CHAPTER 27
That film … got more critical acclaim from the critics than any film I ever made in all the years,” said Larry Weingarten, reflecting upon the curious commercial fate of The Actress, “and we didn’t make enough to pay for the ushers in the theater … I like to think that that very week this picture was produced, color came into full bloom and CinemaScope. And we were black and white on a little screen.”
The industry was indeed awash with new technologies: widescreen, 3-D, stereophonic sound, and a whole host of new color processes, all employed with the intent of providing audiences with an entertainment experience they couldn’t get from television, where old movies were quickly becoming a programming staple. Dore Schary refused to be part of the panic, assuring a conference of exhibitors that “television will start to worry about us” if new pictures were good enough. “I have a hunch … people will ultimately accept television as something they can use when they choose to. I don’t believe that singing commercials, quiz shows, and 20-year-old potboilers will ever take the place of movies and other healthy diversions.”
It was an admirable stance in the spring of 1952, but by the following summer all bets were off, and even 3-D was no longer the grind house novelty it had been just a few months earlier. The Actress drew solid trade notices, Variety praising its “excellent word-of-mouth values,” and the film opened well at New York’s Trans-Lux 60th Street, a former newsreel emporium usually given over to British fare like The Holly and the Ivy and Tight Little Island. The bigger Broadway theaters were showcasing the bigger M-G-M releases—Mogambo, Torch Song, Lili, Julius Caesar. Tracy’s performance was warmly received, Bosley Crowther declaring it worthy of yet another Academy Award. “For the vitality that Mr. Tracy puts into this role of a poor but earnest father who is confused because his little girl is determined to become an actress is worth a bottle of vitamin pills. The sense that he gives of a good man, harassed with making ends meet and with all the other vague frustrations to which the domesticated male is heir, yapping about his difficulties but bearing his burdens honorably, is such as to give other humans the spirit and humor to bear their own.”
The Actress left the Trans-Lux after a respectable eight-week engagement, scarcely noticed amid the hoopla accompanying a record run for The Robe, which offered Jean Simmons in color and widescreen at the nearby Roxy. Left to fend for itself in an increasingly hostile market, the picture ended up posting a loss of nearly $1 million—a horrendous showing for a star of Tracy’s caliber. Weingarten felt the film lacked a happy ending and had wanted to “frame” the story with the successful Ruth in a wraparound, an idea Cukor opposed.
As Clinton Jones, flanked by Jean Simmons and Teresa Wright in The Actress, the film version of Ruth Gordon’s autobiographical play Years Ago. (SUSIE TRACY)
“Failure,” said Dore Schary, “is a more common occurrence than success, and most times, the reasons for failure are apparent—so you swallow and go on to the next effort. But The Actress was beautifully played, written, and directed, and was one of those failures that depress you. It’s like pitching a no-hitter but losing one to zero.”
Tracy arrived back in New York aboard the Queen Elizabeth on September 29, 1953, Hepburn following by air the next day. M-G-M had agreed to count The Old Man and the Sea as one of the pictures on Tracy’s contract, loaning him, in effect, to himself for a straight payment of $150,000. Production was set to begin in February 1954, provided Tracy could complete another picture for Metro in the interim. He had, however, rejected a screenplay for Bad Day at Honda, forcing a complete rewrite. And Digby, a sort of Flight to the Islands set in Scotland, wouldn’t be ready for production until the completion of Old Man. When 20th Century-Fox put in for him in October 1953, Tracy’s schedule was not only clear but, for once, he was eager to work.
In August, as Tracy was ailing in the south of France, Darryl Zanuck was spinning story ideas. At hand was a draft screenplay, a new version of House of Strangers set in the old west. At Sol Siegel’s behest, Richard Murphy had taken Philip Yordan’s screenplay for the earlier picture, which had been directed by Joe Mankiewicz, and transposed it with such fidelity that Zanuck feared they had “adhered too closely to some of the elements that made the original picture a box office disappointment even though it was a fine picture.”
A downbeat tale of family feuds and hatreds, its principal motivations were money and lust, things that, in Zanuck’s estimation, always produced “a sort of sickening feeling in the pit of the stomach.” To take the curse off it all, he proposed a racial divide: three older sons against a younger brother by a different mother—an Indian. “The boys are now only half brothers. Joe [the youngest] is only half-caste. Matt [the father] is the squaw man … I can see only Spencer Tracy as Matt. With contact lenses, Jeffrey Hunter would make a wonderful Joe. He is young and he has guts and he has high cheekbones. The other three brothers should be on the Irish side like Tracy.”
The deal for Broken Lance was set in mid-November, bringing Metro $250,000 for ten weeks. Astonished at the price, Tracy exacted $40,000 of the amount as a donation for the clinic. He then lay low in Los Angeles, speaking with Cukor mostly by telephone and scarcely communicating at all with the Kanins, who, by then, were situated in England. He was back in New York with Hepburn when the loan to Fox was announced to the press, the two of them spotted as they crept into a performance of Teahouse of the August Moon. Kate had committed to filming The Millionairess in England with Preston Sturges adapting and directing. It would put her in London at just about the time Zanuck’s western was set to begin, but with the Hemingway picture now delayed a year—until Tracy had finished out his M-G-M contract—they would likely have the summer together in Europe.
By Christmas, Tracy was in Palm Springs, polishing his riding skills and doing his best to drop some weight. Responding to a chatty New Year’s letter from the Kanins, he wired:
STARTED NEW YEAR RIGHT. WHOOPING COUGH. NOW DESERT TRY TO LEARN WHICH END HORSE TAKE MY PLACE. AS CUKOR QUOTE OLE WESTERN STAR ON TRAIL TO BARN UNQUOTE.
He was back in Los Angeles when Emily Torchia made a seemingly impossible bid for his attendance at the Golden Globes dinner, where he was a likely win as Best Actor for The Actress.
“Of course I’m not going,” he said gruffly.
“It’s very important,” she pleaded.
“I know. Howard Strickling told you to come down here and ask me.” He thought a moment. “Okay, I’ll go. IF you get yourself a date. And you get me a date … with Grace Kelly.”
He knew Clark Gable had been squiring the twenty-four-year-old actress around London. Having been nominated herself as Best Supporting Actress for Mogambo, Kelly was a good sport about it and went, though she declined Tracy’s invitation to go out for a drink afterward.1 “But he got so much pleasure out of teasing Clark Gable,” said Torchia. “ ‘I had a date with Grace Kelly!’ ”
That previous August, Tracy and Gable had reconnected in Paris, having not seen each other in nearly a year. They did the town, Tracy uncaring, for once, at the prospect of being seen in public. There was great camaraderie between them, and Gable had already made the decision not to re-sign with Metro, his well-known antipathy for Dore Schary being only one of the reasons. (“As far as M-G-M is concerned,” said Clarence Brown, “Dore Schary was the beginning of the end.”) The studio had offered Gable a new two-year contract but refused his demand for a percentage of the profits on his future pictures, something virtually all top-tier freelancers were getting. He resented never having gotten a piece of Gone With the Wind, which had grossed nearly $100 million, and was mad at the studio’s refusal to give him a 16mm print of the picture.
Tracy escorted Grace Kelly to the Golden Globes dinner in Santa Monica, 1954, but the actress declined an invitation to drinks afterward. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
“He was disgusted, upset, and angry,” said Howard Strickling, “and he wanted no part of M-G-M ever again.” Gable’s final day on the lot, when he posed for a few stills and cleaned out the remaining items in his dressing room (one of which was a framed Parnell poster), came on March 2, 1954. When he drove through the back gate for the last time, having firmly declined the offer of a farewell party, Tracy was on location near the Arizona border town of Nogales, making his first scenes for Broken Lance.
Zanuck had committed to the picture in a big way, giving it an all-star cast, a $2 million budget, and the full CinemaScope treatment. Originally paired opposite Tracy on a seven-week guarantee was Dolores Del Rio, returning to the American screen after an absence of twelve years.Richard Widmark was cast as the eldest of the Devereaux sons, Hugh O’Brien and Earl Holliman his younger brothers. And filling the roles of the young lovers in the film were Fox contract players Robert Wagner and Jean Peters. Wagner, in particular, was gaining in popularity, having appeared in a string of increasingly prominent pictures, the latest of which, Henry Hathaway’s $3 million production of Prince Valiant, was set for an April release.
“He saw me in a picture I did called Beneath the 12-Mile Reef,” Wagner recalled, “and said, ‘This kid would be great.’ ” Tracy wanted him for the role of Joe, the half-breed son of Matt and Señora Devereaux originally envisioned by Zanuck as going to Jeffrey Hunter. Wagner shook Tracy’s hand at the Golden Globes, thanking him for the boost and telling him how much he was looking forward to being in the picture.
“Well, I am too, son,” Tracy said.
“The first time I ever saw him,” Wagner continued,
was at Riviera, where he got hurt once playing polo. I was just a kid, and he got hit with the ball or something. I remember he was on the grass and all these guys were out there, and then he got up and got back on the horse and I thought, “Wow, is that great!”
I had a resistance to my being in the movies from my father, you know. He didn’t want me to go into the movie business. So when Spence saw me in this movie and asked me to be in Broken Lance with him, it was great because he put his arm around me and he said, “You can really go someplace.” And I was one of a hundred and fifty good-looking young guys with a lot of hair in Hollywood.
As a boy, Wagner had lived at the Bel Air Country Club, where he occasionally caddied for Clark Gable. “He was always a terrific guy. I told him I got a job with Spence: ‘Jesus, can you imagine? I am going to do a movie with Spencer Tracy.’ He said to me, ‘Grab a prop and keep moving, kid.’ ”
Counting unbilled bits, Wagner had appeared in twelve motion pictures by the time of Broken Lance and thought he knew something of screen acting.
