Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [335]
The quality of his cast was such that Capra effortlessly pulled ahead of schedule and was ready for Claudette Colbert a full week before her scheduled October 17 start date. The early call wasn’t a problem for Colbert, forty-four, but working after five o’clock was, the actress being so famously fastidious over the way she was photographed that she refused to show the right side of her face to the lens and reputedly knew more about staging and lighting than some of her cameramen. She had a brief confrontation with Capra in his office (“My doctor says I get too tired—”) and walked out on the picture when the director who guided her to her only Academy Award–winning performance refused to be limited to a seven-hour workday. “Oh my God!” blurted Sam Briskin, one of Capra’s partners. “Everybody’s on salary! Could cost us a fortune—”
Capra’s boldness came in part from the fact that he was several days ahead of schedule, but the replacement of Claudette Colbert with a star of equal magnitude was essential to keeping the picture on track. Briskin called L. B. Mayer, Eddie Mannix (who, according to Capra, cheered the decision), then Tracy himself, whose first reaction was to laugh. When the project first landed at M-G-M and Tracy was officially confirmed as its star, there was widespread speculation that Kate Hepburn would join the cast, since Colbert was presumed to have been left behind at Paramount. She was reported to have just arrived on the coast—this was March 18—to do a Screen Guild broadcast and prepare for Metro’s adaptation of the John P. Marquand novel B.F.’s Daughter, which was to be produced by Edwin Knopf.
Then something happened. In May, Hepburn garnered a lot of attention when she appeared at a rally for New Republic editor Henry Wallace at Los Angeles’ Gilmore Stadium. Wallace, the former vice president and future Progressive Party candidate for president, had been denied use of the Hollywood Bowl. At Gilmore, a venue arranged on short notice, he drew a crowd of 28,000, among them Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona, Edward G. Robinson, and Hedy Lamarr. Hepburn, dressed in a sweeping scarlet gown, struck out at the Thomas-Rankin committee investigating Hollywood in Congress and all but stole the show with fiery talk decrying an atmosphere of official intimidation toward the movie industry and the arts in general. “The artist since the beginning of time has always expressed the aspirations and dreams of his people,” she thundered. “Silence the artist and you have silenced the most articulate voice the people have.” She went on to denounce President Truman, Attorney General Tom Clark, and State Senator Jack B. Tenney, among others, as responsible for a “plot” to foist “thought control” on the “liberal and progressive people of America.”
“I was backstage because I had some involvement in the meeting,” Ring Lardner said, “and she seemed nervous just about speaking in public on politics, rather than nervous about endorsing Wallace … But she went ahead and made a very good speech.” Hepburn created such an indelible impression that the afternoon Hearst paper described a “scarlet robe, and it was plenty scarlet,” reflecting “in red” the “yogi’s [Wallace’s] philosophy.” George Stevens, who later positioned her politically as a “liberal New England conservative,” suggested her appearance that day was not so much out of support for Wallace or in service of Communist or socialist sympathies but simply because “she got mad when they wouldn’t let him use the Hollywood Bowl.” Hepburn herself always said that she was speaking against censorship, not particularly for Wallace, and that it was “the speech that almost ran me out of the business.” Nobody could remember exactly