CHAPTER 28
Tracy’s removal from Tribute to a Bad Man eliminated any conflicts with Paramount and the anticipated August 1955 start of The Mountain. He focused on family matters: his month-old grandson, Joseph Spencer, John’s thirty-first birthday, Susie’s twenty-third birthday, Louise’s hunt for a new house.
“I bet I looked at 150 houses,” Louise said. “I looked at every house in Beverly Hills that came on the market. I got so discouraged; there was always something wrong.” The house she finally settled upon was a gated two-acre estate on Tower Road—three bedrooms, four baths, a vast lawn sloping down to the pool. “It was so quiet and lots of birds and trees,” she said. “I felt it would be the closest thing to the country. That was the big point. Then it had a lot of little points. It had a three-car garage. We had this beautiful piece of furniture, my great-grandmother’s secretary, and we had to have nine-and-a-half-foot ceilings to get this thing in. The ceilings were very high … It was a beautiful house.”
There were, of course, calls to and from Australia and meetings with Leland Hayward. In from New York, Herman Shumlin tried persuading Tracy to join the cast of Inherit the Wind for four weeks, long enough to give the play’s star, Paul Muni, a rest. Then Tracy had a courtesy call fromBenny Thau, the last official interaction he was to have with M-G-M. Eddie Mannix had held up his pension payout—a sum amounting to $221,000 and change—until he had extracted an oral agreement from Bert Allenberg that Tracy would “sometime” do another picture for Metro at $150,000. (“No one but Mannix wants it,” Allenberg told his client, but since Tracy was technically one film shy of his contractual commitment, he was advised to go ahead and accept the provision.) Now, after much talk of shelving Tribute to a Bad Man—and turndowns from both Clark Gable and Gregory Peck—Thau wanted Tracy to know that Jimmy Cagney had agreed to do the picture after Nicholas Schenck had called him at Martha’s Vineyard and put it on a personal basis, asking him to “jump in” for his old friend. Said Cagney, “I was about as interested in working as I was in flying, which means a considerable level below zero, but after much gab, I agreed. I specified that I would need at least two or three weeks between jobs, and then I would come out and do it.” Tracy’s reaction to the news: “Who cares?”
In Australia, Hepburn had drawn unwanted attention of her own from a celebrity-starved press. “Is there a romance in Katharine Hepburn’s life?” asked the Sydney Sun. “We will say that there is. It’s Spencer Tracy. He loves theatre, watched all the rehearsals at the Old Vic Company, and flew back to New York in the plane with Katharine.” Hepburn did her best to deflect such items, consenting to a joint news conference with Bobby Helpmann where she batted back questions she considered too personal. “I saw a report where Spencer was said to have flown from London to see my rehearsals,” she said. “That’s not true because there was no one at the rehearsals. But, yes, Spencer was in London at the time. He joked that they wouldn’t let him in. ‘I was too lowbrow,’ he said.”
The scrutiny followed her to Brisbane, where the Old Vic Company opened at His Majesty’s Theatre on July 18. “Katharine Hepburn’s first waking thought today was to put a call through to Spencer Tracy,” the Brisbane Telegraph reported. “Spencer Tracy, though 10,000 miles away, was the only person who would get a word from Miss Hepburn this morning. It is understood that the Old Vic star phones him daily. A Sydney message says it is rumored that Spencer Tracy may take a brief holiday at Surfer Paradise during the Old Vic three-week season in Brisbane. For the whole morning, Miss Hepburn remained in her room at the city hotel, surrounded by the knick-knacks she insists on carrying around the world. These include three portraits of Spencer Tracy.” Sheilah Graham picked up on all the Queensland crosstalk and ran a slightly more oblique item in her New York Mirror column: “Katharine Hepburn, now in Australia, is spending something like 100 dollars a day in phone bills to her long-time love … that’s love.”
Hepburn was also working her way through the loss of Constance Collier, her almost daily phone calls, her wires and letters. “We miss Constance so much,” Theresa Helburn wrote her, “I realize what her loss must mean to you. You have really lost two mothers in a comparatively short time. But at least you had two wonderful ones.”
There was more to discuss than strictly personal matters. Through Bert Allenberg, Kate was negotiating with Hal Wallis to play Lizzie Curry in Paramount’s adaptation of The Rainmaker. Wallis wanted to pay $135,000, but Hepburn was holding out for $150,000 and director approval. (Wallis would not agree to a deferred deal, similar to the one Hepburn made for The African Queen, in which she would accept half her normal fee up front in exchange for a cut of the profits.) She would talk with Tracy by phone, then Tracy would relay her messages to Allenberg.
“Spence told me today about his talk with you and your approval of the financial terms and your strong feeling about the director,” Allenberg wrote her on July 15, “hence, I will attempt to make the deal on the basis of you having full director approval.”
In London the year before, Jane Feely had said: “Someday I may need you.” And now she did. In a call from Seattle, she relayed the news that her eighty-one-year-old mother, Spence’s beloved aunt Jenny, was in the hospital, gravely ill with cancer of the esophagus. She asked that he come to Renton, and instantly word came back that he would.
“Practically the next day, the arrangements were made,” Jane said.
He was going to come by himself, which was unusual. I had not thought to say, “You come, too, Carroll.” And I think that hurt Carroll’s feelings. Carroll, of course, was the one that you always talked to in order to get in touch with Spence … A broken hip was what put [my mother] in the hospital, and then they did the exploratory things, checked and found out that she had the cancer … One of the nurses said, “We have a patient down there in room twenty-three, and she thinks that she’s related to Spencer Tracy.” They were kind of watching her, you know? And so the next day he arrived, and that nurse was flabbergasted.
They had a couple of good visits in the hospital. My mother had a tremendous sense of humor. When she first saw him, she said to him, deadpan, “Have you got work?” I think he liked talking with her, maybe more than he did with his own mother, because his mother was a very sad person; she mourned the loss of her husband until she died. I think also that he was a little afraid of her, and he certainly didn’t want to offend her in any way.
When the subject turned to Carroll, he echoed the words he had once spoken to Frank Tracy: “Carroll … I don’t know what to do about Carroll. Carroll should have gone back to Wakashan, had his own life, his own success …”
“He was a great success as a husband!” Jenny Tracy interjected. Spence’s face, Jane recalled, was stricken at the remark.
They went on to talk about family and about the old days, and she did not ever, either in my hearing or when they had a private talk, talk about [the fact that] she knew she was dying. I’m certain she did [know], but, in our family, nobody told anybody that anyone was sick or dying. I think it took an awful lot more out of him than I had any idea that it did. I didn’t realize how stressful it was for him to get on a plane by himself, come over here into a strange area.
I had dinner with him at the Olympic Hotel—we didn’t go into the dining room, we had dinner in a suite—and we had a good visit about Ireland, and how fun it had been. We talked, because I was thinking, “What am I going to do?” He said, “You don’t worry. You need a cushion, and here is the beginning of it.” And he left a check for two or three thousand dollars. “Don’t have any worries about taking care of her. Do whatever you have to do.”
I went to the airport with him when he left. We stopped to have a cup of coffee at the counter. It was amazing—nobody approached him. Everything was just fine until a waitress came with his cup of coffee. As she was pouring the coffee, she was staring at him and she poured the coffee all over the counter. “Oh!” He was able to laugh over that one. When we talked afterward about Mama, he said, “You know, she does not demand attention—she commands it. All I can think of with her sitting in that bed is Ethel Barrymore.” There were so many things about her that were dramatic enough, I think, to appeal to him.
