James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  As the new year began, Hemingway defined their two principal problems: finding a boy to play Manolo and getting Tracy in “some sort of shape,” as he now weighed, stripped, 215 pounds. For the job he recommended a man named George Brown, an old friend and his own personal trainer, who could, he said, make Tracy “look as much like a Cojimar fisherman as possible” in the space of six weeks. When Tracy advised Zinnemann he would be going to Europe for a couple of months “to be near Katharine Hepburn,” it was arranged for Brown to meet him in Cuba around March 1, affording them six weeks of uninterrupted work. Tracy, however, did not go to Europe, despite word from Kate that she and Bob Hope were hopelessly mismatched and that the picture was, for all intents and purposes, a stiff. He remained in town, fielding offers from Columbia and Fox, loafing, watching way too much TV, and subsisting primarily on weenies and frozen dinners.

  He saw The Mountain for the first time on February 17 and pronounced himself “disappointed” with the picture. “Mountain is failure—think must be ending,” he wrote in his datebook. “Wrong—always thought wrong. Phony. Should go back get brother. Or at least look at mountain at end. ??? Critics will pan. Some lukewarm. Very moderate business. Retakes for 3 days would fix.”

  John had left Nadine and Joey, taking a room on Tower Road and once again joining the family dinners. Louise always had a lot to talk about; she was traveling regularly, had plans to add a new two-story wing to the clinic, and was in line for an honorary doctorate from MacMurray College, her fourth. “Clinic, clinic, clinic,” Spence would say, throwing the kids an exasperated look. They would usually have hamburgers when he came to dinner, sometimes chicken and maybe a vegetable (if Louise could force one down him). “Quiet, Susie,” she’d say to her daughter, “and let Father talk about himself.”

  The Academy Award nominations were announced on the eighteenth, and once again both Tracy and Hepburn were up for top honors—Spence for Bad Day at Black Rock, Kate for Time of the Cuckoo (released in the United States as Summertime). Tracy was so unimpressed he didn’t even mention the nominations in his datebook. Both he and Kate would be in New York when the awards went off, neither paying the slightest attention. He left Los Angeles on March 6, already a week late, and did not begin training in New York until the twenty-first.

  Zinnemann, meanwhile, was in Cuba fuming, contending that Tracy had let his partners down by not commencing his program of training until three weeks later than promised. The picture’s direct cost was estimated at $1,904,000 (plus $264,280 in overhead), based on the idea of doing everything straight, without process or traveling mattes, except for the action of the jumping fish. This accounted for sixty days of shooting in Cuba, seven days at the studio, and one day in New York. For interiors, a studio had been reopened in Havana that hadn’t been used in five years.

  From New York, George Brown reported that Tracy, his diet supervised by Hepburn, was losing weight at a “very satisfactory” pace. He was not, however, submitting to a physical training routine designed to tone the muscles used in the work of fishing. According to Zinnemann, Hepburn didn’t want Tracy submitting to Brown’s workouts, and Tracy would be in much better shape “if George were allowed to do his work.”

  When he left for Miami on March 26, Tracy’s weight still wasn’t where it needed to be and the scheduled start of production was scarcely two weeks away. Certain he was in for flack from both Zinnemann and Hemingway, he had two drinks aboard the plane to Miami, two more on the jump to Cuba. At Havana, he and Brown were met by Zinnemann and assistant director Don Page. They were taken to the Hotel Nacional, where Tracy insisted on ordering himself a Dubonnet cocktail. “He proceeded to have several,” said Page. When he arrived for dinner that evening at Finca Vigia, he was clutching two bottles of Dubonnet, one of which he had already opened. Hepburn’s flight got in at 8:30, and when told that Tracy was with the Hemingways, she phoned the Finca and then asked to be taken there. “Loaded,” Tracy recorded in his book. “Home bed 1 AM.”

  Tracy and Hepburn (and her friend Laura Harding) were to share a fully staffed seaside estate at Tarara, about ten miles outside of Havana. Nothing was said about his condition the next morning, and he swore off the booze then and there. (“NO DRINKS IN MORNING OR THEREAFTER!!!!!!!”) He submitted to a beach workout with Brown, saw Zinnemann at his house, and was told how happy the director was to have him. What he referred to as the “1st Court Martial by Hayward and Zinnemann” didn’t come until the following afternoon. Told how much he “had them frightened,” given the money involved, Tracy promptly offered to withdraw from The Old Man and the Sea. “Zinnemann said if I left he would,” Tracy afterward noted. “I said I would think it over!”

