CHAPTER 22
The first meeting of the newly installed board of John Tracy Clinic took place on the evening of November 18, 1943. A new demonstration nursery was several weeks into its thirty-six-week session and hot lunches were being prepared daily by a rotation of volunteer mothers. Spence was fighting off a cold, eager to get the last shots for A Guy Named Joe in the can, but Walt Disney, otherwise immersed in the production of war propaganda at his Burbank studio, was interested in seeing firsthand how the clinic worked. It was when Louise was showing him around a few days later that they came upon the kids during nap time.
“Don’t they have cots?” he asked.
“No,” Louise told him. “They just sleep on mats on the floor.”
The next day there were cots and, at Christmas time, a truckload of gifts—puppets and toys, all Disney-licensed, that could be used in teaching.
The service report at the February 1944 meeting was a succession of modest statistics: thirty-one children in the summer course, eight in nursery school, four in a weekly afternoon class. One hundred and seven families were enrolled in the correspondence course, twenty-five mothers were taking adult classes in child psychology and speech, some four hundred other families were assisted in some way via the mails. Granted its federal tax exemption status on June 19, 1944, the clinic had three full-time instructors. In February 1945 the original cottage was extended in the front, creating an annex and an entrance hall that displayed a map of the world on which colored pins marked all the places to which copies of the free correspondence course had been sent.
Collier’s devoted three pages to the clinic in its issue of July 14:
Little wonder the parents flock to this unique clinic with their handicapped offspring. They have heard how Mrs. Spencer Tracy, wife of the movie star, helped her born-deaf son, John, “to hear”—to find his normal place in everyday life through heightened observation, lip reading, and speech. John Tracy, now twenty, acts as natural and rugged as if he had been born with hearing. He drives his own station wagon through traffic, is a talented cartoonist, and plays tennis and polo. His training was no miracle. It was the result of long, patient years of faithful, sympathetic experimenting and persistence on the part of his mother. In gratitude, Mrs. Tracy now devotes her zeal and experience to developing this progressive clinic, in her son’s name, for other deaf children all over the country.
Pictures surrounding the text showed Louise serving lunch to a trio of curly-haired moppets; Miss Hattie Harrell, formerly of the Rochester School for the Deaf, holding a boy’s hand to her cheek as headphones amplify her voice; other instructors in group exercises as parents look on; and a lineup of giggling children arrayed along the rustic front porch of the clinic, some three, some four, one four and a half. Throughout, Louise preached the gospel of “normalcy,” the importance of treating the child as if he or she could hear. “He must be talked to and played with and must be shown that he is loved and wanted.” Though the annual cost of a family’s participation in the demonstration nursery program had been set at $950, Louise was able, by simplifying the sense-training material, to get the cost of the correspondence course down to fifty-five dollars. “Today there is a long waiting list of parents eager for the home training instruction of the Tracy Clinic,” the article concluded. “But they will have to wait until further facilities are available. Funds are urgently needed for more space, personnel, and material.”
The Collier’s piece brought a flood of new inquiries but no comparable flow of donations, and when Spence made the financial concessions for his return to the stage, the ever-increasing needs of the clinic could not have been far from his thoughts. In October, as the first troubled performances of The Rugged Path were taking place, John Tracy Clinic was granted the use of a second building on the SC campus, a small house next door to the original where two additional tutors could be located. That same month, a parents’ auxiliary was formed and Louise began taking on speaking engagements, spending long hours away from the ranch. The drive from Encino took nearly an hour, and with John now a full-time student at Pasadena Junior College, Susie was left largely to her own devices.
The Tracy property was surrounded by the alfalfa fields of the Ador Dairy Farm, and during the war an army camp was directly across the street. Susie was never bored at the ranch; there was always something to do and she never felt she was stuck there. She rode her chestnut mare, Missy, to Encino Elementary, and Hughie would be waiting for her every day after school. At home, Margaret Hunt, the Tracys’ cook-housekeeper, would have crackers and peanut butter and cold milk waiting. The closest businesses were on Ventura Boulevard, half a mile away, and Susie occasionally would go to a drugstore on Ventura to look through the movie magazines.
“She was a very happy, self-sufficient sort of child,” her mother said. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, I don’t need to worry about you.’ ” People sometimes assumed that Susie was neglected by her parents, given Louise’s relentless focus on her brother, but Susie could never remember feeling that way. When John was home, she’d go to his room and watch him get out his paper. Occasionally he’d take her and a friend to the movies. “Susie was a good lip reader,” Louise commented. “She once said, ‘I can lip read…,’ and I just looked at her. I said something without voice, and she told me exactly what I had said. She had watched him. John could always understand her, too. Susie always looked right at him when she talked.”
John had gone through a flirtation with hearing devices in the early forties, first the stationary Phipps-Unit, with which he could hear “pretty well,” then a Western Electric portable that enabled him to discern “low tones” from people up to five feet away. “Pretty soon, however, I got tired of the hearing aid. I didn’t care much to wear it. I thought it drove me crazy. It puzzled and annoyed me. It made me feel nervous and impatient. Soon, I got in the habit of not wearing it anymore.” The unit was so bulky it took a vest to hold it in place, and the battery alone was the size of a beer can. In April 1943 one of the Phipps-Units came home with John for a short while. “I could hear with it all right, but all I could distinguish was the lowness and highness of sounds … I tried my best to be patient when Mother insisted that I work with it. I just sat down and listened, that’s all. I followed Mother with sounds she made through a microphone. It seemed very difficult to me.”
He went on to work three days a week in a Beverly Hills studio, but after the summer of 1943 he stopped using amplification altogether. “Hearing sounds drives me nuts,” he said, “and that’s the truth. I cannot stand words. I like things when they are quiet and when they make me feel patient. Sounds annoy me. I should hear some to make better speech, but I feel it is too late to get into the habit of hearing speech or sounds. After all, I am happy and more comfortable the way things are—quiet.”
In April 1946 Helen Keller visited John Tracy Clinic in the company of her secretary, Polly Thomson. “Encourage your child’s desire to speak,” she urged the mothers on duty that morning. Asked whether blindness or deafness was the greater handicap, Keller, without hesitation, replied that being deaf was the greater handicap because the blind “had more contact with their fellow man.”
Tracy’s return to M-G-M was as likely motivated by money as disappointment in Sherwood’s play. There was general agreement among the critics in Washington, Boston, and New York that The Rugged Path was a personal triumph, albeit a qualified one. Yet the day after it opened on Broadway, Tracy advised Benny Thau that he wished to report back to the studio in ninety days, a condition of the leave-of-absence granted by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Despite the business the show was doing, appearing in it cost him well in excess of $150,000, and the most he could afford to give the Playwrights’ Company for something less than a masterpiece was three months. And even that, as it turned out, was too much. When he reported back to Culver City on February 4, 1946, he was immediately placed back on salary, even though the picture they had waiting for him couldn’t start until Kate had finished with a thriller called Undercurrent, which was then only three weeks into production.
