“But one thing pleased me about the whole affair,” Tracy said to Thomas. “At eight o’clock that night, my agent took me over to M-G-M to have a talk with Louis B. Mayer. At nine o’clock I was signed to a contract, and I’ve been there ever since.”
The column ran nationally, suggesting that Zanuck could have had Tracy in his stable of stars all along had his predecessors only behaved more judiciously. Perhaps more to the point were reports that Tracy would be leaving M-G-M at the end of his current contract.
“Will I sign again? I don’t know. At first I didn’t think I would because I didn’t think they wanted me. Nobody said anything about staying. I think that’s why a lot of actors leave. But we have started having talks, and something may come of it. I still have three pictures to make for them. After that, who knows?”
When Tracy left for New York and London on April 24, it was to meet up with Kate and prepare for the filming of Highland Fling, which was set to go at the end of June. Based on the book Digby by David Walker, the script was by Angus McPhail, whose Whiskey Galore was one of the comic gems to emerge from Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios. The settling of arrangements to shoot the film in Scotland coincided with the cancellation of The Millionairess, which, despite Hepburn’s participation and a “brilliant” screenplay from Preston Sturges, collapsed under its own weight.
She was back in New York when Tracy’s TWA flight touched down at Idlewild, and they met for an intimate dinner the next night at the Pierre. A pinched nerve—an old neck injury—was troubling him, and he needed three fillings in his teeth replaced. They dined with Laura Harding, Constance Collier, the Douglases (who were passing through town), the Leland Haywards, Irene Selznick. Tracy filled the time between meals and doctor appointments watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV.
In London they met up with the Kanins, the Don Stewarts, George Cukor (whose M-G-M contract would soon be up), the Douglases (again), Bobby Helpmann, and Michael Benthall. Tracy’s guests drank freely around him; one night with the Stewarts, he noted Guinness Stout and Ale in his book with some big question marks following the entry. Two nights later, in the same company, he drew a picture of a bottle of Dubonnet on the page. Once with Kate, Helpmann, and Benthall, the party collectively killed a quart of scotch, though if Tracy personally had any, he didn’t make a note of it. Sleeping was difficult—one night he managed barely an hour—and he upped his intake of Seconal capsules to as many as four a night.
He stayed at Claridge’s, Hepburn around the corner at the Connaught. They made no show of their time together but neither could they count on Howard Strickling’s stifling of the press as they had in California. Their behavior patterns were largely dictated by Hepburn’s management of the circumstances. “She once told us that she and Tracy had never spent the night together under the same roof,” remembered Sandy Sturges, who was in town with her husband Preston and their young son. Kate maintained it was Tracy’s tossing and turning that was, at least in part, responsible: “I think Spencer found life very difficult and I found him very fascinating. So he couldn’t sleep. Well, I don’t want to sleep in a bed with someone who can’t sleep.”
Eddie Dmytryk, who was in London making a picture for producer David Lewis, observed their routine:
On our first evening, Tracy, Hepburn, Ambassador Douglas (whom I had met in Arizona), and I had dinner at an excellent Italian restaurant in Soho. We dined well and stayed late, then walked back to the Claridge, where Spence and I were staying. On arriving at the hotel, Douglas excused himself, and Spence went up to his room while I took Miss Hepburn around to the tradesman’s entrance at the rear of the building.3 We took the freight elevator up to Tracy’s floor (the operator knew her well) and joined Spence in his suite. There Katy made coffee for him and we chatted until it was time for her to say good night. Again, I escorted her to the freight elevator, through the rear entrance, and a block or so down the street to the Connaught, where she was staying.
On May 30, Tracy went to Mass and took a long walk through London on his own. Sometime during the course of the day, he discovered that The People, a Sunday tabloid with a circulation in excess of five million, had devoted half a page to an article with the following headline: “For 12 years they’ve kept Hollywood’s gossips at bay—Now LOGAN GOURLAY reveals the secret romance of Spencer and Katie.”
Veiled references to the relationship from American columnists—Sheilah Graham, Winchell, Kilgallen in particular—stretched back to Woman of the Year, but never before had a mass-circulation publication so blatantly fingered them.
For more than 12 years they have succeeded in remaining “just friends, that’s all, just friends” though it may not always look that way [Gourlay wrote]. Indeed, there are all the signs of the usual Hollywood affair. They have popped up together in several of the world’s capitals. At the moment they are here in London, not entirely by coincidence. In 1952, when she was appearing in The Millionairess on the London stage, he flew over from America. Each night he had a box reserved at the theatre. Each night he sent her a bouquet. While Hepburn was filming The African Queen here, Tracy turned up conveniently for a holiday. Yet this is the first time the newspaper spotlight has been turned on their relationship. How have they kept out of the headlines all this time? One answer is—discretion.
Gourlay went on to skirt the onerous English libel laws by branding the relationship “a genuine platonic friendship” while letting the tone and substance of the article speak for themselves. There were a few howlers—Gourlay had Hepburn entering into three separate marriages, the second with Howard Hughes—but most of the observational details were accurate.
Throughout the years they have remained reticent, shunning publicity. When I met him last year in Hollywood, all he would say was: “Yes, I know Katie very well.” She has always restricted herself publicly to saying that “Spencer is one of my closest friends.” (On less public occasions she calls him “Spence.”) The other night on one of their few public appearances together in London during their current visit, I saw them leaving one of the Mayfair clubs. She had to be helped into the car, probably because she was wearing an evening gown instead of her usual slacks. Tracy managed to do it in a gallant—but brotherly—way, although he is suffering from a twisted arm nerve at the moment. It’s fortunate that Hepburn is around to solace him—in a purely sisterly way, of course.
Tracy dined alone at Claridge’s that night, downing three bottles of Guinness and tossing four Seconals in after them. “[F]or din[ner] Claridge’s—Helpmann!! and Hepburn!!” he noted the next evening. “No grog.” On June 3 he learned from Bert Allenberg that Highland Fling had been called off. Dore Schary followed up with a phone call, saying only that the picture was off “for this year” and that he would like to start Bad Day at Honda—retitled Bad Day at Black Rock—on July 15. In its thirtieth year as a production entity, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was reducing its feature film output by 40 percent. “Years ago, every picture made money,” Eddie Mannix explained. “Today every picture is a big gamble—but if you hit the jackpot you make a lot more.”
Tracy lingered in England, not only because Hepburn had committed to a film in Italy—Time of the Cuckoo for director David Lean—but because his cousin Jane was in Ireland visiting family and would soon be making her way to England. Jane’s mother, Spence’s aunt Jenny, had always maintained that she married her late husband because he said that he’d take her to Ireland. But then, of course, he never did.
“I was to go to London when I finished in Ireland,” Jane said,
because I had a cousin who lived there. I also had a very dear friend from Seattle who was working for the Air Force and lived in London, so I had two places to go where I wouldn’t be a burden or have to be put up by him. First we went in as a group, May and Donald [my cousins] and I, to have dinner at Claridge’s with him. Then I went to stay with my friend Phyllis for two or three days, and then Phyllis and I had dinner with him, and there was this young man whose name I can’t re
member who was sort of the liaison for the studio. (He was the person who chauffeured him around.) [Spencer] asked for ice cream for dessert. Everybody else had a drink, but, of course, he didn’t. He said, “I own the third floor of Claridge’s and they don’t have any chocolate ice cream.”
I sensed how much he was annoyed or didn’t want people that he didn’t know coming up and tapping him on the shoulder. He couldn’t understand why this obsession. I think the idea of celebrity just appalled him. The fact that he was one bothered him. It didn’t amount to much in the long run because, I think, he was beginning, maybe a little bit at that time, to understand himself. Why he was there and, you know, what his life was about. I remember I thought at the time that he seemed as if he had worked so hard, and yet he didn’t feel that he had accomplished a great deal. I think that having a little bit of power over what he did was also something he wanted desperately. He knew I did a fair amount of reading and he said, “If you read anything let me know. We”—he would always say “we”—“need some ideas, we need some scripts, we need some writing that is decent.” He was telling us about Bad Day. He told us about the train that comes into this barren little town. And the man who gets off. We all said, “And then what happens?” And he said, “See the picture!” That was the one he was about to do.
And then, when Phyllis went home, we had another visit, and this man left so that he and I could have a private visit. We talked about my mother and about what a great gift this had been for me and for her and about little quirks about people in Ireland and my own family and how much we had meant to one another over the years. He said he envied me my Irish experience. He couldn’t get over the little things that I told him had happened there. The smile would just stay on his face, and he would just laugh and laugh of the various personalities and the people and the reception I got. I said to him, “Someday I may need you.” And he said, “If you do, you just call.” And he knew what I meant. We said goodbye, and that was that until the next year.
There was never any recognition of the fact that there was a Katharine Hepburn or that he was living away from home. It certainly was known, but I think my mother just simply did not accept it, and, of course, I didn’t either. I often wonder why in the world I didn’t think of it at the time, but my friend did. Phyllis knew it. She said, “Well, everybody knows.” And, of course, I said, “Yeah, well, so she’s here. Don’t ask me to introduce you!”
On July 1, Tracy rode with Kate to Southampton and boarded the Queen Mary. On the crossing with him were Benny Thau, Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, and the evangelist Billy Graham. The voyage was smooth, the weather warm and sunny. In New York he caught a TWA sleeper for Los Angeles, arriving back in the midst of a record heat wave.
Temperature fluctuations had come to bother him terribly, as did weather variations of almost any sort. He was now fifty-four years old—the age at which his father had died—and he was convinced he would not live much longer. Fixating on the Hemingway project, the words “Old Man” struck him as an apt label, and he used it constantly. He was, Leland Hayward said, “counting the weeks” until he could begin work on the picture.
There were now two screenwriters working on the project independently: in Europe, Hemingway had chosen Peter Viertel, John Huston’s frequent collaborator, while Hayward had selected Paul Osborn, an idea Tracy hailed as “brilliant.” They were still planning to shoot the film over the spring and summer of 1955, but now Hayward had two other major pictures to make: Mister Roberts, during which he was contending with director Josh Logan’s nervous breakdown, and The Spirit of St. Louis, the story of Charles Lindbergh’s history-making flight across the Atlantic.
The basis for Bad Day at Black Rock was a 1947 magazine story by Howard Breslin titled “Bad Time at Honda.” When actor-writer Don McGuire brought it to M-G-M in 1953, it was with the idea that he would adapt it to the screen. McGuire had been working in tandem with director Joseph Pevney at Universal-International, his best-known writing credit being the bizarrely fascinating Frank Sinatra vehicle Meet Danny Wilson. He took a crack at a screenplay, reportedly on spec, and though Dore Schary didn’t care for McGuire’s take on the material, the story appealed to the moralist in him.
Schary paid off McGuire, acquiring the underlying rights, and assigned the project to screenwriter Millard Kaufman, whose Take the High Ground was one of the production chief’s personal productions for the 1953–54 season. It didn’t seem like obvious screen material for Spencer Tracy, its hero being about thirty-five and a former platoon leader, but Schary almost immediately saw Tracy in the role of John J. Macreedy, a “granite-like wedge of a man” who had about him an air of “monumental dependability, self-confidence, and quiet humor.” As Schary’s daughter Jill wrote in 1963: “Daddy loves all stories about disastrous problems that are overcome. One of the major characters must be A Decent Human Being. To Daddy, the Decent Human Being looks like Spencer Tracy.”
“Dore,” said Millard Kaufman, “liked the idea of the persecution of the Japanese-Americans in World War II because he was a bit enraged by it, and so was I. So he asked me if I wanted to do it and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he gave me this thing.”
Once Kaufman began moving in the right direction, Schary re-teamed him with his High Ground director, Richard Brooks, and made the producer his newly appointed editorial executive, Charles Schnee. Early on came the matter of the title: John Wayne had just come out with a picture called Hondo, and they feared that calling their film Bad Day at Honda would confuse filmgoers into thinking they had already seen it. Kaufman’s first incomplete draft of the screenplay was titled Bad Day at Parma, a title that pleased no one. Then Kaufman, while location scouting in Arizona, came upon a post office and gas station collectively known as Black Rock. “So I called Schary and said, ‘Why don’t we call it Black Rock? And do it in California?’ ”
The first full version of Bad Day at Black Rock was ready for review by the middle of September. In a story conference, Schary suggested opening with a narration and dictated other economies in storytelling. “Let’s give him a bad arm,” he said of Macreedy. “Nobody can resist playing a cripple.” He wanted the porter in the opening shot to offer to help Macreedy with his suitcase, so that Macreedy could insist on carrying it himself.
“You can’t really write a screenplay for an actor,” Kaufman observed, “because actors don’t even have the average of, say, a ballplayer who is a good hitter. If you hit the ball once at three times at bat, you are worth a fortune. An actor will interpret something and decide he wants to do it once in twenty times if he’s a star—that is, a guy in demand. So, no, I wasn’t figuring on Tracy, and anyway … I wasn’t really interested in him. I thought he was too old. [The character] was a platoon leader. I was an old platoon leader in the Marine Corps and I was twenty-five. Most of the kids in my outfit were not old enough to vote.”
Kaufman and Brooks, himself a novelist and screenwriter, went back to the director’s office to begin work on a revision. “We were only into it about ten minutes,” Kaufman remembered,
when Brooks, who was in a slow burn for either being assigned to this or because he said he totally disapproved of it and didn’t like the scene, or whatever the reason, suddenly picked up the phone and dialed. I heard him say, “Spence, this is Richard. Mill and I are working on this thing, but don’t expect anything much because it’s a piece of shit.” So he hung up and I said, “What are you doing??” And before he could answer, the phone rings and it’s Schary. He says, “Get up to my office immediately.”
Tracy had just called and told him that the director said that what we are working on for him—and him alone—is “a piece of shit.” So we go up to Dore’s office, and attending the meeting along with Schary and Herman Hoffman, who is Dore’s assistant, is Brooks, myself, and Charlie Schnee … And Charlie, when he realizes from Dore what has happened, challenges his director, who is twice his size, to step outside. He wants to hit him. Spencer comes in and Dore says, “Look, let me te
ll you the story.” And he starts in on some really dumb idea. He was trying his best, and I found out later that all this encouragement was because they had a play-or-pay deal with Tracy. So they were doing anything to keep him. [Tracy] was really very much a presence, and he was listening … Dore spins the story, making it up as he goes along, and it is rather silly and infantile—not infantile, adolescent. It was kind of a modern western theme, and I thought, “Oh boy, we are really in trouble.” And we were. Very calmly, Spencer said, “There are people who”—and this is a paraphrase, I never wrote it down—“consider me possibly the best actor in America. So why are you giving me this shit?” And he walked out.
Now Dore, as I say, did not do a very smart thing, but he had to do something. Later he did something that was very, very astute and that was this: When I finished the screenplay, he sent a messenger with the thing to Spencer with a note saying, “We have Alan Ladd to play the part. However, this was written for you and we thought you might like to take a look at it.” In about two hours, Spencer called back and said, “Get rid of Alan Ladd. I want to do it.” So we got him back.
Kaufman’s revision, carrying the alternate title Day of Reckoning, was dated November 4, 1953. “We simplified it and gave it the core,” Schary said. “I felt always, too, that in the original there was something lacking in the man’s point of view. I felt there was no real reason in the screenplay why this man did particularly what he did. He just came into the town. There seemed to be no reason for him beyond making this gesture [of delivering a medal to the Japanese-born father of a soldier in his platoon]. I felt that there had to be a deeper psychological root which perhaps would pay off for us. So then I had the notion—it was my idea—to make him crippled in one arm, so that he came to this town with a sense of no longer being able to function, hating what happened to him.”
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