CHAPTER 29
Doubtless the conversation between Tracy and Frank Sinatra touched on the condition of their mutual friend, Humphrey Bogart. In February 1956 Bogart had undergone surgery for esophageal cancer, and both men were tracking his progress. Early in July, having just returned from Cuba, Tracy and Hepburn visited the Bogarts’ Holmby Hills estate. “Bogie post-operative seems very ill,” Tracy wrote in his datebook. “Weighs 120 lbs.” There was no improvement in August and, after a Labor Day visit, Tracy mused, “Poor Bogie—6 mos??” The arrival of his namesake,Tracy Stewart Granger, on September 10 cheered him considerably, and he postponed a drive to Las Vegas to visit Jean and the baby.
As The Mountain neared its September release date, Tracy’s attitude toward the film hardened and, as with Bad Day at Black Rock, he became convinced it would be a flop, a “disaster.” His bleak outlook may have been influenced somewhat by an ill-advised attempt on the part of Paramount to recover the money the studio figured his eleven days of “illness” had cost the company. Bert Allenberg initially agreed they were entitled to perhaps $50,000, yet Tracy had finished his role in the picture in the twelve weeks allotted under the terms of his contract, and cast insurance had already paid $11,000 toward the alleged loss.
In the end, studio head Y. Frank Freeman felt they were unlikely to recover anything more without incurring the expense (and unwanted publicity) of a lawsuit, and the money was ultimately rolled into the negative cost, which came to $2,119,000. Varietyhanded the film a pan, judging Tracy’s performance as “no more than adequate” and rightly placing much of the blame for the picture’s failure on Ranald MacDougall’s script and the uneven direction of Eddie Dmytryk. The Reporter, on the other hand, thought it wonderful, a reaction that clearly left its top-billed star flummoxed. All the trade notices agreed the film’s best moments took place on the mountainside, where the dialogue was held to a minimum and the process plates were used to good effect as the Teller brothers make their ascent to the summit.
“Tracy was an actor, not a mountain climber,” Dmytryk wrote,
yet no one, in my opinion, ever made mountain climbing more real, more harrowing, or more perilous than he did. In one scene, while supposedly standing on an inch-wide ledge (I used inserts made with his climbing double to establish this) he reaches for a crack, finds it filled with ice, carefully takes out his ice ax and chips it away, replaces his ax in his belt, and finally, after a breathless pause, makes the short leap necessary to reach the next handhold. Throughout the scene, shot in close-up, he was standing on the bottom of an upturned apple box, perhaps eight inches off the ground, but you would have sworn it was a matter of life and death on Everest. That’s acting. In the final film I let the scene run without a cut, except for a couple of foot inserts—it must have lasted a full four minutes. Only an actor of Tracy’s caliber could have sustained a scene of this kind for so long.
The New York opening put Tracy on edge, and the day it took place he recorded a “big temper blow up with Kate.” To cool down, he took a drive up the coast in his new Lincoln convertible, returning in time for dinner on Tower Road.1 The notices weren’t terrible, he found, but neither were they laudatory. He listed them carefully in his book, noting where the film had been panned but where his own performance had been well received. The Times, the Post, Saturday Review, and Newsweek were all counted as bad; the Herald Tribune, the News, the New Yorker, and Time good—at least so far as his personal notices were concerned. Herbert Kupferberg of the Herald Tribune found Tracy’s work as Zachary Teller “intensely moving,” while Bosley Crowther described an actor who had allowed his rugged old guide to waver between “a vague sort of peasant valor” and gawking stupidity. “It is hard to determine how to take him, except as a first-class mountain goat.”
After eight years of exile in foreign locales, an unbowed Katharine Hepburn began work on The Rainmaker with the same “no press” policy that had made her such a headache for the publicity people at M-G-M. “We made inquiries with interviewers,” said Teet Carle, “and found that not one had any need (or desire) to do stories on her. I went on the set to tell her we would protect her and keep away media folks.”
It’s possible that Hepburn got wind of such widespread apathy, for in August 1956, having just retrieved Tracy from his latest New York misadventure, she sat for a formal one-on-one with Edwin Schallert, the drama editor of the Los Angeles Times. Schallert was conscious of how rare an occasion this was and said as much in the lede of his write-up. The paper played the story up big, giving it a prominent page-one placement and accompanying it with a generous head shot gamely peering out at the reader, eyes flashing, teeth shining, collar upturned, at forty-nine the “queen of the international stars” (as the caption would have it). The talk focused on the new movie, in which she had been paired with Burt Lancaster, but ranged over a number of topics, her travels, her likes and dislikes, and her by now legendary pictures with Spencer Tracy.
“It is regrettable,” she lamented, “that no one has been able to find a comedy, such as we formerly did, which would be suitable for us.” Within days, Fox production chief Buddy Adler was on the phone to Abe Lastfogel with just such a comedy, a modest hit on Broadway titled The Desk Set.
Adler had picked up the rights as part of an investment strategy that gave Fox an ownership stake in several plays, the final price in each case calibrated to the length of the play’s New York run. In the role of the spinsterish Bunny Watson, head of the research department of a major TV network, the show had starred Shirley Booth, a masterful comedienne who was never much of a draw in the movies (despite having collected an Academy Award for her work in Come Back, Little Sheba). As with Time of the Cuckoo,Booth ceded a role she had created onstage to Hepburn, the crucial change of Bunny ending up with computer consultant Richard Sumner (instead of her boss) having already been effected in a draft screenplay. Adler had originally given the property to writer-producer Charles Brackett, who lasted scarcely three weeks on the assignment. (“It’s not my cup of tea,” Brackett fretted, “and every time I rewrite a scene it gets worse.”) Eventually, Desk Set was settled on the husband-wife team of Henry and Phoebe Ephron.
The initial offer from Fox was $250,000 for the Tracy-Hepburn combo, plus a 10 percent split of the gross after the film had earned double its negative cost in rentals. Kate didn’t like the up-front money, and there was friction between her and Bert Allenberg when she said as much directly to the studio. Fox upped the ante to $350,000 and 30 percent of the profits, which, profits being what they were in Hollywood, didn’t sound all that much better. Eager to meet a projected start date of November 1, Adler finally approved an offer of $400,000—$250,000 for Tracy and $150,000 for Hepburn—and 50 percent of the net profits. Tracy saw the first seventy-five pages of the Ephrons’ revised screenplay on October 2 and thought them only “fair.” Lastfogel finalized the contracts on October 22, the team splitting 10 percent of the gross after $4,400,500 and 20 percent after $4,750,000—an extraordinary deal for their first picture away from M-G-M.
Tracy’s dismay at the first seventy-five pages resulted in an all-day script conference between Hepburn and the Ephrons, Kate clad in her familiar white slacks and matching shirt. “That morning, she and Spence had read the script aloud and had marked where changes in his role, his lines, his activity, could improve the script,” recounted Henry Ephron. “By the end of the day we were on a friendly, warm basis, wildly enthusiastic when we got the script past a sticky spot and violently depressed when we didn’t.”
