On June 10, 1967, Spencer Tracy woke up at 3:00 in the morning, got out of bed, walked to his kitchen to make a cup of tea, and collapsed, dead from a heart attack. The official story, swiftly constructed for the next day’s newspapers, was that Tracy’s body had been discovered by the housekeeper who worked for George Cukor, on whose property he had lived; she then called Tracy’s brother and a physician. Tracy’s wife, Louise, and their two children arrived next, followed by Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, and Tracy’s business manager.1 This fiction was in all likelihood the handiwork of Howard Strickling, the longtime guardian of Tracy’s reputation at MGM and a friend of Louise Tracy’s who escorted her to the funeral.2 Decades later, after the death of Tracy’s widow in 1983, Hepburn began to offer, with increasing frequency and detail, her own account of the last night of Tracy’s life. She had run a wire from a buzzer that was by his bedside to a speaker in the room where she was sleeping; she heard him fall, heard the teacup shatter, found him dead, and called Phyllis Wilbourn, her assistant and closest companion. Hepburn asked Wilbourn to take all of her things out of the house before Tracy’s family showed up; then she changed her mind and put them all back in. When Louise Tracy arrived, she and Hepburn quarreled briefly over what suit Tracy would be buried in. “You know, Louise, you and I can be friends,” Hepburn said she told her a few days later. “Well, yes,” said Tracy’s widow. “But you see, I thought you were only a rumor.”3 Hepburn’s decision to wait until Louise Tracy’s death to tell her side of the story was an act of discretion, but one that contained an element of self-protection; by the time she began to talk about—and to embroider on—her own relationship with Tracy, Hepburn had outlived almost everyone who could have contradicted her.
Six hundred people attended the funeral service for Tracy at Hollywood’s Immaculate Heart of St. Mary Roman Catholic Church. Stanley Kramer and his wife, Karen, had been in Las Vegas, celebrating the end of production of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but they flew back immediately after Hepburn called them.4 Kramer served as one of Tracy’s pallbearers, along with Cukor, Jimmy Stewart, Garson Kanin, John Ford, Frank Sinatra, producer William Self, and Abe Lastfogel, Tracy’s agent at William Morris.5 Hepburn, in her car, followed Tracy’s hearse until it reached the church, then turned around and drove home. “Of course, the minute it was over, the inside group went back to her house and told her everything,” says Karen Kramer.6
Hepburn’s decision not to go to the funeral was consistent with the way she had managed to give the public glimpses of her relationship with Tracy for many years while saying nothing about it: Her behavior represented an act of self-denial and dignified restraint that still managed to be conspicuous and public. She had made nine movies with him, including his last; while her attendance at the church alongside much of old Hollywood might have raised some eyebrows, she must have known that her absence would be highlighted in every story that covered the service. In many of those reports, she was upgraded from “a friend of many years” to “the actor’s longtime companion.” Even The New York Times, in its tribute to Tracy, noted that “in personal crises, she invariably appeared near him” and “maintained a vigil at his bedside” when he had been hospitalized.
The death of the man whom the Times called “one of the last screen titans of a generation”7 was greeted with a flood of sentiment and sorrow that was unusual for the period; in 1967, critics and the entertainment press could be callous, even cruel, to anyone they felt had overstayed his welcome. Earlier in the year, when seventy-seven-year-old Charlie Chaplin released the catastrophically stiff and awkward A Countess from Hong Kong, his first film in more than a decade, reviews had been brutal, not only about the movie but about the man himself: Time magazine’s piece was titled “Time to Retire,”8 and in The New Yorker, Brendan Gill had sneered that he “shows us not a trace of his former genius.”9 Three days later, when Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight opened in New York, the Times’ Bosley Crowther compared the two movies and wrote, “Chaplin … should not have tried to make A Countess from Hong Kong or anything else at his age! … It would have been so apt and charitable if someone could have saved these two men from the embarrassment of their hopeless follies,” and called Welles’s movie “a disgusting indulgence.”10 Neither director ever completed another dramatic feature. But Tracy, perhaps because he had seemed to care so little for his image or appearance over the years, was one of the few older actors whose appeal was multigenerational; even younger moviegoers eager to dismiss anyone they thought was “phony” claimed him as their own. In the language of the Old Sentimentality–vs.– New Sentimentality paradigm that Robert Benton and David Newman had created in Esquire back in 1964, Tracy was like Humphrey Bogart—the rare figure who made the jump from Old to New by making it appear that “a man can both care and not give a damn.”11
Tracy’s death immediately raised the profile of his final movie, which was not due to open for six more months: Magazines and newspapers that had sent reporters to the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner rushed their stories into print early. Life asked Stanley Kramer to write a first-person tribute to Tracy; Garson Kanin began warming up to write a book-length “intimate memoir” that would retail a wildly romanticized version of Hepburn and Tracy’s relationship by penning a tribute in The New York Times; Look published a photo portfolio; Esquire called its Hepburn profile “The Last of the Honest-to-God Ladies.” The enshrinement of Hepburn and Tracy as the first couple of the screen—“perfect representations of the American male and the American female,” as she herself put it, with little apparent irony—was ordained within a week of his death, as was the valedictory affection with which his last screen appearance would be greeted.
