by Mark Harris
At the end of the second week of rehearsals, the room was still tense and unsettled, and Nichols’s frustration focused on one actor. “Gene Hackman and I were in a studio men’s room,” says Hoffman, “with about four or five urinals separating us. We were both taking a pee. And I said, ‘How do you think it’s going today?’ And he said, ‘I think I’m getting fired.’ ‘Fired! What are you talking about? You’re not getting fired.’ And Gene just said, ‘He doesn’t like what I’m doing.’ We were two old friends. We had gone to acting school together. It was hard.”
Nichols fired Hackman that afternoon. “It’s very simple,” the director says. “He was too young. Gene was wonderful about it—he has never been a particularly easygoing guy, but he’s always been amazing about that.” Nichols replaced him with Murray Hamilton, seven years Hackman’s senior. Hackman put up a brave front, but privately, says Elizabeth Wilson, “he was devastated. Gene had refused to learn his lines, maybe that was it. I don’t know why, but we were all told to learn the lines for rehearsals, and Gene didn’t.” The cast had no inkling that it was about to happen, and with only two weeks remaining before the start of production, everybody’s guard went up. “I was kind of in a state of shock when I heard,” says Buck Henry. “Everyone became very dour that day. And I thought, ‘Oh God, is this the beginning of everything coming apart?’”28
TWENTY-THREE
Stanley Kramer didn’t schedule more than a day or two of rehearsals for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Even if Spencer Tracy’s health had allowed him to participate in any kind of extended preproduction, the actor would have found the idea of rehearsing for a movie as ludicrous as if Kramer had asked him to improvise or to base his emotional reaction in a particular scene on a childhood memory. Tracy understood anxiety and fear but scoffed at what he saw as the better-acting-through-neurosis style of the Brando generation and their followers, and he found the notion of interior exploration laughable. He was not a soul-searcher; whether or not he ever actually said that the secret of acting was to know your lines and not bump into the furniture, the frequency with which the remark was attributed to him was no accident. Tracy had an extreme distaste for what he saw as unmasculine oversensitivity in performers; he didn’t even like to do a second take most of the time and would often end the first one by shouting to the cameraman, “Did you get that?” He had managed to make movies his way for nearly forty years, and on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Kramer accommodated him with a production style that, in most ways, owed more to 1947 than to 1967. The large hilltop home of Matt and Christina Drayton, the affluent couple Tracy and Hepburn were playing, was built entirely on the Columbia lot, including a veranda with a not particularly convincing painted backdrop of the San Francisco Bay into which was screwed a small flashing red bulb that was intended to indicate a ship in the distance. The lighting, by sixty-three-year-old cinematographer Sam Leavitt, obliterated every shadow. The costumes were not bought off the rack, as designers for contemporary movies increasingly preferred to do for the sake of realism, but were sketched and constructed expressly for the film by Jean Louis. “As a young person, I thought that was very strange,” says Houghton of the sunshiny little frocks and gloves she was made to wear. “They were clothes that were out of another time and place, things I’d never wear in thirty years!”1 And the driving scenes were done with the careless, blurred backgrounds that had been typical of process photography for decades. As his critics often noted, Kramer was probably the least visual thinker among Hollywood’s major filmmakers of the time; shooting a movie, for him, was primarily a matter of assembling a group of actors and executing the words in a script.
