There is a fragment of black-and-white footage which constitutes the only filmed statement Spencer Tracy ever made on the subject of the clinic that bears his son’s name. He stands at a microphone, eyes downcast, a hand tugging nervously at his bow tie. Behind him are seated Dr. Rufus von Kleinschmid, Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron, and Goodwin Knight, lieutenant governor of the state of California. “This is certainly one occasion,” he begins hesitantly, “where I may truthfully say that as hard as I try, I can find no reason, no excuse to bring motion picture acting into this particular occasion. Because there is no motion picture actor, living or dead, absent or present, who had anything to do with the building of this clinic. It was built through the inspiration of John, I suppose, in the beginning, by his mother, and by her—” And at that point the film runs out.
It was Saturday, May 3, 1952, and the clinic’s new $250,000 complex at 806 West Adams was in the process of being dedicated. A crowd of 250 jammed the new auditorium—really a multipurpose room—and more clustered at the doorways, straining to get a look. Louise, her hands calmly folded in front of her, said the clinic was “as much a movement as it is a place, and wherever you find parents gathered together and helping their children, you find John Tracy Clinic.” Then Spence, who had always determinedly remained in the background, was dragged into the meeting and spoke, as the Los Angeles Times reported, about a hundred words. According to the paper, the statement he begins in the film continued as follows: “—board of directors, and all of the others who have worked for it, the mothers and fathers of the children and all of the others who have helped.” He was loath to acknowledge the money he had personally given over the course of the previous decade, even though the clinic would not have survived its first five years without his support. “I didn’t do anything much,” he once told his cousin Jane. “I gave them a few bucks to get started.”
The building drive, when initiated in 1946, expanded the clinic’s reach and established a broader fund-raising network than Louise had ever thought possible. In 1950, she was able to announce the purchase of one and a half acres of land near the USC campus after a substantial bequest from the estate of William Melvin Davey. And while the clinic was no longer dependent upon Spence’s M-G-M income for its survival, he still gave $20,000 to $30,000 a year, a measure of redemption for which he was truly grateful. “This method of getting deaf children mainstreamed and educated early is really something new that Louise is doing,” he said proudly, “and it is remarkable. It is ground-breaking.”
He was in the midst of Plymouth Adventure and needed a reminder as to why he sometimes did the things he did on screen. Could he have gone freelance? Undoubtedly. Could he have exercised greater control over the pictures he made? Absolutely. But could he have managed the guaranteed income that made his support of the clinic possible? Not quite so likely—at least not so that he could see. Metro paid him an annual salary of $300,000. To make that kind of money as an independent, he’d have to make two or three pictures a year—more than he was currently averaging—and when he laid off, there would be nothing at all coming in. Further, he really didn’t know what he could ask on the open market and tended to devalue his own worth in comparison to others.
At the dedication of John Tracy Clinic’s new Adams Boulevard complex with longtime wardrobe man Larry Keethe and daughter Susie Tracy. (SUSIE TRACY)
“Katharine Hepburn’s best-kept secret will join her in London soon.” It was Dorothy Kilgallen’s lead item on June 5, 1952, and, of course, Kilgallen was correct as far as Tracy’s intent was concerned. He had a date to fly east with Clarence Brown on the eighteenth and was sure of making a June 20 sailing of the S.S. America (on which Larry Weingarten had also booked passage). He declared on his passport application he would be gone four months, visiting England, France, Italy, and Sweden “for the combined purpose of business and pleasure” and told Louella Parsons he intended to rent a car and tour the continent. By the time he actually did set sail, however, he was on the Queen Elizabeth, not the America, it was July 1, not June 20, and his plan was to stay for no more than a month. On the ship were Walt Disney and his family, and Lewis W. Douglas and his wife Peg. Tracy, in a jocular mood, joined the Disneys one night for drinks. “Dad was kidding him about some woman who was chasing him all over the ship,” Diane Disney, who was eighteen at the time, remembered. “At one point, he turned to me and started telling me about Susie and all the things she was doing. He was obviously very proud of her.”
Tracy and the Douglases had met in England, where he was making Edward, My Son, and Lew was U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Since leaving the post in 1950, Douglas, an avid sportsman, had served as chairman of the Mutual Life Insurance Company. Douglas told the Herald Tribune he would do some trout fishing along the Test River near Southampton and see a number of old friends, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Tracy added that he and the Douglases “might visit Norway together.”
In London Kate was a hit in The Millionairess—more so than anyone expected—and all Tracy and Weingarten could manage was standing room. Gene Tierney was in town, making Clarence Brown’s picture with Gable, but Tracy spent a good deal more time with the actress’ mother, Belle, than with Tierney herself. “My mother thought he was the most tormented man she had ever met,” Tierney wrote of Tracy in her autobiography. “They had lengthy conversations about religion. She had returned to her Christian Science beliefs and could talk about them in an almost mystical way … A few times he asked me to lunch or dinner. He was relieved that my mother came along. These dates were perfectly respectable, but Tracy was watching the door in case Katharine Hepburn came in.”
He was also stirring up picture material, having become enthused with Nobel laureate Pär Lagerkvist’s novel Barabbas, the story of the thief spared crucifixion instead of Christ. The character’s struggle to understand the nature of Jesus, his skepticism and his yearning to believe, held special resonance for Tracy, and he sent Dore Schary a script derived from the book, eager for his reaction. Schary came back almost immediately, saying he believed the script fell “far short” of a successful project for American audiences. “Believe it excessively brutal and in many instances highly censorable,” Schary cabled. “Further feel that it is confusing in some aspects and that the final point will be remote to audiences at large.” Bert Allenberg of the William Morris office communicated Tracy’s desire to do it as an independent venture, and Schary offered to arrange a meeting with Nick Schenck to discuss the matter.1
Tracy also went to bat for Garson Kanin, who had written a comedy-drama called A Flight to the Islands. Based on a story by Elizabeth Enright, it offered a part for Tracy that was not unlike Stanley Banks, a put-upon family man escaping for a day to another town, another life. He gets a job, rents a room, applies for piano lessons, meets a girl and learns her story. Schary was enthusiastic at first, but then gave the script to Larry Weingarten, who didn’t care for it at all, and to John Houseman, who said that he wasn’t interested in doing it either. Deciding it wasn’t material that could easily be dramatized, the production chief resisted an outright purchase, agreeing instead to an option deal which took months to settle.
Schary had just announced a slate of eighty-three features either completed, shooting, or in development, fifty-three of which were to be finished by January 1, 1954. It was an absurd number of films given the economic realities of the day, and he seemed overwhelmed by the sheer volume of product. “Unable to understand reply sent me [by] Schary ten days ago,” Tracy wired Kanin in New York. “Stated all cleared, however confusion, slowness, and unawareness. You should understand by now plans indefinite. May slip from tightrope here any moment.”
