Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [315]
Hepburn, who was convinced now more than ever that the best thing for Tracy would be, as their friend Constance Collier put it, to “find release from celluloid fetters,” declared she was going to see him through this thing and passed on the chance to play Isabel Bradley in George Cukor’s proposed filming of The Razor’s Edge. Tracy tried dissuading her from turning the picture down, saying that he really only needed her for the last week of rehearsals and maybe the week of the actual opening, but to no avail. She had, by this point, convinced herself that she was absolutely essential to Spence’s well-being, both personal and professional, and that he was incapable of managing the task without her.
When he heard the wartime limits on gasoline had been lifted, Tracy decided to motor east with Carroll, leaving Kate in California to further contemplate her decision. The men had so much tire trouble the first two hundred miles, they reconsidered, turned around, and set off again via rail, Hepburn, this time, accompanying them.
The train was booked solid and it was no secret who was on board. (Lawrence Tibbett, the acclaimed baritone of the Metropolitan Opera, was also a passenger.) At Freeport the boys visited with family—their uncle Andrew, aunt Mum, Jennie’s daughter Jane, who was working at the USO in Savanna, and Kathleen and Henry Willits, who came over from Dubuque. They took a private dining room in the nearby village of Cedarville and had an elaborate family dinner, Spence talking freely of the work ahead. “I don’t know whether this is going to work or not,” he confided. “In the first place, I don’t know if I’ve got the voice for it. I haven’t been on the stage for years and years and I don’t know if I’ll make it. But I feel I want to try it.” The woman who ran the kitchen had brought a couple of teenage girls in to help with the serving. “This little girl was just shaking,” Jane Feely recalled. “The movie star! She was passing the plates around, and Uncle Andrew said, ‘This is Mary Lou Whatever.’ And she said, ‘How do you do … Do you know Van Johnson?’ Oh, Spencer loved that. He said, ‘Yes, I do. What’s your name? I’ll get you an autographed picture of Van Johnson. Carroll, see to it.’ ”
In New York he had an escape clause inserted into his contract, giving him an out during the first three weeks of performances and another during the New York run of the play. He had, he explained, full confidence in Sherwood’s work; it was the lead actor who gave him pause. Could he still manage the sustained concentration he’d need to carry a play? Could he achieve the same level of purity he had learned to put forth on film? “Once,” Kate remembered, “I asked Spencer some such foolish question like, ‘How did you like my play acting?’ and he stared at me for a moment and said, ‘That’s the strangest remark I ever heard. What is play acting? Do you mean the tricks some people pull on stage? If that’s supposed to be acting, I don’t like it.’ ”
Rehearsals for The Rugged Path commenced on the stage of the Barrymore Theatre on September 3, 1945. Johnny, in the hospital, had a telegram from his father the next day:
EVERYTHING WENT WELL EXCEPT I AM SCARED.
In Morey Vinion, Sherwood had fashioned a character as fitted to Tracy as a second skin—a career journalist, outwardly happy yet inwardly brooding and dissatisfied in his role as the “embattled liberal” in an otherwise conservative newspaper. “He’s never been really happy,” his wife admits. “Well—not since the first few months, and I sometimes wonder about how he really felt even then. When he got down to work in Europe, he began to take everything to heart as though he were personally involved, instead of just being an American reporter.”
She asks him: “Do you want to get out of here, Morey?” And he tells her no, he doesn’t, that he just wants to “stay put” for a change. “I