Biographies & Memoirs

CHAPTER 30

Our Greatest Actor


If Spencer Tracy considered retirement in the spring of 1958, he could be excused a certain pessimism. His first two films away from M-G-M had been commercial failures; even the potent Tracy-Hepburn combination was no longer considered box office magic. The Old Man and the Sea could never break even, no matter how much the public got behind it. And the grind of filmmaking wore on him as it always had.

“Spence,” said John Sturges, “could have been cast as the leader of the Irish revolutionary group very easily. He was a rebel, and he tolerated—but unwillingly—certain requirements of civilization. Also, he had within him this dynamo of jittery nervous energy, and you can’t carry that around all the time, find ways to express it. You have to wait a while. In a movie, scenes are lit, you have to ride in a car to work, and so on. And I’m sure they chopped away a bit at Spence. He said they did, anyhow.”

He watched his finances carefully; a balance sheet as of May 31 showed assets—cash, stocks, insurance, the house on Tower Road—amounting to $692,000. Expenses were primarily allowances—$2,500 a month to Louise, a like amount divided among others. When Andrew Tracy died in 1955, he took over the support of his widow, Mame. And, of course, there was always Carroll, who had to be provided for even when there was nothing coming in. Charitable contributions—primarily the clinic—amounted to $30,000 or more a year, and gifts accounted for another $10,000 or so. His own expenses were meager in comparison—generally no more than $1,000 a month.

Hepburn was touring Much Ado About Nothing during the early days of The Last Hurrah, but she kept in close touch by phone. The Much Ado company’s stage manager, Bernie Gersten, made the jumps between cities with her, and he would help with the luggage and whatnot at each successive hotel. Gersten reported that the first thing she did after checking in was to make two long-distance phone calls to announce her safe arrival: one to Spencer Tracy in California and one to her father in Hartford, Connecticut. When Hepburn returned from New York on March 10, she brought with her a container of Irish stew. “Dear Katy,” Tracy wrote in his book.

They were by now a familiar sight, as comfortable and inseparable as a pair of old shoes. Some nights they could be observed quietly browsing the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. On studio lots, shielded from the public, they were less circumspect, Tracy playing the role of the alpha dog to Kate’s humble and adoring mate. “She was meek and motherly,” said Sheilah Graham,

and you knew she lived only to please the man she treated as lord and master. He knew the extent of her devotion and played on it to the end. He seemed to delight in bawling her out—no one knew how it was in private. Once she stopped to tie her shoelace and he shouted, “What’s the matter, Kate?”

“Well, I—”

“Hurry up, goddamn it.”

She left the lace untied and ran … At the beach home of their friends [the Erskines] he would sprawl in an armchair like Professor Higgins with Eliza Doolittle and command, “Put another log on the fire, Kate.” And she would jump to attention and say, “Yessir,” like a junior officer to the captain, and get the wood while he watched … She would take anything from Spencer because she admired him so much. She was his slave, and he used his power over her. But he also knew he needed her.

“I think he was utterly dependent upon her,” said actress Betsy Drake, adding that there was a part of Tracy that could be cruel. “Whatever she did, she was vulnerable to him.” Yet Drake’s abiding memory of the two of them was at the “wonderful ritual” of the Sunday screenings at Irene Selznick’s house on Summit Drive, Spence telling his familiar stories, Kate hanging on his every word. “She was abject,” said Sally Erskine. “Abject. It was really lovely to see them together, because she just glowed when they were together. She would sit at his feet, and if he just patted her on the head she reacted as if he had given her the Taj Mahal. Just a marvelous sight. I thought he showed love, I really did. In his face, his attitude. I [just] don’t think he ever said anything.”

When Hepburn went off to Greece in May 1958, it was in advance of Tracy’s own planned arrival in Italy, where he would again visit the works of Michelangelo and the sites associated with the life of the great artist. During the course of Last Hurrah, Tracy and Jack Ford had talked of filming the life of Il Divino, and Tracy thought some time in Florence and Rome and particularly Carrara would serve as inspiration. As soon as Kate was gone, though, he seemed to lose his focus, loafing at home and occasionally driving out to the beach.

“Spence was down with us Saturday and Sunday,” Chet Erskine reported in a letter to Kate on May 27, “and, the weather being beautiful, we had a marvelous time. The sea was calm but cold, as usual, and the swimming grand. Spence went in with me, and afterward we toasted in the sun and gossiped in our customary manner. He read parts of your letter concerning the wonders of Greece and we pondered the possibility of bringing the Acropolis over here and setting it up in the hills behind our houses where we could enjoy it without the inconvenience of travel …”

Eddie Lawrence, who also owned a house at Malibu, remembered Tracy from this period: “He would come up every once in a while. I really think he was lonesome.”