Lost in all the tributes was a remarkably timed piece of news that went unmentioned in stories about the movie: On the day Tracy was buried, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia, ruling that laws forbidding racial intermarriage in sixteen states were unconstitutional in that they violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case had taken almost a decade to reach the Court. It began in 1959 when Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a black woman, were sentenced to a year in jail for marrying each other, a term that was suspended on the condition that they leave the state of Virginia. (In his initial decision, the trial judge remarked that God had made His will manifest by putting different races on different continents.) The Warren Court examined Virginia’s law, which forbade intermarriage only if one of the parties was white, and concluded that it was “invidious racial discrimination … designed to maintain White Supremacy”; the Court also ruled that “the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”12 When William Rose had written Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner a year earlier, he had included a line in which Prentice’s father tries to talk his son out of the marriage by saying, “In sixteen or seventeen states you’d be breaking the law!” Kramer kept the line in the movie, but as of June 12, it was no longer true.
The landmark Loving v. Virginia decision might have received more attention had it not arrived at a moment when history was unfolding with breathtaking speed. The same day, news broke that President Johnson would, the next morning, announce the nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court; meanwhile, the networks’ evening newscasts were filled with the aftermath of the Six Days’ War, which ended on June 10 and had transfixed much of America. On The Graduate, crew members were late to location shoots because they pulled their cars over to the side of the freeway, listening to reports that Israel had decisively won what Life magazine called “the astounding war.” Time, which had headlined its June 9 cover Israel: the struggle to survive, came back a week later with a heroic portrait of Moshe Dayan and the headline how israel won the war. And at Warner Brothers, Israel’s victory had an extremely peculiar collateral effect: It helped save Bonnie and Clyde.
In early June, Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn took their movie to New York to screen it for Warner’s head of advertising, Dick Lederer, and distribution chief Ben Kalmenson. Lederer loved it, just as he had loved the screenplay. But Kalmenson thought it was worthless. “Benny really hated it,” says Robert Solo, who was just about to leave his job as assistant to Jack Warner’s deputy Walter MacEwen. “He’d say, ‘Warren doesn’t mean anything to audiences,’ and that was it. He was a crotchety, opinionated guy, a real old distribution hand, basically a jumped-up film salesman. He thought it was a cheap gangster movie, he wanted to bury it, and he did.”13 Lederer lobbied hard to get the movie booked into Manhattan’s Cinema I, one of four first-run theaters on Third Avenue between 59th and 60th streets, a stretch of real estate so important to review-driven movies well into the 1980s that it came to be known in the industry as “the Block.” He talked about the value of a red-carpet premiere on the East Coast. Kalmenson wouldn’t hear of it; he booked the movie into two far less prestigious theaters, one near Times Square, the other in Murray Hill. He thought so little of Bonnie and Clyde that when he handed out a schedule of Warner Brothers’ summer releases to his distribution team, the picture wasn’t even listed.14
Beatty and Penn then took the print to Los Angeles to show it to Jack Warner, but by the time they got there, Kalmenson had delivered his verdict to Warner himself, confirming what his boss had feared when he read the script—the movie was nothing but a bloody retread of the 1930s gangster movies they used to make that were just one step up from Poverty Row. “Warner listened to Kalmenson,” says Solo. “He’s the man who was responsible for Jack Warner selling his stock in the studio to Seven Arts. He was really friendly with [Seven Arts head] Eliot Hyman, and Hyman kept wanting to buy the studio, and Kalmenson talked Warner into it. It was really against Warner’s better judgment, because after that, he was done. He had the money, but he didn’t have his studio.”15
Jack Warner was already livid about the amount of time Penn, Beatty, and Dede Allen had taken editing the movie; he had threatened repeatedly to pull their funding during postproduction, to stop paying the rent on the New York editing rooms, to take the movie out of their hands.16 “It won’t be long before I should be leaving,” he fumed, wondering why he was spending his last weeks at the company he co-founded “waiting around for geniuses to make up their minds, which I am not going to do.”17 In the spring, he had told Walter MacEwen, Penn and Beatty’s biggest champion in the upper ranks, to crack down on the “thoughtless” director and producer: “If they are going to sit around we will end up with a slow, repetitious picture and anything Beatty is in will go on and on. This is the story on actors cutting pictures.”18 Even MacEwen was beginning to lose his patience; Beatty and Penn had insisted on editing the movie in New York against his wishes; they had delayed a small but critical reshoot until mid-May; and they were pushing past the limits of even a liberalized Production Code (“eliminate depiction of fellacio [sic],” an appalled Mac-Ewen jotted down, trying several different spellings after watching footage of Dunaway sliding out of frame while in bed with Beatty). In addition, Beatty, whether out of insecurity or annoyance at the difficulties Dunaway had caused during the shoot, had dug in for months in resistance to her agent’s demand that she be billed above the title, a star-making flourish that the studio thought would help launch her. Beatty didn’t give in until the studio started exploring whether it had legal standing to take the movie away from him altogether. “Would prefer not yielding to threats,” he calmly cabled MacEwen before finally giving in. “In any case you are the boss.”19
