Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [337]
“The world thinks I’m a very successful man—rich, influential, happy,” he says. “You know better, don’t you Mary? You know that I’m neither happy nor successful … not as a man, a husband, or a father. You wanna know something else? I’m glad I’m down here on the floor. That’s where I belong …”
Tracy was energized, engaged on State of the Union, tearing into the part of Matthews with renewed vigor and imagination. Similarly, Hepburn brought a deft balance of humor and pathos to the role of Mary, taking up the slack even as Capra, beset by business worries, grew distracted and oddly unsure of himself. “When Tracy and his ‘bag of bones’ played a scene,” said Capra, “cameras, lights, microphones, and written scripts ceased to exist. And the director did just what the crews and other actors did—sit, watch, and marvel.” Angela Lansbury saw it as a spiritual melding of two supremely talented people: “Their personalities as well as their talents were orchestrated so marvelously. I began to think of them as one person, really; I suppose most people did.”
Scarcely a week into Hepburn’s tenure on the picture, the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities got under way in Washington with windy testimony from Jack Warner, L. B. Mayer, and the Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand. There followed a host of “friendly” film industry witnesses, the first of which, director Sam Wood, fingered Hepburn as having appeared at a recent meeting—apparently referring to the event at Gilmore Stadium—at which “Hollywood Communists” had raised $87,000. The next day, Adolphe Menjou, the first of the big-name actors to take the stand, seconded much of what Wood had said, stopping short of directly accusing specific people of being Communists, but noting that many “acted” like Communists, among them John Cromwell, Paul Robeson, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Henreid, and Alexander Knox.
State of the Union (1948). (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy disapproved—as did Gable—of marquee names muddling around in politics (“Remember, it was an actor who shot Lincoln”), but Hepburn had no such qualms and promptly aligned herself with the Committee for the First Amendment, an ad hoc organization of Hollywood heavyweights that included Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, Eddie Cantor, Myrna Loy, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Rita Hayworth, and director William Wyler. The cornerstone of their collective effort to combat the grandstanding of Chairman J. Parnell Thomas and the eight members of his committee (which included Congressman Richard M. Nixon) was a broadside that characterized the investigation as an attempt to “smear” the industry and called the hearings “morally wrong” because “any investigation into the political beliefs of the individual is contrary to the basic principles of our democracy; any attempt to curb freedom of expression and to set arbitrary standards of Americanism is in itself disloyal to both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution.”
Menjou, who had been cast as the hard-boiled Conover, Capra’s Washington kingmaker in State of the Union, was affiliated with the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a rival group of virulent anti-Communists and right-wingers that counted John Wayne, George Murphy, Walt Disney, Ward Bond, and director Leo McCarey among its more outspoken members. The dapper old character actor, who had first worked with Hepburn in 1933’s Morning Glory, was regarded as something akin to a ticking time bomb on the Capra set. “Scratch do-gooders like Hepburn,” he was once heard to say, “and they’ll yell Pravda!” To which Tracy countered: “You scratch some members of the Hepburn clan and you’re liable to get an assful of buckshot.” Tracy tolerated Menjou largely by ignoring him, while Kate found him merely ridiculous. The atmosphere on the stage was tense but cordial, everyone seemingly committed to bringing in the picture on time and, if possible, under budget.
“Bob Thomas worked for the AP and he always did good stories on the stars,” Emily Torchia recalled.
Not gush, but he never went after