Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [269]
“Shouldn’t a film give more than a portrait of individual characters in themselves? Shouldn’t we be able to see from a number of individual screen characters something that we’d all recognize as a true account of life, the general principles of it, the inevitable relations of cause and consequence?”
“And you don’t think the screen gives those principles?”
“I don’t. Do you?”
“I wouldn’t say the screen is entirely false to life, but I agree that it sometimes dodges the deeper principles, sometimes soft-pedals what you call cause and effect.”
“To that extent,” asked Erskine, “aren’t pictures selling out the audiences?”
“Maybe the audience isn’t fooled,” Tracy replied. “Perhaps they are willing to accept a certain amount of nonsense, as they accept a dramatic convention, in exchange for something else which they really enjoy.”
“But great dramatists don’t feed the world nonsense. If audiences habitually find their entertainment in stories that aren’t true, they’ll lose the ability to find pleasure in stories which are. Shan’t we end up after much picture-seeing by believing that the homes of the rich in America are as the pictures portray them, and that the poor almost never occur, and the middle class, unless it is comical, never exists? That’s the picture our screen asks us to recognize as true, isn’t it?”
Tracy laughed. “You’re a little hard on us, but you and I don’t disagree. I hope pictures will tell the whole truth of life while I’m still on the screen.”
* * *
1 Tracy was a big tipper, a practice Louise thought terrible. “You think these people make a lot of money,” he lectured. “They don’t. It’s only a few of us who do it; other people don’t. I can do it and like to do it, so don’t talk to me about it.”
2 Having taken part in the reorganization of the Screen Writers Guild in 1937, Ring Lardner, Jr., had been branded a radical by M-G-M East Coast story editor William Fadiman. Hepburn’s keeping the authorship of the untitled treatment a secret was partly a negotiation tactic, partly to keep Lardner’s name from scotching the deal.
3 The book that resulted from Steinbeck’s excursion was Sea of Cortez.
CHAPTER 18
I’ve Found the Woman I Want
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Katharine Houghton Hepburn came from the kind of family that Spencer Tracy, in another life, might have wished for himself. Her paternal grandfather was an Episcopalian minister in Hanover County, Virginia, her grandmother a Powell, the family having lost a three-thousand-acre plantation during the Civil War despite having freed their slaves decades earlier. The Reverend Sewell Stavely Hepburn was known for his dramatic flair at the pulpit, a strain of talent that may have passed to his eldest granddaughter. Her father, Thomas Norval Hepburn, was similarly gifted in oratory and, like Tracy, honed his skills in college. A born healer, Dr. Hepburn was reputed to have been Connecticut’s first urologist. In 1910 he became secretary of the Connecticut Social Hygiene Association, capping a crusade against venereal disease initiated by his wife, the former Katharine Martha Houghton.
Mrs. Hepburn was descended from money and position yet always held the less privileged in her sympathies and spent her life fighting for the vote, broad access to birth control and family planning services, and the right of free expression in all its permutations. She was a graduate of Bryn Mawr, where she took a master’s degree in 1900. Four years later she married Tom Hepburn, who was then in his final year of medical school. Not wanting to practice in a big