He did indeed slip from the tightrope in early August—not into the bottle, as Kanin may have feared, but into retirement … or at least a declaration of it. The announcement came in Stockholm, where Tracy had gone to see Alf Sjöberg’s film of Barabbas, a work he described as “thrilling.” Resigned to Schary’s “absolute turndown” of an American version, Tracy told a man with the UP he planned to give up the movie business altogether. “When I have fulfilled my contract duties to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer within some three years,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything else left for me than quit the screen.”
The news, of course, went around the world, though nobody at M-G-M took it seriously. Then Kate had an attack of laryngitis that threatened to take her out of The Millionairess, and doctors advised her not to speak at all except when onstage at the New Theatre. Taking it all as a sign of exhaustion, Tracy was thinking of coming home when he received a telegram from the Kanins asking him to call their friend June Dally-Watkins at the Cumberland Hotel.
The business with Gene Tierney hadn’t gone well, and Hepburn was so depleted it took everything she had just to get through the play each night. Spence, Kanin observed, was “[s]ort of at loose ends” and had “had a bad time in Paris” (presumably with Tierney, although he didn’t say as much). When he told the Kanins on a call from London that he “needed a friend,” Ruth shouted into the receiver, “Well, you’ve got two!” and they began making plans to join him in France toward the end of September.
Dally-Watkins happened along in the interim, a charming, self-assured Australian whom Gar and Ruth had met in Los Angeles through the Aussie costume designer Orry-Kelly. As a top fashion model, she had founded her country’s first schools of deportment and was on a tour of the schools and modeling agencies of Western Europe. “At the appointed time,” she recalled, “I saw him descend the hotel’s marble staircase, glance at me and look away as if to seek out another face. It was obvious he had not been given a recognizable description, so I introduced myself and he seemed surprised. No wonder! Over afternoon tea he told me that Garson and Ruth had played a joke on him, saying I was an older actress from Australia and thought I would make a good mother for Debbie Reynolds’ character in his next movie.”
In London, June found Tracy solitary and “introspective,” more interested in knowing about her than in talking about himself. “Spencer showed a romantic interest in me, and there was a spark between us that culminated in a kiss.” She responded to his dry humor, the way he’d put things, and had no awareness of his relationship with Katharine Hepburn. “I was,” she said, “twenty-five and stupid—well, let’s say unworldly—and I was a single girl, traveling alone.” They went to the ballet at Covent Garden, where he took her backstage to meet prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn. He didn’t want to wait in Europe for the Kanins, though, and returned to New York before they had time to sail. (“Remaining here longer impossible,” he wired.) June was scheduled to go on to Paris but promised to see him again when she returned to California.
While Pat and Mike had garnered excellent reviews, it was The African Queen that put Katharine Hepburn back in the public eye in a big way. Both she and Bogart drew Academy Award nominations for their roles in the picture, and Bogart subsequently won the Oscar for his work as Charlie Allnut after shrewdly and tirelessly campaigning for it. With Hepburn bringing The Millionairess to Broadway for a limited run, Time began preparations for a cover story on the forty-five-year-old actress and put researchers on the job in Connecticut, Los Angeles, and New York City. Kate’s father, as always, refused to talk, as did the Kanins, but there were plenty of other witnesses willing to say their piece—stand-ins, crew members, journalists, and press agents among them. Cary Grant cooperated to the point of telling a couple of anecdotes, as did Howard Hawks, Joe Mankiewicz, George Stevens, and Eddie Knopf. George Cukor was circumspect, speaking only in generalities, and nobody would admit that she was in a long-term relationship with her frequent costar, Spencer Tracy.
Nobody, that is, except one.
Humphrey Bogart, according to Time staff writer Jim Murray, confirmed a romance did indeed exist, that he had seen Tracy and Hepburn together, and that Hepburn was “unaccustomedly subdued and effeminate” in Tracy’s presence. And, he added, she didn’t hog the conversational limelight on such occasions, a real departure for her.
“Ordinarily,” Bogart said, “she talks a blue streak. We listened for the first couple of days when she hit Africa and then began asking ourselves, ‘How affected can you be in the middle of Africa?’ She used to say that everything was ‘divine.’ The goddamn stinking natives were divine. ‘Oh, what a divine native!’ she’d say. ‘Oh, what a divine pile of manure!’ You had to ask yourself, ’Is this really the dame or is this something left over from Woman of the Year?”
Tracy had remained in touch with Bogart over the years, but the two men weren’t terribly close until The African Queen, through Hepburn, brought them together. Likely, as with Gable, it was Bogart’s love of scotch that forced Tracy to hold him at a distance, but gradually Spence had developed the discipline to confront booze and stare it down, and his sobriety was no longer considered so precarious. Kate put them together—tentatively at first—and they found they enjoyed each other’s company enormously, even as, socially, they were completely different animals. “Bogart and Tracy had a special rapport,” said writer Peter Viertel, “based on their mutual admiration and strikingly devoid of professional jealousy.”
Romanoff’s was common ground for them both, but for entirely different reasons. There was nothing secluded about the hexagonal dining room—even the entrance off the bar required a descent down a short flight of steps that ensured all in the room had a chance to take notice—but where Bogart used it as a showcase, a home away from home, a place to hold forth, Tracy frequented the room because it was familiar ground and no one was likely to bother him. The proprietor himself usually managed the seating chart, a Lithuanian émigré and sometime actor who posed as Prince Michael Dimitri Alexandrovich Obolensky-Romanoff, nephew to the late czar of Russia, a harmless fiction that somehow suited a community full of poseurs and phonies. “It’s the parts, not the acting,” Bogart told the AP’s James Bacon one day over lunch, commenting on his recent Oscar win. “If it were acting, Spencer Tracy would win it every year.”
“He was innately a marvelous actor,” Lauren Bacall said of Tracy,
and also a hugely intelligent one. He and Bogie used to compare notes on some of the actors who called themselves actors and what they did during a scene. I remember they were discussing this one actor standing in a scene. The actor would put his left hand on his tie, and his right hand in his pocket. After a while he’d shift gears and put his left hand in his pocket and his right hand on his tie. Very funny stuff. They took no prisoners, those two men, because they had real talent and they had respect for their craft, and the people who called themselves stars, half of them were jokes. Because of the studio system, some of them were in an exalted position they never should have been in. The talent did not require that. It was great to be in their company, I must say. I just loved it.
The magazine, which hit the stands just prior to Labor Day, was largely laudatory and mentioned only that Hepburn and Tracy were “fast friends.” Kate closed in London on September 20 and immediately returned to the United States for minor surgery. She was in and out of Hartford in three days, Tracy at hand the entire time. Emily Perkins, from her place in Maine, urged a complete rest: “You and Spence should go to Ireland for three months’ quiet, go collecting shells by the seaside away from telephones and so forth.” George Cukor thought it “goddamn silly” for Kate to drive herself so hard, closing one night, flying out the next day, then starting New York rehearsals for The Millionairess practically without stop. “She’s been arranging things on such a tight schedule for herself for the last three years or so, driving herself to such a pace that I’m afraid of what will happen to her.”