Tracy’s favorite thing in the world was to drive up the coast, the top down on his Thunderbird, the wind blowing through his hair. Occasionally he’d take Sally Erskine with him, driving as far as they could and then stopping for lunch. She never saw him take a drink, but he would talk about it. “He would say, ‘Oh, Sally, I used to be in the gutter.’ He told me the most horrible things about himself. I was somebody new to confess to, perhaps—I don’t know what it was, perhaps younger.”

Tracy’s spirits were buoyed somewhat by the trade reviews for The Old Man and the Sea, which were extraordinary by any standard. Jack Moffitt, weighing in for the Hollywood Reporter, called it “a beautiful piece of visual poetry” and averred that Tracy’s work as the Old Man was “so intimate and revealing of universal human experience that, to me, it almost transcended acting and became reality.” Variety went further, labeling the picture a screen classic: “One of Tracy’s remarkable achievements, adroitly guided by Sturges, is almost a negative one, but actually the most important. Despite that he is on the screen fully three-quarters of the picture, much of it by himself, his presence does not become oppressive. He has no one to play off of, no other actor by whose presence he can achieve contrast or relief. Within the limitations of the role he can only strive for minute shadings. He does this to create one of the screen’s memorable roles.”

In June the movie was screened at the Venice Film Festival and Expo 58 in Brussels, and it was requested for fests in Brazil and Canada. Tracy was still in town on June 12 when Kate called from Rome to say that she would be returning to New York in a few days. He wired the Kanins in Paris to expect him after a “short stay” in Manhattan, but he was still in California when Hepburn touched down at Idlewild. She was back in L.A. on the seventeenth, back preparing his dinner, back snuggling at his side for TV, back being all that she could be for him. There would be no trip to Europe, though he would continue to think and talk about it well into the fall.

When Stanley Kramer started working in the property department at Fox, moving furniture on and off sets, the year was 1933 and Spencer Tracy was one of the twelve name attractions on the company payroll. It’s conceivable Kramer worked on one of Tracy’s early pictures, but the divide between the grips on the swing crew and the on-camera talent was considerable, and the two men never crossed paths.

Both jumped from Fox to M-G-M, Tracy as a featured player on the studio’s fabled talent roster, Kramer as a researcher for the costume department. After a few weeks Kramer was transferred to Editorial, where he apprenticed and eventually became a cutter’s assistant. (“The pay was low, the glory was small, but it was a good place to learn how to put a movie together.”) Through an uncle who happened to be a talent agent, Kramer found work writing for radio—guest shots for The Chase & Sanborn Hour and Rudy Vallee, episodes of Big Town starring Edward G. Robinson. He sold a spec script to Republic and eventually joined Irving Briskin’s B-picture unit at Columbia.

In 1940, at the age of twenty-seven, Kramer was hired as casting director, story editor, and general factotum by Albert Lewin, the producer who had at one time been his boss at M-G-M. It was Kramer’s doing that a relatively unknown Glenn Ford played the juvenile lead opposite Margaret Sullavan in Lewin’s first United Artists release, So Ends Our Night. On their second picture together, The Moon and Sixpence, Kramer was elevated to the position of associate producer. The film, lacking marketable stars, wasn’t a success, and Kramer was working for producer Val Lewton when he was drafted in 1943.

He spent the rest of the war in the Signal Corps, working out of the former Paramount studio complex on Long Island. Energetic and resourceful, Stanley Kramer returned to Hollywood at a time when independent production was remaking a landscape once dominated by the major studios. Setting out to do what Lewin and his partner David Loew had done on a smaller scale, Kramer optioned two of Ring Lardner’s better-known works, The Big Town and Champion, and went looking for a deal.

Big Town, retitled So This Is New York, was set up at Enterprise, but the film flopped commercially. Rebuffed by the banks, Kramer sought private capital for Champion and eventually secured it from a retired garment manufacturer living in Florida. Guaranteed with lettuce money from central California, Champion turned out to be a huge success. It made a star of Kirk Douglas and set Kramer on his way. There followed a series of productions, all financed with money from “drygoods manufacturers, wildcat oil operators, and all sorts of people.”

A graduate of New York University, Kramer had a taste for class material—often plays that had proven themselves on Broadway. As a producer he amassed one of the industry’s most impressive postwar résumés: Home of the Brave, The Men, Cyrano de Bergerac, Death of a Salesman, High Noon, The Member of the Wedding, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, The Wild One, The Caine Mutiny. He put Marlon Brando onscreen before anyone else, hired Eddie Dmytryk straight out of prison, filmed original screenplays by Carl Foreman, Michael Blankfort, Edward Anhalt, and Dr. Seuss.