Their next picture together, The Sea of Grass, had been in the pipeline since 1937, the year Conrad Richter’s lyrical tale of the changing Southwest was published by Knopf. The studio had it covered in galleys, the reader describing it as “the BEST story in its genre that I know of; it is beautiful, moving, dramatic, quick and subtle in turn, and has some of the most astounding characterizations to be found in any of the modern novels; acting it will be a privilege, directing and producing it a labor of love.”
Bud Lighton took an early interest, and the picture was earmarked for Tracy and Myrna Loy in the days immediately following the completion of Test Pilot. “Its Western setting and pioneer flavor, similar to my own background, promised the kind of role I’d always wanted to play,” Loy wrote. “They kept postponing it, however, and when they finally announced a starting date without informing me, I called Benny Thau and raised hell: ‘What happened? Who’s playing it?’ When he said, ‘Spence is doing it with Hepburn,’ I realized what had happened. ‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘that figures.’ I was mad as hell at Spence, at everyone.”
Pan Berman inherited the project, Lighton having moved to Fox, and an early script by Vincent Lawrence and Earl Paramore was turned over to Marguerite Roberts, who had done some uncredited work on Undercurrent. As usual, Kate involved herself in the writing process, and while Roberts found Tracy “marvelous to work with,” she disliked Hepburn’s intrusions: “I had worked with Hepburn on another picture, Dragon Seed. She frankly wasn’t one of my favorite people. I admire her, and think she’s a very interesting person, but she’s a snob.” Roberts chafed at the film’s message, that the “nesters” settling the land would only ruin it when the rains failed to come and their crops dried up. “The Tracy character affected respect for the natural state of things, the undisturbed grass. He opposed the sodbusters, who wanted land. I had the Hepburn character note that his love for the natural state coincided with his becoming a millionaire off that very state. In other words, was his attachment mystical or opportunistic? [Director Elia] Kazan would have none of my viewpoint, only Tracy’s.”
Kazan learned of Richter’s book while directing his first feature, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, under Lighton’s supervision at Fox. In New York, where he made his name staging The Skin of Our Teeth, Kazan had directed Dunnigan’s Daughter for the Theatre Guild and made an immediate impression on Lawrence Langner, who in turn commended him to Tracy and Hepburn. Assured a $2.5 million budget and an all-star cast, Kazan had visions of creating an epic American western after the fashion of John Ford. “It is,” he told the New York Times, “a fascinating and unusual love story with a psychological tinge.” The Times went on to report that the studio considered The Sea of Grass its most imposing “physical” production of the year, allocating nearly five months to production, while shooting some forty thousand feet of background footage and second-unit work on the plains of western Nebraska.
Tracy was carried a full sixteen weeks before starting the picture on May 27, 1946. He filled the time getting his affairs in order, having earned substantially less in 1945 than in any year since the mid-thirties. Carroll had proven useless as a business manager, and when Peggy Gough went to Belgium with the American Red Cross, Tracy turned his affairs over to her replacement, a tall, raven-haired paralegal named Dorothy Griffith. “Miss G.,” as she soon came to be known around the studio, had come to him through Frank Whitbeck, the salty West Coast promotions guru who had informally advised him for years. “Spencer was very bad at negotiating contracts or pictures to go in or stay out of,” said Robert M. W. Vogel, who managed the studio’s international operations, “and Whitbeck befriended him and was more or less his representative.”
Although he considered investments from time to time, Tracy hadn’t actually put money into anything other than annuities. He could never fully comprehend or justify the vast sums he was paid, and while he was openhanded about luxuries, he seemed most comfortable at the prospect of giving it all away. “I think I’m a pretty good businessman,” he once said, “but I haven’t got any consuming ambition to possess a lot of money. I’m one of those who believes that you can only sleep in one bed at a time, ride one horse, eat one meal, wear one suit of clothes.”
His attitude toward wealth made him an easy touch, and a complete stranger with a compelling story could easily walk away with fifty or a hundred dollars, often over Carroll’s strenuous objections. Once, Carroll remembered a petitioner who claimed he had worked for their late father in Milwaukee. He made some phone calls, asked some questions, became convinced the man was a phony, and told his brother as much. “Well, maybe there’s just a chance he did,” Spence said. “And if there’s any chance, I want to give him something for Dad’s sake.”
This was a man, Miss G. decided, who needed protecting. Early in her tenure, she and her new boss worked out a way of deflecting the endless appeals that came his way, the clinic having come to take up much of what might otherwise have gone elsewhere. “I think it’s possible,” she said, “that every charitable organization, at some time or another, approached him for support.”
Invariably an episode would begin with a call from Larry Keethe, Tracy’s ubiquitous wardrobe man, who would say, “The boss wants to see you.” On the set, Tracy would introduce her to a fund-raiser who had made it onto the lot, sometimes at his own invitation, sometimes at the invitation of a colleague or friend, and who had settled into one of the red leather lounges that lined his portable dressing room.
Mr. Tracy would say, “Miss G., how much money do we have in the till?” This meant honestly and for sure, “What’s left in our charitable fund?” Often I would start with a tentative, “You could possibly manage a few thousand …” He would ask, “Have we got five Gs?” or “Have we got ten Gs?” and, learning that we did, he would say, “Let’s write it.” I would return to my office with the full particulars and write the check and return it for his signature.
On the other hand, if he wasn’t about to contribute, he would say, “Miss Giannini, how much money do we have in the till?” This meant, “I don’t think I want to go along with this one,” and indicated that we play the scene. “Your charitable budget for the year is committed,” I’d reply, and this was usually accompanied by a tightening of the face of our audience of one. Then I would brightly offer my suggestion: “However, we could postpone the new altar you promised the Sisters of—” And this line would be interrupted by quiet outrage on the part of Mr. Tracy. “Miss Giannini,” he’d say, “are you suggesting that I renege on my promise to those wonderful nuns? Those dedicated women who spend their lives praying for good in this world?” And the fundraiser would suddenly look upon me with equal disapproval, as if I had suddenly assumed the head of Medusa. “Very well,” I’d say. “That’s the only suggestion I have, and Mr. Evans has been very firm about your commitments for the rest of the year.” (Ross Evans was our tax man.) Then Mr. Tracy would reach for a cigarette, my cue to leave and tell the assistant director to call him for a shot. I’d depart, and a few moments later the assistant would say, “We’re ready when you are, Mr. Tracy.” His Nibs would warmly shake the hand of his guest, regretting ruefully that he couldn’t help out “this time” and the fundraiser would leave knowing that Spencer Tracy was a fine man indeed and wondering how it was that he was stuck with such a horrible woman on his staff as Miss Giannini.
Where Miss Griffith occasionally did get into trouble was when she was pleading someone’s case for a couple of lines in a Tracy picture.
He was rather like a school for young actors on the Metro lot. Inasmuch as I kept them at bay, I also knew something about them, their small credits and abilities. I didn’t always try to help, but I did have my favorites, those I thought showed potential. An approach to Spencer Tracy was not easy. He always walked to the set, but never alone. Larry Keethe accompanied him or, sometimes, I walked with him and discussed business affairs. One did not accost a star of his magnitude, so the only way to try it was through me. If I thought someone capable, I would very often ask Mr. Tracy to give him a thought. One word from him to the director was all that was necessary. This aggravated him … superficially.
