Stanley Kramer didn’t schedule more than a day or two of rehearsals for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Even if Spencer Tracy’s health had allowed him to participate in any kind of extended preproduction, the actor would have found the idea of rehearsing for a movie as ludicrous as if Kramer had asked him to improvise or to base his emotional reaction in a particular scene on a childhood memory. Tracy understood anxiety and fear but scoffed at what he saw as the better-acting-through-neurosis style of the Brando generation and their followers, and he found the notion of interior exploration laughable. He was not a soul-searcher; whether or not he ever actually said that the secret of acting was to know your lines and not bump into the furniture, the frequency with which the remark was attributed to him was no accident. Tracy had an extreme distaste for what he saw as unmasculine oversensitivity in performers; he didn’t even like to do a second take most of the time and would often end the first one by shouting to the cameraman, “Did you get that?” He had managed to make movies his way for nearly forty years, and on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Kramer accommodated him with a production style that, in most ways, owed more to 1947 than to 1967. The large hilltop home of Matt and Christina Drayton, the affluent couple Tracy and Hepburn were playing, was built entirely on the Columbia lot, including a veranda with a not particularly convincing painted backdrop of the San Francisco Bay into which was screwed a small flashing red bulb that was intended to indicate a ship in the distance. The lighting, by sixty-three-year-old cinematographer Sam Leavitt, obliterated every shadow. The costumes were not bought off the rack, as designers for contemporary movies increasingly preferred to do for the sake of realism, but were sketched and constructed expressly for the film by Jean Louis. “As a young person, I thought that was very strange,” says Houghton of the sunshiny little frocks and gloves she was made to wear. “They were clothes that were out of another time and place, things I’d never wear in thirty years!”1 And the driving scenes were done with the careless, blurred backgrounds that had been typical of process photography for decades. As his critics often noted, Kramer was probably the least visual thinker among Hollywood’s major filmmakers of the time; shooting a movie, for him, was primarily a matter of assembling a group of actors and executing the words in a script.
By the time production began on March 20, Kramer had spoken privately to many members of the cast and crew and explained how the forty-five-day shoot would proceed. Tracy would be available for only two to four hours every day, starting at 10:00 a.m.; by 2:00 p.m. at the latest, he would be on his way home. Kramer and Leavitt would shoot his scenes first, and master shots in which he had to appear in the same frame as other actors would be prioritized, as would his close-ups. In group scenes, other members of the cast would have to be willing to save their own close-ups, answers, and reactions to Tracy until after the actor had left, with script supervisor Marshall Schlom feeding them Tracy’s lines from behind the camera. On days when Tracy was well enough to work, his scenes would move to the top of the schedule. On days when he wasn’t, which might occur with no warning, the rest of the cast would have to be prepared with no notice to shoot scenes that didn’t involve him.2 A story was planted with columnist Dorothy Manners in which she cooperatively explained that the set would be closed to most journalists because it’s “very small … barely enough room for the technicians” and dismissed Tracy’s recent physical collapse as “never as serious as it sounded …. A new maid became frightened when Spence had difficulty due to a chronic nasal congestion.”3
“The whole film was terribly precarious,” says Houghton. “The operative dynamic throughout was in trying to make this work for Spencer, so we all became teammates in that. Stanley must have been under extraordinary tension, but he was not the kind of person to show it. He had so many other responsibilities on the film that he couldn’t afford to even think about the idea that Spencer might just drop dead, that he might not live to make it the next day. Spencer himself was very philosophical about the whole thing—he almost seemed to be the least worried about it. Kate, of course, was a nervous wreck.”4
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner got under way in an atmosphere of artificial good cheer, as the imperative of making a movie temporarily forced everyone to put aside their fears. Tracy’s presence was spectral; he had enough vitality to get through a couple of shots a day, but no more; except for a few pleasant exchanges with Poitier, whom he genuinely liked, he lacked the stamina even to chat with his costars or the crew, leaving the set between scenes to lie down in his trailer. As for Hepburn, she strode onto the lot the first morning, hungry to be back before the cameras for the first time in six years, and immediately started driving Kramer crazy. She paced the perimeter off the Draytons’ living room, asserting her ownership of the set, inspecting the furniture. Why were the cords for all the lamps so visible? Cords running across the floor were vulgar; in her own home, she concealed them by tucking them under the rugs. Could someone get on that? She peered through the viewfinder. The fireplace looked just awful; it would have to be replaced. And what was that hat Kathy was wearing? It looked terrible. Now, about the first scene, a brief exchange between her character and Poitier’s—what angle was he planning to shoot it from? Kramer finally blew up and asked her just who was running the show. “Now, now, Stanley,” she said. “Let’s not lose our equilibrium. I’m only trying to keep the set alive so everyone won’t go to sleep.”5