When Penn and Beatty walked onto the lot, they reentered a world that seemed frozen in time. “Studio life in 1967 was very much the life it had been for years and years and years,” says Sid Ganis, one of a new generation of executives who moved from New York to Los Angeles after Seven Arts’ takeover. “It was still the old guard, lots of old guys with great stories about their old successes. But they had all been there for twenty-five years. Jack Warner still had an office and still had his desk with the three steps up to where he sat. But it was the end of an era.”20
Publicly, Warner was celebrating his approaching seventy-fifth birthday by announcing, “I feel 14!” watching dailies from the production of Francis Coppola’s Finian’s Rainbow,21 and telling reporters, “I intend to go on doing what I am doing. If I quit now, where would I go? What would I do?”22 But the truth was that Warner had given away his power and had only the trappings left; just a few weeks after his confident pronouncements, he would resign as production chief.
Warner was spending more and more of his time at home, and Penn and Beatty brought the print to his private screening room, with Walter MacEwen and a couple of publicists in tow. “If I have to get up and pee,” Warner told Penn, “I’ll know it’s a lousy movie.” “Well, he was up before the first reel,” says Penn. “And several times after that.”23 Penn sat there, his mood black, feeling that he had made “the most diuretic film in human memory.”24 “He didn’t like it, didn’t understand it, didn’t get it, and Benny Kalmenson had already seen it and proclaimed it a piece of shit, so that was that,” Penn says. Warner took in Bonnie and Clyde with the eyes, the ears, and the taste of an angry, cut-off man and hated everything about it. The vintage photographs at the beginning were too blurry; the sound was too low; the dialogue was too muffled. “What the hell was that?” he said. “That’s when Warren tried his wonderful line, ‘It’s an homage to old Warner Brothers gangster movies,’ and Jack sort of perked up and said, ‘What the fuck’s an homage?’” says Penn. “It was the beginning of a dark time, because it was clear that if he didn’t like it and Kalmenson didn’t like it, it was gonna get dumped.”25
In the days that followed, Beatty tried a bluff, suggesting to Kalmenson that if the studio was so unhappy with the movie, he would gladly buy it back from them himself. Then the Six Days’ War broke out. By its end, Jack Warner was in full triumphalist mode. “Jack was very aroused,” Beatty told the Los Angeles Times, “because Israel had done well and he’d raised more money for Israel than anyone in town.”26 At the end of the war, Warner was so exhilarated that he called the studio’s employees together on a soundstage so he could address them one more time as their leader. A few days earlier, he had announced that despite Seven Arts’ takeover, the company would continue to be named for him and his family. In a defiant mood, the pugnacious old man wasn’t about to sell off anything, even a movie he suspected was worthless.
The same week, Columbia Pictures opened Sidney Poitier’s schoolteacher drama, To Sir, with Love. The studio’s expectations were minimal, especially since reviews were tepid, and critics who had praised Poitier for rising above his material in movies like Lilies of the Field and A Patch of Blue were now going after him for choosing these roles in the first place. “One hankers for the character he played in The Blackboard Jungle instead of the point-making prigs he takes on now,” complained Penelope Gilliatt in The New Yorker. “If the hero of this Pollyanna story were white, his pieties would have been whistled off the screen. … The fact that he is colored draws on resources of seriousness in audiences which the film does nothing to earn.”27And Hollis Alpert, writing in Saturday Review, remarked that he was tired of seeing a “consistently desexualized” Poitier turn himself into “an ever more solid symbol, a minority figure who must eventually triumph … while making prejudice seem lowly and nasty.”28
Columbia didn’t realize that Poitier had been building a tremendous audience base thanks to television, where his movies were showing up more frequently. Until 1965, home viewers had rarely seen black performers on TV outside of guest shots on crime dramas, singing and dancing appearances in variety shows, or Amos ’n’Andy and Beulah comic stereotypes, but the emergence of Bill Cosby in I Spy and, a year later, Greg Morris in Mission: Impossible brought a new kind of self-assured African American star into American living rooms and tapped a previously unrecognized viewing audience. During the 1966–1967 season, Variety described Poitier as “redhot in TV ratings,” pointing to huge numbers for telecasts of Lilies of the Field and The Long Ships as well as for the actor’s appearance on a variety show celebrating the history of black humor.29 When To Sir, with Love opened, the studio found out that Poitier was not only review-proof, but a much bigger star than anyone in the movie business had guessed. The film was an immediate and sustained hit that played for months and made the actor a rich man. His deal to take just $30,000 up front in exchange for 10 percent of the gross turned out to be one of the biggest paydays an actor had ever engineered. In Poitier’s contract, Columbia had stipulated that his yearly take would be capped at $25,000 for as many years as it took to pay him in full. The studio realized it would have to revise that deal when To Sir, with Love took in so much money that it would have taken eighty years to fulfill the contract’s terms.