I frequently had to listen to a lengthy and well-played scene attesting to my incompetence. “Miss Griffith, what do I pay you for? You are paid to handle these demands without annoying me. I have all these problems … all these demands upon me … And you … What do you do? You come to me with every indigent actor on the lot …” Knowing very well I wouldn’t bother him with anyone who wasn’t a genuinely viable possibility.
I would take my leave with a “Very well, but he has—” whatever I thought he had, and more often than not, before the day ended, I would receive a call from Larry Keethe to come to the set. Mr. Tracy would have a few matters he wished attended to, and quite often it would end with, “Tell your newest protégé to see the assistant.” Which meant he had been unable to resist reaching out a hand to an aspiring actor or actress who deserved a chance.
As the start date for The Sea of Grass approached, Tracy’s indifference to the project became more pronounced. He had returned to M-G-M a heavier and older version of his former self, and where Louella Parsons could insist in her column that he had become “very handsome since his hair started turning gray,” all he could see in the mirror was a character man who, at forty-five years of age, looked a good ten years older. Having briefly met Tracy the previous year, Elia Kazan was anxious about “the lard around his middle.” Seeing the picture as a dust-blown backcountry story, he imagined its characters as lean and leathery, as wedded to the land as the cattle they grazed. His heart sank when he joined Tracy on Lot 4 to inspect two overfed geldings and choose one for him to ride in the picture: “He had not lost weight, he did not look like a Remington, he was not tight-waisted like the wranglers or even like Bud Lighton. Spencer looked … like the horses.”
Kazan knew he’d been sandbagged when he was asked to approve sketches for costumes that had already been fitted. Berman liked them, he was told, and there was a considerable move on to get the film into production. Hepburn alone had some twenty changes. “Looks to me,” said Kazan, “that every time she goes in to take a piss, she’ll come bouncing out of the can in a snazzy new outfit.” Designer Walter Plunkett, who had been dressing her since Christopher Strong, patiently explained: “She loves Spence, he’s the love of her life, and she wants him to think that on any given day she’s prettier than any other girl in the world.”
“I thought you meant in the movie,” Kazan said.
“The movie!” Plunkett erupted. “I’m talking about real life. Them! Is what matters!”
Soon Tracy had Kazan laughing at stories of how they did things at Metro, the attitudes of the producers in charge, the workings of the clattering assembly line that ground out the product. “At lunch,” Tracy related, “Mervyn LeRoy was raving about a book he’d bought. ‘It’s got everything,’ he said. ‘Surprise, great characters, an important theme, fine writing! But,’ he said, ‘I think we can lick it.’ Honest. That’s what he said!” And Kazan, spiritually, threw in the towel. “We both laughed and we were buddies, he and I, I his admirer, he my star, and I had no fight left in me. Friendship had defeated me.”
Undercurrent finished in early May, and Hepburn made a quick trip east to see her parents. Tracy stationed himself in Phoenix, where he occasionally went to paint for “occupational therapy”—dark, brooding desert landscapes, abstract to the point of being more about color and mood than representation, “just putting paint on cardboard,” as Louise characterized it, but producing, over the space of a few years, several paintings that were, in her judgment, “very unusual and very good.” Fanny Brice had gotten him started, sensing “a nervous time” and sending over a whole outfit—paint, oil, brushes, palette. Though he dismissed what he did as “daubing,” he was downright jovial by the time he got down to work on The Sea of Grass, explaining to Earl Wilson that he was just a supporting player in the picture and that Kate was the true star. “You want to come out and watch Her Highness? It’ll be very educational.”
On the set, Wilson observed Hepburn in slacks, a towel around her head, congenial at first, less so as she realized he wasn’t going to leave. (“Oh, are you still here?” she said after a costume change. “I thought we’d be able to avoid you.”) Tracy knew the press irritated her, and it amused him when he could get people like Wilson to linger. “I did a scene that will revolutionize the industry,” he began dryly, encouraging the columnist to stick around. “I walked over to a wagon and put a basket in it, and then I walked down the road. I did that whole gigantic scene without forgetting one thing. Of course, I didn’t have any lines. You do a scene like that 15 times and you get silly. Now you know why actors go nuts.” He went on to say that was why he wanted to get out of the movies entirely and go back to the stage.
Kazan was fond of multiple takes but made a calculated decision not to try and direct Tracy very much, knowing he would likely alienate his two stars without substantially improving the picture. “Tracy was great in take one,” he said, “okay in take two. About take four he began to go down, and by take six he was not very good. After take seven he just wouldn’t do any more. He’d say, ‘What do you want?’ ”
Kazan, observed actor Melvyn Douglas, seemed to want “bursts of energy and an undertone of malevolence” he simply couldn’t get from Tracy. “Spence projected a heavy, relaxed authority. He was wonderfully skillful but, finally, did not do what the director requested.” Giving up on him, Kazan found Hepburn more accepting, and his one great achievement on The Sea of Grass was the unusually restrained performance he managed to coax from her. “Spence and Hepburn were lovers, and she was very protective of him,” said Kazan. “She’d watch him shoot and say, ‘Isn’t Spence wonderful?’ And I’d think, ‘He’s only giving a tenth of what he’s got.’ In one scene, he was supposed to come in from the open plains where it was snowing and he’d take a little water, throw it on his face, and make an entrance. His shoes looked like they had just been shined. I never could get him to stretch himself.”
With director Elia Kazan, who, for myriad reasons, found The Sea of Grass a frustrating experience. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
When Tracy told Earl Wilson he wanted to get out of movies altogether and go back to the stage, he wasn’t just saying it for effect. Kate had committed to As You Like It for the Theatre Guild on the understanding that Tracy would also do something in the fall. In May, just as The Sea of Grass was getting under way, the Guild’s Lawrence Langner came west, where the decision was made to go ahead with the sets and the costumes. “Now Kate,” Langner urged, “don’t sell yourself into slavery for another five years when you can be supporting me and Spencer by working for us in Shakespeare. As soon as Spencer quits, I am going to set the two of you up in a wonderful company which will go to London and will be known as the ‘Old Trics’—the ‘Old Trics’ would be much better than the ‘Old Vics.’ ”
Laurence Olivier had brought the Old Vic to New York with a company that included Margaret Leighton, Ralph Richardson, and Miles Malleson, and Langner proposed a similar setup for Tracy and Hepburn. “Everyone here is talking about Laurence Olivier,” Langner said in a letter to Tracy on June 6, “and the reason isn’t because he gives any one special performance (except in the case of Oedipus), but because they are seeing him in four different parts, playing old men, middle-aged men, etc. No trick to any good actor, but the public has gone wild with enthusiasm. Please consider very seriously a proposition that—when your contract is up—you and Kate, with the Guild, form a repertory company in which you would play in four or five masterpieces and set the country on fire by bringing back some of the real old-time theatre.” Among the titles Langner proposed were Dodsworth, The Devil’s Disciple, and O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms. “Hope you will discuss this with Kate before she commits herself to another five with M-G-M. The Theatre Guild is willing, as part of this proposition, to form an independent pictures corporation to make one outstanding picture each year in which you and Kate appear and in which, in addition to receiving your salary, you would also both have a share on a capital gains basis, so that you would only be paying 25% tax to the government.”