In 1955 Kramer began directing and, after a shaky start, landed a six-picture deal with United Artists. His first film under the new contract, The Defiant Ones, was finished and awaiting release when he approached Tracy about playing a role he had rejected on two previous occasions—that of Henry Drummond in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s enduring stage hit, Inherit the Wind. Herman Shumlin had been the first to come calling, thinking he could get Tracy for old times’ sake and the promise of a limited run. Tracy, of course, had other commitments, and Shumlin got a similar turndown from Fredric March, who was vacationing in Europe with his wife, the actress Florence Eldridge. Later that same year, Burt Lancaster’s partner, Harold Hecht, optioned the play and offered to set the deal up anywhere—M-G-M, Paramount, Fox, Columbia, Universal—if only Tracy would play the lead. Again, the timing wasn’t right.

Tracy went on to do The Old Man and the Sea and forgot all about Inherit the Wind until Kramer nabbed the rights for $200,000 and a percentage of the gross. Like Hecht, Kramer had Tracy in mind from the outset, but first he went to March—whom he knew from Death of a Salesman—and got his commitment to play Brady, the Gilded Age orator modeled on William Jennings Bryan. The people at UA were wary of the material—based on the storied Tennessee trial over the teaching of evolution in the public schools—and feared a backlash from Christian fundamentalists. “You’re going to have enough trouble with the subject matter,” one UA executive warned Kramer. “Why take on Tracy? How can you take a chance?” Kramer consulted with March, who said simply, “He’s a great actor. Let’s go.”

Kramer had been nursing a fascination with Tracy since his days at M-G-M, where, as a lowly cutter’s assistant, he had once introduced himself to his idol. “Everyone identified with Tracy from the time he started, when he was a redheaded tough guy—drunk, breaking the windows of cafes and being picked up by the police. Even in those early days nobody could really explain why it was that up against Mr. Movies—Clark Gable—everybody always wanted Tracy to get the girl. He was stocky and he underplayed it. He was kind of the good guy, full of sacrifice, the clichéd character. But, by gosh, he gave it so much more, and somehow you never wanted to see him go. Then, as his stature grew and he became the premiere character actor of his day, he had what a lot of fellows just dream about.”

Bert Allenberg drove a hard bargain. Sensing Kramer’s resolve, he held firm to a fee of $250,000. Tracy hadn’t had a hit since Bad Day at Black Rock, hadn’t made the top ten since Father’s Little Dividend, but he was still widely regarded as the gold standard among American film actors, the best Hollywood had to offer. “Kramer said that he wanted to direct it,” Tracy later recalled, “but that if I’d rather have another director he’d try to get whoever I wanted—Gar Kanin or whoever. But I’d seen the job Kramer did on The Defiant Ones and I told him that was good enough for me.”

The deal was settled just as The Old Man and the Sea and The Last Hurrah would again be putting Tracy’s drawing power to the test. Old Man came first, with a gala world premiere on October 7, 1958, to benefit the March of Dimes. Kate braved the crowds at New York’s Criterion Theatre, something she was ordinarily loath to do, trying her best to distract from advance press clouded with news of the picture’s troubles and its $5.5 million price tag. The notices were mixed, the critics admiring the filmmakers’ guts more than their results, but there were still some who applied the word “masterpiece” to the picture and none at all who mentioned the matter of Tracy’s weight. The first week’s take was surprisingly good—$32,000 for fourteen showings—and the picture continued to draw well into November. The pattern repeated itself in key cities around the country, intense interest in the first two or three weeks, then a precipitous dropoff that was both startling and ominous.

Columbia moved The Last Hurrah into the Roxy on the twenty-second, timing its appearance to the midterm elections, and the picture went over big despite heavy rains that, according to Variety, clipped as much as $20,000 off the first week’s gate. Metro’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was the town’s big winner in the comparably sized Music Hall, but Hurrah, helped by strong notices, held firm in its second week, bettering its first by some $15,000. It continued into its third and fourth weeks, falling off in much the same manner as Old Man and the Sea. In the end, neither film was a success, The Last Hurrah posting a loss of $1.8 million.

As both films were playing themselves out, their star was at Harkness Pavilion, where he had gone for a checkup, some forced dieting, and the removal of a basal cell eruption on his nose. He spent nearly two weeks at the exclusive facility, enduring a battery of tests and a series of cardiograms that showed, much to his dismay, no trouble at all. All the dieting, he decided, was at the expense of his ulcer, and he was still only three pounds to the better. “Out!” he wrote at the end of thirteen days, and he promptly fled to the Gotham Hotel.