Jenny’s time in the hospital was brief—six weeks—and Spencer underwrote it. When she died, word came through Carroll that the funeral expenses were to be covered, too.
The Mountain, at first glance, would have seemed an unlikely vehicle for Spencer Tracy. The work of the prolific Russian-born novelist and historian Henri Troyat, it told the story of a retired mountain guide pressed back into service when an airliner crashes in the French Alps. Based on an actual event, the 122-page novel was first published in the United States in 1953. Tracy read a review of the book in England; subsequently, he gave it to Eddie Dmytryk. “It’s a simple story,” he later said, “full of honest suspense and character, a Cain and Abel tale of two brothers on a mission to a wrecked airplane in the Alps. They fight the elements, themselves, and each other. It depicts the contrast of good and evil. An emotional back-breaker, believe me.”
He tried getting Metro to buy the rights, only to learn that Paramount had snapped them up for the bargain price of $10,000. Within a couple of months, Tracy had made a deal with Don Hartman, Paramount’s production chief, to star in the picture as soon as he was free of his M-G-M contract. Alpine weather conditions dictated a start in late August or early September, when the snow level would be at seven thousand feet and the daytime temperature at Luzern would be a very tolerable sixty-five degrees. Dmytryk signed on in May while Tracy and Sam Zimbalist were locking horns over Tribute to a Bad Man. The irony was lost on no one that Tracy gained his release from that picture on the basis of altitude, only to step into a part that would put him at elevations considerably higher than the six thousand feet he found so debilitating at Montrose.
Tackling the script was the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, whose previous job for Paramount had been the listless Humphrey Bogart comedy We’re No Angels. Agreeing with Tracy that the story was essentially “Cain and Abel on a mountain,” MacDougall deliberately simplified the two brothers—the older one embarking on one last climb to rescue survivors, the younger intent more on looting the crash site than on checking it for signs of life. The result became a treatise on the nature of human greed, a sort of snowbound Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Having carefully balanced the story between the two competing characters, MacDougall clashed with Dmytryk over the casting of twenty-five-year-old Robert Wagner as brother to the fifty-five-year-old Tracy. “To me, as a primal contest between simple good and simple evil, it called for an equality of forces involved,” MacDougall said. “Wagner seemed to me to be a born loser in a contest with Tracy. I am not questioning the ability of Wagner as an actor by this, merely stating my approach to the subject. I had written the part with Charlton Heston in mind.1 As an antagonist for Tracy, it seemed to me the outcome of the contest would be in doubt with a stronger man. With Wagner, I felt that the younger man would emerge as being petulant rather than powerfully evil. Also, of course, the mountain climbing contest of man against nature did not play as well as it might have with a stronger pair.”
Dmytryk explained his rationale: “Spence had had a good relationship with Robert Wagner during the shooting of Broken Lance; he also had a very realistic attitude regarding his own box office appeal. He felt that Wagner might attract the younger and larger audience and suggested we try to borrow him from 20th. I agreed with his analysis (as it turned out, we were both somewhat in error) and 20th was willing, so R.J. was set.”
As an added gesture of both fondness and respect, Tracy spoke to Paramount and arranged for the billing clause of his contract to be modified, permitting Wagner’s name to be placed above the title, the first time the younger actor had been accorded equal billing with a star of Tracy’s stature.
“It was extraordinary,” said Wagner, “and it made a big difference in my career because it took me out of being homogenized with all these other people. He made very sure that I had a dressing room at Paramount and that I was on dressing room row with all of them, so I was there withBing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Spencer Tracy, Bill Holden, me. He did that for me. I said to him, ‘Jesus, Spence, thank you so much.’ He said, ‘That’s okay, I wanted you to have it.’ He was sure that I had the same thing.”
However much he initially wanted to do the film, Tracy began to tense up as the start of production grew near. He fretted over individual lines of dialogue, disapproved of the supporting cast assembled by Dmytryk—Claire Trevor, William Demarest, Barbara Darrow, Richard Arlen.
The prospect of a long plane trip filled him with dread, for the actor who hated location work above all others had somehow committed himself to the ultimate location picture. “I can’t do it,” he finally said to Dmytryk. “It’s just not the part for me. How about Gable? I think he’s free, and he’d be perfect. Or Robert Young?” Dmytryk was gently reassuring but at a point decided that Tracy needed—and wanted—a firm hand. “When he stalled again, I simply said the car and driver would be calling to take him to the airport at a certain time, and I would expect to see him there. That was it. He showed up.”
To calm Tracy’s nerves on the flight that took them to Europe, R. J. Wagner presented him with a St. Bernard medal, Bernard being the patron saint of mountaineers. “He wore it on a chain around his neck throughout the trip and never once took it off.” They paused for a few days in Paris, putting up at the Raphael and taking in the nightlife. Bert Allenberg saw Tracy there and dutifully reported back to Hepburn that he was looking and feeling fine: “He was leaving the next morning for Chamonix and seemed to be in excellent spirits.” Dmytryk bought a convertible, planning to have the car shipped back to the States.
“The three of us drove together from Paris to Geneva,” Wagner recalled, “then up to Chamonix and the French Alps to get acclimated. That was the first time ever that there had been a company up there shooting.” Their arrival at Chamonix preceded the start of production by a couple of weeks, time to acclimate and train with Charles Balmat, a prominent Alpine guide whose ancestor, Jacques Balmat, was said to have been the first to climb Mont Blanc in 1792.
“Mr. Tracy is very unhappy with his accommodations,” production manager Harry Caplan advised his office in Los Angeles, the Hotel Les Alpes being something less than the Sun Valley resort Tracy had evidently envisioned. “We offered to rent (he proposed it) a chateau so that he could have more privacy. However, before looking at some chateaus, I took A. C. Lyles [Dmytryk’s assistant producer] to the Le Savoy Hotel and Lyles agreed with me that he (Tracy) and all the Paramount staff might be better off there … Tracy is one of those artistic people who is a complainer. The room is filthy, the rugs, beds are dirty, and the food (being pension plan) has no variety or selection to it.”
Caplan had started out in the thirties as prop man to the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields, so he was used to difficult talent. It fell principally to Eddie Dmytryk to nurse Tracy along while the company was on location. “Our unit is definitely being run by Mr. Tracy,” Caplan reported a couple of days later.
Eddie kowtows to his every wish. As a result, it is hard to get organized. We found Tracy a chalet (apartment) but now he doesn’t want it. I added some rugs to his room [and] am employing an English-speaking chamber maid, and we are painting the doors and closets in his room … Tracy has been complaining because the coffee isn’t here. He complains and criticizes at the drop of a hat. This location is very difficult and trying and this added problem does not make it any easier for us. He is very evasive about okaying wardrobe and Eddie sides with him. The reason I wired for new shirts is because he says these we brought are too small. [Assistant director] Bill [McGarry] has brought him three other types to no avail … I have a feeling Mr. Tracy is not going to do the things that Mr. Dmytryk said he would. He walked over about one mile of mountain today and gave up, returning to the hotel. He hasn’t as yet gone to the top of the Teleferique.
