James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  The give-and-take between Tracy and March seemed to energize them both, and the long scenes they played were done without cuts. “I had about 250 extras as spectators on the set,” Kramer said, “and because of the camera movement I wasn’t able to do what we usually do, which is snip part of them every day so that when you do a closeup or whatever, but we were moving in circles and I needed them there. As a result, for some 35 days these 250 people sat there and watched these fellows go at each other, and they started to applaud at the end of each scene alternately. Both of them came alive under the influence of the applause.”

  March’s character was, by definition, the more theatrical of the two, a man used to filling whole arenas in the days before amplification. (“I seen him once,” Meeker, the bailiff, tells Cates. “At a Chautauqua meeting in Chattanooga. The tent poles shook!”) The courtroom makes a puny theater for a figure of such size, playing to the crowd as he does with grand gestures and thundering oratory. Drummond, the old warrior, lies back, permitting the bombastic Brady to do the heavy lifting of the buffoon. It made for a bantering relationship between the two actors, each of whom had obvious affection for the other.

  “Better stand up,” Tracy advised columnist Joe Hyams as March approached. “Here comes the Doctor Doctor. Freddie has two doctorates. He just got his second from his alma mater, Elmira.”

  “Tracy’s got a doctorate, too,” March shot back, taking a seat for himself. “Got his right after Captains Courageous. They wanted to take it away from him after he did Jekyll and Hyde.”

  Hyams observed Tracy taking Gene Kelly aside to warn him that March had been cracking walnuts during what was supposed to have been Kelly’s close-up. March, in turn, urged Tracy to tell Hyams when he was going to retire. “When you’ve seen this picture all put together,” Tracy retorted, “you will have seen me in my prime. I cracked Brazil nuts all through your scenes.”

  There was, to be sure, a considerable amount of fly-catching, March with his food, his sweating, his belches and grimaces. “He wouldn’t put down the fucking fan,” Tracy later said of his colleague’s performance. Yet he allowed, “It was a lot of fun. I love Freddie. We got along beautifully, wonderfully.”

  Donna Anderson, who was studying with a coach, tried talking to Tracy about acting but could never get much out of him. “He was very nice to me,” she said. “I would ask him about acting, and he would say, ‘There’s nothing I can teach you. You either are an actor, or you’re not. And you are.’ Then he’d change the subject with a wave of the hand.”

  Gene Kelly, who hadn’t played many straight parts, was plainly uncomfortable in the role of Hornbeck but had taken the job with the hope that he might learn something from working on a picture with two old masters like March and Tracy.

  “I could understand and see what Fred was doing,” he later said.

  He was like Olivier. A wonderful technician. You could see the characterization taking shape—the cogs and wheels beginning to turn. If you studied his methods closely, it was all there, like an open book. But with Spence it was just the reverse. He’d play a scene with you, and you’d think nothing much was happening. Then, when you saw the rushes, there it all was—pouring out of his face. He was quite amazing. The embodiment of the art that conceals art. It was impossible to learn anything from Spence, because everything he did came deep down from some inner part of himself which, to an outsider anxious to learn, was totally inaccessible. All you could do was watch the magic and be amazed.

  The script afforded Tracy many passages of eloquence, but the film’s most memorable moments come when Drummond calls Brady to the stand as an authority on the Bible. Their scalding exchange is rooted in fact, as Darrow had done the same thing with Bryan in 1925. Kramer shot these exchanges in four- and five-minute takes, completing the entire sequence in the space of a few days.

  “We had quite a system worked out whereby we started at nine, worked until twelve, had a two-hour lunch, and we quit at five. Both of these fellows would eat lunch and lie down for a while, and if we were due back at two, at a quarter of two they were both saying, ‘Well, are you ready? We’re here. We’re here.’ And, boy, they’d be ready to go, and we’d quit at five, and, you know, that in six hours as against an eight-hour day we really did a tremendous amount. It was a 180-page script which we did in 41 days, and that’s pretty fast shooting.”

  Donna Anderson could recall how amazed people were that Kramer was shooting the picture “like it was on stage. I didn’t go in that often [when I wasn’t needed], but I went to that one long shot. It was an incredible thing to see those two guys work.”

