George Cukor had directed Hepburn in five pictures, beginning with her first, A Bill of Divorcement, and always knew precisely what she needed. Tracy, on the other hand, took some getting used to because his command of the character was so extraordinarily complete. “Kate says I was always giving her hundreds of suggestions,” Cukor said in 1971, “but none to Spence. Well, Spence was the kind of actor about whom you thought, ‘I’ve got a lot of things I could say to you, but I don’t say them because you know,’ and the next day everything I’d thought of telling him would be there in the rushes. Also, I was never sure whether Spence was really listening when I talked to him. He was one of those naturally original actors who did it but never let you see him doing it.”
The supporting cast was exceptionally good and included Richard Whorf as the dead man’s conniving secretary, Forrest Tucker, Frank Craven, Horace McNally, Percy Kilbride, Donald Meek, Howard Da Silva, and eleven-year-old Darryl Hickman as Jeb Rickards, a young acolyte who blames himself for the accidental death of his idol. Hickman was working on two other pictures simultaneously and could appreciate Tracy’s impatience with Cukor and Hepburn as they worked their way through a page of dialogue. “Before they shot take one,” he said, “Cukor and Hepburn would talk and talk and talk about the scene, about the characters, whatever, and Tracy would stand there, first on one foot and then the other, and finally, after about twenty minutes, Tracy would say, almost under his breath, ‘Let’s get on with it, Kate.’ And when Tracy said, ‘Let’s get on with it, Kate,’ we shot the scene.” And then, much as Joe Mankiewicz had observed on Woman of the Year, Tracy and Hepburn would seem to compete and undercut one another. “In the intimate scenes, Tracy would go low and Hepburn would go lower. The sound man would have to yell, ‘Cut! I’m not picking them up!’ ”
As the film progressed, Tracy’s relationship with Hickman’s tormented boy became more complex and shaded than the one with Hepburn’s Christine, the unintended consequence of a character written more as a cipher than as a grieving wife with a terrible secret to keep. (“I think,” Cukor said, “she finally carried a slightly phony part because her humanity asserted itself, and the humor.”) Jeb’s scene on a dark hillside, an emotion-charged exchange full of beats and transitions in which he decides that he can trust O’Malley, was, as Hickman later put it, “the most difficult scene I played as a child actor.” He credited its success to Cukor, who walked him through it change by change, and to Tracy, “who was so ‘with you’ as an actor that you could feel his energy. He was very still and very quiet and very unspoken, but he was with you psychically in a way that I have never felt from another actor. He listened to you with such intensity that he literally drew you into himself. It isn’t that he did very much; in fact, he did almost nothing. But he created a connection that was so intense that you couldn’t pull yourself away from him.”
Director George Cukor makes Darryl Hickman’s close-ups for Keeper of the Flame. “Tracy never budged,” Hickman recalled. “He was there with me every step of the way.” (DARRYL HICKMAN)
Hickman knew nothing of craft, but he came to see his time with Tracy and Cukor as the beginning of a process of learning that culminated in a successful career as a teacher of acting.
The only thing Tracy said to me directly, at some point during the shooting of that scene, was, “I think if you took more time there, you’d make a better transition.” I didn’t know what the word “transition” meant, but I got the sense of what he was talking about. He never, ever said anything to me, but I could feel his respect and that meant a lot. He would sit there when I did my closeups, and—I swear, we shot my closeups for a day—Tracy never walked away from that apple box he was sitting on. Most big-time stars would get up and go to their dressing room, then they’d come back and maybe they’d feed you your lines from beside the camera or maybe they wouldn’t. Tracy never budged. He was there with me every step of the way. And he gave me the same performance when he was beside the camera that he gave me in front of the camera. And that wasn’t the way most of those big-time movie stars did it.
Kate would appear on the set on days she wasn’t needed, sometimes to confer with Cukor, invariably to sit near the camera and watch Tracy as he worked. The pace of production was glacial, and the picture took as long to make as Tortilla Flat—nearly eleven weeks. As it dragged on, Hepburn’s partners at the Theatre Guild grew increasingly worried that she would be unable to rejoin Without Love as originally planned. The Guild’s business manager, Warren Munsell, began wiring in July, looking for a commitment to open the play in Columbus on September 17. Before long, it became apparent that Hepburn was ducking them. “What are you up to that you keep changing your phone number?” Theresa Helburn, Langner’s codirector at the Guild, wired on August 9. “I will guard your secret if you will send it to me. How is the picture going and how are things relative to our September dates?”
Now that she was on more intimate terms with him, Kate could plainly see the stress Spence put himself under during the course of a film and the psychological toll his insomnia was taking. When he wasn’t fretting about the picture, his part, and what he was doing with it, it was his life and the way he was living it. “He felt the miseries that he’d brought on people were avoidable,” she said, “and that if he hadn’t existed the world would have been better off.” Unworthy of God’s forgiveness, he could see only darkness before him, eternal punishment by fire, the literal interpretation of hell as preached to believers. Overwhelmed by a sensitivity to everything around him—the emotions of others, the stir of the wind—his heart beat furiously and occasionally it would skip, a chilling, ever-present reminder in the depth of the night that he could be taken at any moment.