Tracy was back in Los Angeles on November 25 when Bert Allenberg suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at the home of client Danny Kaye. Allenberg lingered two days at Cedars of Lebanon and died without regaining consciousness. Tracy was an active pallbearer at Sinai Temple on the twenty-eighth, as were Joel McCrea, Edward G. Robinson, Stewart Granger, Benny Thau, Leo Durocher, and Frank Capra.

It had been a lousy year, rife with disappointment, and being named Best Actor by the National Board of Review did little to bolster his spirits. He considered the Old Man far and away the toughest part he’d ever played and resented all the press about the tank and the phony marlin and such. (“Unless you can arrange for someone to deliver a live 3,000-pound marlin to you once a day for the sharks to chew up, how are you going to do the story?”) He also thought parts of The Last Hurrah overcooked—particularly Minihan’s wake and the death scene in which the cardinal comes to call.

“You liked all that schmaltz,” he said accusingly when his cousin Jane told him she loved the film. “Yes, I did,” she insisted. “That’s where we were all from.” And then there was that line she thought so marvelous: “We’re not all descended from kings, you know.”

He saw Ethel Barrymore, who was twenty-one years his senior, and said gloomily, “Ethel, I’m getting old.”

“Yes,” she said, “just like Jack and Lionel and me …”

When Tracy hit his blue moods, Hepburn redoubled her efforts to look after him. Dina Merrill recalled a day in March 1959 when she saw Hepburn standing in line at the airport. “I said, ‘Kate, where are you going?’

“ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Spencer is going to make The Devil at 4 O’Clock in Martinique, and I’m going down to find him a house to live in.’

“As if nobody else could do that!” Merrill exclaimed. “She wasn’t even in the picture!”

The Devil at 4 O’Clock promised to be yet another rough shoot, the sort of location picture Tracy hated to do. It was the last deal Bert Allenberg had set up for him, and he stuck with it despite learning, just after the first of the year, that producer Fred Kohlmar had no script, no director, and a projected start date of April 15. It was, Tracy told Abe Lastfogel, impossible, and he was no less dubious when he learned the West End’s Peter Glenville would likely direct the film. He finally saw forty-two pages of script on January 21 and thought them terrible. He sent Lastfogel back to Columbia’s Sam Briskin and asked that production be postponed until an entirely new script could be developed. A subsequent meeting with Glenville revealed the new writer to be Bridget Boland, the woman who had written The Prisoner, the first of only two movies Glenville had ever directed. “Start June 1???” Tracy wrote in his book. “I doubt!!

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.

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.

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.”

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 Broadway 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 founderLawrence 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.

An advance crew was working over the tiny town of Lahaina, the ancient capital of Hawaii, when Tracy received word from his brother Carroll that Emma Brown, their venerable aunt Mum, had died in Freeport at the age of ninety. Famously parsimonious, Emma Brown had sent cash gifts to her nephews every Christmas—as if Spence needed the money. “She could send them a certain amount each year to help keep her taxes down,” Bertha Calhoun recalled. “They sent her fur coats and televisions, all kind of things she wouldn’t buy for herself … Any big thing in the house that you would consider a convenience—she wouldn’t buy that, so that’s what they’d give her for Christmas.” Spence said he wouldn’t come back for the funeral, that it would be a mob scene if he did. “When they buried Emma there were people there at the funeral hiding behind the tombstones because they thought Carroll was Spencer. It was terrible.”

Upon Carroll’s return to Los Angeles, Tracy withdrew from The Devil at 4 O’Clock, citing a conflict with the scheduled start of Judgment at Nuremberg. In a statement, Columbia’s Sam Briskin said the studio considered the Hawaiian location work “too hazardous” to assure the completion of Tracy’s scenes by December 16, the absolute drop-dead date for Tracy’s release to Stanley Kramer. In the meantime, Kramer was flogging the release of Inherit the Wind, which had its world premiere as a two-a-day attraction at London’s Astoria Theatre on July 7, 1960.

The early notices were superb, the trades rhapsodizing over every element of the picture—Kramer’s direction, Ernest Laszlo’s evocative black-and-white photography, Ernest Gold’s exquisitely restrained musical score, the stark vocals of Leslie Uggams. “Tracy has the lines, the ringing phrases and sentences, purposely homely at times, the insistence of mind over matter, the shafts of irony by which Bryan and the proponents of ignorance were routed,” James Powers wrote in the Hollywood Reporter. “He delivers them, and a deep humanity, by enormous conviction and force of intelligence.” Variety called Kramer’s pairing of Tracy and March “a stroke of casting genius. They go at each other on the thespic plane as one might imagine Dempsey and Louis would have had time and circumstance brought them to the same ring. Both men are spellbinders in the most laudatory sense of the word. If they aren’t two contenders in the next Academy sweepstakes, then Oscar should be put in escrow for another year.”