  BRADY

  Your Honor, I am willing to sit here and endure Mr. Drummond’s sneering and his disrespect. For he is pleading the case of the prosecution by his contempt for all that

  is holy.

  DRUMMOND

  I object, I object, I object.

  BRADY

  On what grounds? Is it possible that something is holy to the celebrated agnostic?

  DRUMMOND

  Yes! The individual human mind. In a child’s power to master the multiplication table there is more sanctity than in all your shouted “Amens!” “Holy, Holies!” and “Hosannas!” An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of waters! But now are we to forgo all this progress because Mr. Brady now frightens us with a fable?

  “They’d go through these long, long scenes together,” said Jimmy Boyd. “Sometimes the camera rolled for five minutes, and Spencer wouldn’t forget a word.” Elliott Reid, who had a box seat for the Brady-Drummond confrontation, marveled at the experience: “Tracy was so good. And to sit there, that close to the performance … I thought he was wonderful, just wonderful. And I watched it live all those weeks. I had chills once in a while watching him because, well, first of all, the material had so much to do with what we believed, and what seemed to be the intelligent view of this world. And because he had such power, Tracy. Just in the way he moved toward the witness. There was power without being overstated, without being hammed up. He was so real, he was so true … He was as perfectly cast in that part as anybody I can imagine.”

  The speed at which they worked became a matter of some pride to Tracy, who wasn’t shy about pointing it out. “Tracy was very funny,” Kramer said.

  We were doing these seven- and eight-page scenes at a clip. When the production manager would come on the set, Tracy, for some reason, would quiet everybody down. He’d ask for complete quiet and then he’d turn to the production manager, who was Clem Beauchamp, and say, “Well? Say something! Say something!” And Beauchamp would say, “What do you mean, Spence? What are you getting at?” He’d say, “What am I getting at? Over on the next stage they’re shooting television shows. You know how many pages they did yesterday? Seven pages. You know how many we did yesterday? Eight-and-a-half! Now put that in your pipe. What are we? Fifteen pages ahead?” And Beauchamp would say, “We’re right on schedule. That’s all.” “Right on schedule? How can we be on schedule? We did eight-and-a-half pages yesterday. I haven’t done eight-and-a-half pages since 1935!”

  Tracy completed Inherit the Wind on Friday, December 18, and spent Christmas with the family—Carroll and Dorothy, Louise, the kids. He and Larry Keethe caught a red-eye to New York the following week, Tracy enclosing himself in a suite at the Waldorf Towers and briefly tumbling off the wagon. There was talk in the columns of him and Clark Gable reteaming for the film version of Irwin Shaw’s Two Weeks in Another Town, but the only firm commitment on his calendar was The Devil at 4 O’Clock. His blood pressure was high—over 200—and a tooth that had been giving him trouble was found to be cracked. He rested a few days, went out for a long walk finally on January 7. “Flowers for Kathy,” he noted in his datebook.

  Lauren Bacall was starring at the Lyceum Theatre in Goodbye, Charlie, and Tracy and Hepburn made one of their infrequent forays into the Br
oadway theater district to see her. “At one performance I knew someone special was out front,” she remembered, “but I didn’t know who—from the rumbling backstage, it must be someone important. I was afraid to think it might be Spence and Kate—they would never come together, and he’d never come at all, I didn’t expect that. But when the curtain came down, into my dressing room walked Katie—adorable, warm, loving—full of compliments. And then the door opened again and in he walked. I threw my arms around him—he’d actually come to the theater and sat out front through the whole play. It moved me beyond words.”

  Most of Tracy’s meals were taken at Hepburn’s home on Forty-ninth Street. Dinner sometimes included the Kanins, Bobby Helpmann, Larry Olivier on a couple of occasions. About this time, actor Larry Kert was renting the top floor apartment in Stephen Sondheim’s house just to the east. One afternoon, he later told a friend, he was looking out the window, over the back garden, when he saw Kate doing the same thing from her window next door. “And then,” he recounted, “I saw a pair of hands on her shoulders. The next thing I knew, Spencer Tracy was behind her, gazing out over Katharine Hepburn. It was like a dream, I thought I was in a movie.”