The advantage of locating the shoot on the Aiguille du Midi in the Mont Blanc massif of the French Alps was the Téléphérique de l’Aiguille du Midi, the historic aerial tramway that climbs the north face of the mountain, depositing its passengers near the top of the 12,800-foot summit. In terms of facilitating the transport of both equipment and personnel, it was unmatched anywhere in Europe and effectively made location work for The Mountain feasible. Tracy’s distrust of the thing was obvious, and he had plenty of time to formulate disaster scenarios as he haggled with Caplan and struggled for rest.
“Maybe,” suggested Robert Wagner, “he was just giving them trouble … I was below him in the hotel, and I could hear him pacing around because he had a very difficult time sleeping.” Hepburn, particularly, knew how rough the location was going to be on him and arranged for Margaret Shipway, David Lean’s script supervisor on Time of the Cuckoo, to serve as Tracy’s secretary, a soothing presence over the course of the shoot. In her tweed skirts and cashmere sweater sets, Shipway had a civilizing effect on the crew, always “smiling and friendly and interested” in whatever was going on, serving the same approximate role as the young woman from Boise who was hired to sit calmly and demurely alongside Tracy on the set of Northwest Passage.
“Just a short line to let you know we started shooting today,” Maggie wrote Hepburn on the morning of August 29. “Weather is doubtful but the crew are all happy and keen. Have settled in this hotel now—they’ve painted Mr. Tracy’s bedroom—and apart from the dreadful smell of new paint he’s more comfortable … Mr. Tracy’s sense of humor is wonderful—we laugh and laugh. I think he’s a marvelous person. He talks about you all the time.”
Shooting began with the making of stereo plates, POV shots, and long shots of the doubles in action. There was bad light all morning and hail by noon, causing the company to quit after lunch. Dmytryk found himself moving scenes around to take advantage of whatever light he could get, frustrating Harry Caplan’s attempts at creating a rudimentary schedule. Maggie Shipway worried that Tracy wasn’t eating very much and that the noise from a nightclub opposite the hotel was keeping him awake nights.
R. J. Wagner was as unnerved by the extreme elevations as Tracy and just as wary of the new single-cable Téléphérique. “I didn’t want to get on that thing too many times, and we had to shoot up there. As a matter of fact, I had to shoot there. It wasn’t Spence, but Spence said he’d go with me. I was very hesitant about it always. Eddie Dmytryk was up there with the crew, and I had to come around and get up into this thing, and [Spence] said, ‘Come on. I’ll go with you.’ And it got halfway up, and it went off the cable!” The car had, in fact, lurched to a stop with such force that it swung up and hit the cable, shattering the glass. As it rocked back and forth, R.J. felt Tracy’s arm around him. “I thought we were falling … and boom! It stopped, and we looked out the window and we were hanging [by the protective iron covering that served as the wheel housing] in the middle of this cable.”
At a sheer drop of eleven thousand feet, it was as heart-stopping a sight as either man had ever beheld. “Those damn things are scary enough when all is going well,” Dmytryk said, “but to be caught in one of those claustrophobic cubicles, swinging in the void …” Frank Westmore, the unit makeup man, was among the crew members observing the scene: “From our viewpoint on the Aiguille du Midi, we could see the little car below us, swinging wildly from side-to-side and bouncing frighteningly against a now-slack cable.”
There was nothing the crew could do other than keep their eyes on the tiny figures gripping the safety bars inside the car. “So we wait,” said Wagner, “and they sent an open work car down. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, we’re going to have to get out of this thing and get in there?’ And then go up because it came from up above?’ I mean, it was very, very frightening. So they come down and they leave and then they back the thing down again. I think, ‘Jesus, it’s going back down.’ And, indeed, no, they put it back [on the cable], and it would go back up.” The car took what seemed like an eternity to make its way up to the platform.
“When it ground its way into the station,” Westmore said, “Tracy staggered out looking twenty years older than he had that morning.” The irony of the incident was that once everyone had safely reached the summit, there was nothing to do but sit around and wait for a break in the light. Finally, they made a couple of shots for the trailer showing the crew sitting it out on the rocks. Then Tracy had to ride back down the mountain in the very same car that had balked carrying him up. “He went up there for me,” Wagner said of Tracy, “that is all I know. He was with me. He went up there because he knew that I was really frightened. I think it was after that experience, that next couple of days, that he got into drinking a little bit.”
There was no grand tumble, at least not on location, but rather a controlled leavening that put everyone on edge. The night of the Téléphérique incident, Wagner found Tracy in the hotel bar, where he was “completely drunk—gone! It was startling, because he had become an entirely different person.”
Tracy was given to quicksilver twists of temperament that alcohol only served to exacerbate. “Strangely, he was very talkative and friendly, actually charming,” said Frank Westmore, “telling all sorts of fascinating Hollywood stories, even as his head sagged lower and lower on his chest. He ordered another round of drinks.” It looked as if he would be in for an early night when he abruptly snapped to and hurled a brandy snifter at the face of the bartender.
“As I remember,” said Wagner, “the bartender made some kind of remark. And out of that remark Spence took exception and picked up his glass. It came out of nowhere, just out of nowhere. Flash anger.” Wagner stuck his right hand out to deflect the glass and reflexively closed his hand in on it, shattering it in his palm and driving the shards deep into his middle fingers.
“Tracy was oblivious to everything by then,” Westmore said, “and didn’t even know that he was being wrestled from his chair by members of his crew and hustled up to his room. I helped our company doctor as he stitched and bandaged Bob’s hand, meanwhile pondering the practical consideration of how I would mask the gashes for the remainder of the film.” Westmore was able to cover the injury with a combination of collodion and makeup, neatly concealing the stitches. “A contrite Tracy watched the procedure, barely remembering what had happened the night before.”
Fortunately, the light improved and Tracy and Wagner were able to begin working together. They and the crew were usually roped together in groups of four, lest someone disappear into a hidden ravine, and they wore crampon spikes to keep from slipping. The members of the company came to dread the rending sounds of the avalanches, which they could hear more often than see. “I was very, very frightened of the mountains and the crevices,” Wagner admitted. “We were on a piece up there and saw an avalanche, and it was at least a mile away, and we backed up when we saw that thing break. And I remember in the book they referred to the sound as ‘the tearing of silk.’ And it was that.”
At the end of a full workday, Tracy was too tired to create much trouble. “Conditions are a little better,” Caplan, obviously relieved, reported to the studio. “Tracy has settled down a little. He is a natural born crabber. I had it out with him and we seem to be friends. He is going to work Sunday (tomorrow) as a favor to Bill [McGarry] and myself. The last two days of shooting we have done a lot of work but [neither] I nor Bill can quite understand the way Eddie is shooting … He is very evasive. He is transferring a lot of work to the studio on account of Tracy. This means we will have a lot of plates and need many rock sets.”
Lloyd Shearer, the West Coast correspondent for Parade, observed Tracy in the hotel bar, impassively sipping milk and absorbing a lecture from Harry Mines, the unit publicist. “We have a still photographer,” Mines was heard to complain, “and his job is to take pictures. You won’t let him, and I think that’s pretty uncooperative.”
Tracy had a long and well-deserved reputation for coming off at photographers who got in his line of sight, clicked while a scene was in progress, or otherwise got on his nerves. Pat Elsey could remember kneading the tension from his shoulders after an ill-timed candid was snapped on the set of Northwest Passage. Bill Self once saw a studio photographer come up and take his picture while the two men were deep in conversation. “Spence turned to him and said, ‘You’re going to click yourself right out of the business.’ Well, at that point, the guy faded away.”
