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By Root 3921 0

Surles, yet it was Kate’s appearance, hair upswept, in a long red evening wrap, that set the most necks craning. She attended with her friend Laura Harding, the American Express heiress, and when the curtain went up, she could plainly see that Spence was nervous. “Now he was never nervous,” she said. “Never nervous. And the thing hadn’t been going too well, and I thought, ‘Oh dear, is he going to sort of … take that road?’ And Laura Harding said to me, ‘Is he nervous?’ And, of course, I said, ‘Oh, no, of course he’s not nervous.’ But he finally overcame it. But when you are aware that the material that you’re playing is not of great interest to an audience, it’s tough sometimes to keep from being nervous.”

All the reservations Tracy had about his own capabilities—voice, technique, mastering an ever-changing part—proved to be completely without merit. Kate, in a letter to M-G-M makeup artist Emil Levigne, described his performance as brilliant: “[H]e really delivers the goods—easy, funny & moving—& I think the audience is positively bewildered by his naturalness—& he can be heard in the very last row—I know this because my usual spot is standing in the back …” Irene Selznick, escorted that evening by New York Post publisher George Backer, did not expect to see Tracy in the Sherwoods’ suite after the opening, but she took the absence of Garson Kanin as an ominous sign. “Curiously,” she wrote, “there seemed to be a party going on; several of Bob’s friends, Washington celebrities of that period, were on hand—all very interesting, except that nothing constructive was happening. The play had problems, but not anything that couldn’t be solved, and I thought it had a great chance.” She watched as Anderson, Rice, and designer Jo Mielziner waited to confer—“twiddling their thumbs”—and Sherwood, all aglow, drifted into a spirited rendition of “Red, Red Robin”—a sure sign that nothing substantive would get discussed that evening.

Tracy fell ill with grippe in Washington, alternately dripping with sweat and then trembling with chills, knowing the first performance he missed, however sick he might legitimately be, would be laid to booze. Loading up on sulfa drugs, he struggled to the theater eight times a week, vomiting in the wings and, in Kate’s words, looking back on his life at Metro “as a paradise which he didn’t appreciate.”

The show limped into Boston, where the Hub critics laid it out extravagantly. Louise trained up from New York and was dismayed by what she saw. “It didn’t amount to anything,” she said. “He didn’t want to stay there. He always said, ‘Should I get out of it?’ It wasn’t up to what he had hoped, and he just wanted to get back.” Kate, of course, was in Boston as well, and it was her constant bucking up that kept him with the show, even when it was apparent that Sherwood wouldn’t be able to fix the play’s most fundamental faults. At the hotel, the author and his partners spent four hours trying to talk Tracy out of quitting; Sam Zolotow reported in the New York Times that he would be leaving the show on October 27, causing the vigorous advance sale in New York to come to a dead halt. Through Carroll, Tracy told Victor Samrock that he would stay with the play only if he could give a two-week notice at any time during its Broadway run, and Samrock, desperate to get the show into New York at any cost, had little choice but to agree. On October 22, his stamina gone, Tracy wired Samrock:

TWO WEEKS CONTRACT SATISFACTORY. OPENING NEW YORK NOVEMBER 10TH.

After nearly four months of back-and-forth, he had finally signed his Equity contract.

On the morning the show moved into New York, Garson Kanin came across Hepburn scrubbing the bathroom floor in the star dressing room. He wrote: “In the ten days prior to the New York opening all the important working relationships had deteriorated. Spencer was tense and unbending, could not, or would not take direction, which amounted to the same thing.” With a Life magazine cover story pending that would focus national attention on the show, Tracy approached the New York opening