The first scene I had with Spence, we were on location in Arizona and we had to ride up into this sequence. I don’t remember what the dialogue was, but he said something like, “Were they here? Where did they go?” This guy says, “They went down that way.” And Spence says, “Did you hear that?” And I say, “Yeah, they went that way I guess.”
He said, “What? What was that? Can you bring it up a little next time so I can hear the cue?” And we ride back the next time and I bring it up a little. [Afterward,] I said, “Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t think there were very many people who could underplay you.”
He said, “Come here.” And he’d get that sort of face. “Come here!” He had this portable dressing room, and [we went inside and he] shut the door and sat down. He said, “Do you really think you could underplay me? Do you really think you could? Because you could never underplay me. That is not the point. What are you thinking about that for? Why would you be thinking that you could underplay me? Why don’t you think about playing the scene and being honest in it and bringing something of yourself to it and taking all this other stuff out of the way? Why don’t you think about that instead of being a smartass son of a bitch and trying to underplay me?”
I could see he was really starting to get hot. I said, “Yes sir, Mr. Tracy. You are absolutely right, and thank you very much.” He said, “Kid, get out of here!” But the fact that he took the time to do that was a big thing.
Directing Broken Lance was Edward Dmytryk, a former cutter who had graduated from formula product at Paramount to the first wave of film noir at RKO. Known as one of the Hollywood Ten, Dmytryk had rebuilt his career after a stretch in prison (and a controversial appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee) with a series of pictures for producer Stanley Kramer, the last of which, The Caine Mutiny, was still awaiting release. For Broken Lance, Dmytryk peopled the Santa Cruz Valley with a cast and crew numbering 130 individuals, along with forty steers and twelve unusually spirited horses.
Tracy and Dmytryk got on famously, in part because the director recognized the level of effort his fifty-three-year-old star was putting into his work. “He’d agonize over everything. He was searching for the character’s key.” Finding himself in a character was never easy for Tracy, and a long drive at the end of a workday gave him time to ponder the seemingly endless problem of inhabiting another man’s skin. For accommodations, Tracy chose to alternate between the Arizona Inn in Tucson, seventy miles from where the Broken Lance company was based, and Pantano Ranch, Lew Douglas’ 100,000-acre spread some thirty miles north at Sonoita.
Dmytryk knew that Tracy had played polo but wasn’t aware that it had been a number of years since he had last been on a horse. Tracy noted that Clark Gable refused to ride on camera and that Gary Cooper had to be hoisted into the saddle and would only ride at a slow walk.2 “Spence did everything but say flatly that he didn’t want to ride, and I refused to take any hints. So, when the time came, he rode, and he rode extremely well—all of which added to the authenticity of the scenes.”
Settling in, Tracy briefly turned his attentions to Jean Peters—who was being wooed by Howard Hughes—and persuaded her to dine with him. Otherwise, he took his meals at the Douglas ranch or back in Tucson, where he attended Mass and frequently ate alone. Dolores Del Rio, her visa having been held up in Washington “pending investigation of her political affiliations,” was replaced by Katy Jurado, another Mexican actress, nineteen years her junior and in the international spotlight for a flashy supporting role in High Noon. Jurado arrived in Nogales on March 9 and stayed for the remainder of the location schedule, taking on a dour character part in lieu of the smoldering seductresses she frequently played in her native country.
Tracy’s death scene, shot on the last day out, went contrary to the calamitous symphony of thunder and horse’s hooves that Zanuck had once conceived, Matt quietly slipping off the saddle, having died without anyone even knowing it. “He got so pissed off,” remembered Hugh O’Brien, “because, not mentioning any names, a couple of people blew their lines. He said, ‘Take a close-up of me lying here, goddamn it, then shoot around it, because I’m not going to lie here in the hot sun for another two hours!’ ”
Location work wrapped on the thirteenth, and Tracy, fueled by a gigantic thermos of coffee, drove all night to get back to L.A., hitting town just after noon and dining at the ranch in Encino that same evening. The “St. Ives Roy Rogers” seemed fine, Cukor dutifully reported in a letter to Hepburn, adding they’d had some “ecstatic notes” from Zanuck with regard to the rushes. Though Tracy had dropped five pounds during his time in Arizona, he had little hope of keeping it off.
Metro was talking Highland Fling (the aforementioned Digby) as his next picture, and Tracy drove out to Culver City to confer with Larry Weingarten and director Ronald Neame. Neame’s droll comedy The Million Pound Note (Man with a Million in the United States) had garnered considerable attention for its use of Gregory Peck in what otherwise would have been an art house attraction. Tracy met the Englishman for lunch at Romanoff’s, where he gave him a small sampling of his disenchantment with the studio.
“I found him down-to-earth, personable, and honest,” Neame said. “He gave me a warning, though. ‘M-G-M is a tricky studio. It’s a dangerous machine. The executives think nothing of mowing people down. The person who’ll help you deal with them is Kate Hepburn. She’s in London, and I’ll ask her to speak with you.’ Once back home, I met with her at Claridge’s. She is a brutally frank, incredibly articulate, and vehement lady. She spoke against the studio system generally, and M-G-M specifically. Her advice on how to survive amongst their hierarchy was simply, ‘Stay away from them!’ ”
Production on Broken Lance resumed at Fox Hills on March 19, 1954, and Tracy expressed satisfaction at having gotten through the riding scenes with a minimum of fuss. “At first I had been diffident at working with Tracy,” Dmytryk said,
but as the film progressed, I found he was very receptive to changes of inference or emphasis. Once only he resisted a suggestion of mine, and in doing so exhibited what was one of his greatest talents. In studying a scene we were to do in a couple of days, I found one long speech that was rather stiffly written. I had reworked it until I felt it was more playable. “Look, Eddie,” Tracy said, “I’ve already learned the words. Why don’t you let me try them the way they are? If you don’t like it, I’ll look at your rewrite.” I agreed, and later we shot the scene. He hadn’t changed a word in the original speech, but he broke it up and played with it in such a way that it seemed the most natural scene in the world.
Dmytryk likened Tracy’s handling of dialogue to the phrasing of an accomplished jazz singer, taking a “leaden line” and making it shine like gold. “The odd thing was that he felt it was nothing special—that it was just something that every actor owed his art.”
Richard Widmark had declined to sign a new contract with Fox, and Zanuck retaliated by assigning him to Broken Lance, where he was accorded fourth billing after Tracy, Wagner, and Jean Peters.
I told Tracy I was trying to get out of the movie, but it had nothing to do with him. I told him, “You’re the greatest actor, and I’ve admired you since I was a babe in arms.” He understood completely. Strangely enough, a few weeks later, we were shooting a scene and I had nothing to do—just stand around. It was Spence’s scene; he was doing all the talking. I happened to be standing in the wrong place or something, and he looked up and said, “Who the fuck do you think is the star of this picture?” I said, “Oh, Spence, come on.” Then he got embarrassed. That’s the other side of Tracy. He could be very petty and egomaniacal.
Tracy was impressed when he learned that Sol Siegel, the line producer on Broken Lance, was the same man who had fired Eddie Dmytryk from Paramount in 1940. That it was the same Sol Siegel who wanted him for a picture at Fox thirteen years later gave Dmytryk a measure of “personal vindication” that made the offer of Broken Lance irresistible. So when the AP’s Bob Thomas visited the set, Tracy puckishly appropriated the story, suitably embellished, and claimed for the first time that he himself had been fired from Fox in 1935. There was nobody to contradict him—Thomas didn’t know any better, both Winnie Sheehan and Sidney Kent were dead, and Zanuck hadn’t yet arrived on the scene when Tracy made the move to Metro.
“But one thing pleased me about the whole affair,” Tracy said to Thomas. “At eight o’clock that night, my agent took me over to M-G-M to have a talk with Louis B. Mayer. At nine o’clock I was signed to a contract, and I’ve been there ever since.”
The column ran nationally, suggesting that Zanuck could have had Tracy in his stable of stars all along had his predecessors only behaved more judiciously. Perhaps more to the point were reports that Tracy would be leaving M-G-M at the end of his current contract.
“Will I sign again? I don’t know. At first I didn’t think I would because I didn’t think they wanted me. Nobody said anything about staying. I think that’s why a lot of actors leave. But we have started having talks, and something may come of it. I still have three pictures to make for them. After that, who knows?”
When Tracy left for New York and London on April 24, it was to meet up with Kate and prepare for the filming of Highland Fling, which was set to go at the end of June. Based on the book Digby by David Walker, the script was by Angus McPhail, whose Whiskey Galore was one of the comic gems to emerge from Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios. The settling of arrangements to shoot the film in Scotland coincided with the cancellation of The Millionairess, which, despite Hepburn’s participation and a “brilliant” screenplay from Preston Sturges, collapsed under its own weight.
She was back in New York when Tracy’s TWA flight touched down at Idlewild, and they met for an intimate dinner the next night at the Pierre. A pinched nerve—an old neck injury—was troubling him, and he needed three fillings in his teeth replaced. They dined with Laura Harding, Constance Collier, the Douglases (who were passing through town), the Leland Haywards, Irene Selznick. Tracy filled the time between meals and doctor appointments watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV.
In London they met up with the Kanins, the Don Stewarts, George Cukor (whose M-G-M contract would soon be up), the Douglases (again), Bobby Helpmann, and Michael Benthall. Tracy’s guests drank freely around him; one night with the Stewarts, he noted Guinness Stout and Ale in his book with some big question marks following the entry. Two nights later, in the same company, he drew a picture of a bottle of Dubonnet on the page. Once with Kate, Helpmann, and Benthall, the party collectively killed a quart of scotch, though if Tracy personally had any, he didn’t make a note of it. Sleeping was difficult—one night he managed barely an hour—and he upped his intake of Seconal capsules to as many as four a night.
