the chairs on either side of it. And there was the sideboard—the old pine dresser with the new matching top—but everything else was contemporary maple, some pieces, like the dining set, built to order, while others came directly from the showroom floor. All serviceable, comfortable, but hardly showplace rare or extravagant by the standards of even small-town America. Louise wondered why any magazine would want to take pictures, much less publish them, but Mook was an old friend and had drawn an assignment for yet another intimate look at Spencer Tracy and his family.
The ranch itself made for better photo ops, and the same magazine, Screenland, had run a pictorial spread a few months earlier, all exterior shots made by an M-G-M photographer showing Spence and the kids out among the animals, pitching hay, working the fields, drinking from the garden hose, and nuzzling the dogs. The headline was “Tracy Takes It Easy,” but what it showed was an increasingly rare event, a day spent at home where Spence was indeed at rest, his wife and kids enjoying the air, the sun, the dust kicked up by the horses and the cars, the notion that this was as far away from the studio as one could get and still earn the extraordinary living he had come to expect from his position as a genuine star of the movies.
A rare day together on the ranch, as captured by a studio photographer, 1939. (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy wasn’t there the day Mook showed up; he was shooting Edison, the Man, and so Louise gamely showed Dick around, poking into Spence’s modest room, where the desk was piled high with scripts and mail and random scraps of paper, notes he had written himself and stuffed in his pockets. Two wastebaskets had come from an old lady who made them both herself—one pictured Stanley, the other Livingstone, and both arrived accompanied by a bill for sixteen dollars. A globe sat to one side, to the other a bookcase that held a model of the Carrie B (which Mook always referred to as “Tracy’s Folly”). The other rooms were similarly plain, though homey and obviously lived in. There were no formal areas nor guest rooms, nothing set aside for company or otherwise off limits to the kids and the dogs.
They strolled out back, past the pool and the tennis court and the onetime bunkhouse, to where the horses were kept, White Sox, Johnnie, four or five racehorses, none on the level of Man o’ War nor ready even for Santa Anita but all right for the lesser tracks. “At least we think they are,” Louise said. She pointed out a small horse, a yearling, which they had entered in a breeder’s sale. “What a shame to sell her,” Mook, the Tennessee horseman, remarked. “No,” Louise said. “We’ve had our fun with her while she was growing up. Racehorses are an expensive proposition. We’d better get our money out of her if we can. We’ll probably sell the other racers, too, when we can, and only keep the polo ponies.”
It was a crisp, windy day, and with the kids in school and Spence off making a picture, the place seemed quiet and empty and Louise somewhat subdued, as if she had everything she could possibly ask of life except happiness and a sense of purpose beyond John and the job of being Mrs. Spencer Tracy—a role that qualified her, in the opinion of many, as a candidate for sainthood. At the age of forty-three she was no longer playing competitive polo, no longer in the swim of things at Riviera. Her friend Audrey Caldwell once allowed as how Louise should never have given up the stage, but it had been nearly twelve years since that abbreviated season at Lima, where she had last appeared before an audience as leading woman in a company of actors.
“That’s all there is—there isn’t any more,” she said to Mook, wryly echoing Ethel Barrymore’s famous curtain line. “Are we going to see you again soon, or are you going to go on ignoring us?”
If Louise knew of Spence’s relationship with Ingrid Bergman, she never let on. If anything, she made it easier for him by absenting herself from the Encino ranch, either with trips to Arizona or Palm Springs, or her frequent visits to New York, where Johnny was once again a student at the Wright Oral School. Spence was on the wagon, working constantly, home, at times, for tennis and swimming, occasionally for dinner out or a movie in the company of friends. They attended the premiere of Disney’s Fantasia at the Carthay Circle and caught up with Citizen Kane some four months after its release. On a day-to-day basis they were leading separate lives—purposely, it would seem, for when Louise was in residence, Spence usually was not, and when he was around, Louise often was elsewhere, leaving the children in his care and the care of the help—Miss Lystad, Susie’s Norwegian nurse; Margaret, the family cook; Hughie, who took care of the horses and lived out back of the property. Spence’s presence at the dinner table became something of an event, and Susie would later remember his palming quarters (“What’s that behind your ear?”) as the last vestige of his childhood magic act.
“I could see a change over the years,” said Chuck Sligh, whose business occasionally brought him to Los Angeles.
When I first went to California in ’34 or ’35 I stayed at their house … they certainly seemed very happy and everything was fine. And [then] I was at the ranch maybe twice. The first time I went, I remember specifically because Louise said, “Spence isn’t going to be here because he’s making a movie and he has to get in for makeup and everything very early in the morning. It’s a lot easier for him to stay at the hotel and be there in the morning instead of driving way into there from here. So why don’t you just take his room and stay there?” So I did. And I looked in the closet and there were, oh, four or five or six suits … but the next time I went out there and stayed in Spence’s room, I opened the closet door and there was practically nothing.
Tracy was also distancing himself from his brother Carroll, whom he blamed for getting him into “deep trouble” with the Internal Revenue Service. At one point, as he later told it, he was sure he was going to jail, and a man from the IRS actually appeared at the studio to audit his records.
“I keep seeing the name Feely,” the man said. “Jenny Feely, Aberdeen, South Dakota. Who is that?”
“That’s my aunt.”
“I see regular payments …”
“Yes, that’s right. You can ask her. I send checks to her.”
“And she lives on Washington Street in Aberdeen?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well,” said the man, “I know Jenny Feely who lives on Washington Street in Aberdeen, South Dakota. My name is Walter Higginbottom, and I was born and brought up two blocks up the street from her.” He closed the file lying in front of him on the table. “That’s all right, Mr. Tracy.”
Spence’s cousin Frank was out over the summer of 1940, and the tension between the two brothers was palpable. “It was a period,” said Frank,
of two or three months—two or three months—that he and Carroll did not speak. He didn’t even look at him. He’d sit by the pool (and the kids were in Hawaii with Louise, or somewhere) and he’d talk to me and he wouldn’t even LOOK at Carroll. Carroll usually picked me up at the hotel and drove me out there. We’d sit around for a couple of hours, have lunch, and [Spence would] never talk to him. Never even look at him. He wasn’t even there … surely there must have been some business points they had to discuss, or SOMETHING … Carroll never opened his mouth. That went on for a couple of months. And then when the ice finally broke, it just barely broke. It was like “pass the salt” or something. Matter of fact, most of the time I was out there, they didn’t speak.