Hepburn’s bulldozer energy exhausted Kramer, but it had a purpose: She was letting him know that he wasn’t going to be able to get through the movie without her, and she may have been using manic activity to keep her alarm about Tracy’s weakness at bay. Hepburn put in marathon days on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—attending to Tracy and his needs every morning, getting him home in the afternoon, returning to the lot to shoot the scenes that didn’t involve him, and then spending two hours every evening coaching her game but awkward niece through her role, after which she would run lines with Tracy, who was fearful about his failing ability to memorize his dialogue.6 If the price for that level of commitment was her meddling, it was a trade-off Kramer was willing to make. “When she signed for the film, she said, ‘I bet I’ll bug you—I bet I’ll drive you crazy,’” he told a reporter. “I said, ‘I bet you will too, and I’ll tell you how I’ll live with it. Go ahead and bug me, drive me crazy—I’ll let you know, but don’t stop doing it.’ Katie … is not always right, in my opinion, but she’s right 60 percent of the time.”7 On a grouchier day, speaking to another writer, he revised that figure down to 50 percent.
Some natural insecurity was also playing on Hepburn’s nerves: The actress, who celebrated her sixtieth birthday during the production, was being filmed in color under garish light for the first time in ten years, and she worried about her neck, her age spots, her wrinkled hands, her sun-damaged skin. Hepburn developed a self-protective strategy in which, in scene after scene, she would suggest blocking that positioned her face lower in the frame, where she believed the light was less harsh. “I’m not really vain,” she insisted, “but I don’t think people want to see me look like a corpse, or a monkey.”8 Tracy had no patience for her contrivances. He let every wrinkle show and even refused to wear makeup in the movie; when someone would try to powder his forehead, he would push him away with a look of disgust, calling it “nonsense.”9 When Hepburn entered for one scene and dipped low to kneel beside him, hiding her neck, Kramer recalled later, “it really teed Spencer off. He said, ‘What the hell are you doing now?’ She said, ‘Spencuh, I just thought …’ And he said, ‘Spencuh, I just thought …,’ imitating her Bryn Mawr accent. ‘Go out and come in like a human being, for Christ’s sake!’”10 “Kate, why don’t you talk like a person?” he snapped at her on another day. “You talk like you’ve got a feather up your ass!”11 Hepburn would just smile and swallow whatever she was thinking. “In many ways, she was all about pleasing the men,” says Karen Kramer, “acquiescing and making them feeling comfortable and almost being a doormat.”12
On most days, Tracy’s energy would evaporate quickly. “They used a very old-fashioned kind of lighting that took forever,” says William Mead, who played a delivery boy in the film (he’s billed as “Skip Martin”). “I remember Spencer Tracy getting very impatient between takes because they had to light everything within an inch of its life.”13 The more he felt his strength ebbing, the more he made Hepburn the target of his abuse. “Why don’t you just mind your own goddamn business, read the lines, do what he says, and just get on with it,” he would tell her when she started to argue with Kramer.14
As irritated as he would become with Hepburn, Tracy also knew that she was creating a buffer zone between him and the production, whisking him away for naps, telling Kramer that she thought the last take was perfect when she sensed he was tiring, making sure that he always had a glass of milk filled with ice cubes at hand (by then, despite Tracy’s long history of alcoholism, he apparently restricted himself to milk during the day and a single beer at night). He was kinder when talking about her than when talking to her. “Do you notice she’s the same with everybody—how she tries to help people?” he told a reporter in one of the rare interviews he gave during the production. “She helps little Kathy, she helps Cecil Kellaway … she helps me, she helps you ….”15 Hepburn, though endlessly solicitous with Tracy, was a drillmaster with her niece, warning her, “I can see the wheels turning!”16 whenever she thought Houghton was slowing down a scene, and ordering her to be home for dinner every night. While rehearsing a scene in which Joey Drayton runs downstairs to greet her mother, Houghton tripped on the staircase and sprained her ankle badly. Hepburn unsentimentally told her to soldier on. “Poor Kathy,” she remarked. “Think of what would have happened if she’d broken something and had to be replaced. After losing this opportunity, there’d be just one goddamn thing for her to do—kill herself.”17
Had she been a more experienced actress, or made her debut in a less troubled production, Houghton might have felt freer to articulate her own misgivings about playing a character who, on screen, seems so oblivious to the realities around her that, as many critics pointed out, it’s hard to imagine what Poitier’s character sees in her. “In the original script,” she recalls, “there was a wonderful scene in which the girl gets to say to her father, ‘I don’t understand what’s wrong with you—you brought me up to believe that a person’s worth is not based on the color of their skin, but on what they are intrinsically. If anything, I’m not worthy of him, because he’s a world-famous doctor and I’m young and haven’t done anything!’” says Houghton. “For me, that scene saved me as a character, because I really did think, why on earth would he be interested in this girl unless she has something to say for herself?”