The second day they were joined by Walter Lang, the veteran Fox director who had been assigned the picture, and whose previous films for the studio had been the top-drawer musicals The King and I, There’s No Business Like Show Business, and Call Me Madame. The Ephrons considered Lang an ally—he had filmed their sly 1950 satire The Jackpot—and figured it would be “three against one” if they ever came to loggerheads with their leading lady. Someone had the idea to do a crucial scene—Sumner’s interrogation of Bunny by way of a personality test—on location, and Adler went for it. (“Shoot in New York, start at Fifty-seventh and Madison, outside the IBM building, and take them west on Fifty-seventh Street to Sixth Avenue where they would lunch at one of those outdoor Jewish delicatessens.”) Hepburn and Henry Ephron made a quick trip east to scout locations for the sequence.
Bogart, meanwhile, was fading rapidly. Tracy endured the gut-wrenching business of a visit on November 16 and found him frail and depleted. Pulling up a chair at the foot of the bed, he began to tell jokes, his coffee nearby, kidding around with his old friend as he always did. “He was great with Bogie when Bogie was sick,” said Lauren Bacall. “Katie used to say, ‘He was tortured before he went to your house, put on a great act when he was there, and was tortured when he left.’ ” That night, Tracy made a rueful note in his datebook: “Poor Bogie. Not long—2 months?”
In the following days, his mood sank—there was trouble with his new Lincoln, trouble with The Mountain, trouble with the revised script of Desk Set. On Sunday, the L.A. Times ran a piece by movie columnist Philip K. Scheuer titled “TV Offers a Second Look at So-Called Film Classics.” Leading the article was a case in point—Tracy’s own version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
“For one thing,” Scheuer wrote, “Tracy’s portrayal (and movie) undoubtedly had its merits, though I was hard put to discover many of them when the film was first released in 1941 and I would hardly call it a masterpiece today. It was, I felt, inferior to the Jekyll-Hyde of Fredric March in 1932 and even to that of John Barrymore as far back as 1920, and I would have confided as much to everybody within earshot, if anybody had been there to listen.”
To Henry Ephron, the reaction was obvious and easy to imagine. “I could see the whole scene: Spencer reads the L.A. Times, gets violently angry, and then reads the script in no mood to read a script. Soooo, it was no surprise to me when Kate showed up Monday morning and said, ‘Spencer wants out. How about Fred Astaire?’ ” Ephron called Buddy Adler, who not only wasn’t interested in Fred Astaire, but didn’t even want Hepburn if Tracy wasn’t part of the package. He went back to Kate and asked for a group meeting as soon as possible: “I’m sure that if all three of us talk to him, we’ll get him back in the picture.”
The meeting the next morning was little more than a rally, a rousing pep talk orchestrated along the lines of what the Hacketts—Albert and Frances—had recommended when Ephron called them for advice. “Phoebe, Walter, and I said, in as many ways as we could, ‘You’re a great actor. No one else can play the part. Without you the picture is nothing.’ Within an hour he said, ‘Okay, kids. I’m not trying to get votes. Just pay me my money when the picture is over.’ Strangely, Hepburn seemed a little sad. She wanted him in the picture, but she also wanted him to be strong and not so susceptible to flattery.”
Shooting was set to begin Christmas week in Manhattan, the location work timed to the seasonal look of the city. Told by his friend Denny to take off twenty-five pounds, Tracy committed to dropping thirteen pounds in twenty-four days, putting him at 198 for the formal start of production on January 14. With Bogart’s condition worsening, Tracy feared he would be caught out of town when the end came.
“Call from Betty Bogart to call [their business manager] Morgan Maree!” he wrote in his book on December 14. “Talk of Memorial Service for Bogie! Deliver eulogy?!? WOW! Could be any day—could be 3 mos? To see Bogie (seemed same??) Betty discuss[es] his death.”
Reluctantly, Tracy left by rail for New York on the twenty-first, choosing the Hotel Westbury in lieu of the Pierre, the scene of his last bender. On Christmas Eve he dined alone at the Westbury but met Garson Kanin afterward for coffee. On Christmas Day he attended eight o’clock Mass at St. Vincent’s Cathedral—Kate was in Connecticut—and ate dinner in front of the TV set at the hotel.
A publicity gimmick had Hepburn screening the young New York actresses tentatively selected for Desk Set, some of whom would go on to California for testing. Blond Dina Merrill had trained at the American Academy; Kate and Fox casting director Billy Gordon had seen her on television with Phil Silvers. Sue Randall, likewise trained at the academy, had her own fifteen-minute soap opera, Valiant Lady, on CBS. Ash blond Merry Anders had once been under contract at Fox, while Diane Jergens was something of a TV and movie veteran, a recurring role on The Bob Cummings Show having been her most prominent credit.
Tracy was taking part in the interviews at Fox’s Fifty-sixth Street offices when a call from the coast advised them both that there wasn’t going to be any location work after all. “It would make the picture too expensive,” Ephron later explained, “and by some crazy rule of thumb they had, no Tracy-Hepburn picture should cost over $2 million.”2 As Tracy noted in his book, the savings to the company could amount to as much as $200,000. “Forget New York,” he told Ephron. “We don’t have to walk down Sixth Avenue to do a scene. We’re getting four hundred thousand for this picture, Kate and I, and if we can’t play a scene in front of a black backdrop and get all the laughs there are, we’re stealing your money.”
They left New York under the cover of darkness, eluding, in particular, the Kanins. “Does the Westbury know that you have left?” Gar inquired in a note a week later. “They seem to be taking messages ad infinitum.” Back on the coast, they phoned and then again visited the Bogarts—first on January 4, the last time together on the evening of the twelfth.
“When anyone is desperately ill,” said Kate, “you get a feeling, ‘Oh, dear, it’s going to be soon,’ which struck me. So Spencer and I went to the house, and [Bogart] was sitting in a chair in his bedroom—sitting in a wheelchair—and then we got up to go so as not to exhaust him. And I kissed him goodbye, walked over to the door, and Spencer walked over and patted his shoulder and said, ‘We’re on our way.’ And Bogie reached up with his hand and patted Spencer’s hand, looked at him, and said ‘Goodbye, Spence.’ ” The way he said it that night had special resonance, and they could both tell that he meant it. “When we were downstairs, Spence looked at me and said, ‘Bogie’s going to die.’ ”
“Very weak—semi-conscious,” was the way Tracy recorded the patient’s condition in his book that night. He spent the thirteenth—a Sunday—on “the hill” (as he referred to the house on Tower Road) dining with Louise, John, Susie. A call came the next morning from Betty Bacall—Bogart, she told him, had died at 3:00 a.m. Work on Desk Set was to begin within hours.
“I originally wanted him to deliver the eulogy,” Bacall remembered. “He called me up immediately and said, ‘I’d never get through it.’ It was just too emotional.” He told her he could have done it for someone he wasn’t as close to, but not Bogie, dear Bogie. “I remember when he delivered the eulogy at Walter Huston’s memorial. He was brilliant, but shaky.”
The mood on the set was somber as Tracy played his first scenes in the reference library of the Federal Broadcasting Company, initially with Dina Merrill, Joan Blondell, and Sue Randall, soon with Hepburn, who marches in with a box from Bonwit Teller under her arm.
“My name is Richard Sumner,” he says pleasantly, emerging from her office.
“Well, numerologically that’s very good,” she smiles, taking the advantage and offering her hand. “There are thirteen letters in your name.”
“You calculate rapidly.”
“Up to thirteen anyway.”
The verbal jousting in Sumner’s introduction to Bunny Watson followed the familiar Tracy-Hepburn pattern. “They did all their own blocking and rehearsing before they came on the set,” said Dina Merrill. “They knew exactly what they were going to do. All the director did was tell them where the camera was and work the other actors into the scene.”
