Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [262]
“We never rehearsed together,” Hepburn said. “He hated to do more than one take. I never cared how many takes I did. That was curious. But Spencer’s peak concentration was the first take. And it was usually the best.” She could remember an early scene in the back room of Pinkie Peters’ tavern—modeled on Bleeck’s, the famous newsmen’s hangout underneath the Herald Tribune building in New York—where Sam and Tess are getting to know one another. “Spencer had the most extraordinary technique. I mean, he was so natural you thought he’d blown. And I was hoping he’d like me. So I was struggling to be very easy and very with it, and I knocked over a glass of water. And I saw him take his handkerchief out of the pocket and start to dry it up. So I took the table napkin and dried a little bit off, and then disappeared under the table to dry the rest of it. I thought: The old son of a gun. I’ll show him. I’m not really as silly as I look. So we went right on playing the scene.”
Tracy and Hepburn got to know each other in much the same way, having dinner one night ten days into production. The conversation came around to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which Hepburn had made a point of seeing.
“Very interesting,” she said.
“Oh no—no—nothing—rotten,” he said. “I just can’t do that sort of thing. It’s like constructing a dummy and then trying to breathe life into it. I like to be the dummy myself, and then make people—force people—to believe that I’m whatever I want them to believe. Inside out—instead of outside in. No makeup.”
She studied his face. “His ears stuck out. And he had old lion’s eyes. And he had a wonderful head of hair. And a sort of ruddy skin, really like mine. I mean, he was not as freckled as I am, but he was ruddy. And…[a] nice mouth.” Both were at loose ends in terms of relationships. Ring Lardner knew that Gar Kanin was “kind of in love” with Hepburn and remembered her once asking whether she should marry him. “I think he probably realized it was a very unlikely thing with Kate. Although, as I said, she did say to me, ‘What do you think?’ I don’t think she ever took it too seriously or that she was in love with him.” And Tracy had been to San Francisco with Ingrid Bergman not long before the start of the film, but now Bergman was off in New York with her husband and daughter.
There was a surprising amount they had in common. Both had thought about careers in medicine, and both had influential fathers who didn’t take the theatre seriously as a vocation. As kids, both loved movies—westerns in particular—and both staged amateur performances for the neighbors. Hepburn displayed real talent as an actor at Bryn Mawr, just as Tracy had at Ripon. Both got their professional starts in stock, and both came to Hollywood expecting to go back to Broadway. Hepburn did, disastrously in The Lake, spectacularly in The Philadelphia Story. Tracy, of course, never had. The Theatre Guild still wanted him for The Devil’s Disciple—and there was talk of Eugene O’Neill’s new play, The Iceman Cometh—but Metro complicated things by insisting on first refusal and the right to put in money. Similarly, Hepburn was aiming to do Saint Joan for the Guild and wanted Orson Welles to direct. Within days, Philip K. Scheuer’s column in the Times carried an item: “Katharine Hepburn, a lady who wastes no time, has apparently communicated her enthusiasm for the stage to Spencer Tracy … Now he says he may appear in a play with Katie.”
Katharine Hepburn’s attraction to him was immediate and intense. Director George Stevens takes note. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
They settled into a comfortable pattern of working with one another, Hepburn considering every possible nuance of a given scene while Tracy gently heckled her from the sidelines. “I think he was so steady,” she said, “and I was so volatile, that we exasperated each other. And we challenged each other, and that was the fun of it.” When John Chapman visited the set on September 12, Hepburn was at a