On location for The Mountain, 1956. (ROBERT WAGNER)
Tracy ran a hand across the weathered face he once likened to an outhouse door and fixed Mines with a withering stare. “Did you mention the word ‘job’?” he demanded, allowing the word to hang in the air.
Well, I’ve got a “job” too. I’ve got a job to act in this picture, and I mean to do it as well as I can. I’m not going to let anyone interfere with that. I get up at 5:30 every morning, and we’ve got to hike up the mountain. It’s 10, 12, 13 thousand feet up. How many times have you been up, Harry? Once? Well, the air’s pretty thin up there, and after you trudge for two hours, it’s a little hard to breathe. I stand in the snow with a pack on my back and I try to give the scene everything I’ve got. I’m concentrating on the lines and the mood and the take, and then in the middle I suddenly hear camera shutters clicking. I’m sorry, but it breaks my concentration. I know that stills have to be taken, but let’s shoot ’em a little distance away.”
Then Tracy, according to Shearer, got to his feet, smiled good-naturedly, and said, “Don’t make me a heavy. Let’s go in and eat.” The next day, he spent two hours posing in the snow, giving the photographer his complete cooperation.
As unpopular as he was with Mines and Harry Caplan, Tracy was well regarded among the rank and file, having seen that the crew was made more comfortable after they were stuck at the Hotel Les Alpes. “You know Spence,” Wagner said. “Everybody loved him. He was wonderful and very funny and had a terrific edge on his humor.” When R.J. complained one day that Dmytryk was working him too hard—a measure of the location’s difficulty and the relative thinness of its air—Tracy handed him a stern look. “Young man,” he said as if back playing Father Flanagan, “you ought to get down on your knees every night and thank God you work in the most overpaid business in the world.”
There were constant delays getting equipment and personnel to location by foot and by jeep. Days were often overcast and no film could be exposed, while at other times it rained and snowed. Takes were ruined by mike shadow. Mercifully, one take was all that was usually necessary when all the elements cooperated. There was no coverage, and certain shots intended to be made on location—particularly close-ups—were deferred to the studio.
Much of the tension dissolved with the completion of the mountain sequences, and the company began working close to the hotel on the introductory scenes for Wagner’s character of Chris. (“You there—boy!”) A few miles from Chamonix was the town of La Tour, where the village scenes were shot, and where Claire Trevor and E. G. Marshall joined the company. Trevor would recall how Tracy adored R. J. Wagner—whom he called “Bobby”—and how Wagner loved him. Marshall would remember the relish with which Tracy read aloud a letter from Hepburn, who was in Melbourne at the time. “Only parts,” Marshall qualified. “We should all have such a correspondent.”
Location work on The Mountain ended with a retake, as the weather prevented further shooting at the village. After lunch, the B Unit went to the first Téléphérique station to shoot plates, and the ordeal was at last at an end. There was a party that night and a presentation to the guides who had made the whole expedition possible.
“It was quite a wingding,” Eddie Dmytryk recalled, “and, naturally, many toasts had to be drunk with the excellent local wines. Just as naturally, Tracy had to drink them.” Said Wagner:
It was the end of the location and everyone was rather relaxed. And he started off by stopping and having a beer, then a little piece of cheese, and everyone was all very happy … When we left [Chamonix], it was Claire Trevor, [her husband] Milton [Bren], myself. We were all in a van coming down the hill, and I remember Spence took his hat off and he went, “Whooow!” and flung it right out into the Alps. We got down to Paris, and it didn’t take much for him … Spence was very nervous about flying … I think he was very anxious, and when we got on the plane he had a few belts on the plane. We landed in New York and got on another plane to come to L.A., and he was out of control.
The flight was to be met at LAX by Louise and Susie, but Carroll headed them off, gravely whispering something in Louise’s ear. “It was the first inkling I ever had that he had a drinking problem,” Susie remembered. “On the way home, my mother explained it a bit, saying it was something he’d had to battle all his life.”2
Where he went, whom he was with, is uncertain to this day. “Carroll came and got him,” said Wagner, “and they took him away.” Tracy’s datebook entry for the twenty-eighth carries a picture of a jug and the notation “Home TWA 11 PM drove.” The final two days of September show identical words: “out” and “orchestra.” (“He wasn’t belligerent,” said Wagner. “He said, ‘We’ll get the band and we’ll get together.’ ”)
“For the next six days,” wrote Eddie Dmytryk, “I received daily progress reports: This quiet, very private man was on the town, and in spades. I shot what few scenes I could without him, then closed down. On day seven, he was in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. I planned to restart production a week from that day, and in a week he showed up, ready to work. For a few days he had a bottle of milk constantly at hand. Then it was back to Cokes again and what Warren G. Harding called ‘normalcy.’ ”
Somewhat chastened after ten days of “illness,” Tracy became a model employee, welcoming visitors to the set—Cary Grant, Pearl Bailey, Jesse Lasky, Donald O’Connor—and cooperating with the press to the extent of handwriting the answers to eighteen questions submitted him by Jack Hirshberg of the studio’s publicity department. On what basis do you select your roles? one question asked. “Don’t just want to make movies at this stage of the game,” he replied. “I’m an old bastard. Hard to please.” Do you ever want to direct? “No. Lack patience to deal with actors.” Teet Carle, who had worked with Tracy as a publicist at M-G-M, was now publicity director at Paramount: “[Tracy] prompted the tops in good fellowship reunions when I met him in the studio café. I was his ‘old buddy’ whom he had missed. Maybe he, at long last, was sleeping better.”
At the beginning of production, Tracy had notified Bill McGarry and Harry Caplan that he was accustomed to taking a ninety-minute lunch (although it was not mentioned in his contract). At the studio he fell into the habit of returning to the set thirty to forty-five minutes later than expected, setting off another round of internal hand-wringing. On the set he was reflective, telling Lloyd Shearer he was going to “take it easy” after The Old Man and the Sea.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not retiring. The only time an actor really retires is when they don’t want him anymore. I don’t think that’s true in my case, although maybe it is. But I don’t see any point in making run-of-the-mill pictures. People can get as much of that stuff as they want on television. I’m not money hungry, and what I’d like to do is make maybe one picture a year or even less. But I want the picture to be memorable, something substantial and worthwhile. When I get out of my Thunderbird these days, my back hurts. And it’s not because of the driver’s seat. It’s because I’m not a kid anymore. And if I’m going to do a picture, I want the story to be solid and meaningful and entertaining. When the public walks out of the theater where a picture of mine’s been playing, I want to feel that the people have gotten their money’s worth.
He was working interiors the day his uncle Andrew died in Freeport at the age of seventy-two. It wasn’t unexpected; Andrew Tracy, in his forty-second year at the bank, had endured a trumped-up embezzlement investigation that left his spirit broken. Spence had sent Carroll to Freeport for moral support, and Carroll had brought Gene Sullivan down from Milwaukee. Results of a lie detector test were inconclusive, and a grand jury refused to indict him.
“So the whole thing evaporated,” said Andrew’s son Frank.