Poitier himself agreed with some of the criticism of To Sir, with Love. “The guys who write these parts are white guys, more often than not,” he said at the time. “And there are producers to deal with who are also white, and a studio with a board of directors, also white. So they have to make him—the Negro—kind of a neuter. … You put him in a shirt and tie … you make him very bright and very intelligent and very capable … then you can eliminate the core of the man: His sexuality.”30 For the first time, Poitier decided to channel his frustration into producing: He made a deal with ABC, which was then launching a motion picture division, to produce and star in For Love of Ivy, which would mark the first mainstream romantic comedy about a black couple’s relationship.31
The success of To Sir, with Love was good news for United Artists, which had chosen the beginning of August as a release date for In the Heat of the Night and was counting on Poitier’s growing popularity to boost the chances of a movie for which the studio had planned only a modest publicity campaign. UA seemed remarkably short on inspiration when it came to selling Jewison’s movie; the ideas it sent out to local publicity teams felt almost deliberately designed to avoid any mention of race, conflict, or civil rights. “It’s a natural for stores selling air conditioners!” UA suggested. “Don’t Lose Your Cool In the Heat of the Night. … Reverse angle, for cooler nites, is ‘When Winter Winds Blow, Sleep “In the Heat of the Night” with (furnace, fuel, or heater tie-in).’” Some posters carried the tagline “They got a murder on their hands. They don’t know what to do with it”; other ads featured a still from a seconds-long shot of a strategically concealed nude woman from an early scene and built an entire campaign around her, with the slogan “She always traipses around with the lights on. Somebody sure oughta make her stop it!”32 No poster mentioned race at all. Jewison, who was in Boston shooting Thomas Crown, saw the posters for the first time when he passed the Music Hall and, not for the first time, complained bitterly to UA.* “I hate to keep flogging a dead horse,” he wrote, “but the picture deserves a little better than this.”33
United Artists had not had a hit all year and was counting on one movie, the James Bond adventure You Only Live Twice, to turn its bottom line around. The fortunes of the Bond franchise had grown exponentially with each installment, and a new Bond rip-off opened almost every month, but just before the massive success of Thunderball in early 1966, another studio decided to take direct aim at the value of UA’s hottest property. What’s New, Pussycat? producer Charlie Feldman owned the rights to Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, the only 007 story that producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli hadn’t acquired. Feldman initially approached Saltzman and Broccoli about going into partnership with them; when they stiff-armed him, he decided to make a bigger, wilder, more expensive Bond movie than any that had come before and took the project to Columbia. Creatively, Casino Royale was a disaster of fascinatingly outsize proportions: Six different directors and at least seventeen screenwriters (including, at various points, Woody Allen, Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, and Billy Wilder) were swallowed by Feldman’s $12 million sinkhole, an incoherent spoof involving a half-dozen would-be Bonds played by, among others, David Niven and Peter Sellers, that was condemned as “total chaos,”34 “unfunny burlesque,”35 and “a frightful mess”36 by the very people who made it.