Kramer strongly disagreed; he believed that the naiveté of the blind girl in Poitier’s A Patch of Blue had made her affection for a black man more palatable to white audiences, and two years later, he didn’t believe moviegoers were ready for anything more challenging. “The day came when Spencer and I were going to do our big scene,” she recalls, “and just before we shot it, Stanley said to me, ‘I want you to know I may not use this. You don’t know America the way I do,’ he said. ‘The American public will accept a girl’s blind love for this man, but they won’t forgive you if you go into this relationship with open eyes.’ Well, I thought it was cuckoo, but because of the circumstances, I didn’t know how hard I could push. How was this going to affect me, was this a good career move, blah blah blah—afterwards I had a lot of thoughts about that. But it’s amazing what the traumatic event of being close to someone with a serious illness can do. That was our world. Nothing else mattered.”18
The on-screen reunion of Tracy and Hepburn generated a tremendous amount of interest in the press, and despite the preemptive announcement that the set would be closed, Hepburn surprised everyone involved in the movie by making herself more available to reporters than she had ever been. In the 1940s, her exchanges with journalists were often combative; in the 1950s, around the time of The African Queen, she began using selected interviews to shape an image of herself as tough, indomitable, and indifferent to the vicissitudes of Hollywood. At sixty, Hepburn could be forbidding—“Bunk about the-public-has-a-right-to-know!” she barked. “They haven’t got the right to know anything—not until forty or fifty years from now!”19 But on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, she apportioned generous helpings of her carefully honed personality to writers from Look, from Life, from Esquire, and from The New York Times; she cooperated with a promotional book being written about the stars of the movie; she toured reporters around the set, chatted away about any number of topics, and began to shape a new image—funnier, more talkative, full of loose-cannon opinions, stridency leavened by a measure of self-deprecation—that would carry her through the next thirty years. In part, the change came about because Hepburn was genuinely surprised and touched at the affection journalists suddenly seemed to feel for her after years in which she hadn’t worked. “She’d always had an adversarial relationship with the press and enjoyed it, but I think on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner she found she could have an unadversarial relationship with the press and enjoy it, too,” says Houghton. “This was a reemergence from her cocoon after five or six years. But she was also very aware that Spencer was going, and that made her vulnerable in a way that didn’t involve her ego as much as all of the previous moments in her career—it really wasn’t about her. Heretofore, she would have been much more concerned about ‘Kate,’ about what impression Kate Hepburn was making, her caprices, her image, was she going to be a success? But this film was probably the most personal film she made, and it opened a door for her into a new way of relating to the public.”20
Hepburn took one journalist after another and gave them exactly what they wanted: good copy. She railed against sexual frankness (“Elia Kazan’s book [The Arrangement, about a middle-aged married man who takes a mistress] is the most REPULSIVE point of view about sex”); about the new European cinema (“I saw Blow-Up and thought it an absolute bunch of claptrap… a lot of twaddle that winds up with a lot of poor, wretched, underfed things playing tennis WITHOUT a ball”);21 about the uselessness of psychiatry, a favorite and tellingly persistent theme of hers; about Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (“straight pornography”); and about her loathing for on-screen nudity (especially when it featured “people with bosoms smaller than mine”). When she heard herself becoming too prissy or sour, she could switch gears immediately: Suddenly she would sing the praises of daring British movies like Georgy Girl or Alfie, remarking, “I think it’s too bad that we can’t, in this country, compete with that market and produce a picture that doesn’t have to appeal to so many people.” She started finding a useful tone of endearing self-disparagement (“I suppose people may be rather fond of me as they are of an old building”).22 And most surprising, she talked about Tracy in warmer and more personal terms that she had ever allowed herself to use publicly, even taking a cheerfully conspiratorial tone with visiting writers. “Listen, I’ll be the easy one to get—I gab a lot,” she told Look. “It’s Spencer we have to work on. He gets melancholia if he thinks too much about the past.” In talking about Tracy, Hepburn may have revealed more of the complexity of their relationship than she realized. Describing their on-screen sparring, she said, “The woman is always pretty sharp and she’s needling the man, sort of slightly like a mosquito … and then he slowly puts out his big paw and slaps the lady down, and that’s attractive to the American public.” She even said to Tracy, in front of a writer, “I’m the most necessary person on this here set. I’m just here for you to pick on.” Above all, she always remembered to sell the movie, telling reporters that she believed interracial marriage would soon become routine and letting them know that “there’s no bunk in our movie—we play tennis WITH the ball.”23
