Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [284]
Kate would appear on the set on days she wasn’t needed, sometimes to confer with Cukor, invariably to sit near the camera and watch Tracy as he worked. The pace of production was glacial, and the picture took as long to make as Tortilla Flat—nearly eleven weeks. As it dragged on, Hepburn’s partners at the Theatre Guild grew increasingly worried that she would be unable to rejoin Without Love as originally planned. The Guild’s business manager, Warren Munsell, began wiring in July, looking for a commitment to open the play in Columbus on September 17. Before long, it became apparent that Hepburn was ducking them. “What are you up to that you keep changing your phone number?” Theresa Helburn, Langner’s codirector at the Guild, wired on August 9. “I will guard your secret if you will send it to me. How is the picture going and how are things relative to our September dates?”
Now that she was on more intimate terms with him, Kate could plainly see the stress Spence put himself under during the course of a film and the psychological toll his insomnia was taking. When he wasn’t fretting about the picture, his part, and what he was doing with it, it was his life and the way he was living it. “He felt the miseries that he’d brought on people were avoidable,” she said, “and that if he hadn’t existed the world would have been better off.” Unworthy of God’s forgiveness, he could see only darkness before him, eternal punishment by fire, the literal interpretation of hell as preached to believers. Overwhelmed by a sensitivity to everything around him—the emotions of others, the stir of the wind—his heart beat furiously and occasionally it would skip, a chilling, ever-present reminder in the depth of the night that he could be taken at any moment.
He hated himself at times like these, hated his inability to live up to his own moral and professional standards, to be the good man he aspired to be, the man his audience believed him to be. Worse, he was unable to express these thoughts and feelings to anyone other than himself, for, as with Louise, Kate wasn’t Catholic—wasn’t anything, for that matter—and he knew that whatever he had to say, should he say it, would be taken, however politely and sympathetically, as nonsense. He would appear on the set every morning looking red-eyed and haggard, and he would speak to nobody. He’d disappear into his dressing room and not emerge until it was time for the first shot to be blocked. Everyone assumed he was hungover, but he wasn’t drinking anything stronger than tea at the time. He was just desperate for sleep, and his fatigue threatened the concentration he needed to do his best work.
As the wires from New York grew more insistent, Hepburn brokered the sale of Without Love to M-G-M for $260,000, a figure she hoped would satisfy all the parties involved so that she could put forth what she really wanted, which was to get out of doing the play in New York altogether. The studio was talking more pictures for the two of them, and Tracy had gotten her interested in Paul Osborn’s script for Madame Curie, which he had originally hoped to do with Garbo. The thought of Hepburn as the great Polish scientist struck everyone as odd, and Hedda Hopper reminded her readers that Irene Dunne had been the original choice for the role. Regardless, she was desperate to stay in California, desperate to stay with Spence and to help him get a handle on this curse that seemed to drain him of all life. Sleep had never been a problem for her; she retired early, slept soundly, often rose before dawn. If he could just set his mind to it, he could do that as well, and if it