  The second court-martial, which occurred on the thirty-first, took on the tone of an intervention when Hemingway joined in. “You’re a rummy!” the author said accusingly. “What the hell! Admit it!” He went on to dare him to get out the Bible and swear to the ten years of sobriety he claimed. “[Again] I offered to withdraw,” Tracy recorded, “but said I would have to stay if they sued. They would.”

  The company quickly divided into armed camps—Page and Zinnemann on one side, Tracy and Hepburn on the other. Kate, as always, was fiercely protective of Spence, ever vigilant in matters of abuse or perceived disrespect, and could strike with the ferocity of a rattlesnake. Among the production team, she was awarded the code name “George Arliss” after the long-faced British character actor with the prominent cheek bones. Hemingway, who couldn’t abide a man who could not hold his liquor, found it impossible to utter the name of the star of his film and took to tartly referring to him simply as “the artist.”

  Tracy’s deal called for a rate of $5,769.24 a week for twenty-six weeks beginning April 15, 1956, the official start of the picture. Hemingway left that same day for the Cabo Blanco Fishing Club in Peru, intent on photographing the film’s marlin sequences. Once on salary, Tracy could be given calls, and Don Page asked him to go to Cojimar where they would shoot all the beach scenes and get together with the technical adviser, a Cuban fisherman who would get him acquainted with handling the oars and the lines.

  “Whose idea is that?” Tracy asked, and he was told by Page that it was Zinnemann’s and his own.

  “He said he didn’t know whether he would do it then or wait until we started shooting on Monday the 23rd,” Page recounted in a memo. “At that time, the Old Man’s boat will be tied up as we will be using it.” Clearly agitated, Tracy then raised the subject of his first night in Cuba and the matter of his drinking. He said “all Hollywood knew about it” and that Page must have done a lot of talking. “I straightened him out, and told him that if he felt I was a stool pigeon I would just as soon get off the picture right now. He feels no one in the company likes him and he doesn’t like anyone connected with us. As for his promise to lose weight, it seems to me that he is as heavy now as he has always been, and I recall Mr. Zinnemann stating to Mr. Hayward that if Tracy did not lose the necessary weight that he would not start the picture with Mr. Tracy, as he would be laughed right out of the theater.”

  For the part of Manolo, Zinnemann settled on eleven-year-old Felipe Pazos, Jr., the brown-eyed son of a prominent Cuban economist. Tracy appeared for a wardrobe test with the boy on April 21, and Hayward wired his enthusiastic approval of the results from his offices in Burbank. Actually getting some film exposed, however minor the footage, seemed somehow to relieve all the tensions of the previous month.

  “Tracy is behaving fairly well these days,” Zinnemann related in a note to Hemingway. “He went out with us in a pretty rough sea. It didn’t seem to bother him too much. He is going again Wednesday morning … George Arliss is getting ready to leave. She is going to do a picture with Burt Lancaster, as you know. It is going to be a gruesome twosome. Pity the poor director.”

  Back from a trip, Jack Warner viewed the wardrobe test on May 1 and added his own vote of confidence:

  I THINK TRACY LOOKED EXCELLENT AND I VISUALIZE HIM AS BEING
OUR OLD MAN OF THE SEA. HE JUST STEPS RIGHT OUT OF THE BOOK AND THE BOY IS A TEN STRIKE.

  Filming officially began on May 4, when Tracy’s call was for 4:45 a.m. in order to make “dawn shots” of the Old Man returning home. Progress was slow, as most of Zinnemann’s shots were dependent upon the time of day, limiting Tracy’s working hours almost exclusively to mornings. Don Page, himself an actor (known professionally as Don Alverado), loathed Tracy, and since it was Page’s job to give Tracy his calls, every official interaction took on an air of belligerence.