Curiously, the British public didn’t flock to the theater to see the heralded clash of the titans, and Kramer would later talk of forlornly standing in front of the Leicester Square cinema “with reviews I could have written myself” and watching as “no one came.” The American premiere was set for July 21 in Dayton, Tennessee—the site of the original courtroom battle—with several members of the original jury commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the trial. Kramer’s New York press representative, Meyer Beck, got in touch with John T. Scopes, the Louisiana geologist who, in 1925, was the man on trial for the teaching of evolution, and persuaded him to help promote the film, following a “carefully scheduled itinerary” that culminated in Scopes’ return to the town H. L. Mencken once famously dubbed “the buckle on the Bible belt.”

The mayor, who proclaimed a Scopes Trial Day, called the resulting crowd the second-largest in Dayton’s history. Scopes noted little change in the place—the Butler Act was still on the books and teachers were still required to sign a pledge that they wouldn’t teach evolution—and he said that he was certain the verdict would be the same were the trial to be repeated. “I enjoyed the movie,” Scopes later wrote in a memoir. “Of course, it altered the facts of the real trial. I was never jailed and I hadn’t met my future wife until years later in Venezuela. I didn’t mind such small liberties. They had to invent a romance for the balcony set. Also, Matthew Harrison Brady, the Bryanlike character, died nearer the close of the trial than Bryan had. What was important, though, the film captured the emotions in the battle of words between Bryan and Darrow …”

The $2.2 million movie generated little heat in its initial openings, despite some of the strongest reviews of Tracy’s career. A boycott active within 17,000 American Legion posts was likely a factor, as actor-screenwriter Nedrick Young had pleaded the Fifth when asked to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953. (Under the pseudonym of Nathan E. Douglas, Young had collected an Academy Award for his work on The Defiant Ones.) Kramer fired back at National Commander Martin B. McKneally, characterizing the Legion’s announced stand against “a renewed invasion of American filmdom by Soviet-indoctrinated artists” as “reprehensible” and “as totally un-American as anything I can imagine.” His principled stand did nothing to win him—or Inherit the Wind—many friends in the heartland, where UA’s flawed release strategy had, unfortunately, placed the picture ahead of its New York and Los Angeles openings.

As originally scheduled, The Devil at 4 O’Clock would have prevented Tracy from actively promoting the picture, which, surprisingly, he told Kramer he would do. Then Sinatra, alarmed at Tracy’s withdrawal, went to work on him, as Tracy was, in effect, the only reason Sinatra was doing the picture. Kramer pushed off the start date of Nuremberg, hoping to free up Tracy for a round of promotional appearances, and Tracy left for Hawaii two days later.

Kate, who thought Liam O’Brien’s screenplay a bore and wasn’t overly fond of Sinatra, went under protest, having finished at Stratford only a week earlier. Actor Kerwin Matthews, cast as a young priest sent to the island to take over for Father Doonan, could vividly remember the malevolent glint in her eye: “The first day on location on Maui—standing exactly where the first pilgrims landed on a Hawaiian island—I met the Hepburn thing. I had a present for her—a book to read, Hawaii, which would explain so much about the islands. I gave it to her. She walked out on a pier and threw the book in the ocean, saying, ‘Who wants to know anything about this awful place?’ Because she was always next to Spence, no one had a chance to talk to him. No one got a chance to know him, even though I tried constantly.” Hepburn, said Mervyn LeRoy, kept a wary eye on Tracy at all times. “She never interfered with us in any way, and never tried to offer any suggestions. She just watched Spence.”

Actor Gregoire Aslan, who had worked with such heavyweights as Alec Guinness, Orson Welles, and John Huston in a career spanning two decades, was nonplussed at the prospect of making a picture with Tracy. He recalled that he was visiting his sister and her family in London when he caught Inherit the Wind at the Astoria. “Well,” he said, “I thought it was near perfect. And I came back shaking and saying to my brother-in-law, ‘I have just witnessed the greatest performance, and I wonder if I’m not going to act with the greatest actor in the world?’ I was terribly moved. I try to be the character myself when I’m playing something, and when I play with him I have not an answer but I get the answer from the Catholic priest he’s playing. So it’s not a surprise it’s just so easy.” Kerwin Matthews concurred: “Our working together was magic—he was always patting me on the shoulder at the end of each take. We could have been good friends; [he could have been a] ‘father figure’ to me, as was Lee J. Cobb.”