There were no calls on the fourth day of production, as Tracy and Hepburn were freed to attend the memorial service at All Saints Episcopal Church. Tracy arrived, according to the Los Angeles Times, “grief deep-etched in his broad face.” Hepburn, the paper reported, was already there. “Katie,” said Bacall, “managed to get into the church before anyone else did, and she was sitting there when they came in.” As the service began at 12:30 p.m., John Huston reading the eulogy, a minute of silence was observed on the nearby Fox lot, where together Bogart and Tracy had made their first feature, Up the River, twenty-seven years earlier.
It was Walter Lang’s idea to stage the questionnaire scene—the one originally set to be done on location—on the roof of the network’s building some forty flights above Midtown, Sumner brown-bagging their lunches, pigeons everywhere, the spectacular New York skyline serving as backdrop. Sumner sets out coffee, sandwiches, takes out a notepad and a pen.
“Often, when we meet a person for the first time,” he begins, checking his notes, “some physical characteristic strikes us. Now, what is the first thing you notice in a person?”
“Whether the person is male or female,” Bunny replies.
Stifling a grin, he makes a note. “Now this is a little mathematical problem…,” he continues, catching himself and picking a cup up off the table. “Celery or olives?” he offers.
She peers inside. “Four olives, three pieces of celery.”
Withdrawing the cup, he glances inside. “Right,” he says.
“Uh-huh.”
“That doesn’t happen to be the question.”
“Oh.”
He reads: “A train started out at Grand Central with seventeen passengers aboard and a crew of nine. At 125th Street, four got off and nine got on. At White Plains, three got off and one got on. At Chappaqua, nine got off and four got on. And at each successive stop thereafter, nobody got off and nobody got on until the train reached its next to the last stop, where five people got off and one got on. Then it reached the terminal.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” she smiles. “Eleven passengers and a crew of nine.”
“That’s not the question.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“How many people got off at Chappaqua?”
“Nine.”
He stops short of biting into his sandwich. “That’s correct,” he says.
“Yes, I know.”
A bemused look comes over his face. “Would you mind telling me how you arrived at that?”
“Spooky, isn’t it?” she says, shivering in the cold. “Do you notice that there are also nine letters in Chappaqua?”
Hepburn later characterized the eight-minute sequence as “a remarkable example of comedy acting between two people who really, more or less, knew what they were doing.” Fiercely proud of the work she and Spence were doing together, she scolded him when he branded a scene lousy (“You don’t know what you’re talking about—the director knows what he’s doing”) and demanded the full attention of the cast and crew when the two of them were at work.
“Kate saw me reading a magazine one day on the set,” Dina Merrill recalled, “and she came over. She said, ‘Dina, what are you reading?’ I said, ‘Oh, just an article in this magazine.’ She said, ‘I don’t want you ever to do that again. You’re a beginner here. You should watch Spence and me.’ Yes, ma’am! That was the last time I brought a paper or a magazine or anything to the set—and she was right.”
Tracy, who was averaging just three hours of sleep a night, was “dead tired” and irritable, certain Desk Set would be another clunk of a picture. “Lang is nice man,” he wrote on the sixteenth day of production, “but childish director. Ephron—producer—dumb.Bad pic[ture]. K. bad. Me bad.”
Owing to Tracy’s presence, Hepburn monitored every aspect of life on the set, even to the point of bringing props in from her own home. “She was a mother hen,” Merrill said, “worrying if he had a cold, or might catch one. It was like he was her child.” Her constant hovering irritated him, and he seized on every possible opportunity to put her in her place. “Shut your mouth,” he’d tell her. “Go back where you belong in vaudeville and keep out of here.” Dina Merrill found him “just as sweet as he could be” but full of hell: “He gave it to her pretty good; one day she came on the set with her hair pinned up in a horrible bun—she always looked like an old shoe anyway—and he was giving an interview. He stopped what he was saying, gestured at her and said, ‘And that, gentlemen, is our star!’ ”
Henry Ephron, fascinated by the obvious bond between them, haunted the set like a stagestruck teenager. “Tracy, we discovered, was incurably a mischievous kid. Once, when Hepburn left to go on the set, leaving me and Tracy together, he whispered, ‘She’s never forgiven me for Bergman.’ He said it affectionately … She must have loved him terribly. Phoebe once asked Kate what it was about Spencer that fascinated Kate. She said, ‘I’m like a little fly that buzzes around him all the time, and every once in a while he gives me a good swat.’ ”
When the AP’s Bob Thomas visited the set, he congratulated Hepburn on her Academy Award nomination for The Rainmaker and asked if she’d be attending the ceremonies. “Of course not,” she replied. “I didn’t even go when I won the Oscar for Morning Glory.” Tracy furled his brow as if trying to recall a past life. “Let’s see,” he said. “That was back in 1902, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” she returned, “and you won in 1901 and 1906.”
“These awards,” he said, waving off the subject, “don’t mean a damn thing. They may add some dough to a picture’s gross, but they don’t do anything for actors. The big names out here aren’t actors anyway. They’re personalities. I know of only one great actor and he’s coming out here soon. Guy named Laurence Olivier.” Thomas thought Hepburn had a good shot at the Oscar, but Tracy disagreed. “Naw, I don’t think so. Bergman will get it.” Ignoring the obvious jab, Hepburn went on to praise the Mexican comedian Cantinflas, who had made an international hit for himself in Around the World in 80 Days. “Such style! Such wit! He is simply sensational.” And he was not, she was quick to add, nominated for anything.
When Walter Lang called them to the set, Hepburn slipped out of the white slacks she was wearing and back into Bunny Watson’s prim business suit. The set, an almost exact copy of the Broadway original, was crowded with the steel-gray console, whirring processing cabinets, and flashing display screen of Emmarac, the enormous job-killing computer Sumner has installed on the main floor of the library. Scene completed, she changed back into her slacks and blouse and greeted Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, visiting from an adjacent stage where Leo McCarey was shooting An Affair to Remember. They launched into a spirited discussion of Kate’s decision to do The Merchant of Venice at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford. (“It’s better to try something difficult and flop,” she said, “than to play it safe all the time.”) When Lang again wanted them, Hepburn had to be bodily dragged away by Tracy, who added a small kick for good measure.
On the thirty-third day of production, they played their longest scene in the film together—eight pages of material in which Bunny and Sumner dine on fried chicken in Bunny’s apartment. Gig Young, playing her boss and longtime boyfriend, comes in on the exchange and finds both of them in bathrobes, Sumner having gotten drenched in a cloudburst. Then Joan Blondell arrives, adding a note of farce to the sequence and giving Tracy an audience for an improvisational exit, a Skeltonesque turn as a drunk that left the atmosphere giddy.
“2 days scheduled—done by 2:30—Katie wonderful,” he noted proudly in his book. They finished interior work on the picture two days later, the final shot featuring the trademark Tracy-Hepburn kiss, Kate with her back to the camera, Spence drawing her to him in perfect symmetry with their first screen embrace sixteen years earlier. It would be, Tracy had said, their last picture together. “Who is going to hire us after this?” he asked, acutely conscious of his age, his white hair, the ever-deepening lines in his face. “He felt he was too old for the part,” Lang remembered, “and he was; but Katie wanted him and I wanted him. We all wanted him, so he did it.”
