Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [349]
The company spent two solid weeks on the courtroom set on which the Bonners’ battle of wits takes place, the principal cast, excepting Wayne, gathered together under Cukor’s watchful eye. Tracy was in his element, comfortable, in full command of the character and not particularly interested in the few things Cukor had to say to him. “Sometimes he would just say, ‘Yes, George,’ ” as Marvin Kaplan remembered it. “I don’t think he liked to be directed. But at the end of the day, when everyone else was tired, Hepburn could wrap her legs, her whole body, around this pole in the courtroom and watch and absorb like a sponge exactly what Mr. Cukor wanted her to do in the next day’s shooting.” Tracy would watch quietly, a mildly skeptical look on his face. “I don’t think he was one for working out a lot of stuff,” Hepburn said. “I think he knew it, then he was it.”
On the day actress Hope Emerson—six feet two and 240 pounds—was to hoist him into the air (in support of Amanda’s contention that “woman can be quite the equal of man in any and all fields”), Tracy was particularly boisterous, recalling the specialty acts and the tumblers he had seen in vaudeville as a kid.
“Hope Emerson was a very sweet woman who was not half as strong as she looked,” said Kaplan. “Tracy was attached by wires, so he could sit in the air and it would look like she was holding him.” Emerson was posed grasping Tracy’s left foot, her enormous right hand supporting his rump like a bicycle seat. “He said such terrible things to her during the take— ‘Watch it! Watch it! What are you doing down there?’ The woman started to blush and then she put her hand down, and there he was left hanging in the middle of the air with no support whatsoever.”
Edward, My Son had its New York opening during the making of Adam’s Rib, and Tracy, as he had feared, took a drubbing from critics familiar with the wit and precision of Robert Morley’s performance (which had just closed on Broadway). Bosley Crowther lamented the play had been “drained of its most trenchant poison” in its transfer to the screen, the “plainly un-British Spencer Tracy” acting the principal role. “Apart from the hopeless miscasting of Mr. Tracy,” the New Yorker added, “the picture is fortunate in its acting.” Morley himself thought the criticism unfair in that Tracy had been slammed for playing it too straight. “I’m not sure there was much alternative,” the actor said in his autobiography. “When some years later I did it myself on television in the States, it was not very successful. It was much easier to play on the stage with scenery than it was to act in the more realistic settings which are necessary on the screen. A great deal of its initial success depended, too, on my speaking direct to the audience, and this device loses its spontaneity when attempted in the cinema.”
Edward, My Son performed acceptably in New York, but with overhead loaded into its already inflated cost, the film became Tracy’s biggest money-loser at M-G-M, and his first since Northwest Passage. His star was plainly fading, his future well and firmly fixed on a return to the stage. With the kids now grown and the clinic no longer dependent solely on his support for its survival, he seemed more comfortable with the natural arc of an actor’s career, the inevitable easing into mature roles, the passing of the commercial mantle to a younger generation. Upon his arrival in England, fully aware that he was being led to the slaughter, he had noted that he had made “nearly 40 films” since 1930. (The number was actually forty-five.) “No matter what anyone says, I have been bad in about 30 of them. The fault has been my own.”
Then he smiled, stuck out his jaw as if inviting somebody to take a poke at it, and strolled off, seemingly comfortable, at least for the moment, in his own skin.
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1 The agreement between the Motion Picture Association of America and the British government, which went into effect June 14, 1948, limited remittances to the United States to $17 million a year, plus an amount