Feldman oversaw a comically disjointed production during which scenes were sometimes written just to utilize elaborate sets that had been built for other purposes or to work in actors who happened to be in London for a few days, but he nonetheless succeeded in getting Casino Royale into theaters two months before You Only Live Twice. Abetted by a slogan that sold its gimmick effectively (“Casino Royale Is Too Much … For One James Bond!”) and an eye-catching psychedelic poster of a nude woman covered in tattoos, the movie drew huge initial crowds. Bad word of mouth spread quickly, but Columbia had made its money (the film was the third-highest grosser of the calendar year) and done its damage. When You Only Live Twice finally arrived, audiences were oversaturated by Bond and his rivals. Even the film’s nominally topical plotline, the space race, had been chewed up and parodied by everything from the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie to Don Knotts in The Reluctant Astronaut. Time magazine’s critic called the movie a “victim of the same misfortune that once befell Frankenstein: there have been so many flamboyant imitations that the original looks like a copy.”37 The comparison was not lost on Sean Connery, who had already given his producers notice that he would not play Bond again. “The whole thing has become a Frankenstein monster,” he complained. “The merchandising, the promotion, the pirating—they’re thoroughly distasteful.” 38 UA could take some consolation in the fact that the movie managed to outgross Casino Royale, but for the first time, the franchise started to contract instead of expand—You Only Live Twice, the studio’s most expensive Bond film yet, grossed significantly less than Thunderball and signaled a dip in Bond’s drawing power that would not turn around until the late 1970s.
The notion of a summer movie season as a business model wasn’t yet formed in the 1960s, but in 1967 the studios began to grasp that there was money to be made by releasing movies with broad appeal while their potential audience was on vacation or out of school. Two weeks after You Only Live Twice opened, just in time for the July Fourth holiday weekend, MGM released The Dirty Dozen across the country and made the Bond film look puny. For twenty years, World War II movies had been a reliable box office staple, but they had begun to run out of steam as their plots became repetitive and moviegoers grew bored with their drab, earnest storytelling. The studios were still putting out several war movies every year, but there hadn’t been a truly crowd-pleasing entry in the genre since 1963’s The Great Escape. When Dirty Dozen director Robert Aldrich read seventy-year-old Nunnally Johnson’s original script about twelve thuggish criminal soldiers in military prison who are melded into a ragtag unit and given a mission to bomb a German château, he thought it “would have made a very good, very acceptable 1945 war picture. But I don’t think that a good 1945 war picture is a good 1967 war picture.”39 He hired the German-born screenwriter Lukas Heller to overhaul the screenplay and made a picture that was far more gory and violent, and far less interested in conventional military heroics, than any action movie Hollywood had produced about World War II. The Dirty Dozen’s antiauthoritarian message appealed to war movie buffs who wanted an unsanitized look at tough guys in combat, but it also found a tremendous audience of moviegoers in their twenties who had generally stayed away from the kinds of war movies their parents liked. “We got on a wave that we never knew was coming: not a wave, a tidal wave,” said Aldrich. “Younger people by the bushel thought it was an antiestablishment movie.”40
If United Artists had any doubts about whether moviegoers were ready to accept an angrier black man on screen than they had seen before, the success of The Dirty Dozen erased them. One of the film’s most popular characters was played by former NFL fullback Jim Brown. Aldrich treated Brown’s role carefully in some regards: Where almost every other member of the dozen has a record of irredeemable criminality, audiences were told that Brown’s character had been jailed for attacking a group of white men, “cracker bastards” who had tried to castrate him. After thus preemptively exonerating Brown from any real wrongdoing, the script went on to turn his character into an anachronism in every respect. He’s a street-talking separatist who sounds nothing like a jailed GI in the 1940s. When he’s first told to join the unit, he declines, shrugging: “That’s your war, man, not mine.”
Aldrich denied that his intentions in making the movie were explicitly political: “When we planned The Dirty Dozen in 1965 do you think for one moment we knew that by the time the film came out the French kids would be in revolt and Americans would be sick of Vietnam so the mood would be just right for our picture? Rubbish,”41 he said. But he admitted that the film’s climax, in which Brown’s character throws bombs down a ventilator shaft and burns a group of trapped Germans alive, was intended to discomfort audiences by evoking the use of napalm. The scene was shocking, in part because almost no Hollywood movie had yet made even an oblique reference to the Vietnam War and in part because Aldrich had found a way to make an audience cheer a lone black man killing a huge group of white people. Jim Brown could have been the embodiment of Stokely Carmichael’s declaration in the spring of 1967 that “black people are now serving notice that we’ll fight back.”42
The Dirty Dozen became the year’s biggest box office hit, and its unmistakable Vietnam-era resonance might have gotten more attention had it not opened at a moment when the news was filled with the war at home. On July 12, after John Smith, a black taxi driver in Newark, was seen being physically dragged into a police station after a minor traffic violation, two hundred protesters gathered outside the precinct; the assembly dissolved into an unruly ramble in which store windows were broken and a few Molotov cocktails were thrown. Two days later, state troopers and National Guardsmen moved into the city, an overreaction that was met with escalating violence. By July 17, 1,200 people had been jailed, 600 injured, and 23 killed; H. Rap Brown became famous that week when he called for “guerrilla war on the honkie white man.”43 The following weekend, Detroit exploded into riots and looting after a raid on illegal gambling dens; another 1,200 people were arrested, and four thousand fires were set. Again, federal troops rolled into the city. Even as President Johnson was increasing the number of American soldiers in Vietnam to nearly a half million, worries about the war were temporarily overshadowed by stories about “the fire this time,” hugely exaggerated reports of property damage (the $25 million of wreckage caused in Detroit was widely reported as $500 million)44 and a storm of “Who says it can’t happen here?” editorials.