Included in the principal cast and crew of Desk Set were three notorious drinkers—Tracy, Gig Young, and cinematographer Leon Shamroy. “Shammie” was by far the most practiced, a brusque, cigar-chomping raconteur who played the horses prodigiously. “It was obvious that Katie really had kind of a schoolgirl crush on Shamroy,” said Henry Ephron, “and Phoebe said, ‘Katie, what do you see in Shammie?’ She said, ‘He’s a rascal.’ ” On their last night of shooting they were on the Fox lot’s New York street, where Bunny and Sumner catch a ride with a coworker and his quarrelsome family. Staged in a driving rain, the scene took from midnight to 5:30 in the morning to complete. “Shammie had a bottle of whiskey. Spence said, ‘Goodbye, everyone!’ grabbed the empty bottle of whiskey, and said, ‘See you in June!’ and took off.”
Desk Set closed four days under schedule and $131,800 under budget. Buddy Adler was so pleased he phoned Fox president Spyros Skouras from the projection room. (“Good news was so scarce around the studio those years,” commented Henry Ephron.) When a preview was set for Pasadena, Ephron called Hepburn and extended an invitation. “Thank you,” she responded, “but we never go to previews.” Tracy took the phone: “Henry, would you send a script to my son John? Send it to the Tracy Clinic. His mother will take him to the preview, and if he’s read the script beforehand, he’ll have no trouble following the picture.”
With Jesse L. Lasky during the making of Desk Set. (BETTY LASKY)
After the preview, Louise, who could be excused for detesting the movie, came over to the Ephrons in the lobby. “It’s wonderful,” she said graciously. “We’re going to call Spencer as soon as we get home.”
Work on The Old Man and the Sea had resumed on July 2, 1956, but the Nassau expedition was, by and large, a failure. They got some long shots of the boat with the fish lashed alongside, they got some backgrounds for Tracy, some sunrises and sunsets, and some usable shots of shark fins racing through the water. There were, however, no live sharks to be photographed—at least none that would respond to direction or appear in numbers large enough to make an impression on screen. The artificial fish, they found, was completely unphotogenic, and it was subjected to repainting after some tests were made. Carefully posed, the fish would be convincing enough dead, but as a living thing it was pretty much hopeless. Nassau was a costly location, even without Tracy’s participation, and production was suspended again on July 28, John Sturges wanting to rethink every aspect of what had been done so far. Soon he found himself at odds with Ernest Hemingway’s mania for realism.
“They got mixed up with reality and film,” he later said.
The fact that the story takes place in the Gulf Stream off Cuba doesn’t mean that that’s the right place to shoot it. It isn’t. The Gulf Stream goes at 12 miles an hour and it’s rough. They took a very realistic approach to the film. And if you’re going to do that, then I don’t think Spencer Tracy was a good choice. He’s an actor of obvious skills and emotional power and all the things that make him such a great actor. But he’s certainly not a starving Cuban fisherman. I think if you attack the picture that way, you’re in trouble. The plans they had to get the shark, the plans to get the fish, got all scrambled up and 50 sets of people came up with 50 sets of solutions and the first thing they knew was that they’d spent $3,000,000. Why I took it on I’ll never really know. I knew Tracy well. The idea intrigued me, to play it as an exercise in imagination and emotion. A theatrical approach. Now if anyone objected to that, the hell with them—they weren’t going to like the film. This approach I found interesting and I felt I could profit by the mistakes they’d already made.
At Warner Bros., Leland Hayward had Zinnemann’s footage cut together. In early July he and Tracy ran the material—opening with the Old Man coming into the harbor and continuing through to his leaving at dawn—and thought it all quite beautiful, some of it breathtakingly so. They talked of where the narration should go and how it might conflict with the scripted lines of spoken dialogue. They decided it would be almost impossible to mix the two on shore, and Hayward suggested that the voice-over carry the story until the Old Man found himself alone out at sea. “He didn’t remember when he first began to talk aloud when he was by himself,” the narrator would say. “If the others heard me they would think I was crazy,” the Old Man would then say aloud, “but since I am not, I do not care.” Whether Tracy could take both roles—that of the narrator as well as that of the Old Man—was still undecided.
Tracy deflected other offers, eager to be done with the marathon project. He saw Sturges and cinematographer James Wong Howe off for Hawaii on June 9, 1957, and followed on the fifteenth accompanied by John, Larry Keethe, and a new secretary, Jeri Tyler, whose job it would be to keep John entertained. The Kona Inn was a beautiful place with a large pool, and John and Jeri spent their days swimming, sunning, shopping, and practicing tennis. Kona had been selected because there was no current or tide to speak of, the color of the water was right, and it was possible to shoot very close to shore. It was, in other words, a quiet location that could, above all else, be controlled. A rented camera barge called the Julie B. was outfitted as a floating soundstage, with recording equipment, a dressing room for Tracy, a makeup room, a commissary, and film refrigeration facilities. It also boasted a twenty-foot camera boom and a crane for raising and lowering the diving bell used for underwater filming.
“Although we had powerful generators and scores of reflectors,” Howe later wrote, “we used them as little as possible for the simple reason that the movement on the Old Man’s boat on even the slightest swell would reveal their presence as a fixed source of light. Instead we used only the sun as our natural source of light. An important reason for this was the desire to give the audience the intense feeling of heat from the glare on the water—the intense exhausting heat the Old Man of the story was getting. And without the use of artificial balanced light, it was necessary we keep changing the position of the camera barge to maintain the proper light source angle.”
Lighting became such a severe problem that filming took more time than anticipated. Tracy’s double, Harold Kruger, typically worked a ten-hour day, while Tracy himself appeared in just two, three, or four setups. “This picture is becoming my life’s work,” he groused to a visiting reporter from the Associated Press. “The book is a masterpiece and should make a great picture. I believe in it. You’d have to believe in it to stay with it after all the troubles we’ve had. By now there isn’t a chance to make back all the money we will spend, so we’re concentrating on making something worthwhile.”
Shooting The Old Man and the Sea in Hawaii. Cinematographer James Wong Howe is behind the camera. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
He was on his best behavior, but Hemingway, for one, could not be placated. His Old Man still weighed 210 pounds, a fact Hayward confirmed in a phone conversation. “Tracy can make money playing fat men now,” the author thundered in a subsequent letter, “or he can always get by in those toad-and-grasshopper comedies with Miss Hepburn, but he is a complete and terrible liability to the picture and has been since he presented himself out of condition in 1956.” Hemingway was also unhappy that Hayward had asked Paul Osborn to go over Peter Viertel’s latest draft of the screenplay to “make the dialogue more playable.”
A half day’s work on June 26 completed the water exteriors, and Tracy was able to leave for L.A. via Honolulu several days ahead of schedule. It was 110 degrees in Burbank the day he walked onto Warners’ Stage 7, where a tank held a million gallons of water tinted with candy dye and Jimmy Howe was struggling to duplicate the single-source lighting he had achieved at Kona. Sturges spoke to Tracy “very frankly” and told him that he was still too fat, yet Sturges and Hayward both had to acknowledge that Tracy’s ulcer made it “damned hard” for him to diet as he should. Hayward assured Hemingway they were photographing their star “very, very carefully” and that while they were both fully aware of the problem, no one else would be. Work got under way again on July 5, with Tracy expecting to be another two months on the picture.
There were camera problems that first day—“par for the course,” as Tracy said—and they got exactly one shot in the can. The following Monday was given over to process work, and the ultraviolet lights needed for Arthur Widmer’s new blue screen effects were so strong (2,300 kilowatts) that Tracy was suffering from eye burn—an injury akin to welder’s flash—by the end of the second day. The doctor gave him drops and ordered him to work only half days in front of the UV lights, a restriction that hobbled the company still further and made the matching shots more difficult.
Felipe Pazos, now twelve, was brought to California for interiors and had to be photographed just as carefully as Tracy to keep from jolting the audience with a year’s growth. “This time we are going to rehearse with him carefully,” Hayward assured a dubious Hemingway, “and try to treat him with some kindness and understanding which he never had before.” Tracy played the film’s first dialogue scenes with young Pazos, still not sure how the narration would work in around it. Reshot by Sturges were Zinnemann’s scenes at the terraza, where the boy buys the Old Man a beer after eighty-four days without a fish, and a lengthy exchange in the Old Man’s shack, where Santiago talks hopefully of the work ahead. (“Tomorrow is the eighty-fifth day. Eighty-five is a lucky number.”) Paul Osborn always felt the core of the picture was the relationship between the Old Man and the boy, and now their love for each other was finally coming across. “He is very appealing and very touching,” Hayward said of Pazos. “The fact that he is little and has that serious face has been greatly utilized by John Sturges, and he comes out of it like a little boy who is trying very hard to be a grown up and like a man. Sturges has done an extraordinary job with him.”
They finished with the boy on August 6, leaving the balance of the work to be done on the process stage and in the tank. Howe created the glare of the tropical sun with a blazing bank of photo floods that pulled sixty thousand watts of electricity when fully illuminated. Bob Thomas visited the set to do a piece on why the film had taken so long and found Tracy in his dressing room.
“Maybe Zinnemann couldn’t stand to see my face every morning,” Tracy suggested. “I don’t know. Anyway, he finally quit.” The company, he said, burned through $3 million in Cuba, yet the Cuban footage would comprise only 20 percent of the movie. By then Jack Warner figured he was in too deeply to scrap the thing and approved another $2 million to get it completed. “Luckily,” said Tracy, “they had an actor who was stupid. I put off other pictures to remain available for this one. I’ve got Ten North Frederick to do at Fox and The Last Hurrah at Columbia, and I didn’t know if they would wait for me. Fortunately, both schedules have been pushed back … Yeah, I really wanted to do The Old Man and the Sea. But if I had known what trouble it was going to be, I never would have agreed to it. This is for the birds.”
It was when floating alone in the tank on Stage 7 that Tracy’s value to the troubled company became most forcefully apparent, for he had nothing other than the Old Man’s words and his wits as an actor to carry the picture. The quiet routine at sea, the flying fish, the man-o’-war hovering overhead … and then comes the first tentative tugs at the line. “Never have I had such a strong fish,” he speaks wearily, “or one that acted so strangely … Maybe he’s too wise to jump. He could ruin me with a jump … or one quick rush … Maybe he has been hooked many times before and he knows this is how he must make his fight.” And then the resolve that comes when, rising to the night sky, the line clutched powerfully in his hands, he pulls at it with all the strength that is in him. “Fish,” he declares, his jaw set for battle, “I love you and I respect you very much—but I will kill you before this day ends!”
As Hayward wrote Hemingway, “The difference in Tracy’s performance is amazing. Freddie kind of played him like he was a senile old man tottering around barely able to walk or stand up. Sturges has directed him obviously like he is an old man but still with great virility and great strength still in him. Obviously unless he did have these qualities it would be impossible for him to go through the ordeal that he had to. Spencer is deeply moving in the picture and very believable.”
By August 9 they had roughly two weeks of work left to do, yet they still had not resolved the problem of narration. Knowing Tracy did not feel that he could play the part, say the dialogue, and do the voice-over as well, Hayward had actor Joseph Cotten record a scratch track that could be used for cutting purposes. He then proposed that Hemingway himself do the narration—a job Hemingway said that he “could not and would not do.” On August 30, Tracy marked his fifty-first and final day on the film, bringing an end, nine days behind schedule, to a project that had been foremost in his mind for nearly five years. The following day he shaved off the beard he had grown for the role and rewarded himself with a TV dinner.
As his father was making the final shots for The Old Man and the Sea, John Tracy was on the witness stand in Los Angeles Superior Court, giving testimony in the divorce action he had brought against his estranged wife, charging her with mental cruelty and seeking custody of their child. Nadine Tracy testified that John had treated her as a servant and that he had repulsed her after the birth of their son. “If I put my arm around him he would say, ‘Let me alone.’ ” She told the court that on the day they separated, she took the baby with her on a shopping trip and returned to find that John had cleared out. A custody agreement had already been arrived at, leaving only the financial issues to be resolved when they met in court on August 28.
On the stand, Johnny’s excellent lipreading skills failed him and he struggled to make himself understood. Louise volunteered her services, relaying questions in a way he could easily read and “interpreting” the answers he gave. He told the court that he had never been employed but that he hoped to become an artist. He said that his income came primarily from a trust left by his maternal grandfather, and that during the marriage his father had made him an allowance of seventy-five dollars and then later one hundred dollars a month. He indicated that he would not oppose Nadine’s being granted the divorce on her cross complaint, and the judge directed him to pay seventy-five-dollars’ monthly alimony and one hundred dollars in child support, less than half the $472 Nadine had sought. Spence took the family to dinner at Romanoff’s that evening, noting ruefully in his book that John had dropped ten pounds over the course of the ordeal.
Kate, meanwhile, was in Stratford, fulfilling the commitment to the American Shakespeare Festival she had originally made for the 1956 season. Under Jack Landau’s direction, her fiery Portia, first seen on the Old Vic’s Australian tour, was a sensation—eloquent and graceful and enthusiastically received by most of the morning papers. When Spence promised to come back for Much Ado About Nothing, she was giddy with excitement.
“She spoke of him openly,” the festival’s artistic director, John Houseman, remembered, “and always with a mingling of loyalty, tenderness, and admiration. We all shared this admiration and hoped that he would presently appear among us. Several times that summer, Kate joyfully announced his imminent arrival, then reported that he had been detained or prevented. Finally, during Much Ado, the great day came when Kate, with a young girl’s enthusiasm, proclaimed that this time Spencer was really coming. His plane ticket was bought and all the arrangements were made. On the evening of his arrival—carefully chosen as an Othello day—she drove off alone, in a state of high excitement that she made no attempt to conceal, to [Idlewild] Airport to meet him.”
Tracy’s datebook shows that he made an attempt to talk to John on September 13. (“Out of it,” he recorded, “no luck …”) He boarded an American Airlines flight for New York the next morning, arriving on the East Coast at five o’clock. His entry for the day includes a word that suggests the scene Kate must have encountered upon her arrival: “Load.” He was bundled off to the Sherry-Netherland, where the room, he noted, was air-cooled. His entry for the next day, September 15, contains just three words: “missed Stratford” and then again the word “load.” Humiliated, Hepburn told the company that Tracy had missed his flight.
“He never did appear,” said Houseman.
Officially, Tracy was in New York on the first leg of a publicity tour that was to take him to Europe in advance of The Old Man and the Sea. The Kanins, who were to accompany him to Montecatini, found it impossible to book space on the S.S. Independence but promised to follow in a few days aboard the Île-de-France. Tracy himself noted three continuous days of drinking at the Sherry-Netherland, having placed himself in Dr. Stock’s expert care. He slept most of September 18 and 19 and until noon on the twentieth. Rousing himself, he spoke to Louise by phone and had calls from Hayward and Bert Allenberg. He dined with Kate at the hotel that evening, took all three meals in her company the next day, and was well enough for a drive on the twenty-second.
Warners’ New York office finally caught up with him on the twenty-fifth. Tracy told them he had the Asiatic flu and would not be meeting with the press at all. He thought he might still go to Europe and was looking at cars for the trip as late as the twenty-eighth. At 2:30 the following morning he abruptly decided he wanted to go back to California. Kate made the flight on two hours’ notice and was there on St. Ives with him that night to serve dinner.
As The Old Man and the Sea inched toward completion, Tracy faced a logjam of properties vying for his attention. The most promising of these, however, went away within days.
Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had acquired the rights to the two Terence Rattigan one-acts known collectively as Separate Tables, and the offer had been made for Laurence Olivier to direct and star in the picture. Olivier and Vivien Leigh traveled to Los Angeles to finalize the deal. Spence, of course, had known Vivien since 1940, when he presented her with the Oscar for Gone With the Wind. Later, he helped Larry master his Midwestern accent when Olivier was preparing for the part of the tragic Hurstwood in William Wyler’s production of Carrie. The two men were subsequently photographed together on the set of Father’s Little Dividend, but their paths seldom crossed. “I have often thought we both sensed an affinity in our fates,” Olivier wrote, “as people well might who felt that their lives are a bewildering mixture of incredibly good and incredibly bad fortune.” It was over dinner at George Cukor’s that Olivier was seized with the notion of adding Tracy to the cast as the hard-drinking writer John Malcolm. He put the idea to Tracy as a sort of fait accompli.
“Won’t Burt Lancaster want the part?” Tracy asked.
“No,” Olivier assured him. “He’s agreed that you do it.”
What Olivier didn’t tell Tracy was that he had put the request forth in the form of an ultimatum and that the reaction of the “Young Duke” was sharper than anyone expected. “We had a party to celebrate,” Tracy remembered, “and then the Oliviers flew home. When he arrived, a call was waiting from Hollywood. Lancaster had decided he wanted the role. ‘Either Tracy does it or you can’t have us,’ Larry said. But Lancaster was determined. Larry rang me that night. ‘Well, old cock,’ he said, ‘we’ve all been fired.’ I said, ‘That’ll teach you to ask for me.’ ”
Far more resilient as a pending project was Ten North Frederick, from the best-selling novel by John O’Hara. Tracy was first sent the book in February 1956, with Fox saying they’d buy it if he would agree to do it. As with The Power and the Glory, O’Hara began the novel with a corpse and then unfolded the story of Joe Chapin in flashback. Trapped in a sterile marriage, Joe falls in love with a younger woman named Kate. Hemmed in by social convention, he decides that he must remain with his wife. “The practice of love had gone out of their life together; they continued to live in the same house, eat their meals together, expose themselves to the intimacies of living together; and Edith could count on Joe to pay the bills … There was nothing, certainly in the public prints or in the public view that could be inferred to be proof or hint of a change in their relationship … they behaved toward each other with the same precise politeness they had observed all their lives.” Meanwhile, unable to marry Kate, Joe Chapin methodically drinks himself to death.
With Laurence Olivier on the set of Carrie (1952). (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
“WOW!” Tracy wrote in his book. “Not for me!”
Nothing more was said about Ten North Frederick until Buddy Adler showed such an unbridled enthusiasm for Desk Set. He called Tracy one day in March 1957 and expressed hope that something could be worked out for the O’Hara story, which was being developed by Charles Brackett and writer-director Philip Dunne. Where Tracy saw a character and a plotline that hit far too close to home, Dunne saw one of the greatest of all modern novels: “It is the story of the first citizen of a representative American city, of his wife, his son and daughter, and of his brief political career. Above all, it is the story of the girl who brings him happiness too late. It is a touching story, both realistic and intensely dramatic.”
Tracy relented, and in April a deal was struck for the same money and percentages as for Desk Set. He briefly tried getting out of the commitment in June, pro forma, but the real trouble over Ten North Frederick didn’t start until Adler began pushing a protégée, actress-model Suzy Parker, for the role of Kate. Tracy didn’t think Parker could act, and there followed a flurry of tests—Dina Merrill, Marjorie Steele, Inger Stevens. According to Merrill, Adler “had the hots” for Suzy Parker, and in the end no one else would do for the part. Tracy told Allenberg to get him out of the picture, and there was a momentary threat from Fox of a lawsuit.
Adler backed off, convinced he had an even stronger use for Tracy—as Professor Unrat opposite Marilyn Monroe in a modern remake of The Blue Angel. There was no director yet attached, but the plan was to do the film that summer in Europe. Tracy was intrigued enough to have a look at the 1930 original with Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich. “Fabulous pic[ture] & part,” he wrote in his book. “O.K. if right director.” By the time the deal was made, however, Desk Set had proven a failure, reporting domestic rentals of just $1.7 million. The best Adler could do was a straight salary of $200,000. The deal was still hanging fire on October 29 when Louis B. Mayer died of leukemia and Irene Selznick asked Tracy to read the eulogy.
Kate described the chaotic funeral at Wilshire Boulevard Temple as “something out of the black” with Spence “almost having a fit” while Irene was “lost in the search for simplicity.” Two thousand mourners gathered under the temple’s great vaulted ceiling as another three thousand onlookers crowded outside. From high in the organ gallery Jeanette MacDonald sang “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” Seated below was a veritable Who’s Who of Mayer’s M-G-M family—Robert Taylor, Eleanor Powell, Fred Astaire, Jimmy Stewart, Red Skelton, Van Johnson, Howard Strickling, Clarence Brown, Billie Burke, Jimmy Durante. Great masses of flowers surrounded a casket draped with red and white roses. Tracy spoke of a “shining epoch” that seemed to pass with Mayer’s death, an epoch of which he clearly felt a part. “There were giants in those days,” he said firmly, “and there are giants in these days—but rarely. Louis B. Mayer was a giant. The merchandise he handled was intangible—something that met the primary human need for entertainment. He knew how to take people out of the everyday world and into a dream world. Even those long associated with him marveled at where he found his insight. He did not find it; he earned it by knowing people.”
The deal for The Blue Angel was okayed just after the first of the year, but with stipulations: that Monroe would be the costar, that Tracy would receive first billing, that Adler would personally produce the picture, and that it would be made in color. The drop in price was to be covered with a percentage of the gross after breakeven. Within a week there was “Monroe trouble” and Tracy, by now having heard all the horror stories, told Allenberg he wanted out. Word was passed to Fox’s Lew Schreiber, who felt the studio would probably work out a deal with the actress and then come back. “No soap!” was Tracy’s response.
Hepburn, who thought Ten North Frederick “a big bore,” was instrumental in bringing Tracy’s next picture to fruition. Jack Ford had set up a deal at Columbia to make Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah and wanted Tracy to play the part of O’Connor’s engaging old Irish pol, Frank Skeffington. The story was a natural fit for both men, the passing of an era in American politics in which showmanship and patronage won the hearts and votes of the immigrant poor and the New England bluebloods were the perennial enemies of the people. After a brief flirtation with Jimmy Cagney, Ford set his sights on Tracy for the role and refused to give up.
Kate knew there had been “not too much interest” between the two since Tracy had been unable—or, in Ford’s mind, unwilling—to do The Plough and the Stars in 1936. When Leland Hayward, at Eddie Mannix’s urging, wanted Ford to direct The Old Man and the Sea, he put the idea forth to Tracy, knowing there would be serious reservations. Tracy wired:
BRILLIANT DIRECTOR OF YOUR CHOICE. ONLY FEAR: QUESTION HE WILL SHOOT SCRIPT IF NOT PAPA YOU ME.
Tracy was sent O’Connor’s novel in February 1956, and he devoured it in two days. “Great but NO!!” he wrote in his book. “John Ford?? Told Allenberg no ‘Hurrah.’ ” In September Columbia came back with an offer that was promptly rejected by Abe Lastfogel: $125,000 plus 25 percent of the profits. Being “Irish and smart,” Ford applied to Hepburn for help. One night at her place—the “aviary” on what was once the John Barrymore estate—Allenberg complained that involving her was “unethical” of Ford, a statement that elicited from Tracy a “sharp reminder to him of the facts of life.” The next afternoon Hepburn arranged the first substantive talk between Tracy and Ford in some twenty years.
“Kate ‘Agent’ with Ford for Hurrah,” Tracy wrote. “Met with him. Deal now possible.” Columbia’s Harry Cohn made the same offer as before, then raised it, under pressure from Ford, to $175,000 and 10 percent of the gross after breakeven. Tracy again said no, and four days later Allenberg appeared on the set of Desk Set with word that Ford “wanted a deal” but was still working to bring Cohn around. Subsequently Ford told Hepburn that he would not make the picture without Tracy.
The back-and-forth continued into March 1957, when Tracy made the decision to keep his schedule open for The Old Man and the Sea. Kate notified Ford—who wanted to start May 1—and Ford, not wishing to wait any longer, said in a fit of pique that he would move ahead with Orson Welles in the role. “End of Hurrah!!” Tracy wrote. Eight days later, “Pappy” was once again on the phone to Hepburn; Columbia had upped the offer to $200,000 but said they wanted to start June 1. “Par!” Tracy responded. “NO!” The deal wasn’t settled until May, when the producers agreed to push the start of production back to January 1958. Tracy went off to Hawaii to do Old Man and the Sea, and Ford lined up a picture in London to fill the time.
The Last Hurrah was not without controversy, the character of Skeffington having been modeled on Boston’s legendary mayor (and onetime Massachusetts governor) James Michael Curley. As the story goes, an enterprising newspaper editor sent the eighty-one-year-old Curley a set of galleys with the hope that Curley would file a review of the O’Connor book. Curley took little more than a fleeting glance at the galleys before returning them to the paper with a terse one-line notice: “The matter is in the hands of my attorneys.”
His outrage was short-lived. O’Connor painted Skeffington with obvious affection, saving the sharp edges for the rogues, bigots, and hypocrites who opposed him on the battlefield of public approbation. In a time and place where Irish political operatives did what they felt they had to do for the advancement of their people, Curley was a hero to the men and women of South Boston, a fierce and colorful advocate for the disenfranchised. In time, he began referring to himself as “Skeffington” and was heard to have said on at least one occasion, “I like best the scene where I die.” Despite the apparent change in Curley’s attitude toward the book, Columbia took the precaution of paying the former mayor, governor, and convicted felon $25,000 in exchange for his signature on a release shielding the corporation from any legal action that might otherwise result from the production and exhibition of the movie.
After striving for more than a year to get Tracy committed, Ford set about creating the most comfortable of working environments. The script, written by Ford’s frequent collaborator Frank Nugent, was such a faithful job of adaptation that it was scarcely mentioned in the few meetings between Tracy and Ford that led up to production. Surrounding Tracy in the film would be, as Ford put it, his “ex-pals and ex-playmates”—Jimmy Gleason, Wallace Ford, Frank McHugh, and, making his first major studio appearance in six years, Pat O’Brien. Ford filled out the cast with a sterling collection of character people, Basil Rathbone, Donald Crisp, Edward Brophy, John Carradine, and Jane Darwell among them. Jeffrey Hunter was borrowed from Fox to play Adam Caulfield, the pipe-smoking sportswriter invited to follow one last campaign by his uncle Frank, and the cast was completed with such vintage names as Ricardo Cortez, Basil Ruysdael, Edmund Lowe, Anna Lee, Ruth Clifford, Hank Mann, Tom Neal, Mae Marsh, and Julius Tannen.
A wardrobe fitting on February 13 gave Ford an opportunity to stress the importance of Tracy’s performance in the film. This was a big picture, Ford emphasized, with a budget of $2.5 million and an aggressive thirty-five-day schedule. Tracy would have a wonderful line of support, but in the end it would be up to him—and him alone—to carry the picture. Tracy spent the next few days at home, studying the script, honing his characterization. From the book he knew Skeffington as a vigorous seventy-two-year-old, a man of thoroughgoing cynicism who nevertheless made himself the most accessible of public figures, comfortable in the knowledge that all successful political activity harbored an element of quid pro quo.
“I’d like to say that I have a theory about acting,” Tracy had said at the time of The Mountain. “But I don’t. It’s just that I was born a sentimental Irishman, and I play the parts the way they react on me.” The way the part of Skeffington reacted on him was a constant source of delight toJohn Ford. He was, Ford later said, a “wonderful guy” with whom to work. “When I say Spencer Tracy is the best actor we ever had, I’m giving you something of my philosophy of acting. The best is most natural. Scenery never gets chewed in my pictures. I prefer actors who can just be.”
Filming began on February 24, 1958. Returning to Gower Gulch for the first time since Man’s Castle, Tracy marveled at the span of time. “John Ford—after 28 years—!” he wrote in his datebook. The first scene that morning had Skeffington descending the staircase of the mayoral mansion, the usual crowd of supplicants gathered outside the gate. Pausing on the landing before a portrait of his late wife, he gently removes the single rose at its base, as he has done every day since her death, and replaces it with a fresh one. He then pauses to gaze up at her, warmed by her memory. The moment is as brief as it is heartfelt, and it energizes him for the day ahead. “Well, Winslow,” he says, resuming his descent, “is the lark on the wing this morning?”
Tracy resisted The Last Hurrah because of John Ford’s involvement, but the experience was a pleasant surprise for both men. (SUSIE TRACY)
Surrounded in this initial scene by Gleason, Brophy, O’Brien, others, Tracy’s natural charm and authority took hold, and he was at once the wily politician of O’Connor’s famed novel. Regarding the stack of wires on his desk—the result of his announcement that he will run for reelection—he says wryly, “We should be getting a kickback from Western Union.” To which one of his henchmen responds, “I spoke to them about it last year—negative.”
Though envisioned by Ford as a character study, much of The Last Hurrah was played as broad comedy, the humor rooted in the reality of the Irish-American experience. When Skeffington storms the restricted battlements of the Plymouth Club, he does so with a Jewish ward healer in tow. When a prominent banker blocks a slum clearance project, Skeffington appoints the man’s wastrel son to the post of fire commissioner and then uses the resulting photographs as blackmail.
