Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [280]
Tracy spent the next three days getting a pretty thorough going-over. Teeth and eyes were checked, hearing, glands, sinuses, organs, respiration were all found to be normal. A blood analysis fixed his cholesterol level at 168, well within acceptable range, and a routine test for syphilis came back negative. X-rays showed his heart and aorta to be of normal size and shape and his lungs to be clear. A sleep observation under the supervision of Dr. Samuel Crowe, founder of the school’s division of otolaryngology, took place on the night of May 14, when Tracy was given a single Nembutal tablet, a dosage mirroring words he had written for the first time in his datebook the previous year: “one pill.” He was coming to rely on barbiturates to quiet a mind that was constantly turning, but all that Dr. Crowe could suggest was to reduce alcohol and tobacco consumption to a minimum. The patient was discharged on the fifteenth with the finding “no organic disease diagnosed.”
The following morning, he made the five-hour drive back to Pittsburgh, where Kate was giving her final matinee and evening performances of Without Love. Hepburn commemorated the occasion by engaging in a wrestling match with a photographer for the Bulletin-Index who snapped her without permission as she arrived backstage. The camera was smashed and the man suffered a few scratches before the two were separated by a cop who had heard the scuffle. The engagement closed with nearly $40,000 in the till—an excellent week—and Tracy drove her on to Cincinnati, the next stop on the company’s seemingly endless tour of the provinces, then went on to Chicago, where he met up with Carroll for the return trip to Los Angeles.
Keeper of the Flame was the work of the Australian-born poet and novelist I.A.R. Wylie, a story specifically designed for the screen and submitted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer just weeks ahead of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Set for serialization in the American Magazine, it told the story of ace war correspondent Steve O’Malley and his assignment to write the biography of a New England governor and self-styled patriot named Robert Forrest. Forrest’s death inspires a wave of mourning befitting a beloved national figure, but unlike Citizen Kane, another film of the time with a similar setup, the author keeps the subject of O’Malley’s inquiry completely offstage, following instead the journalist’s interactions with local townspeople and the young widow as he uncovers the secret life of an American fascist.
The model for Forrest became a matter of some discussion when the book was published by Random House in the spring of 1942. Speculation ranged from William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Wylie herself would never say, and all director George Cukor would allow was that “[w]e made this picture during a period of undercover Fascism in this country … Certain things were in the air but hadn’t come out into the open. I suppose, to draw attention to them, we exaggerated.”
The property was for Tracy from the very beginning, and he was announced for the role in December 1941. Keeper of the Flame didn’t take on urgency, however, until Hepburn committed to playing Christine Forrest in April 1942. Aglow from her twin triumphs in The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year, she was instrumental in getting Cukor assigned to the picture and in arranging a test for Audrey Christie in the part of Jane Harding, O’Malley’s colleague and sounding board.
“I’m most anxious to start the new film,” she told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, deftly taking ownership of the project. “The script has been written by Donald Ogden Stewart, who did the excellent screen treatment of Philadelphia Story, and George Cukor will again direct me … I want to repeat Woman