Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [305]
On September 14 Tracy began a USO tour of Hawaii, visiting the wounded at thirteen army and navy hospitals in his usual low-key manner, refusing all press interviews and relenting only when Major Maurice Evans of the army’s Entertainment Section dispatched a man to his suite at the Royal Hawaiian. Tracy, the man observed, was traveling with two snugly strapped brown suitcases, at least one of which was filled with liquor. He offered the obviously terrified young private, dripping in ill-fitting khaki, a long pull from what tasted like a bottle of bonded bourbon.
“I recall the liquor dribbling down my chin,” Dan Alexander wrote. “Eventually, he removed the bottle, saying, ‘Don’t talk yet. Have another drink.’ I did and now started feeling more relaxed. When I finished this second, Mr. Tracy asked if I smoked and bid me have a cigarette when I said yes. As I puffed, I became aware that he was scrutinizing me—and then, as if satisfied, he said, ‘Now start your interview.’ Which I did, handily, and then easily shared my notes with the waiting media.”
Tracy made the rounds without fanfare, walking in unannounced and introducing himself individually to the men. He signed hundreds of short-snorters, pictures, and scraps of paper, and accepted scores of messages for delivery back home to relatives and sweethearts. In one ward, he saw Joe Breen’s son Tommy, who had lost a leg in a raid on Saipan. In another, he struck up a conversation with a Midwestern boy who hailed, he discovered, from Ipswich. (“My God, Ipswich!” he erupted. “That’s where my Uncle Frank Tracy lived …”) Routinely, he started the day at 5:00 a.m. and continued until nightfall, taking just an hour out for lunch and a swim. On nine of his twelve days there, he also appeared at GI theaters showing A Guy Named Joe and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.
He arrived back in the States on the twenty-sixth, relieved to know that he didn’t need a formal routine to do his bit for the troops. “You don’t have to get up and do a song and dance,” he said. “They just want to talk to you and know someone is thinking of them.” He told Louella Parsons that he wanted to go back, and he started looking for a play he could do in the camps. “I actually think,” said Adela Rogers St. Johns, “that he believed they would take one look at him and say, ‘Is that Spencer Tracy? What a sell. Tell him to go away and send Betty Grable.’ ”
Katharine Hepburn regarded the film version of Without Love as a chance not only to fix the failings of the Barry play, which were manifest, but also to—at long last—do it with the proper leading man. Its sale to M-G-M had made news in 1942, but the selling price, as it turned out, wasn’t nearly as unique as it seemed. That same season, Warners paid $250,000 for Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army, Fox an estimated $300,000 for The Eve of St. Mark. Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson was heard to explain: “All the film companies got together and agreed not to pay less than $250,000 for any play.”
At first the property was assigned to Leon Gordon, whom Hepburn may have blamed in part for her troubles on Keeper of the Flame. Gordon, newly elevated to the rank of full producer, brought in playwright Samson Raphaelson, Ernst Lubitsch’s frequent collaborator, to do the script. In all, Gordon and Raphaelson spent six months working on the picture, the tension between them evident in the condescending tone Gordon assumed in his notes. Few problems seemed to get resolved, and the ending was satisfactory to no one.
Gordon put the material aside, and the project stalled until March 1944, when Hepburn was able to get the material reassigned to the studio’s veteran comedy specialist, Larry Weingarten. Just prior to going east at the completion of Dragon Seed, she participated in at least one story conference in which Michael Arlen and Howard Emmett Rogers