When they finished State of the Union on December 6, 1947, both Tracy and Hepburn were eager to return east, Kate to see her family and caucus with Helburn and Langner, Spence to pursue a production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, also for the Theatre Guild. Working with O’Neill had been a long-held ambition, Tracy having initially been paired with the ailing playwright in 1943 when only revivals were on the table. Subsequently, O’Neill gave the Guild permission to stage The Iceman Cometh, the first new play of his to hit Broadway in twelve years, with A Moon for the Misbegotten and A Touch of the Poet to follow. Tracy had served notice on M-G-M in May, while deep in the midst of Cass Timberlane, that he intended to take a twelve-week leave of absence at the end of the year to do the play. Coupled with the six-week vacation due him upon the completion of every picture he made for the studio, he would have a total of eighteen weeks to rehearse and perform the show, with perhaps more time to be negotiated if all went exceptionally well.
Iceman was not the critical nor commercial success everyone had hoped it would be, and when Moon for the Misbegotten encountered casting and censorship problems on the road, O’Neill asked that it be withdrawn until his health improved and that Touch of the Poet be similarly postponed. Capra held his cast in Los Angeles over Christmas as he supervised the editing of State of the Union and determined if any retakes would be necessary, an unusually lengthy process due to the timeliness of the material. (He had a newspaperman on retainer—Bill Henry of the L.A. Times—whose sole job it was to inject contemporary political references into the dialogue and make sure nothing in the script was suddenly rendered obsolete by national or world events.) Growing more impatient by the day, Tracy was granted the start of his vacation on December 29, with the possibility that he could still be recalled at the end of six weeks, pursuant to the terms of his contract.
Still holding out hope the O’Neill play would somehow free up, he went off to Arizona to paint and ponder his future as an actor, as he would be turning fifty just as his current contract would be coming up for renewal. Langner offered another play, a consolation that lacked a woman’s part large enough for Kate, but Tracy already had mastered the self-loathing Melody, contradictory and full of bluster, and was as fixated on Poet as he had been on nothing else since Rugged Path. “He read that play to me several times,” Hepburn remembered. “O’Neill didn’t like stars. And he never did ask him to do it. Which, I think, is a great pity, because I think Spencer understood that character.” Langner remained convinced that if he could just arrange a meeting between Tracy and O’Neill, all doubts about the rightness of the package would be swept away.
In Culver City, Capra was hoping to preview State of the Union the first week in February, which would enable him to serve notice for retakes just short of the February 8 cutoff date. Dubbing stretched on, however, and the initial preview got pushed back a week, prompting Sam Briskin to ask Tracy, through Leo Morrison, for a week’s extension on the deadline—something Tracy proved unwilling to grant. Lighting a fire under Capra, he said Liberty would have to pay him a daily retainer to go beyond the contractual notification period, knowing the company had come in some $450,000 under budget. Capra, as it turned out, didn’t need him after all, and on February 9, 1948, Eddie Knopf spoke to Tracy in Palm Springs and asked him to travel to London to see Robert Morley in Morley’s and Noel Langley’s hit play Edward, My Son, and, while there, to make some background shots for the picture version, which Knopf said he expected to start by the end of March.
Tracy, unhappy to be assigned a part so resolutely British, said at first that he would go to England but not make any location shots without being paid for them. Eddie Mannix, concerned he might be angling to break his contract, gave orders that Tracy was not to be required under any circumstances to make the shots, completely sidestepping the issue of whether or not he should have been given the picture to begin with.
Tapped for Arnold Holt, a ruthless, class-obsessed businessman who alternately charms and throttles his way from shopkeeper to peer of the realm, Tracy was seemingly the only star on the M-G-M roster who could reasonably be expected to handle the role—despite his refusal to attempt an accent. Having paid $160,000 for the screen rights, the studio could ill afford to lose him. Knopf engaged Donald Ogden Stewart to write the screenplay, and it was Stewart who suggested making the character Canadian, which solved the accent problem without making Tracy any happier. George Cukor’s assignment as director was a further attempt at mollification.
On February 18, Tracy dutifully set out for New York in the company of Knopf, his wife Mildred, and Cukor, but then said that he would not see the play for fear he’d be unduly influenced by Morley’s lusty performance. He thought Morley a wonderful actor, witty and florid, but as unlike himself as any actor could be. Playing a part that Morley had specifically written to be played by Morley would be little short of ridiculous, and playing it straight would naturally rob it of its leavening strokes of finish and humor. Moreover, the part called to mind Tracy’s only other attempt at a British character, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and the derision it engendered. “I know Spence so well,” Louella Parsons commented, “and he thinks he’s going [to England] now, but will he actually go when the time comes? He’s not much on traveling too far from the home base.”
