Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [336]
Unofficially branded as “pink,” Kate didn’t work at all that summer, and when Metro announced that she and Tracy would be teamed for another picture, Hedda Hopper took care to print a reader’s suggestion: “I hope Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn won’t be starred for the fifth time in Before the Sun Goes Down. Hepburn couldn’t stand being called ‘box-office poison’ twice.” It was then reported that Hepburn “had a real peeve on” because M-G-M gave the lead in B.F.’s Daughter to Barbara Stanwyck (who was presumably safer, politically, because she was known to be a Republican). Hepburn had, in fact, been idle nine months—people were reportedly throwing things at screens showing Song of Love—when Capra made the admittedly heated decision to let Colbert go her own way.
“What the hell happened?” asked Tracy as he took the director’s call. “Goddamn you, I’m going to report you to the Actors Guild.” Then he laughed: “You told that Frankie Froggie Colbert to go to hell, did you?”
Capra asked if he knew any actresses, any “friends” who weren’t working, and, as calculated as the question now seems, claimed to have absolutely no one in mind when Tracy responded, “The Madam! I’ve been rehearsing my part with her, she’s taking Colbert’s role, at home here.” Capra’s response: “My God, do you think she’d do it?” And Tracy’s reply: “I don’t know. She’s kind of nutty that way, about people being in trouble. She’s ‘theatre’ you know.”
Hepburn took the phone and, according to Capra, said, “Sure! What the hell? When do we start?” She then, as she later remembered it, called Colbert herself. “Claudette I knew,” she said, “and I called Claudette and I said, ‘You know, they’re just going to dump you and take me, because here I am and they’re paying me. And I don’t care what hours I work, and I think you’re wrong to say you have to quit.’ And she said, ‘Please, just do the part, because I …’ That’s how it happened.” Capra was amazed: “No contract, no talk of agents, money, billing—nothing. She worked day and night, all through the weekend, with the costume designer, Irene … I don’t know anybody in the business who wouldn’t have held us over a barrel for money—and we would have paid anything to save the picture.”
Colbert’s exit took place on a Friday, and Kate stepped into the role of Mary Matthews the following Monday, thus ending Spence’s moratorium on further Tracy-Hepburn pictures little more than a year after he first proclaimed it. The irony of Hepburn’s portrayal of the spurned wife with two children could not have been lost on those in the know, Lansbury’s Kay zeroing in on Grant in much the same way Hepburn had targeted Tracy. “We all knew,” Lansbury said, “but nobody ever said anything. In those days it wasn’t discussed. They were totally hand-in-glove, totally comfortable and unself-conscious about their relationship. She wasn’t the sort of woman that many men would be attracted to—the snugly, cuddly woman in the movies at that time. And yet because of her enormous affection and love for Spencer, she had the ability to subjugate this almost manly quality she had at times and become this wonderfully warm, irresistible woman.”
The first scene between Tracy and Hepburn was one in which the estranged couple must share a bedroom in Menjou’s “boarding house for political has-beens.” Lansbury has deliberately left her glasses on the nightstand. Mary finds them and starts transferring bedding to the floor, Grant protesting her apparent decision to sleep there until she crawls into the bed and leaves the boards to him. Dissolve to the two of them in semidarkness, Mary peering down at her estranged husband from atop the mattress, Grant pensively puffing a cigarette below. She wonders if she has lost him for good, asks him if he wants a divorce. He scratches the back of his neck thoughtfully, winces at the directness of