James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  He was also reviewing the draft screenplay for Inherit the Wind and cabling his comments to Stanley Kramer, who was in Australia filming On the Beach. A hit, The Defiant Ones had garnered nine Academy Award nominations, adding considerable luster to the other projects on Kramer’s schedule. Unwilling to sacrifice Wind for something as ephemeral as Devil at 4 O’Clock, Tracy had Columbia agree to a stop clause that guaranteed his release no later than September 1, 1959.

  Once again, he found himself an unwilling participant in the annual Oscar race. The Old Man and the Sea had made a number of ten-best lists, and it was widely assumed that Tracy would be nominated for either the Hemingway picture or Last Hurrah. Of the four other nominees, handicappers assumed Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, both with nominations for The Defiant Ones, would cancel each other out, leaving the field to Tracy, Paul Newman (for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), and David Niven (who had taken the part Olivier was to have played in Separate Tables). The Los Angeles Times’ Philip K. Scheuer declared his preference for Old Man and the Sea, noting that, as virtually its only actor, Tracy should get the major credit for sustaining it. “What would it have been without him?” Yet, when fingering the “probable” winner, Scheuer went with Niven. The ceremony took place April 7 at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Tracy watched it on television and later pronounced the event “a new low” in entertainment. As predicted, David Niven took the award for Best Actor.

  In May Hepburn traveled to London to make Suddenly, Last Summer, for Sam Spiegel and Joe Mankiewicz. Based on Tennessee Williams’ play of the same title, the picture, which joined her for the first time with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, promised to be one of the year’s major releases. Tracy stayed behind, immobilized by Kohlmar’s frantic preparations for Devil at 4 O’Clock. In June he attended George Burns’ triumphant opening at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, then mourned the death of Ethel Barrymore with a rosary at Good Shepherd. In July he was reported by both Sheilah Graham and Hedda Hopper as visiting the set of Suddenly, Last Summer and taking part in a London charity event called Night of 100 Stars. When pressed by British reporters about how much he earned and how old he was—two matters with which Fleet Street always seemed unnaturally obsessed—he said: “I earn $300,000 every Friday. And I am 78 years old.”

  He was back in Los Angeles for Natalie Wood’s twenty-first birthday and the party thrown in her honor by Frank Sinatra at Romanoff’s. There was talk of a picture with Sophia Loren, as Garson Kanin had written a script to be shot in Italy titled Big Deal. Over the phone, Tracy approved Kanin’s idea and the arrangements. Two days later, Abe Lastfogel called to say that the deal was not yet set. According to Tracy’s book, Kanin, who had not directed a movie since 1941, wanted $100,000 in cash, another $100,000 deferred, and 50 percent of the profits. “Now!” Tracy wrote in disgust. “Shenanigans!”

  “The young actors who are coming along are interesting,” Tracy told William Weber Johnson of Time magazine.

  They know so much about acting, how it should be done, and they are perfectly willing to tell you about it. I guess I’ve never really known about acting, how it should be done. And I remember George M. Cohan, who taught me more than anyone else ever has about the theatre—he and Jack Barrymore were probably the greatest we’ve ever had—I remember him telling me the same thing, that he really didn’t know how it was done, that you just do it. I guess maybe when I was a young punk in the theatre and people came backstage to say that I’d done a terrific job, I was the same way. And I was probably intolerant; I probably looked at older people and thought, “Why you old, fat slob, why don’t you quit?”

  And then he gave his own ample girth a friendly pat.

  George Cukor commented: “I’ve never had a really gifted, magical actor go into long explanations and long theories and long intellectualizing about the acting process … Tracy used to tell you, ‘Well, I certainly learned those lines, spoke those eight pages down to every if, and, and but. I knew every word.’ That’s all he would tell you. Now there was a great deal else that went on with him, but he wasn’t telling it to you. That would have taken the magic out of it somehow, to have chewed it all over beforehand.”