The emergence of a new, more open Hepburn was a result of some genuine softening on her part, but it was also the end product of what one reporter called a “minuet” of careful negotiations;24 the visits were orchestrated by Columbia Pictures and by Howard Strickling, MGM’s longtime publicity chief and the man who had successfully kept Tracy’s problems out of the press for twenty years. Reporters from approved publications arrived on the set with an understanding that no rumor of Hepburn and Tracy’s personal relationship, whatever it was, was to make its way into print; old-Hollywood decorum was to be observed. Accordingly, Hepburn and Tracy had separate trailers and dressing rooms. “Even then,” says Marshall Schlom, “they always played it very low-key. She would go to her dressing room, but then she would bring lunch to his.”25 When the press was present, everyone knew their roles. Houghton was called in for interviews and struck the right note of pert enthusiasm and unflappability. Poitier was gracious and modest, trotting out a story—as did Kramer—that he was so nervous about his first time acting with stars of Hepburn and Tracy’s magnitude that Kramer had to send them home and let Poitier say his lines to empty chairs. Tracy’s illness seems a far more likely explanation of that anecdote than Poitier’s nerves, but, says Houghton, “there was always a facade. There was just no way anybody was going to betray what was going on at the time with the seriousness of Spencer’s fragility.”26
For Poitier, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner felt, in some ways, like a creative step backward after the revitalizing challenge of his work with Rod Steiger on In the Heat of the Night; his character, Prentice, was the film’s straight man, a paragon of accomplishment and good manners who existed primarily to generate comic reactions in the characters around him. “In this film we are first and foremost, it seems to me … presenting entertainment with a point of view,” he told a reporter, expressing his reservations as politely as possible. “I really don’t quite understand what I think of it in racial terms.”27
Poitier’s reticence was unsurprising. William Rose’s script offered a good deal of genuinely funny social comedy revolving around Tracy and the spectacle of, as Cecil Kellaway’s monsignor put it, “a broken-down old phony liberal [coming] face-to-face with his principles.” But when the movie aimed for a more direct and contemporary take on race, the results were hopeless. In the first scene in the movie to feature two black characters talking to each other, the Draytons’ suspicious maid, Tillie, corners Prentice while she’s out of earshot of her employers and confronts him about his intentions. “I got something to say to you, boy!” she says. “You think I don’t see what you are? You’re one of those smooth-talkin’ smart-ass niggers just out for all you can get with your black power and all your other troublemaking nonsense. And you lissen here! I brought up that chile from a baby in her cradle and ain’t nobody gonna harm her none while I’m here watchin’! You read me, boy?” Isabel Sanford, hired for $600 a week to play Tillie,28 would go on to become well-known to TV viewers a few years later as part of the cast of All in the Family and The Jeffersons; she played the scene with tremendous comic vigor, and Kramer himself added the “black power” line as a fainthearted nod to the news,29 but nothing could save the scene from the mammy clichés of a screenwriter who was completely out of touch with the civil rights movement and who couldn’t even imagine Poitier’s character would have a word of reaction to the dressing-down. And Poitier had rarely had to say a worse line than Prentice’s jab at his own father (Roy Glenn): “Not until you and your whole lousy generation lay down and die will the weight of you be off our backs. … You think of yourself as a colored man—I think of myself as a man.” The screenplay was surely to blame for that moment, but in part, it echoed words Poitier himself had spoken just a year earlier; talking about his role in the western Duel at Diablo, he had said, “I play a guy, not a Negro.”30
In fact, Kramer had taken pains to smooth out anything that might disturb white moviegoers. In an early draft of the script, Rose had had Prentice’s father tell off Matt Drayton: “Calm down? Now, listen, you better let me tell you something. Have you got any idea at all of what a Negro doctor in the United States is up against?” He goes on to say that marriage to Joey would mean “throwing away everything he’s ever done or ever hoped to do! I mean he would be ruined!” Kramer crossed it out.