He stayed at Claridge’s, Hepburn around the corner at the Connaught. They made no show of their time together but neither could they count on Howard Strickling’s stifling of the press as they had in California. Their behavior patterns were largely dictated by Hepburn’s management of the circumstances. “She once told us that she and Tracy had never spent the night together under the same roof,” remembered Sandy Sturges, who was in town with her husband Preston and their young son. Kate maintained it was Tracy’s tossing and turning that was, at least in part, responsible: “I think Spencer found life very difficult and I found him very fascinating. So he couldn’t sleep. Well, I don’t want to sleep in a bed with someone who can’t sleep.”
Eddie Dmytryk, who was in London making a picture for producer David Lewis, observed their routine:
On our first evening, Tracy, Hepburn, Ambassador Douglas (whom I had met in Arizona), and I had dinner at an excellent Italian restaurant in Soho. We dined well and stayed late, then walked back to the Claridge, where Spence and I were staying. On arriving at the hotel, Douglas excused himself, and Spence went up to his room while I took Miss Hepburn around to the tradesman’s entrance at the rear of the building.3 We took the freight elevator up to Tracy’s floor (the operator knew her well) and joined Spence in his suite. There Katy made coffee for him and we chatted until it was time for her to say good night. Again, I escorted her to the freight elevator, through the rear entrance, and a block or so down the street to the Connaught, where she was staying.
On May 30, Tracy went to Mass and took a long walk through London on his own. Sometime during the course of the day, he discovered that The People, a Sunday tabloid with a circulation in excess of five million, had devoted half a page to an article with the following headline: “For 12 years they’ve kept Hollywood’s gossips at bay—Now LOGAN GOURLAY reveals the secret romance of Spencer and Katie.”
Veiled references to the relationship from American columnists—Sheilah Graham, Winchell, Kilgallen in particular—stretched back to Woman of the Year, but never before had a mass-circulation publication so blatantly fingered them.
For more than 12 years they have succeeded in remaining “just friends, that’s all, just friends” though it may not always look that way [Gourlay wrote]. Indeed, there are all the signs of the usual Hollywood affair. They have popped up together in several of the world’s capitals. At the moment they are here in London, not entirely by coincidence. In 1952, when she was appearing in The Millionairess on the London stage, he flew over from America. Each night he had a box reserved at the theatre. Each night he sent her a bouquet. While Hepburn was filming The African Queen here, Tracy turned up conveniently for a holiday. Yet this is the first time the newspaper spotlight has been turned on their relationship. How have they kept out of the headlines all this time? One answer is—discretion.
Gourlay went on to skirt the onerous English libel laws by branding the relationship “a genuine platonic friendship” while letting the tone and substance of the article speak for themselves. There were a few howlers—Gourlay had Hepburn entering into three separate marriages, the second with Howard Hughes—but most of the observational details were accurate.
Throughout the years they have remained reticent, shunning publicity. When I met him last year in Hollywood, all he would say was: “Yes, I know Katie very well.” She has always restricted herself publicly to saying that “Spencer is one of my closest friends.” (On less public occasions she calls him “Spence.”) The other night on one of their few public appearances together in London during their current visit, I saw them leaving one of the Mayfair clubs. She had to be helped into the car, probably because she was wearing an evening gown instead of her usual slacks. Tracy managed to do it in a gallant—but brotherly—way, although he is suffering from a twisted arm nerve at the moment. It’s fortunate that Hepburn is around to solace him—in a purely sisterly way, of course.
Tracy dined alone at Claridge’s that night, downing three bottles of Guinness and tossing four Seconals in after them. “[F]or din[ner] Claridge’s—Helpmann!! and Hepburn!!” he noted the next evening. “No grog.” On June 3 he learned from Bert Allenberg that Highland Fling had been called off. Dore Schary followed up with a phone call, saying only that the picture was off “for this year” and that he would like to start Bad Day at Honda—retitled Bad Day at Black Rock—on July 15. In its thirtieth year as a production entity, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was reducing its feature film output by 40 percent. “Years ago, every picture made money,” Eddie Mannix explained. “Today every picture is a big gamble—but if you hit the jackpot you make a lot more.”
Tracy lingered in England, not only because Hepburn had committed to a film in Italy—Time of the Cuckoo for director David Lean—but because his cousin Jane was in Ireland visiting family and would soon be making her way to England. Jane’s mother, Spence’s aunt Jenny, had always maintained that she married her late husband because he said that he’d take her to Ireland. But then, of course, he never did.
“I was to go to London when I finished in Ireland,” Jane said,
because I had a cousin who lived there. I also had a very dear friend from Seattle who was working for the Air Force and lived in London, so I had two places to go where I wouldn’t be a burden or have to be put up by him. First we went in as a group, May and Donald [my cousins] and I, to have dinner at Claridge’s with him. Then I went to stay with my friend Phyllis for two or three days, and then Phyllis and I had dinner with him, and there was this young man whose name I can’t remember who was sort of the liaison for the studio. (He was the person who chauffeured him around.) [Spencer] asked for ice cream for dessert. Everybody else had a drink, but, of course, he didn’t. He said, “I own the third floor of Claridge’s and they don’t have any chocolate ice cream.”
I sensed how much he was annoyed or didn’t want people that he didn’t know coming up and tapping him on the shoulder. He couldn’t understand why this obsession. I think the idea of celebrity just appalled him. The fact that he was one bothered him. It didn’t amount to much in the long run because, I think, he was beginning, maybe a little bit at that time, to understand himself. Why he was there and, you know, what his life was about. I remember I thought at the time that he seemed as if he had worked so hard, and yet he didn’t feel that he had accomplished a great deal. I think that having a little bit of power over what he did was also something he wanted desperately. He knew I did a fair amount of reading and he said, “If you read anything let me know. We”—he would always say “we”—“need some ideas, we need some scripts, we need some writing that is decent.” He was telling us about Bad Day. He told us about the train that comes into this barren little town. And the man who gets off. We all said, “And then what happens?” And he said, “See the picture!” That was the one he was about to do.
And then, when Phyllis went home, we had another visit, and this man left so that he and I could have a private visit. We talked about my mother and about what a great gift this had been for me and for her and about little quirks about people in Ireland and my own family and how much we had meant to one another over the years. He said he envied me my Irish experience. He couldn’t get over the little things that I told him had happened there. The smile would just stay on his face, and he would just laugh and laugh of the various personalities and the people and the reception I got. I said to him, “Someday I may need you.” And he said, “If you do, you just call.” And he knew what I meant. We said goodbye, and that was that until the next year.
There was never any recognition of the fact that there was a Katharine Hepburn or that he was living away from home. It certainly was known, but I think my mother just simply did not accept it, and, of course, I didn’t either. I often wonder why in the world I didn’t think of it at the time, but my friend did. Phyllis knew it. She said, “Well, everybody knows.” And, of course, I said, “Yeah, well, so she’s here. Don’t ask me to introduce you!”
On July 1, Tracy rode with Kate to Southampton and boarded the Queen Mary. On the crossing with him were Benny Thau, Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, and the evangelist Billy Graham. The voyage was smooth, the weather warm and sunny. In New York he caught a TWA sleeper for Los Angeles, arriving back in the midst of a record heat wave.
Temperature fluctuations had come to bother him terribly, as did weather variations of almost any sort. He was now fifty-four years old—the age at which his father had died—and he was convinced he would not live much longer. Fixating on the Hemingway project, the words “Old Man” struck him as an apt label, and he used it constantly. He was, Leland Hayward said, “counting the weeks” until he could begin work on the picture.
There were now two screenwriters working on the project independently: in Europe, Hemingway had chosen Peter Viertel, John Huston’s frequent collaborator, while Hayward had selected Paul Osborn, an idea Tracy hailed as “brilliant.” They were still planning to shoot the film over the spring and summer of 1955, but now Hayward had two other major pictures to make: Mister Roberts, during which he was contending with director Josh Logan’s nervous breakdown, and The Spirit of St. Louis, the story of Charles Lindbergh’s history-making flight across the Atlantic.
The basis for Bad Day at Black Rock was a 1947 magazine story by Howard Breslin titled “Bad Time at Honda.” When actor-writer Don McGuire brought it to M-G-M in 1953, it was with the idea that he would adapt it to the screen. McGuire had been working in tandem with directorJoseph Pevney at Universal-International, his best-known writing credit being the bizarrely fascinating Frank Sinatra vehicle Meet Danny Wilson. He took a crack at a screenplay, reportedly on spec, and though Dore Schary didn’t care for McGuire’s take on the material, the story appealed to the moralist in him.
Schary paid off McGuire, acquiring the underlying rights, and assigned the project to screenwriter Millard Kaufman, whose Take the High Ground was one of the production chief’s personal productions for the 1953–54 season. It didn’t seem like obvious screen material for Spencer Tracy, its hero being about thirty-five and a former platoon leader, but Schary almost immediately saw Tracy in the role of John J. Macreedy, a “granite-like wedge of a man” who had about him an air of “monumental dependability, self-confidence, and quiet humor.” As Schary’s daughter Jill wrote in 1963: “Daddy loves all stories about disastrous problems that are overcome. One of the major characters must be A Decent Human Being. To Daddy, the Decent Human Being looks like Spencer Tracy.”
“Dore,” said Millard Kaufman, “liked the idea of the persecution of the Japanese-Americans in World War II because he was a bit enraged by it, and so was I. So he asked me if I wanted to do it and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he gave me this thing.”
