Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [275]
A simple funeral took place on the afternoon of January 26. Carrie had embraced Christian Science in her later years, but her sister Emma was active in the First Presbyterian Church and had the pastor, a Dr. Odiorne, officiate. It wasn’t as emotional an occasion as the funeral for John Tracy had been, Carrie having lived into her mid-sixties, but Spence wept all the same and kept pretty much to himself. The ground at the cemetery was frozen solid, and Carrie couldn’t be buried in the Tracy plot alongside John until after the spring thaw. They left for Chicago the next morning in a heavy fog and were back in California on the twenty-ninth.
The filming of Tortilla Flat dragged on endlessly, and the picture was still in production when Woman of the Year opened at the Radio City Music Hall on February 5. After a mid-December sneak in which the new ending had played flawlessly, the studio got behind the picture in a big way. Metro budgeted $2.5 million annually in display advertising, dividing it among general circulation magazines, farm magazines (which accounted for eight million rural subscribers), the various fan magazines, and 145 newspapers reaching a combined circulation of 31 million readers. Immediately after “The Hepburn Story,” a serialized biography, appeared in five consecutive issues of the Saturday Evening Post, M-G-M ran a full-page ad in the magazine for Woman of the Year. Two-column teasers followed in 118 key city newspapers: “SPENCER TRACY is crazy about KATHARINE HEPBURN—but she’s too busy!” A cartoon pictured her surrounded by photographers, with Tracy knocked to the ground in the stampede to get to her. “She’s the WOMAN OF THE YEAR!”
The lines around the Music Hall, despite some nasty weather, reflected the enormous popularity of The Philadelphia Story when it played the same theater in December 1940. (At that point, it had been seven years since Hepburn had last filled the place with Little Women.) Tracy’s personal drawing power had long been established, having built steadily since 1936 and been demonstrated most recently with the crowds that flooded the Astor to see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The combination of the two names was seemingly all the people needed to drive Woman of the Year to a first week’s total of $99,000—which was essentially capacity business for the 5,945-seat venue.
“They call the new Music Hall offering Woman of the Year,” William Boehnel wrote in the World-Telegram, “but I think a far better name for it would be Film of the Year, for seldom have I seen a more freshly written, gayer, wiser, more beautifully acted and directed entertainment than this one. To begin with, it has Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in the leading roles. This in itself would be enough to make any film memorable. But when you get Hepburn and Tracy turning in brilliant performances to boot, you’ve got something to cheer about.” Bosley Crowther said practically the same thing, adding that Woman of the Year made him feel “like tossing his old hat into the air and weaving a joyous snake dance over the typewriter keys” for the first time in months. Propelled by exceptionally strong notices in all the New York dailies, Woman of the Year built to an even better $102,000 in its second week. It stayed a total of six weeks, equaling the unprecedented run of The Philadelphia Story, an astonishing feat for a picture that had neither a book nor a play for its foundation. As it made its way across the country—it reached Los Angeles in April—Woman of the Year showed its strength in the biggest cities, amassing a domestic gross of $1,937,000. When Tracy reached New York on February 16, Hepburn was reveling in the film’s success and eager for another pairing of the new Tracy-Hepburn team.
But first there was the matter of Without Love, the Philip Barry play to follow The Philadelphia Story. As with the latter, Barry wrote it with Hepburn in mind, and she owned a 25 percent interest in it—same as the playwright. As part of the arrangement, she agreed to play the part of Jamie Coe Rowan for $1,000