The dissonance between the cloistered world of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and the racial maelstrom of 1967 America became impossible to ignore when actress Beah Richards arrived on the set to film her scenes as Prentice’s mother. Richards was a well-regarded stage actress and a deeply committed political activist who wrote a column for the civil rights publication Freedomways; by 1967, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had been keeping a file on her for sixteen years. At forty-six, she was just seven years Poitier’s senior, but she usually played characters who were older than her actual age—“I was everybody’s mother, from Sidney’s to James Earl Jones’s,” she said. Richards was furious about the lack of opportunities offered to African American performers, and she wasn’t alone: Months after she had won a Tony nomination for James Baldwin’s 1965 play, The Amen Corner, her director, Frank Silvera, took out a trade ad complaining that since the nomination, she had received only a single acting offer, “one day’s work as a maid.” Just a few months earlier, she had played opposite Poitier in In the Heat of the Night as the character Stirling Silliphant had once imagined as a sort of voodoo abortionist. She had made just $2,500 for the role31 and never knew when—or if—another offer would be coming. Now she was put in a synthetic gray wig and dressed in pearls, white gloves, and a modest hat; her character was made to look like a loyal old housekeeper who has just come from a president’s funeral. Prentice’s mother was meant to embody the kind of soft-spoken, well-kept, epitome-of-dignity little old black lady who Kramer and Rose thought would put white audiences at their ease, but having to return to the kind of role that had made her into what one reviewer later called “the best sweet-and-sensitive Negro mother in all of show business,” Richards was openly unhappy. Her speech to Spencer Tracy was, in the words of her friend Ossie Davis, a reminder that “‘These children are in love, and love is all that we need to consider.’… Now, Beah knew that was a lie. … At the same time, it was a chance at that level to make any statement at all, so she made it with authority.”32
Richards brought great delicacy and restraint to her scenes, especially to her poignant and exquisitely performed speech to Tracy about how old men can no longer remember or understand passion, but by the end of her work on the movie, says Houghton, “I felt that she hated all of us. She was a formidable presence and a very angry person. She never misbehaved in any way. But I felt that there was no way, as a young white woman, that I could ever be redeemed in her eyes. And I totally understood that, and I didn’t think the film really did a whole lot to ameliorate that situation. It was a big reality check—it must have been horribly difficult for her to even get those lines out.”
As for Poitier, he felt more resigned than angry. The “Negro in white face” article and the increasingly personal attacks from black writers on his choices of roles had stung. “He was very, very kind to me,” says Houghton. “He would talk to me when we were waiting for shots to be set up, but what I remember him talking about most was that he was tired of acting. He wanted to become a director—he felt that that was the only way he would be able to bring more black people into the business and tell different stories. He felt that as an actor, he had contributed as much as he could.”33
By early May, Tracy was in such rapid decline that he was missing entire days and working as little as six hours a week.34 “The on-the-set situation is tenser than tense,” associate producer George Glass wrote to a journalist. “Tracy fell ill over the past weekend and failed to show for yesterday’s big scene, shooting of which will occupy all this week.” Hepburn was on guard at every moment; when Glass brought John Flinn, Columbia’s director of publicity, onto the set, she berated him for allowing a “stranger” onto the production. When Glass explained who Flinn was, Hepburn, he wrote, “was taken about as far aback as she ever goes (an inch or so).”35
Kramer had worked around Tracy as much as possible, bringing in a body double for angles in which only his back was seen; as the shoot progressed, even the effort of standing exhausted his star, “and when he tired,” Kramer said, “it came quickly.” “He huffed and he puffed,” said Schlom. “He had difficulty even walking up a short flight of stairs.”36 But there would be no way to fake the actor’s big scene—a climactic monologue in which Matt Drayton summarizes every argument for and against racial intermarriage that the other characters have made and then grants his blessing to his daughter and future son-in-law. The speech, which unfolds virtually uninterrupted over the last eight minutes of the movie, is a skillful and touching piece of screenwriting in which Matt wrenchingly articulates his love for Christina and then works his way toward a benevolent conclusion. The final words in the monologue blended Kramer’s taste for heartfelt speechifying with Tracy’s warm, commonsensical voice almost perfectly: “As for you two and the problems you’re going to have, they seem almost unimaginable. … There’ll be a hundred million people right here in this country who will be shocked and offended and appalled by the two of you. … You will just have to ride that out, maybe every day for the rest of your lives. You can try to ignore those people, or you can feel sorry for them and their prejudices and their bigotry and their blind hatreds and stupid fears, but where necessary, you’ll just have to cling tight to each other and say, screw all those people.” (Just before production, Geoffrey Shurlock had warned Kramer that such a “coarse and vulgar expression” would not be approved “in a picture of this caliber,” but Kramer and Rose had kept it in, knowing Shurlock no longer had enough power to take it out.)37
