Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [325]
Pan Berman inherited the project, Lighton having moved to Fox, and an early script by Vincent Lawrence and Earl Paramore was turned over to Marguerite Roberts, who had done some uncredited work on Undercurrent. As usual, Kate involved herself in the writing process, and while Roberts found Tracy “marvelous to work with,” she disliked Hepburn’s intrusions: “I had worked with Hepburn on another picture, Dragon Seed. She frankly wasn’t one of my favorite people. I admire her, and think she’s a very interesting person, but she’s a snob.” Roberts chafed at the film’s message, that the “nesters” settling the land would only ruin it when the rains failed to come and their crops dried up. “The Tracy character affected respect for the natural state of things, the undisturbed grass. He opposed the sodbusters, who wanted land. I had the Hepburn character note that his love for the natural state coincided with his becoming a millionaire off that very state. In other words, was his attachment mystical or opportunistic? [Director Elia] Kazan would have none of my viewpoint, only Tracy’s.”
Kazan learned of Richter’s book while directing his first feature, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, under Lighton’s supervision at Fox. In New York, where he made his name staging The Skin of Our Teeth, Kazan had directed Dunnigan’s Daughter for the Theatre Guild and made an immediate impression on Lawrence Langner, who in turn commended him to Tracy and Hepburn. Assured a $2.5 million budget and an all-star cast, Kazan had visions of creating an epic American western after the fashion of John Ford. “It is,” he told the New York Times, “a fascinating and unusual love story with a psychological tinge.” The Times went on to report that the studio considered The Sea of Grass its most imposing “physical” production of the year, allocating nearly five months to production, while shooting some forty thousand feet of background footage and second-unit work on the plains of western Nebraska.
Tracy was carried a full sixteen weeks before starting the picture on May 27, 1946. He filled the time getting his affairs in order, having earned substantially less in 1945 than in any year since the mid-thirties. Carroll had proven useless as a business manager, and when Peggy Gough went to Belgium with the American Red Cross, Tracy turned his affairs over to her replacement, a tall, raven-haired paralegal named Dorothy Griffith. “Miss G.,” as she soon came to be known around the studio, had come to him through Frank Whitbeck, the salty West Coast promotions guru who had informally advised him for years. “Spencer was very bad at negotiating contracts or pictures to go in or stay out of,” said Robert M. W. Vogel, who managed the studio’s international operations, “and Whitbeck befriended him and was more or less his representative.”
Although he considered investments from time to time, Tracy hadn’t actually put money into anything other than annuities. He could never fully comprehend or justify the vast sums he was paid, and while he was openhanded about luxuries, he seemed most comfortable at the prospect of giving it all away. “I think I’m a pretty good businessman,” he once said, “but I haven’t got any consuming ambition to possess a lot of money. I’m one of those who believes that you can only sleep in one bed at a time, ride one horse, eat one meal, wear one suit of clothes.”
His attitude toward wealth made him an easy touch, and a complete stranger with a compelling story could easily walk away with fifty or a hundred dollars, often over Carroll’s strenuous objections. Once, Carroll remembered a petitioner who claimed he had worked for their late father in Milwaukee. He made some phone calls, asked some questions, became convinced the man was a phony, and told his brother as much. “Well, maybe there’s just a chance he did,” Spence said. “And if there’s any chance, I want