By September 29, Tracy was back at the Pierre Hotel, attempting calls to the Kanins and June Dally-Watkins in Paris with no apparent success. “Has she run off [with] handsome stranger?” he asked Gar and Ruth via cable. “Cruel after sweet letters. When coming here? Lonesome and discouraged and now broke.” He also pressed for news of Gene Tierney, who had grown somewhat close to Ruth in the interim. “I was surprised,” said Bill Self, “because once in a while Carroll and Spence would talk about some other affair that he was having or thinking of having while he was very involved with Hepburn. And I always—naively, I suppose—thought Spence had his affairs while he was married, before Hepburn, but when Hepburn came into his life, that was the woman of his life. And, apparently, that wasn’t true.”
Constance Collier reported Hepburn as resting, ready to start in again on The Millionairess and make the play as great a success on Broadway as it had been in England. “I can’t tell you what we went through in London,” Collier confided in a letter to George Cukor. “Kate was really ill, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I think it is delayed shock. She has never let down since the death of her mother, and with the strain of the part and everything else, I think it piled up and really upset her terribly.” Years later, Hepburn wrote of her mother’s death and of the repression of grief that had by then become something of a tradition in the family.2 “I stood—my mother—dead—my darling mother—the only mother I’ll ever have—gone. I took her hand—still warm—unclasped her fingers from the sheet she had pulled up—and I kissed her and went down to Dad. No goodbyes. Just gone.”
The Millionairess opened at the Shubert Theatre on October 17, 1952, but where the show had been widely acclaimed in London and the provinces, the reception of the New York critics was lukewarm at best. Kate’s boisterous performance was sometimes unintelligible, even as she drew praise for the physical stamina she displayed in the part. (“Miss Hepburn can be understood clearly,” Brooks Atkinson countered. “Perhaps that’s the trouble.”) Business was fine—they were sold out for the entire ten weeks of the run—and its star was reported as being in “fine spirits and good health.”
Gar Kanin wrote Tracy at the end of the same month, saying that Gene Tierney’s mother had called him but offering nothing more. Tracy took this as a bad sign and cabled back: NO REPORT GT GUESS BAD FOR OLD TOM. Concurrently, an item appeared in Kilgallen’s column to the effect that Tracy was “facing a decision that could make front page news. If so, it will startle the public—but not show business.” A few weeks after that, Walter Winchell compounded the news by suggesting that “Katharine Hepburn’s long-time heart” would seek a “special dispensation” to marry.
Curiously, it was around this time that Tracy sent Louise and Susie, who were in New York on a brief holiday, backstage to see “Kath” after a performance of The Millionairess. Susie had already met Hepburn on the set of Adam’s Rib, but Louise had seen her only on screen, never in person, and how Spence imagined it going is anyone’s guess. Susie was completely unaware of the relationship between Hepburn and her father—they were simply coworkers as far as she knew—but Louise would remember the strained cordiality of the encounter and the attention Hepburn lavished on her twenty-year-old daughter.
That Kate was caught off guard is almost a certainty, but why did Louise do it? Did she fix her adversary with a knowing glare? Did she insert a little dig into her greeting or her reaction to the performance? Did she gain any satisfaction from having the upper hand for once? Had the column items somehow emanated from Hepburn’s camp? And was suddenly putting his wife and daughter on display Spence’s way of answering them? Or, in choosing to go, was Louise answering them herself? “Don’t ever leave me,” Spence had said to her, and she assured him that she never would.
Kanin finally wrote Tracy on December 1, saying it was about time to accept the fact that it was “good-bye Charlie” with respect to Gene Tierney. She had recently been in the papers, photographed on the arm of Prince Aly Khan, the notorious playboy and estranged husband of actress Rita Hayworth. Gar asked Ruth to call Tierney at her hotel and see if she could find out exactly what was going on, but Gordon had already had a “great big girl-talk” on the subject, and it seemed that Tierney had been deeply stuck on another man—the implication being that it was Kirk Douglas—and that his alleged treatment of her was what drove her back into the “maelstrom of Paris highlife.” Tracy, in a handwritten Christmas letter to Gordon, complained she was “difficult to get information” from (“like you just refuse any word of talks with G.T.”) but then acknowledged having received a “nice letter from her—sort of the ‘kiss off’ ” that appeared to end the matter once and for all.
Plymouth Adventure was released on November 28, 1952, a Thanksgiving turkey that inspired more respect than praise, more lip service than business. While Clarence Brown readily admitted it was “not my best, not by any means,” Dore Schary was relentlessly optimistic about the picture, advising Tracy by cable of how well it was doing in preview (“cards wonderful, reaction good”) and how well Tracy’s performance had been received (“You are simply great and everybody says so.”) The press preview on October 20 had been polite, dignified, like the opening of a museum exhibit. The notices carefully embalmed the picture, Bosley Crowther labeling it “a thoroughly respectful and respectable adjunct to the schoolroom histories,” while Otis Guernsey, in the Herald Tribune, called it “the kind of film in which the characters cannot help being self-conscious of destiny.”
Most reviewers noted the truly spectacular storm sequence at the movie’s core but reserved comment on the pallid on-screen romance between Tracy and the doomed Gene Tierney. Business was weak from the outset, with its first-day gross comparable to that of The Magnificent Yankee, a modestly filmed play that boasted Louis Calhern and Ann Harding as its nominal stars. It went on to lose $1.8 million on total billings of just over $3 million—a disastrous showing.
Near the end of his life, Schary contemplated what exactly happened with the picture. “It sank!” he said after thinking a moment. “Plymouth Adventure had some wonderful things. The voyage. Clarence Brown did some great things. But we made terrible mistakes in the casting. I thought some of the people were good. I thought Tracy did well, Gene Tierney was nice, Leo Genn was properly stolid, but Van Johnson was a thorough error, just terrible. It just never worked. Maybe because pictures where they wear long knickers and those big collars can’t be made real. They can’t come to life. I wanted that picture very badly; I fought for it. But it was a loss.”
When Ruth Gordon began dabbling in autobiography, the results came in the form of articles in Forum and the Atlantic Monthly. In 1944 she collected her experiences as a hopelessly stage-struck young girl living on the outskirts of Boston into a play called Journey to a Star. Two years later, a substantially revised version titled Years Ago opened at the Mansfield Theatre in New York with Fredric March as Clinton Jones, Florence Eldridge as his wife Annie, and Patricia Kirkland as the playwright’s own younger self, Ruth Gordon Jones. The play was a modest hit, lasting 206 performances, and March walked off with the Tony that season for Best Actor. Just prior to its closing in May 1947, M-G-M was erroneously reported as having agreed to pay $425,000 to bring Years Ago to the screen, an astounding sum for the time. Much later, the price was fixed at a more realistic $75,000, and Metro acquired the rights with the understanding that Spencer Tracy was to star in it.
