Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [327]
I would take my leave with a “Very well, but he has—” whatever I thought he had, and more often than not, before the day ended, I would receive a call from Larry Keethe to come to the set. Mr. Tracy would have a few matters he wished attended to, and quite often it would end with, “Tell your newest protégé to see the assistant.” Which meant he had been unable to resist reaching out a hand to an aspiring actor or actress who deserved a chance.
As the start date for The Sea of Grass approached, Tracy’s indifference to the project became more pronounced. He had returned to M-G-M a heavier and older version of his former self, and where Louella Parsons could insist in her column that he had become “very handsome since his hair started turning gray,” all he could see in the mirror was a character man who, at forty-five years of age, looked a good ten years older. Having briefly met Tracy the previous year, Elia Kazan was anxious about “the lard around his middle.” Seeing the picture as a dust-blown backcountry story, he imagined its characters as lean and leathery, as wedded to the land as the cattle they grazed. His heart sank when he joined Tracy on Lot 4 to inspect two overfed geldings and choose one for him to ride in the picture: “He had not lost weight, he did not look like a Remington, he was not tight-waisted like the wranglers or even like Bud Lighton. Spencer looked … like the horses.”
Kazan knew he’d been sandbagged when he was asked to approve sketches for costumes that had already been fitted. Berman liked them, he was told, and there was a considerable move on to get the film into production. Hepburn alone had some twenty changes. “Looks to me,” said Kazan, “that every time she goes in to take a piss, she’ll come bouncing out of the can in a snazzy new outfit.” Designer Walter Plunkett, who had been dressing her since Christopher Strong, patiently explained: “She loves Spence, he’s the love of her life, and she wants him to think that on any given day she’s prettier than any other girl in the world.”
“I thought you meant in the movie,” Kazan said.
“The movie!” Plunkett erupted. “I’m talking about real life. Them! Is what matters!”
Soon Tracy had Kazan laughing at stories of how they did things at Metro, the attitudes of the producers in charge, the workings of the clattering assembly line that ground out the product. “At lunch,” Tracy related, “Mervyn LeRoy was raving about a book he’d bought. ‘It’s got everything,’ he said. ‘Surprise, great characters, an important theme, fine writing! But,’ he said, ‘I think we can lick it.’ Honest. That’s what he said!” And Kazan, spiritually, threw in the towel. “We both laughed and we were buddies, he and I, I his admirer, he my star, and I had no fight left in me. Friendship had defeated me.”
Undercurrent finished in early May, and Hepburn made a quick trip east to see her parents. Tracy stationed himself in Phoenix, where he occasionally went to paint for “occupational therapy”—dark, brooding desert landscapes, abstract to the point of being more about color and mood than representation, “just putting paint on cardboard,” as Louise characterized it, but producing, over the space of a few years, several paintings that were, in her judgment, “very unusual and very good.” Fanny Brice had gotten him started, sensing “a nervous time” and sending over a whole outfit—paint, oil, brushes, palette. Though he dismissed what he did as “daubing,” he was downright jovial by the time he got down to work on The Sea of Grass, explaining to Earl Wilson that he was just a supporting player in the picture and that Kate was the true star. “You want to come out and watch Her Highness? It’ll be very educational.”
On the set, Wilson observed Hepburn in slacks, a towel around her head, congenial at first, less so as she realized he wasn’t going to leave. (“Oh, are you still here?” she said after a costume change. “I thought we’d be able to avoid you.”) Tracy knew the press irritated her, and it amused him when he could get people like Wilson to linger. “I did a scene that will revolutionize