One night Spence and Frank were driving to the studio to see a picture. It was just the two of them, and Spence began to ruminate on the matter of his big brother. “I don’t know what the hell to do with Carroll,” he said. “Christ, he’s been out here seven years and he still doesn’t do anything. I pay him $250 a week … he’s always on the golf course, when I want him I can’t find him, or when I want him he’s doing something for [somebody else]…the guy’s all screwed up … I don’t know what the hell to do with him. But he’s my brother. I love the big lug. What am I going to do?” He spoke, Frank said, in a tone of almost complete disgust. “If it weren’t for me getting him out here in California,” Spence said, “he’d still be selling malted milk in Milwaukee for Sam Thompson.”
Where Carroll was an almost constant source of frustration for his younger brother, Peggy Gough, Tracy’s secretary, was a godsend. A graduate of UCLA, she handled the job with quiet efficiency, sorting the mail, taking dictation, helping her boss cope with the weird business of being a movie star. Working out of his combination office–dressing room on the second floor of an apartment building on M-G-M’s Lot 1, she diplomatically fielded appeals for money and what Tracy called “oddments”—buttons from his jackets, locks of hair, contest prizes and the like. She ordered stills from his movies, answered fan mail, made luncheon and dinner reservations, sent out photos, turned down party invitations, delivered messages, and kept the number at the house in Encino a closely guarded secret.
Pleas for autographs were the most common, and they came in all sorts of forms. People would see him leave his car and poke hastily scrawled scraps of paper through the windows. One went so far as to scratch a name and address into the paint of his new Lincoln, which he then had to have refinished. Before going to work for Tracy, Peggy never knew how many requests a public figure could get—hundreds a month, not to mention appeals from legitimate charities, which also numbered in the hundreds. “He is a very charitable person,” she said at the time. “In fact, many of his friends call him a sucker, but he just laughs it off. You’ve no idea how much can be given away right inside the studio itself—not a day passes that some extra or old-time actor doesn’t come up with a hard luck story, and the only ones he refuses are the ones he knows are downright fakes who make a business of it, and, unfortunately, there are a good many of them.”1
There was also the matter of the fan club, a job of care and feeding for which he was profoundly unsuited. One of the earliest rackets in the movie business, clubs had been known to charge fans as much as $2.50 a year to officially admire a preening film idol and another fifty cents for a lithographed picture of same. The money went into the pockets of organizers or, in some cases, the star himself. After a vogue that lasted well into the twenties, such organizations fell into disrepute, and some studios—such as Fox—forbade them altogether. It was radio that fueled a new wave of them in the mid-thirties, and soon men like Howard Strickling saw the value in building and maintaining mailing lists so that when the sales organization had trouble selling its block into a place like Kokomo, the local fan clubs could be rallied into action. The membership of Jean Harlow’s fan club reportedly topped fifteen thousand at the time of her death.
In Tracy’s case, a club took shape after Captains Courageous but fell apart with the illness of its president, a woman known simply as Miss Barclay. When a club member wrote in, Peggy explained the situation and the woman wrote back, offering to form another on Tracy’s behalf. Mrs. Frances Rasinen of Detroit had previously run a club for singer-actor Johnnie “Scat” Davis and came well recommended for the job. With annual dues set at fifty cents, she built up a membership in short order, Tracy agreeing to sign a five-by-seven photo to each new member. The inaugural issue of the club’s quarterly newsletter, The Tracy Topper, was published in October 1940, but Mrs. Rasinen proved to be high maintenance, and in the club’s prime Peggy was responding to two or three letters a week, juggling dozens of names and addresses and trying as best she could to keep everyone happy.
There was time to talk over the summer of 1940, and cousin Frank asked Spence about acting. “I said, ‘Did you ever think about doing anything else?’ He said, ‘Well, my Dad wanted me to go into business with him, and I was only interested in medicine. I’d have liked to be a doctor, but I knew I could never make it academically. Maybe I was bright enough, but I didn’t have any kind of dedication. I had no motivation at all. You know, school was abhorrent.’ ” And then he told Frank what he had told Pat O’Brien, that one of the things he had really thought about was being a priest, but, as with medicine, he never thought he could “get through the Latin and all that stuff.”
Frank struggled to control his look of surprise. “What?” he said.
“I don’t go to church as much as I should,” Spence continued. “I get to Mass fairly regularly, but I could be a lot better. This kind of life, sometimes you’re traveling, sometimes you’re working. Sunday’s just another Tuesday or Wednesday. I don’t practice the religion the way I should. I often thought about the priesthood. I went to St. Rose’s for those years. Nuns. Every year. They drill that religion into you. I’ve got it in my head. I know what’s right and wrong, I know what’s sinful. I know. It bothers me. I’ve got a conscience.”
David Caldwell, Audrey and Orville’s fifteen-year-old son, felt quite close to the Tracys. “I never had the impression of Spence as a movie star,” he said. “He was always very friendly and seemed to be interested in asking about things I was doing. And Louise certainly kept in pretty close touch. She even got me to help John very often with his studies.” David was at the ranch one day, passing through the succession of rooms that included Spence’s, when he noticed the Oscar for Captains Courageous sitting on the bookcase.
“There was always a great deal weighing on him, I must say … I said, ‘Oh, that’s what this looks like.’ And he said something which was close to these words: ‘There are qualities that make a man a good actor but don’t necessarily make him a good man.’ I was just very shocked at that statement. It was in a calm voice from him … but it had a lot of meaning behind it.”
The idea for Woman of the Year came from director Garson Kanin, who conceived it as a vehicle for an actress he had designs on marrying. Kanin, twenty-eight, had been with RKO three years, having spun a year’s apprenticeship with Samuel Goldwyn into a chance to direct a picture for producer Robert Sisk. A specialist in snappy comedies, Kanin was rushing to complete Tom, Dick and Harry, his seventh movie for the studio, when he described his concept to screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr. Kanin’s principal character was modeled on columnist Dorothy Thompson, who was, according to Time magazine, one of the two most influential women in the nation. (The other was Eleanor Roosevelt.) His notion was to portray a courtship between the outspoken political pundit and a hardheaded sportswriter—the Post’s Jimmy Cannon in Kanin’s mind—who worked on the same paper. “[T]hey clash in print about something; meet; clash in person; both wrong, both right—not bad!”