Tracy mulled the proposition over, talked with Leo Morrison, and proposed to M-G-M that he go to a straight $110,000 per picture, drawing no salary between films as he was currently doing. An interoffice memo summarized his reasoning:
He stated that he does not want to feel under obligation to the studio, which he would be if he continued to accept compensation when he is not working. He also feels that he does not want to be placed in the position that he had been two or three times in the past when a question has arisen as to whether or not he will do a picture and Mr. Mannix has called his attention to the fact that he has been on salary. He stated that the studio will not be able to get five pictures every two years and, as a matter of fact, will get only three or four at the most. He is perfectly willing to be paid on the basis of the pictures he does, even though it will mean less compensation to him than under the present agreement.
M-G-M always resisted per-picture agreements, nurturing instead a dependency on the narcotic of a weekly paycheck. Benny Thau countered with an offer to cancel paragraph 26 of Tracy’s contract, which would mean that, were the agreement to be terminated, Tracy would not be obligated to repay any monies that he had received in excess of $110,000 per picture. The matter was allowed to lie dormant, and Tracy did not respond to Langner until July, when he apologized for not answering sooner and said that he was expecting to come east so they could “have a chat” around September 1. “The picture has been going very well,” he added. “Kazan lives up to your recommendation.” A week later, Guild records show he turned down Damien by Samoan playwright John Kneubuhl on the grounds that he “did not want to play another priest.”
What happened next is unclear, but in proposing to go east and work in partnership with Hepburn on the New York stage, Tracy was changing the dynamic of his twenty-three-year marriage to an unprecedented degree. Tina Gopadze Smith, Dorothy Griffith’s daughter, remembered her mother’s account of a conference in Louis B. Mayer’s office, sometime in the latter forties, in which Louise and, most probably, Spence participated (since it was Miss G.’s job to take down everything that got said). Was Mayer urging a reconciliation, as he so often did when the domestic lives of his players threatened the tranquillity and well-being of the studio? Or was he engineering a quiet separation, perhaps even a divorce, since one of the parties involved was Katharine Hepburn, one of his favorite people, proof positive, he once told his daughter Irene, that one could have “talent without temperament”?
The Tracy-Hepburn combination was a powerful draw at the box office, and it was generally known and acknowledged that Kate had played an important role in keeping Spence on an even keel. Louise, as the innocent party, would have to consent to a divorce under California law and agree to either adultery or extreme cruelty as specific grounds, thus risking adverse publicity that could affect Tracy’s standing with the public. Did Mayer offer the use of his personal attorney? Help with a monetary settlement? Money, perhaps, for the ongoing maintenance and expansion of the clinic? No record now exists of that meeting, and Tina Smith could only remember, by her mother’s account, what Louise said in shutting down the discussion: “I will be Mrs. Spencer Tracy until the day I die.”
Was the clinic a factor in Louise’s gravitational pull? Was it possible that, through the funding he provided, Spence had at last been given a way to respond to the deafness of their son that wasn’t born of guilt and self-recrimination, something that was so thoroughly redemptive that it was to be preserved and fostered at any cost? Never a strong proponent of marriage, Kate was philosophical, if not completely aware of what was happening. “I can’t live with Spence,” she told their friend Bill Self, “and he won’tlive with Louise.”
When The Sea of Grass wrapped on August 6, 1946, Tracy made a surprise announcement to Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times. “I think we should appear in a film about two years hence,” he said of the Tracy-Hepburn team,
and then I should play the father of Miss Hepburn. I can’t stay young and act romantic heroes forever. Actually, a critic in the east who praised very highly our work in various pictures together also indicated that he hoped the matching of our personalities would not be carried to the point where audiences might ever weary of us. Therefore, I believe that it is safer that we should rest on laurels gained, rather than try for new ones, and that probably Sea of Grass, which I believe will be a very great picture, should be the final one for a time. It has been a pleasure to work in various pictures with Miss Hepburn. Her honesty in her acting is a remarkable thing. She is the tops.
According to Schallert’s report, which was picked up by the wire services and carried nationally, Hepburn had agreed to a new term contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer “which still permits her to return to the stage.” Langner had advised so strongly against such a commitment that either Tracy, or money, or both were likely factors in her decision. Certainly the quality of the material wasn’t a major consideration; since Woman of the Year Hepburn had appeared in one troubled M-G-M production after another, and her next, A Love Story, in which she was to play Clara Schumann, would be yet another missed opportunity. When the contract was formally signed on September 15, 1946, it specified a term of three years at $4,792.33 a week, a bump in compensation of more than $1,200 a week from what she was paid for The Sea of Grass.
On August 29 Tracy responded to a note from Langner by saying that it seemed “impossible” to find out “anything definite regarding my plans for the full year” but that he was keeping at it and would know something shortly. Kate was going east for the month of September, and Tracy was due to start a six-week vacation himself, after which he was committed to Cass Timberlane. He was back in Los Angeles in time for a clinic board meeting on October 1—his seventh in the space of three years.
In August Louise had unveiled plans for a $500,000 fund-raising campaign to cover the cost of a new building to “meet the needs of the constantly expanding program.” The clinic also obtained the services of a full-time psychologist, Mrs. Alathena Smith, in order to offer psychological counseling, group therapy, and psychological testing for children—a big step in rounding out the program. Another meeting on the eighteenth further clarified the future included a wealth of new programs, extended outreach on an international level, and ongoing refinement of the JTC correspondence course. It was more than one man could ever hope to support, and fourteen new members were added to the board. It was time to bring the public, the community at large, into the grand scheme of what John Tracy Clinic was to become.
Spence took off for Arizona as Kate began filming Love Story1 at M-G-M, but was back before long and present on the lot for much of its production. “He would come on the set every morning,” recalled Paul Henreid, Hepburn’s costar on the picture, “say hello, and then, with a half-smile, ask me, ‘Is she behaving herself?’ Without smiling, I’d say, ‘Oh yes, Spence. She’s being marvelous.’
“ ‘Good, good.’ He would turn to Hepburn. ‘Now Kate, have you learned your lines?’ Rather demurely, she’d say, ‘Yes, dear.’ He’d go on: ‘Now don’t forget. Say the lines loud and clear. Don’t grin and make faces—just say the words.’ And, grinning at him like a child, she’d say, ‘Yes, Spence, I will.’ ”
Observing all this, Clarence Brown, who was directing the picture, once asked her, “Why the hell don’t you find a guy you can marry and raise a family? Otherwise, one of these days when you’re older you’ll be all alone.”