And after that he was never any good healthwise. His mental attitude was very sour. A couple of times I met with him in Chicago at the Blackstone when Spence was going through. And Spence would say, “Jesus, your dad is in terrible shape.” I’d say, “Yeah, he is.” He’d say, “That goddamn bank. That’s all he’s got in his head. No wonder he couldn’t get by a lie detector—the goddamn bank was like his wife. Could accept no criticism, wouldn’t sign that non-indictment thing … it was loyalty.” I said, “That’s the way he is, Spence. That’s the way he is. He’s straight as an arrow. He’ll accept no criticism of his character or his actions.” And Spence said, “Well, it’s gonna kill him.” Spence was very good to him, very concerned. He used to call up from California: “How’s he doing today?” And when he died, he called and said, “I can’t make it. We’re finishing up The Mountain. This picture’s a stinker, and I want to get it in back of me. I hate it. I’ve been buried in the thing for so long. I think in two weeks we can wrap it up here, and I’m going to stay with it.”
Tracy’s loathing of a picture was, for once, well founded. By purposely reducing the Teller brothers to “simple good and simple evil,” Ranald MacDougall had robbed them of all shading. The Mountain was ill written, miscast, awkwardly staged—and almost everyone, at least secretly, seemed to know it. “Oh, God, that was a terrible picture!” Claire Trevor exclaimed in 1983. “It goes on forever and it’s bad. Spencer Tracy plays the older brother of Robert Wagner who was then a beanpole, he was so skinny. He looked like he was twelve years old, and Spence had already gotten heavy and old-looking. It was ludicrous.” Eddie Dmytryk admitted that he never should have done the picture: “[Tracy] was playing Bob Wagner’s older brother but looked like Bob’s grandfather. We poured him on the plane but he continued drinking back here. It was an awful situation. I realized I had become his keeper.”
Tracy tried mightily in individual scenes, and occasionally he prevailed on a crowded soundstage when all eyes were upon him. Dmytryk described a scene toward the end of the picture in which Zachary recounts the climb and the rescue of the lone survivor, an Indian girl, and casts himself in a harsh light, insisting the hero of the day was his younger brother, killed in the process. “It is a long scene, running five to six minutes, interrupted only by one short question from E. G. Marshall near the beginning. I shot Tracy’s close-up first, as was frequently my custom, to ensure that this shot, in which most of this scene would be played, had all the freshness and spontaneity possible. As usual, Spence nailed it in the first take. At the finish, most of the crew was crying. I said, ‘Cut,’ and looked over at E.G. [Marshall]. Tears were streaming down his face. ‘I wish all the method actors could watch this man work—just once!’ he said.”
In 1943, Andrew B. Tracy visited his famous nephew on the set of A Guy Named Joe. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Kate’s Old Vic tour ended in Perth on November 11, and she quietly returned to town via American Airlines on the sixteenth. That night Tracy noted in his book: “Din[ner] with Old Rat [with food] from Chasen’s.”
Filming finally concluded with scenes inside the wreckage of the plane on the nineteenth, and again he dined alone with Kate, as he had every night since her return. When she flew back to New York on the morning of the twentieth, she called from the airport, and again that evening from Hartford. In a few days she was off to London, where she would be making a picture with Bob Hope. In the nine eventful months just ended, Spence had seen Old One exactly four days.3
In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Jane Feely came to California for an extended visit, and she met the Tracys at Chasen’s one night for dinner. Spence had brought two Christmas presents for her, one of which was a Madonna of hammered brass he had found for her in Chamonix.
With Edward Dmytryk. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
It was a beautiful thing, and then a little carving of the Last Supper, one of those tiny, tiny things that he had picked up over there. And we had a nice visit. He said that he was cooking for himself, and it was obvious, of course, that he wasn’t at home—he had eaten wieners for the whole last week. And there was this feeling that he was lonely, that he was standing apart from the rest of them at the table. I detected a little sadness there, but thought: “It is none of your business. Stay out of it.” It was hard to be very, very loyal to Louise and to think as much of her as I did, and also think as much of him as I did … That dinner was kind of strained. It was—oh, you know, they talked back and forth about family matters and what everybody was doing, what John was doing, but there were two different people, two different households. It was as if he was living in one country, and she in another.
On December 24, Tracy attended the Bogarts’ annual Yuletide party, where he noticed singer Rosemary Clooney peering out a picture window, a study in holiday sadness. They’d met, but she knew him mostly from the movies.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, staring out the window alongside her.
“I don’t know,” she said, her husband, José Ferrer, dancing with Betty Bacall just a few feet away. “I’ve never been to a party on Christmas Eve. I guess I’m just homesick.”
His voice was strong, but he was not unkind.
“Get used to it,” he said.
Nineteen fifty-six would at last be the year of The Old Man and the Sea. Fred Zinnemann had signed on as director after two years of hesitation—John Ford, Vittorio De Sica, David Lean, and John Sturges were discussed in the interim—and Peter Viertel had produced a screenplay in collaboration with Ernest Hemingway that Tracy, for one, thought “great.” Leland Hayward had made a distribution deal with Warner Bros. that called for full financing and, after the picture returned twice its negative cost, 50 percent of the gross. In December Tracy recorded a scratch track narration so that he could “come to grips with the characterization” and show that he could carry the descriptive voice-over in Viertel’s script as well as the thoughts and words of Santiago, the Old Man.
“I had a good feeling about the way he approached the characterization of the Old Man,” Zinnemann said in a letter to Hemingway. “As to the descriptive part, I think that it will have to be read like poetry; like a ballad, with an underlying rhythm to it. Spencer tended to read these descriptive parts a bit too objectively, rather like a report. I think that when we do the final narration, it should give the impression of rising out of a musical mood, created by one softly strumming guitar.”
As the new year began, Hemingway defined their two principal problems: finding a boy to play Manolo and getting Tracy in “some sort of shape,” as he now weighed, stripped, 215 pounds. For the job he recommended a man named George Brown, an old friend and his own personal trainer, who could, he said, make Tracy “look as much like a Cojimar fisherman as possible” in the space of six weeks. When Tracy advised Zinnemann he would be going to Europe for a couple of months “to be near Katharine Hepburn,” it was arranged for Brown to meet him in Cuba around March 1, affording them six weeks of uninterrupted work. Tracy, however, did not go to Europe, despite word from Kate that she and Bob Hope were hopelessly mismatched and that the picture was, for all intents and purposes, a stiff. He remained in town, fielding offers from Columbia and Fox, loafing, watching way too much TV, and subsisting primarily on weenies and frozen dinners.
He saw The Mountain for the first time on February 17 and pronounced himself “disappointed” with the picture. “Mountain is failure—think must be ending,” he wrote in his datebook. “Wrong—always thought wrong. Phony. Should go back get brother. Or at least look at mountain at end. ??? Critics will pan. Some lukewarm. Very moderate business. Retakes for 3 days would fix.”
John had left Nadine and Joey, taking a room on Tower Road and once again joining the family dinners. Louise always had a lot to talk about; she was traveling regularly, had plans to add a new two-story wing to the clinic, and was in line for an honorary doctorate from MacMurray College, her fourth. “Clinic, clinic, clinic,” Spence would say, throwing the kids an exasperated look. They would usually have hamburgers when he came to dinner, sometimes chicken and maybe a vegetable (if Louise could force one down him). “Quiet, Susie,” she’d say to her daughter, “and let Father talk about himself.”