Once Kaufman began moving in the right direction, Schary re-teamed him with his High Ground director, Richard Brooks, and made the producer his newly appointed editorial executive, Charles Schnee. Early on came the matter of the title: John Wayne had just come out with a picture called Hondo, and they feared that calling their film Bad Day at Honda would confuse filmgoers into thinking they had already seen it. Kaufman’s first incomplete draft of the screenplay was titled Bad Day at Parma, a title that pleased no one. Then Kaufman, while location scouting in Arizona, came upon a post office and gas station collectively known as Black Rock. “So I called Schary and said, ‘Why don’t we call it Black Rock? And do it in California?’ ”
The first full version of Bad Day at Black Rock was ready for review by the middle of September. In a story conference, Schary suggested opening with a narration and dictated other economies in storytelling. “Let’s give him a bad arm,” he said of Macreedy. “Nobody can resist playing a cripple.” He wanted the porter in the opening shot to offer to help Macreedy with his suitcase, so that Macreedy could insist on carrying it himself.
“You can’t really write a screenplay for an actor,” Kaufman observed, “because actors don’t even have the average of, say, a ballplayer who is a good hitter. If you hit the ball once at three times at bat, you are worth a fortune. An actor will interpret something and decide he wants to do it once in twenty times if he’s a star—that is, a guy in demand. So, no, I wasn’t figuring on Tracy, and anyway … I wasn’t really interested in him. I thought he was too old. [The character] was a platoon leader. I was an old platoon leader in the Marine Corps and I was twenty-five. Most of the kids in my outfit were not old enough to vote.”
Kaufman and Brooks, himself a novelist and screenwriter, went back to the director’s office to begin work on a revision. “We were only into it about ten minutes,” Kaufman remembered,
when Brooks, who was in a slow burn for either being assigned to this or because he said he totally disapproved of it and didn’t like the scene, or whatever the reason, suddenly picked up the phone and dialed. I heard him say, “Spence, this is Richard. Mill and I are working on this thing, but don’t expect anything much because it’s a piece of shit.” So he hung up and I said, “What are you doing??” And before he could answer, the phone rings and it’s Schary. He says, “Get up to my office immediately.”
Tracy had just called and told him that the director said that what we are working on for him—and him alone—is “a piece of shit.” So we go up to Dore’s office, and attending the meeting along with Schary and Herman Hoffman, who is Dore’s assistant, is Brooks, myself, and Charlie Schnee … And Charlie, when he realizes from Dore what has happened, challenges his director, who is twice his size, to step outside. He wants to hit him. Spencer comes in and Dore says, “Look, let me tell you the story.” And he starts in on some really dumb idea. He was trying his best, and I found out later that all this encouragement was because they had a play-or-pay deal with Tracy. So they were doing anything to keep him. [Tracy] was really very much a presence, and he was listening … Dore spins the story, making it up as he goes along, and it is rather silly and infantile—not infantile, adolescent. It was kind of a modern western theme, and I thought, “Oh boy, we are really in trouble.” And we were. Very calmly, Spencer said, “There are people who”—and this is a paraphrase, I never wrote it down—“consider me possibly the best actor in America. So why are you giving me this shit?” And he walked out.
Now Dore, as I say, did not do a very smart thing, but he had to do something. Later he did something that was very, very astute and that was this: When I finished the screenplay, he sent a messenger with the thing to Spencer with a note saying, “We have Alan Ladd to play the part. However, this was written for you and we thought you might like to take a look at it.” In about two hours, Spencer called back and said, “Get rid of Alan Ladd. I want to do it.” So we got him back.
Kaufman’s revision, carrying the alternate title Day of Reckoning, was dated November 4, 1953. “We simplified it and gave it the core,” Schary said. “I felt always, too, that in the original there was something lacking in the man’s point of view. I felt there was no real reason in the screenplay why this man did particularly what he did. He just came into the town. There seemed to be no reason for him beyond making this gesture [of delivering a medal to the Japanese-born father of a soldier in his platoon]. I felt that there had to be a deeper psychological root which perhaps would pay off for us. So then I had the notion—it was my idea—to make him crippled in one arm, so that he came to this town with a sense of no longer being able to function, hating what happened to him.”
The script went to New York, where Nicholas Schenck took it to be another of Schary’s pricey morality tales—a dated story of antique prejudices—and said he didn’t think Schary should do it. Within days, an item in the Hollywood Reporter indicated that the film was being put off “indefinitely.”
“The quarrel,” said Schary, “was healed finally by Mr. Schenck saying he’d let me make the picture. He wouldn’t oppose it. The whole argument took place during the time when I was having this whole series of problems about my attitudes toward the job, and I certainly said—and I felt it very strongly—that if I had to fight to make this picture, there was no point in staying around.”
In January 1954 Tracy agreed to do the film after Highland Fling but was never completely on board. “I think his opinion may have been colored by some people at the studio who felt it would be a very unsuccessful picture,” Schary suggested.4 “We then spoke again [in April] and he said, ‘What do you really think will happen with this picture?’ I said, ‘Spence, this is not a twelve-million-dollar picture. But if it’s successful, if we do it well and it comes off, it’s the kind of picture that will receive perhaps the penetration of Crossfire5 and, if you’re good in it, I think your chances for recognition are wonderful in it.’ Well, he didn’t know. So he left very undecided that day. There were some things about the script that bothered and disturbed him … In the beginning he was not enthusiastic.”
Tracy was in London when Kaufman’s final draft, eliminating the opening narration, was okayed for production. It would be a couple of weeks before he learned that Highland Fling had been canceled and that Bad Day had been moved up to a July 15 start date with Vincente Minnelli directing. To Schary’s mind, Minnelli had the advantage of having made two pictures with Tracy. He was, however, just coming off the demanding musical fantasy Brigadoon and was reluctant to take it. John Sturges signed on with scarcely a month’s notice and quickly saw the opportunities in marrying the sweep of widescreen with the desolate stretch of wreckage known as Black Rock.
“The people at Metro didn’t really have any faith in CinemaScope or the concept of widescreen,” Sturges said.
They were enamored of 3-D, which to me was the passing fancy—not widescreen, which was obviously the picture of the future. So then word came back from New York: “Make one in widescreen. They’re doing business.” So I rushed up and said, “Now with the orders from New York, let me make one.” They said, “You don’t want to make this one—there’s nobody in it.” I said, “What’s that got to do with it?” Well, to them, if you had widescreen, that meant thousands of extras, thousands of togas, amphitheaters with Christians being mauled by lions, and so on. They said, “What are you going to do with all that space?” I said, “Well, the idea of a man, Tracy, in a black suit standing against this empty space. Doesn’t that tell you something? Isn’t that better the bigger the screen?”
Sturges envisioned a panorama of complete isolation, a place where a handful of people could hold a grim secret between them. He had, said J. J. Cohn, “an idea that it ought to be done on location. Dore turned to me and said, ‘What do you think, Joe?’ I said, ‘Well, I think we can do it on lot number three, but I don’t think it would be too much of a difference to shoot on location. Why not let John Sturges go and pick a location, then we’ll figure the cost.’ So John Sturges went out and, I think, [selected] Lone Pine, if I remember rightly.”
It was indeed Lone Pine, some two hundred miles due north of Los Angeles, where Greed, Gunga Din, High Sierra, and countless B-westerns had been filmed and where every angle offered a fresh expanse of the rugged Owens Valley. They found a spur on an old Southern Pacific easement that could, with care, support the modern streamliner that delivers Macreedy to Black Rock and sent a crew up to build a cluster of wind-worn buildings, a task that took all of eleven days.
According to Schary, Tracy appeared in his office one day toward the start of production. “Kid, you can get yourself a new boy,” he said. “I’m not going to do the movie.” This came as no surprise to Schary, who had grown used to Tracy’s vacillations. Mannix was in talks with Bert Allenberg and the William Morris office over a new three-year term for Tracy, and Schary may have interpreted this particular maneuver as a negotiating tactic. Tracy had, however, been up all night convincing himself he wasn’t up to the job—that he hadn’t prepared enough, that he wasn’t going to be good enough—for, as his datebook shows, he was awake until 5 a.m. and only able to sleep with the aid of four and three-quarters Seconal capsules.
“Okay,” said Schary.
Tracy, he recalled, seemed surprised. “You mean it’s okay? Really?”
“Sure. I was supposed to make only twenty or twenty-two pictures this year. It won’t make a fuss if I lose one.” Schary then advised his recalcitrant star that Nick Schenck might well insist on suing him to recover the costs incurred in the run-up to the picture—sets and cast in particular—and estimated the total at $480,000.
Tracy backed off, but not before eliciting a promise from Schary that he would make the dusty trip north to visit the set. The following week, John Sturges had his first and only conference with Tracy regarding the picture: “I anticipated various approaches to ‘Why can’t we do this in the studio?’ and, sure enough, they occurred. I talked him out of them. He said, ‘Well, you don’t want [the heat] to affect the acting, do you?’ I said, ‘Spence, you’re not going to tell me you can’t act in hot weather.’ And he laughed and he said, ‘I guess I’ll forget the rest of my speech.’ He wanted to build the set on the back lot.”
Tracy went shopping for clothes at Rothschild’s, where he purchased a plain gray suit to wear in the picture. “He hardly had it altered,” said Millard Kaufman, “because he wanted it to look like [it belonged on] a guy that just got out of the Army. And it did. It didn’t really fit him the way that Gregory Peck, for example, would have had a suit fit.” Sturges recalled him discussing the clothes: “He said, ‘I figure [Macreedy’s] from the east, he’ll wear a hat, okay?’ And I said, ‘Sure, you can use [it] in the sun, the shadows, you know—for looks.’ He said, ‘Don’t think I won’t.’ And [he] showed up in that and it looked great.”
On the morning of Sunday, July 18, 1954, Tracy set out for the western edge of Death Valley, where the temperature was one hundred degrees and a room awaited him at the Frontier Motel. John Sturges had assembled a stellar cast in the brief time allotted him. The role of Reno Smith, Macreedy’s nemesis in the picture, was filled by Robert Ryan, a human counterpart to the weathered surroundings of Black Rock. M-G-M contract player Anne Francis would be Liz Wirth, the solitary girl in the cast, John Ericson her timid, ineffectual brother Pete. Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, Ernest Borgnine, and Lee Marvin filled out the roles of the principal townspeople, the sixty-year-old Brennan making his fourth appearance in a picture with Tracy.