A highlight of the four-week trip was the celebration of Mervyn LeRoy’s sixtieth birthday on October 15. More than seventy people attended the party, which was organized by LeRoy’s wife Kitty and held at Kula Lodge, 3,200 feet up the slopes of Maui’s Haleakala volcano. Smoked black wattle steaks were served, and Sinatra sang the lyrics to four songs written expressly for the occasion by Sammy Cahn.

“When it came Tracy’s turn to give his talk,” publicist Bob Yager remembered,

he got up there and he said that he wanted to welcome Mervyn LeRoy into the Sixty Club. LeRoy was sixty years old, and Spencer is sixty years old, and he said he has welcomed James Cagney, he has welcomed Pat O’Brien into the club, and that soon he would be welcoming his very dear friend Clark Gable into the club … And then he looked toward Sinatra and he got that Irish pixie look and I knew immediately something was going to come out. He said, “And Frank, I would like to welcome you to the Sixty Club, but, unfortunately, I can’t. It is not enough to LOOK sixty, you have to BE sixty to get into this club.” Well, it wrapped up the whole evening. There was a tremendous roar, and Frank laughed the loudest…

Sinatra got itchy as filming progressed; occasionally he would refuse to do a close-up or make an additional take, and on one such occasion, apologized to the cast and crew by cooking a spaghetti dinner.

“The problem,” said Jean-Pierre Aumont, “was that Sinatra would only work in the afternoon. In the morning he hired a private plane and hopped from island to island trying to convince the startled inhabitants to vote for Kennedy in the next presidential election. Around two o’clock he returned, exhausted, at the precise moment when Tracy was retiring for the day to his rooms. How, in these conditions, the scenes between Tracy and Sinatra were shot is a mystery to me.”

Sinatra’s shifting moods were well known within the industry. According to his longtime valet-aide George Jacobs, the singer developed a serious fixation on Kate when he saw her in the see-through tank suit she wore during her sunrise swims in the ocean. One night toward the end of the shoot, Jacobs was called upon to cook dinner for Tracy and Hepburn as Sinatra’s guests for the evening. “It could be that Mr. S was feeling particularly horny and frustrated, because he was extra edgy that night. When I served the spaghetti marinara, which I had made a million times for him, he tasted it, started raving that it wasn’t al dente, and picked up the bowl and threw the pasta all over me and my white jacket. This was the only time he had ever abused me, but once was enough. Tracy and Hepburn were so appalled that they left immediately, while Sinatra cleared the table by smashing all the dishes.”

When the company returned to Los Angeles, another eight weeks of shooting remained—far more than anyone, particularly Sinatra, had anticipated. Tracy’s promotional plans for Inherit the Wind got scuttled, and the film had to make its New York and L.A. debuts with just Kramer and the UA promotions team in support.

In Manhattan, it opened to solid business at the Astor and the Trans-Lux on Eighty-fifth Street, but neither venue was at capacity, despite another round of exceptional notices. (Bosley Crowther called it “one of the most brilliant and engrossing displays of acting ever witnessed on the screen.”) Said Kramer, “[I]n many of the first run houses, in order to get the terms we wanted, which I think was, let’s say, above average, I had to run sneak previews in order to show theater managers how an audience would react to these fellows going at it, and the audience reaction was so marvelous, in a matter of seconds so much better than any other picture I’ve ever been associated with. I mean by an audience reaction that upon eight or ten occasions breaking into a wild applause during the film.”

Yet the film failed everywhere—a bitter disappointment. “It was a double disappointment because United Artists had said, ‘Look, we don’t want you to make this film. You’re making it with two old men—Tracy and March—nobody wants to see them. You’ll never get a woman in the theater. You’ll never get any feminine audience whatever.’ ” By the time the picture had its Hollywood opening at Grauman’s Chinese, the industry had written it off as a flop.

The cornerstone of Tracy’s anticipated campaign on Kramer’s behalf was an interview with a feature writer for Look named Bill Davidson. Tracy didn’t know Davidson, hadn’t seen his work, and only agreed to sit for him at Kramer’s request. According to Joe Hyams, Davidson was “a good reporter,” but when Inherit the Wind failed to generate any heat at the box office, it looked as if the magazine would kill the story, holding Davidson’s material in abeyance until another picture came along.

