Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [263]
George Stevens, meanwhile, was demonstrating a bit of wordless business, Tracy’s character having happened onto the speaker’s platform, unsure of where he was and unable to get off. Tracy, Hepburn soon decided, was modeling his performance on the deadpan mannerisms of their esteemed director.
“I never met a man I knew as quick as I knew Spence,” Stevens commented.
And he felt the same about me. So he’d come in a little early, and he’d come over in my little office and sit down and we’d talk, or I’d go in his dressing room. And all of a sudden I hear a knock on the door, and the door opens and it’s Katharine. She says, “What are you two conspiring about?” “Well,” he says, “you know, Kate, I like guidance on things … And this man is our director, and I’d like to get some guidance from him. And I asked him a question: How can I be such a damn fool to get into a picture with a woman producer and her director? How can I be such a dumb bastard as that, Katharine? And you know what he tells me? He says, Well, Spencer, I can’t understand it. That sounds pretty stupid to me. How can you do it? Can you give me a good reason? he says. No I can’t.” It took me a long time to get the answer: He wanted to make a picture with Kate Hepburn.
In Woman of the Year, Sam Craig and Tess Harding start out as rivals, sparring with each other in their respective columns. The publisher of the paper calls them in to make peace, and Sam is startled by the cool, determined beauty of his adversary. Out of earshot, he asks her to a game at Yankee Stadium—her first—and patiently explains the ins and outs of baseball. She reciprocates, and he walks into a postbroadcast cocktail party in which none of the distinguished guests appears to speak English. Awkward and uncomfortable, Sam makes the best of it, then slips out the door. The next day, she asks him to drive her to the airport, and he finds himself onstage as she’s delivering an address before a hall full of women. Their snatches of time together don’t add up to much, and Sam can’t tell what she’s up to. As they reach LaGuardia, his dissatisfaction, as the script put it, “oozes out of every pore.”
“What’s the matter, Sam?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“Sure?”
“Well, I dunno. I can’t quite figure you out. What are you trying to prove? Why am I here?”
And when she catches her breath and says, “I thought you might want to kiss me good-bye,” Tracy calmly takes it in, processes it, then turns himself away from the camera, ostensibly to glance down the terminal corridor, but also to make sure the most significant kiss of his entire career takes place completely out of sight of the audience. The camera moves in, Hepburn in profile as he draws her toward him, her lips apart, the moment of contact perfectly obscured by the brim of his cocked hat. It is brief but heartfelt, passionate and completely unencumbered by concerns of lighting, position, focus. It’s the back of his head, her chin, the muffled soundtrack, their eyes laser-locked on each other as he releases her. It’s as real as any kiss in the history of the medium, the look of astonishment on her face, the deadly serious look on his, screen acting at its finest … if it was acting.
“Mike Kanin and I were frequent visitors to the set,” said Ring Lardner, “and what we saw happening there was the final blessing on the venture. When you write a love story, you hope that the actors will make it seem convincing, but you scarcely expect them to actually fall for each other. A familiar sight on a movie set comes when the director calls ‘Cut!’ and the two lovers withdraw abruptly from a tight embrace, briskly heading off in separate