The screenplay was drafted over the summer of 1951, then put on ice as Pat and Mike and Plymouth Adventure took precedence. By the fall of 1952, the picture was moving toward production with Debbie Reynolds in the part of Ruth, an idea that had followed the property since its purchase. Tracy was happy to do the picture, but was against the casting of Reynolds, and over the space of sixteen months did everything he could to scuttle it. The first salvo came in the form of a letter from Garson Kanin to George Cukor in August 1951. Tracy, Kanin advised, was “not at all convinced” that Reynolds was the best possible choice, worried, perhaps, that the picture would be burdened with “the usual sweetening of songs, dances, and funny sayings” (as some early coverage had threatened). Gar urged open minds, as Ruth’s dream was to see Tracy in the part of Clinton Jones and she didn’t much care who played herself. The name of Wanda Hendrix was briefly floated, then it came down in Sheilah Graham’s column that Reynolds was out because she was “too old” for the part—she was twenty at the time—and that the role would likely go to Margaret O’Brien.
Cukor, however, wasn’t willing to give up on Debbie Reynolds quite so easily and shot a test of her in September 1952. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed,” he wrote Ruth, “I think we’ve got our girl.” But then he soured when he saw the footage and wondered if she was “exceptional enough.” Her strength was in her averageness, he said, and she had never before played a straight—that is, nonmusical—part. He suggested tricking her up a bit to give her a little character but lamented how very little of the “odd fish” there was about her. Tracy liked Reynolds, thought her clever enough but felt very much the same as Cukor. And neither of the Kanins thought much of the test, Ruth not minding it so much as Gar, who judged it a lot of “superficial nonsense.” Walter Plunkett was hard at work on Reynolds’ clothes, but the casting of the part still wasn’t settled when, on November 18, Tracy wired Kanin at St. Moritz:
MEETING S[C]HARY NOTHING RESOLVED. LOOKING GIRLS. AFRAID WORD WILL BE GO AHEAD PRESENT SETUP. UNBELIEVABLE LACK HELP BY PRODUCER. ONLY COURSE WOULD BE REFUSAL DO PICTURE WHICH OF COURSE WILL NOT DO.
With the start date fast approaching and no one else on the horizon, Tracy and Cukor went jointly to actress Jean Simmons, who was under contract to Howard Hughes and had recently starred for M-G-M in Young Bess. Simmons knew Tracy casually, as he occasionally came to the house to play poker with her husband, actor Stewart Granger. “He had the most wonderful sense of humor,” she said. “Wicked Irishman, you know—with a twinkle. I don’t know how other people felt about him; I just adored him.”
She leaped at the part and the opportunity of working with both Tracy and Cukor. Dore Schary, who had resisted the change from Debbie Reynolds, acknowledged that Simmons was more interesting, more ambiguous in her gifts, more likely, in terms of her looks, to grow into the woman who was to become Ruth Gordon. As Ruth herself wired on the twenty-seventh:
With Simmons set, they turned to the matter of casting the mother, a part nearly as vexing as that of Ruth. Early on, the Kanins had mentioned the possibility of doing the picture to Helen Hayes, who seemed “extremely interested” and dubious as well. “But would Spencer want me in the picture?” she asked. “He usually prefers younger girls.” They later talked of Shirley Booth, but Booth was in rehearsals for Time of the Cuckoo and unavailable. Tracy liked Dorothy McGuire, but the studio thought the $75,000 she asked excessive. Her agent, Kurt Frings, suggested Teresa Wright, whose salary was more in line with what Metro was willing to pay. Cukor said he liked Wright well enough but thought her a bit on the dreary side. Maureen Stapleton and Jane Wyman were mentioned, as was Uta Hagen (whom Garson Kanin considered “one stunning actress”). In the end they settled on Wright, Cukor having decided she didn’t have to be dreary: “I think she can have some edge and get the comedy out of the part. At least we’ll see.”
Particular care was given the design of the sets, which were as true to the original rooms of the Jones house as humanly possible, given the demands of the camera crew and the staging of the action. Cukor and Ruth Gordon made a trip to the Wollaston neighborhood where she grew up, and where there were still neighbors who remembered her. They ended up, he noted proudly, with six volumes of reference—snapshots, interiors of Mellin’s Food Company (where Ruth’s father worked), dressing rooms, hotel interiors, etc. “There was,” said Teresa Wright, “a lot of talk about the preciousness of the research.”
Filming was set to begin on December 15, 1952. There was concern over the title—Years Ago implying a nostalgic riff for the elderly—and the Kanins suggested Fame and Fortune as a substitute. With the sets already standing and the film comprised mostly of interiors, Cukor insisted on two weeks of rehearsal, after which he proposed to shoot the entire picture in just three weeks.3 It was, as Jean Simmons later noted, “most unusual” but the ideal way of getting such an intimate production up on its feet. Mastering the American accent was the most difficult part of the job for the London-born actress, and she worked with a coach over the entire course of production. “There was a wonderful woman,” said Cukor, “who was a most distinguished voice production teacher, Gertrude Fogler, and Jean is a very talented and accomplished actress, and within a week she sounded exactly like an American girl of that period and of that class and did it very subtly.”
After six days of rehearsal, Tracy wrote Garson Kanin in Paris: “We are going along well with the work. The girl ‘Ruth’ is, I venture to say, just about the greatest talent these old misty rum-soaked eyes have seen! ‘Pipe’ and very short haircut—characterization for Clinton—hair short for ‘youth,’ so they told me, since mother is played by Shirley Temple.4 Otherwise, same old fellow as in Plymouth Advent[ure], which is playing to the worst business since they took the hay out of the balcony.”
June Dally-Watkins, meanwhile, was back in Los Angeles after her grand tour of Europe, gathering marriage proposals as she went and expressing “pretty deep stuff” (Kanin’s words) on the subject of Spencer Tracy. In Rome, however, she had become involved with actor Gregory Peck, who was much closer to her own age, and who invited her to accompany him to Paris, a proposal she fearfully and foolishly—as she later acknowledged—declined. By the time she got back to California, she was homesick and eager to return to Sydney. Tracy had a car and driver meet her at the airport.
“He had also organized my hotel accommodation and began to turn up his efforts to seduce me: ‘Why stay at the hotel? Move in with me while you’re in town.’ Maybe Spencer would have cherished me, but I wasn’t about to take the risk of finding out. By now I knew of his relationship with Katharine Hepburn and was curious as to why she never appeared or attended any of the social gatherings that I went to with Spencer.”