Others made their way to the supposedly closed set of Devil at 4 O’Clock—Jack Bradford of the Hollywood Reporter, Murray Schumach of the New York Times, Neil Rau of the Los Angeles Examiner, Lee Belser of the Mirror. To Schumach, Tracy denied the occasional rumor that he intended to direct: “I have thought about directing. I don’t know enough about directing. I could never stand some of the things I have seen directors put up with from actors. I would kill the actors. Not to mention some of those beautiful actresses.” To Rau he explained the volcanic lava on the set was really Hollywood snow—shredded plastic—sprayed gray to look like ash. To Belser he mourned the deaths of Whitey Hendry and Clark Gable.

Gable’s death at the age of fifty-nine came as a terrific shock, as King had just finished a picture with Marilyn Monroe and was expecting a child by his fifth wife, the former actress Kay Williams. To UPI’s Vernon Scott, Gable had acknowledged that he was transitioning to character parts but said he wasn’t so sure he could do it with the success that Tracy had enjoyed. “Tracy is that rare exception,” he said. “He completed the transition beautifully. Spencer can play anything he wants except young men. I hope I can do the same thing.”

On November 6, 1960, two days after finishing the Monroe picture, Gable suffered a heart attack. He was hospitalized and seemed to be recovering when he was killed by a second thrombosis on the evening of November 16. The funeral three days later was a simple affair, mirroring the rites for Carole Lombard eighteen years earlier. Tracy, who served as a pallbearer, arrived alone, sunglasses shielding his gaze from reporters and fans, his white hair glistening in the morning sun. “I’ve known a lot of wonderful people in this business,” he said. “They’re just about all gone now.”

With actor Robert Taylor at the funeral of Clark Gable, November 19, 1960. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

With John F. Kennedy’s narrow victory on November 8, 1960, Sinatra lost what little interest he retained in The Devil at 4 O’Clock and the gulf between him and Tracy widened. “By the end of Devil at 4 O’Clock,” said Kerwin Matthews, “Tracy was barely tolerating Frank.”

“He’ll call Frank Sinatra ‘The Other Fellow,’ ” Bob Yager said at the time. “He’ll come on the stage and say, ‘Where’s the Other Fellow? Where’s the star of this picture?’ He’ll be needling Sinatra, and he’ll keep saying, ‘I know I’m not the star of this picture. Sinatra is the star. After all, my last picture wasn’t a success, and they’ve got Sinatra in this picture to insure its success.’ ” When not in front of the camera, Sinatra was on the phone arranging entertainment for Kennedy’s inaugural ball. Since he was always referred to as “Mr. S” around the set, Tracy began referring to himself in the third person as “Mr. T.”

Well over $1 million had been spent on sets—a record for a Columbia picture. The figure included $500,000 for Hawaii alone. (“We built,” said Mervyn LeRoy, “a lovely set there—an entire village, complete with a street, a church, and even a jail.”) It reportedly cost another $500,000 to create a miniature of the island on a farm outside of Fallbrook. They spent $150,000 to build a hospital on the back lot at Fox, $100,000 to replicate the lush Maui vegetation on Columbia’s Stage 8. Given the money riding on the picture—more than $5 million—Tracy plainly regarded Sinatra’s behavior as unprofessional.

Stanley Kramer, eager to start Judgment at Nuremberg, was monitoring the situation: “I called him one morning and said, ‘How’re things going?’ He says, ‘Well!’ Just like that, but I can’t use the language he used. ‘I’ve been in this business ONLY thirty years. Just thirty years, that’s all, and you know what I’m doing? I’m playing scenes with a double. How do you do that? Now tell me, am I a goddamn fool or am I a goddamn fool?’ He just told them [the double] reads Sinatra’s lines better than Sinatra does. Sinatra had said, ‘Hot or cold, I’m leaving on Thursday.’ And Spence said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on. I just don’t know what’s going on.’ He’s really funny about it; burned up too.”

With Sinatra’s departure, Tracy was left to finish the picture by himself. When Pete Martin of the Saturday Evening Post came calling, he was shooting actor Bernie Hamilton’s death scene and unhappy the interview had been scheduled for such a crucial day. “This is the boy’s big chance,” Tracy said of Hamilton. “I remember these scenes. I used to play them. Now he plays it in my arms, you know, he dies, and if he’s good as he is … this kid’s going to steal this picture. So we want to do it well, you know, as well as we can.”

They quickly got onto the subject of Martin’s recent appearance on David Suskind’s show, a panel discussion that included the aforementioned Bill Davidson. Martin said of Davidson, “He kind of came through in his true colors the other night—a sneering son of a bitch … You’re in for a surprise, Spencer, I think.”

