Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [258]
Frank struggled to control his look of surprise. “What?” he said.
“I don’t go to church as much as I should,” Spence continued. “I get to Mass fairly regularly, but I could be a lot better. This kind of life, sometimes you’re traveling, sometimes you’re working. Sunday’s just another Tuesday or Wednesday. I don’t practice the religion the way I should. I often thought about the priesthood. I went to St. Rose’s for those years. Nuns. Every year. They drill that religion into you. I’ve got it in my head. I know what’s right and wrong, I know what’s sinful. I know. It bothers me. I’ve got a conscience.”
David Caldwell, Audrey and Orville’s fifteen-year-old son, felt quite close to the Tracys. “I never had the impression of Spence as a movie star,” he said. “He was always very friendly and seemed to be interested in asking about things I was doing. And Louise certainly kept in pretty close touch. She even got me to help John very often with his studies.” David was at the ranch one day, passing through the succession of rooms that included Spence’s, when he noticed the Oscar for Captains Courageous sitting on the bookcase.
“There was always a great deal weighing on him, I must say … I said, ‘Oh, that’s what this looks like.’ And he said something which was close to these words: ‘There are qualities that make a man a good actor but don’t necessarily make him a good man.’ I was just very shocked at that statement. It was in a calm voice from him … but it had a lot of meaning behind it.”
The idea for Woman of the Year came from director Garson Kanin, who conceived it as a vehicle for an actress he had designs on marrying. Kanin, twenty-eight, had been with RKO three years, having spun a year’s apprenticeship with Samuel Goldwyn into a chance to direct a picture for producer Robert Sisk. A specialist in snappy comedies, Kanin was rushing to complete Tom, Dick and Harry, his seventh movie for the studio, when he described his concept to screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr. Kanin’s principal character was modeled on columnist Dorothy Thompson, who was, according to Time magazine, one of the two most influential women in the nation. (The other was Eleanor Roosevelt.) His notion was to portray a courtship between the outspoken political pundit and a hardheaded sportswriter—the Post’s Jimmy Cannon in Kanin’s mind—who worked on the same paper. “[T]hey clash in print about something; meet; clash in person; both wrong, both right—not bad!”
“Gar,” Lardner said, “had decided he needed a writer conversant with the New York newspaper world to work on the script, and Paul [Jarrico, who wrote Tom, Dick and Harry] had volunteered me. To further complicate matters, Gar had just been drafted into the Army, so we talked out a story line in the couple of days before he went off to training camp, leaving his share of the project to his brother Mike.” Michael Kanin was no more established in the profession than Lardner, having written only a few programmers at RKO.
It was an unlikely arrangement, two out-of-work screenwriters with only a logline of an idea, but through Garson Kanin they had access to one of Hollywood’s hottest properties, the newly rejuvenescent Katharine Hepburn, whose shrewd co-opting of the rights to The Philadelphia Story had brought her one of the biggest hits of the season. Kanin had been linked romantically to the thirty-four-year-old actress ever since it came out that he and she had been the only witnesses to the midnight wedding of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Within days, Kanin and Hepburn were denying