Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [289]
Tracy rejoined Hepburn in New York, where he was once again reported as taking a “rest cure” at a local hospital. When Keeper of the Flame opened there in February 1943, Kate was just finishing her run in Without Love and glad to be rid of it. The play had been profitable, but it was far from playing to capacity business and a credit to no one. Keeper continued a bleak streak for Hepburn, a good picture that could have been great without the meddling of Victor Saville and Leon Gordon and the rigid dictates of the Breen office. The notices were mixed, most offering up praise for Spence, indifference for Kate. (“Miss Hepburn is Hepburn,” the advance review in Variety noted, “with the usual mannerisms and studied delivery of lines.”) That her artificiality stemmed, in part, from her confusion over her character’s innocence or guilt at any given moment in the story was lost on everyone, save Tracy, Cukor, and, of course, Hepburn herself. All that she would allow, somewhat disingenuously, was that she was proud of Metro for not turning it into a “routine garden-variety love story.”
Donald Ogden Stewart, seemingly indifferent to the damage done to the third act of his screenplay, proclaimed Keeper of the Flame one of Hollywood’s “most important productions,” hailing an industry “which is now grown up and has begun to mature politically, with a full consciousness of present-day problems.” Stewart’s good-natured reception of the picture may have been due in part to Kate’s diligent fence mending, having belatedly come to the realization that the screenwriter had left Culver City hating her. She wrote him a desperate letter of explanation, expressing both affection and admiration and recounting how she had successfully seen Woman of the Year through the scripting process “[b]ut only after horrible scenes with everyone and his brother in all the conferences and everyone loathing me even though they used the stuff and would have been badly off without it.” She admitted that on Keeper of the Flame she was “as wrong as wrong” and supremely sorry for it.
Tracy and Hepburn in Keeper of the Flame (1943). (SUSIE TRACY)
“I was guilty as far as you were concerned of the great crime of that lot—lack of enthusiasm and excitement. May I add to this that for the first time in my life I am humbly—sweetly—desperately in love—was then, and frantically trying to understand this feeling and to become a woman rather than a working automaton which I have been for years—Don—try to understand and to forgive me—”
In later years Don Stewart embraced a story that had Louis B. Mayer witnessing the film for the first time at the Radio City Music Hall and storming out in a fury when he realized what the picture was really about. “I can’t vouch for it,” he said cheerfully, “but I’d be very happy if it were true.” Ironically, Keeper of the Flame managed to better the Music Hall’s first-week figures for Woman of the Year, confirming the box-office potency of the Tracy-Hepburn combination. A weak draw in rural playoffs, the picture nevertheless managed to outgross its predecessor, and work on the next Tracy-Hepburn collaboration began immediately.
Tracy, in the meantime, went into a wartime ghost story titled A Guy Named Joe. Producer Everett Riskin, the elder brother of screenwriter Robert Riskin, had been responsible for a number of Columbia’s upper-tier productions, including Theodora Goes Wild, The Awful Truth, and, most recently, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, a hit picture with a similar premise. It was Riskin’s notion to pair Tracy with Irene Dunne, his star from Theodora and Awful Truth, and it was at his behest that Dunne, one of the industry’s most prominent freelancers, was brought to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on a two-picture deal.