“Going to be a blast, eh?”

“Well, he may be nice to you, but …”

“I don’t think so … He can say I used to get drunk. He could bring up some of these old things—I couldn’t care less. I don’t think he’ll let himself in for libel … He seemed such a nice guy and I think, you know, he liked me. Yet remember he said he doesn’t like any actor.”

Tracy was in and out of the dressing room all morning, Martin getting his questions in between setups. A range of subjects got touched upon, though none very deeply. The talk was liveliest when Tracy spoke of Judgment at Nuremberg. “I’ll tell you Nurembergis the best script I’ve ever read,” he said.

Inherit the Wind I thought was a great script. I’ve made two or three pictures in my time that I thought were good: Captains Courageous, Inherit the Wind. Why, [if it was] just a job, I couldn’t function that way—without thinking, without thought. That I’d come here in the morning like a mechanical toy. Jesus Christ, I don’t do that! I don’t look at every script. I know sometimes scripts are bad. I don’t think this [one] is any great shakes … I’m getting more choosy. The Old Man and the Sea, even though it was not a great financial success, when you do things like that and Inherit the Wind, Nuremberg—you know, it’s hard to turn around and put on the sheriff’s suit again. But they don’t come. Fortunately, I don’t have to work. I don’t have all the money in the world. If I live too long I’d have to worry. My family would have to worry if I lived too long, but I don’t like to figure that way.

He told Martin that Olivier had dropped out of Judgment at Nuremberg, tied up as he was in New York with Becket.2 In replacing him, Kramer had gone to Burt Lancaster, whom Abby Mann thought all wrong for the part, but who was just about the screen’s hottest star. “I admire Kramer,” Tracy said. “I don’t know how the hell he gets the money to put on these shows.”

“He says, ‘The way I get these people is I don’t take the money myself.’ ”

“That’s right,” Tracy said. “He’s telling the truth, because I had the percentage and I get the figures and you’d be amazed to know what Stanley Kramer takes out of a picture.”

With Lancaster’s addition to the cast, Tracy’s percentage was adjusted to make room for Lancaster’s. “Joe Hyams came in here,” Tracy told Martin,

and said he talked to Lancaster. Then Stanley called me up to tell me that Dick Widmark was going to do the picture, which pleased me mightily. You know he’s paying Lancaster a tremendous amount of money—much more than he’s paying me or anybody else. And a big percentage. I said, “I think I should tell you, Stanley, that Lancaster told Joe Hyams he would have done the picture for nothing. I think it’s always nice to know these things. He also said that there would have to be a little rewriting done.” And I said, “I would like to know if Lancaster is going to rewrite the script or if Abby Mann is going to rewrite it. Because if Lancaster’s going to rewrite it, I might have to read it over a little more carefully.” That’s when he said, “Geez, you’ve got a needle that long and you’re sticking it in. Go ahead, turn it around.” I said, “Well, I’m just telling you Kid, you could have gotten him for nothing apparently. Also, Burt says he’s playing a ‘bit.’ He’s playing the part Larry Olivier was going to play.”

“How much does he get?” Martin asked. “A quarter of a million?”

“Well, I’m not going to quote this …”

“I’ll see him myself. I’ll find out.”

“How much did you say?”

“A quarter of a million? A picture?”

“Oh, come now.”

“You mean a lot more than that?”

“Twice that. Twice that. And against ten percent of the gross. The Other Fellow gets twice that! Or seven-fifty or something.”

“I did Lancaster when he was working for Mark Hellinger and wasn’t even doing anything.”

“Now he gets half a million,” Tracy said. “I shouldn’t tell you—don’t tell him. I only know that because …”

Tracy was called for more of Bernie Hamilton’s death scene, a quick reaction shot, a couple of lines called up to where Sinatra should have been standing. “Frank wasn’t there. A fellow came down and said to me, ‘That’s the best scene you’ve ever played in your entire career.’ And I was looking at a stick. So I said, ‘Well maybe I should have played the whole thing to a stick.’ ” When he returned to his dressing room, the shot in the can, Tracy had scarcely been gone ten minutes.

“Well, that didn’t take long, Spence,” Martin said.

“Well,” said Tracy, deadpan, “I’m awful good … No, the truth is they shoot it once with me and they figure, well, we can’t get any better from the son of a bitch. It’s like trying a suit on me. You know it’s only so far you can go.”


1 The schedules show that March had a 7:00 a.m. makeup call, while Tracy was given a 9:00 a.m. call.

2 Actress Joan Plowright, whom Olivier was soon to marry, was also in New York, appearing at the Lyceum in A Taste of Honey.

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