The Academy Award nominations were announced on the eighteenth, and once again both Tracy and Hepburn were up for top honors—Spence for Bad Day at Black Rock, Kate for Time of the Cuckoo (released in the United States as Summertime). Tracy was so unimpressed he didn’t even mention the nominations in his datebook. Both he and Kate would be in New York when the awards went off, neither paying the slightest attention. He left Los Angeles on March 6, already a week late, and did not begin training in New York until the twenty-first.
Zinnemann, meanwhile, was in Cuba fuming, contending that Tracy had let his partners down by not commencing his program of training until three weeks later than promised. The picture’s direct cost was estimated at $1,904,000 (plus $264,280 in overhead), based on the idea of doing everything straight, without process or traveling mattes, except for the action of the jumping fish. This accounted for sixty days of shooting in Cuba, seven days at the studio, and one day in New York. For interiors, a studio had been reopened in Havana that hadn’t been used in five years.
From New York, George Brown reported that Tracy, his diet supervised by Hepburn, was losing weight at a “very satisfactory” pace. He was not, however, submitting to a physical training routine designed to tone the muscles used in the work of fishing. According to Zinnemann, Hepburn didn’t want Tracy submitting to Brown’s workouts, and Tracy would be in much better shape “if George were allowed to do his work.”
When he left for Miami on March 26, Tracy’s weight still wasn’t where it needed to be and the scheduled start of production was scarcely two weeks away. Certain he was in for flack from both Zinnemann and Hemingway, he had two drinks aboard the plane to Miami, two more on the jump to Cuba. At Havana, he and Brown were met by Zinnemann and assistant director Don Page. They were taken to the Hotel Nacional, where Tracy insisted on ordering himself a Dubonnet cocktail. “He proceeded to have several,” said Page. When he arrived for dinner that evening at Finca Vigia, he was clutching two bottles of Dubonnet, one of which he had already opened. Hepburn’s flight got in at 8:30, and when told that Tracy was with the Hemingways, she phoned the Finca and then asked to be taken there. “Loaded,” Tracy recorded in his book. “Home bed 1 AM.”
Tracy and Hepburn (and her friend Laura Harding) were to share a fully staffed seaside estate at Tarara, about ten miles outside of Havana. Nothing was said about his condition the next morning, and he swore off the booze then and there. (“NO DRINKS IN MORNING OR THEREAFTER!!!!!!!”) He submitted to a beach workout with Brown, saw Zinnemann at his house, and was told how happy the director was to have him. What he referred to as the “1st Court Martial by Hayward and Zinnemann” didn’t come until the following afternoon. Told how much he “had them frightened,” given the money involved, Tracy promptly offered to withdraw from The Old Man and the Sea. “Zinnemann said if I left he would,” Tracy afterward noted. “I said I would think it over!”
The second court-martial, which occurred on the thirty-first, took on the tone of an intervention when Hemingway joined in. “You’re a rummy!” the author said accusingly. “What the hell! Admit it!” He went on to dare him to get out the Bible and swear to the ten years of sobriety he claimed. “[Again] I offered to withdraw,” Tracy recorded, “but said I would have to stay if they sued. They would.”
The company quickly divided into armed camps—Page and Zinnemann on one side, Tracy and Hepburn on the other. Kate, as always, was fiercely protective of Spence, ever vigilant in matters of abuse or perceived disrespect, and could strike with the ferocity of a rattlesnake. Among the production team, she was awarded the code name “George Arliss” after the long-faced British character actor with the prominent cheek bones. Hemingway, who couldn’t abide a man who could not hold his liquor, found it impossible to utter the name of the star of his film and took to tartly referring to him simply as “the artist.”
Tracy’s deal called for a rate of $5,769.24 a week for twenty-six weeks beginning April 15, 1956, the official start of the picture. Hemingway left that same day for the Cabo Blanco Fishing Club in Peru, intent on photographing the film’s marlin sequences. Once on salary, Tracy could be given calls, and Don Page asked him to go to Cojimar where they would shoot all the beach scenes and get together with the technical adviser, a Cuban fisherman who would get him acquainted with handling the oars and the lines.
“Whose idea is that?” Tracy asked, and he was told by Page that it was Zinnemann’s and his own.
“He said he didn’t know whether he would do it then or wait until we started shooting on Monday the 23rd,” Page recounted in a memo. “At that time, the Old Man’s boat will be tied up as we will be using it.” Clearly agitated, Tracy then raised the subject of his first night in Cuba and the matter of his drinking. He said “all Hollywood knew about it” and that Page must have done a lot of talking. “I straightened him out, and told him that if he felt I was a stool pigeon I would just as soon get off the picture right now. He feels no one in the company likes him and he doesn’t like anyone connected with us. As for his promise to lose weight, it seems to me that he is as heavy now as he has always been, and I recall Mr. Zinnemann stating to Mr. Hayward that if Tracy did not lose the necessary weight that he would not start the picture with Mr. Tracy, as he would be laughed right out of the theater.”
For the part of Manolo, Zinnemann settled on eleven-year-old Felipe Pazos, Jr., the brown-eyed son of a prominent Cuban economist. Tracy appeared for a wardrobe test with the boy on April 21, and Hayward wired his enthusiastic approval of the results from his offices in Burbank. Actually getting some film exposed, however minor the footage, seemed somehow to relieve all the tensions of the previous month.
“Tracy is behaving fairly well these days,” Zinnemann related in a note to Hemingway. “He went out with us in a pretty rough sea. It didn’t seem to bother him too much. He is going again Wednesday morning … George Arliss is getting ready to leave. She is going to do a picture with Burt Lancaster, as you know. It is going to be a gruesome twosome. Pity the poor director.”
Back from a trip, Jack Warner viewed the wardrobe test on May 1 and added his own vote of confidence:
I THINK TRACY LOOKED EXCELLENT AND I VISUALIZE HIM AS BEING OUR OLD MAN OF THE SEA. HE JUST STEPS RIGHT OUT OF THE BOOK AND THE BOY IS A TEN STRIKE.
Filming officially began on May 4, when Tracy’s call was for 4:45 a.m. in order to make “dawn shots” of the Old Man returning home. Progress was slow, as most of Zinnemann’s shots were dependent upon the time of day, limiting Tracy’s working hours almost exclusively to mornings. Don Page, himself an actor (known professionally as Don Alverado), loathed Tracy, and since it was Page’s job to give Tracy his calls, every official interaction took on an air of belligerence.
Tracy again had a dawn shot—rowing at sunrise—on the morning of May 10 and was dismissed for the day at 11:30. Page gave him an afternoon call for the following day, with work to continue after dinner with night exteriors featuring the boy. Tracy, he said, informed him that he would show for the afternoon but would not work that night and that Page could inform both Hayward and Zinnemann. Tracy’s pocket diary for the day carries the words: “Opinion wrong shooting. Blow-up with Leland.”
Filming in Cuba with novelist Ernest Hemingway. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
What Tracy had noticed was that Felipe Pazos had been given a 4:45 call for that next morning, and that Zinnemann and Page expected him to work an eighteen-hour stretch—something that would never have been required of a youngster on an American set. Tracy refused to make the night shots simply so the boy would not have to work. He noted in his book that he was ready to leave for location the following afternoon when a call came from Hayward: “Day lost because alleged refusal work to-nite, etc. False.”
The company was shut down, and the next morning a letter from Hayward was hand-delivered to Tracy’s house at Tarara: “We notify you that your default in your contract has forced us to stop production and shut down, and we will hold you responsible.”