“My first scene was after I had supposedly knocked [Tracy] off the road,” Borgnine remembered.
The first scene we did together was when he comes back to town after that. My line was, “Well, if it’s not Macreedy, the world’s champion road hog.” I had been asked by Walter Brennan, “I understand you’re a fairly good country actor. I’d like to see your scene.” Everybody was watching. As Tracy came out of the car and started to cross, I forgot every line I had. All I could see were these two Academy Awards coming at me. And then my first line popped into my head. We did our scene, and then he walked through the door. The director said, “Cut! Print!” Walter Brennan went by and said, “Good enough.” And Tracy came back out: “Kid, you did all right. I like working with you. You look a man right in the eye.”
At night, the company would adjourn to Lone Pine, where the daytime temperature was 112 degrees and there was little to do after dark. Tracy would open his room for snacks and cocktails, keeping strictly to soft drinks for himself. “It seemed like a form of torture almost,” Anne Francis remarked. “He would invite all the actors up to his suite at the end of the day for cocktails, and he’d sit there and drink his 7-Up while everybody else was having cocktails.”
Hepburn was shooting Time of the Cuckoo in Venice, and there was a cable or a letter from her every day or two. Walter Brennan, whose politics were every bit as conservative as Adolphe Menjou’s, made the mistake of commenting one night on Kate’s supposedly leftist views, the memory of her appearance for Wallace still trailing her after seven years of innuendo. “He said that Katie didn’t have ‘good judgment’ or common sense,” Anne Francis remembered, “and that topped it for Tracy—he went icy cold.” The following day, Sturges found the two men weren’t speaking.
Tracy’s scenes with Robert Ryan were a highpoint for the people on location, Ryan conforming, in Millard Kaufman’s words, to “D. H. Lawrence’s disturbing observation of the American hero as ‘cold, hard-eyed, isolate and a killer.’ The characterization applied equally well to Ryan’s American heavy.” A taut confrontation between the two men was staged as if an idle conversation between two Midwestern schoolboys, Tracy seated on a bench, his eyes downcast, Ryan casually standing before him, hands folded in front, squinting into the sun and speaking with the softness of a chaplain. (“Komoko. Sure, I remember him. Japanese farmer. Never had a chance …”)
“We never rehearsed,” said Ernest Borgnine. “If [Tracy] rehearsed, I never saw it. They just said, ‘Let’s shoot it.’ On Bad Day, when Tracy is sitting on the bench and Robert Ryan is talking to him, Tracy has his head down. And I’m there thinking, ‘Nobody’s going to be looking at him.’ And on screen you couldn’t take your eyes off him. And Bob Ryan was doing everything but loosen his pants.”
John Ericson recalled,
I was sitting on the porch there—you know, the one in the opening shot. They were down by the gas station … The whole crew was around there, and they were down there for quite a while. I got tired of sitting up there in the sun, and so I said to whoever I was with, “I’m going to go and see what they’re doing.” Because I could hear them talking away, and I thought they must be having a discussion about the scene … So I started ambling down the road, and I got halfway down, shuffling in the gravel and all, and then I stopped. “Oh, my God—that’s the scene they’re doing!” It sounded like they were having a conversation, and everybody was just standing around, taking notes or watching to see what’s going to be next. So I tiptoed on up there, and there was Tracy doing his close-up with Robert Ryan off camera. And I thought to myself, “My God, he makes those words sound like they’re coming out of his mouth.” They weren’t written, you know? He’s really thinking before he answers. When he opens his mouth, he reacts to what he’s heard.
After the scene, Tracy flopped into a chair next to Millard Kaufman. “Ryan is bristling with a kind of cerebral muscle, you know, and he’s a tough guy. And Spencer sits down next to me and says, ‘Does Ryan scare you?’ At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about, and then I realized he was talking about the scene that he had just finished. So I said, ‘No, I’ve known Bob Ryan for years. He’s a fine man. No, he doesn’t scare me.’ And Tracy said, ‘Well, he scares the hell out of me.’ ”
Much to Tracy’s satisfaction, Dore Schary did indeed make his promised appearance on the hottest day of the shoot, when the location temperature climbed to 114 degrees. “Dore, you got a great script here,” Tracy told him that day. “However, the critics are going to love it, but nobody’s going to go see it.” And then, echoing Nick Schenck’s concerns, he added, “It’s out of its time.”
Tracy made the five-hour trip home that evening, driving out to the valley on Saturday to discuss John’s plans for a divorce after fifteen months of marriage.
The release of Broken Lance came on July 29, 1954, when the picture opened its New York engagement at the Roxy Theatre. Tracy had seen it twice, once by himself, again with Louise and the kids. (Weeze thought the picture good and said it would do excellent business; Spence judged his own performance more harshly and thought he had overacted in spots.) The trade notices were wonderful, Variety proclaiming “a grownup CinemaScope, a process that has lived up to the pioneer The Robe.”
Tracy and Robert Ryan play a tense exchange for Bad Day at Black Rock. Director John Sturges, in sunglasses and white cap, is seated next to the camera. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Presented in four-track magnetic sound, Broken Lance promised audiences the kind of visual and aural thrills they now seemed to demand in pictures, and it came close to matching the success of The Robe in its initial engagements. The family dynamics and Tracy’s commanding performance as the hard-bitten Devereaux also seemed to resonate across generational and cultural lines.
“I thought I put my old man in Broken Lance,” screenwriter Richard Murphy commented, “and my son says, ‘Goddamn, there’s dad.’ So I guess the father’s universal. I went to Japan later on, and have a very dear friend over there, whom I met when I was shooting Three Stripes in the Sun, and the guy said to me, ‘I saw Broken Lance—it’s exactly like my father!’ Tracy didn’t look very Japanese, but I can see what the guy meant.”
When work on Black Rock resumed in Culver City on August 9, Tracy was at work on a painting of Mount Whitney he had started on location. The heat had been a considerable distraction, and in Culver City temperatures were twenty-five degrees cooler. The pressure that always accompanied the start of a film had dissipated; Sturges was working ahead of schedule, printing a lot of initial takes, supremely confident in the script, the actors, and the footage he had. “We shot almost no film at all—no negative, that is, because you shoot negative and then you print part of it—I think something like 86,000 negative [feet] for the whole picture. Only a handful of scenes were ever take two. Scene after scene after scene after scene was take one.”
After the implicit threat of violence colors the whole tone of the film, it finally erupts in the town diner, where Coley Trimble (Borgnine) crowds Macreedy to the point of no escape. Tracy, anxious about the scene, went to Sturges and Millard Kaufman.
“He was rather apologetic,” Kaufman remembered,
and he said, “I need a double for this.” John said, “Why?” And he said, “Well, if I hit somebody, I don’t think I’d be able to stop.” Now that could mean one of two things: It meant that he was so involved in a fictional character that it became natural or realistic to him to such an extent that he would get carried away by it. It could also have meant that he simply didn’t want to do it, which happens quite often with actors who are bright enough to give you another excuse for it. And he certainly was that. I don’t know what it was. All I know is that he did not want to hit anybody, so we got a double—and if you notice in the picture, all the close stuff with Coley, Ernie Borgnine, is over Spencer’s shoulder and you don’t see his face because it wasn’t him.
On location near Lone Pine for Bad Day at Black Rock. Left to right: Robert Ryan, Tracy, and studio head Dore Schary. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
“I wondered,” said Borgnine,
how the hell a man with one arm was going to fight me, and I’m a big husky guy. I went to John Sturges. “What do you have in mind?” [he said.] “Judo,” I said. And Sturges said, “Okay, do it.” So we got the stunt guy and worked out the scene.6 I figured I’d have somebody else double me, but Sturges wanted me to do it. Jesus Christ, what have I started? Well, I got ready and they put this piece of rubber in my hand full of blood. And we got started. I take the first blow, and his knee comes up and into my face and misses me by a quarter inch. I hit my face with the sponge and dropped it and the blood spurted out. And Spence was standing there watching and said, “Jesus Christ, they killed him!” Then I went through the [screen] door. In rehearsal, the door flew open. But for the take, they had closed the door, and locked it, and I can still see the screws flying out the door when I went through it. I picked up myself, and the take was fine. And then I went to find the son of a bitch that had locked the door. Well, no one would own up to it. Years later, I visited John Sturges in Cuernavaca, when he’s shooting The Magnificent Seven, and he owned up to it. It was Sturges that had locked the door.
Sturges said,
We were interested in [Black Rock] as a film, and what could be called the “message” in the film, to us, gave it the dimension of reality in the characters. It fleshed them out, it made them meaningful, gave them points of view. You can’t play scenes at a surface level. That’s Spence’s great trick in acting. Well, it’s not a trick; he has great ability in acting. He wasn’t playing on top. He was playing what was underneath.
He told me his method. It’s most interesting. I think it accounts for the substance in Spence’s work, certainly not just the talent of his ability on the screen. He would take the script, he told me, take it out to the desert, read it aloud, the whole script, not just his part, to evaluate not only the picture, [but] his relationship to it. And, perhaps most important of all from Spence’s standpoint, he said, was where he should come on and where he should lay back. You can’t hit all the time. You can’t overwhelm all the time. And Spence would lay away until those moments when he felt he should come on. And the nicest compliment I ever got as a director was when he said, “You know where those are too.” He said, “I can tell.” Then he would do that again—read it aloud. The only thing Spence ever suggested in a script were cuts of himself, so that he wasn’t on too much. Then he said that he prepared in a way that just kind of had to be a secret. He said, “It’s mechanical.” He’d memorize the lines, then he wouldn’t look at them for five days. So that when he looked at people, he was hanging onto them as if he was listening to them for the first time—because, in fact, he was. He wasn’t that sure what they were going to say.