Louella, of course, was right. Spence joined Kate in New York on February 22 and declared he was staying put, leaving Cukor and the Knopfs to travel on without him. There was still some hope that he could meet Eugene O’Neill and loosen up Touch of the Poet for a fall production, but the playwright had been hospitalized with a shoulder fracture and, although he was receiving visitors, he deflected a meeting with Tracy. Privately, O’Neill told Lawrence Langner, “I don’t believe I could live through a production.”
Suddenly concerned he had produced no income in the new year, Tracy had Leo Morrison advise M-G-M that he would report back to the studio on April 1 and ask that his salary for the rest of the year be prorated accordingly. He was back in Los Angeles by March 21, when he met with Cukor and Don Stewart to begin work on the script. Metro was planning a wide opening for State of the Union, promising “red hot, up-to-the-minute entertainment” so timely that it would be hitting hundreds of screens simultaneously, one of “the greatest mass bookings in America’s top theaters that has ever been undertaken in the history of our business.” Indeed, the film had its world premiere in Washington on April 7, 1948, Capra seated alongside Harry S. Truman, who was mulling a run for the office he had ascended to with the death of Franklin Roosevelt.
“President Truman, according to those who watched closely—as presidential reactions always get watched—has a habit, much like a small boy watching a chase sequence, of lifting himself slightly from his seat when what he sees on the screen excites and interests him,” said Charles Alldredge, the assistant secretary of the interior. “That’s how he reacted to the story of a good man presidential candidate who almost lost himself and finally won out over himself and the bosses by appealing frankly to the people.” Truman requested a print for the presidential yacht, then ordered yet another showing at the White House, after which he announced at a capital dinner: “There will be a Democrat in the White House in 1949, and you’re looking at him!”
Emboldened, Capra hit the promotional trail, knowing that neither Tracy nor Hepburn could be counted upon to give the picture much in the way of support. Yet, when the film opened at Radio City on April 22, it was the two principal stars who garnered the lion’s share of the press, Bosley Crowther finding Tracy “a much more attractive-looking candidate than anyone who has yet declared” and Kate giving “every assurance of making the most stylish First Lady we’ve had in years.” Warmly greeted in nearly all critical corners, the movie performed well at the box office, though not quite up to expectations and nowhere near the record run of I Remember Mama, which had just preceded it at the Music Hall.
With topicality as its primary selling point, State of the Union played off quickly, posting domestic rentals in the range of $3.5 million—not bad, but lower than for Cass Timberlane, which demonstrated much greater appeal among women and had the added help of a best-selling book as its basis. It disappeared by the end of the year, never to be reissued nor widely shown on television.
Decades later, when Ronald Reagan exceeded his allotted time at a New Hampshire debate, the moderator ordered his microphone cut off. “I paid for this microphone!” Reagan famously stormed in protest. So obscure by then was State of the Union that practically no one recognized it as one of Tracy’s lines from the picture.
In terms of publicity, Spencer Tracy generally did less to promote his movies than any star since Garbo—initially to cover his drinking, later because Kate herself had such an aversion to the press. (Her father disapproved of personal publicity of any kind, or anything else, for that matter, that smacked of “showing off.”) Gradually, Howard Strickling tightened access to the point where he was not talking to journalists at all. “They used to say, ‘He’s a prick and he doesn’t want to see anybody,’ ” Tracy explained. “They were partly right.”
The only promotional efforts he made over the spring of 1948 were in support of John Tracy Clinic, which had officially been in operation now for five years. He broke his radio embargo to appear on Louella Parsons’ ABC broadcast and made himself available for photos when Sophie Tucker turned over a $1,000 check to the clinic’s building fund. The premiere of Cass Timberlane netted another $10,000 for the fund, and it soon got so he was better known around the lot for the clinic than for the pictures he was making.
“If somebody approached him,” said June Caldwell, Eddie Mannix’s secretary, “and had a problem with a child in the family, or if anyone needed help from the clinic, he was very sympathetic to that and he would make arrangements … I know of incidences [where people who] were working around the studio went down to the set and waited until he got a chance to talk to them, and he’d say, ‘Certainly,’ and he would give them a name and he would be helpful.”
With the expansion of the clinic’s board to eighteen members it was no longer practical to hold meetings at the ranch. When meetings shifted to the Biltmore downtown, Tracy started looking for a graceful exit. “We’d have a dinner meeting,” Louise said. “One of the things that bothered him was that everybody had to pay for their own dinner. He thought that was absurd. He wouldn’t come to one and not pay for the whole dinner. He invited them and he said, ‘This is on me.’ He couldn’t see anybody else paying money for something that he would be involved in. I said, ‘They’re paying for their own.’ He said, ‘I know, but they shouldn’t have to do that.’ ”
Alathena Smith, the clinic’s staff psychologist, first came upon him one day by chance. He and John had pulled up in front of the main cottage in John’s station wagon, and it was the young man driving that first caught her notice, not his famous parent. “I was very attracted to him,” she said of John. “I observed his limping and I knew before he rounded the station wagon that this was a well-raised young man, taught to be polite.” Instantly, she could sense the gulf between father and son, the inability of John to communicate with his dad on anything more than a superficial level. “The agony in his father’s eyes [tore] my heart to pieces … to see a man not able to express feelings, deep feelings that you can’t express…[They were only] on the cottage property for a moment, and all I can tell you is my antennae picked up agony, and the special kind of agony that I associate with not being able to get across and express yourself openly with warmth. I’d seen it before, knew about it … I think this was the trouble—the inability to communicate feelings [on the part of] both of them.”