Bert Allenberg had attorney Lawrence Beilinson call Hayward, and an appointment was set for the following day, a Sunday. Hayward came to talk, saying that he was in a bad spot, liable for the production to Jack Warner—who thought Zinnemann was moving too slowly—and that Don Page had been forced on him by the studio. (Page was the ex-husband of Ann Warner and the father of Jack Warner’s step-daughter, actress Joy Page.) Having cleared the air, Tracy agreed to continue with the picture but said he thought it doubtful that Zinnemann would stick with it.
A wire went out to Steve Trilling, Warner’s executive assistant, in Burbank:
BYGONES ARE BYGONES COOPERATION COMPLETE PRODUCTION RESUMED INFORM ALL CONCERNED HAYWARD TRACY ZINNEMAN
Beginning May 17 they planned to shoot all the land scenes, which would take a month, followed by four weeks at sea with Tracy. The crew would be cut for two weeks of second-unit work, then Zinnemann would go to New York to shoot a sequence at Yankee Stadium. The project would wrap with two weeks of process work in Burbank. Zinnemann, who saw the story as “the triumph of man’s spirit over enormous physical power,” was discouraged when Hemingway failed to land a thousand-pound black marlin off Peru. The company was forced to substitute a mechanical version so big and cumbersome it took two flat cars to get it by rail to Florida. “Hemingway hated it at first sight,” said Zinnemann, “and christened it ‘the condomatic fish.’ When it was put in the Gulf Stream near Havana it sank without a trace and was never seen again.”
Zinnemann grew disenchanted with the choice of Felipe Pazos, and there was talk of replacing him. On the seventeenth Tracy worked with a second boy, shooting duplicate scenes, before it was decided to stick with Pazos. Hemingway, when he returned from Peru, declared that he, too, was unhappy with the boy, describing him as “a cross between a tadpole and Anita Loos.” In a letter to his friend Gianfranco Ivancich, Hemingway seemed resigned to the situation: “As you know, there was some difficulty with the artist, but they say that is all straightened and we have a docile artist now, but to me in the stills I saw last night he still looked very fat for a fisherman and the boy looks very tiny. There is nothing that a rubber fish cannot fix. In later stills he looks much better and he is such a good actor he can probably surmount most things.”
Work moved to the Old Man’s shack and, according to Tracy’s diary, Zinnemann demanded the replacement of the boy. A call was put into Hayward, and the producer arrived in Havana on June 4. Though Tracy had managed to drop seventeen pounds, Zinnemann still considered him too heavy to play the role, and Pazos’ size only served to emphasize his girth.
“Tracy was most certainly a problem,” Zinnemann said. “He was not doing his job. Everybody, except Leland Hayward, was a problem, including myself. There were a lot of egos on that movie.” Hayward lined up with Zinnemann and Hemingway in calling for the boy’s replacement. Zinnemann became convinced that Tracy was out to sabotage the picture: “He seemed malevolent and hostile. The crew hated him and he hated them back. Day after day, there was the sense that no progress was being made on the picture.”
Anonymous squibs began to appear in the press: “Spencer Tracy’s newest all-day buddy is Cuban dictator Batista. They play golf together every morning. Batista’s caddies also carry machine guns around the course.” And: “Spencer Tracy and another gent had one of the bloodiest fist fights in Havana’s history. Ernest Hemingway had to be restrained several times from massacring Tracy all over Cuba.”
In 1992 Zinnemann recalled a second drinking episode “which interrupted shooting for several days.” A thirdhand reference to Tracy and Hemingway having broken up a bar is unconfirmed in any of the memos or wires preserved in the Jack Warner, Leland Hayward, Fred Zinnemann, Ernest Hemingway, or Warner Bros. collections, and Peter Viertel, in his 1992 memoir Dangerous Friends, includes no such story. Zinnemann only remembered that Hemingway once threatened to go looking for Tracy with a shotgun “but that was just one of those silly gestures of his.”
Hayward clashed with Zinnemann over the director’s insistence on doing as few process shots as possible and scolded him for making three shots of Tracy that could easily have been done on the Warner lot in Burbank. Zinnemann decided to make the long shots on the ocean with Tracy’s double, saving close-ups for the process stage. In exchange for the time off, Tracy agreed to give the company four additional weeks. Then Hayward, channeling Warner, told Zinnemann that he had to start the second-unit work in Cojimar no later than July 25 “or else.”
When Tracy visited the set to say good-bye on June 13, Zinnemann asked him to stay until Hayward arrived for a “showdown.” On the sixteenth, Tracy had a call from Hemingway “apologizing for madness, etc.” That same day, Zinnemann received a cable from Jack Warner:
SAW DAILIES INTERIOR CUBAN CAFE CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY YOU DID NOT SHOOT INDIVIDUAL OF TRACY WHEN YOU WERE THERE AND LIGHTED FOR IT … YOU ARE SHOOTING TOO MANY SUPERFLUOUS TAKES AND SCENES…
Specifically, Warner was objecting to a flashback shot over Tracy’s shoulder (to cover his age) even though its composition was clearly indicated in the script. Said Zinnemann: “Shooting most of the movie in the studio tank seemed to be the only way out; unfortunately, I could not see how this could be done … Suddenly the story seemed pointless. It made little sense to proceed with a robot pretending to be a fish in a studio tank pretending to be the gulf stream with an actor pretending to be a fisherman.” His withdrawal from the picture was reported in Louella Parsons’ column of June 23, 1956.
“The argument had nothing to do with Spence,” Leland Hayward told Parsons via telephone from Havana. “He finished his scenes in time and begged Zinnemann to remain. The trouble was strictly between Zinnemann and myself over locations—of all things. Fred wanted to remain in Cuba, and I felt it wasn’t practical to stay any longer. Warners agreed.”
Tracy, who spoke to Parsons as well, said he never had any argument with Zinnemann and that they were good friends. The following day, he flew back to New York, where he sequestered himself in a suite at the Pierre and slept on and off for hours at a stretch.
“Did not take any calls from Gar!!!” he wrote in his book.
When Tracy arrived back in Los Angeles, Hepburn, for once, was already there, finishing off her first week of filming The Rainmaker. Spence had dinner on Tower Road that first night back—it was John’s thirty-second birthday—but otherwise spent the week with Kate. He had been absent from St. Ives for three months and seemed to enjoy burrowing in, seeing no one in particular and basking in some near-perfect weather. There was talk of resuming Old Man and the Sea in the waters off Nassau, but he thought Hayward too eager to get going again and opposed such a move. He backed the more cautious approach of the picture’s new director, John Sturges, who wanted time with the script and favored closing the film down until fall or even the spring of 1957. Under protest, Hayward eventually agreed to the delay.
After nearly a decade of hotel living, Tracy’s move to 9191 St. Ives effectively put an end to any hopes of reconciliation between him and Louise. In earlier days, he could still come to the ranch for meals and the occasional game of tennis with John, and he still had a room there where he could lie down on Sunday afternoons and take a nap. (“Do an el foldo,” as he put it.) After 1951, though, the house on White Oak was no longer his legal address, and when Louise chose the house on Tower in 1955, she did so with the wrenching knowledge that it had only three bedrooms—one for her, one for Susie, and one, should he ever need it, for John. According to Eddie Dmytryk’s wife, the actress Jean Porter, it was about this same time that Louise told Spence that he could have a divorce if that was what he wanted.
