Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [286]
They finished Keeper of the Flame on September 22, with a do-over on a key scene set for the following week. Actress Pauline Lord was revered on the New York stage, where she had starred in O’Neill’s Anna Christie and Strange Interlude, but she was almost completely unknown to movie audiences, having appeared in just two pictures. Her role as the vindictive Mrs. Forrest promised fireworks in the company of Tracy and Hepburn, but she was nervous and fidgety, overwhelmed by the mechanics of moviemaking, and Cukor had to nurse her along. The scene didn’t work well, and Saville, in collaboration with playwright Leon Gordon, drafted a set of retakes in which the part of Mrs. Forrest would be taken by Margaret Wycherly, an equally prominent—and considerably more seasoned—actress of both stage and screen. Wycherly’s revised scene, which made her character more crazy than evil, took three days to shoot. The film was readied for preview as Saville and Gordon busied themselves with still more emendations, and after putting it all before an audience it was decided that Christine would have to be guilty of murder after all. Soon, the men had forty-five pages of new material to shoot.
It was now October 6, and Hepburn was due in the East for rehearsals on the twelfth. New scenes requiring her participation, including her death at the hands of her husband’s former secretary, were dated as late as October 10. Tracy finished with his scenes on the seventeenth—Kate was long gone by then—and left within days for a new round of tests at Johns Hopkins, his principal complaint being “insomnia and general nervousness with vague feelings of fear.”
He met briefly with President Roosevelt on the twenty-ninth for a conference regarding a possible trip to England but was nowhere to be seen when the very public funeral of George M. Cohan took place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on November 7. At Johns Hopkins, a physical exam, as before, showed him to be in good health and completely normal. His first night of monitored sleep displayed a familiar pattern: asleep four hours, then awake thirty minutes, asleep for another hour, then awake ninety minutes. He got a total of six and a half hours with the aid of Nembutal, an hour less the following night. He remained at the hospital a total of four days and was discharged, it was noted, “with his condition improved.”
New York saw the opening of Without Love while Tracy was at Johns Hopkins, and Tracy hired a car to return to Manhattan on the afternoon of November 12. The play and Kate were, in her words, “roasted,” but the public disagreed with the critics, came, and evidently liked it well enough to send their friends. Tracy remained close at hand, marking ten months of sobriety on December 15, 1942. The city was under a blackout order, and the darkness after nightfall was the darkness of a country lane. No theater marquees could be lit, no restaurants could be lighted from the street, and it was possible to walk past Radio City Music Hall and not know it.
Another conference with Roosevelt, this time in the company of Robert Emmet Sherwood, overseas director of the Office of War Information, confirmed that Tracy would soon leave for Great Britain to convey Christmas greetings to American and British soldiers. The plan lost momentum, though, as the president began preparations for a secret conference with Winston Churchill at Casablanca. Kate was dutifully serving her time on the stage of the St. James Theatre when Spence left for Chicago on the eighteenth, arriving back home in Los Angeles on the evening of December 21. Christmas, as usual, was at the ranch, where he and his brother Carroll observed their first Yuletide together since the passing of their mother.
Tracy spent the next four consecutive days in Encino, his longest uninterrupted stretch of time there in more than a year.
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1 Gable, however, was considerably more popular internationally.
2 Tracy subsequently canceled