Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [266]
Hepburn, who had been in on the development process almost from the beginning, wasn’t happy with the new ending and wasn’t shy about saying so. “Mayer was away,” John Lee Mahin remembered, “and Sam Katz was in charge of the studio. Hepburn came into Sam’s office; wham, she threw what I had written on the desk and said, ‘That’s the biggest bunch of crap I’ve ever read!’ Sam was bewildered; he was looking at Stevens. Tracy was stuck on her, but he knew this ending was for him and not for her, so he was sitting there and he wasn’t saying a word. Finally, Sam said, ‘George, what do you think?’ George didn’t even answer. ‘Sam,’ he just said, ‘why don’t you put [up] that apartment on Stage 3, we’ll shoot it in the morning.’ And Sam said, ‘Oh, that’s fine, that’s fine.’ ”
Stevens, whose career began with two-reel comedies, envisioned a sequence devoid of dialogue, Tess managing her kitchen duties with clattering incompetence, Sam looking on with scarcely a grimace, toast shooting skyward, the coffee boiling over, an innertube of a waffle threatening ominously to burst. “Now there,” commented Tracy, “is a real meaty hunk of business. I look.” Hepburn was similarly bewildered: “I’ve never done anything like this in my life. Honestly, George, I don’t know a thing about gag comedy.” Stevens remained adamant, promising his two leads the revised sequence would never be shown if it wasn’t any good. “The first ending we shot was wrong,” he told them. “Why? Because it didn’t put over the idea we were shooting for. Kate talked about being a good wife. Audiences don’t want talk. They want action. In this new finish, Kate doesn’t talk. She acts like a good wife as nearly as she can. She tries to cook. To the point of being ridiculous. But she’s trying.”
The new material took eleven days to shoot, Stevens, formerly a gag man for Laurel and Hardy, having worked out an array of mechanical gags that were, he declared, “foolproof.” He gave Hepburn what he called “W. C. Fields business”—trying to button her dress, struggling to keep her straps from slipping, juggling the various kitchen gadgets. But what really made the scene work, Mankiewicz said, were “the kind of looks, or non-looks, of Tracy. The other directors would have had Tracy react. Instead of which, George had Tracy play it the way George would, gives this quiet look, that Indian impassivity, while Kate made a ninny of herself making toast. That’s George.”
To make the retakes for Woman of the Year, Tracy broke off from shooting Tortilla Flat, his first picture for Victor Fleming since the Yearling debacle. Tracy’s relationship with the book’s author, John Steinbeck, dated from a late-night encounter at Chasen’s in the early summer of 1939, when Steinbeck was reeling from the uproar created by the publication, just two months earlier, of The Grapes of Wrath. The men talked until 2:30, comparing notes on the odd burden of fame and parting with the hope they would soon work together.
That fall, as Tracy was preparing to play Thomas Edison, he and Fleming approached Steinbeck with the notion of filming The Red Pony at M-G-M, an idea to which the author, now flush with royalty money, was decidedly cool. Steinbeck was suspicious of Hollywood in general and Metro in particular, having just seen the first screen adaptation of one of his books, Of Mice and Men, spectacularly filmed by director Lewis Milestone at the tiny Culver City studio of Hal Roach. “There was great unity,” he wrote, “because only one man touched it, and that was Milestone.” That sort of unity, he argued, was impossible at the producer-dominated mechanism that was M-G-M.
A subject far closer to Steinbeck’s heart was a six-week collecting trip to the Gulf of California he was planning with marine biologist Ed Ricketts. He described their plans to Tracy one night over dinner, saying they planned to write a book to pay for the trip and invited him along.3 Having just started I Take This Woman for the third time, Tracy was in the mood for a long break and volunteered to secure a boat for the expedition. Three days later,