“One time at Romanoff’s—this is after we had heard that Mrs. Tracy was willing to get a divorce—I said, ‘Why don’t you and Katie get married?’ He said, ‘Too late. I’ve asked her. She said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it now. It doesn’t matter. We’ve lived this long with things this way.’ I think she enjoys her independence. We’re together all the time anyway. So I’m not pushing her. And she’s not pushing me.’ ”
St. Ives seemed the perfect home for him, simple and spare. “I don’t own one damned thing I’d miss for more than five minutes if I lost it or it were swiped,” he once said to Garson Kanin. “I like to check in and check out.” For years he didn’t spend much time there, and Cukor, who never could tell whether he was in residence or not, took to referring to him as “my elusive tenant” in his notes to Kate. (“My elusive tenant turns up at his little home from time to time, unexpected and unannounced. Before I know it, he’s gone again …”) He never really settled in until he came to regard the location as a permanent base, as he had the Beverly Hills Hotel for so many years.
“He knew the way from the Beverly Hills Hotel down Beverly Drive into Beverly Hills to Romanoff’s,” said Kate,
and he knew the way to go to Chasen’s … George built him a charming house and Spencer rented it, but his sense of direction … he didn’t know where he was. Well, what to do, what to do? Being a simple fellow and a sensible man, he thought, “Well, I’ll go down Doheny to Sunset, and I’ll go back Sunset to the Beverly Hills Hotel. And then I’ll go from there.” Well, everything was fine until one night he and his brother Carroll decided that they’d go to Chasen’s. So Spencer got into the car to drive it. He backed out of the garage, he turned onto Doheny, got to Sunset and turned right, and Carroll thought, “What the hell is he doing?” But he shut up, and Spencer continued until he got to the Beverly Hills Hotel. He turned left, he went down Beverly Drive, he got to Santa Monica, he turned left, he got to Beverly Boulevard, and he turned right, and he went down Beverly Boulevard and he got to Chasen’s. It was there on the corner, and they drove into the parking lot.
But before he got out of the car, Carroll said to him, “Spencer, you could have gone out your driveway, straight down Doheny, across Santa Monica, still down Doheny, across the beginning of Melrose, and you would have arrived at Chasen’s in two minutes instead of ten.” Spencer was thrilled. He said, “Is that really true?” Carroll said, “Yes, it’s true, Spencer. You live right up there on that hill.” When I heard that story for the first time I said, “It’s amazing he ever found Dr. Livingstone, isn’t it?”
A rare snapshot of Tracy and Hepburn at a private function, circa 1956. (JUDY SAMELSON COLLECTION)
Tracy enjoyed a measure of contentment at St. Ives. Gone were the halfhearted days of womanizing he had known in the early 1950s. After five years of life on the run, Hepburn had once again returned to make “a life for him that was irresistible” so that he would not, as she put it, wander off.
“I think he thought Kate very attractive,” Joe Mankiewicz said,
and Kate somebody he could talk to. Not only that, but [somebody] he could listen to. But most of these [other] women couldn’t amuse him. Kate had anecdotes, Kate came in with gossip, Kate was like marrying The Hollywood Reporter, except she knew everything from all sources. And one thing Spence was very, very curious about [was] gossip. He loved to hear stories about people. Well. Would you like to have Ingrid Bergman come in and tell you stories about people? Or would you like to have Joan Bennett tell you about people? But KATE, who had the entire mirage of English society and French society and Riviera society and Florida society, plus the theatre society! Constance Collier, up and down, coming in with gossip. This was kind of a jackpot of entertainment for Spence. And, in a way, a kind of tribute to him. Laying all this at his feet. Oh, this was a tremendous jackpot that Spence hit. What he liked in terms of entertainment, liked more than anything else in the world, was gossip about people—who’s doing what to whom. Kate never went out after it, but my God it came to her. Cukor! Cukor was the Generalissimo of gossip! Both homosexual and heterosexual. And here he sat in the middle of this place, and all these busy bees gathering this honey for him! This information. [A] constant, never-ending source of information, gossip, and amusement for him. He didn’t have to go out, sit through a whole night of conversation before he got to bed with a woman. This was wonderful, because Louise wasn’t about to tell him who was doing what to whom. Louise wanted to keep him comfortable and happy, give him books to read.
By 1956 the break with Louise was so complete that Spence wasn’t even on hand for her sixtieth birthday. In the days leading up to the event, he made two attempts to leave for New York—one by air, one by rail—and canceled both times. He finally got away on July 24, taking a TWA sleeper flight to Idlewild and spending the next three days at the office of his dentist, Dr. Carl Bastian. He went to Mass at St. Patrick’s, dined with Bert Allenberg and Benny Thau, spent the night of Weeze’s birthday attending a performance of My Fair Lady with the Allenbergs and Frank Sinatra. (“You made the little wop cry!” he rather sweetly told Rex Harrison afterward.) The following evening he dined solo with Sinatra and, as he noted in his datebook, the “grape.”
“Well,” said Sinatra, “we lifted a few, in New York particularly. You know, Jesus, at four o’clock in the morning, five o’clock … and I was doing six shows a day at the Paramount [in between showings of Johnny Concho] and had to look fairly well—not like I was dying at 132 pounds. He said, ‘Oh the hell with it. We’ll have another one and you’ll be there on time and you’ll be great.’ I said, ‘Thanks a lot.’ ”
Tracy had known Sinatra since the day in 1945 when the singer walked up and introduced himself on the M-G-M lot. “I was in a sailor suit doing a dance picture with [Gene] Kelly, and he thought I was in the Navy … He said, ‘Where are you stationed?’ And I said, ‘Right here.’ And, of course, I teased him for about five minutes. And then he said, ‘Oh, you’re the guy with the swooning and all that stuff.’ And I said, ‘I guess so.’ And we became fast friends after that. Immediately.”
The break with Louise had never been clean, never final, never the sort of thing where the parties could heal and move on. It was an open wound for them both, something neither of them could face or acknowledge. “In a way,” said Seymour Gray, “he did love her. He felt responsible to her. There was the time he had this fight with Hepburn in front of me about this coat that he bought [Louise]. Hepburn was furious. ‘Why didn’t you buy me one?’ He said, ‘Because you don’t need one. And you’ve got enough money to buy your own.’ I think he admired her and had enormous respect for her … And I don’t think Spencer wanted a divorce.”
And yet he ran from Louise on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, and he hated himself for it. Two weeks later he emerged from another self-induced stupor at the Pierre and placed himself under the care of Dr. Richard Stock, a prominent cardiologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. On August 18, 1956, Carroll Tracy quietly settled the hotel bill for $2,700, and he and Kate, who had just finished work on The Rainmaker, took him home to California.
1 Heston was thirty-one at the time. In the book, Isaiah Vaudagne, the elder brother, is fifty-two, while Marcellin is “barely thirty.” In MacDougall’s screenplay the brothers were renamed Zachary and Chris Teller, their ages unspecified.
2 When Susie was in high school, her best friend tried telling her that her father had a drinking problem. “Oh, he doesn’t drink,” Susie insisted. “He orders ginger ale or 7-Up whenever we have dinner with him.”
3 Tracy liked to tease Kath about her age, pointing out that he had given her joy in her “latter days.” The name “Ratty” was a term of affection they tossed between themselves, though never in public. “Old One” and “Old Rat” were generally applied in the third person.