James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  The Devil at 4 O’Clock, though generally received as the superficial product it was, turned out to be Tracy’s biggest commercial success since Father of the Bride, with gross receipts amounting to $4,555,000. As an element of commerce, however, it lost more money than Inherit the Wind and Plymouth Adventure combined. Tracy made no comment on the fate of the picture, and his relationship with Sinatra seemed to survive the ordeal. Judgment at Nuremberg was the greater concern, and Kramer held firm to his plan for a December premiere in Berlin, despite an increasingly tense political climate that in August saw the closing of the border between East and West Berlin and the construction of a wall to prevent defections to the West.

  “I wanted Spencer to go to Berlin for the world premiere,” Kramer recalled, “and Kate didn’t want him to go. I said, ‘How can you tell him not to go? The trip wouldn’t hurt him, and you said you’d go with him.’ She replied, ‘It seems such a stupid thing to do. What do you want to flaunt him in front of the Germans for?’ I said, ‘I’m not flaunting him. Willy Brandt’s invited us. Let’s go.’ She was reluctant, but finally she agreed.” Kramer had not seen Tracy and Hepburn together much—she was mainly out of town when Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg were made. “As soon as [they arrived in Berlin,] she got him set up in his place with all the pill bottles and everything, and all the prescriptions, and then took off his shoes and put on his slippers, and put his robe around his shoulders. She was like a nursemaid, really.”

  More than three hundred newsmen from twenty-six countries had traveled to the partitioned city to cover the event, some 120 columnists and political commentators alone having been flown in via charter from New York. Tracy, as the film’s principal star, was closely questioned by reporters at a press conference. Did he believe every word he said in the script? “Yes.” Why did he take a role like this at this stage of his career? “Money.” (“Gelt!” an interpreter shouted in German.) To most questions he answered simply yes or no. Finally one journalist, apparently irked, asked, “Do you always answer just yes or no?”

  “No!” he shot back.

  Even with Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Maximilian Schell, Richard Widmark, and Judy Garland in attendance, the premiere was pretty much a bust. Tracy grew ill and left the Kongresshalle—just seven hundred yards from the Berlin wall—shortly after the film began. (A UA representative later explained it as a “flareup of an old kidney ailment.”) Most of the Germans attending the champagne dinner afterward were poker-faced, some thinking the film badly timed given the country’s division.

  “There was a buffet for fifteen-hundred people,” Kramer recalled, “and only two-hundred showed. I had been raised to know that the perfect tribute at the end of a film was like at the end of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—total silence. We had total silence, but I knew it wasn’t a perfect tribute. The press was very divided, some saying that all the Germans should see the film if they aspired to be a cosmopolitan city in Berlin again, others saying it’s just raking over old coals for what?”

  At the Berlin premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg. Left to right: Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, and Stanley Kramer. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  Many felt the film too long, but Friedrich Luft, a German theater critic, found it a “fair and human statement” of the problems of responsibility and guilt for war crimes. “I think people in Germany will accept it.” Conversely, Wolfgang Will, who reviewed the picture for the West Berlin tabloid BZ, thought it went much too easy on the Nazis. “This is a fable of Nuremberg, a downright counterfeit,” he wrote. “Much worse things happened at those trials than what was portrayed.” According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, four German papers praised the film, one condemned it, and a sixth was noncommittal.

  Tracy and Hepburn departed for Paris via chauffeured limousine, only to be denied access to the Autobahn that crossed East Germany because Tracy lacked a visa. The car detoured back to East Berlin, a distance of thirty-eight miles, to comply with the requirement, and they weren’t finally ensconced at the Raphael until well past dark. Continuing on to Le Havre, Tracy boarded the liner United States for New York, leaving Hepburn to catch a flight to London.