“Gar,” Lardner said, “had decided he needed a writer conversant with the New York newspaper world to work on the script, and Paul [Jarrico, who wrote Tom, Dick and Harry] had volunteered me. To further complicate matters, Gar had just been drafted into the Army, so we talked out a story line in the couple of days before he went off to training camp, leaving his share of the project to his brother Mike.” Michael Kanin was no more established in the profession than Lardner, having written only a few programmers at RKO.
It was an unlikely arrangement, two out-of-work screenwriters with only a logline of an idea, but through Garson Kanin they had access to one of Hollywood’s hottest properties, the newly rejuvenescent Katharine Hepburn, whose shrewd co-opting of the rights to The Philadelphia Story had brought her one of the biggest hits of the season. Kanin had been linked romantically to the thirty-four-year-old actress ever since it came out that he and she had been the only witnesses to the midnight wedding of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Within days, Kanin and Hepburn were denying marriage rumors of their own.
Ring Lardner and Michael Kanin began working out the story from the sportswriter’s perspective, which Lardner then wrote up in the form of a first-person narrative for submission to Hepburn. “Garson,” said Lardner, “probably sent it to her; he was the one who knew her personally. And she responded very well to it. And then we got up this plan of her taking it herself to Louis B. Mayer and talking to him about it.”
It was a sweet position for Katharine Hepburn, who had come to prominence in the early thirties but whose later pictures weren’t calculated to sustain a brand image. She won the Academy Award for Morning Glory, her third movie, and her version of Little Women was an astounding commercial hit. Yet she played character parts and oddballs, and where it once had seemed that audiences couldn’t get enough of her, by 1938 she was part of Harry Brandt’s infamous ad in the Hollywood Reporter in which the president of the Independent Theatre Owners Association labeled her, along with Mae West, Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich, “box office poison.”
“They made a mistake with me at RKO and renewed my contract,” Hepburn later said. “They shouldn’t have done that. I was washed up. If I had gone on making pictures that year I would have been not only washed up, but enshrouded and buried. So I bought out my contract.”
She left the movies and returned to the stage, where Philip Barry and his Philadelphia Story awaited her. Sensing the quality of Barry’s play and its profound commercial potential, she paid $30,000 for the film rights, then passed those rights to Howard Hughes—with whom she had been linked romantically—with the understanding that any deal he made for them would include the proviso that she play the self-centered Tracy Lord, a part that Barry had written with her in mind. It was, of course, the property that had value at the time, not Hepburn, whose participation would otherwise have been a shaky proposition.
Under Joe Mankiewicz’s careful supervision—he had the entire stage production recorded and then clocked for laughs—The Philadelphia Story was a startling success. Hepburn walked away with an Oscar nomination as well as new currency with the moviegoing public. Said Mankiewicz, “Having had a very good time and a very successful time with Kate on Philadelphia Story, in her typical fashion she brought me a screenplay. An untitled screenplay, unauthored as far as the title page was concerned, because she wouldn’t tell me who wrote it. She said, ‘Read this.’ I read it.” Mankiewicz thought it “absolutely marvelous” but wasn’t empowered to make a deal. “And she hadn’t said what she wanted for it, and I said, ‘Kate, I have nothing to do with that. That’s up to the higher levels of L. B. Mayer, but I would love to do it.’ ”
Since Philadelphia Story had generated more than $3 million in worldwide billings for M-G-M, Mayer was only too happy to consider the new eighty-nine-page property, which carried the gold-plated title The New Philadelphia Story. Mankiewicz had already passed the material to Kenneth MacKenna, Metro’s West Coast story editor, and MacKenna, in turn, had handed it over to Sam Katz, one of the rare members of the executive team who actually read the things given him. Having built enthusiasm all around, Hepburn caught a Stratoliner for the coast and took a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. A meeting was scheduled between her, Mankiewicz, Mayer, and Benny Thau for the next morning. “I was terrified,” she said. “Mr. Mayer is a charming man, and I was afraid he’d talk me into promising something I had no intention of doing. He began by saying a lot of nice things to me—still not knowing who wrote the story or how much I’d ask. And I said a lot of nice things to him—the usual preliminaries to hitting each other over the head.”
Once she had them snared, Hepburn outlined her terms: $40,000 for the story and another $60,000 for the shooting script. She asked $100,000 for herself as star (the same fee she had commanded for Philadelphia Story), $10,000 commission on the deal, and an extra $1,000 “for telephone calls and things.” The entire package—Hepburn, original story, screenplay—was valued at $211,000, and she stuck to her guns, rejecting an initial offer from Sam Katz of $175,000 “for the whole business.” Mike Kanin remembered that he and his partner were astonished: “We would have been lucky to get $10,000 for the script under our own names. As it was she got $100,000 plus agent’s fee of ten percent—for herself. I couldn’t say it was all a big conspiracy against Metro, but we were quite breathless with the speed of it. We had nine days in which to finish the script. We holed up, and with the aid of a lot of Benzedrine managed to do it.” It instantly became the costliest original ever purchased for the screen; it was only after the deal had been set that Hepburn revealed its authors as two novice screenwriters whose earnings had previously amounted to no more than $200 a week.2
With two-thirds of the screenplay drafted, Hepburn took it to George Stevens, who had directed one of her better films at RKO, Alice Adams. “My great buddy George Cukor had to be offered things first,” she said, “but he didn’t know a baseball game from a swimming match, so I thought this picture had to be directed by a very male man, and that’s George Stevens.”
With a deal at Columbia, Stevens thought Hepburn was bringing him something that could be made there.
Kate called on me and gave me this script to read. I said, “Kate, this is the only time in my life that I’ve read a motion picture script that I think is ready to go.” [A script] that was excellent in every way. She said, “Well, why don’t we make it?” I said, “What about the last part?” She said, “Well, the boys are working on it.” And it didn’t seem very difficult to finish it. I said, “That’s a good idea. Bring it over to Columbia and we’ll make it.” She said, “I can’t.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Because I promised it to Louis B. Mayer. I thought you’d leave here and make a deal at Metro.” I said, “Things are so pleasant for me I really shouldn’t do it.” So I don’t know what happened, but I agreed to go to Metro and make the picture. And we hadn’t had the last act written.