The poor, angry black man from the ghetto, ready to loot, shoot, and kill, became as much of a focus for the fears of Middle America—and of Middle American media—as the acid-tripping hippies and runaways pouring into San Francisco had been a month or two earlier; and Sidney Poitier, on a press tour for In the Heat of the Night, found himself asked again and again to denounce the rioters or ally with them, to identify himself politically at a moment when the ground was constantly shifting. “You ask me questions that pertain to the narrow scope of the summer riots,” he seethed into a bank of microphones. “I am artist, man, American, contemporary. I am an awful lot of things, so I wish you would pay me the respect due.”45 “He was the only black leading actor out there for fifteen years,” said Lee Grant later. “It was a terribly unfair responsibility for him… he was carrying this alone, and it was not a burden that he welcomed.”46
But the relentless call for Poitier to become a political spokesman was also an indication of his growing cultural significance; To Sir, with Love was becoming Columbia’s biggest hit since Lawrence of Arabia, and Variety called Poitier “the only Negro which myriads of Americans feel they know and understand … a symbol of the thoughtful, efficient Negro whose technological knowhow (no dropout, he) enables him to help, compete with, and, when necessary, show up whites.” In a season during which the country was “stained by ugly race riots,” the paper said, Poitier was now so popular that if he declines a role, “they rewrite the part for a white actor!”47 Poitier heard that quasi compliment many times in 1967, usually from people who hadn’t an inkling of the condescension that was built into it, and generally responded by politely acknowledging that, yes, he had heard that people were saying that, and quickly moving on to another subject. During the press junket for In the Heat of the Night, he was barely asked anything about his work; instead, he had to compose answers to questions about whether it was inherently offensive to depict black people in a cotton field in the movie. At one point, he was required to list other talented black actors for an indignant reporter from Boston who didn’t believe she knew of any. (Although I Spy had been on the air for two years, he had to spell the name “Cosby” for her.)48
When In the Heat of the Night opened in New York on August 2, critics, perhaps inevitably, treated the movie as if it had been hatched overnight in response to the long, bloody summer, and most of them approved of what they saw. Although the film had nothing to do with race riots, Bosley Crowther announced that “the hot surge of racial hate and tension as it has been displayed in many communities this year … is put forth with realism and point,” praising “the crackling confrontations between the arrogant small town white policeman … and the sophisticated Negro detective with his steely armor of contempt and mistrust.”49 A number of critics besides Crowther strained to find parallel flaws in Tibbs and Gillespie, unwilling to see In the Heat of the Night as anything other than a movie in which the black man needs to learn a lesson, too: Time magazine praised it for showing “that men can join hands out of fear and hatred and shape from base emotions something identifiable as a kind of love,”50 and Life called it “a fine demonstration that races can work together.”51 Pauline Kael liked the film but hated the tone of most of its positive reviews; she had been relieved to discover that Jewison hadn’t made a “self-righteous, self-congratulatory exercise in the gloomy old Stanley Kramer tradition” but complained that too many of her colleagues praised it “as if it had been exactly the kind of picture that the audience was so relieved to discover it wasn’t.”52
A few prominent critics dissented strongly. Andrew Sarris’s dismissal of the movie as a “fantasy of racial reconciliation”53 was echoed by The New Yorker’s Penelope Gilliatt, who was then in a relationship with Mike Nichols and had seen a screening of the movie during production of The Graduate. The film, she said, “has a spurious air of concern about the afflictions of the real America at the moment. … There is a predictable night interlude when the rivals suddenly come together and speak for a second of their common loneliness, thus tritely demonstrating that we are really all the same, though I can’t think of any really first-rate film, play or book that isn’t unconsciously dedicated to the fact that we are all inconsolably different.”54 The most pointed criticism In the Heat of the Night received stemmed from the decision Jewison made early in the development of Silliphant’s screenplay to strip away scenes in which Tibbs faced the systemic racism of a small southern town and to boil down the movie’s racial politics to a single relationship. “Jewison and … Silliphant are running on the premise that movies can correct the world by describing it incorrectly,”55 the critic Ethan Mordden wrote later. And Esquire’s Wilfrid Sheed remarked, “If that were all Mississippi amounted to it wouldn’t take much courage to march down there; one Poitier per town would soon bring the rascals to their senses. … Our peoples will work this thing out some day. Yeah, sure.”56
The vast majority of reviewers weighed in with strong praise for the movie and its two stars, with the New York Daily News claiming that “nobody but an actor of Poitier’s stature could have characterized [the] Negro detective with any amount of forcefulness”57 and Newsweek’s Joseph Morgenstern writing that “Poitier, who could be ruling the roost if parts were handed out on the basis of talent instead of pigment, gets a rare opportunity to demonstrate the full sweep of his powers.”58 The Chicago Sun-Times and The Boston Globe both suggested that Steiger was headed for an Academy Award.59 But Poitier—and what he represented—was also coming under harsher scrutiny. “He is not a Negro before being a man. He is a Negro instead of being a man,” wrote Sarris in the Village Voice, dismissing the movie as “liberal propaganda. … Nowadays … Negroes are never condemned in the movies. Their faults, if any, are tolerated as the bitter fruits of injustice, and thus their virtues are regarded less as the consequences of free choice than [of] puppetry. … All that is expected of the Negro… is that he be inoffensive, and Poitier [is] heroically inoffensive. … It is not Poitier’s fault that he is used to disinfect the recent riots of any lingering racism. It is his destiny to be forbidden the individuality to say ‘I’ instead of ‘we.’”60
Sarris underestimated how unusual In the Heat of the Night would look to most moviegoers. Audiences reacted so strongly to the chance to see Poitier fight back, and the politics behind it, that In the Heat of the Night soon acquired the jokey nickname “Super-Spade Versus the Rednecks.”61 And, as Jewison had predicted, the scene in which Virgil Tibbs delivers a backhand slap to the face of a white racist became a galvanizing moment. “Sidney and I used to go to the [Capitol] Theater in New York to see the scene,” Steiger said later. “You could hear the black people say, ‘Go get ’em, Sidney!’ and the white people going, ‘Oh!’ And we used to break up. We could tell how many white and how many black were in the theater.”62 Anthony James, the young actor who had made just $100 a day to play the counterman in a Sparta diner who turns out to be involved in the murder, went to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles and listened to the gasps. “I have young African American friends who have seen the movie, and they don’t really notice the scene now,” he says. “But at the time, it was really startling.”63
In almost every movie house, the slap drew cheers. “Applause in the movies … seems to have some belligerence in it, an assertion of will,” wrote Renata Adler in The New York Times. “People applaud at movies, I think, because they want to insist on seeing more of something. … The enthusiasm for [Poitier’s] small act of violence also contains a strong awareness of his real situation. He is playing once again, patiently, angrily, that young Negro … which he has managed to turn, over the years, into a kind of deliberate, type-cast, reverse racial stereotype. … This reinforces the sense of outrage at the abuse which, until the point of the liberating slap, he has had to take in role after role. … The reaction is shock and pure relief.”64
1. Swindell, Spencer Tracy: A Biography, op. cit.
2. Davidson, Spencer Tracy: Tragic Idol, op. cit., p. 213.
3. Hepburn, Katharine. Me: Stories of My Life (New York: Ballantine, 1991); and Barbara Leaming, Katharine Hepburn, op. cit.
4. Author interview with Kramer.
5. “Spencer Tracy’s Funeral Attended by 600 on Coast.” United Press International, June 12, 1967.
6. AI with Kramer.
7. “Spencer Tracy Dies at Age of 67; A Hollywood Star for 37 Years.” New York Times, June 11, 1967.
8. “Time to Retire.” Time, March 31, 1967.
9. Gill, Brendan. “The Current Cinema: Triumphs and Defeats.” The New Yorker, March 25, 1967.
10. Crowther, Bosley. “How Hath the Mighty?” New York Times, March 26, 1967.
11. Benton and Newman, “The New Sentimentality,” op. cit.
12. Loving Et Ux. v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, Decided June 12, 1967.
13. AI with Solo.
14. AI with Lederer.
15. AI with Solo.
16. Memo from Jack Warner to Walter MacEwen, March 9, 1967, and telegram from MacEwen to Warren Beatty, April 5, 1967, Warner Bros. Collection, USC.
17. Memo from Jack Warner to Walter MacEwen, May 15, 1967, Warner Bros. Collection, USC.
18. Ibid., April 14, 1967.
19. Letter from Walter MacEwen to Warren Beatty, November 2, 1966; memo from Peter Knecht to Walter MacEwen, May 31, 1967; memo from Walter MacEwen to Benjamin Kalmenson, May 31, 1967; telegram from Warren Beatty to Walter MacEwen, undated; and handwritten notes by Walter MacEwen, also undated, all from Warner Bros. Collection, USC.
20. AI with Ganis.
21. “Jack L. Warner Rolls ‘Finian’s Rainbow’; He ‘Starts Another Decade.’” Variety, June 28, 1967.