  In Los Angeles, the West Coast premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg was a benefit for John Tracy Clinic, with George Cukor, Walt Disney, Burt Lancaster, Ronald Reagan, Dinah Shore, and Robert Young listed among the twenty-five members of the ticket sales committee. With seats selling for twenty-five and fifty dollars each and former Vice President Richard Nixon heading the guest list, the sold-out event raised $50,000 for the clinic. Louise, escorted by John, hosted a champagne reception in the theater’s lobby after the film and spoke briefly of the clinic’s work: “It is a place where parents of deaf babies and young children may come for encouragement and guidance to help their children.”

  The trade reviews, which appeared in October, were admiring and respectful, even as the film’s length and top-heavy casting—for which Abby Mann later took some of the blame—were called into question. As the Variety review stated from the top: “The reservations one may entertain with regard to Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg must be tempered with appreciation of the film’s intrinsic value as a work of historical significance and timeless philosophical merit. With the most painful pages of modern history as its bitter basis, Abby Mann’s intelligent, thought-provoking screenplay is a grim reminder of man’s responsibility to denounce grave evils of which he is aware. The lesson is carefully, tastefully, and upliftingly told via Kramer’s large-scale production.”

  Internationally, the film was playing in thirty-six cities by Christmas of 1961. However, with its initial U.S. engagements limited to New York, Los Angeles, and Miami Beach, most Americans learned of the movie through the national magazines, many of which gave Kramer and the picture full marks for intent and delivery. Henry Luce’s Time (which in 1939 had named Hitler “Man of the Year”) was an exception, accusing Kramer of cynically timing the release of his movie to coincide with the reading of the verdict against Adolf Eichmann. In Show, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., pondered the extent to which movies could serve as a medium for the intelligent discussion of complicated problems and pronounced the film brilliant but confused. “It has the raw force of an eloquent pamphlet without clear direction or logical conclusion.”

  Unfortunately, one of the film’s key showcases, with more than seven million readers, was in the pages of Look, where Tracy’s 1960 interview with Bill Davidson, killed after the failed release of Inherit the Wind, was raised from the dead and reslotted for the magazine’s January 30 issue.

  “I had a friend—I went to Marquette with him—named Jerry Zimmermann,” Frank Tracy said.

  [H]e was an associate editor at Look. Well, he did a lot of traveling. And, [since] he and his wife were from Milwaukee, they used to get back and forth. Whenever he came through town he’d call me; we’d have lunch or dinner, a drink, or something. He came through one day about 1960 or so, and he said, “Do you know Bill Davidson?” I said, “No, I never heard of him. Who is he?” He said, “He works for Look. He’s a full-time, part-time kind of guy, but he’s on the payroll. I see him from time to time. We share information on stories we’re doing and so on. He told me he’s doing a piece for Look on Spencer Tracy.” I said, “Oh yeah?” Nodded. “It’s going to be a Spencer Tracy–Katharine Hepburn story.” I said, “Ohhh.” He said, “I’ve not seen it, but he’s talked to me about it. The Tracy family ain’t gonna like this.” I said, “Would it do any good—should I talk to him?” He said, “Oh Christ, no, don’t talk to him. He’s a bastard. He’d be all over you, he’ll never let go of you. He’d follow you to your grave. He has a technique of making something serious or horrible … he develops things that way. Everything he’s ever written is written in that vein. He’s a real son of a bitch. You want to stay away from him. But I just thought I’d let you know that this is coming. It ain’t gonna be good. I think it’s a series. Brace yourself. This is going to be a firecracker.” So I cal
led Carroll. They knew about it, they knew something was in the works. I got the impression that Carroll didn’t understand that it was going to involve Hepburn, because he kind of said, “Ohhh.” Something like that.