According to Lardner, the script was written initially with Clark Gable in mind. (“Because of M-G-M we thought Gable was more likely.”) Hepburn, however, saw an opening when the postponement of The Yearling gave her a shot at Spencer Tracy. She had asked for him when making the deal for Philadelphia Story—Gable and Tracy both—and both, she was told, had turned the picture down. “I knew he was a brilliant actor,” she wrote of Tracy. “And he represented just the sort of American male of that era. That’s why I was anxious to have him do it.” She had first laid eyes on him at the Harris Theatre during a performance of The Last Mile (“a remarkable show”) and had been captivated by him ever since Captains Courageous, a performance she described as “shattering.”
“I don’t think Spencer had any idea who I was. I don’t think he was that much of a movie fan.” Actually, they already had appeared together in other media, so Tracy was certainly well aware of her. In 1933 they shared a two-page pictorial spread (“Screenland’s Double Honor Page”), Tracy posed with Colleen Moore, Hepburn opposite with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. In 1938 Walt Disney put them on screen together in Mother Goose Goes Hollywood, a seven-minute cartoon which had Tracy fishing Freddie Bartholomew from the ocean while Hepburn, all jaw and cheekbones, circled them with an outboard motor, dressed as Bo-Peep and looking for her sheep.
Tracy was on vacation when Joe Mankiewicz put the idea to him. Based on what little he had seen of Hepburn, he didn’t think it would work. She could play screwball, as she had opposite Cary Grant, and she could play earnest parts like Terry Randall in Stage Door, but Woman of the Year—Joe’s title—was the sort of comedy at which Carole Lombard and Rosalind Russell excelled. Hepburn, he had heard, was difficult and wore pants all the time. (He thought she was a lesbian, Hepburn would later note with some amusement.) David O. Selznick, who was responsible for bringing her to RKO in 1932, spoke of a “curious kind of masculine drive” that was off-putting to a lot of men. “I never felt she was really unattractive. I think she just appeals to certain people.” It was only after Tracy had been persuaded to see The Philadelphia Story—Hepburn’s first true glamour girl part—that all his reservations fell away and he agreed to the assignment.
Tracy returned to the studio on a hot and humid August day, still smarting from the Jekyll and Hyde notices and eager to see the picture cut as drastically as possible. He and Mankiewicz were exiting the Thalberg Building—which Joe had dubbed the Iron Lung, the air-conditioned administration building where “paralytic minds were at work”—when they encountered Hepburn on her way in. “I have no idea where she might have been going,” said Mankiewicz. “She stopped as we stopped. I said, ‘Well, it’s certainly high time you two knew each other.’ ” Hepburn was in slacks, wearing no makeup, her angular architecture—which caused one detractor to remark, “Throw a hat at her and wherever it hits it will hang”—on full display. Her eyes were a pale, nearly colorless blue-gray, her skin drawn tightly across her freckled face. She affected an illusion of height, which gave her a psychological advantage over a lot of men, not simply her costars. “Spencer was five-eleven, I was five seven and a half,” she said. “I wore very high heels.” She always disputed what Joe Mankiewicz remembered her as saying as they stood on the landing that led to the guard’s gate and the lot beyond: “I might be a little tall for you, Mr. Tracy.”
“I wouldn’t have been dumb enough to say what I [supposedly] said to him,” she asserted decades later—and she had a point, given how badly she wanted Tracy to be in the picture. According to Hepburn, there was instead an awkward silence. “I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said, ‘Sorry I’ve got these high heels on. When we do the movie, I’ll be careful about what I wear.’ ”
It wasn’t quite the wholesale emasculation Mankiewicz recalled, but it had much the same effect. “And Spencer’s just sort of eyeing her. He did that, and she didn’t know at the time that he was going to pay her back. But I spoke up and said, ‘Don’t worry, Kate. He’ll cut you down to size.’ And she smiled and walked on. And we walked on.” Said Hepburn, “I think he thought I was awful. And he said [to Joe], ‘She has dirty fingernails. Her hands are dirty. And she’s bossy.’ That was his impression of me. Not that I was too tall. I think he just found me rather unattractive and disappointing. And thought: ‘My God, what am I stuck with?’ ”
They proceeded, said Mankiewicz, to study each other’s pictures, and Stevens’ first rushes betrayed a softening in Hepburn’s normally strident delivery, while Tracy seemed to be upping his energy level a notch. “There they were,” said Mankiewicz, “imitating each other.” At first Hepburn fretted she would be “too sweet” in the part. “Katie,” said Stevens, “you get out there and be as sweet as you can be. You’ll still be plenty nasty.” Then she objected to Stevens’ introductory image of her, a generous sampling of leg from Tracy’s perspective, the first genuine cheesecake shot of her career. “It’s not like crossing your legs in front of a man,” Stevens argued, painfully aware of her lack of credentials as a movie sexpot. “You don’t know your leg is showing. But he sees it. And the audience sees it. And everybody remembers it and forgives you when you are not being feminine.”
Hepburn was not an instinctive actor. She questioned everything, debated everything, would happily have rehearsed the same scene all day if she could. The director’s guidance—the director’s discipline—was essential to her delivering her best work. Tracy was just the opposite. He talked very little about the character he was playing, did his scenes, and rarely, if ever, relied on the director. Where Hepburn was constantly leaping into the void, Tracy was watching, observing, taking in what she and the other members of the cast were doing. “Acting to me,” he once said to Sylvia Sidney, “is always reacting.”
“We never rehearsed together,” Hepburn said. “He hated to do more than one take. I never cared how many takes I did. That was curious. But Spencer’s peak concentration was the first take. And it was usually the best.” She could remember an early scene in the back room of Pinkie Peters’ tavern—modeled on Bleeck’s, the famous newsmen’s hangout underneath the Herald Tribune building in New York—where Sam and Tess are getting to know one another. “Spencer had the most extraordinary technique. I mean, he was so natural you thought he’d blown. And I was hoping he’d like me. So I was struggling to be very easy and very with it, and I knocked over a glass of water. And I saw him take his handkerchief out of the pocket and start to dry it up. So I took the table napkin and dried a little bit off, and then disappeared under the table to dry the rest of it. I thought: The old son of a gun. I’ll show him. I’m not really as silly as I look. So we went right on playing the scene.”
Tracy and Hepburn got to know each other in much the same way, having dinner one night ten days into production. The conversation came around to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which Hepburn had made a point of seeing.
“Oh no—no—nothing—rotten,” he said. “I just can’t do that sort of thing. It’s like constructing a dummy and then trying to breathe life into it. I like to be the dummy myself, and then make people—force people—to believe that I’m whatever I want them to believe. Inside out—instead of outside in. No makeup.”
