Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [281]
Without Love closed in Buffalo on May 30, and Hepburn promptly headed west, where June 2 had been set for the start date. She most likely read Stewart’s screenplay, developed under the supervision of producer Victor Saville, on her way out to California. The role of Christine, she said, fascinated her. “She is a woman, strong, resolute, placed in a tragic position in life. Thinking back, I am surprised to find that I have never played a mature woman. I have played girls, girls, girls—all sorts of girls, shy, whimsical, flamboyant, tempestuous—everything but mature human beings.”
Having previously consumed the novel, Hepburn found much to dislike about the script and the changes that had been made. Stewart had based his conception of O’Malley on the knowledge that Tracy would be playing the part, contending that in the novel the character came off as an “impotent eunuch who plays sad love scenes.” Hepburn, it seemed, wanted a film as true to Wylie’s original as humanly possible. As Stewart complained in a letter to his wife, the journalist Ella Winter, “I created an intelligent character with action as his keynote … Is it not interesting that Miss H., not an active character in the story, is Goddamned if there will be an active male in the same story?”
Kate originally had thought that she would stay away from the development of the script, knowing that she was considered a troublemaker on the M-G-M lot. (“I thought, ‘Express your opinion when asked, but don’t go over everybody and don’t try to be too helpful. Just keep your place and be an actor.’ ”) But it was difficult for her to be on the outside of things, if not completely impossible, and all she really managed to do was to be critical without being helpful, excited by the subject matter but no longer by the character she was being asked to play.
Stewart, who had won an Oscar for his work on Philadelphia Story, thought Wylie’s book “exciting screen material” and saw his primary job as making sure the picture “accurately reflected the 1943 background.”4 Hepburn, Stewart told his wife, was not so much interested in the script as she was in control and had gone over the heads of both Saville and Cukor in taking her demands directly to the studio brass. In the book, Christine ensures her husband’s death when she chooses not to warn him that a bridge is out. Under the Production Code, a character who commits murder must be punished. But was passively allowing someone’s accidental death to occur the same as a willful act of murder? When the screenplay was first submitted to the Breen office, Saville purposely held back the ending, in which both Steve and Christine decide, in effect, to “print the legend” now that Forrest himself is safely dead. But the administrators of the Code could sense the direction in which the movie was headed: “We assume … that in order to comply with the provisions of the Code, you will either clear Christine of any suspicion of murder or else will punish her. Otherwise, we could not approve the finished picture.”
A significant change that occurred on Hepburn’s watch was the compounding of her character’s guilt. Where before Christine had merely failed to warn her husband of the danger he faced, she now became responsible for disabling the bridge as well. Nearly all of Christine’s scenes were rewritten, but there came a point when the beleaguered Saville felt he had to push back:
A full conference was called in the executive producer’s office and all were present: Hepburn, Tracy, Cukor, Stewart, and myself. Katie was the first to speak, which she did with great passion and at length. She told us the story as she would like to see it. When she had finished, we looked at Tracy, who passed, as did Cukor and Stewart, and all eyes turned to me. I guess I must have been a little edgy as, just before going into the meeting, I had heard on the radio of the disastrous defeat of the British army by Rommel and the probability that Egypt would fall. In