When it came time to shoot Knocko Minihan’s wake, Ford told a visitor it was probably the “most hilarious episode” in the entire story. “The wake is as obsolete as a dinosaur today,” Tracy explained, “but in the old days among the Boston Irish they were practical and often enjoyable affairs. They allowed neighbors and friends of the deceased to get together as a kind of relief from the grimness.” There was also, added Jimmy Gleason, a serious side to the mayor’s presence at such an event. “In those days in Boston, an elected official was a tribal chieftain as well, the tribe, of course, being the Irish. So it was incumbent upon the elected official to attend those affairs, it was he who took care of the financial burden of the widow.”
Thirty days into production, Tracy wearily commemorated his birthday. “58 years old,” he said in his book, “and feel 90.” He dined that evening with Louise and the kids, Kate typically making herself scarce. On April 7, work shifted to the Columbia Ranch in Burbank, where Ford began shooting exteriors.
Tracy plainly had fun making the picture, and the fireworks many anticipated between him and Pappy Ford never came. “[T]hey were both, shall we say, gentlemen of very strong habits,” Hepburn said, “and Spencer liked to take a nap in the afternoon. He could get up early and go to work, but just absolutely would wilt. So [John], instead of making a problem of this, used to say, ‘God, I’m exhausted. You know, I think we’ve done a full day’s work and I don’t know why the hell you don’t go home.’ And there were two enormously talented people sort of stalking around like prize bulls in the ring, having a deep understanding of each others’ wickednesses. It always used to entertain me.”
Night work on the ranch captured the events that follow Skeffington’s defeat at the hands of a telegenic Republican, the wooing of the electorate having evolved from hand-to-hand engagement to the sterility of the electronic age. The old line’s frustration with this turn of events is seen in the great pumpkin face of Ditto Boland, Skeffington’s loyal lieutenant, who is not quite so button-down as the others. Ed Brophy, making his final appearance in a feature picture, pulled out all the stops that night, racing up to his boss’ limousine and throwing his overcoat and his prized homburg to the sidewalk, stomping on them as he sputtered threats of physical violence. “I’m on my way over to that McCluskey’s headquarters! I’m gonna step right up and poke him in the eye! I’m gonna tell him to his face—”
As they rehearsed the scene, Tracy calming him and telling him to get ahold of himself, retrieving the hat (his “hamburger”) from the pavement and carefully pressing it back into shape, Ford eyed the plate glass storefront adjacent to campaign headquarters and decided to have Brophy let fly with a brick once Tracy’s car had cleared the shot. The sixty-two-year-old actor had just one chance of hitting the window dead square, and in the end it broke clean, the shattering of one generation’s traditions in service of another’s.
The rest of the night was spent setting up and staging a midnight victory parade for the opposing candidate, Skeffington making his way home on foot, a solitary figure in the foreground, the clamor and fire of a newer—if not necessarily better—administration fading off into the distance. It was a particularly long and complicated tracking shot, requiring the services of eight assistant directors and hundreds of extras, two hundred lighted torches, lapel pins as big as silver dollars. They didn’t finish until 5:00 a.m., but the resulting shot became one of the most prized in the Ford catalog.
The Last Hurrah didn’t finish in thirty-five days—Tracy never thought it would—but it did come in $200,000 under budget. Ford printed so many first takes that the final shooting ratio was just six to one—almost unheard of on a major feature. Tracy completed his final scene—Skeffington casting his vote on election day—at 4:10 p.m. on April 24, 1958. “Happy picture!” he wrote in his book. “Ford great!”
Just prior to finishing up The Last Hurrah, Tracy had a call from John Sturges: Ernest Hemingway had run The Old Man and the Sea and said that he liked it very, very much. Tracy was astonished; he himself wasn’t happy with the picture. Since shooting had wrapped at the end of August, he had been locked in an ongoing battle with Hayward over the handling of the soundtrack. Tracy’s preference had always been to play the Old Man silent and speak his words in voice-over, the same approximate technique that had been dubbed “Narratage” for The Power and the Glory. But nobody liked the idea of a $5 million silent movie, and he dutifully made a preliminary narration track for editing purposes, a dubbing job that took three days. In October, the film cut, he went back and did the final voice-over, which involved his speaking the narrative as well as the words and thoughts of Santiago, the latter in the voice of the Old Man. It was a technique that worked, despite all the hand-wringing that led up to it, and by the middle of November, Hayward could report to Hemingway that the picture was entirely finished “with the exception of a couple of minor inserts.”
On January 9 they had taken it to Riverside, where the reaction of a near-capacity house—which had come to see A Farewell to Arms—was so good the studio people were a little surprised. “Worth all the agony everyone went through—I think,” Louise reported in a letter to a friend. “Whether it is worth the ulcer Spence wound up with is a question. But it is a fine, fine picture.” Even Tracy thought the reaction good. “ ‘Old Man’ seemed to go well,” he wrote in his book the next day. “Think excellent, true pic. Should get good reviews. Business??? Very dubious.” He made some minor suggestions—things to cut—but when he ran the picture again in March, he found that not one of his changes had been made and his mood soured again. “[N]o suggestions followed—stinks!—will get panned.”
According to Hayward, Hemingway said the picture had “a wonderful emotional quality and is very grateful and pleased with the transference of his material to the screen. He thought Tracy was great (in light of his quarrels with him this is quite a compliment)…the photography was excellent … the handling of the fishing and the mechanical fish very good. Had some minor dislikes…[B]ut all in all he was terribly high on the picture and very pleased with it.”
For a second preview in May, Tracy wanted Betty Bogart to see it. “I went to the preview with Carroll Tracy,” she recalled, “and he was waiting for me at his house afterwards for the full report. Things like that meant something to him.” Her reaction was so positive it threw him, and he thought for a moment that he might be overreacting. “Is it great???” he wondered. A few days later he phoned Sturges about the changes he wanted. He was unhappy with the ending, the titles, and the scene toward the end with the tourists, which he thought out of tone with the rest of the sequence. Two days later, he had his answer: Warners refused to make any of the changes he wanted. That day he suffered the “worst ulcer pains yet” and the upset continued into the evening hours, when he irritably dined at Romanoff’s with the Durochers, the Wagners (Bob and Natalie), and Betty Bogart (with whom he gratuitously picked a fight). He was chronically tired, unhappy, ill, and uninterested in work.
When Tom Pryor of the New York Times visited the set of The Last Hurrah, it was, in part, to check a report that Tracy was looking upon the picture as his own professional swan song. “Well,” said Tracy, “twenty-eight years is a long time. I started with John Ford and it has been suggested that since he is directing this film it might be an appropriate time for me to call it quits. You know, the beginning and the end with Mr. Ford.” Asked who had made such a suggestion, Tracy took on a sardonic smile.
“I have heard the suggestion,” he replied. “In fact, I have been told that the people have voted for it.”
1 The tension between Tracy and Hepburn may have been exacerbated by the appearance of an article in the October issue of Inside Story titled “That Tracy-Hepburn Affair.” Pictures of Spence and Kate were balanced with shots of him with Louise. The text alleged “monumental scenes in the Tracy household” and went further than any previous publication in suggesting a long-standing sexual relationship.
2 Without the location work, Desk Set was budgeted at $1,997,470.