Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [285]
Another wire from Terry Helburn on September 1 considerably upped the pressure:
I MUST ADVISE YOU THAT SHOULD WE OPEN MORE THAN TWO WEEKS AFTER OUR AGREED DATE OF OCTOBER FIFTH WE WILL OWE A WEEKS SALARY TO MOST OF THE CAST FOR WHICH WE WILL HAVE TO HOLD METRO RESPONSIBLE SINCE YOUR CONTRACT WITH THEM EXPIRES OCTOBER FIRST AND BEGINS WITH US OCTOBER FIFTH.
While Tracy spent the Labor Day weekend with his family in Encino, Hepburn took pen in hand and began drafting a letter to Helburn, her partner Lawrence Langner, and Phil Barry, the gifted playwright whose work was at the center of it all. “I want to talk to you very seriously about the play,” she wrote. “I do not think you should have me do it. There are many reasons for my coming to this conclusion and I wish you would read them and think about them seriously.” She went on to warn that she would not stay with the show past her contracted time, which meant that they could play New York for a maximum of twelve weeks.5 She was not good in the part, she added, and she could not play well with Elliott Nugent. (“We are just unfortunate together.”) She said that she thought the play needed considerable work—new work, not revision—and that it was almost impossible to act in such a thing without conviction. “I am sunk to feel this way—but I have right along—and in a way I feel that I have done my part in it. I have played on the road to good business—made back the investment—helped settle the movie rights. You have certainly not lost anything by having me in it …”
The letter was lucid, reasoned, and made a solid case against dragging her back to Broadway for what was sure to be a drubbing. She thought about it, slept on it, then realized they would be hell-bent on bringing it in regardless. In Spence’s absence, Hepburn redrafted the letter and added a strictly emotional appeal: “Finally—for personal reasons—it will crucify me to be tied up in N.Y. for four months. I shall be frantic and miserable and I beg you not to force me to do it. In these times life is entirely uncertain, and for the sake of the extra money you may make with me in it, you may be ruining me. Please, as my friends, think these points over seriously … I have done the best I can do—please let me out of it—”
Postmarked September 7, 1942, the letter reached the Fifty-second Street offices of the Theatre Guild on the twelfth. Barry was “thunderstruck” when he read it, and Helburn and Langner set about the task of drafting a measured reply. While they sympathized deeply with the “emotional disturbance” she seemed to be in, there were duties and obligations that could not be overlooked. Barry’s career as a dramatist had to be considered, as did the Guild’s continuing position as an institution of the American theatre. They put the best possible spin on Without Love, insisting that audiences liked Hepburn better in it than they had in Philadelphia Story. “The fact that you are in pain when you are playing with Elliott is merely because you see Spencer in it, but the audience doesn’t, and everybody thinks that you and Elliott make a good team in it. You did yourself until you got feeling strongly about Spencer in it, and you are surely too good a trouper to let a purely personal point of view stand in the way of an objective success …”
After every conceivable argument had been committed to paper, they decided it would be wisest to talk it over with Kate in person. Helburn sent a telegram on the thirteenth: “YOUR LETTER OF COURSE A SHOCK TO US ALL …” and said that she would see her in Hollywood that coming Wednesday. The meeting was a hurried affair, and Hepburn’s hasty exit left their talk unfinished. Helburn thought she had an agreement from Kate to take the play into New York as long as their Detroit opening was postponed until October 26 and that Hepburn would cover a week’s worth of cast salaries out of the extra money she would be getting from Metro for her additional time on