Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [354]
The father was, in the opinion of Alathena Smith, at the root of Louise’s coolness. She was, as Dr. Smith put it, a “blood-red bleeding heart locked into a blue block of ice,” for she had been hurt by a man before Spence. “Don’t blame this on deafness,” she warned Jane Ardmore, who was planning a book on Louise and the clinic. “She adored her father and her father left her mother.” The memory of loss, the aversion to pain, held Louise at an emotional distance from even those closest to her. She got around it by giving herself to the work of the clinic and to young parents who reminded her of Spence and herself when they were confused and scared and unsure of what to do. “She shows it in the kindness in her letters,” said Dr. Smith in 1972. “She’ll spend 45 minutes on a paragraph to help some mother … She puts no limits on the help that I give to parents.”
Louise was still invisible to much of the film colony, a solitary figure at her husband’s previews, sometimes with John but just as often completely alone. “Occasionally we sat near her at some of the Tracy-Hepburn previews,” said screenwriter Lenore Coffee, “and she had the air of an interested member of the audience; of course, no one knew her by sight.” In the November 1949 issue of Modern Screen, Louise was featured in an article by Hedda Hopper, who made no secret of her dislike for Katharine Hepburn. Its title: “Hollywood’s Forgotten Wives.”
Hepburn, meanwhile, was slowly tightening her grip on Tracy, moving him away from Leo Morrison and into the hands of Bert Allenberg, who was now managing her own affairs at the William Morris Agency. Morrison was stunned when the process began, first by the appointment of Ross Evans as Tracy’s interim representative in August 1949, then by the formal request for a letter of termination at the end of the calendar year. Once payment in full had been acknowledged for all outstanding claims, Tracy gave his agent of twenty years a bonus “in appreciation of past services” even as he continued to duck his calls.
Kate also disliked Spence’s ongoing residency at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where managing partner Hernando Courtright allowed him to live rent-free in exchange for being seen regularly in the Polo Lounge, where he sat quietly sipping tea in the late afternoon and signing autographs for the guests. He hated being put on display and had to be goaded by his secretary into doing it, but the simplicity of hotel life suited him. (“I’ve always liked to live in small places,” he once said, “because I live a small life.”) The arrangement horrified Hepburn, who began looking around for quarters where he could be content and cared for, and yet shielded from the public.
If, as Tracy sometimes said, acting was reacting, then no role could possibly have afforded him a better showcase than that of Stanley T. Banks, the hapless hero of Father of the Bride. The book was by Edward Streeter, a New York banking executive who, in a former life, had been a war correspondent and travel writer. Streeter’s infrequent works, starting with 1919’s Dere Mabel, distinguished him as a chronicler of the put-upon everyman, a wryly observant Boswell of human nature. When Father made the rounds in manuscript form, it was snapped up by the Book-of-the-Month Club, then by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which paid $100,000 for the film rights. As soon as word of the purchase got out, comedian Jack Benny cornered Dore Schary at a party and said that he wanted to play Banks. According to Pan Berman, who had responsibility for the project, Schary said, “Great, marvelous, we’d love to have you, you’ve got it.” And then he dropped his fait accompli in Berman’s lap.
“ ‘Dore,’ I said, ‘Jack Benny is a wonderful personality, but he simply won’t do. I know we don’t even have to ask [Vincente] Minnelli, but if you want to …’ ” Minnelli had directed Madame Bovary under Berman’s supervision and liked the idea of following it with a comedy.
We did test Jack Benny and he made a valiant effort, but it was terrible because it wasn’t