“He listened,” said Millard Kaufman, “with every fiber of his entire body. It was almost to say he was leaning toward you to pick up every word. And then he knew a great deal about film. He knew what would work and he knew apparently what would not. I remember on more than one occasion we’d do a scene and the setup would be finished and John would say, ‘Thank you. Cut. Let’s go over here.’ And Spencer wouldn’t budge. He’d just stand there with his finger on his nose, the way he always does, and frown, and John would look over there and say, ‘Let’s do it once more.’ So, he was not a passive actor. He knew what was going on every minute of the time.”
John Ericson’s big scene with Tracy came at the top of the third act, when Macreedy knows that Smith and his men are going to kill him. Doc Velie (Brennan) has come over to Macreedy’s side, but there’s not much he can do without help.
“Tracy said to me, ‘What are the ideas in your head about this scene?’ ” Ericson recalled. “And I told him … He said, ‘All very good. You’ve got seven or eight things right there, but you’ve got to take the most important one—the one that works for you—and that’s the only hat you hang on the hat tree. That’s all, and you play that. Otherwise, it gets so cluttered up the audience is going to have a problem figuring out what’s going on. Because you’ve got seven different things going. The other six things can be underneath the surface, but you don’t let those out. You just have this one thing you hang your hat on.’ That was a wonderful piece of advice.”
When action was called, Tracy was positioned at the hotel registration desk, Brennan behind and a little to the left of him, Ericson on the other side of the desk in his nominal position as the clerk on duty. “Nobody’s helping him,” said Ericson,
and he’s talking to me, trying to get me to say what happened. And I won’t say anything. He finally takes a bottle of booze and sets it on the counter in front of me and says, “It’s going to take a lot of whiskey to wash out your guts.” And I reach down to grab the bottle and take a swig. Sturges, I remember, had said, “John, now reach for the bottle.” So I look at the bottle and the scene’s not working.
It’s not working, and it’s getting to be quitting time for Mr. Tracy. (He quit at four o’clock every day. He was there bright and early, but he quit at four.) Finally, Tracy said to Sturges, “This scene isn’t working.” And I said, “Yes, it’s not working. I’m very uncomfortable in this scene.”
So Tracy says, “I’ll tell you what: Let’s call it a day. We’ll go at this in the morning.”
I said, “Great. Thank you.”
Sturges says, “Okay, quittin’ time!”
Next morning we come in, and we were getting ready for the scene again. Tracy comes out. “You know what’s wrong with the scene?” he says, and he looks at me. He looks at Walter Brennan. He looks at Sturges. And he’s waiting for somebody to respond. And we’re all afraid to respond because we’re thinking this genius here is really going to show us up, you know?
He said: “The problem is, when John goes for that whiskey bottle, we break eye contact. Can’t he just grab the bottle without breaking eye contact?”
I said, “I sure as hell can.”
Sturges said, “Okay, roll ’em.” So we did it, and that’s how the scene is.
The climactic face-off between Macreedy and Reno Smith takes place in the desert, Smith armed with a hunting rifle, Macreedy only his wits and his one good arm. Taking cover behind his jeep, Macreedy improvises a Molotov cocktail with an empty soda bottle and the gas in the vehicle’s tank. In order for the incendiary to have any value, the audience must know that Macreedy would be carrying matches.
“I had in the script,” said Millard Kaufman, “that Macreedy was a smoker. So to show a kind of determination (if you could call it that; anyway, it was theatrical) I had him at one point light a cigarette by taking a book of matches out of his pocket and, with one hand, flipping into a horseshoe shape a single match, [which he] rubs against the striking surface, and then he puts the flame to the cigarette. And Spencer calls and says, ‘Look, I’m an old man with arthritis. Why don’t I have a Zippo, which everybody in the army had? I still got a few of them.’ I said, ‘Fine.’ ”
Freed from a bit of business better suited to Lon Chaney in his prime, Tracy ignited the device with a common cigarette lighter and sent Ryan’s stunt double to a sizzling death. The last scene in the picture becomes a reversal of the first, the train pulling into Black Rock, Macreedy leaving the younger Komoko’s medal with the remaining townspeople as a way of giving them “something to build on.”
“What’s the excitement?” the conductor asks as Macreedy climbs aboard. “What happened?”
“A shooting,” Macreedy says.
“Thought it was something. First time this streamliner’s stopped here in four years.”
“Second time,” Macreedy corrects as he disappears into the car.
Tracy left for Europe on August 30, stopping off in Manhattan to see New York Giants manager Leo Durocher and his wife, the actress Laraine Day. Troubled by the pinched nerve in his neck, he spent the month of September following a regimen of traction and heat treatments while attending the playoffs and the first two games of the World Series.
“We were just going into the winning streak that clinched the pennant,” Durocher remembered, “and I was able to keep him with us for the next two weeks by convincing him that I needed his advice. ‘How could you leave me now?’ I’d say every time he pleaded that they were waiting for him in Europe. ‘I can’t possibly win without your help.’ I kept him in New York while we were winning the first two games of the World Series and was aghast when he suggested that I would have to go the rest of the way without him.”
Tracy boarded the Andrea Doria on October 2 and was at sea when he got the news that the Giants had prevailed over Cleveland to win the world championship.
The voyage was smooth at first, the weather warm and clear, and he was able to limit his drug intake to a couple of Demerols. The water got considerably rougher the fourth day out, and he gobbled five Seconals on top of the pain medication, upsetting his stomach and keeping him confined to quarters for much of the following day. That evening, he laid off the barbiturates altogether and took some wine with his dinner. The next day he tried mixing a couple of Seconals with brandy to predictable results.
In 1977 King Vidor remembered back to a doctor he met aboard the steamer on its next crossing to Naples: “He’d been on the trip before, with Spencer, and he’s had to stay up each night talking with him, drinking with him. When Spencer got off at Genoa, he wouldn’t get off … he came right back on the same boat. So this doctor took another trip to rest up from Spence keeping him up at night the trip before!”
Tracy consulted a doctor who prescribed the spa cure at Montecatini Terme. He spent the next three weeks at the historic Tuscan baths, making day trips to Piza, Civitella, and Florence, seeing Michelangelo’s David and unfinished Pietà and losing himself in Will Durant’s book The Renaissance. Kate arrived on October 25, and they spent their days driving through the mountains and hill towns, picnicking on the beach, touring the countryside. By November 1, his use of Seconal was down to three capsules a night and he was sleeping more soundly. When he left for Rome on the eighth, he was completely drug-free for the first time in years.
From his rejuvenative Italian sojourn, Tracy returned to a world of aggravation in California. While in Montecatini, he had spoken with Louise by phone and learned that his estranged daughter-in-law, the one Johnny had announced his intention of divorcing, was in fact pregnant.
“Perfect!” he said.
Nobody was happy about it, least of all John. “I was there when Nadine told John that she was pregnant,” recalled Susie Tracy. “He just looked at her and said nothing. And then he turned and went back to his room. I think he was stunned.”
Louise had been house hunting, the State Highway Commission having routed the new Ventura Freeway through the property on White Oak. She hated the thought of moving after nearly twenty years on the ranch, even though Spence thought it time: “He had said for several years, ‘It’s a wonderful place, but it is not practical. Susie is growing … nobody is going to come out here to see her. It’s no good either from the standpoint of friends for John—everybody is over on the other side.’ They didn’t want to move, but he said it would be much better for the children. And then he said also the Clinic was quite a trek for me.”
Tracy was sure that Bad Day at Black Rock would be a disaster—a commercial long shot and a stinker to boot. Schary ran it for him just days after production closed, and an opening reminiscent of High Noon got the film off to a listless start. “Bad picture?” Tracy wrote in his datebook. “Nothing—mediocre. Grade B.”
Nothing the studio was offering promised to be any better. John Houseman wanted to pair Tracy and Montgomery Clift in a union drama called Bannon. Another picture, a western called Jeremy Rodock, had script and casting problems. The far more interesting action was coming from other studios. At Paramount, he had committed to The Mountain, based on a novel he had tried to option himself. William Wyler had proposed The Desperate Hours opposite Humphrey Bogart, and though Tracy wasn’t keen on the story, he took six weeks to say no, laying the blame to billing problems. Sol Siegel was offering The Captain’s Table, a broad comedy based on the novel by England’s Richard Gordon. And there was, of course, The Old Man and the Sea, for which Hemingway had agreed to yet another postponement.
Under the circumstances, it was hard for Tracy to get excited over another term at Metro. The studio was offering three pictures, nonexclusive, at $150,000 each, while Tracy’s freelance rate, first with Broken Lance, then with The Mountain, had been firmly established at $250,000. Moreover, Dore Schary was in trouble, losing ground with Schenck and unhappy with the way the industry in general was going. On December 28, 1954, Tracy met with Eddie Mannix at the studio and tentatively okayed the new three-year deal, Mannix agreeing to route all outside picture money through the studio so that it could count toward Tracy’s company pension. On January 7, 1955, Bert Allenberg followed up with a letter to Mannix outlining the contemplated deal, granting Metro preemptive rights but otherwise agreeing to loan Tracy’s services to other producers and studios when he requested it. Exempted were The Captain’s Table, The Mountain, and The Old Man and the Sea, all three of which were to be completed by the fall or winter of 1956. “I understand that you have not yet made it as a firm offer,” Allenberg wrote Mannix, “and that you will let me hear from you at such point.”
Although they were essentially the same age, Bert Allenberg was a stark contrast to the man he represented, tall and natty, a charming bankerlike figure where his impish partner Abe Lastfogel was more avuncular, a down-home type who grew up on New York’s East Side. Both had deep roots in the industry, Allenberg from his longtime partnership with the famously nurturing Phil Berg, Lastfogel from the early years of William Morris, which he joined as an office boy at the age of fourteen.
