Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [248]
Fleming spent four days shooting the ornate dinner party at which Jekyll first expounds his theories of good and evil, Beatrix demurely seated to his left. The table was designed to accommodate twenty guests and was divided into three sections so that one section could slide away to enable intimate shots of the other two. On the third day of coverage, director George Cukor brought W. Somerset Maugham to the set. With Tracy in his soup-and-fish, Cukor explained to the eminent British author that he was in the process of remaking Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When Tracy had finished playing the scene for the umpteenth time, Maugham turned to his host and asked, “Which one is he now?”
Maugham, perhaps, had heard there wasn’t going to be any “ape makeup” in this version of the story. “We’re going to try to make Hyde a believable man,” Tracy told John Chapman, syndicated correspondent for the New York Daily News. “When the picture was first proposed I even suggested that Hyde never be pictured, except maybe the back of his ear or something like that, but it didn’t work out. But he’ll be a recognizable human being.” Visitors found that Tracy wasn’t as interested in discussing Turner as he was her luminous costar. “The Hyde part isn’t believable when you come right down to it. But if the audiences are convinced, I think it will be because of Ingrid Bergman. There is an actress! I don’t throw the word ‘great’ around—just use it on Helen Hayes and a couple of others—and I think Miss Bergman is great. She’ll make Hyde. It’s like Captains Courageous. Here I was with an accent picked up from all parts of the world, and I wasn’t believable. But there was Freddie Bartholomew looking at me wide-eyed and believing—so the audience did, too.”
Eager and passionate, Bergman loved the role of Ivy and worked hard at it. “Ingrid,” said Victor Saville, “came to my office most mornings to perfect her accent—we decided on the very posh upper-Tooting style—‘Ouw, yereversonice, aren’t yer.’ ”
Tracy saw Ingrid Bergman as the key to putting his Mr. Hyde across on screen. She campaigned for the role of Ivy and worked hard on her accent. (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy’s fascination with the actress soon extended to their off hours as well, and with Bergman’s husband in Rochester studying medicine, she had a lot of free time on her hands. The two first dined together on March 21, fittingly after all the Jekyll scenes had been completed and Tracy was now working exclusively as Hyde. He had taken a room at the Beverly Wilshire and was spending most weekends sailing with Jimmy Cagney. They dined again the following week, and again the week after. They celebrated his forty-first birthday on the set of the picture, with Myrna Loy and Mickey Rooney stopping by for cake. Louise took him to dinner that night at Ciro’s (with the Disneys) and then left the following day for New York to check up on Johnny.
With Louise out of town, Tracy began dining with Bergman almost every night and continued to do so after the picture finished on April 12. Bergman, for her part, thought Tracy “wonderful” as a leading man and recorded as much in her diary. “I watched her relationship with Spencer on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” said John Houseman, a vice president for Selznick with responsibility for bringing Bergman along as an actress. “But that’s not uncommon in this business.”
Fleming, whose work on the film was careful and studied, may have stirred the pot by investing the picture with a strong undercurrent of sexual tension, boldly Freudian in its exploration of the unconscious mind. The intensity of the scenes between Ivy and Hyde, their imagery and sadism, became the film’s most daring break with the versions of the past. (“So this is what has destroyed the world from the beginning,