Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [360]
She was back in California when Father of the Bride was released nationally on the sixteenth. Already in the midst of a six-week engagement at the Radio City Music Hall, the film surpassed any of Tracy’s previous features, bringing in more than $6 million in worldwide rentals and showing a profit of nearly $3 million on a cost of $1.2 million. From New York, where he had witnessed an advance screening on May 2, Edward Streeter wrote Tracy: “No one who ever sees the picture will be a more severe critic than I was last night in view of the fact that you were portraying ME. All I can say is that you have given me much to live up to, although it is more or less wasted in one sense of the word as I have no more daughters to marry off.”
Tracy replied:
It is utterly impossible for me to express to you the pleasure your letter has given me. The fact that I admired your book so much has a great deal to do with this, plus, I suppose, the fact that this is the first time an author of a book in which I was part of the so-called movie version has ever written me except to warn me that it might be in my best interests to avoid him. Sinclair Lewis, whom I knew well enough to call “Red,” has not spoken to me since the “version” of Cass Timberlane, and Kenneth Roberts, whose Northwest Passage I thought we did a pretty fair job [on], I understand has gone so far as to threaten bodily harm if I so much as entered the state of Maine. Since I had heard that you did not particularly like the script, I was doubly pleased to get your favorable reaction. Had I known this, I should certainly have called upon you last week when I was in New York, and now that I know you are not armed, I shall do so on my next visit.
The picture’s notices were wildly favorable, coming as they did just six months after a similar embrace for Adam’s Rib. (As Variety noted, “It’s the second strong comedy in a row for Spencer Tracy, doing the title role, and he socks it.”) Terms like “glamour-packed,” “rich in comic invention,” and “charming and refreshing” littered the reviews. Bosley Crowther used the first paragraph of his notice in the Times to heap praise on the book and then went on to say the movie was “equally wonderful … Mr. Tracy conducts himself with precisely the air of self-importance that a bride’s father likes to think he has, coupled with the mingled indignation and frustration that he is sure to acquire. Further, he has a capacity to show that warmth and tenderness toward his own which flavors with universal poignance the irony of the joke on him. As a father, torn by jealousy, devotion, pride, and righteous wrath, Mr. Tracy is tops.”
The pressure to do a sequel only increased with the film’s commercial success, but given that Tracy’s only experience with sequels had been the execrable Men of Boys Town, he resisted the idea. “Tracy didn’t want to do the second picture,” Pan Berman remembered. “What actor wants to do it again? I hated the sequel. I didn’t want to do it, but knew money. You know the sequel isn’t going to do as well.” According to Minnelli, it was Hepburn who stepped in once again, perhaps as a favor, as Berman believed, for either Benny Thau or L. B. Mayer. “In her practical way, she convinced Spencer that he owed it to the studio to do the film. Movies were a business, after all, and the first picture had been such a huge success that this one couldn’t fail either.”
A draft screenplay was completed in April, but Tracy held out until plans for Father’s Little Dividend collided with Minnelli’s next project, an elaborate musical based on the works of George and Ira Gershwin titled An American in Paris. Tracy went east on September 2, joining Kate as she began rehearsals for the national touring company of As You Like It, declaring he would take the rest of the month off before starting the new picture. On the thirteenth he received a telegram from Pan Berman confirming an official start date of October 9. “Am very happy,” Berman wrote,