  Tracy again had a dawn shot—rowing at sunrise—on the morning of May 10 and was dismissed for the day at 11:30. Page gave him an afternoon call for the following day, with work to continue after dinner with night exteriors featuring the boy. Tracy, he said, informed him that he would show for the afternoon but would not work that night and that Page could inform both Hayward and Zinnemann. Tracy’s pocket diary for the day carries the words: “Opinion wrong shooting. Blow-up with Leland.”

  Filming in Cuba with novelist Ernest Hemingway. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  What Tracy had noticed was that Felipe Pazos had been given a 4:45 call for that next morning, and that Zinnemann and Page expected him to work an eighteen-hour stretch—something that would never have been required of a youngster on an American set. Tracy refused to make the night shots simply so the boy would not have to work. He noted in his book that he was ready to leave for location the following afternoon when a call came from Hayward: “Day lost because alleged refusal work to-nite, etc. False.”

  The company was shut down, and the next morning a letter from Hayward was hand-delivered to Tracy’s house at Tarara: “We notify you that your default in your contract has forced us to stop production and shut down, and we will hold you responsible.”

  Bert Allenberg had attorney Lawrence Beilinson call Hayward, and an appointment was set for the following day, a Sunday. Hayward came to talk, saying that he was in a bad spot, liable for the production to Jack Warner—who thought Zinnemann was moving too slowly—and that Don Page had been forced on him by the studio. (Page was the ex-husband of Ann Warner and the father of Jack Warner’s step-daughter, actress Joy Page.) Having cleared the air, Tracy agreed to continue with the picture but said he thought it doubtful that Zinnemann would stick with it.

  A wire went out to Steve Trilling, Warner’s executive assistant, in Burbank:

  BYGONES ARE BYGONES COOPERATION COMPLETE PRODUCTION RESUMED INFORM ALL CONCERNED HAYWARD TRACY ZINNEMAN

  Beginning May 17 they planned to shoot all the land scenes, which would take a month, followed by four weeks at sea with Tracy. The crew would be cut for two weeks of second-unit work, then Zinnemann would go to New York to shoot a sequence at Yankee Stadium. The project would wrap with two weeks of process work in Burbank. Zinnemann, who saw the story as “the triumph of man’s spirit over enormous physical power,” was discouraged when Hemingway failed to land a thousand-pound black marlin off Peru. The company was forced to substitute a mechanical version so big and cumbersome it took two flat cars to get it by rail to Florida. “Hemingway hated it at first sight,” said Zinnemann, “and christened it ‘the condomatic fish.’ When it was put in the Gulf Stream near Havana it sank without a trace and was never seen again.”

  Zinnemann grew disenchanted with the choice of Felipe Pazos, and there was talk of replacing him. On the seventeenth Tracy worked with a second boy, shooting duplicate scenes, before it was decided to stick with Pazos. Hemingway, when he returned from Peru, declared that he, too, was unhappy with the boy, describing him as “a cross between a tadpole and Anita Loos.” In a letter to his friend Gianfranco Ivancich, Hemingway seemed resigned to the situation: “As you know, there was some difficulty with the artist, but they say that is all straightened and we have a docile artist now, but to me in the stills I saw last night he still looked very fat for a fisherman and the boy looks very tiny. There is nothing that a rubber fish cannot fix. In later stills he looks much better and he is such a good actor he can probably surmount most things.”

  Work moved to the Old Man’s shack and, according to Tracy’s diary, Zinnemann demanded the replacement of the boy. A call was put into Hayward, and the producer arrived in Havana on June 4. Though Tracy had managed to drop seventeen pounds, Zinnemann still considered him too heavy to play the role, and Pazos’ size only served to emphasize his girth.

  “Tracy was most certainly a problem,” Zinnemann said. “He was not doing his job. Everybody, except Leland Hayward, was a problem, including myself. There were a lot of egos on that movie.” Hayward lined up with Zinnemann and Hemingway in calling for the boy’s replacement. Zinnemann became convinced that Tracy was out to sabotage the picture: “He seemed malevolent and hostile. The crew hated him and he hated them back. Day after day, there was the sense that no progress was being made on the picture.”

  Anonymous squibs began to appear in the press: “Spencer Tracy’s newest all-day buddy is Cuban dictator Batista. They play golf together every morning. Batista’s caddies also carry machine guns around the course.” And: “Spencer Tracy and another gent had one of the bloodiest fist fights in Havana’s history. Ernest Hemingway had to be restrained several times from massacring Tracy all over Cuba.”

