Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [306]
A problem with the original play was its topicality; Without Love was dated within two years of its first performance. Under Stewart, only the core of the loveless marriage was retained, Pat, the political economist, becoming a natural scientist working on an improved oxygen mask. In the revised character of Jamie, Hepburn may have been projecting some of her own feelings toward Tracy in making her the daughter of a famed research scientist whose interest in Pat is aroused by his own experimental work. “I often felt that she was submerging herself to him,” her youngest brother, Dr. Robert Hepburn, said of Tracy. “I think, too, that Spencer was a sort of younger edition of her father in her mind. I think she admired his ruggedness.”
When Tracy returned to Los Angeles and the Beverly Hills Hotel on September 28, Hepburn was already settled in a house on nearby Beverly Grove and anxious to get Without Love before the cameras. “We actually are going to begin shooting next week,” she reported to Terry Helburn in a letter. “I feel as though I’d already made the darned thing four times.” The supporting cast, she went on, had been settled with Keenan Wynn, Lucille Ball (“she made a very good test”), Patricia Morison, Emily Perkins (her secretary and onetime dresser, appearing under the stage name of Massey), and Carl Esmond. The director, Harold Bucquet, was a veteran of Metro’s Dr. Kildare pictures and had, like Fred Zinnemann, made his bones in the short-subject department. Bucquet had replaced the tubercular Jack Conway on Dragon Seed, and Hepburn, in the midst of a grueling five-month shoot, took a liking to him. Soft-spoken and English by birth, Bucquet was inclined to stay out of the way, and one principal cast member, when later asked, could scarcely recall him.
“As always,” said Larry Weingarten, “Kate was into everything … People always said to me, ‘She’s trying to do everything.’ And my reply was, ‘The thing I’m afraid of, and you should be afraid of, is that she can do everything.’ Producer, director, cameraman! That’s what she was! Her idea of everything was always better than you could have ever envisioned.” Actress-singer Morison, as a seventeen-year-old drama student, had witnessed the filming of Hepburn’s New York screen test in 1932, but she didn’t formally meet the actress until her first day on the picture. Casually clad in white linen pants and matching shirt, Kate was obviously running the show, head-to-head with the director and the cameraman while Tracy retreated to the relative calm of his dressing room. Morison knew Tracy from a formal dinner party a few years earlier when, attending stag, he had graciously offered to drive her home.
“I remember we stopped at the top of Mulholland Drive—not for anything romantic, but because the view was so beautiful. He didn’t make a pass, which was unusual in those days. It was very refreshing.” Tracy, she recalled, was always cordial and charming to her on the set of Without Love, his relationship with Hepburn an open secret. “I think in the business it was common knowledge. I knew it.” Tracy was less cordial to the director, whom he seemed to regard as inept in matters of staging, and Hepburn went so far as to consult with George Stevens for a scene built entirely on physical comedy.
Sleeplessness had brought Tracy to the ragged edge of sanity, and neither booze nor medication could quell the demons within him. He tossed and heaved, his mind a tornado of shame and worry. “I didn’t believe that he did it,” Kate said years later, “and I lay on the floor of his room one night and watched him and he could not get to sleep … he twisted and he turned and it took him an hour and a half to quiet down at all.” On October 29 she sat on the set, the script serving as a desk, and wrote a long letter to Ellen