  “In 1960,” recalled Eddie Lawrence, “I was back [in New York] and I went up to see Katharine, you know, just as a courtesy to see her, and she was really quite disturbed. Tracy was going to do a cover story for Look, and Katharine said, ‘I just feel worried that they’re going to use the story about Spencer and me.’ I said, ‘Look, if [editorial director] Dan Mich, as you tell me, has agreed that Spence has rights to look at the story, you don’t have a thing to worry about. He’s not going to break it. It’s unusual in the first place that Look would ever let you see the story.’ ”

  Bill Davidson and Look had parted company over the writer’s outside assignments and his practice of inflating expense reports. By the fall of 1960, his name was gone from the masthead as a contributing editor and he was working at McCall’s. Warned by Pete Martin that Davidson was “a sneering son of a bitch,” Tracy sailed for England with Hepburn just after Christmas 1961, the ship carrying Noël Coward, Victor Mature, and Sir Ralph Richardson and his wife among its 122 first-class passengers. When Look hit the stands a month later, readers were surprised by the relentlessly negative tone of the piece.

  “At 61,” the profile began, “Spencer Tracy is ornery, cantankerous, sometimes overbearing, sometimes thoughtless. He is a rebel, a loner, a man of mystery who occasionally disappears for weeks at a time. Little of his behavior has been reported in newspapers. Yet he has been the object of nationwide hunts by his studios. During his appearance in more than a hundred plays and films, he has led an unorthodox private life, has staged violent revolts against his producers and directors, and wrecked studio sets.”

  Davidson went on to sketch Tracy’s early life, largely drawing the details from clipping files and studio-compiled bios. Tracy’s discovery of John’s deafness was misportrayed, and most of the revelatory statements in the piece were attributed to conveniently anonymous sources. One “friend” explained how Tracy’s drive to help his son “overcome his handicap” increased his natural tendency to escape his problems and contributed to his “roistering” in Hollywood. “John’s deafness also helped bring Spence and Louise together,” the friend continued, “but, paradoxically enough, it set up a situation that drove them apart and led him to seek the companionship of Katharine Hepburn.”

  John Tracy subscribed to Look, but Louise saw the article first. “John doesn’t need to see this,” she said to Susie, and the rest of the week was spent deflecting questions of how the issue could have gone astray. (Susie herself chose not to read it.) Eddie Lawrence was surprised at how Dan Mich had apparently reneged on his pledge to let Tracy see the article, perhaps having forgotten their original bargain in the two years it took to get the piece into print. “Of course,” he said, “you can never trust ’em anyhow.”

  Davidson later claimed that Tracy had talked openly of his relationship with Hepburn during their 1960 interview (speaking of her as “Kate, my Kate”), but publicist Pat Newcomb, who Davidson said was present at the meeting, had absolutely no memory of such an exchange. (Newcomb met Tracy through R. J. Wagner and Natalie Wood but said that Tracy never spoke of Hepburn in front of her, either privately or in an interview.) Joe Hyams saw a more basic distinction: “We were local reporters [unlike Davidson] and, of course, we knew that Rock Hudson was gay and things like that, but we’d have never written about it. He was a national reporter; maybe that’s why he did it. For us, that would have been a betrayal. We could have lost all our contacts. So it never occurred to me to write about Tracy and Hepburn.”

  On a more positive note, Tracy received his eighth Academy Award nomination for Judgment at Nuremberg but ended up losing to Maximilian Schell, who, in his acceptance speech, praised the picture, its director, and the other members of the cast, “especially that grand old man, Spencer Tracy.” Tracy called him and said, “You son of a bitch! I don’t mind you winning the award, but calling me the grand old man, as if I’m some sort of ancient monument, is just too much!”

  The film itself was wildly successful as a two-a-day roadshow attraction, playing sellout houses for months in New York and Los Angeles and drawing heavily in cities like Washington and Toronto. As was frequently the case with highbrow entertainment, though, the film never caught on in general release, where its extreme length limited the number of showings a theater could manage. Produced on a budget of $3,170,000, Judgment at Nuremberg recorded a domestic gross of approximately $4 million and extended a near-perfect record of losses for Stanley Kramer at United Artists.