“Spencer Tracy never fluffed a word,” Poitier wrote later. “Every person on the soundstage that afternoon became engrossed with [his] character as that remarkable actor did his job. … It was hypnotic watching that man pick up the pace here, slow it down there, take a pause here, smile there … all of it making sense—all of it believable. There was applause when he finished.”38 Poitier’s words represented a warm and deeply felt appreciation of Tracy’s talents, but also a beatification that bore little resemblance to the actual, far more arduous shooting of the speech. Kramer, aware of Tracy’s memory problems and his difficulty breathing, broke the scene into tiny pieces and shot it over six full days, shooting a great deal of coverage of the other actors.39 He wanted Tracy on his feet for most of the scene, and Tracy badly wanted to deliver a strong performance for him. “Lots of people around here keep telling me how great I am, but you notice how it’s Stanley who puts me to work,” he told his friend Garson Kanin. “I tell him my life expectancy is about seven and a half minutes, and he says ‘Action!’”40
Summoning the little strength he had left, Tracy rose to the occasion, delivering one of his tenderest and most fully felt performances and letting the speech unfold with the relaxed cadence and rueful half-smile of a man who knows he’s made any number of mistakes but is seeing his own life and marriage clearly for the first time in years. There were no more afternoons off; that week, he put in six-and seven-hour days, pushing through one segment of the scene after another. In the monologue’s most famous moment, he talks about his love for Christina. “Old?” he says of himself. “Yes. Burned out? Certainly. But I can tell you, the memories are still there—clear, intact, indestructible, and they’ll be there if I live to be a hundred and ten. … In the final analysis,” he says, “the only thing that matters is what they feel for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt,” he says, turning to Hepburn, whose eyes are glistening with tears, “that’s everything.”
Hepburn’s tears were, for all the real emotion behind them, a measure of her remarkable control. (In the script, Rose simply wrote, “Is Christina weeping quietly? I don’t know.”)41 Kramer was stunned by her ability, in “seven, eight, nine successive takes of a scene, [to] make the teardrop drop on the same line each time. … She was just fantastic the way she could do that.”42 It takes nothing away from Tracy’s thoughtfulness and timing as he worked his way through the speech to note that the sequence audiences eventually saw was a triumph of editing as well as of acting. “To keep him appearing dynamic and healthy in that scene was the greatest challenge,” says editor Robert C. Jones. “To keep him seeming vibrant meant going through a lot of film and cheating a lot of things, carefully picking lines that were usable and deleting those that weren’t, using a line of dialogue from take three over a picture from take four. … Stanley gave me a lot of room to do that and permission to cut to Katharine Hepburn or one of the other actors so that we could just pick Tracy’s best delivery of a line regardless of what the camera was doing. We went through it for weeks and weeks. And I think Tracy’s health actually added something to the performance—a kind of vulnerability he hadn’t had before.”43
Tracy finished the monologue on May 19, 1967, just five days before the end of production on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.44 He had one more scene to shoot, but his relief was palpable. “I’ve been looking over the script,” he told his director. “You really don’t need me after tomorrow. If I die on the way home, you and Kate are in the clear. You’ll get your money.” The next day, he returned, visibly haggard, for his final scene—a process shot in which he and Hepburn take a drive to get some ice cream. It was a simple sequence that demanded little more from him than his physical presence and a bit of easy dialogue. When his work was complete, assistant director Ray Gosnell turned to the crew and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this was Spencer Tracy’s last shot.” “When he said that,” says Karen Kramer, “Stanley cried. It was the first and last time I ever saw him cry.” As the crew burst into applause, Tracy didn’t say anything. He just stepped out of the prop car, smiled broadly, waved, and walked slowly off the soundstage. Kramer watched him go and then said softly, “That is the last time you will see Spencer Tracy on camera.”45
Tracy went home and returned to the same chair in which he had been sitting a year earlier when Kramer had talked him into making the movie. The wrap party was three days later. Hepburn attended and made a speech in which she described herself as “everlastingly grateful,” telling the crew, “Your help … made a hell of a lot of difference … to Spence.”46 Tracy didn’t feel up to a party; instead, he picked up the telephone and called his friends. “I did it!” he said. “I’ve finished the picture! And I was betting against myself all the way.”47