  A writers’ strike was looming on the coast, threatening to disrupt Columbia’s plans to put The Devil at 4 O’Clock into production. Tracy stayed east, noting “heart flutters” that gave him cold sweats and kept him to his bed. Three cardiograms showed nothing—all normal—and he was told the flutters “mean nothing.” Louise was traveling on the East Coast—Washington, Pensacola—and they talked almost daily. Abe Lastfogel called to say that Frank Capra was interested in directing Big Deal with Tracy and Sophia Loren and asked if he could be home by Monday. The next day Tracy left by rail, stopping at the Blackstone in Chicago and arriving back in L.A. on February 8, 1960.

  The picture foremost in Tracy’s mind that spring wasn’t the movie for Fred Kohlmar, nor even his proposed pairing with Sophia Loren, but rather a project that had been gathering momentum for three years. It originally came to him by way of Philip Langner, the son of Theatre Guild founder Lawrence Langner and his wife, Armina Marshall. Langner had been scouting properties when over the transom came a teleplay destined for the noted CBS anthology series, Studio One. Titled “A Child Is Waiting,” it tackled the difficult subject of institutionalized care for the mentally retarded. Langner saw in it a possible adaptation for the stage and bought the theatrical rights from the show’s twenty-eight-year-old dramatist, Abby Mann. Within months, Mann had another, even more ambitious play for television, and Langner “immediately got more interested in that.”

  Mann’s new play told the story of Dan Haywood, a humble jurist from “the backwoods of Maine” recruited to help preside over the military tribunals of the political and industrial leadership of Nazi Germany—the judges, lawyers, financiers, and businessmen who enabled the Third Reich to function. “It struck me as fantastic,” Mann said, “that perhaps the most significant trial in all history had never been treated artistically and little journalistically. Casual research unearthed an even more startling fact. Of the ninety-nine men sentenced to prison terms in the second of the Nuremberg trials, not one was still serving his sentence.”

  Though Abby Mann had written “Judgment at Nuremberg” for television, from the outset he envisioned only one actor in the role of Judge Haywood—Spencer Tracy. Langner, through his parents, knew Katharine Hepburn and knew they could get the play to Tracy through her. “Kate,” Langner recalled, “was out at the Shakespeare festival in Stratford, which my father had started. She and Alfred Drake were starring out there, so Abby and I drove out to Stratford, where they had a guest house on the festival grounds where they put up the stars. We knocked on the front door, and Kate came to the door. There we were with our script. I said, ‘Oh, Kate, you look so wonderful. You’ve got a terrific sunburn …’ She said, ‘That’s not a sunburn! Those are spots!’ You can imagine my mortification; I turned a deep crimson.”

  Hepburn did indeed get the script to Tracy, who liked what he saw so much that he said he would do it if they could line up a director and some financing. Mann spent nearly two years refining the play, writing in the interim for Matinee Theatre, The United States Steel Hour, Studio One, and, ultimately, Playhouse 90, which dramatized his story “Portrait of a Murderer” in 1958. Tracy subsequently put Stanley Kramer onto “Judgment at Nuremberg,” though Kramer was still in Australia shooting On the Beach when Playhouse 90 produced the play in April 1959, Claude Rains taking the role of Judge Haywood. “It is his tremendous responsibility,” Kramer later said of the character, “to decide whether [the four judges on trial in the story] merely carried out the law, as written by the Nazis, or were guilty of crimes against humanity.”

  Kramer’s deal for the rights to the teleplay—$150,000 plus another $50,000 for Mann’s work as screenwriter—was finalized in January 1960. Tracy okayed the deal to star in the picture on February 16 for the same money as for Inherit the Wind—$250,000 against a percentage of the gross. With Nuremberg in the offing, he was relieved when Columbia pulled the plug on Devil at 4 O’Clock, citing a pending SAG strike for which Tracy had already signaled his support. It was just as well; Devil was to have been Tracy’s fourth film in a Roman collar, a whiskey priest tending the children afflicted with leprosy on a small volcanic island. With the cancellation, the film lost Peter Glenville, Bridget Boland, whose work on the script hadn’t yet been completed, and costar Sidney Poitier. There was still a chance Big Deal would come to fruition, but an attempt by Capra to set the picture up at United Artists collapsed over money, as neither Tracy nor Loren were considered bankable.

