Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [313]
Discharged on May 19, Tracy was still unable to sleep very much, but he was finally free of the symptoms of alcoholism. He made his way back to Los Angeles, where Kate was waiting for him and where her own Pacific tour was subsequently canceled because of “ill health.” The events of the preceding three months had badly shaken them both, and now Tracy would be entering a period of unprecedented sobriety.
Producer Arthur Hopkins, who directed both Tracy and Hepburn in their Broadway debuts, had monitored the situation and kept in close touch with Kate in California. “Spence,” he wrote her,
is finding his way out … Spence, in his meditations, will learn discrimination. He will recognize the enemy and reject him. This is not a struggle, for struggle gives the adversary strength. It is not Will Power or Resolution. It is realization of God’s presence and God’s desire to strengthen us and make us useful to Him. You too, Kate, in strengthening Spence, strengthen yourself. Faith increases as you draw upon it. It is the accumulation of that [which] vanishes when not drawn upon.
Above all, Spence must learn that a sense of shame is vanity and is an affront to God … when we pray, it is God who is praying with us. He wants us to understand and be free. Spence is learning this, and you and I with him.
By 1945 Robert Emmet Sherwood was widely regarded as the dean of American dramatists, a man whose death was likened by Maxwell Anderson to “the removal of a major planet from a solar system.” The author of such varied fare as The Road to Rome, Waterloo Bridge, Idiot’s Delight, and Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Sherwood had enjoyed a string of critical and commercial hits stretching back to the 1920s. At the time he proposed to write a play for Spencer Tracy, he held three Pulitzers for drama—one for each of his previous three plays. In the uncertain business of the American commercial theater in the days immediately following the Second World War, there was nothing more prestigious—nor closer to a sure thing—than a new play from the redoubtable R.E.S.
Tracy, of course, had attracted plenty of feelers from Broadway, most notably from Kate’s friends at the Theatre Guild, who took his interest in The Devil’s Disciple as a firm commitment and eagerly announced it to the press in August 1941. Paul Osborn put up an original on the basis of Tracy’s praise for Madame Curie, and Oscar Serlin reportedly offered Metro “a terrific amount of money” to lend Tracy for his production of The Moon Is Down, which combined the talents of John Steinbeck and director Chet Erskine. By late 1943 the Guild’s Lawrence Langner was sweetening the pitch by suggesting plays that would accommodate both Tracy and Hepburn, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and Marco Millions being his top choices. So convinced was Langner that Tracy and O’Neill would make a powerhouse combination, he tried arranging for Tracy to travel to Contra Costa, rationing notwithstanding, to meet the famously reclusive playwright. At the time, however, Tao House was in the grip of a flu epidemic and hospitable to no one.
In a subsequent letter to Langner, O’Neill thought The Great God Brown “a good bet” for Tracy but warned against Strange Interlude (“Nina’s play—always has been”) and Marco Millions, which he wasn’t keen on seeing revived. “My best bet for Tracy would be Lazarus Laughed,” O’Neill wrote. “Now give heed to this and re-read it carefully in the light of what that play has to say today. ‘Die exultantly that life may live,’ etc. ‘There is no death’ (spiritually) etc. Also think of the light thrown on different facets of the psychology of dictators in Tiberius and Caligula. Hitler doing his little dance of triumph after the fall of France is very like my Caligula.”
Though Tracy was genuinely thrilled with the substance of O’Neill’s letter, he read Lazarus, with its masked chorus and its Greek pretensions, and frankly admitted he did not understand it. Kate didn’t either, wasn’t much on Strange Interlude, and didn’t know Marco Millions at all. When queried, Langner said that