She studied his face. “His ears stuck out. And he had old lion’s eyes. And he had a wonderful head of hair. And a sort of ruddy skin, really like mine. I mean, he was not as freckled as I am, but he was ruddy. And…[a] nice mouth.” Both were at loose ends in terms of relationships. Ring Lardner knew that Gar Kanin was “kind of in love” with Hepburn and remembered her once asking whether she should marry him. “I think he probably realized it was a very unlikely thing with Kate. Although, as I said, she did say to me, ‘What do you think?’ I don’t think she ever took it too seriously or that she was in love with him.” And Tracy had been to San Francisco with Ingrid Bergman not long before the start of the film, but now Bergman was off in New York with her husband and daughter.
There was a surprising amount they had in common. Both had thought about careers in medicine, and both had influential fathers who didn’t take the theatre seriously as a vocation. As kids, both loved movies—westerns in particular—and both staged amateur performances for the neighbors. Hepburn displayed real talent as an actor at Bryn Mawr, just as Tracy had at Ripon. Both got their professional starts in stock, and both came to Hollywood expecting to go back to Broadway. Hepburn did, disastrously in The Lake, spectacularly in The Philadelphia Story. Tracy, of course, never had. The Theatre Guild still wanted him for The Devil’s Disciple—and there was talk of Eugene O’Neill’s new play, The Iceman Cometh—but Metro complicated things by insisting on first refusal and the right to put in money. Similarly, Hepburn was aiming to do Saint Joan for the Guild and wanted Orson Welles to direct. Within days, Philip K. Scheuer’s column in the Times carried an item: “Katharine Hepburn, a lady who wastes no time, has apparently communicated her enthusiasm for the stage to Spencer Tracy … Now he says he may appear in a play with Katie.”
Katharine Hepburn’s attraction to him was immediate and intense. Director George Stevens takes note. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
They settled into a comfortable pattern of working with one another, Hepburn considering every possible nuance of a given scene while Tracy gently heckled her from the sidelines. “I think he was so steady,” she said, “and I was so volatile, that we exasperated each other. And we challenged each other, and that was the fun of it.” When John Chapman visited the set on September 12, Hepburn was at a rostrum rehearsing a speech, while Tracy was sitting out in the audience, haw-hawing loudly and doing his best to throw her off. “We are told that this is the big new friendly feud. Spence and Miss H. had never worked together before, and each at first was a little in awe of the other; but now they are in the happy Hollywood state of amiable insult. ‘We will now pause,’ announces Tracy, ‘while Miss Hepburn rewrites the script.’ ”
George Stevens, meanwhile, was demonstrating a bit of wordless business, Tracy’s character having happened onto the speaker’s platform, unsure of where he was and unable to get off. Tracy, Hepburn soon decided, was modeling his performance on the deadpan mannerisms of their esteemed director.
“I never met a man I knew as quick as I knew Spence,” Stevens commented.
And he felt the same about me. So he’d come in a little early, and he’d come over in my little office and sit down and we’d talk, or I’d go in his dressing room. And all of a sudden I hear a knock on the door, and the door opens and it’s Katharine. She says, “What are you two conspiring about?” “Well,” he says, “you know, Kate, I like guidance on things … And this man is our director, and I’d like to get some guidance from him. And I asked him a question: How can I be such a damn fool to get into a picture with a woman producer and her director? How can I be such a dumb bastard as that, Katharine? And you know what he tells me? He says, Well, Spencer, I can’t understand it. That sounds pretty stupid to me. How can you do it? Can you give me a good reason? he says. No I can’t.” It took me a long time to get the answer: He wanted to make a picture with Kate Hepburn.
In Woman of the Year, Sam Craig and Tess Harding start out as rivals, sparring with each other in their respective columns. The publisher of the paper calls them in to make peace, and Sam is startled by the cool, determined beauty of his adversary. Out of earshot, he asks her to a game at Yankee Stadium—her first—and patiently explains the ins and outs of baseball. She reciprocates, and he walks into a postbroadcast cocktail party in which none of the distinguished guests appears to speak English. Awkward and uncomfortable, Sam makes the best of it, then slips out the door. The next day, she asks him to drive her to the airport, and he finds himself onstage as she’s delivering an address before a hall full of women. Their snatches of time together don’t add up to much, and Sam can’t tell what she’s up to. As they reach LaGuardia, his dissatisfaction, as the script put it, “oozes out of every pore.”
“What’s the matter, Sam?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“Sure?”
“Well, I dunno. I can’t quite figure you out. What are you trying to prove? Why am I here?”
And when she catches her breath and says, “I thought you might want to kiss me good-bye,” Tracy calmly takes it in, processes it, then turns himself away from the camera, ostensibly to glance down the terminal corridor, but also to make sure the most significant kiss of his entire career takes place completely out of sight of the audience. The camera moves in, Hepburn in profile as he draws her toward him, her lips apart, the moment of contact perfectly obscured by the brim of his cocked hat. It is brief but heartfelt, passionate and completely unencumbered by concerns of lighting, position, focus. It’s the back of his head, her chin, the muffled soundtrack, their eyes laser-locked on each other as he releases her. It’s as real as any kiss in the history of the medium, the look of astonishment on her face, the deadly serious look on his, screen acting at its finest … if it was acting.
“Mike Kanin and I were frequent visitors to the set,” said Ring Lardner, “and what we saw happening there was the final blessing on the venture. When you write a love story, you hope that the actors will make it seem convincing, but you scarcely expect them to actually fall for each other. A familiar sight on a movie set comes when the director calls ‘Cut!’ and the two lovers withdraw abruptly from a tight embrace, briskly heading off in separate directions as if to emphasize the nothing-personal aspect of their physical contact. Kate and Spence wanted to be together off camera as well as on.”
With Johnny attending school in Manhattan and Susie, now nine, still at Brentwood, there was little to occupy Louise beyond the running of the house. It was a gilded but solitary existence, broken only by her occasional visits with Audrey Caldwell, the former actress from Australia who was her closest friend and only true confidante. Spence was living at the Beverly Hills Hotel, making the picture, home Sundays and holidays. Carroll Tracy slipped quietly into the role of liaison between husband and wife, scheduling their times together as one might arrange meetings and conferences. With so much time on her hands, Louise began writing a book about her struggle to rear, educate, and mainstream a boy who was profoundly deaf, its purpose to give “a complete account of one family’s experiences with a deaf child, to the end that other deaf children may prosper.” The title she gave the book was The Story of John.