By the time production began on March 20, Kramer had spoken privately to many members of the cast and crew and explained how the forty-five-day shoot would proceed. Tracy would be available for only two to four hours every day, starting at 10:00 A.M.; by 2:00 P.M. at the latest, he would be on his way home. Kramer and Leavitt would shoot his scenes first, and master shots in which he had to appear in the same frame as other actors would be prioritized, as would his close-ups. In group scenes, other members of the cast would have to be willing to save their own close-ups, answers, and reactions to Tracy until after the actor had left, with script supervisor Marshall Schlom feeding them Tracy’s lines from behind the camera. On days when Tracy was well enough to work, his scenes would move to the top of the schedule. On days when he wasn’t, which might occur with no warning, the rest of the cast would have to be prepared with no notice to shoot scenes that didn’t involve him.2 A story was planted with columnist Dorothy Manners in which she cooperatively explained that the set would be closed to most journalists because it’s “very small…barely enough room for the technicians” and dismissed Tracy’s recent physical collapse as “never as serious as it sounded…. A new maid became frightened when Spence had difficulty due to a chronic nasal congestion.”3
“The whole film was terribly precarious,” says Houghton. “The operative dynamic throughout was in trying to make this work for Spencer, so we all became teammates in that. Stanley must have been under extraordinary tension, but he was not the kind of person to show it. He had so many other responsibilities on the film that he couldn’t afford to even think about the idea that Spencer might just drop dead, that he might not live to make it the next day. Spencer himself was very philosophical about the whole thing—he almost seemed to be the least worried about it. Kate, of course, was a nervous wreck.”4
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner got under way in an atmosphere of artificial good cheer, as the imperative of making a movie temporarily forced everyone to put aside their fears. Tracy’s presence was spectral; he had enough vitality to get through a couple of shots a day, but no more; except for a few pleasant exchanges with Poitier, whom he genuinely liked, he lacked the stamina even to chat with his costars or the crew, leaving the set between scenes to lie down in his trailer. As for Hepburn, she strode onto the lot the first morning, hungry to be back before the cameras for the first time in six years, and immediately started driving Kramer crazy. She paced the perimeter off the Draytons’ living room, asserting her ownership of the set, inspecting the furniture. Why were the cords for all the lamps so visible? Cords running across the floor were vulgar; in her own home, she concealed them by tucking them under the rugs. Could someone get on that? She peered through the viewfinder. The fireplace looked just awful; it would have to be replaced. And what was that hat Kathy was wearing? It looked terrible. Now, about the first scene, a brief exchange between her character and Poitier’s—what angle was he planning to shoot it from? Kramer finally blew up and asked her just who was running the show. “Now, now, Stanley,” she said. “Let’s not lose our equilibrium. I’m only trying to keep the set alive so everyone won’t go to sleep.”5
Hepburn’s bulldozer energy exhausted Kramer, but it had a purpose: She was letting him know that he wasn’t going to be able to get through the movie without her, and she may have been using manic activity to keep her alarm about Tracy’s weakness at bay. Hepburn put in marathon days on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—attending to Tracy and his needs every morning, getting him home in the afternoon, returning to the lot to shoot the scenes that didn’t involve him, and then spending two hours every evening coaching her game but awkward niece through her role, after which she would run lines with Tracy, who was fearful about his failing ability to memorize his dialogue.6 If the price for that level of commitment was her meddling, it was a trade-off Kramer was willing to make. “When she signed for the film, she said, ‘I bet I’ll bug you—I bet I’ll drive you crazy,’” he told a reporter. “I said, ‘I bet you will too, and I’ll tell you how I’ll live with it. Go ahead and bug me, drive me crazy—I’ll let you know, but don’t stop doing it.’ Katie…is not always right, in my opinion, but she’s right 60 percent of the time.”7 On a grouchier day, speaking to another writer, he revised that figure down to 50 percent.