In May, word went around town that Dick Mook had died of a stroke in Memphis at the age of fifty-three. Five days later, Father Flanagan suffered a fatal heart attack while in Europe on a tour of Austria and Germany. Tracy was hit hard by the sudden death of a man so closely aligned with him in the public mind, furiously pacing the floor and craving a drink as at no other time in the three years since his last. “I watched my father walk the floor and bite his lips until they bled to keep from drinking,” he had told his cousin Jane, “and I know what he went through.” And now, alone with his aunt Jenny, he paced and he chewed, he paced and he chewed. “I’m not going to be like my father,” he said with his voice cracking, tears welling in his eyes, blood trickling down his chin. “I’m not. I’m going to lick it!”
A wire went out to Patrick Norton, Monsignor Flanagan’s assistant, who was in the process of returning to Boys Town the body of its founder:
THERE IS NOT MUCH I CAN SAY, OTHER THAN TO EXTEND MY DEEP DEEP SYMPATHY TO THE BOYS IN THEIR GREAT LOSS. THE MEMORY OF A MAN AS GREAT AS HE WAS WILL HELP SUSTAIN THEM IN THEIR SORROW FOR HE WAS TRULY A FINE A[ND] GOOD MAN.
Mercifully, Tracy was set to leave town again within a few days. M-G-M had revived a plan to make pictures at the former Amalgamated Studios, Borehamwood, under a new Anglo-U.S. films agreement that would enable American producers to use unremittable sterling for quota-qualifying productions.1 For Edward, My Son, the scheme meant that Tracy would be surrounded by an all-British cast, headed by the Scottish-born actress Deborah Kerr. Of the Americans involved, there would be only himself, Knopf, Cukor, and Donald Ogden Stewart. He and Kerr left for London aboard the H.M.S. Queen Mary on May 22, Howard Strickling and his wife Gail accompanying them at Tracy’s request.
“I’ve come to work,” he told a dockside reporter upon his arrival, dispensing with the usual how-nice-it-is-to-be-here routine. “My new picture, Edward, My Son, should take ten or twelve weeks to make. If they get it over in eight weeks, I’ll be glad. The idea is to get in and get out fast. There should be no hanging around.” Asked the dreaded question about acting and his approach to it, he creased his brow, brick-red from the sun, and ran his tongue along his teeth, jutting his lower lip out in an expression of near pain. “You should know all about acting,” he replied. “Britain has that side of the business sewn up. In America we have no actors to touch Olivier, Richardson, and Donat. Olivier is way out in front of anything we can produce. That is the tragedy of Hollywood. We are out of touch with the theatre and we have no real actors now. Our young boys lack theatre training.”
He dismissed his alleged naturalness as an “instinct for the stage” and said that he had never really had to struggle to get on. “If you really want to know, it is just that I try no tricks. No profile. No ‘great lover’ act. I could never get by with things like that. I just project myself as I am—plain, trying to be honest. I am a guy who likes reading and an old man’s game of tennis. I leave the frills to the youngsters.”
Metro had poured £1 million into capital improvements at Elstree (as the studios were now known), making it the largest and most modern production facility in all of Great Britain. Portions were still under construction when Tracy arrived on the scene, and war-era Romney huts still dotted the property. Accepting his fate with a kind of grand resignation, he commenced filming there on June 9, the lone American in a cast of classically trained actors that included Ian Hunter, Mervyn Johns, Felix Aylmer, Ernest Jay, and, from the play’s West End production, Leureen MacGrath. The pretense of the character’s being Canadian instead of English fooled no one, and the changing of his name from “Holt” to “Boult” (to avoid confusion with Sir Herbert Holt, the onetime chairman of the Royal Bank of Canada) did nothing to bolster Tracy’s own perceived legitimacy in the role. “If he sometimes appeared grumpy,” said Deborah Kerr, “it was because he was not altogether happy about himself as Boult.”
Unable to match Morley for dexterity and accent, Tracy delivered a performance so intense that he rendered the character, in George Cukor’s words, a “cold-blooded monster” who cloaked a string of petty crimes in an obsessive concern for the well-being of his wastrel son, the unseen but ever-present Edward of the play’s title. “It’s rather disconcerting to me to find how easily I play a heel,” Tracy remarked to Cukor. “I’m a better actor than I thought I was. When I was doing Father Flanagan, that was acting. This is not acting.”