Bert Allenberg understood the care and feeding of a man as insecure as Spencer Tracy, while at the same time maintaining absolute credibility with men like Mannix, Thau, and Dore Schary. All had genuine affection for Tracy—Mannix and Schary in particular—and all had come to understand, each in his own way, the demons that sometimes possessed him. In the peculiar business they were in, men like Tracy, who could capture and retain for decades the fascination of a worldwide audience, were rare indeed, like the precious gems of which Mayer used to speak. There were, in fact, only a few leading men who shared the pantheon with Tracy—Gable, Bogart, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart. Cagney, maybe. Fred Astaire, if you counted musicals. And of them all, only Tracy was still part of the dwindling roster that had at one time boasted “more stars than there are in Heaven.”
Bad Day at Black Rock, its opening moments fixed by Herman Hoffman, had its first public showing at Loew’s 72nd Street Theatre in New York on December 8, 1954. Tracy, who was in town but did not attend, was told afterward the picture “held the audience spellbound,” a claim backed by the trade reviews, which were unanimous in their praise. He remained dubious until New Year’s Day, when calls came from Sam Goldwyn, Danny Kaye, Leland Hayward, and others. Incredulous, he wrote in his datebook: “Black Rock good???”
He conferred with Schary, Thau, and producer Sam Zimbalist on January 12 and tentatively okayed Jeremy Rodock with the understanding that the female lead was to be offered to Grace Kelly, who, with the December release of The Country Girl, was suddenly Hollywood’s hottest actress. Tacitly agreeing to do the picture, Kelly asked to see a script. Two days later, Thau called and said she was stalling. “BET TURN DOWN,” Tracy wrote in his book.
The situation became clearer over the following week: Kelly, an M-G-M contract player, had, with the exception of Mogambo, made her most notable films on loan-out—to Stanley Kramer for High Noon, to Alfred Hitchcock for Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, to Paramount for The Country Girl. Now George Stevens wanted her for Giant, and she was using Jeremy Rodock as a bargaining chip. Tracy was infuriated. “Wishes reserve decision,” he wrote in his datebook. “I wish replace fast. Studio inclined give her way. ‘I.E.’ loanout to Stevens’ Giant after ours. Her announcement reading script stupid because other girls asked if turndown—which obvious is—or wedge for Giant. Hell with Kelly. Get someone. ??? Bergman??? Call from Allenberg—told him facts of life re: his handling of business.”
Disgusted, Tracy doped himself extravagantly—ten Seconals—and boarded a flight to New York for his annual physical, this time at Harkness under the supervision of Dr. Dana Winslow Atchley. Kate, meanwhile, had committed to a six-month tour of Australia with Bobby Helpmann and the Old Vic, a company of twenty-eight players performing Measure for Measure, Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice under the direction of Michael Benthall.
Tracy arrived in Manhattan in time to see the opening of Black Rock on February 1, an event only in the sense that he didn’t expect it to do well at all. M-G-M’s big picture of the moment was a reissue of Camille, and Broadway in general was in the grip of near-zero temperatures. The film performed nicely in its opening stanza at the Rivoli, bolstered, no doubt, by exceptional notices—novelist John O’Hara called it “one of the finest motion pictures ever made”—and Tracy’s concurrent appearance on the cover of Lifemagazine. (“A Great Star Ages Gracefully” was the title of the accompanying article.) It all faded quickly, though, the weather crippling practically every attraction apart from The Country Girl, Cinerama Holiday, and Garbo’s 1936 classic, which inspired long lines and set house records at the Normandy. Bad Day at Black Rock was gone by the time Tracy returned to Los Angeles on the twenty-seventh.
As predicted, Grace Kelly declined Jeremy Rodock, citing a poor script, and Tracy began wondering if he was making the right choice. The story was by Jack Schaefer, the author of Shane, but it was only a short story, and somehow it resisted the efforts of screenwriter Michael Blankfort to give it a plot. Director Robert Wise met Tracy for the first time at a conference in early March.
“He was practically selling me on the picture,” Wise remembered, “he was so enthusiastic.” They talked about locations. “We had the idea of getting high up in the mountain scene and hav[ing] lovely green meadows, lakes, and mountains all around as the setting for it. We thought that would be a good change in the background for a western. Tracy called me the next day and asked, ‘Bob, do you think we’re really right about that? Do you think it’s going to be good for me?’ He was getting all kinds of second thoughts about it, so I found myself having to buck up his enthusiasm for it.”
Thau and Schary expressed concerns that Tracy did not “feel committed to Rodock.” Tracy’s worries weren’t assuaged when Grace Kelly went public on the suspension Metro had handed her, confirming she had declined the picture after reading the script. “I’m not trying to be difficult or temperamental,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I just don’t feel I’m right for the part in Jeremy Rodock.”
By the middle of March, Zimbalist had Blankfort working on a complete revision of the screenplay, and Tracy agreed to a three-month extension that would free him to travel to Europe. In New York he dined with Mannix and Howard Strickling, met Constance Collier for tea, and spent forty-five minutes on the phone to Kate in London. He flew over on the eighteenth, slept soundly the first night, then fell back into his Seconal habit, popping as many as seven capsules a night.
Hepburn was, of course, deep into rehearsals for her upcoming tour of Australia but found time for dinner most nights, and they occasionally could be seen walking together in Hyde Park. On the twenty-fourth he had two rodent ulcers removed from his face, aggravating the fear of cancer he had long held within him. The procedures were described to him as routine, and the medication caused him to sleep nearly six hours the following night. But then late the next evening, in his suite at Claridge’s, he fell off the wagon, scribbling in his datebook: “1 AM,” the drawing of a bottle, and the words “Here we go.”
Between March 27 and April 8, 1955, he was confined to his suite at Claridge’s under a doctor’s care and attended by a pair of nurses. He took his last drink on April 2 (“FINI,” he wrote in his datebook) and spent the rest of the week “recuperating.” He passed his fifty-fifth birthday with a cake but otherwise saw no one other than Kate. “Poor Spence must necessarily be alone a good deal,” Constance Collier mused to Hepburn in a letter, “though I suppose you have your evenings together, you can’t be working at night.” The Kanins, stopping at the hotel while Ruth was appearing in The Matchmaker, attempted “endless abortive and unsuccessful telephone calls” but could make no contact. When he left for home on the ninth, Tracy did so without contacting them, and nearly two months would pass before Gar could manage a letter.
Back at the studio, Tracy ran On the Waterfront and became enthused at the idea of Eva Marie Saint for Jeremy Rodock. (“Wonderful,” he wrote in his book.) Wise and Zimbalist were equally high on the idea, but Saint turned the part down within a matter of days. (“Par for the course,” said Tracy.) They tested Constance Collier’s latest protégée, Marjorie Steele, the wife of A&P heir Huntington Hartford, but the test was weak and Steele had little experience. By the time David Selznick turned it down on behalf of Jennifer Jones, pointing out how similar the role of Rodock was to that of Devereaux in Broken Lance, Tracy was having serious qualms about doing the picture.
“I talked to Spence,” Collier wrote Hepburn on the sixteenth. “He is very unhappy and feels your leaving him for so long and doesn’t seem to understand why you do it—but he calmed down—and I think will come on [to New York]. He is to call me tomorrow and we will make arrangements. You must keep him happy until you go and the time will not seem so long.7 I hope everything will be alright over there and you will get things straightened out. Don’t let anything delay your return if Spence come[s] on.”
The growths removed from his face in London, Tracy learned, were malignant, and it was recommended that another spot on his face be tested. The biopsy was set for April 25 in Los Angeles, which turned out to be a bad day all around. He awoke with stomach cramps and a mild temperature and was attempting to sleep them off when he got the news that Constance Collier had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of seventy-seven. She had been like a second mother to Hepburn, a personal as well as a professional mentor, and it fell to Spence to phone Kate in London and break the news. A week later, he motored to San Francisco in a driving rain to meet her as she prepared to leave for Sydney on Qantas. He had Carroll with him, and the two of them attended Mass together at Old St. Mary’s.
The day Hepburn departed, he learned he had yet another malignancy and that surgery would be necessary. He was up at 3:00 a.m., on the road at 5:30, back home again by two in the afternoon. He dined alone that night and needed the help of six Seconals to get to sleep. The surgery took place at St. Vincent’s Hospital on the morning of May 12, 1955. The doctor had to go in deeper than he expected, and while all basal cell eruptions were removed, it was feared there would be scarring that could delay the start of the picture. The matter of casting the girl had become a dispiriting problem; nobody seemed to want the part. Schary may have thought it had something to do with the title, for he changed it to Tribute to a Bad Man, one he had a particular liking for, having previously hung it on one of John Houseman’s pictures.8
After both Eva Marie Saint and Jennifer Jones turned it down, the studio put forth a Greek girl named Irene Papas, who had made what Benny Thau termed an “exciting test.” Papas was in Rome, but could be in California on a few days’ notice, having been put under contract with virtually no vetting of any kind. Sam Zimbalist talked of putting a new writer on the screenplay, but then nothing happened, and when Tracy asked to see the test of the new girl, he was told they were going to shoot one specifically for Tribute.
Nothing seemed to be going right. When the stitches from the surgery came out, the scar was nastier than expected, a sort of upside-down Y on the left side of his face. Despite repeated fittings, his wardrobe for the picture was too tight. The script still needed work—more than they seemed to think—and on the twenty-third he told off Zimbalist. (“Moron!!!” he wrote in his datebook.) The following day he was shown the new test of “the Greek” and thought it horrible. “Zimbalist—Wise BLOW UP,” he recorded that day. “Girl simply awful. Schary & I agree, others no. Schary suggests Dorothy McGuire.” When Tracy finally met Papas, an austere woman with jet-black hair and bushy eyebrows, he could scarcely contain himself. “Boy or girl???” he wrote in his book. “The Greek it is,” he conceded. “[V]ote of Schary, Wise, Zimbalist against me (Dorothy McGuire).”