Some natural insecurity was also playing on He
pburn’s nerves: The actress, who celebrated her sixtieth birthday during the production, was being filmed in color under garish light for the first time in ten years, and she worried about her neck, her age spots, her wrinkled hands, her sun-damaged skin. Hepburn developed a self-protective strategy in which, in scene after scene, she would suggest blocking that positioned her face lower in the frame, where she believed the light was less harsh. “I’m not really vain,” she insisted, “but I don’t think people want to see me look like a corpse, or a monkey.”8 Tracy had no patience for her contrivances. He let every wrinkle show and even refused to wear makeup in the movie; when someone would try to powder his forehead, he would push him away with a look of disgust, calling it “nonsense.”9 When Hepburn entered for one scene and dipped low to kneel beside him, hiding her neck, Kramer recalled later, “it really teed Spencer off. He said, ‘What the hell are you doing now?’ She said, ‘Spencuh, I just thought…’ And he said, ‘Spencuh, I just thought…,’ imitating her Bryn Mawr accent. ‘Go out and come in like a human being, for Christ’s sake!’”10 “Kate, why don’t you talk like a person?” he snapped at her on another day. “You talk like you’ve got a feather up your ass!”11 Hepburn would just smile and swallow whatever she was thinking. “In many ways, she was all about pleasing the men,” says Karen Kramer, “acquiescing and making them feeling comfortable and almost being a doormat.”12
On most days, Tracy’s energy would evaporate quickly. “They used a very old-fashioned kind of lighting that took forever,” says William Mead, who played a delivery boy in the film (he’s billed as “Skip Martin”). “I remember Spencer Tracy getting very impatient between takes because they had to light everything within an inch of its life.”13 The more he felt his strength ebbing, the more he made Hepburn the target of his abuse. “Why don’t you just mind your own goddamn business, read the lines, do what he says, and just get on with it,” he would tell her when she started to argue with Kramer.14
As irritated as he would become with Hepburn, Tracy also knew that she was creating a buffer zone between him and the production, whisking him away for naps, telling Kramer that she thought the last take was perfect when she sensed he was tiring, making sure that he always had a glass of milk filled with ice cubes at hand (by then, despite Tracy’s long history of alcoholism, he apparently restricted himself to milk during the day and a single beer at night). He was kinder when talking about her than when talking to her. “Do you notice she’s the same with everybody—how she tries to help people?” he told a reporter in one of the rare interviews he gave during the production. “She helps little Kathy, she helps Cecil Kellaway…she helps me, she helps you….”15 Hepburn, though endlessly solicitous with Tracy, was a drillmaster with her niece, warning her, “I can see the wheels turning!”16 whenever she thought Houghton was slowing down a scene, and ordering her to be home for dinner every night. While rehearsing a scene in which Joey Drayton runs downstairs to greet her mother, Houghton tripped on the staircase and sprained her ankle badly. Hepburn unsentimentally told her to soldier on. “Poor Kathy,” she remarked. “Think of what would have happened if she’d broken something and had to be replaced. After losing this opportunity, there’d be just one goddamn thing for her to do—kill herself.”17
Had she been a more experienced actress, or made her debut in a less troubled production, Houghton might have felt freer to articulate her own misgivings about playing a character who, on screen, seems so oblivious to the realities around her that, as many critics pointed out, it’s hard to imagine what Poitier’s character sees in her. “In the original script,” she recalls, “there was a wonderful scene in which the girl gets to say to her father, ‘I don’t understand what’s wrong with you—you brought me up to believe that a person’s worth is not based on the color of their skin, but on what they are intrinsically. If anything, I’m not worthy of him, because he’s a world-famous doctor and I’m young and haven’t done anything!’” says Houghton. “For me, that scene saved me as a character, because I really did think, why on earth would he be interested in this girl unless she has something to say for herself?”