Hepburn arrived on June 10, registering at Claridge’s and generally keeping a low profile. There was a vogue for extended takes, spurred by word of Alfred Hitchcock’s use of nine- and ten-minute takes in his recent production of Rope. They were, however, making excellent time—three or four days ahead on a particularly tight schedule—and had some forty minutes in the can by the end of the third week. “It is very largely Spencer,” Cukor acknowledged in a letter to a friend. “He is such an accomplished actor, works with such ease and surety, that we are able to do long, long scenes—five pages, in fact, which not only makes for speed in shooting but for fluency and flow in the scenes.”
“The long takes didn’t trouble him at all,” said Freddie Young, the cinematographer on Edward, My Son. “If he couldn’t remember his lines he’d just rub his nose and say something that seemed to make sense. He never dried up.” Deborah Kerr recalled him as unfailingly helpful, and her Grand Guignol descent into drunkenness and old age brought her an Academy Award nomination. “George, do you mind if I tell her something?” Tracy asked one day as they were in the middle of a scene. Kerr was done up as a woman of sixty, gingerly sipping a drink. “You know, darling,” he said gently, “when you’re an alcoholic, you don’t sip, you just throw the whole thing down.” As Kerr later remarked: “Being young and not alcoholic, I didn’t know that.”
The pace of European production being considerably slower than in Hollywood, Cukor found himself adopting Tracy’s way of working, trying fewer angles and making fewer takes. Exteriors shot at The Mall, Hammersmith, went so smoothly the company was in and out before most residents had a chance to notice. If Kate had come to London simply to provide moral support, she was doubtless relieved to be on hand when Under Capricorn began shooting on another stage on July 19. Starring opposite Joseph Cotten and Michael Wilding in Hitchcock’s Technicolor production was Ingrid Bergman, who was promptly photographed alongside Tracy, smiling broadly, only months from her historic meeting with Roberto Rossellini.
They completed Edward, My Son, on July 30, 1948, but waited until after the Bank Holiday to have the wrap party in the studio’s cafeteria, where the company presented Tracy with an autographed cricket bat (so amused he was by the terrible importance attached to the test match) and the studio sports club contributed a ball and a cap adorned with the club badge. Kate was “thrilled” with what she had seen of the picture but worried it might be “too long to keep the terrific punch going.”
Tracy returned stateside on the Queen Mary, the Stricklings again accompanying him. Hepburn followed on the S.S. New Amsterdam, where she found herself quartered next to Paul Muni and his wife. The weather was dismal, communication between the two ships spotty at best. (She learned Clark Gable and Charles Boyer were aboard the Queen but complained that reception was so poor she “couldn’t get any real dirt.”) When the ship docked at the port of New York on August 12, photographers snapped an illustrious cluster of arriving passengers—Gable, Tracy, and a beaming Boyer—all, of course, under Strickling’s watchful supervision.
Tracy was at the River Club into September, Hepburn alternately in Hartford and nearby on Forty-ninth Street. Metro had a new production chief in Dore Schary, the onetime actor and screenwriter who was being talked up around town as the “new” Thalberg—a dangerous appellation. Schary had played a minor part in The Last Mile and seemed a bit fixated on Tracy. Their first meeting in Schary’s new suite of offices took on the tone of an amateur theatrical as Tracy, rubbing his hands in a dry wash, assumed the groveling posture of Uriah Heep. “I don’t know if you remember me,” he said in his very best Roland Young. “My name is Tracy … Well sir, you may remember that I was in a play with you called The Last Mile…Well, believe me, Mr. Schary, you can ask anyone in that play—I told all of them—just keep your eye on that young fella who plays the reporter—one day he’s going to be head of M-G-M.” Then, dropping the character, he added: “And so you are—you son of a bitch.” Tracy told Schary he had no gripes, no complaints, that he was on the wagon and that he felt pretty good. “Just send me the stuff you want me to do. If I like it, I’ll do it. If not, I’ll tell you to get another player.”
Schary’s first production for M-G-M was to be William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, and it had already been announced that Tracy would play lawyer John Gavin Stevens with Claude Jarman, Jr., the eventual Jody of The Yearling, as his nephew. Within a month Intruder had been supplanted by Robinson Crusoe, a story that had been in and out of the columns for at least three years. Tracy disliked the prospect of traveling to Jamaica, where the exteriors were to be shot, and began making noises once again of wanting out of his M-G-M contract. In New York, Lawrence Langner pressed for word on Touch of the Poet and suggested to Kate that she arrange for Captains Courageous to be shown in Salem so that O’Neill and his wife Carlotta could see it.