Hepburn, of course, was still in New York, finishing up her run in The Millionairess. Tracy took June to the Bogarts’ annual Christmas party on the twenty-fourth, and to Cukor’s another night for dinner. “After I rejected Spencer’s advances, he continued to treat me well and respect me. He even arranged for one of his cars to be at my disposal. It was the first time I had driven an automatic car, and it came with a remote control to open his garage door. I’d go around the block to his house again and again to test the remote control, such was its novelty value.” Benny Thau invited her to the M-G-M lot and suggested the establishment of a personal development school for the studio’s starlets. Arthur Loew was smitten as well and mounted a campaign to keep her in Hollywood. Kate arrived back in California at just about the time Dally-Watkins left for home, but she didn’t stay for long.
“One time I was playing a scene,” Jean Simmons recalled. “I was having a bit of trouble, and she sort of put her head around the corner. I heard him say, ‘Get out of here!’ I thought, ‘My God, you can’t talk to Kate Hepburn like that!’ But I knew she was there, and I think that’s why I was getting nervous.”
The actual filming of Fame and Fortune got under way in January 1953. Tracy had lost weight and was in a far more agreeable frame of mind than for Plymouth Adventure, where his moodiness and his baiting of Dore Schary had been the talk of the studio. “He didn’t seem intense at all,” said Jean Simmons. “It just seemed like rolling off him, easy. Obviously, he’d be up half the night—working, working, working, and then would come on totally prepared. He would say to me, ‘Listen, kid, just know your lines and get on with it.’ No silliness or temperament—anything like that. Just get on with it.”
Cukor was skilled at creating a comfortable work environment—a necessity when shooting in tight spaces—but had the annoying habit of telling actors how to say their lines. Simmons had never met Ruth Gordon, so she looked to him for the proper cadence of speech. “I had to rely totally on George Cukor, who was so funny because he would get up and play my character—and it was oh so much better than I could possibly do … George would say, ‘This is how you do it.’ And then he would go up to Spence—and they were great friends—and start to do it and Spencer would just walk away. He’d say, ‘Shut up, George!’ ”
Clinton works himself into a state over money, the cost of food, the perpetual poverty he sees for himself. “I live on hash and stew and Louisiana cat meat, for all I know, and I got a taste for oysters and curry the way they used to fix ’em in Bombay.” When he discovers a thirty-five-cent theater magazine in his daughter’s room, he is apoplectic. “Thirty-five cents! Did you get stung thirty-five cents for this thing?” Cukor was struck by Simmons’ response to the force of Tracy’s fury: “Talk about people who can be scary. Spence could be scary. He and Jean Simmons adored each other, but when we rehearsed the scene his anger was so real that she started giggling. ‘I know I’m old and not much good,’ Spence said, ‘but does this broad have to laugh in my face?’ ‘No, keep it in, Jean,’ I said. ’When you’re absolutely terrified you piss yourself with a kind of laughter. It’s real.” Said Simmons of Tracy: “I was fortunate enough to have known him before I worked with him, and he was oh such a help to me because when you saw him work, it didn’t seem like acting at all. He just was. He was the most truthful actor I ever worked with.”
When Ruth rebels at her father’s dictum that she become a physical culture teacher, she sits her parents down and proceeds to assault them with recitation and song. “He loved and respected Jean Simmons,” said Cukor,
who gave a wonderful performance, and there was a scene when she wanted to be an actress and she stood on the steps in their house [and sang] and she was starting things off rather badly. And Spencer looked at her and he did something very funny: for no reason at all, he looked at the mother as though she had talked this girl into doing something. But then he looked at her with this eloquent face of his and his face changed color. And I said, “That was lovely.” He said, “Well, I remember when I told my father that I wanted to be an actor and he looked at me, this skinny kid with big ears, and he said, ‘Oh that poor little son of a bitch; he’s going to go through an awful lot.’ ”
As Tracy told it, it wasn’t the disappointment his father felt at his son’s not coveting a career in business, but rather concern the boy seemed to have so few of the essential gifts of an actor. “In the play it is so interesting,” said Cukor, “that both Ruth and her mother are scared to tell the father about her ambitions because they think he would object on purely conventional grounds, that she would become ‘fast,’ etc. They under-rate him. He has none of those conventional scruples, he’s just concerned that she be spared the disappointment and heartache in undertaking something for which she has no obvious qualifications.” Tracy also recounted how hurt he was when he told his girl of his ambitions. “She all but laughed at him,” Cukor related, “and it almost killed him when he overheard her making some cracks to her girlfriend. He must have been completely unlike her idea of what an actor should be, nothing like the leading man of the Milwaukee Stock Company—Bert Lytell, or a real matinee idol type.”
As Clinton speaks of his own wretched childhood, his mother’s suicide and workhouse conditions, he punctuates the scene with the building of a sandwich—slicing the bread, spearing the meat, retrieving the ketchup from the pantry, chewing and talking, chewing and talking. Actor Richard Burton had read the speech and was observing on the set that day. “He was devastating,” Burton emphasized. “Devastating.”
Tracy made it so eloquent, said Cukor. “He was funny and he had the authority to switch from comedy to rather serious [material] and did it wonderfully.” And in the end, after promising to stake Ruth to a spell in New York, he loses his job and can no longer count on the bonus that was to have, in part, funded the trip. She can’t go, he tells her, but her determination is fierce, and he listens with a growing sense of admiration and pride. (“He never acted listening,” Simmons commented, “which is what a lot of actors do—they ‘act’ listening.”) It awakens in him a realization that maybe she does have what it takes “if it’s gumption that it takes to be an actress.” He removes his cherished spyglass from the mantel, wraps it carefully in newspaper, and presents it to her as the most precious of commodities—a chance to do what she knows that she must.
In the hands of a lesser actor, Clinton Jones would have been a one-note performance, all bluster and broad takes, but in Tracy’s care he became an amalgam of all the fathers of the world who want something more for their children than what they had for themselves—an education, a place to live, good food on the table, and a chance to do the work they love best. “When he sold that spyglass,” Jean Simmons said, “it broke my heart.”
Cukor completed Fame and Fortune a few days over schedule. Larry Weingarten thought it too long and was talking eliminations before they had even finished. Garson Kanin, meanwhile, was in Europe with his wife, urging Tracy to join them and plying him with news of available women. (“Do you know Evelyn Keyes? Ruth and I think her a charming girl …”) While the deal for Flight to the Islands had been finalized, the script was “pretty stinkin’ ” (Tracy’s words), and he was told that if he wanted to do it—since he owed the studio a second picture in the first year of his new three-year contract—he and Gottfried Reinhardt, who was set to direct the picture, would have to go to Paris to meet with Kanin and see if it could be whipped into shape.
Tracy wanted the trip “like he wanted a hole in his head” but he also wanted to clear his schedule for an outside picture and had few other immediate options—a “lousy” book called Jefferson Sellick and a story titled “Bad Time at Honda.” Hepburn was in New York, catching the new shows with her Millionairess costar, actor-dancer Robert Helpmann, but her relationship with Tracy was at its nadir—her chronic absences having taken their toll—and she left for Jamaica with Irene Selznick before he arrived in town on February 23. Tracy and Reinhardt set sail aboard the Queen Mary on the twenty-fifth, arriving in Cherbourg on March 2. They dined with the Kanins the following night and connected with George Cukor on the evening of the sixth.