1. Author interview with Houghton.
2. AIs with Katharine Houghton, Robert C. Jones, Karen Kramer, and Marshall Schlom; also Assistant Director’s Daily Production Reports, Kramer Collection, UCLA.
3. Manners, Dorothy. Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, March 22, 1967.
4. AI with Houghton.
5. Frook, John. “Hepburn Comes Back Big, Bringing a Niece Who Calls Her Aunt Kat.” Life, January 7, 1968; Edwards, Anne. A Remarkable Woman: A Biography of Katharine Hepburn (New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1985).
6. Berg, A. Scott. Kate Remembered (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003).
7. Newquist, A Special Kind of Magic, op. cit.
8. Ibid.
9. Kramer, Stanley. “He Could Wither You with a Glance.” Life, June 30, 1967.
10. Davidson, Spencer Tracy: Tragic Idol, op. cit.
11. Kramer, A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, op. cit.
12. AI with Kramer.
13. AI with Mead.
14. Kramer, “He Could Wither You with a Glance”, op. cit.
15. Hamilton, Jack. “A Last Visit with Two Undimmed Stars.” Look, July 11, 1967.
16. Frook, “Hepburn Comes Back Big,” op. cit.
17. Newquist, A Special Kind of Magic, op. cit., p. 62.
18. AI with Houghton.
19. Israel, Lee. “Last of the Honest-to-God Ladies.” Esquire, November 1967.
20. Ibid.
21. Hamilton, “A Last Visit with Two Undimmed Stars,” op. cit.
22. Newquist, A Special Kind of Magic, op. cit.
23. Hamilton, “A Last Visit with Two Undimmed Stars,” op. cit.
24. Ager, Cecilia. “Katharine Hepburn: ‘Come, I Want You to Meet My Niece.’” New York Times, June 18, 1967.
25. AI with Schlom.
26. AI with Houghton.
27. Newquist, A Special Kind of Magic, op. cit.
28. Salary memo, November 11, 1966, Gordon Collection, Margaret Herrick Library.
29. Handwritten note on early draft of William Rose’s script, Kramer Collection.
30. Goudsouzian, Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon, op. cit., p. 246.
31. Salary sheets and cast contact lists, Stalmaster Co., Jewison Collection, op. cit.
32. The quotations from Richards, Davis, and Silvera, and valuable background on Richards’s life and career, come from the documentary Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, produced by Neda Armian, Jonathan Demme, LisaGay Hamilton, and Joe Viola and written and directed by Hamilton (Clinica Estetico, Ltd., and LisaGay, Inc., copyright 2003).
33. AI with Houghton.
34. Assistant Director’s Daily Production Reports, Kramer Collection, UCLA.
35. Letter from George Glass to Roy Newquist, May 10, 1967, Kramer Collection, UCLA.
36. AI with Schlom.
37. Letter from Geoffrey Shurlock to Mike Frankovich, February 20, 1967, Production Code Files, Margaret Herrick Library.
38. Poitier, This Life, op. cit., pp. 286–287.
39. AI with Jones, Karen Kramer, and Schlom.
40. Kanin, Garson. “Tracy: He Did His Job Before He Died.” New York Times, June 25, 1967.
41. Final draft, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, February 15, 1967, Kramer Collection, UCLA.
42. Kramer, in Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute, op. cit., p. 572.
43. AI with Jones.
44. Assistant Director’s Daily Production Reports, Kramer Collection, UCLA.
45. Kramer, A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, op. cit., pp. 227–228; AI with Karen Kramer and Schlom.
46. Swindell, Spencer Tracy: A Biography, op. cit., p. 271.
47. AI with Kramer; also Kanin, “Tracy: He Did His Job Before He Died”, op. cit.