He hated himself at times like these, hated his inability to live up to his own moral and professional standards, to be the good man he aspired to be, the man his audience believed him to be. Worse, he was unable to express these thoughts and feelings to anyone other than himself, for, as with Louise, Kate wasn’t Catholic—wasn’t anything, for that matter—and he knew that whatever he had to say, should he say it, would be taken, however politely and sympathetically, as nonsense. He would appear on the set every morning looking red-eyed and haggard, and he would speak to nobody. He’d disappear into his dressing room and not emerge until it was time for the first shot to be blocked. Everyone assumed he was hungover, but he wasn’t drinking anything stronger than tea at the time. He was just desperate for sleep, and his fatigue threatened the concentration he needed to do his best work.
As the wires from New York grew more insistent, Hepburn brokered the sale of Without Love to M-G-M for $260,000, a figure she hoped would satisfy all the parties involved so that she could put forth what she really wanted, which was to get out of doing the play in New York altogether. The studio was talking more pictures for the two of them, and Tracy had gotten her interested in Paul Osborn’s script for Madame Curie, which he had originally hoped to do with Garbo. The thought of Hepburn as the great Polish scientist struck everyone as odd, and Hedda Hopper reminded her readers that Irene Dunne had been the original choice for the role. Regardless, she was desperate to stay in California, desperate to stay with Spence and to help him get a handle on this curse that seemed to drain him of all life. Sleep had never been a problem for her; she retired early, slept soundly, often rose before dawn. If he could just set his mind to it, he could do that as well, and if it meant staying at M-G-M a while longer and making a few more pictures, then that was what she wanted and what she needed to do.
Another wire from Terry Helburn on September 1 considerably upped the pressure:
I MUST ADVISE YOU THAT SHOULD WE OPEN MORE THAN TWO WEEKS AFTER OUR AGREED DATE OF OCTOBER FIFTH WE WILL OWE A WEEKS SALARY TO MOST OF THE CAST FOR WHICH WE WILL HAVE TO HOLD METRO RESPONSIBLE SINCE YOUR CONTRACT WITH THEM EXPIRES OCTOBER FIRST AND BEGINS WITH US OCTOBER FIFTH.
While Tracy spent the Labor Day weekend with his family in Encino, Hepburn took pen in hand and began
drafting a letter to Helburn, her partner Lawrence Langner, and Phil Barry, the gifted playwright whose work was at the center of it all. “I want to talk to you very seriously about the play,” she wrote. “I do not think you should have me do it. There are many reasons for my coming to this conclusion and I wish you would read them and think about them seriously.” She went on to warn that she would not stay with the show past her contracted time, which meant that they could play New York for a maximum of twelve weeks.5 She was not good in the part, she added, and she could not play well with Elliott Nugent. (“We are just unfortunate together.”) She said that she thought the play needed considerable work—new work, not revision—and that it was almost impossible to act in such a thing without conviction. “I am sunk to feel this way—but I have right along—and in a way I feel that I have done my part in it. I have played on the road to good business—made back the investment—helped settle the movie rights. You have certainly not lost anything by having me in it …”
The letter was lucid, reasoned, and made a solid case against dragging her back to Broadway for what was sure to be a drubbing. She thought about it, slept on it, then realized they would be hell-bent on bringing it in regardless. In Spence’s absence, Hepburn redrafted the letter and added a strictly emotional appeal: “Finally—for personal reasons—it will crucify me to be tied up in N.Y. for four months. I shall be frantic and miserable and I beg you not to force me to do it. In these times life is entirely uncertain, and for the sake of the extra money you may make with me in it, you may be ruining me. Please, as my friends, think these points over seriously … I have done the best I can do—please let me out of it—”
Postmarked September 7, 1942, the letter reached the Fifty-second Street offices of the Theatre Guild on the twelfth. Barry was “thunderstruck” when he read it, and Helburn and Langner set about the task of drafting a measured reply. While they sympathized deeply with the “emotional disturbance” she seemed to be in, there were duties and obligations that could not be overlooked. Barry’s career as a dramatist had to be considered, as did the Guild’s continuing position as an institution of the American theatre. They put the best possible spin on Without Love, insisting that audiences liked Hepburn better in it than they had in Philadelphia Story. “The fact that you are in pain when you are playing with Elliott is merely because you see Spencer in it, but the audience doesn’t, and everybody thinks that you and Elliott make a good team in it. You did yourself until you got feeling strongly about Spencer in it, and you are surely too good a trouper to let a purely personal point of view stand in the way of an objective success …”
After every conceivable argument had been committed to paper, they decided it would be wisest to talk it over with Kate in person. Helburn sent a telegram on the thirteenth: “YOUR LETTER OF COURSE A SHOCK TO US ALL …” and said that she would see her in Hollywood that coming Wednesday. The meeting was a hurried affair, and Hepburn’s hasty exit left their talk unfinished. Helburn thought she had an agreement from Kate to take the play into New York as long as their Detroit opening was postponed until October 26 and that Hepburn would cover a week’s worth of cast salaries out of the extra money she would be getting from Metro for her additional time on the picture. Back in New York, Helburn announced to the press that Without Love would arrive on Broadway in November.