“Yes,” she replied, “and I’ll look back at all the fun I had.”
With the exception of a trailer for the American Cancer Society, Spencer Tracy was entirely offscreen for the year 1946 and his popularity with the public plummeted. End-of-year surveys placed him well out of the top ten, the Motion Picture Herald having fixed him at number twenty-two, behind Van Johnson, Bob Hope, Humphrey Bogart, Margaret O’Brien, Roy Rogers, and Cornel Wilde, among others. (Bing Crosby again came in first.) It was as if the results underscored the precarious situation in which Tracy and a number of his contemporaries now found themselves, slipping in the marketplace as newer, younger personalities moved up. Gable placed thirteenth, Bette Davis fifteenth, Claudette Colbert nineteenth in a tie with Gene Tierney. Mickey Rooney, who had equaled Crosby’s achievement by placing first for three consecutive years, failed to make the list at all.
M-G-M’s new year was awash in Technicolor and all-star casts, the few genuine vehicles on the schedule relegated to B-picture status, the studio settling into a new epoch as the leader in glossy musicals and little else. As a nod to the tastes of prewar audiences, there was still Andy Hardy, still Wallace Beery, still Lionel Barrymore and Robert Montgomery, Ann Sothern and Myrna Loy, but their appearances were fewer, their aging audiences now staying home more with the radio and, in a few cases, the TV set, leaving the neighborhood theaters to changing tastes and kids who wondered what the big deal was over someone like Gable. The Sea of Grass was tossed in with the other black-and-white features, a major attraction but not the event it might once have been. Set to open at Radio City Music Hall, its initial success was virtually assured, given the receptions accorded the three previous Tracy-Hepburn collaborations. The big question was whether Middle America would embrace a western so insistently artificial at a time when even Roy Rogers shot his pictures out of doors.
“I find my feeling for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn is a mixture of personal respect and professional regret,” Shirley O’Hara wrote for the New Republic.
I’ve admired them for years, and would still rather watch them than any other team on the screen, but in The Sea of Grass it seems wasteful to let two such good, attractive actors wander through a lavish production like thoroughbred somnambulists. Hepburn of the beautiful bones is more polished than ever; Tracy, though he is no longer a priest—here he is a colonel and what the press has called a Cattle Baron—is still playing Father Tracy and is getting more pensive and solemn and good every day. I think back to when he was just Spencer Tracy and an exciting actor, though I minded his always wearing a gray felt hat, and those days are like a noisy picnic remembered in church. His playing has always been on the quiet side, but now that former underacting seems like a wild romp in the sun. And yet I’m sure there is still fire and magnetism behind his strength. It must be some mistaken actor’s mold he has made for himself (or his reputation), and the story chosen because of it, and the awed direction, that give his performance a static quality.
In Los Angeles, Louise and Jane Feely (in town for a job interview) went to a sneak at Spence’s behest. “It was one of those performances that was not all great on his part,” Jane recounted. “Louise said to me, ‘This is her picture.’ I said, ‘Sure is.’ When we came home, the phone rang. She said, ‘Uh oh, there he is. That’s Spencer.’ On the phone she was a good hour. She had to answer all the questions—Which scene? What scene? What did you think? She was in the other room and I kept hearing her say, ‘Well, it was her picture, Spencer. You let her have it. It was HER picture.’ When she got off the telephone, I said, ‘Was he not so happy with it?’ She said, ‘Well, it’s his own fault. She walked off with scenes.’ ”
Remarkably, The Sea of Grass did more than $3 million domestically and another $1.5 million in foreign billings, making it the most popular, commercially, of all the Tracy-Hepburn features. It now remained for Tracy to see if he had the same kind of commercial appeal without Hepburn, given that he hadn’t made a film without her since 1944. Starkly subtitled “A Novel of Husbands and Wives,” Cass Timberlane, with its Book-of-the-Month Club cachet, its serialization in Cosmopolitan, and its rumored advance that ran well into six figures, seemed the perfect vehicle for an aging, albeit reluctant, matinee idol of Tracy’s stature, its sedate, flute-playing judge a meaty counterpoint to any one of a dozen of the industry’s livelier young actresses, a “half-tamed hawk of a girl, twenty-three or -four,” in author Sinclair Lewis’ words, “not tall, smiling, lively of eye …”
Metro paid $150,000 for the picture rights, Tracy involving himself in the development process to an unusual degree. As early as December 1946 he could be spotted in Superior Court alongside director George Sidney, dark glasses in place, observing a divorce action and drinking in the procedural atmosphere of the place. Treatments were commissioned from Sonya Levien and the novelist John O’Hara, who, according to producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr., wanted to “show Sinclair Lewis how the story should really have been written.” O’Hara produced a series of “character portraits” and managed to collaborate with Levien on a draft that was, said Hornblow, “such an unsuccessful screenplay (unsuccessful in terms of the way we all felt about it) that we couldn’t even produce it.” When Tracy returned from New York and the debacle of The Rugged Path, playwright Sidney Kingsley was at work on a script that ultimately “stank” in the collective opinion of Tracy, Hepburn, and Elia Kazan.
Before the completion of Sea of Grass, Donald Ogden Stewart was summoned to the coast, where he and his wife, Ella Winter, established themselves on a corner of Salka Viertel’s Santa Monica property, happily gardening in the Mediterranean climate and dining most Sundays at Kate’s rented place on Beverly Grove Drive. Stewart thought the job “one of the most interesting and difficult” of his Hollywood career, since Cass, as portrayed in the novel, wasn’t a very good part. “He falls in love with Jinny, a lively and mad younger girl from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ and marries her against the opposition of his upper-class neighbors on the exclusive Heights. O.K. so far, but not particularly original. And for the rest of the novel, Cass sits around with what in show business we call ‘egg on his face’ while Jinny takes over.” Stewart considered the problem and came up with a subplot, the kind of social content usually present in a Lewis book but somehow missing in the case of Cass Timberlane. “Cass was a judge, born into and surrounded by the upper class of his home town. Supposing that problem were to enter the picture? Supposing a judge had to fight for his judicial integrity and his self-respect against a danger of which he was only dimly aware—his affection for and belief in his best friends.”
Stewart’s work went a long way toward strengthening the character of Cass, but at the cost of leaving the character of Jinny underdeveloped, a point hit home in December when David Selznick refused the loan of Jennifer Jones for the role. Without Jones, Hornblow was at a loss over whom to cast in the part, having tested “virtually every young actress at the studio.” He told the New York Times he was prepared to delay the picture until the proper woman could be found, and soon Sonya Levien was back at work on the screenplay, charged with punching up the character of Jinny. When Stewart got wind that much of his material had been cut in favor of Levien’s new scenes, he was understandably miffed at being left out of the loop, communicating his upset to Hornblow through his wife, Ella. Filming began on March 29 with Lana Turner—George Sidney’s idea—in the part of Jinny and nobody particularly happy with the script or the way the various drafts had been stitched together like a patchwork quilt.