By the first of the year, Tracy was set to do a different picture for Schary, the somewhat true story of how an itinerant newspaperman working for the American government partnered with a convicted smuggler to get much-needed rubber out of the Jap-infested territories of Southeast Asia. Called Operation Malaya, it had been set for Schary to do at RKO, where he had planned to star Robert Mitchum and Merle Oberon. When Howard Hughes, more interested in the growing Communist threat than wartime Axis enemies, pulled the plug on it, Schary arranged to have the material, which included a full screenplay by novelist Frank Fenton, brought to M-G-M. As his inaugural project for the studio, Operation Malaya was fast-tracked on the production schedule, a start date aggressively set for mid-February 1949. Tracy had just read Fenton’s script, filled with the florid dialogue typical of Fenton’s B-picture output, when he learned, over dinner at Romanoff’s, that Victor Fleming had died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine.
Tracy had not seen much of Fleming in the four years that had passed since the completion of A Guy Named Joe, the last of their five pictures together. In the interim, Vic had directed just two additional films—Clark Gable’s ill-fated return to the screen, Adventure, and a top-heavy version of the Maxwell Anderson play Joan of Lorraine, for which he had partnered with Ingrid Bergman and producer Walter Wanger. The epic film had recently had its New York and Hollywood premieres to very mixed reviews, and Fleming was reported to have been “exhausted” after the nearly two-year ordeal of getting it made. (“Vic Fleming wore himself out on that picture,” Bergman later wrote. “He was here, there, and everywhere.”) Fleming was vacationing in Arizona with his wife and two daughters when he began complaining of chest pains at the Beaver Creek Guest Ranch, about twenty miles east of Cottonwood. He died en route to the hospital.
“Mike Romanoff,” remembered Susie Tracy, “was the one who told my father that Fleming had died. He came over to the table and very quietly said, ‘Did you know about …’ My dad was utterly stunned. He really couldn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. Finally he said, ‘Go ahead with your meal, but you’ll have to excuse me. I can’t stay.’ And it was clear that he was very upset about it.” Tracy attended the Fleming services on January 10, 1949, at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, as did Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, L. B. Mayer, Van Johnson, Ingrid Bergman, and a number of others.
With the deaths of Dick Mook, Father Flanagan, and now Fleming coming within such a short span of time, Tracy found himself drawn closer to Gable, who was, as they both approached fifty, a touchstone to earlier and happier times. Schary’s arrival had given the studio an atmosphere of uncertainty, for Mayer, Mannix, and Thau were no longer the triumvirate in charge of production, and all the producers on the lot had, for the first time since the heyday of Irving Thalberg, been consolidated under one man. Gable had come onto the set of State of the Union to be photographed with his old friend and costar, the two men grayer and heavier than they had been only a few years earlier but letting fly with the same good-natured insults. Not long after the Fleming funeral, at which Gable was a pallbearer, Tracy returned the favor by walking onto the set of Any Number Can Play.
“He and Gable went into Gable’s dressing room,” Darryl Hickman remembered, “and they laughed—I never heard two men carry on like Gable and Tracy carried on. They had a great relationship. They laughed and told old stories, and everything just shut down for about an hour while Gable and Tracy sat in that dressing room, and it shook with them having a ball. It was just a delight to sit there and listen to them do it.”
Soon after, Gable ambled onto the stage where Operation Malaya was shooting, planted himself in a comfortable chair, and greeted the unlikely sight of Tracy, in white linen suit and Panama hat, gingerly making his way through a stand of jungle growth with a tremendous peal of laughter. “That’s all right,” shouted Tracy. “This time, I get the girl.” Gable returned: “That’s just because I’m not in the picture!” Later, when Tracy wandered onto the set of Gable’s next film, the King showed him a framed clipping from a Shanghai newspaper naming Parnell the best picture of the year. “Looky here Spence,” he said, “and admit defeat.” Underneath the yellowing review were scrawled the words “50 million Chinese can’t be wrong.” Tracy scornfully studied the display, then handed it back. “Well, King, now I know where you belong … in China.”
With Clark Gable during the filming of Gable’s picture Homecoming, 1947. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Collegial and sweet-tempered, Dore Schary was sincere in his desire to raise the tone and profitability of the M-G-M program, taking personal responsibility for an announced slate of sixty-seven features for the 1949–50 season. Heading the list, Operation Malaya had the advantage of a short schedule and, given its cast and pretensions, the relatively modest budget of $1.3 million. Tracy took the role of Carny Carnahan, submitting to a prison buzz cut that had the effect of aging him ten years. Jimmy Stewart, playing the newsman, would share the screen with Tracy for the first time since The Murder Man, when he was, as he once remarked, “all hands and feet and didn’t seem to know what to do with either.” Sydney Greenstreet, John Hodiak, Lionel Barrymore, Gilbert Roland, and Valentina Cortese, borrowed from Fox, rounded out the principal cast.
A genuine potboiler, turgid and obvious, Operation Malaya was difficult to take seriously, and Tracy and Stewart played their parts as if they were making a “Road” picture rather than an exotic adventure yarn. “This normally would be a Gable-Tracy picture,” Tracy told a visiting columnist who was somehow able to get on the set, “but Gable isn’t available, so I am playing his part.” Added Stewart: “Yeah, and I’m playing Tracy.” Questioned about his next picture, Tracy said it was called Love Is Legal. “Naturally, I am playing MY part in a Katharine Hepburn picture.”