  In 1992 Zinnemann recalled a second drinking episode “which interrupted shooting for several days.” A thirdhand reference to Tracy and Hemingway having broken up a bar is unconfirmed in any of the memos or wires preserved in the Jack Warner, Leland Hayward, Fred Zinnemann, Ernest Hemingway, or Warner Bros. collections, and Peter Viertel, in his 1992 memoir Dangerous Friends, includes no such story. Zinnemann only remembered that Hemingway once threatened to go looking for Tracy with a shotgun “but that was just one of those silly gestures of his.”

  Hayward clashed with Zinnemann over the director’s insistence on doing as few process shots as possible and scolded him for making three shots of Tracy that could easily have been done on the Warner lot in Burbank. Zinnemann decided to make the long shots on the ocean with Tracy’s double, saving close-ups for the process stage. In exchange for the time off, Tracy agreed to give the company four additional weeks. Then Hayward, channeling Warner, told Zinnemann that he had to start the second-unit work in Cojimar no later than July 25 “or else.”

  When Tracy visited the set to say good-bye on June 13, Zinnemann asked him to stay until Hayward arrived for a “showdown.” On the sixteenth, Tracy had a call from Hemingway “apologizing for madness, etc.” That same day, Zinnemann received a cable from Jack Warner:

  SAW DAILIES INTERIOR CUBAN CAFE CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY YOU DID NOT SHOOT INDIVIDUAL OF TRACY WHEN YOU WERE THERE AND LIGHTED FOR IT … YOU ARE SHOOTING TOO MANY SUPERFLUOUS TAKES AND SCENES…

  Specifically, Warner was objecting to a flashback shot over Tracy’s shoulder (to cover his age) even though its composition was clearly indicated in the script. Said Zinnemann: “Shooting most of the movie in the studio tank seemed to be the only way out; unfortunately, I could not see how this could be done … Suddenly the story seemed pointless. It made little sense to proceed with a robot pretending to be a fish in a studio tank pretending to be the gulf stream with an actor pretending to be a fisherman.” His withdrawal from the picture was reported in Louella Parsons’ column of June 23, 1956.

  “The argument had nothing to do with Spence,” Leland Hayward told Parsons via telephone from Havana. “He finished his scenes in time and begged Zinnemann to remain. The trouble was strictly between Zinnemann and myself over locations—of all things. Fred wanted to remain in Cuba, and I felt it wasn’t practical to stay any longer. Warners agreed.”

  Tracy, who spoke to Parsons as well, said he never had any argument with Zinnemann and that they were good friends. The following day, he flew back to New York, where he sequestered himself in a suite at the Pierre and slept on and off for hours at a stretch.

  “Did not take any calls from Gar!!!” he wrote in his book.

  When Tracy arrived back in Los Angeles, He
pburn, for once, was already there, finishing off her first week of filming The Rainmaker. Spence had dinner on Tower Road that first night back—it was John’s thirty-second birthday—but otherwise spent the week with Kate. He had been absent from St. Ives for three months and seemed to enjoy burrowing in, seeing no one in particular and basking in some near-perfect weather. There was talk of resuming Old Man and the Sea in the waters off Nassau, but he thought Hayward too eager to get going again and opposed such a move. He backed the more cautious approach of the picture’s new director, John Sturges, who wanted time with the script and favored closing the film down until fall or even the spring of 1957. Under protest, Hayward eventually agreed to the delay.

  After nearly a decade of hotel living, Tracy’s move to 9191 St. Ives effectively put an end to any hopes of reconciliation between him and Louise. In earlier days, he could still come to the ranch for meals and the occasional game of tennis with John, and he still had a room there where he could lie down on Sunday afternoons and take a nap. (“Do an el foldo,” as he put it.) After 1951, though, the house on White Oak was no longer his legal address, and when Louise chose the house on Tower in 1955, she did so with the wrenching knowledge that it had only three bedrooms—one for her, one for Susie, and one, should he ever need it, for John. According to Eddie Dmytryk’s wife, the actress Jean Porter, it was about this same time that Louise told Spence that he could have a divorce if that was what he wanted.