  Cukor perceived a certain musicality to the way Tracy approached his work, a quality of speaking that came from the time when he first went on the stage in the early 1920s. Indeed, he could remember the way the young Katharine Hepburn struck him when he watched the screen test she had made for RKO, a scene from the Philip Barry play Holiday: “[T]hat was a period when there was a sort of slightly affected, almost singing way of speaking. There was a rhythm in the lines, and she spoke it that way. And it was a sort of rather grand life. They were all very swell. And Philip Barry had his own note as a writer, and she almost sang that note. As a matter of fact, years later she did another play of Phil Barry’s, and … Tracy said, ‘Yes, I thought all you people sang it so nicely, all of you.’ ”

  Eddie Dmytryk picked up on it when he likened Tracy’s phrasings to those of a great jazz singer. And it was while on location for The Mountain that he heard Tracy say something akin to it himself. “Our company was resting between setups on a path above the glacier. Somehow or other, a young, English-speaking hiker got through our lines and approached Tracy, who usually avoided people. The young man was interested in the theatre. Before Tracy could escape, he was asked that dreadful question, ‘Mr. Tracy, what is the secret of great acting?’ Spence fixed him with a fishy eye. ‘Read the lyrics, kid,’ he said. ‘Read the lyrics.’ But how many could read the lyrics like Spencer Tracy?”

  Humphrey Bogart knew it was an illusion, that the wheels were always turning, but that Tracy never showed the mechanism at work. “He covers up,” Bogart said. “He never overacts or is hammy. He makes you believe he is what he is playing.” Laraine Day saw a hint of it in The Last Hurrah, the precision with which Tracy tackled a scene. “Well, for example, an actor is normally trained never to turn his back on an audience, unless it’s for some deliberate purpose … Tracy is talking [to Jeffrey Hunter] and he’s going to walk to a window over there. So he walks away from the camera and stoops and picks up a pin for absolutely no reason, sets it on the table, and continues on. And I will bet you that no one in that theater will remember he ever did that. But watch his performances: they are filled with everyday things like that. Finding a little thing here, a little thing there and getting rid of it, but you’re never aware that he’s done it.” Said James Cagney, who loved watching him: “I’m easy to imitate, but you never saw anyone imitate Spence Tracy. You can’t mimic reserve and control very well.”

  Tracy’s best performances were orchestrated in movements, as in a symphonic score. He touched on this when he told John Sturges he would go over a script, read it aloud, and determine “where he should come on and where he should lay back.” There was no impact in hitting all the time, no advantage in constantly trying to overwhelm an audience. To do it well required the right material, and only occasionally did he get it. Fury was such a script, as were The Show-Off, The Power and the Glory, and, curiously, Northwest Passage. He never thought he had achieved it with Jekyll and Hyde, couldn’t feel it with Edison or Cass Timberlane. The best pictures with Kate had it—Woman of the Year, Adam’s Rib, Pat and Mike. Father of the Bride had it; The Actress, certainly. And, of course, Bad Day at Black Rock, though you couldn’t have convinced him of that at the time.

  “Spencer Tracy is the kind of actor I like to watch,” Marlon Brando told Truman Capote in a 1957 New Yorker profile. “The way he holds back, holds back—then darts in to make his point, darts back. Tracy, Muni, Cary Grant. They know what they’re doing. You can learn something from them.”

  Despite the quality of Frank Nugent’s screenplay, there was no real chance for Tracy to open up in The Last Hurrah, no darting in and darting back. Ford had surrounded him with such a broadly drawn cast of characters that he went through much of the film serving as straight man to actors like Gleason, Brophy, Wally Ford, Frank McHugh.
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  Inherit the Wind would be an entirely different proposition, however, a shrewd dramatization of one of the century’s most colorful trials, a story pulsing with the natural ebb and flow of controversy. In taking on the role of Henry Drummond, Tracy would be assuming the mantle of one of Kramer’s boyhood heroes, the crusading criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow. It was Darrow’s courtroom battle with Bryan, spurred by the determination of the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge a Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution in the schools, that defined both men in the public imagination: Darrow, the passionate Chicago progressive, squaring off against Bryan, the bumptious Bible-thumper. They were images—cartoons almost—that proved irresistible to Lawrence and Lee, radio dramatists with a keen understanding of religious intolerance and the underpinnings of commerce at the heart of most great debates. The play opened on Broadway in the spring of 1955 and was an immediate sensation, bagging Tony awards for Paul Muni as Drummond and Ed Begley as Bryan’s counterpart, Matthew Harrison Brady. The show ran for two years, more than eight hundred performances, then went out on the road with Melvyn Douglas in the Drummond role and Begley continuing as Brady.