The topic of conversation wasn’t so much Flight to the Islands as Fame and Fortune, which had been previewed to mixed results. Length was a problem—easily correctable in Larry Weingarten’s estimation—but so was some of the throwaway dialogue Tracy permitted himself in the early reels. “I knew this would be a disturbing element,” Weingarten reminded Cukor, “and, of course, there is no way to cure it. Audiences insist on hearing every word and understanding it, otherwise they are annoyed and the very thing you strive for is lost.” Weingarten wanted to make some cuts that Cukor was resisting, but the quality of Tracy’s performance was never in question. “The comedy, of course, played brilliantly, and Spence’s scene at the table—where he speaks of his childhood—was applauded.”
There was a lot of tweaking of the sound, and the picture had to be redubbed because Sidney Franklin thought Jean Simmons’ voice “irritating if she uses the higher register.” At Weingarten’s urging, the sound department leveled out everyone’s dialogue to the extent of distorting the performances, and Cukor and the producer clashed bitterly over it. Finally, Dore Schary allowed the whole movie to be remixed after diplomatically permitting the two men to agree on the balancing of certain scenes. In addition, there was trouble over the title—practically no one liked Fame and Fortune—and somebody suggested Father and the Actress in a wan attempt to tie the film to the Father of the Bride franchise.
A preview at the Fox Theatre in Inglewood played better, with men and women liking it equally and 105 of 160 cards rating it very good or better. It had, Cukor observed, a curious effect on an audience: “At first they think they’re seeing a ‘homey’ sentimental comedy. They dote on Spence, laugh at his jokes. Then they’re taken aback by the strength of his feelings and his occasional bursts of violence. They’re gradually forced to the realization that he isn’t quite the old peach they’d first taken him for. But when the picture is over, the audience feels that they’ve met an extraordinary human being.”
When Tracy docked at New York on March 26, 1953, he didn’t return directly to the studio, as originally anticipated, but instead boarded a plane for Cuba, where he was to meet for the first time with Ernest Hemingway, whose novella The Old Man and the Sea was to be the first outside picture allowed him under his new deal with Metro. Life had published the story in a single installment in its September 1, 1952, issue, an event in American literature that moved more than five million copies in the space of two days. Scribner followed with its hardcover publication, selling out on an initial print run of fifty thousand copies.
Hemingway’s agent, Leland Hayward, was bombarded with calls from Hollywood—Bogart, Tracy, Jimmy Stewart. Alexander Korda phoned from London. Hayward referred them all to Alfred Rice, the author’s lawyer, convinced it could never be filmed without destroying the honesty and simplicity of the original. It wasn’t until Hayward connected the material to the popular stage readings of Don Juan in Hell and John Brown’s Body—in which the actors worked in evening clothes—that he saw the performance of The Old Man and the Sea as a genuine possibility. He called Tracy, who was smarting from the tepid reception of Plymouth Adventure and squabbles over the fate of Fame and Fortune, and put the idea to him. The following day he wrote Hemingway: “Of all Hollywood people, the one that comes the closest to me in quality, in personality and voice, in personal dignity and ability, is Spencer Tracy.”
Tracy thought it “a tremendous idea” and said, “What about the motion picture rights? Why can’t we do this lecture idea, and after that do it as a motion picture?” Hayward detailed the problems he saw in filming the thing, of preserving the integrity of it. Said Tracy, “Let’s make the picture absolutely as simply and honestly as we can—make it actually in Cuba—make it silent—and I will commentate the whole motion picture.” Hayward thought it a wonderful idea and told Tracy that if he wanted to do it, he would come on as producer—assuming they could make a deal with Hemingway.
Just after the first of the year, when Tracy was deep in the shooting of Fame and Fortune, Hayward came west, meeting with Bert Allenberg and, later, with Tracy himself. A fundamental misunderstanding arose: Tracy assumed that he would be playing the Old Man as well as speaking the voice-over. Hayward, on the other hand, assumed they would use another actor, maybe a Cuban, in the part. He wrote Hemingway at Finca Vigia, fearful the prospect of seeing Tracy in the role would “destroy the appeal of the venture” for him. “I can only tell you that he looks great—is as enthusiastic as a human being can be about doing anything—and is one of the biggest and most important stars in the motion picture business. He understands all the hardship he may have to undergo to make it—has no star-like ideas or theories—and in my own mind I feel he would probably be very believable as the Old Man—providing we could make him lean and hungry looking.”
By February 1953 Hayward was talking widescreen and Cinerama and whether shooting the picture in Ansco Color would be preferable to Eastman. Eddie Mannix told them they were crazy not to make it in 3-D, and Fred Zinnemann, now a hot commodity with High Noon and Member of the Wedding to his credit, expressed a keen interest in directing it. The deal, as outlined by Hayward, called for a ten-year license on the rights for a price of $150,000, plus an additional $100,000 to be paid Hemingway for his services as screenwriter. Tracy would receive $150,000 as star of the picture, and Hayward $50,000 as producer. All three would split the net profits on an equal basis, with the film reverting to Hemingway at the end of the license period. The partners were looking at filming it in September and October, when, according to Hemingway, the weather would be at its “loveliest” (provided there were no hurricanes) and when both Tracy and Zinnemann would be available.
Hemingway urged Tracy to come to Cuba so they could “talk things over” and so that Tracy could see some of the old fishermen “before they die so that he will know things that cannot but be helpful to him when he takes it on the road.” With Flight to the Islands set to start on June 4, Tracy traveled to Havana on April 3, a turbulent and unnerving flight that abruptly terminated when a typewriter fell from overhead storage, injuring a passenger and smashing into Tracy’s leg. The plane made an emergency landing at Miami for x-rays, which showed that while the leg was swollen there were no breaks. The flight resumed at 4:00 p.m. “Rough to Havana,” Tracy wrote in his datebook. “Ernest Hem[ingway] worth it.”
Havana was sunny and hot. They visited Cojímar (the “Old Man’s town”), did some fishing and swimming, and talked business with Hayward on the last day. Tracy reiterated what he had said before—that he was committed to filming the book and nothing more. “Hemingway,” he said, “was afraid of having the book cluttered up with a commercial love story.” On Easter, Hemingway inscribed for Tracy a copy of The Old Man and the Sea, “To Spencer Tracy from his friend Ernest Hemingway.” He added: “Looking forward to the long fight we’ll win together.” He wrote to Alfred Rice, “We are in a big fight from now on in and can make a terrific killing if we make a great picture. But there won’t be any great picture nor nothing unless Tracy and I carry the ball most of the time. He knows it and I know it. Everybody is going to have to work like hell and we are going to have to do the miracle stuff.” In his summary to Leland Hayward, Hemingway said: “Had a very good and practical time with Spencer. We understand each other and get along fine. I feel like I’d known him about 150 years.”
