Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [265]
Tess goes on to the banquet alone, and Sam, having made his stand, calmly returns the boy to the orphanage, where other children speak his language and he won’t be trapped in an empty apartment. Sam completes the paperwork while the broadcast is on in the background, and when Tess returns to the apartment, her plaque under her arm and the press in tow, he is nowhere to be found.
Hepburn, during the writing of the script, suggested the climactic sequence the preview audience saw that night: Tess covers an upcoming prizefight for the missing Sam, while Sam can be found, in a game attempt at meeting his estranged spouse halfway, studying French and Spanish at Mademoiselle Sylvia’s, a language parlor that Sam’s friend Pinkie takes for a bordello. When he learns he’s picked a washed-up fighter named Dunlap in the column Tess has so obligingly ghosted, Sam sprints from the building in a panic. (“Who did it? Who wrote that tripe?”) At the fight, Tess materializes directly behind him and fesses up to the writing of the column. “We didn’t know where you were. It had to be written.” And then she tells him she hasn’t been a woman or a wife or anything to him.
SAM
(with heavy skepticism)
And now you know just how to go about it?
TESS
(enthusiastically)
Yes, Sam … we’ll move out of the apartment, get a little house out of town somewhere. I’ll make it a real home, honest. I’ll learn how to take care of it … and you.
SAM
And you’ll cook, sew, and order the groceries? Drive me to the station every morning?
TESS
(exultant now in the picture)
Yes, Sam—!
SAM
You’re not making sense.
It was, said Ring Lardner, “one of those kind of it’s-all-starting-over-again endings.” The picture got over at preview, but only to a point. “And there was a lot of confusion,” Hepburn admitted, “and a lot of slight—shall we say—unpleasantness. Anyway, they shot my end. And the minute my end came up at the preview, the interest dropped dead. So Mayer came to me and said, ‘It was a wonderful preview.’ And I said, ‘Mr. Mayer, it was a great preview up to such and such, and then, at the end, which I’m totally responsible for, [it] laid an egg.’ And he said, ‘How much to fix it?’ And I said, ‘About two hundred thousand dollars.’ And he said, ‘Go ahead.’ So I rushed back, and everyone was, you know, suggesting ends, ends, ends.”
George Stevens had returned to Columbia, and it was Joe Mankiewicz who figured out what the picture needed. “Philip Barry wrote the definitive play about Kate,” he said.
About Kate. For Kate. Philadelphia Story. In which [there was] a woman so superb, so elevated in class, so intelligent, so accomplished, so everything, that she antagonized every woman in the audience, because this is superwoman. Philip Barry wrote the play in which she got her comeuppance, and the audience loved a comeuppance, loved her for taking it, and this was the start of Kate’s second career. That formula, that needed element, in what was otherwise a woman so perfect that she could not be tolerated by the mass female audience…
I called John Lee Mahin, who was a very good writer, and he and I and George Stevens, the director, sat down and I said, “Look, what I think this needs is what Phil Barry discovered …” and I devised this new ending in which she tries to make breakfast. This was a retake. And it was the equivalent of her being taken apart in Philadelphia Story.
Tracy was present at the November 14 preview but wasn’t quite sure what to make of the audience’s reaction. “Good, I think,” he wrote in his book, a question mark accompanying the comment. Lardner, who wasn’t there, thought the ending “too feminist” for Mayer and the studio brass. “The executives at M-G-M, including Joe Mankiewicz, supported by George Stevens, felt that the woman character, having been so strong throughout, should be somehow subjugated and tamed, in effect.