  In opening it up, Kramer turned to Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith, the screenwriting team behind The Defiant Ones. Young and Smith went back to the original transcripts of the trial, studying the way the playwrights had given majesty to the words and ideas originally spoken in court. A full year of development went into the screenplay, which they were still trying to “improve and sharpen” as Kramer established a production office on the moribund lot at Universal City.

  “Inherit the Wind,” said Kramer, “became more and more topical as it spun around inside my head … The picture had so many basic things in it in which I believe. Darrow telling [H. L.] Mencken that the trouble with William Jennings Bryan was that he looked for God too high up and too far away, that there is more power in a single child’s imagination than in all the shouted amens and hosannas in church. These were things that hit home with me and excited my imagination. I thought I could reach a mass audience with the ideas embodied in that picture.”

  Rehearsals for the principal members of the cast began on October 12, 1959, Kramer intent on staging the film in lengthy takes, giving his two stars the freedom to go at each other without fear of interruption. The supporting cast was comprised of Gene Kelly, Florence Eldridge, Dick York (as Cates, the high school biology teacher at the center of the storm), Donna Anderson, Elliott Reid, and Harry Morgan. The first two days of shooting were given over to nighttime scenes in the empty courtroom, York and Anderson establishing their relationship, he the heretic schoolteacher, she the earnest preacher’s daughter. Kelly entered the scene as the Menckenesque reporter Hornbeck, chomping an apple and lending a big-city perspective to the backward antics of the rural South.

  Tracy and March took their places on the third day of production, the set now crowded with extras—reporters, photographers, jurymen, farmers, wives, kids, policemen. While March was anticipating considerable time in the makeup chair—skullcap, hairpiece, greasepaint, body padding—Tracy, as usual, required nothing other than a light dusting of powder.1 A genuine reporter, Thomas McDonald of the New York Times, was on hand to witness the filming of their preliminaries, Kramer intent on starting in the courtroom proper and continuing in sequence until all the court interiors had been completed. “The actors’ first exchange before the cameras was the opening courtroom sequence in which Mr. March asked permission to remove their coats because of the heat. Mr. Tracy then took off his coat and sarcastically explained that the colorful suspenders he was wearing were purchased in Mr. March’s hometown in Nebraska. When Mr. Kramer finally said, ‘cut,’ the courtroom, full of extras and the crew, broke into spontaneous applause, an unusual occurrence on a Hollywood set.”

  Kramer told McDonald that he considered Inherit the Wind the third point in a three-pronged attempt to provide “provocative” film fare. “In The Defiant Ones we dealt with the problem of race. On the Beach, which will be released in December, concerns the big question, the Bomb. And now I’m dealing with what I consider the third major problem today, freedom of speech and, more important, freedom of thought. From the standpoint of box office, I think people want thought-provoking material on the movie screen—something they can’t get on their home screen.”

  On the set of Inherit the Wind. Left to right: Gene Kelly, Donna Anderson, Dick York, director Stanley Kramer, and Tracy. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  Said one crew member proudly, “It takes us as long to get one shot as it takes one of those TV outfits to make a whole show.” Indeed, Inherit the Wind was the only theatrical motion picture shooting on the Universal lot, the rest of the plant having been given over to Revue, the television arm of MCA, the talent agency that now owned the 480-acre facility. Conscious of the big-screen values his picture needed, Kramer kept a camera crane and two operators available at all times, a source of some amusement to Tracy.

  “We were rehearsing and practicing some camera moves on a boom, which gives you a chance for another movement,” Kramer recalled, “and Spence said, ‘Why years ago I could remember at M-G-M, why Eddie Mannix came down on the set and he took the boom away from guys like you … They took it away, they locked it up in a room. They wouldn’t let you get near it.’ He said, ‘Here we are moving all over the place like a frightened barracuda.’ I got the message, which was: Let’s shoot this picture and let’s not start moving all over the place.”