  * * *

  1 Despite his early work with the Group Theatre, Montgomery Clift did not consider himself a Method actor. His technique, in fact, was remarkably similar to Tracy’s, although Clift was not the quick study that Tracy happened to be. Described by Lee Strasberg as the “perfect Method actor” because he came by it naturally, Tracy thought Stanislavsky’s emotional or “sense memory” technique, when misapplied, encouraged overacting—the doing of more than was necessary. Method actors, he felt, sometimes obscured the meaning of the text in the crafting of a performance. “If I remember correctly,” said Chester Erskine, “he said, ‘They don’t let it breathe.’ ”

  CHAPTER 32

  Something a Little Less Serious

  * * *

  I’m tired of controversy,” said Stanley Kramer in October 1960. “After I finish my next picture, Judgment at Nuremberg, I’m making the biggest comedy in the history of the business—Something a Little Less Serious. It’s a long Keystone Kops comedy. Somebody said to me, ‘You should do something a little less serious,’ and so we used that as the title.”

  The original title of the story had been So Many Thieves, and it was the brainchild of a transplanted Missourian named William Arthur Rose. Having settled in England at the end of the war, Rose became the journeyman screenwriter who in 1952 conceived a comedic gem about an antique auto race called Genevieve—an original script that won him the first of four Academy Award nominations. He went on to write a string of British classics: The Maggie, Touch and Go, The Ladykillers, The Man in the Sky, and The Smallest Show on Earth, four of which were for Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios. It was, in fact, one of Rose’s stories that formed the basis of the very last of the great Ealing comedies, Davy.

  Bill Rose loathed the idea of working in Hollywood, but with Ealing’s demise in 1957, he found himself adrift and scrambling for work. After a long dry spell, he traveled to California to make the rounds in April 1960, meeting Kramer for the first time in his office on the Revue lot. Rose, as Kramer later remembered it, pitched So Many Thieves along with four other story ideas, verbally developing the property as a “giant comedy” with an all-star cast of comedians, a “monster chase story, heavily larded with visual humor, and spun off against a background of time pressure in which, literally, every minute of screen time represented exactly two minutes of elapsed time in terms of the story’s progress.”

  When it came time to put the story down on paper, however, Rose found himself blocked, and his agent at William Morris, Mike Zimring, urged him to simply write it out in the form of a letter. Zimring charged Kramer $20,000 for the resulting document, and another $330,000 for the original screenplay. Rose retreated to his home on the Isle of Jersey to begin work on the script, and Kramer caught up with him only briefly that summer—once in London, again at Cannes.

  Rose had a mania for structure. Collaborating with his British-born wife Tania, the first few months of work were spent developing a proper character mix and puzzling out the mechanics of the thing. “For weeks and weeks and weeks,” recalled Tania Rose, “there were these eighteen feet of cardboard lying across our living room floor, marked out as if for some outsize game of snakes and ladders. There was a large white square outlined in blue with blue arrows leading out of it every which way which had simply COLLOQUY written in the
middle. And then there was a bit of a grind while Bill got out the dialogue.”

  The Roses turned in their first draft, carrying the title Something a Little Less Serious, just as Judgment at Nuremberg was being readied for release. But the massive 297-page script lacked an ending. “We tell ourselves that if there are to be a hundred comedians involved in this business we shall have a thousand suggestions for our pay-off to contend with before this last page is ever shot, and that a lot of them are likely to be better than any of our own devising. And if not, then we tell ourselves that, having got this far in little more than a year, we aren’t really likely to need more than another year to get a last page which really will be The End.”

  In December 1961 Kramer and his attorney, Samuel S. Zagon, got Arthur Krim to agree to accept Something a Little Less Serious as one of the pictures due under Kramer’s contract with United Artists. A budget of $5 million was approved, along with the casting of Ethel Merman, Sid Caesar, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, and Spencer Tracy. Wrote Kramer: