by Mark Harris
The emergence of a new, more open Hepburn was a result of some genuine softening on her part, but it was also the end product of what one reporter called a “minuet” of careful negotiations;24 the visits were orchestrated by Columbia Pictures and by Howard Strickling, MGM’s longtime publicity chief and the man who had successfully kept Tracy’s problems out of the press for twenty years. Reporters from approved publications arrived on the set with an understanding that no rumor of Hepburn and Tracy’s personal relationship, whatever it was, was to make its way into print; old-Hollywood decorum was to be observed. Accordingly, Hepburn and Tracy had separate trailers and dressing rooms. “Even then,” says Marshall Schlom, “they always played it very low-key. She would go to her dressing room, but then she would bring lunch to his.”25 When the press was present, everyone knew their roles. Houghton was called in for interviews and struck the right note of pert enthusiasm and unflappability. Poitier was gracious and modest, trotting out a story—as did Kramer—that he was so nervous about his first time acting with stars of Hepburn and Tracy’s magnitude that Kramer had to send them home and let Poitier say his lines to empty chairs. Tracy’s illness seems a far more likely explanation of that anecdote than Poitier’s nerves, but, says Houghton, “there was always a facade. There was just no way anybody was going to betray what was going on at the time with the seriousness of Spencer’s fragility.”26
For Poitier, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner felt, in some ways, like a creative step backward after the revitalizing challenge of his work with Rod Steiger on In the Heat of the Night; his character, Prentice, was the film’s straight man, a paragon of accomplishment and good manners who existed primarily to generate comic reactions in the characters around him. “In this film we are first and foremost, it seems to me…presenting entertainment with a point of view,” he told a reporter, expressing his reservations as politely as possible. “I really don’t quite understand what I think of it in racial terms.”27
Poitier’s reticence was unsurprising. William Rose’s script offered a good deal of genuinely funny social comedy revolving around Tracy and the spectacle of, as Cecil Kellaway’s monsignor put it, “a broken-down old phony liberal [coming] face-to-face with his principles.” But when the movie aimed for a more direct and contemporary take on race, the results were hopeless. In the first scene in the movie to feature two black characters talking to each other, the Draytons’ suspicious maid, Tillie, corners Prentice while she’s out of earshot of her employers and confronts him about his intentions. “I got something to say to you, boy!” she says. “You think I don’t see what you are? You’re one of those smooth-talkin’ smart-ass niggers just out for all you can get with your black power and all your other troublemaking nonsense. And you lissen here! I brought up that chile from a baby in her cradle and ain’t nobody gonna harm her none while I’m here watchin’! You read me, boy?” Isabel Sanford, hired for $600 a week to play Tillie,28 would go on to become well-known to TV viewers a few years later as part of the cast of All in the Family and The Jeffersons; she played the scene with tremendous comic vigor, and Kramer himself added the “black power” line as a fainthearted nod to the news,29 but nothing could save the scene from the mammy clichés of a screenwriter who was completely out of touch with the civil rights movement and who couldn’t even imagine Poitier’s character would have a word of reaction to the dressing-down. And Poitier had rarely had to say a worse line than Prentice’s jab at his own father (Roy Glenn): “Not until you and your whole lousy generation lay down and die will the weight of you be off our backs…. You think of yourself as a colored man—I think of myself as a man.” The screenplay was surely to blame for that moment, but in part, it echoed words Poitier himself had spoken just a year earlier; talking about his role in the western Duel at Diablo, he had said, “I play a guy, not a Negro.”30
In fact, Kramer had taken pains to smooth out anything that might disturb white moviegoers. In an early draft of the script, Rose had had Prentice’s father tell off Matt Drayton: “Calm down? Now, listen, you better let me tell you something. Have you got any idea at all of what a Negro doctor in the United States is up against?” He goes on to say that marriage to Joey would mean “throwing away everything he’s ever done or ever hoped to do! I mean he would be ruined!” Kramer crossed it out.
The dissonance between the cloistered world of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and the racial maelstrom of 1967 America became impossible to ignore when actress Beah Richards arrived on the set to film her scenes as Prentice’s mother. Richards was a well-regarded stage actress and a deeply committed political activist who wrote a column for the civil rights publication Freedomways; by 1967, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had been keeping a file on her for sixteen years. At forty-six, she was just seven years Poitier’s senior, but she usually played characters who were older than her actual age—“I was everybody’s mother, from Sidney’s to James Earl Jones’s,” she said. Richards was furious about the lack of opportunities offered to African American performers, and she wasn’t alone: Months after she had won a Tony nomination for James Baldwin’s 1965 play, The Amen Corner, her director, Frank Silvera, took out a trade ad complaining that since the nomination, she had received only a single acting offer, “one day’s work as a maid.” Just a few months earlier, she had played opposite Poitier in In the Heat of the Night as the character Stirling Silliphant had once imagined as a sort of voodoo abortionist. She had made just $2,500 for the role31 and never knew when—or if—another offer would be coming. Now she was put in a synthetic gray wig and dressed in pearls, white gloves, and a modest hat; her character was made to look like a loyal old housekeeper who has just come from a president’s funeral. Prentice’s mother was meant to embody the kind of soft-spoken, well-kept, epitome-of-dignity little old black lady who Kramer and Rose thought would put white audiences at their ease, but having to return to the kind of role that had made her into what one reviewer later called “the best sweet-and-sensitive Negro mother in all of show business,” Richards was openly unhappy. Her speech to Spencer Tracy was, in the words of her friend Ossie Davis, a reminder that “‘These children are in love, and love is all that we need to consider.’…Now, Beah knew that was a lie…. At the same time, it was a chance at that level to make any statement at all, so she made it with authority.”32
Richards brought great delicacy and restraint to her scenes, especially to her poignant and exquisitely performed speech to Tracy about how old men can no longer remember or understand passion, but by the end of her work on the movie, says Houghton, “I felt that she hated all of us. She was a formidable presence and a very angry person. She never misbehaved in any way. But I felt that there was no way, as a young white woman, that I could ever be redeemed in her eyes. And I totally understood that, and I didn’t think the film really did a whole lot to ameliorate that situation. It was a big reality check—it must have been horribly difficult for her to even get those lines out.”
As for Poitier, he felt more resigned than angry. The “Negro in white face” article and the increasingly personal attacks from black writers on his choices of roles had stung. “He was very, very kind to me,” says Houghton. “He would talk to me when we were waiting for shots to be set up, but what I remember him talking about most was that he was tired of acting. He wanted to become a director—he felt that that was the only way he would be able to bring more black people into the business and tell different stories. He felt that as an actor, he had contributed as much as he could.”33
By early May, Tracy was in such rapid decline that he was missing entire days and working as little as six hours a week.34 “The on-the-set situation is tenser than tense,” associate producer George Glass wrote to a journalist. “Tracy fell ill over the past weekend and failed to show for yesterday’s big scene, shooting of which will occupy all this week.” Hepburn was on guard at every moment; when Glass brought John Flinn, Columbia’s director of publicity, onto the set, she berated him for allowing a “stranger”
onto the production. When Glass explained who Flinn was, Hepburn, he wrote, “was taken about as far aback as she ever goes (an inch or so).”35
Kramer had worked around Tracy as much as possible, bringing in a body double for angles in which only his back was seen; as the shoot progressed, even the effort of standing exhausted his star, “and when he tired,” Kramer said, “it came quickly.” “He huffed and he puffed,” said Schlom. “He had difficulty even walking up a short flight of stairs.”36 But there would be no way to fake the actor’s big scene—a climactic monologue in which Matt Drayton summarizes every argument for and against racial intermarriage that the other characters have made and then grants his blessing to his daughter and future son-in-law. The speech, which unfolds virtually uninterrupted over the last eight minutes of the movie, is a skillful and touching piece of screenwriting in which Matt wrenchingly articulates his love for Christina and then works his way toward a benevolent conclusion. The final words in the monologue blended Kramer’s taste for heartfelt speechifying with Tracy’s warm, commonsensical voice almost perfectly: “As for you two and the problems you’re going to have, they seem almost unimaginable…. There’ll be a hundred million people right here in this country who will be shocked and offended and appalled by the two of you…. You will just have to ride that out, maybe every day for the rest of your lives. You can try to ignore those people, or you can feel sorry for them and their prejudices and their bigotry and their blind hatreds and stupid fears, but where necessary, you’ll just have to cling tight to each other and say, screw all those people.” (Just before production, Geoffrey Shurlock had warned Kramer that such a “coarse and vulgar expression” would not be approved “in a picture of this caliber,” but Kramer and Rose had kept it in, knowing Shurlock no longer had enough power to take it out.)37
“Spencer Tracy never fluffed a word,” Poitier wrote later. “Every person on the soundstage that afternoon became engrossed with [his] character as that remarkable actor did his job…. It was hypnotic watching that man pick up the pace here, slow it down there, take a pause here, smile there…all of it making sense—all of it believable. There was applause when he finished.”38 Poitier’s words represented a warm and deeply felt appreciation of Tracy’s talents, but also a beatification that bore little resemblance to the actual, far more arduous shooting of the speech. Kramer, aware of Tracy’s memory problems and his difficulty breathing, broke the scene into tiny pieces and shot it over six full days, shooting a great deal of coverage of the other actors.39 He wanted Tracy on his feet for most of the scene, and Tracy badly wanted to deliver a strong performance for him. “Lots of people around here keep telling me how great I am, but you notice how it’s Stanley who puts me to work,” he told his friend Garson Kanin. “I tell him my life expectancy is about seven and a half minutes, and he says ‘Action!’”40
Summoning the little strength he had left, Tracy rose to the occasion, delivering one of his tenderest and most fully felt performances and letting the speech unfold with the relaxed cadence and rueful half-smile of a man who knows he’s made any number of mistakes but is seeing his own life and marriage clearly for the first time in years. There were no more afternoons off; that week, he put in six- and seven-hour days, pushing through one segment of the scene after another. In the monologue’s most famous moment, he talks about his love for Christina. “Old?” he says of himself. “Yes. Burned out? Certainly. But I can tell you, the memories are still there—clear, intact, indestructible, and they’ll be there if I live to be a hundred and ten…. In the final analysis,” he says, “the only thing that matters is what they feel for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt,” he says, turning to Hepburn, whose eyes are glistening with tears, “that’s everything.”
Hepburn’s tears were, for all the real emotion behind them, a measure of her remarkable control. (In the script, Rose simply wrote, “Is Christina weeping quietly? I don’t know.”)41 Kramer was stunned by her ability, in “seven, eight, nine successive takes of a scene, [to] make the teardrop drop on the same line each time…. She was just fantastic the way she could do that.”42 It takes nothing away from Tracy’s thoughtfulness and timing as he worked his way through the speech to note that the sequence audiences eventually saw was a triumph of editing as well as of acting. “To keep him appearing dynamic and healthy in that scene was the greatest challenge,” says editor Robert C. Jones. “To keep him seeming vibrant meant going through a lot of film and cheating a lot of things, carefully picking lines that were usable and deleting those that weren’t, using a line of dialogue from take three over a picture from take four…. Stanley gave me a lot of room to do that and permission to cut to Katharine Hepburn or one of the other actors so that we could just pick Tracy’s best delivery of a line regardless of what the camera was doing. We went through it for weeks and weeks. And I think Tracy’s health actually added something to the performance—a kind of vulnerability he hadn’t had before.”43
Tracy finished the monologue on May 19, 1967, just five days before the end of production on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.44 He had one more scene to shoot, but his relief was palpable. “I’ve been looking over the script,” he told his director. “You really don’t need me after tomorrow. If I die on the way home, you and Kate are in the clear. You’ll get your money.” The next day, he returned, visibly haggard, for his final scene—a process shot in which he and Hepburn take a drive to get some ice cream. It was a simple sequence that demanded little more from him than his physical presence and a bit of easy dialogue. When his work was complete, assistant director Ray Gosnell turned to the crew and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this was Spencer Tracy’s last shot.” “When he said that,” says Karen Kramer, “Stanley cried. It was the first and last time I ever saw him cry.” As the crew burst into applause, Tracy didn’t say anything. He just stepped out of the prop car, smiled broadly, waved, and walked slowly off the soundstage. Kramer watched him go and then said softly, “That is the last time you will see Spencer Tracy on camera.”45
Tracy went home and returned to the same chair in which he had been sitting a year earlier when Kramer had talked him into making the movie. The wrap party was three days later. Hepburn attended and made a speech in which she described herself as “everlastingly grateful,” telling the crew, “Your help…made a hell of a lot of difference…to Spence.”46 Tracy didn’t feel up to a party; instead, he picked up the telephone and called his friends. “I did it!” he said. “I’ve finished the picture! And I was betting against myself all the way.”47
TWENTY-FOUR
Dustin Hoffman paced the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, about to relive the worst nightmares of his early adolescence. Mike Nichols was getting ready to shoot a scene in which Benjamin, with growing panic, attempts to book a room for his first tryst with Mrs. Robinson and tries desperately to improvise a lie he can tell to an inscrutable desk clerk. The concierge was to have been played by William Daniels, but when Daniels lobbied Nichols to give him something more to do in the movie, the director bumped him up to the role of Benjamin’s father, and Buck Henry stepped behind the reservations desk instead.1
“Have you ever done anything like this?” Nichols said to Hoffman while they rehearsed the scene.
“I don’t think so,” Hoffman said, feeling himself start to freeze up.
“Let’s think,” Nichols said, persisting. “Did you ever go anywhere that unnerved you?”
Hoffman reached into his memory. “When I was a kid, I could never buy rubbers if it was a female behind the counter,” he told Nichols. “I would go into a drugstore, and if it was a man, I could ask him very quietly, could I have some prophylactics? But many times, just as I got to the counter, the man would move away and a woman would be there. And in midsentence, I’d have to think of something else.”
“Okay,” said Nichols. “When you’re going to get the room, you’re walking in to get rubbers. And Buck is a female pharmacist.”2
Hof
fman didn’t need much help to access his anxieties. Weeks into shooting The Graduate, he was so nervous that he even worried about his ability to manufacture nervousness on camera. And his relationship with Nichols was a complicated one; the more he opened up to Nichols, the more ammunition he gave his director to get under his skin and toy with his blackest fears. “I get to you sometimes, don’t I?” Nichols asked him. “You just kind of clam up when I do.”
“In New York I blow my top when things aren’t going right,” said Hoffman. “But here I go to the other extreme.”
“That’s no good. Just tell me to go to hell,” said Nichols.
“I can’t do that,” said Hoffman. “You’re the director.”3
The shoot at the Ambassador that day was turning out to be particularly hard for Hoffman. “I had been having a difficult time with my parents,” he says, “but they wanted to come watch, and I finally acquiesced. I figured it would be okay—there would be a lot of people there, and they could stand behind a rope.” Hoffman’s father, Harry, was a movie fan; in the early 1930s, before his son was born, he had worked at Columbia Pictures as a prop master and set decorator. “I never heard about any of that stuff growing up,” says Hoffman. “But later I found out that he had really wanted to direct after watching Frank Capra work.”
Before the scene started, Hoffman excused himself to go to the bathroom. At least once a day, before the cameras rolled, Nichols would give him the same humiliating reminder: “Don’t forget to clean the inside of your nose.” Hoffman stared at himself in the mirror, wondering, probably for the hundredth time, why Nichols had cast him. When he came out of the restroom, he saw his father standing next to Nichols, chatting with him. “It was the nightmare thing that every kid experiences,” says Hoffman. “He had gone under the rope! I went over to them and he was saying, ‘Mike, you know, you’re not shooting this right….’”
