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its New York debut. State of the Union was the first new play in three years from the team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and only the second to follow Life With Father, the phenomenal Broadway stage hit that was still playing to capacity houses six years into its run. A sharp topical satire, State of the Union followed the presidential aspirations of one Grant Matthews, an idealistic and self-made industrialist who proves too wayward a candidate ever to win an election. Caught between a wife, a mistress, and a perceived duty to the nation, Matthews ultimately decides the price of public office is too great to suit his iconoclastic nature. As a commentary on the public mind-set of postwar America, it was everything The Rugged Path was not—slick, funny, popular with both critics and the public, and the winner of the 1945–46 Pulitzer Prize for drama. If Tracy ever peered around the corner from the stage entrance of the Plymouth Theatre and envied his friend Ralph Bellamy the jackpot he had so decidedly hit with the part of Matthews, he never let on, other than to openly covet the movie role when the rights were sold to Paramount in May 1946.

The playwrights were powerful enough to insert casting approval into their contract with the studio, and when first Gary Cooper, then Ray Milland proved out of reach, the property passed to Liberty Films, Inc., and the most ideal of all American directors to tackle the subject—the inestimable Frank Capra. Tracy campaigned for the part, and within a month of Capra’s involvement he was considered a lock, even as Liberty continued to dicker with M-G-M. “I’m getting old,” Tracy explained laconically, “and I’ve never done a picture with Capra.” Predictably, the sticking point became the price Metro would exact for the loan of one of its most valuable stars. As when Clark Gable was borrowed by Selznick for Gone With the Wind, the studio demanded the distribution rights to the picture in addition to a fee of $175,000. For its part, Paramount contributed the play and the services of Claudette Colbert. The net result from Tracy’s standpoint was the best role, the best material, and the best director he had had in years.

At first it was thought Cass Timberlane would be delayed in favor of State of the Union, but with Tracy on board, Capra undertook a complete rewrite of the script to strengthen the character of Matthews, who would no longer vacillate under the competing influences of the play’s supporting characters. The final shape of the picture owed as much to circumstance as design, Tracy’s own involvement, however ideal, being the direct result of the playwrights’ inability to deliver Gary Cooper and Paramount’s subsequent willingness to surrender the property. The secondary part of the wisecracking columnist Spike McManus, first assigned Robert Walker, went to Van Johnson when Walker fell ill, Johnson, Angela Lansbury, and Lewis Stone all being M-G-M contract players. Shooting commenced on September 29, 1947, so the film could be in theaters well before the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1948—a contractual stipulation as well as a commercial imperative. The only non-M-G-M personnel in the cast would be Adolphe Menjou and the aforementioned Colbert, who would be appearing opposite Tracy for the first time since Boom Town.

Tracy ordered six new suits for the picture—three predictably gray, three blue. (“Spence owns plenty of suits,” Larry Keethe observed, “but you can take my word there’s not one suit among them that isn’t blue, gray, or brown.”) The first days of production were given over to introductory scenes with Kay Thorndyke, the conniving daughter of old Sam Thorndyke, a dying newspaper baron, and McManus, their star employee.

Tracy joined the shoot on October 8, playing the first of several intimate scenes with twenty-one-year-old Angela Lansbury, an awkward circumstance given the nature of the role and Lansbury’s extreme youth. “We had a very tricky scene to play in which I was his mistress,” she remembered. “Spence understood that I was a very young woman who had