Production limped along for nearly two weeks, at which point agent Harold Hecht advised Stewart that Tracy was “evidently upset about [the] present script.” Two days later, Hecht informed his client that a letter from Arthur Hornblow was en route to him, asking that he return to California. “Tracy wants [you] to know that he feels all of it is [of] vital importance to him for you to do this and will regard it as [a] mark of your friendship for him.” In his letter, producer Hornblow explained that despite the fact that both he and Tracy liked Stewart’s script, it became clear after his departure for New York that “no likely actress for Jinny wanted any part of it.”
“Tracy,” said Ella Winter, “had refused to make a Judge-Meets-Girl picture with Lana Turner, and his refusal had been accepted as final by [the] producer and studio.” Getting back to the “Wargate matter”—the ethical dilemma that confronts Judge Timberlane as his marriage is crumbling—was no easy thing, as about a quarter of the picture had already been shot. Filming resumed with a greater sense of mission, if not necessarily the wherewithal to accomplish it, and Stewart’s changes, such as they were, came in the form of retakes about halfway through the course of production. “In the book,” said George Sidney, “the judge is supposed to be 41 but he acts 65. We’ve tried to straighten that out. The story is really about two people who haven’t sat down and thought out what their marriage means to them. Each has a different idea about it. The judge wants honesty, integrity, a marriage on his own terms. The girl wants freedom. She wants to go to New York, maybe to a cocktail party in the Waldorf Towers, all the things a small town girl dreams about.”
The son of an M-G-M executive, Sidney, thirty, had been around the studio all of his adult life, initially as a director of Our Gang comedies. “I’d played polo with Spence and he called me ‘Kid.’ He came to my office for the first conference, full of his usual doubts, and asked, ‘Kid, can you handle me?’ Getting the fix on a character was agony for him … But once we started, and he had found the motivation, he was marvelous.”
As with the previous picture, Tracy was surrounded by a cast of seasoned character people, among them Mary Astor, Albert Dekker, Margaret Lindsay, Rose Hobart, John Litel, Mona Barrie, Josephine Hutchinson, and John Alexander (who was known to both stage and screen audiences as the boisterous Teddy Brewster of Arsenic and Old Lace). From a publicity standpoint, the most fuss was made over Selena Royle, who had signed a term contract with M-G-M in 1943. Tracy had created a stir by coming onto the set of her first picture on the lot, Mrs. Parkington, and tellingSidney Skolsky she was “one of the few people, when I was in stock, who thought I might someday amount to something on the stage.” Apart from running into him at the studio, however, or into Louise at a premiere, Selena never saw either of them. Not knowing their situation at home, she was plainly bewildered by their seeming aloofness.
“I had pushed their baby’s perambulator along the streets of Brooklyn while we both were playing there,” she said. “We had worked together for months at a time, year after year. I had dined with them, they with me. We had shared a small amount of success together, and we always had been there to console when the going got tough for any one of us … I was never asked to their house, nor was my presence in Hollywood acknowledged in any way.”
Selena was in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, playing Phyllis Thaxter’s mother in the final minutes of the picture, and she was considered part of the M-G-M stock company when she was selected to play Louise Wargate in Cass Timberlane. It wasn’t a big part, and she wasn’t even sure at first if Spence knew she was in it.
“A huge cast of actors and extras were sitting around during one of the customary long waits while electricians work on the lights. Suddenly there occurred one of those complete silences which inexplicably descends on a large group of people … out of which Spence’s voice boomed over a microphone, ‘This is all your fault, Selena. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be driving a truck in Milwaukee and happy.’
“I replied that he might have been driving a truck, but he wouldn’t have been happy.”
Just four days into the run of The Rugged Path, another hotly anticipated show made its New York debut. State of the Union was the first new play in three years from the team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and only the second to follow Life With Father, the phenomenal Broadway stage hit that was still playing to capacity houses six years into its run. A sharp topical satire, State of the Union followed the presidential aspirations of one Grant Matthews, an idealistic and self-made industrialist who proves too wayward a candidate ever to win an election. Caught between a wife, a mistress, and a perceived duty to the nation, Matthews ultimately decides the price of public office is too great to suit his iconoclastic nature. As a commentary on the public mind-set of postwar America, it was everything The Rugged Path was not—slick, funny, popular with both critics and the public, and the winner of the 1945–46 Pulitzer Prize for drama. If Tracy ever peered around the corner from the stage entrance of the Plymouth Theatre and envied his friend Ralph Bellamy the jackpot he had so decidedly hit with the part of Matthews, he never let on, other than to openly covet the movie role when the rights were sold to Paramount in May 1946.
The playwrights were powerful enough to insert casting approval into their contract with the studio, and when first Gary Cooper, then Ray Milland proved out of reach, the property passed to Liberty Films, Inc., and the most ideal of all American directors to tackle the subject—the inestimable Frank Capra. Tracy campaigned for the part, and within a month of Capra’s involvement he was considered a lock, even as Liberty continued to dicker with M-G-M. “I’m getting old,” Tracy explained laconically, “and I’ve never done a picture with Capra.” Predictably, the sticking point became the price Metro would exact for the loan of one of its most valuable stars. As when Clark Gable was borrowed by Selznick for Gone With the Wind, the studio demanded the distribution rights to the picture in addition to a fee of $175,000. For its part, Paramount contributed the play and the services of Claudette Colbert. The net result from Tracy’s standpoint was the best role, the best material, and the best director he had had in years.
At first it was thought Cass Timberlane would be delayed in favor of State of the Union, but with Tracy on board, Capra undertook a complete rewrite of the script to strengthen the character of Matthews, who would no longer vacillate under the competing influences of the play’s supporting characters. The final shape of the picture owed as much to circumstance as design, Tracy’s own involvement, however ideal, being the direct result of the playwrights’ inability to deliver Gary Cooper and Paramount’s subsequent willingness to surrender the property. The secondary part of the wisecracking columnist Spike McManus, first assigned Robert Walker, went to Van Johnson when Walker fell ill, Johnson, Angela Lansbury, and Lewis Stone all being M-G-M contract players. Shooting commenced on September 29, 1947, so the film could be in theaters well before the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1948—a contractual stipulation as well as a commercial imperative. The only non-M-G-M personnel in the cast would be Adolphe Menjou and the aforementioned Colbert, who would be appearing opposite Tracy for the first time since Boom Town.
Tracy ordered six new suits for the picture—three predictably gray, three blue. (“Spence owns plenty of suits,” Larry Keethe observed, “but you can take my word there’s not one suit among them that isn’t blue, gray, or brown.”) The first days of production were given over to introductory scenes with Kay Thorndyke, the conniving daughter of old Sam Thorndyke, a dying newspaper baron, and McManus, their star employee.
Tracy joined the shoot on October 8, playing the first of several intimate scenes with twenty-one-year-old Angela Lansbury, an awkward circumstance given the nature of the role and Lansbury’s extreme youth. “We had a very tricky scene to play in which I was his mistress,” she remembered. “Spence understood that I was a very young woman who had been cast in this role of a woman probably fifteen years older than I was. And he instinctively knew my sense of not quite knowing how to play this scene with him, which was in fact almost a love scene. And he was extraordinarily sensitive to that fact and helped in every possible way he could to make me feel at ease and not have any sense of embarrassment.”