Moments later, as if on cue, Hepburn came sauntering onto the set in a white flannel pantsuit, George Cukor at her side. “We want to talk to you,” she said, ignoring the fact that director Richard Thorpe and the assembled cast and crew were ready to make a scene. “Well, fine,” said Tracy, gesturing grandly toward the bustling set, “we’ll call off all this.”
Love Is Legal, of course, became known as Adam’s Rib, possibly the best of all the Tracy-Hepburn pictures and certainly one of the sharpest romantic comedies ever to come out of Hollywood. Significantly, the idea, and the script that evolved from it, owed nothing to the development process that put producers in charge and rendered writers as interchangeable as transcription typists. Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin had authored exactly one original screenplay, an uncommonly intelligent backstage drama called A Double Life. Written entirely on spec, it went on to earn Academy Award nominations for the Kanins and for George Cukor—who directed the film on loan to Universal—and a late win for Ronald Colman as Best Actor. Kanin described motoring through Connecticut on a dreary winter afternoon when he asked his wife to tell him “something interesting about Connecticut.” She responded with the story of two couples who had divorced and intermarried after a week’s vacation together in England. One couple was actor Raymond Massey and his wife, the actress Adrianne Allen. The other was William Dwight Witney and his wife Dorothy, both of whom, as it turned out, were successful New Haven attorneys.
“Can you see it as a movie?” Kanin asked excitedly.
“Not really,” said Gordon. “Unbelievable. Too pat. Like life.”
“What about just the first half then? Two lawyers. Married. And they get onto opposite sides of a case.”
They began spinning the idea, and the obviousness of the casting hit them both like a bolt of lightning. “Kate and Spence!” they erupted in unison.
The screenplay, tentatively titled Man and Wife, came together with remarkable speed, and a first draft was back from the steno bureau on November 10. Following consultations with both Tracy and Hepburn—Kate in particular—a revised 152-page version was submitted to Dore Schary via Hepburn and the William Morris Agency on January 27, 1949. Three days later, a deal was closed for $175,000, which included the authors’ services should any rewrites be necessary.
“It was the first time in thirty years the studio had ever seen a screenplay that was ready to shoot immediately, without changes,” said Larry Weingarten, who was assigned to produce the picture with Cukor directing. So when Kate appeared with Cukor on the set of Operation Malaya and said to Spence, “We want to talk to you,” it was not simply a social call she had in mind but an impromptu script conference.
Man and Wife grew expressly from the Kanins’ intimate knowledge of the Tracy-Hepburn relationship, but putting that relationship on screen in all its tones and colorations was risky business, given how fiercely private the two people in question were. “Their on-camera relationship reflected both the easy intimacy they shared in the off-camera relationship and much of my own marriage to Ruth,” said Kanin, who came west with his wife. “They were easy to write for.”
That Cukor was assigned the project made perfect sense, as he too had observed Spence and Kate at close range over a number of years. Moreover, as an actress, Ruth Gordon had been directed by Cukor and knew his strengths. Their collective experience on A Double Life had been pleasant and rewarding. With Weingarten producing and, in effect, shielding the company from front-office interference, the package proved the perfect incubator for a well-crafted movie.2 “The Kanins would do certain scenes,” said Cukor, “and we would go to my house and read them and hear how they sounded aloud, then go to the studio where I would stage them kind of roughly with a camera and see how they worked.”
The shooting final was dated February 24, 1949, with a start date set for late May. Tracy finished with Operation Malaya on March 24, and began his customary six-week vacation on April 4. Knowing the caliber of material he had to work with, Cukor lit into preparations and arranged to shoot the setup—an attempted domestic homicide—during two weeks of gritty location work in New York City. Performing these early scenes would be a quartet of young Broadway stage actors, all of whom would be playing their first substantial parts on screen—Tom Ewell, David Wayne, Jean Hagen, and, in the role of the earnest Doris Attinger, the rattlebrained defendant who pulls a Frankie-and-Johnny on her philandering husband, singer-actress Judy Holliday. Gar Kanin had brought Holliday to prominence in his play Born Yesterday (where she replaced, out of town, the show’s original star, Jean Arthur) and was on a campaign to have her re-create the role of Billie Dawn in the film version. Columbia studio head Harry Cohn had already rejected the idea—even the making of a screen test—so it became Kate’s idea to make Love Is Legal the test Cohn denied her by custom-tailoring the role of Doris to Holliday’s very considerable talents.
When Tracy returned to Culver City on May 16, Hepburn was attempting to persuade Cole Porter to write something original for Kip Lurie, David Wayne’s wisecracking songwriter, to sing to her character in the picture. (Kanin had written one, which everyone agreed was lousy.) Porter, at first, declined, maintaining the song’s intended target, Madeline Bonner, had a name he could neither abide nor rhyme. Later, he agreed so long as the name of the character was changed from Madeline to Amanda.3 (“Some of the things Kate goes in and demands!” marveled Cukor. “The Cole Porter song, for instance. Not the crappy sort of star demands. She always wanted something for the show.”) The name of Tracy’s character was similarly changed from Ned to Adam, and soon after the start of production the picture became officially known as Adam’s Rib.
Filming began on May 31, 1949, Tracy and Hepburn settling into their roles with an effortless grace, their ad-libs, their intimacies and parries those of genuine lovers, not actors or movie stars, their scenes together a deft embodiment of what Kenneth Tynan called “a whole tradition of American sophistication,” Tracy, the “placid, sensible panda,” Hepburn, the “gracious, deadpan albatross,” replacing “the crude comedy of flirtation” with the subtler, warmer comedy of marriage as practiced not by ingenues but by seasoned artists well into their forties. The home movie horsing around on the Kanins’ Connecticut farm, the droll courtroom flirtations, the off-screen kiss (by now a trademark of the Tracy-Hepburn combination), the wordless looks.
Cole Porter plays “Farewell, Amanda,” as Tracy and Hepburn listen on the set of Adam’s Rib, 1949. (SUSIE TRACY)
“It was human,” said Cukor. “Comedy isn’t really any good, isn’t really funny, without that. First you’ve got to be funny, and then, to elevate the comedy, you’ve got to be human.”
AMANDA
You were making some noises in the night.
ADAM
(immersed in his paper)
I always do. Don’t I? At least you always say I always do. How do I know?
AMANDA
(without looking up)
You do, but not this kind.
ADAM
What kind?
Can’t remember exactly, naturally, but sort of like ooooo-eehah! ooooo-eegah.
(She emits a series of strange groans and grunts and whistles and wheezes.)
Like that, sort of.
ADAM
You don’t say.
AMANDA
Yes.
ADAM
Fascinating.
AMANDA
(She looks at him.)
What?
ADAM
I say I sound fascinating.
AMANDA
(her lovely smile shining)
You’ll do.
“I think,” said Katharine Houghton,
that the film represents a fairly accurate dynamic—for one aspect of their relationship, anyway. The banter and the flirtation seem very genuine. I don’t know that Spencer ever slapped her on the rump or pointed a licorice pistol at her as he does in the film, but the essence of the Bonner relationship seems right on. Yet Kate, especially in the early years of their relationship, was never confident that she was good enough or beautiful enough to keep Spencer’s interest. Who knows why she felt that way, but she often agonized over that. Amanda is more confident than Kate of her spouse. I doubt that Kanin or Gordon ever suspected the depth of Kate’s insecurity, or maybe they simply chose not to address it. One could say that the Bonners represent Tracy and Hepburn at their best with each other. They certainly seem to be comfortable playing those roles, and I doubt that they would seem so comfortable if it weren’t natural to them. Perhaps one could say that the Bonners were a couple they would have liked the world to think they were.
Sharing an intimate moment in Adam’s Rib. (SUSIE TRACY)
As Hepburn told Kenneth Tynan in 1952: “Spence and I have an agreement when we’re working. If we fluff a line, we won’t stop. In Adam’s Rib, there was a scene with us dressing to go out, and I had to put on a hat and say, ‘How do I look?’ and he was supposed to say something good and flattering. What happened was, he stepped back and said: ‘You look like Grandma Moses!’ I stamped my foot and sort of yelped—but they printed it.”
The youthful supporting cast brought out the paternal instincts of the veteran filmmakers—Cukor, the Kanins, Tracy and Hepburn. “In the course of the shooting of Adam’s Rib,” Kanin wrote, “Kate and Spencer involved everyone necessary in our master plan: the costume designer, Orry-Kelly; the hairdressers; the make-up people; the cameraman Joe Ruttenberg; the supporting players; everyone and everything was aimed toward Judy’s making a hit.” When it came time for Holliday’s big scene, Amanda’s jailhouse interview of the would-be murderess, Hepburn asked that Cukor set it up so that it showcased Judy, she in profile, framing the left edge of the shot, Eve March, her secretary, to the right, the whole thing played in one continuous five-minute take. “She was wonderful with Judy Holliday,” said Tom Ewell. “She worked like a dog to throw the emphasis on her with extra lines and closeups. No other star ever did that.”
The cast’s crisp ensemble playing gave the film a tart, noirish edge suited more to the stark independent productions of the time and not the ultra-glossy tradition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. One day on the set, Tracy gave Cukor a mock scolding: “Damn it, George, why did you hire all these young actors from New York? They’re acting us old timers right off the picture!” The casting, though, was as much Hepburn’s doing as Cukor’s, as she could take credit not only for Holliday’s presence in the picture, but also Tom Ewell’s, Eve March’s, and Marvin Kaplan’s. “Hepburn called me personally in New York,” Ewell recalled, “and said, ‘Look, if you do this film, I’ll do everything I can to be your press agent.’ She kept her promise.” Kaplan’s soft-edged Brooklyn drone caught Hepburn’s attention at a performance of L.A.’s Circle Players, and she referred him to George Cukor for an interview. (“Katharine Hepburn’s your agent,” Cukor told him.) Freshly graduated from USC, Kaplan made his film debut as the court reporter in the picture.