Tracy was back in New York only a few days when Louise reached him—very late at night—with word that their son John had eloped with a neighbor girl named Nadine Carr. The news didn’t come as a complete surprise, as John had already come out with plans to be married, having raised the subject over dinner with his father as early as December 1951. “Din. John—Valley—John’s Wedding!” Tracy wrote incredulously in his datebook. A few days later: “Din. Valley—John’s Marriage Plans!” Neither he nor Louise was happy; the bride-elect was seventeen, a junior at Van Nuys High School, and scarcely mature enough for marriage. Neither, for that matter, was Johnny, who, at age twenty-eight, reflected the sheltered nature of his upbringing. “He believes that he lives in a world of peace and dignity and quiet, of gentleness and kindliness and smiling faces,” his father once said of him. “Well, he is going to continue to believe that, so far as it is in my power.” And Johnny did, naive as to the ways of the world, sunny and worry-free and as willful, at times, as a petulant six-year-old. “I think people thought, ‘Well, for goodness’ sake, let him do things himself!’ ” Louise mused in 1972. “I think I probably at times did much more for him than I should have. I went out of my way. He had so many troubles when he was little. He had such a difficult time that you just felt you had to [help] in any way, and while I don’t think doing things for him … really did any good, sometimes it’s all you know to do.”
Spence’s views were similarly conflicted, informed as they were by his own deep feelings of responsibility. “I only saw him and his son once,” said Seymour Gray. “And his reaction—he sort of laughed, he was laughing at himself. He said, ‘Oh my God.’ He looked at the sky and all that. [I said,] ‘What’s the matter with you? This is a handsome, well-adjusted boy. What difference does it make?’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. It’s my fault. I did it.’ Yeah. That set him, made the drinking even worse, because he had tremendous guilt related to this boy.”
John’s first view of Nadine was on horseback, and they were soon playing foot polo on Sundays, recruiting Nadine’s half-sister, Eveline, and a neighbor boy, Don Elderson, to create a foursome. On December 20, 1951, the bride’s family went ahead with a prenuptial compliment at the Carr home, twenty guests celebrating the prospect of a June wedding. Louise was aghast, unable to prevent her adult son from marrying, Joe Carr and his family seemingly happy to facilitate their daughter’s entry into a rich movie star’s family, even though she was underage and had yet to finish her schooling. When June came and went, Louise hoped the matter had blown over.
“I went to Las Vegas with them,” Susie Tracy recounted.
They asked me to go and I thought, “Well, I would rather be with them than to be here when they call to say what they’ve done.” Because I knew that my mother was going to be upset, to say the least. So I thought I’d better be there. I went also because I wanted to be sure that everything went the way it should. And that I thought I should be there in order to send them off … I think she was pushing for it, because he went back and forth about it—“Shall I, shall I not?” John’s friend Jim Marsters, who had been with him at Wright Oral School, tried to talk him out of it, and our cousin George Payson said the whole idea was “ludicrous at best.” I felt they should have at least waited until she graduated—April to June isn’t so very long—but, you know, we were kids. We didn’t know what we were doing…
Nadine called [my mother], I remember that, and then she put me on the phone. Thanks a lot. I mean, my mother was not happy from the very beginning. I don’t know what I said to her. She wanted to know why I didn’t stop it, and why I ended up going with them. Later, I wondered if they would have gone through with it had I told them I wasn’t coming … Then they were married legitimately—legally—at the church the following day. We drove to Las Vegas, came back, and then they were married again the next afternoon. We were crossing the parking lot, going into the Episcopal church in Encino, and that was when my uncle Carroll made the classic line: “Well, Suze, never a dull moment in this outfit!”
John’s father wasn’t any happier than his mother, but what he had to say on the matter was never set down anywhere. His notes in his date-book abruptly stopped a few days before his son’s wedding, but his agitation was on full display in an April 13 telegram he sent from New York to Ruth Gordon:
STILL HERE. LEG NEEDS WATCHING. SHOULD FLY COAST FAST. FROM CUKOR TODAY WORST NEW TITLE: FATHER AND THE ACTRESS. THIS, RUTH, I PROMISE [I WILL] FIGHT WITH LIFE’S BLOOD. THAT MAY BE THE LAST PICTURE I EVER MAKE THERE, BUT IT WILL GO OUT [UNDER] THAT TITLE AND BAD DUBBING GEORGE DESCRIBES OVER L[ARRY] W[EINGARTEN]’S DEAD AND MY TORN BODY.
Gottfried Reinhardt returned from Paris infinitely more enthused about Flight to the Islands than when he had left, Kanin practically having written a whole new script. But Tracy had always been the one pushing it, and most of the work and money put into it had been at his behest. It was difficult stuff, a drama of the mind, an excursion from within, and breaking the back of the story, figuring out how it could be done in filmic terms, was no easy matter. Tracy’s faith in Kanin, his ability to somehow do the impossible, was boundless, and he told Reinhardt on his last day in Paris that the only thing that really worried him was that Reinhardt wasn’t as enthusiastic about the thing as he was.
When Reinhardt handed him the revised screenplay in New York, he was 100 percent certain that Tracy was bound to love it. And then it was Reinhardt who was dumbfounded when Tracy said after reading it, “This is not for me.” Said Reinhardt: “I first thought that he was joking, but then I realized that I was to witness this strange mind pulling the final switch on me. His actual objections were, incidentally, of a very minor nature … What shocked me most, however, was that he suddenly seemed concerned about Dore’s reaction. He kept saying, ‘I think Dore will be disappointed.’ And ‘after all, Dore’s suggestions have been more or less disregarded.’ ”
Back at the studio, both Schary and Mannix dismissed Tracy’s behavior as typical of his preproduction jitters. “I remembered Spence’s original attitude toward this project when we were still on our way over,” Reinhardt said in a letter to Kanin. “I could not rid myself of the impression that what he uttered in Paris was mostly lip service and that he never really wanted to make this picture, at least not now.” Schary thought the script much better than it had been, but he still had serious doubts about the “clarity of the theme.” Charles Schnee, the line producer on the project, liked it very much. Mannix, too, thought it much improved, while Kenneth MacKenna, the studio’s story editor, expressed disappointment. All had considerable doubts about the commercial potential of a film so intimate, so lacking in romance, spectacle, excitement. When Tracy delivered the death blow over lunch with Schary, he spoke “purely as an actor,” presumably with serious doubts about carrying so much of the load. After nearly a year’s work, the plug was unceremoniously pulled on Flight to the Islands just six weeks before it was set to go before the cameras. Tracy never addressed Kanin directly on the subject, and Kanin never let on that he knew from Reinhardt exactly what had happened.
