Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [283]
George Cukor had directed Hepburn in five pictures, beginning with her first, A Bill of Divorcement, and always knew precisely what she needed. Tracy, on the other hand, took some getting used to because his command of the character was so extraordinarily complete. “Kate says I was always giving her hundreds of suggestions,” Cukor said in 1971, “but none to Spence. Well, Spence was the kind of actor about whom you thought, ‘I’ve got a lot of things I could say to you, but I don’t say them because you know,’ and the next day everything I’d thought of telling him would be there in the rushes. Also, I was never sure whether Spence was really listening when I talked to him. He was one of those naturally original actors who did it but never let you see him doing it.”
The supporting cast was exceptionally good and included Richard Whorf as the dead man’s conniving secretary, Forrest Tucker, Frank Craven, Horace McNally, Percy Kilbride, Donald Meek, Howard Da Silva, and eleven-year-old Darryl Hickman as Jeb Rickards, a young acolyte who blames himself for the accidental death of his idol. Hickman was working on two other pictures simultaneously and could appreciate Tracy’s impatience with Cukor and Hepburn as they worked their way through a page of dialogue. “Before they shot take one,” he said, “Cukor and Hepburn would talk and talk and talk about the scene, about the characters, whatever, and Tracy would stand there, first on one foot and then the other, and finally, after about twenty minutes, Tracy would say, almost under his breath, ‘Let’s get on with it, Kate.’ And when Tracy said, ‘Let’s get on with it, Kate,’ we shot the scene.” And then, much as Joe Mankiewicz had observed on Woman of the Year, Tracy and Hepburn would seem to compete and undercut one another. “In the intimate scenes, Tracy would go low and Hepburn would go lower. The sound man would have to yell, ‘Cut! I’m not picking them up!’ ”
As the film progressed, Tracy’s relationship with Hickman’s tormented boy became more complex and shaded than the one with Hepburn’s Christine, the unintended consequence of a character written more as a cipher than as a grieving wife with a terrible secret to keep. (“I think,” Cukor said, “she finally carried a slightly phony part because her humanity asserted itself, and the humor.”) Jeb’s scene on a dark hillside, an emotion-charged exchange full of beats and transitions in which he decides that he can trust O’Malley, was, as Hickman later put it, “the most difficult scene I played as a child actor.” He credited its success to Cukor, who walked him through it change by change, and to Tracy, “who was so ‘with you’ as an actor that you could feel his energy. He was very still and very quiet and very unspoken, but he was with you psychically in a way that I have never felt from another actor. He listened to you with such intensity that he literally drew you into himself. It isn’t that he did very much; in fact, he did almost nothing. But he created a connection that was so intense that you couldn’t pull yourself away from him.”
Director George Cukor makes Darryl Hickman’s close-ups for Keeper of the Flame. “Tracy never budged,” Hickman recalled. “He was there with me every step of the way.” (DARRYL HICKMAN)
Hickman knew nothing of craft, but he came to see his time with Tracy and Cukor as the beginning of a process of learning that culminated in a successful career as a teacher of acting.
The only thing Tracy said to me directly, at some point during the shooting of that scene, was, “I think if you took more time there, you’d make a better transition.” I didn’t know what the word “transition” meant, but I got the sense of what he was talking about. He never, ever said anything to me, but I could feel his respect and that meant a lot. He would sit there when I did my closeups, and—I swear, we shot my closeups for a day—Tracy never walked