Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [300]
Sexually, Tracy and Hepburn were simpatico—so much so that Kate confided to their friend Eugene Kennedy that she had once asked a doctor if Spence could get injections to “lower his libido.” Emotionally, they were on different planes, and she was very possibly crowding him at a time when he felt particularly vulnerable to bad publicity. He laid out Sheilah Graham one day over a “veiled allusion in the column regarding his private life” and he was rapidly adopting Kate’s policy of never talking to the press, ever.
Ingrid Bergman, in costume for Gaslight, visits the set of A Guy Named Joe. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Tracy’s irritability became the stuff of legend during the making of The Seventh Cross, in part because there were an unusual number of observers on the set. “I never tried missing a scene when Tracy was playing,” Hume Cronyn said. “His method seemed to be as simple as it is difficult to achieve. He appeared to do nothing. He listened, he felt, he said the words without forcing anything. There were no extraneous movements. Whatever was provoked in him emotionally was seen in his eyes.” Said Zinnemann, “When a signal from the M-G-M grapevine said that he was about to do an important scene, all the young hopeful contract players would sneak on the stage and, lost in awe and fascination, would watch him from protective darkness.”
The Seventh Cross was unusual for a Tracy picture in that he played the first thirty minutes with no dialogue. On the run, the guards and their dogs after him, the SS keeping watch, George Heisler is a hunted man, desperate and worn. To achieve the effect, he submitted to a Prussian haircut and a gray-toned makeup job accentuated by the fact that he had dropped eight pounds in as many weeks. When a writer from Time magazine dropped by the set in January 1944, Tracy described himself as “a box of chocolates broadened out into a character actor” and explained the drop by noting that the war had curtailed his normal supply of sweets. By the time Signe Hasso, the Swedish actress, arrived to play the last act as Tracy’s love interest, he was tense and withdrawn at times but had settled into a more comfortable frame of mind, helped, perhaps, by the fact that Karl Freund had fallen ill and had been replaced for a spell with Robert Surtees.
“To work with Tracy was the easiest thing in the world,” Hasso later wrote. “We rehearsed once and that was it. I remember the director, Fred Zinnemann (it was his first big picture) got a bit nervous about only one rehearsal, but Tracy said, ‘I know my lines. Signe knows hers. Let’s have a cup of tea while they set the lights. And you too, Fred. You need a cup of tea.’ Fred wasn’t so sure that he needed any tea, but, of course, off he went for a tea session, where no work was discussed. We talked about life in general, and Fred grew more and more nervous. However, when the scene was lit and the camera ready to shoot, we did it in one take. And Fred was again happy.”
When Frederick Othman, Hollywood correspondent for the United Press, visited the set, Tracy was in a pretty good mood, noting dryly that this was the first time in years that a man and wife—meaning the Cronyns—had played a man and wife on the screen and just as well, too. He then charged Jessica Tandy, making her American film debut, with walking into a scene just to take her husband’s paycheck away from him. This, he suggested, set a bad precedent, even as Tandy herself blushed and denied the whole thing. Only once she was out of earshot did he allow that Tandy was “one of the finest actresses ever to get into the movie business.”
Relaxing in his dirt-caked pants, his torn sweater and greasy leather jacket, he went on to discuss work in general, saying that although a film actor made a lot of money, he usually earned every cent in the loss of many