  Donna Anderson, relatively new to films, remembered Kramer’s mobile camera as a challenge Tracy chose to ignore. “When the shot was on me, I was doing waltzes around people because he wanted the camera to be working in. If I was saying something, I had to justify moving this way and then moving that way so he could have the fluidity in this little space with the camera. Well, when it came time for Spencer Tracy, he just said, ‘The camera will find me.’ ”

  Drummond’s admonition to Rachael and Cates in the now empty Hillsboro courtroom, Hornbeck off to one side, the townspeople’s taunts still ringing in their ears, was Tracy’s first opportunity to come on, to take command of the film, the camera slowly circling him in one continuous three-minute take.

  “I know what Bert is going through,” he tells the minister’s daughter. “It’s the loneliest feeling in the world. It’s like walking down an empty street, listening to your own footsteps.” And then to Cates, a harder edge to his words: “But all you have to do is to knock on any door and say, ‘If you’ll let me in I’ll live the way you want me to live and I’ll think the way you want me to think,’ and all the blinds will go up and all the doors will open and you’ll never be lonely, ever again. Now it’s up to you, Cates. You just say the word and we’ll change the plea— That is, of course, if you honestly believe that the law is right and you’re wrong. Now if that’s the case, just tell me and I’ll pack my bag and go back to Chicago where it’s a nice cool hundred in the shade.”

  The business, the body language, the passion behind the eyes. There was no polish to Tracy’s Drummond, nothing mannered in his ragged delivery. Tracy, said Kramer, “reduced everything to a fine powder of simplicity, and that takes hard work, it takes a lot of hard work. ‘Improvisation,’ he always said, ‘is perspiration.’ There’s so much advance work to do so you can recognize something good if you saw it.”

  There can be little doubt the performance took a lot out of him, and he didn’t seem well during the course of the shoot. Said Kramer,

  I had been warned that he could be a bit irascible at times and kick up his heels if things got a little tight or if they weren’t going so well … He was doing a scene, about the third or fourth day we were shooting, and he mumbled a line, which is a stock-in-trade, really. He’d throw away a line or put an emphasis somewhere. He’ll play with it and tinker with it and put it here and put it there and finally get it the way he wants it, and that’s one of the reasons he’s so wonderful and so natural.

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sp; And I cut the scene and said, “Spence, I know what you’re doing with that line,” but I said, “We just didn’t understand it at all. It didn’t come through at all.” So there was a long pause, and when I tell you a long pause I mean a pause—you could have driven a train right through this pause—and he looked at me and he kind of clenched his teeth. He was overdoing it purposely a little bit. He looked at me and said, “Mr. Kramer”—just about in that tempo, but he never calls me Mr. Kramer. He said, “You know, it has taken me just about thirty years to learn how to read a line in that fashion. Now you want something out of Have Gun, Will Travel evidently. If that’s what we’re dealing with, just say so.”

  There wasn’t any answer because I never did think of the snapper. He did it 14 different ways, and he was just setting the stage properly. Anyway, for some reason after that, and I choose to believe that it was because the material was right and we had a rapport and he felt I was doing my job and God knows he was doing his, he went along just fine. The cooperation and the driving intensity to do the job was beyond anything I’d ever experienced.

  “Everyone on the set was sort of petrified when Tracy came about,” remembered actor Jimmy Boyd, who at age twenty was chosen to play Howard, one of Cates’ biology students. “Once he was on the set, everyone shut up.” Reared in the South, Boyd himself wasn’t familiar with Tracy or his work. He was a semiregular on Bachelor Father, a Revue TV series shooting two stages over, and always seemed to be in transit between the two jobs. “He just smiled,” Boyd said of Tracy. “He heard that I was quite a swinger around town. Spencer would motion me over to sit with him. Then he’d ask, ‘What blonde were you with last night?’ It wasn’t that he was so serious, he just thought it was kind of funny.”