The casting of Papas brought Tribute to a Bad Man still closer to Broken Lance—Papas essentially repeating the Katy Jurado role—and whatever enthusiasm Tracy retained for the project quickly boiled away. In a conciliatory gesture, the studio took out a full-page ad in the trades, formally congratulating him for having been named Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival (for Bad Day at Black Rock) and “Outstanding Western Star” (for Broken Lance) at the Silver Spur Awards in Reno. “Wear your ‘Silver Spurs’ in health and happiness in your new picture Tribute to a Bad Man,” the copy chirped, but if Tracy was in any way mollified, it didn’t show. The day after the ad appeared, he had a blowdown with Larry Keethe when his pants still wouldn’t fit—after five tries—and Keethe, after nearly twenty years on the job with Tracy, tendered his resignation.
Shooting began at Montrose, Colorado, on June 1, with Irene Papas and actor Robert Francis (The Caine Mutiny) filming scenes for which Tracy was not required. Tracy departed for location that same day, arriving with Carroll early the next evening. According to Tracy’s datebook, Wise was “shocked” at the scar on his face and ordered camera tests to see if it would show. The following morning they all drove up to the Rodock Ranch. “Wonderful set built upon mesa [at] 8700 ft. elevation—surrounded 14,000 or [so] over Rocky Mts.—snowcovered peaks.” The weather was beautiful and clear, and the company, bedeviled by bad weather, got in a full day’s work for a change.
Tracy had been set to start shooting on the sixth, but with all the weather delays, Wise thought he might not actually be needed for another week. He spoke by phone with Schary and decided to go back to L.A. to have the scar examined by his doctor. With Wise’s blessing, Tracy left Montrose on the morning of the fifth, took the short route through Cedar City, and was in Las Vegas by 7:30 p.m. Wise called him in Los Angeles the next day to tell him that the tests made of the scar had come out okay.
Privately, Tracy asked Bert Allenberg to explore the possibility of starting the picture in Culver City and leaving the location work until last, but the studio just as privately nixed the idea, as none of the interior sets had yet been constructed. He was up at 3:30 on the morning of the tenth to place a call to Australia. “[T]alked Old One,” he noted in his book. “Wonderful connection. Dear Old One.”
Kate thought Tribute “a story with no merit whatsoever.” At her suggestion, Tracy met with Benny Thau and asked that the film be postponed. Thau said it couldn’t be done, then Allenberg pointed out that Tracy was supposed to start The Mountain for Paramount on August 1. “Allenberg gibberish threat of ‘suit by Paramount’ etc. etc.,” Tracy wrote. “What hogwash—lies, deceit, sickened by it all.” Then Howard Strickling called to advise him that there was a “plot” afoot to have Strickling go back with him to Colorado.
There was no word from the studio after that, and on June 13 there were discussions between Floyd Hendrickson and George Cohen as to how best to serve notice on Tracy that he was liable for damages if he failed to report for work. “[M-G-M counsel Saul Rittenberg] and GC both feel that we are in a better position to give oral notice to Bert Allenberg rather than formal written notice,” Hendrickson wrote, “because in this way we are simply advising what is going to happen and, therefore, doesn’t sound legal or like an ultimatum but still has legal effect.”
That evening, Tracy boarded a United Airlines flight for Denver, arriving back in Montrose on the morning of the fourteenth. The weather was bad—Wise got only one scene in the can—and Tracy wasn’t called for work at all. The next day was sunny and clear, and Tracy shot his first scene for the picture, Rodock’s entrance to the ranch. The company finished the day with a barn interior. “[G]ood day’s work,” Tracy wrote. “Bob Wise agrees with foregoing.” That evening, assistant director Arvid Griffin barbecued steaks and tomatoes for everyone on an outdoor grill.
“We arranged our shooting up at the ranch,” said Wise,
in a way that [Tracy] could come up for only an hour or two the first couple of days to get acclimated because it was much higher than the town we were staying in. After that, I still took it very easy—just two or three hours a day. He was being a little irascible with both Bob Francis and Irene Papas, but I attributed that to the altitude. He kept complaining about shortness of breath and suggesting that we move the location to a lower altitude. Finally, about the fifth day, he had a bit of action where he had to bend over and pick up a horse’s hoof and examine it. When he came up, he kind of gasped and said, “Bob, you better get someone else to replace me. The only way I can finish this film is if you can scrub this location and we go down to a lower place.” I just about had it up to my eyeballs by that time. I said, “Okay, Spencer, we go down the hill and talk to the studio.” I called Sam Zimbalist, who knew of the problems I was having, and told him I couldn’t continue with Tracy. An hour later he called me back and said that Tracy was out of the picture.
Tracy tersely recorded the events of the day in his datebook: “Wise and Griff[in] talk to Strickling—all feel cannot go on in altitude…[C]all to studio. Replaced.”
Said Wise: “I went over to see him. I was so angry at this man because of the mess he caused, but he was so emotional about it.” Tracy, he recalled, was almost in tears. “It’s the end of my career,” he told the director. “I’m finished. I’ll never make another picture.” Wise, at first, could muster little sympathy for a man who had given him such fits. Like everyone else, Wise thought Tracy had conspired to make The Mountain during the time it would have taken to rebuild the sets at a lower elevation. “After one hour of this, as mad as I was, I was also feeling sympathy and sorrow for him. Tracy always came on the screen like the Rock of Gibraltar, yet he was actually the reverse of his screen image.”
That night, Tracy made a one-word entry in his datebook: “Gin!” He caught an 11:00 p.m. flight out of Grand Junction, arriving back in Los Angeles at three in the morning. Tom Pryor of the New York Times got hold of the story and ran it as an eight-inch item on the twenty-first:
This morning the studio publicity department said Mr. Tracy had experienced difficulties working in a high altitude. Montrose, on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, is 5,820 feet above sea level. Later, a studio executive acknowledged that the altitude was not the only cause of Mr. Tracy’s return. “Spencer is very exacting about everything he does,” the executive said, “and he is unhappy about several things. The studio has to determine if it wants to give in to him on some points.” Metro executives are meeting with the actor’s agent,Bert Allenberg of the William Morris agency, and it is expected that a decision about Mr. Tracy’s continuance will be made within forty-eight hours.
Had Eddie Mannix been on hand, had Kate been there, had Tracy had the kind of gentle handling and reassurance he always needed at the start of a picture, the outcome might have been different. Mannix, however, was recovering from a heart attack, Hepburn was eight thousand miles away with her own set of responsibilities, and Dore Schary could never justify to the New York office the moving of an outdoor set while a company of 110 sat idle on location.
There was a time, back in the heyday of the studio, when such a move might have been possible, particularly for a star of Tracy’s magnitude. But 1955 wasn’t 1940, M-G-M no longer dominated the world entertainment landscape, and the economics of picture making had irrevocably changed. The men who had come up in the time of Mayer and Thalberg, of block booking and studio-owned theater chains, were having to reorient their thinking to the new realities of the marketplace, where flickering black-and-white pictures on a home TV set generally trumped the big screen as long as those flickering pictures were free.
Dore Schary was troubled in later years by the widely held presumption that Tracy had been fired from M-G-M. “That’s crazy. That’s crap. Total crap,” he erupted when asked about it in 1978. “A stupid story. A ridiculous, stupid story.” Tracy had completed three of the four pictures required of him under his contract, and the contract was up as of August 1, 1955. “I would never have fired Spencer Tracy,” Schary insisted. Might he simply have been at the end of his rope? “I would never have been at the end of my rope with Spence. He was always worried whether a picture was good for him, whether he wanted to do it. Back and forth. But that is not true … Just … not … true. And I would know that.”
Schary thought that maybe Robert Wise was part of the problem, that he had no real knowledge of the culture at M-G-M. Years of coddling on the part of the studio had created a dependency that Wise couldn’t possibly understand. “He just got scared,” Schary said of Tracy. “He began to get short of breath. A guy like Tracy needed a father [in a director]. He needed someone around to kind of look after him. And I don’t think Wise gave him that. I think another director might have solved that problem, pulled him through the picture. But Spence was by then pretty well convinced that he was very sick.”
On June 25, 1955, Tracy made the following entry in his datebook: “Finished at Metro! June 18 last salary day. Phone by Allenberg to Thau. Eddie M. away!!! The end of 20 years. Feel I did my best for last pic.”
Eddie Mannix was stunned when he returned to the studio and was briefed on what had taken place in his absence. “Well,” he demanded, “why the hell didn’t you take it down to three thousand feet and do the picture?”
1 News photos of the two seated together at Santa Monica’s Club Del Mar, where the event took place, were enough to prompt the following item in Dorothy Kilgallen’s column: “Lovely Grace Kelly’s newest admirer is a Hollywood star who has been Katharine Hepburn’s close pal for years.”
2 Cooper’s trouble was due to a bad back.
3 Claridge’s had requested that Hepburn not wear trousers in the “public rooms” of the hotel, which, of course, included the lobby. Hepburn’s solution, rather than to wear a dress when visiting Tracy, was instead to come up in the service elevator. Management at the Connaught imposed no such restriction.
4 Kate later admitted that she, too, never cared much for Black Rock.
5 One of Schary’s signal achievements at RKO, Crossfire (1947) was based on Richard Brooks’ 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole.
6 According to Millard Kaufman, the Breen office restricted the use of karate chops “because it wasn’t fighting heroically. Dore said, ‘What the hell? The guy’s got one arm.’ And so they let it get by.”
7 Hepburn once told David Lean she was “almost certain” that if she and Tracy had married, it wouldn’t have lasted. “She was saying that it’s almost impossible to hope that anyone, husband or wife, can understand what it’s like when this creative thing takes hold and they find themselves suddenly pushed aside into fourth or fifth place.”
8 The release title was The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).