They finished Keeper of the Flame on September 22, with a do-over on a key scene set for the following week. Actress Pauline Lord was revered on the New York stage, where she had starred in O’Neill’s Anna Christie and Strange Interlude, but she was almost completely unknown to movie audiences, having appeared in just two pictures. Her role as the vindictive Mrs. Forrest promised fireworks in the company of Tracy and Hepburn, but she was nervous and fidgety, overwhelmed by the mechanics of moviemaking, and Cukor had to nurse her along. The scene didn’t work well, and Saville, in collaboration with playwright Leon Gordon, drafted a set of retakes in which the part of Mrs. Forrest would be taken by Margaret Wycherly, an equally prominent—and considerably more seasoned—actress of both stage and screen. Wycherly’s revised scene, which made her character more crazy than evil, took three days to shoot. The film was readied for preview as Saville and Gordon busied themselves with still more emendations, and after putting it all before an audience it was decided that Christine would have to be guilty of murder after all. Soon, the men had forty-five pages of new material to shoot.
It was now October 6, and Hepburn was due in the East for rehearsals on the twelfth. New scenes requiring her participation, including her death at the hands of her husband’s former secretary, were dated as late as October 10. Tracy finished with his scenes on the seventeenth—Kate was long gone by then—and left within days for a new round of tests at Johns Hopkins, his principal complaint being “insomnia and general nervousness with vague feelings of fear.”
He met briefly with President Roosevelt on the twenty-ninth for a conference regarding a possible trip to England but was nowhere to be seen when the very public funeral of George M. Cohan took place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on November 7. At Johns Hopkins, a physical exam, as before, showed him to be in good health and completely normal. His first night of monitored sleep displayed a familiar pattern: asleep four hours, then awake thirty minutes, asleep for another hour, then awake ninety minutes. He got a total of six and a half hours with the aid of Nembutal, an hour less the following night. He remained at the hospital a total of four days and was discharged, it was noted, “with his condition improved.”
New York saw the opening of Without Love while Tracy was at Johns Hopkins, and Tracy hired a car to return to Manhattan on the afternoon of November 12. The play and Kate were, in her words, “roasted,” but the public disagreed with the critics, came, and evidently liked it well enough to send their friends. Tracy remained close at hand, marking ten months of sobriety on December 15, 1942. The city was under a blackout order, and the darkness after nightfall was the darkness of a country lane. No theater marquees could be lit, no restaurants could be lighted from the street, and it was possible to walk past Radio City Music Hall and not know it.
Another conference with Roosevelt, this time in the company of Robert Emmet Sherwood, overseas director of the Office of War Information, confirmed that Tracy would soon leave for Great Britain to convey Christmas greetings to American and British soldiers. The plan lost momentum, though, as the president began preparations for a secret conference with Winston Churchill at Casablanca. Kate was dutifully serving her time on the stage of the St. James Theatre when Spence left for Chicago on the eighteenth, arriving back home in Los Angeles on the evening of December 21. Christmas, as usual, was at the ranch, where he and his brother Carroll observed their first Yuletide together since the passing of their mother.
Tracy spent the next four consecutive days in Encino, his longest uninterrupted stretch of time there in more than a year.
* * *
1 Gable, however, was considerably more popular internationally.
2 Tracy subsequently canceled an appearance on CBs’ Silver Theater and, with one minor exception, never again appeared on a commercial radio broadcast. “I think the reason he isn’t on the radio more is because it makes him so nervous,” Peggy Gough commented at the time.
3 Treatment for alcoholism was often based on aversion therapies, where the consumption of liquor was accompanied by a powerful emetic. (Some so-called liquor cures even involved the use of leeches.)
4 Stewart, who had been president of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, also appreciated the political message of the film and thought his work on it could be, in the words of his wife, “a contribution to this war against Hitler.”
5 Hepburn’s commitment to the play was actually for sixteen weeks. Allowing for a two-week tryout period, she could have been required to play a maximum of fourteen weeks on Broadway, not twelve.
CHAPTER 19
Not the Guy They See Up There on the Screen
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Wi
thin days of receiving Matie Winston’s letter, the one that urged her to “take another flier,” Louise Tracy was presented with the opportunity she craved. “I’ve always had to have a project,” she later said. “Never occurred to me that it might be a big business.” Louise had met somebody who was part of a group of older people who were hard of hearing. “They met every so often, played cards and complained,” she said. “I felt that I wanted to get more deeply interested. I wondered what was going on and what could be done … I met once with them, but I didn’t know enough.”
Through the group she learned of a workshop at the University of Southern California for social workers, teachers, and parents of the hard of hearing. She took Johnny, now eighteen and home from school, and met Dr. Boris Markovin, who was the director of a reading clinic at USC. “He just asked, asked, asked questions,” she said of Dr. Markovin. “He want[ed] to know everything about everything.
“He said, ‘Mrs. Tracy, why don’t you do something for the deaf?’
“I said, ‘What could I do?’
“ ‘Well, of course you [could] do something. Didn’t you ever think of anything you’d like to do?’
James Curtis Page 62