The quality of his cast was such that Capra effortlessly pulled ahead of schedule and was ready for Claudette Colbert a full week before her scheduled October 17 start date. The early call wasn’t a problem for Colbert, forty-four, but working after five o’clock was, the actress being so famously fastidious over the way she was photographed that she refused to show the right side of her face to the lens and reputedly knew more about staging and lighting than some of her cameramen. She had a brief confrontation with Capra in his office (“My doctor says I get too tired—”) and walked out on the picture when the director who guided her to her only Academy Award–winning performance refused to be limited to a seven-hour workday. “Oh my God!” blurted Sam Briskin, one of Capra’s partners. “Everybody’s on salary! Could cost us a fortune—”
Capra’s boldness came in part from the fact that he was several days ahead of schedule, but the replacement of Claudette Colbert with a star of equal magnitude was essential to keeping the picture on track. Briskin called L. B. Mayer, Eddie Mannix (who, according to Capra, cheered the decision), then Tracy himself, whose first reaction was to laugh. When the project first landed at M-G-M and Tracy was officially confirmed as its star, there was widespread speculation that Kate Hepburn would join the cast, since Colbert was presumed to have been left behind at Paramount. She was reported to have just arrived on the coast—this was March 18—to do a Screen Guild broadcast and prepare for Metro’s adaptation of the John P. Marquand novel B.F.’s Daughter, which was to be produced by Edwin Knopf.
Then something happened. In May, Hepburn garnered a lot of attention when she appeared at a rally for New Republic editor Henry Wallace at Los Angeles’ Gilmore Stadium. Wallace, the former vice president and future Progressive Party candidate for president, had been denied use of the Hollywood Bowl. At Gilmore, a venue arranged on short notice, he drew a crowd of 28,000, among them Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona, Edward G. Robinson, and Hedy Lamarr. Hepburn, dressed in a sweeping scarlet gown, struck out at the Thomas-Rankin committee investigating Hollywood in Congress and all but stole the show with fiery talk decrying an atmosphere of official intimidation toward the movie industry and the arts in general. “The artist since the beginning of time has always expressed the aspirations and dreams of his people,” she thundered. “Silence the artist and you have silenced the most articulate voice the people have.” She went on to denounce President Truman, Attorney General Tom Clark, and State Senator Jack B. Tenney, among others, as responsible for a “plot” to foist “thought control” on the “liberal and progressive people of America.”
“I was backstage because I had some involvement in the meeting,” Ring Lardner said, “and she seemed nervous just about speaking in public on politics, rather than nervous about endorsing Wallace … But she went ahead and made a very good speech.” Hepburn created such an indelible impression that the afternoon Hearst paper described a “scarlet robe, and it was plenty scarlet,” reflecting “in red” the “yogi’s [Wallace’s] philosophy.” George Stevens, who later positioned her politically as a “liberal New England conservative,” suggested her appearance that day was not so much out of support for Wallace or in service of Communist or socialist sympathies but simply because “she got mad when they wouldn’t let him use the Hollywood Bowl.” Hepburn herself always said that she was speaking against censorship, not particularly for Wallace, and that it was “the speech that almost ran me out of the business.” Nobody could remember exactly what Wallace said during his half-hour address, but the Progressive Citizens of America later claimed to have distributed more than three million copies of Hepburn’s talk, which was titled, aptly enough, “Thought Control.”
Unofficially branded as “pink,” Kate didn’t work at all that summer, and when Metro announced that she and Tracy would be teamed for another picture, Hedda Hopper took care to print a reader’s suggestion: “I hope Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn won’t be starred for the fifth time in Before the Sun Goes Down. Hepburn couldn’t stand being called ‘box-office poison’ twice.” It was then reported that Hepburn “had a real peeve on” because M-G-M gave the lead in B.F.’s Daughter to Barbara Stanwyck (who was presumably safer, politically, because she was known to be a Republican). Hepburn had, in fact, been idle nine months—people were reportedly throwing things at screens showing Song of Love—when Capra made the admittedly heated decision to let Colbert go her own way.
“What the hell happened?” asked Tracy as he took the director’s call. “Goddamn you, I’m going to report you to the Actors Guild.” Then he laughed: “You told that Frankie Froggie Colbert to go to hell, did you?”
Capra asked if he knew any actresses, any “friends” who weren’t working, and, as calculated as the question now seems, claimed to have absolutely no one in mind when Tracy responded, “The Madam! I’ve been rehearsing my part with her, she’s taking Colbert’s role, at home here.” Capra’s response: “My God, do you think she’d do it?” And Tracy’s reply: “I don’t know. She’s kind of nutty that way, about people being in trouble. She’s ‘theatre’ you know.”
Hepburn took the phone and, according to Capra, said, “Sure! What the hell? When do we start?” She then, as she later remembered it, called Colbert herself. “Claudette I knew,” she said, “and I called Claudette and I said, ‘You know, they’re just going to dump you and take me, because here I am and they’re paying me. And I don’t care what hours I work, and I think you’re wrong to say you have to quit.’ And she said, ‘Please, just do the part, because I …’ That’s how it happened.” Capra was amazed: “No contract, no talk of agents, money, billing—nothing. She worked day and night, all through the weekend, with the costume designer, Irene … I don’t know anybody in the business who wouldn’t have held us over a barrel for money—and we would have paid anything to save the picture.”
Colbert’s exit took place on a Friday, and Kate stepped into the role of Mary Matthews the following Monday, thus ending Spence’s moratorium on further Tracy-Hepburn pictures little more than a year after he first proclaimed it. The irony of Hepburn’s portrayal of the spurned wife with two children could not have been lost on those in the know, Lansbury’s Kay zeroing in on Grant in much the same way Hepburn had targeted Tracy. “We all knew,” Lansbury said, “but nobody ever said anything. In those days it wasn’t discussed. They were totally hand-in-glove, totally comfortable and unself-conscious about their relationship. She wasn’t the sort of woman that many men would be attracted to—the snugly, cuddly woman in the movies at that time. And yet because of her enormous affection and love for Spencer, she had the ability to subjugate this almost manly quality she had at times and become this wonderfully warm, irresistible woman.”
The first scene between Tracy and Hepburn was one in which the estranged couple must share a bedroom in Menjou’s “boarding house for political has-beens.” Lansbury has deliberately left her glasses on the nightstand. Mary finds them and starts transferring bedding to the floor, Grant protesting her apparent decision to sleep there until she crawls into the bed and leaves the boards to him. Dissolve to the two of them in semidarkness, Mary peering down at her estranged husband from atop the mattress, Grant pensively puffing a cigarette below. She wonders if she has lost him for good, asks him if he wants a divorce. He scratches the back of his neck thoughtfully, winces at the directness of the question.