  In May Kate left for Stratford for another season with the Shakespeare festival, and Tracy followed her east in the company of Abe Lastfogel. Alone in New York, he immediately started drinking again, a bout with the bottle that lasted three days. Following a day of recuperation, he checked into the Waldorf and was well enough to go to Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Kramer called, confirming that Laurence Olivier had been set for the role of Ernst Janning, the principal defendant in Judgment at Nuremberg. Delighted with the news, Tracy effectively blew off a dinner with Lastfogel and Gar Kanin, who was desperately trying to keep Big Deal in play. An agreement with Universal-International was brewing, but again the money was insufficient, and Tracy, in effect, told them both to forget it. He drove out to see Kate at Stratford, putting up at a nearby motel.

  In Stratford, Hepburn was asked by Newsweek if there could be such a thing as an American—as distinct from a British—style of playing Shakespeare. “I don’t know,” she mused. “You’d have to take our greatest actor—who is he? Spencer Tracy, I imagine, and contrast him with their greatest—Larry [Olivier] or Gielgud. There’s something about the great American actor that’s like a clipper ship in action, a sort of heart’s directness. Spencer has it. He could do Shylock, or Lear, or Macbeth. We could do Macbeth together.” The thought, of course, horrified Tracy, who had little interest in Shakespeare and refused to stretch himself with the verse roles Kate was so doggedly tackling. “It was the thing she didn’t admire about Spencer,” Bill Self said, “and she told me this more than once: ‘You know, he has never reached his potential as an actor.’ She’s off doing Shakespeare, Spence is sitting by the pool. She often would say, ‘Spence has never reached his potential, but it’s his fault.’ Maybe he knew his limitations better than she did.”

  Dutifully, Tracy returned for Kate’s opening in Twelfth Night on June 4, 1960, then he left her to the festival for the remainder of the summer, content to spend his time dieting and loafing back in California. There was talk of reviving Devil at 4 O’Clock with yet another script and Frank Sinatra joining the cast, but there was still no director and no firm commitment on Tracy’s part. Yet Fred Kohlmar, who harbored fond memories of Boys Town, seemed obsessed with the idea of Tracy in the role of the bad-tempered Father Doonan and pursued him with a fervor that was, to some, baffling. By the end of June, Mervyn LeRoy
had signed on as director, but Sinatra still hadn’t formally committed. He was, however, anxious to make a picture with Tracy and was offered $600,000 to take the role of a convict temporarily consigned to a labor crew at Father Doonan’s South Seas hospital. Once he did commit, Sinatra did everything possible to accord Tracy the respect he was due, ceding first billing when, in reality, he was by far the bigger draw.

  “When we did that film,” Sinatra remembered,

  Mervyn LeRoy said to me, “We have a little problem with your desires and Spencer’s desires.” And I said, “Well, like what?” He said, “Well, you know, he likes to come in very early in the morning and he doesn’t want to work beyond four o’clock in the afternoon, and you want to come in later and work till six or seven o’clock.”…I said, “Well, what are we going to do about the problem?” He said, “I don’t know, but … you’re friends and he doesn’t want to talk to you about it. He doesn’t want to, you know, upset the apple cart, so to speak.” And I said, “Well, I’ll talk to him about it.” So I did. I went up to his house and we sat and had a cup of tea, and we talked about it. And I said, “Now we have a problem here.” “Oh,” he said, “naw, it’s no problem, Kid.” He said, “It’s going to be all right.” I said, “You know why?” I said, “Because what time do you want to start? Three o’clock in the morning? Four in the morning? I’ll be there.” He said, “No, no.” He said, “Now that’s going too far.” He said, “Well, you know, I just don’t want to work late in the afternoon.” And I said, “Well, you’re not going to be able to in this picture because of the lighting problem. In the mountainous areas where we’ll be shooting in Maui, we lose all the light at two o’clock, three o’clock in the afternoon.” He said, “No kidding?” I said, “That’s true. You’re not going to work beyond three o’clock.” He said, “Well, we can start anytime you want.” I said, “We won’t get any work done. We’ll have to start early.” So we did start shooting at seven or seven-thirty in the morning. So we got a full day’s work in.