Louise Treadwell Tracy was a skilled and facile writer, and her words flowed with the same candor that distinguished her infrequent talks with the press. With her background in journalism, she was incapable of portraying an event inaccurately, nor could she temper her opinions in the name of diplomacy. She could avoid a subject altogether—Spence’s infidelities, for example, even though the Loretta Young affair was a matter of public record—but once she chose to tackle something—public school administrators, clueless doctors, antique attitudes on the part of the public, and baseless misconceptions—she did so with a sharpness and conviction that were startling. “Unless I write as fully, as clearly and as honestly as I am capable of doing,” she said, “my purpose has no hope of accomplishment.”
And so she began her book with these words: “He was sleeping late that afternoon, too late. He probably would not want to go asleep again that night until long after he should. I would waken him. I went out onto the porch where he slept, and as I went, I called ‘Johnny, Johnny, time to wake up.’ He did not move.”
Woman of the Year took almost nine weeks to shoot, finishing on Saturday, October 25, 1941. Louise was vacationing in Arizona, but if Spence was involved with Katharine Hepburn he didn’t note anything about it in his datebook. He was still seeing Ingrid Bergman—had dined with her on the sixteenth—and it was about this time that Bergman’s husband, Petter Lindstrom, prevented his wife from returning with Tracy to San Francisco to discuss “future roles.” When Louise did get back from Phoenix, Spence drove her down to Balboa, and they spent the day looking at houses and boats. That evening they dined at Carroll’s, where a frail Mother Tracy celebrated her sixty-sixth birthday.
Louise was in Palm Springs when Woman of the Year had its first preview on November 14. In the movie Tess and Sam are wed at a perfunctory ceremony, but the marriage veers spectacularly off course when she asks him what he’d think about having a child. He thinks, of course, that she is pregnant, only to discover that she’s adopted a Greek orphan. “Two weeks ago they made me chairman of the Greek Refugee Committee and I accepted without thinking much about it. And then while you were away they held a meeting and some idiot suggested that I should take the first one.”
The boy is already lost in the whirlwind of Tess’ life, and Sam takes pity on him when there’s no one to babysit on the night Tess is to be named America’s Outstanding Woman of the Year over a nationwide radio hookup.
“Well,” she says dismissively, “Chris will be all right, Sam. He’s old enough and, besides, we’ll be home before midnight.”
“He can do a lot of crying in four hours,” Sam shoots back.
Tracy’s “business,” Stevens observed, “is always behind his eyes. Whatever Spence does behind his eyes—if he thinks the audience should turn to his character, something takes place behind his eyes. You hear it in the sound of his voice. You see it in the direct look in his eyes. You know he’s on and he’s the man to be heard … It’s just as authoritative as if he rapped on the table with a gavel.”
Tess goes on to the banquet alone, and Sam, having made his stand, calmly returns the boy to the orphanage, where other children speak his language and he won’t be trapped in an empty apartment. Sam completes the paperwork while the broadcast is on in the background, and when Tess returns to the apartment, her plaque under her arm and the press in tow, he is nowhere to be found.
Hepburn, during the writing of the script, suggested the climactic sequence the preview audience saw that night: Tess covers an upcoming prizefight for the missing Sam, while Sam can be found, in a game attempt at meeting his estranged spouse halfway, studying French and Spanish at Mademoiselle Sylvia’s, a language parlor that Sam’s friend Pinkie takes for a bordello. When he learns he’s picked a washed-up fighter named Dunlap in the column Tess has so obligingly ghosted, Sam sprints from the building in a panic. (“Who did it? Who wrote that tripe?”) At the fight, Tess materializes directly behind him and fesses up to the writing of the column. “We didn’t know where you were. It had to be written.” And then she tells him she hasn’t been a woman or a wife or anything to him.
SAM
(with heavy skepticism)
And now you know just how to go about it?
TESS
(enthusiastically)
Yes, Sam … we’ll move out of the apartment, get a little house out of town somewhere. I’ll make it a real home, honest. I’ll learn how to take care of it … and you.
SAM
And you’ll cook, sew, and order the groceries? Drive me to the station every morning?
TESS
(exultant now in the picture)
Yes, Sam—!
SAM
You’re not making sense.
It was, said Ring Lardner, “one of those kind of it’s-all-starting-over-again endings.” The picture got over at preview, but only to a point. “And there was a lot of confusion,” Hepburn admitted, “and a lot of slight—shall we say—unpleasantness. Anyway, they shot my end. And the minute my end came up at the preview, the interest dropped dead. So Mayer came to me and said, ‘It was a wonderful preview.’ And I said, ‘Mr. Mayer, it was a great preview up to such and such, and then, at the end, which I’m totally responsible for, [it] laid an egg.’ And he said, ‘How much to fix it?’ And I said, ‘About two hundred thousand dollars.’ And he said, ‘Go ahead.’ So I rushed back, and everyone was, you know, suggesting ends, ends, ends.”
George Stevens had returned to Columbia, and it was Joe Mankiewicz who figured out what the picture needed. “Philip Barry wrote the definitive play about Kate,” he said.
About Kate. For Kate. Philadelphia Story. In which [there was] a woman so superb, so elevated in class, so intelligent, so accomplished, so everything, that she antagonized every woman in the audience, because this is superwoman. Philip Barry wrote the play in which she got her comeuppance, and the audience loved a comeuppance, loved her for taking it, and this was the start of Kate’s second career. That formula, that needed element, in what was otherwise a woman so perfect that she could not be tolerated by the mass female audience…
I called John Lee Mahin, who was a very good writer, and he and I and George Stevens, the director, sat down and I said, “Look, what I think this needs is what Phil Barry discovered …” and I devised this new ending in which she tries to make breakfast. This was a retake. And it was the equivalent of her being taken apart in Philadelphia Story.
Tracy was present at the November 14 preview but wasn’t quite sure what to make of the audience’s reaction. “Good, I think,” he wrote in his book, a question mark accompanying the comment. Lardner, who wasn’t there, thought the ending “too feminist” for Mayer and the studio brass. “The executives at M-G-M, including Joe Mankiewicz, supported by George Stevens, felt that the woman character, having been so strong throughout, should be somehow subjugated and tamed, in effect.”