Kramer strongly disagreed; he believed that the naiveté of the blind girl in Poitier’s A Patch of Blue had made her affection for a black man more palatable to white audiences, and two years later, he didn’t believe moviegoers were ready for anything more challenging. “The day came when Spencer and I were going to do our big scene,” she recalls, “and just before we shot it, Stanley said to me, ‘I want you to know I may not use this. You don’t know America the way I do,’ he said. ‘The American public will accept a girl’s blind love for this man, but they won’t forgive you if you go into this relationship with open eyes.’ Well, I thought it was cuckoo, but because of the circumstances, I didn’t know how hard I could push. How was this going to affect me, was this a good career move, blah blah blah—afterwards I had a lot of thoughts about that. But it’s amazing what the traumatic event of being close to someone with a serious illness can do. That was our world. Nothing else mattered.”18
The on-screen reunion of Tracy and Hepburn generated a tremendous amount of interest in the press, and despite the preemptive announcement that the set would be closed, Hepburn surprised everyone involved in the movie by making herself more available to reporters than she had ever been. In the 1940s, her exchanges with journalists were often combative; in the 1950s, around the time of The African Queen, she began using selected interviews to shape an image of herself as tough, indomitable, and indifferent to the vicissitudes of Hollywood. At sixty, Hepburn could be forbidding—“Bunk about the-public-has-a-right-to-know!” she barked. “They haven’t got the right to know anything—not until forty or fifty years from now!”19 But on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, she apportioned generous helpings of her carefully honed personality to writers from Look, from Life, from Esquire, and from The New York Times; she cooperated with a promotional book being written about the stars of the movie; she toured reporters around the set, chatted away about any number of topics, and began to shape a new image—funnier, more talkative, full of loose-cannon opinions, stridency leavened by a measure of self-deprecation—that would carry her through the next thirty years. In part, the change came about because Hepburn was genuinely surprised and touched at the affection journalists suddenly seemed to feel for her after years in which she hadn’t worked. “She’d always had an adversarial relationship with the press and enjoyed it, but I think on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner she found she could have an unadversarial relationship with the press and enjoy it, too,” says Houghton. “This was a reemergence from her cocoon after five or six years. But she was also very aware that Spencer was going, and that made her vulnerable in a way that didn’t involve her ego as much as all of the previous moments in her career—it really wasn’t about her. Heretofore, she would have been much more concerned about ‘Kate,’ about what impression Kate Hepburn was making, her caprices, her image, was she going to be a success? But this film was probably the most personal film she made, and it opened a door for her into a new way of relating to the public.”20
Hepburn took one journalist after another and gave them exactly what they wanted: good copy. She railed against sexual frankness (“Elia Kazan’s book [The Arrangement, about a middle-aged married man who takes a mistress] is the most REPULSIVE point of view about sex”); about the new European cinema (“I saw Blow-Up and thought it an absolute bunch of claptrap…a lot of twaddle that winds up with a lot of poor, wretched, underfed things playing tennis WITHOUT a ball”);21 about the uselessness of psychiatry, a favorite and tellingly persistent theme of hers; about Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (“straight pornography”); and about her loathing for on-screen nudity (especially when it featured “people with bosoms smaller than mine”). When she heard herself becoming too prissy or sour, she could switch gears immediately: Suddenly she would sing the praises of daring British movies like Georgy Girl or Alfie, remarking, “I think it’s too bad that we
can’t, in this country, compete with that market and produce a picture that doesn’t have to appeal to so many people.” She started finding a useful tone of endearing self-disparagement (“I suppose people may be rather fond of me as they are of an old building”).22 And most surprising, she talked about Tracy in warmer and more personal terms that she had ever allowed herself to use publicly, even taking a cheerfully conspiratorial tone with visiting writers. “Listen, I’ll be the easy one to get—I gab a lot,” she told Look. “It’s Spencer we have to work on. He gets melancholia if he thinks too much about the past.” In talking about Tracy, Hepburn may have revealed more of the complexity of their relationship than she realized. Describing their on-screen sparring, she said, “The woman is always pretty sharp and she’s needling the man, sort of slightly like a mosquito…and then he slowly puts out his big paw and slaps the lady down, and that’s attractive to the American public.” She even said to Tracy, in front of a writer, “I’m the most necessary person on this here set. I’m just here for you to pick on.” Above all, she always remembered to sell the movie, telling reporters that she believed interracial marriage would soon become routine and letting them know that “there’s no bunk in our movie—we play tennis WITH the ball.”23