Besides, Kanin had other projects before Tracy: an idea for a picture based on Benjamin Franklin’s years in France, to be written in collaboration with either Thornton Wilder or Bob Sherwood. Then another for him and Kate, to be made in Europe and known, at various times, as Cat and Mouse and It Takes a Thief. Kanin wrote the opening, which George Cukor described to Gavin Lambert:
You were on a European train and you saw a lady in black sitting in one corner of a compartment, all alone. The camera moved very slowly up close to this lady—and it was Spence dressed as a widow. Then you discovered he was the head of a currency-smuggling gang based in Zurich. Spence was going to appear throughout the picture in different disguises. People in the State Department knew this chicanery was going on, and they got the best T-man from the Treasury—and it was Kate. She had this ruthless drive and purpose, and she was going to track him down and bring him to justice, like whoever-it-is pursues Valjean in Les Miserables. Then halfway through the picture she realizes she’s stuck on him.
Tracy, Cukor suggested, may simply have felt that he and Hepburn were “getting too old” to do that sort of a film, but he just as likely was in no mood to make another picture with her, and neither, it would seem, was she in any hurry to do another with him. It appears she knew of his affair with Gene Tierney—Katharine Houghton believed so—and may well have been aware of the Kanins’ role—particularly Gar’s—in abetting it. Tracy, moreover, was wild at the prospect of doing The Old Man and the Sea—Pulitzer and, as it would turn out, Nobel Prize–winning material—and nothing else could be nearly so attractive. He acknowledged to Leland Hayward he was “perfectly willing” to make a comparatively “bum” movie in order to get sprung from M-G-M to make Old Man, but instead he made a handshake agreement with Eddie Mannix, promising, in effect, to make two pictures for the studio during the second year of his contract, bringing them current with three pictures for the first two years of the deal. Metro, in turn, would distribute the Hemingway subject but would otherwise have no direct participation in the project. And so, one by one, the stories Kanin proposed for Tracy all faded away.
Tracy began a sixteen-week vacation on June 16, traveling to New York to meet up with the Hemingways, who were preparing to sail for Europe, and to undergo what had become his annual checkup routine at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. He considered doing The High and the Mighty, an original story for the screen about a seemingly doomed airliner for Duke Wayne’s production company, Wayne-Fellows, but was put off by the knowledge that Bill Wellman would be directing the picture. “It’s a real, honest story, just full of enthusiasm,” Wellman said. “And Tracy read it and thought it was lousy, wouldn’t do it.” Reluctantly, Wayne ended up playing the role of the pilot himself and the picture became one of the outstanding commercial hits of 1954. It also garnered six Academy Award nominations, including one for Wellman as Best Director.
Tracy, it seemed, wasn’t much interested in doing anything other than The Old Man and the Sea, and due to Hemingway’s travel schedule—which pretty much obliterated the rest of the year—that wasn’t going to be possible anytime in the immediate future. Kanin, who with Ruth was spending the summer on the French Riviera, implored him to come join them at Cap Ferrat: “I am absolutely convinced that you would love it here, and that the climate and atmosphere would be highly beneficial. Good food and pasteurized milk abounds, and what you would love most of all would be the peace of it.”
On August 1, Tracy compliantly notified Metro that he was going to Europe, first to Cannes to see the Kanins, then on to Paris and London. Ten days later, with Tracy already in France, Louella Parsons phoned Eddie Mannix to check the persistent rumor that M-G-M was buying out Tracy’s contract. “Far from it,” Mannix told her, confirming instead that Metro would be releasing Old Man as Tracy’s picture to follow The Actress (as Fame and Fortune had come to be titled). Parsons, however, was aware of Tracy’s growing disgruntlement with the studio and went on to report that he and M-G-M would be ending their “long and happy association of over 18 years” after he completed the two remaining pictures on his contract. Hedda Hopper, apparently noting the Parsons item, mentioned Bad Day at Honda as a story purchase for Tracy, naming Sam Zimbalist as producer and George Sidney as director. “Looks like Spence’s co-starring days with Katharine Hepburn are over,” she wrote with obvious satisfaction.
The Kanins were waiting when Tracy stepped off the boat at Cannes, and they all drove back together to Cap Ferrat. Tracy fell in love with the place immediately, and they were all splashing around in the Mediterranean before noon. “It’s no more than what we deserve,” he said contentedly, settling in for a stay of indeterminate length. Home was Les Rochers, the villa that Paris Singer, an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, had built for dancer Isadora Duncan. The food gave him trouble at first—his ulcer was acting up—but the next morning he was up early and off to Mass. “He didn’t speak one word of French,” Kanin commented, “but, still, he went to church that morning and came back quite happy.”
Tracy mailed an oversized picture postcard of the historic village to Louise in California. “This is it,” he wrote. “Old Florentine, brought piece by piece. Fabulous swim Mediterranean outside door. Good trip. Present fighting pylorics, etc., but have hopes for this. Swim, long walk yesterday.”
He seemed to be having such a marvelous time that Gar gingerly raised the possibility of his ending the “shocking routine” of too much coffee, Dexedrine, and sleeping pills at night. He wasn’t defensive, as Kanin might have feared, and promised to make a real stab at cleaning himself up. They talked about Flight to the Islands and Cat and Mouse, and then Tracy noticed a little rash on his side. Gar and Ruth tried telling him that it was nothing, but a doctor promptly diagnosed it as shingles (zona in French). As the doctor began treating the condition, his patient “suddenly got worried” about an operation that Kate had undergone. Spence hadn’t known about it but apparently found out after the AP picked up on the news and the New York Times printed it. By then, France was paralyzed by a general strike, almost all of the nation’s two million public workers having walked off their jobs, and it was impossible to phone or telegraph. With Tracy increasingly anxious, the inflammation plaguing him stubbornly refused to clear up. Finally and reluctantly, the Kanins drove him to Nice, where they put him on a plane bound for London. He kept promising to come right back, but they somehow knew that he wouldn’t.
Kate, whose surgery had been for skin cancers, flew to be with him in England, and it was there that they enjoyed a reunion, having had only minimal contact with one another since the completion of Pat and Mike. However good it was for Tracy and Hepburn, who were still in London together a month later, Kanin lamented the event as an opportunity lost.
“It was very, very sad,” he wrote. “The main reason for the sadness was that if only everything hadn’t gone wrong, that place would have proved a godsend to Spence. I think he would have piled up years of health, and I know that he would have wanted to stay quite a long time.”
1 It is unclear whether Tracy sent Schary a translated copy of Alf Sjöberg’s screenplay for a Swedish-language film of the same title, or Lagerkvist’s own two-act play based on the book.
2 As her early stand-in, Adelaide Doyle, recalled, “She was very close to her family and she called her mother all the time—maybe every day.”
3 The official schedule was twenty-four days.
4 Teresa Wright’s early movie roles were as a young girl, even though she was in her twenties. Born in 1918, Wright was thirty-four years old when she played Annie Jones.