David Wayne, on leave from Broadway’s Mister Roberts, thought Tracy “the greatest motion picture actor that ever was” and observed his work on the set “in a kind of wonderment.” Tracy’s technique, Wayne decided, was indiscernible: “I tried to measure why he was so right in the part each day. I never knew him to not know every word of the script. I never knew him to not be exactly right in every word and move the director suggested, but in addition to that he brought a mental aggrandizement to the scene that had not been hinted at by the authors.”
George Cukor directing Adam’s Rib. Note the dubious look on Tracy’s face. (SUSIE TRACY)
The company spent two solid weeks on the courtroom set on which the Bonners’ battle of wits takes place, the principal cast, excepting Wayne, gathered together under Cukor’s watchful eye. Tracy was in his element, comfortable, in full command of the character and not particularly interested in the few things Cukor had to say to him. “Sometimes he would just say, ‘Yes, George,’ ” as Marvin Kaplan remembered it. “I don’t think he liked to be directed. But at the end of the day, when everyone else was tired, Hepburn could wrap her legs, her whole body, around this pole in the courtroom and watch and absorb like a sponge exactly what Mr. Cukor wanted her to do in the next day’s shooting.” Tracy would watch quietly, a mildly skeptical look on his face. “I don’t think he was one for working out a lot of stuff,” Hepburn said. “I think he knew it, then he was it.”
On the day actress Hope Emerson—six feet two and 240 pounds—was to hoist him into the air (in support of Amanda’s contention that “woman can be quite the equal of man in any and all fields”), Tracy was particularly boisterous, recalling the specialty acts and the tumblers he had seen in vaudeville as a kid.
“Hope Emerson was a very sweet woman who was not half as strong as she looked,” said Kaplan. “Tracy was attached by wires, so he could sit in the air and it would look like she was holding him.” Emerson was posed grasping Tracy’s left foot, her enormous right hand supporting his rump like a bicycle seat. “He said such terrible things to her during the take— ‘Watch it! Watch it! What are you doing down there?’ The woman started to blush and then she put her hand down, and there he was left hanging in the middle of the air with no support whatsoever.”
Edward, My Son had its New York opening during the making of Adam’s Rib, and Tracy, as he had feared, took a drubbing from critics familiar with the wit and precision of Robert Morley’s performance (which had just closed on Broadway). Bosley Crowther lamented the play had been “drained of its most trenchant poison” in its transfer to the screen, the “plainly un-British Spencer Tracy” acting the principal role. “Apart from the hopeless miscasting of Mr. Tracy,” the New Yorker added, “the picture is fortunate in its acting.” Morley himself thought the criticism unfair in that Tracy had been slammed for playing it too straight. “I’m not sure there was much alternative,” the actor said in his autobiography. “When some years later I did it myself on television in the States, it was not very successful. It was much easier to play on the stage with scenery than it was to act in the more realistic settings which are necessary on the screen. A great deal of its initial success depended, too, on my speaking direct to the audience, and this device loses its spontaneity when attempted in the cinema.”
Edward, My Son performed acceptably in New York, but with overhead loaded into its already inflated cost, the film became Tracy’s biggest money-loser at M-G-M, and his first since Northwest Passage. His star was plainly fading, his future well and firmly fixed on a return to the stage. With the kids now grown and the clinic no longer dependent solely on his support for its survival, he seemed more comfortable with the natural arc of an actor’s career, the inevitable easing into mature roles, the passing of the commercial mantle to a younger generation. Upon his arrival in England, fully aware that he was being led to the slaughter, he had noted that he had made “nearly 40 films” since 1930. (The number was actually forty-five.) “No matter what anyone says, I have been bad in about 30 of them. The fault has been my own.”
Then he smiled, stuck out his jaw as if inviting somebody to take a poke at it, and strolled off, seemingly comfortable, at least for the moment, in his own skin.
1 The agreement between the Motion Picture Association of America and the British government, which went into effect June 14, 1948, limited remittances to the United States to $17 million a year, plus an amount equal to the earnings of all British product released in the United States. The excess revenues, as much as $15 million annually, could be used in Britain for the production of American films with British personnel. In the ensuing two years, more than $10 million in frozen sterling was expended on film production and story acquisitions by five major American studios, M-G-M included.
2 The change of title—the Kanins’ original Man and Wife being deemed “dangerously indiscreet”—was the only executive mandate that stuck.
3 As it turned out, “Farewell, Amanda” was a trunk item, and Porter’s insistence on the change of name was simply to facilitate its use.