Hepburn, who had been in on the development process almost from the beginning, wasn’t happy with the new ending and wasn’t shy about saying so. “Mayer was away,” John Lee Mahin remembered, “and Sam Katz was in charge of the studio. Hepburn came into Sam’s office; wham, she threw what I had written on the desk and said, ‘That’s the biggest bunch of crap I’ve ever read!’ Sam was bewildered; he was looking at Stevens. Tracy was stuck on her, but he knew this ending was for him and not for her, so he was sitting there and he wasn’t saying a word. Finally, Sam said, ‘George, what do you think?’ George didn’t even answer. ‘Sam,’ he just said, ‘why don’t you put [up] that apartment on Stage 3, we’ll shoot it in the morning.’ And Sam said, ‘Oh, that’s fine, that’s fine.’ ”
Stevens, whose career began with two-reel comedies, envisioned a sequence devoid of dialogue, Tess managing her kitchen duties with clattering incompetence, Sam looking on with scarcely a grimace, toast shooting skyward, the coffee boiling over, an innertube of a waffle threatening ominously to burst. “Now there,” commented Tracy, “is a real meaty hunk of business. I look.” Hepburn was similarly bewildered: “I’ve never done anything like this in my life. Honestly, George, I don’t know a thing about gag comedy.” Stevens remained adamant, promising his two leads the revised sequence would never be shown if it wasn’t any good. “The first ending we shot was wrong,” he told them. “Why? Because it didn’t put over the idea we were shooting for. Kate talked about being a good wife. Audiences don’t want talk. They want action. In this new finish, Kate doesn’t talk. She acts like a good wife as nearly as she can. She tries to cook. To the point of being ridiculous. But she’s trying.”
The new material took eleven days to shoot, Stevens, formerly a gag man for Laurel and Hardy, having worked out an array of mechanical gags that were, he declared, “foolproof.” He gave Hepburn what he called “W. C. Fields business”—trying to button her dress, struggling to keep her straps from slipping, juggling the various kitchen gadgets. But what really made the scene work, Mankiewicz said, were “the kind of looks, or non-looks, of Tracy. The other directors would have had Tracy react. Instead of which, George had Tracy play it the way George would, gives this quiet look, that Indian impassivity, while Kate made a ninny of herself making toast. That’s George.”
To make the retakes for Woman of the Year, Tracy broke off from shooting Tortilla Flat, his first picture for Victor Fleming since the Yearling debacle. Tracy’s relationship with the book’s author, John Steinbeck, dated from a late-night encounter at Chasen’s in the early summer of 1939, when Steinbeck was reeling from the uproar created by the publication, just two months earlier, of The Grapes of Wrath. The men talked until 2:30, comparing notes on the odd burden of fame and parting with the hope they would soon work together.
That fall, as Tracy was preparing to play Thomas Edison, he and Fleming approached Steinbeck with the notion of filming The Red Pony at M-G-M, an idea to which the author, now flush with royalty money, was decidedly cool. Steinbeck was suspicious of Hollywood in general and Metro in particular, having just seen the first screen adaptation of one of his books, Of Mice and Men, spectacularly filmed by director Lewis Milestone at the tiny Culver City studio of Hal Roach. “There was great unity,” he wrote, “because only one man touched it, and that was Milestone.” That sort of unity, he argued, was impossible at the producer-dominated mechanism that was M-G-M.
A subject far closer to Steinbeck’s heart was a six-week collecting trip to the Gulf of California he was planning with marine biologist Ed Ricketts. He described their plans to Tracy one night over dinner, saying they planned to write a book to pay for the trip and invited him along.3 Having just started I Take This Woman for the third time, Tracy was in the mood for a long break and volunteered to secure a boat for the expedition. Three days later, he drove Steinbeck, his wife Carol, and Louise to San Pedro to see the We’re Here, which looked to be ideal. Then the owner wanted too much money and the deal collapsed. “I look on you with peculiar and strong affection,” Steinbeck wrote Tracy, “which must be the result of some profound recognition. I hope it will remain like that. Meanwhile, think about joining us at Guaymas.”
Louise was all for it, but Spence, as it turned out, could manage only four weeks between the finish of Edison, the Man, and the start of Boom Town and had to settle for a short trip to Phoenix instead. In September 1940 Steinbeck had Tracy to the house he had built at the Biddle Ranch, Los Gatos, where he was preparing the narration for a documentary that had been shot in Mexico over the spring. Codirected by Herbert Klein and Alexander Hammid, The Forgotten Village told the story of a cholera outbreak in the rural village of Santiago and the clash that takes place between the healing traditions of the village elders and modern medical science. Steinbeck asked Tracy if he would narrate the completed film and was delighted when he said that he would. “He has a great heart,” Steinbeck wrote his friend, actor Max Wagner. “I knew he would want to do it.”
Tracy had just started Jekyll and Hyde when he saw a rough cut of The Forgotten Village in a screening room at M-G-M. He professed to like the film but was guarded and, Steinbeck thought, “a little afraid” of Herbert Klein’s direction. Steinbeck came down to Los Angeles, but by the time he arrived, Klein was ill and in the hospital and Tracy had been told he couldn’t do the narration, suggesting to him that the studio had played along just long enough to get Jekyll and Hyde under way. Steinbeck blamed Eddie Mannix for the double cross and briefly plotted revenge, intending to “blast” Metro’s forthcoming production of Tortilla Flat and wondering in a letter to his agent if they couldn’t make trouble over the similarities between The Red Pony and The Yearling, which extended to the name of the boys (which in both cases was Jody). “If we don’t want money we might easily get a court order,” Steinbeck suggested. “And I want to plague them as much as I can.”
The flap over Forgotten Village was allowed to die down—Burgess Meredith replaced Tracy as the film’s narrator—and an olive branch was extended in the form of an offer to adapt Tortilla Flat to the screen. “I had a letter yesterday from your charming bosses asking whether I would like to collaborate on Tortilla Flat, in which, it was said, you were to be,” Steinbeck wrote Tracy in mid-June. “I replied that I would like to very much if I could be happy doing it—my happiness requiring control of the script, a lot of money, and the right to work somewhere but Hollywood.”
