Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [261]
Tracy returned to the studio on a hot and humid August day, still smarting from the Jekyll and Hyde notices and eager to see the picture cut as drastically as possible. He and Mankiewicz were exiting the Thalberg Building—which Joe had dubbed the Iron Lung, the air-conditioned administration building where “paralytic minds were at work”—when they encountered Hepburn on her way in. “I have no idea where she might have been going,” said Mankiewicz. “She stopped as we stopped. I said, ‘Well, it’s certainly high time you two knew each other.’ ” Hepburn was in slacks, wearing no makeup, her angular architecture—which caused one detractor to remark, “Throw a hat at her and wherever it hits it will hang”—on full display. Her eyes were a pale, nearly colorless blue-gray, her skin drawn tightly across her freckled face. She affected an illusion of height, which gave her a psychological advantage over a lot of men, not simply her costars. “Spencer was five-eleven, I was five seven and a half,” she said. “I wore very high heels.” She always disputed what Joe Mankiewicz remembered her as saying as they stood on the landing that led to the guard’s gate and the lot beyond: “I might be a little tall for you, Mr. Tracy.”
“I wouldn’t have been dumb enough to say what I [supposedly] said to him,” she asserted decades later—and she had a point, given how badly she wanted Tracy to be in the picture. According to Hepburn, there was instead an awkward silence. “I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said, ‘Sorry I’ve got these high heels on. When we do the movie, I’ll be careful about what I wear.’ ”
It wasn’t quite the wholesale emasculation Mankiewicz recalled, but it had much the same effect. “And Spencer’s just sort of eyeing her. He did that, and she didn’t know at the time that he was going to pay her back. But I spoke up and said, ‘Don’t worry, Kate. He’ll cut you down to size.’ And she smiled and walked on. And we walked on.” Said Hepburn, “I think he thought I was awful. And he said [to Joe], ‘She has dirty fingernails. Her hands are dirty. And she’s bossy.’ That was his impression of me. Not that I was too tall. I think he just found me rather unattractive and disappointing. And thought: ‘My God, what am I stuck with?’ ”
They proceeded, said Mankiewicz, to study each other’s pictures, and Stevens’ first rushes betrayed a softening in Hepburn’s normally strident delivery, while Tracy seemed to be upping his energy level a notch. “There they were,” said Mankiewicz, “imitating each other.” At first Hepburn fretted she would be “too sweet” in the part. “Katie,” said Stevens, “you get out there and be as sweet as you can be. You’ll still be plenty nasty.” Then she objected to Stevens’ introductory image of her, a generous sampling of leg from Tracy’s perspective, the first genuine cheesecake shot of her career. “It’s not like crossing your legs in front of a man,” Stevens argued, painfully aware of her lack of credentials as a movie sexpot. “You don’t know your leg is showing. But he sees it. And the audience sees it. And everybody remembers it and forgives you when you are not being feminine.”
Hepburn was not an instinctive actor. She questioned everything, debated everything, would happily have rehearsed the same scene all day if she could. The director’s guidance—the director’s discipline—was essential to her delivering her best work. Tracy was just the opposite. He talked very little about the character he was playing, did his scenes, and rarely, if ever, relied on the director. Where Hepburn was constantly leaping into the void, Tracy was watching, observing, taking in what she and the other