22. “World-Famous ‘Warner Bros.’ Name to Be Retained After 7A Merger; Jack L. Goes on Producing.” Variety, June 7, 1967; Francis Coppola’s commentary track on Finian’s Rainbow DVD (copyright 2005, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.).
23. AI with Penn.
24. Penn, “Making Waves,” op. cit.
25. AI with Penn.
26. AI with Beatty; Goldstein, “Blasts from the Past,” op. cit.
27. Gilliatt, Penelope. “The Current Cinema: The All-Right World.” The New Yorker, June 17, 1967.
28. Alpert, Hollis. “The Admirable Sidney.” Saturday Review, July 8, 1967.
29. “Poitier Redhot in TV Ratings.” Variety, April 19, 1967.
30. Barthel, “He Doesn’t Want to Be Sexless Sidney,” op. cit.
31. “ABC Makes Feature Deals with David, Nelson, Maybe Poitier.” Variety, June 14, 1967.
32. United Artists Pressbook for In the Heat of the Night, Jewison Collection, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
33. Letter from Norman Jewison to Fred Goldberg, Jewison Collection.
34. Ken Hughes, quoted in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (New York: Applause Books, 1997) by Roger Lewis, p. 205.
35. Woody Allen, quoted in Woody Allen: A Biography (Da Capo, 1991) by Eric Lax, pp. 222–223.
36. Wolf Mankowitz, quoted in Orson Welles: A Biography (New York: Crown, 1995) by Barbara Leaming, pp. 570–573.
37. “006 3/4.” Time, June 30, 1967.
38. Bart, Peter. “Sean Connery Vows He’s No Fan of James Bond’s.” New York Times, November 16, 1965.
39. Miller, Eugene L, Jr., and Edwin T. Arnold, eds. Robert Aldrich Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), p. 50. Originally printed in Sight and Sound (Winter 1968–1969).
40. Silver, Alain, and James Ursini, What Ever Happened to Robert Aldrich: His Life and His Films (New York: Limelight, 1995).
41. Miller and Arnold, Robert Aldrich Interviews, op. cit., p. 104. Originally printed in Movie (Winter 1976–1977).
42. Branch, Taylor, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 607.
43. Ibid., pp. 632–633.
44. Time, August 3, 1967.
45. Archival footage from American Masters: Sidney Poitier—One Bright Light. Directed by Lee Grant, written by Prudence Glass, produced by Mary Beth Yarrow and Glass (a production of Thirteen/WNET in association with Joseph Feury Productions, copyright 1999).
46. Lee Grant, on commentary track for In the Heat of the Night, op. cit.
47. Landry, Robert J. “Poitier: Negro Image-Maker—His ‘Know How’ over Rednecks.” Variety, July 26, 1967.
48. Robinson, Barry. “Press Junketing with Poitier and Steiger.” Asbury Park Evening Press, July 3, 1966.
49. Crowther, Bosley. “Screen: ‘In the Heat of the Night,’ A Racial Drama.” New York Times, August 3, 1967.
50. “A Kind of Love.” Time, August 11, 1967.
51. Schickel, Richard. “Two Pros in a Super Sleeper.” Life, July 28, 1967.
52. Kael, Pauline. “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” Harper’s (February 1969).
53. Sarris, Andrew. “The Inoffensive Hero.” In Film 67/68, op. cit., pp. 214–215. Originally printed in The Village Voice.
54. Gilliatt, Penelope. “The Current Cinema: Heated Bandwagon.” The New Yorker, August 5, 1967.
55. Mordden, Ethan. Medium Cool: The Movies of the 1960s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. 158.
56. Sheed, Wilfrid. “The Movie South.” In Film 67/68, op. cit., p. 220. Originally printed in Esquire.
57. “In the Heat of the Night.” New York Daily News, August 3, 1967.
58. Morgenstern, Joseph. “Red-neck and Scapegoat.” Newsweek, August 14, 1967.
59. Jewison Papers.
60. Sarris, “The Inoffensive Hero,” op. cit.
61. Ewers, Carolyn H. Sidney Poitier: The Long Journey (New York: Signet/New American Library, 1969).
62. Steiger, on Larry King Live, CNN, rebroadcast July 14, 2002.
63. AI with James.
64. Adler, Renata. “The Negro That Movies Overlook.” New York Times, March 3, 1968.
* Jewison’s relationship with the Mirisch Company was friendly but often tense; the original contract the company offered him to direct In the Heat of the Night had so many points that were objectionable to him that he didn’t officially sign the deal to make the movie until it had already been in theaters for a month. Jewison ultimately agreed to a salary of $200,000 plus a share of the profits.