Steinbeck couldn’t see how anything more than a series of blackouts could be made from his tales of idyllic poverty in the hills above the California coast. He had already seen one failed attempt at dramatization—a Broadway play that lasted all of five performances—and doubted anything better could come from a film version. When he sold the screen rights to Paramount in 1935 he needed the money, and he wasn’t kidding when he offered Metro, which acquired the rights in 1940, $10,000 to simply take it off the market. Producer Sam Zimbalist put John Lee Mahin on the script, and the two men were in Monterey, soaking up the local atmosphere, when they encountered Steinbeck at a local bar where the fishermen and soldiers drank.
“What are you doing to my story?” the author demanded.
“We’ve butched it up plenty,” came the reply.
What they had done, other than to remove a lot of the sex, petty theft, and drunkenness of the book, was to change the ending, focusing on the “poison of possessions” and letting Steinbeck’s romantic hero, Danny, live only to have him married off—another form of death among the paisanos of the novel. Much to everyone’s surprise, Steinbeck asked to see the script and actually liked it, telling Mahin that he’d made the story “a hell of a lot more fun” by taking all the “drama and message” out of it. Over a midnight session at Chasen’s, Steinbeck told Tracy much the same thing and blessed the making of the film, at least to the extent that he could approve of anything Metro did with his material.
Steinbeck’s conniving Pilon was not unlike Manuel in that the role required both makeup and an accent (not to mention singing), but Tracy never resisted the assignment as he had Captains Courageous and had, in fact, been linked to the project for more than a year. The accent seemed to flow naturally from the script’s Runyonesque dialogue, suggesting the mixed blood of the paisanos and the notion they spoke both English and Spanish in an equally unique manner. His skin was darkened as it had been for Manuel, but his hair was left uncurled, hidden as it was under a battered hat with a white poppy poked carelessly into its band.
Victor Fleming exuded an unquestionable authority—Tracy always addressed him as “Mr. Fleming” in front of the cast and crew—and the decorum on the set was exemplary. The shoot was confined almost entirely to indoor sets, the largest, on M-G-M’s Stage 3, being a fanciful exterior designed by Paul Groesse, weedy yards and rickety fences and a dirt road leading off to a panoramic view of Monterey and the ocean beyond.
In a rare stab at ethnic fidelity, Zimbalist tried borrowing Rita Hayworth to play Dolores Engracia “Sweets” Ramirez and then, failing that, dropped Hedy Lamarr into the part about the same time John Garfield was secured on loan from Warner Bros. for the role of Danny. Once Lamarr was set for the picture, Tracy conspired to stash his ever-present box of chocolates—which usually occupied the third drawer of his dressing room desk—in her dressing room instead, figuring that casual visits to a frequent costar would not be nearly as scrutinized as trips to his own on-set trailer, where his weight was carefully monitored and he endured a constant razzing from the crew over his addiction to sweets.
“I can see,” said John Erskine, “that the kind of truth which only the actor can convey is something the audience will recognize out of their experience. But, to secure this effect of convincing reality, should pictures give us any particular kind of story or character which we don’t get now?”
Tracy thought a moment. “I doubt it,” he said finally. “We get all kinds of characters, don’t we? The only restriction is in what we are permitted to say about them.”
“But that’s the same thing as not being allowed to portray them.”
“Not quite the same thing. If all types of characters are already permissible on the screen, we shall gradually win the privilege of understanding them.”
“You’re not interested, then, in people of any particular economic group?”
He looked surprised. “Why should I be? I am interested in people. They may be in one group today and in another tomorrow.”
Still, Erskine thought Tracy was interested, more than he realized, in characters rising “from a lower to a higher condition” and that, from talking to him, he would always prefer people who could survive their successes and “bear their weight of human sorrows.” He was also sure that although Tracy was more interested in interpreting people than in putting over any social or economic theories, his interpretations suggested a politically liberal point of view, something that was implicit in the generosity of his own spirit.
“But,” said Erskine, “the films which we seem to demand cannot possibly cover the whole range of a mature person’s experience. Our pictures must be growing toward a real presentation of life, but only a small part of our life is presented.”
Tracy agreed. “I like to believe the audience will gradually accept more and demand more; then the screen will give it to them. That’s the tendency now, don’t you think?”
“You speak of the audience,” said Erskine, “and I admit that theirs is the controlling influence, but why shouldn’t screen actors of the first rank demand something too? In other arts—architecture, sculpture, painting—the great artists set the pace for the public.”
“In those other arts,” Tracy replied, “the leaders can wait for the public to catch up. But the actor must speak to his public immediately during the performance. However, there is no reason why we shouldn’t exercise more leadership than we do. I believe there is a gradual pressure in that direction. But I think it should be leadership in artistic ideals, rather than in political or economic or social theories, since pictures are the art of the people and should give a real portrait of them rather than of the individual artist.”
“Shouldn’t a film give more than a portrait of individual characters in themselves? Shouldn’t we be able to see from a number of individual screen characters something that we’d all recognize as a true account of life, the general principles of it, the inevitable relations of cause and consequence?”
“And you don’t think the screen gives those principles?”
“I don’t. Do you?”
“I wouldn’t say the screen is entirely false to life, but I agree that it sometimes dodges the deeper principles, sometimes soft-pedals what you call cause and effect.”
“To that extent,” asked Erskine, “aren’t pictures selling out the audiences?”
“Maybe the audience isn’t fooled,” Tracy replied. “Perhaps they are willing to accept a certain amount of nonsense, as they accept a dramatic convention, in exchange for something else which they really enjoy.”
“But great dramatists don’t feed the world nonsense. If audiences habitually find their entertainment in stories that aren’t true, they’ll lose the ability to find pleasure in stories which are. Shan’t we end up after much picture-seeing by believing that the homes of the rich in America are as the pictures portray them, and that the poor almost never occur, and the middle class, unless it is comical, never exists? That’s the picture our screen asks us to recognize as true, isn’t it?”
Tracy laughed. “You’re a little hard on us, but you and I don’t disagree. I hope pictures will tell the whole truth of life while I’m still on the screen.”
1 Tracy was a big tipper, a practice Louise thought terrible. “You think these people make a lot of money,” he lectured. “They don’t. It’s only a few of us who do it; other people don’t. I can do it and like to do it, so don’t talk to me about it.”
2 Having taken part in the reorganization of the Screen Writers Guild in 1937, Ring Lardner, Jr., had been branded a radical by M-G-M East Coast story editor William Fadiman. Hepburn’s keeping the authorship of the untitled treatment a secret was partly a negotiation tactic, partly to keep Lardner’s name from scotching the deal.
3 The book that resulted from Steinbeck’s excursion was Sea of Cortez.