“The world thinks I’m a very successful man—rich, influential, happy,” he says. “You know better, don’t you Mary? You know that I’m neither happy nor successful … not as a man, a husband, or a father. You wanna know something else? I’m glad I’m down here on the floor. That’s where I belong …”
Tracy was energized, engaged on State of the Union, tearing into the part of Matthews with renewed vigor and imagination. Similarly, Hepburn brought a deft balance of humor and pathos to the role of Mary, taking up the slack even as Capra, beset by business worries, grew distracted and oddly unsure of himself. “When Tracy and his ‘bag of bones’ played a scene,” said Capra, “cameras, lights, microphones, and written scripts ceased to exist. And the director did just what the crews and other actors did—sit, watch, and marvel.” Angela Lansbury saw it as a spiritual melding of two supremely talented people: “Their personalities as well as their talents were orchestrated so marvelously. I began to think of them as one person, really; I suppose most people did.”
Scarcely a week into Hepburn’s tenure on the picture, the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities got under way in Washington with windy testimony from Jack Warner, L. B. Mayer, and the Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand. There followed a host of “friendly” film industry witnesses, the first of which, director Sam Wood, fingered Hepburn as having appeared at a recent meeting—apparently referring to the event at Gilmore Stadium—at which “Hollywood Communists” had raised $87,000. The next day, Adolphe Menjou, the first of the big-name actors to take the stand, seconded much of what Wood had said, stopping short of directly accusing specific people of being Communists, but noting that many “acted” like Communists, among them John Cromwell, Paul Robeson, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Henreid, and Alexander Knox.
State of the Union (1948). (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy disapproved—as did Gable—of marquee names muddling around in politics (“Remember, it was an actor who shot Lincoln”), but Hepburn had no such qualms and promptly aligned herself with the Committee for the First Amendment, an ad hoc organization of Hollywood heavyweights that included Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, Eddie Cantor, Myrna Loy, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Rita Hayworth, and director William Wyler. The cornerstone of their collective effort to combat the grandstanding of Chairman J. Parnell Thomas and the eight members of his committee (which included Congressman Richard M. Nixon) was a broadside that characterized the investigation as an attempt to “smear” the industry and called the hearings “morally wrong” because “any investigation into the political beliefs of the individual is contrary to the basic principles of our democracy; any attempt to curb freedom of expression and to set arbitrary standards of Americanism is in itself disloyal to both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution.”
Menjou, who had been cast as the hard-boiled Conover, Capra’s Washington kingmaker in State of the Union, was affiliated with the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a rival group of virulent anti-Communists and right-wingers that counted John Wayne,George Murphy, Walt Disney, Ward Bond, and director Leo McCarey among its more outspoken members. The dapper old character actor, who had first worked with Hepburn in 1933’s Morning Glory, was regarded as something akin to a ticking time bomb on the Capra set. “Scratch do-gooders like Hepburn,” he was once heard to say, “and they’ll yell Pravda!” To which Tracy countered: “You scratch some members of the Hepburn clan and you’re liable to get an assful of buckshot.” Tracy tolerated Menjou largely by ignoring him, while Kate found him merely ridiculous. The atmosphere on the stage was tense but cordial, everyone seemingly committed to bringing in the picture on time and, if possible, under budget.
“Bob Thomas worked for the AP and he always did good stories on the stars,” Emily Torchia recalled.
Not gush, but he never went after them either. On State of the Union, Bob started to interview Adolphe Menjou and I thought, “Isn’t that nice?” because usually, you know, they just want the stars. And I didn’t hover, I walked away. The next day there was a terrible headline. Menjou had said something terrible about Miss Hepburn. You know, it was an awful time politically with McCarthy, and Menjou attacked her terribly. Oh, I almost lost my job. Mr. Strickling said, “How could you? How could you have walked away?”
“I can’t face them,” I said.
“Well, you have to,” he said, and he walked me down to the set. Miss Hepburn and Mr. Tracy, they were both so quick to say, “Emily had nothing to do with it.” And in that situation, Mr. Tracy never raised his voice.
Cass Timberlane opened at the Music Hall on November 6 and was a big hit with the matinee trade, the Armistice Day upsurge carrying it to an outstanding first week total of $145,000. Variety took its commercial appeal for granted, declaring Lana Turner’s itchy performance as Jinny Marshland “the surprise of the picture” and noting that Tracy was made to “look wooden by comparison.” Turner overshadowed Tracy in most of the reviews, turning the pulpy material into something of a breakout. Enthusiasm for her work in the picture drove domestic billings to nearly $4 million, making Cass Timberlane only marginally less successful than Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a remarkable circumstance given the film’s listless pace and its unconscionable length.
The West Coast opening came amid an unusual amount of fanfare. The Kappa Kappa Gamma Alumnae Association sponsored a benefit premiere at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre for John Tracy Clinic that included a short film explaining the clinic’s mission.
Listening Eyes was principally the work of Walt Disney, who funded the short for $12,000 and contributed its director, Larry Lansburgh. To control costs, students at the USC School of Cinema crewed and helped with sets, and the color stock was donated by Ansco. “He has been very much interested in our Clinic because he has known John since he was a little fellow and was on our original Board of Directors,” Louise said of Disney, “and yet it took him five years to get around to ‘allowing’ that maybe he could make a picture about us.”
Work began in June 1946, with Louise playing herself, advising the young mother of a deaf baby girl that her child isn’t ready yet for nursery school and that, besides, there is only room for twenty children in the program. However, Louise continues, “We have room for you now, Mrs. Henry.”
The storyline closely paralleled Louise’s own experience as a parent, the baby sleeping late, the mother trying to rouse her in her crib and then taking her to the doctor for an examination. Spence, of course, spoke the narration, and when he laments that the young Mrs. Henry will never hear her daughter say “Mother,” it mirrors his own comment from some twenty-two years earlier when he first learned that he himself was the parent of a deaf child.
Modest but professional, Listening Eyes did an exceptional job of explaining the clinic and its role in the lives of families with deaf and hearing-impaired children, and in the end Mrs. Henry “experiences a moment never to be forgotten” when, for the first time, little Betsy Henry does indeed form the word “Mother.”
The crowd at the Egyptian that night was composed mostly of industry types, Lana Turner on the arm of her future husband, millionaire socialite Henry J. “Bob” Topping, Jr., Louella Parsons holding court in the lobby, a generous representation of Metro brass and contract players, many fascinated at the prospect of seeing the Tracy family together onstage and hearing from a woman who had been out of the Hollywood swim for so long there were some people who assumed she was dead.
“Mr. Tracy never talked about his family,” said Emily Torchia, who handled publicity for the event. “It was very hard for him to talk about John. I’ll never forget that night. He got up and made the most moving speech, how proud he was of John, how proud he was of Louise’s work. It was the hardest thing for him to do, and he did it. It was a beautiful speech. Everyone was there, and there wasn’t a dry eye. I’ve never, never forgotten it. It was one of the most impressive moments of my career.”
1 Released as Song of Love (1947).