Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [366]
Tracy’s muscle at the studio, meanwhile, had never been greater. With the enormous success of Father of the Bride, he was once again polling as one of the nation’s top stars, and Father’s Little Dividend, thanks to promotional tie-ins with Sunbeam Bread, Libby’s Baby Foods, Lux Soap, FTD, Lane Bryant, and others, was drawing on a par with the first picture in places like Buffalo, New Haven, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. He went to bat for his boyhood pal, landing Pat—whom he still called “Bill”—a featured part in The People Against O’Hara at $4,375 a week on an eight-week guarantee. “Spence had to put on a wild, desperate fight to secure the role for me,” O’Brien said, “even threatening to walk out unless I was signed.”
The two men lunched at the studio just five days after the deal was set, a pair of graying veterans in a picture full of youthful faces—Diana Lynn, William Campbell, James Arness, Richard Anderson. And when Tracy arrived in Manhattan for location work, Pat was there waiting for him, laid up with the flu like everyone else. “He wanted me to go out with him, but I just couldn’t raise my head. A little later, when he had gone out, I learned that the director and producer and some of the other players were also sick with the flu and that Spence had taken over the job of filming the background shots down at the fish market.”
Production resumed in Culver City on March 19. Tracy’s character, Jim Curtayne, was written as a recovering alcoholic whose drinking had derailed a successful career as a criminal defense attorney. It was a grim and uncomfortable job for a man of his particular history, and where Pat was his usual gregarious self, taking the younger actors under his wing and proffering nonstop advice and encouragement, Tracy kept to himself, insular in a way he had not been on either of his two previous pictures. That he was trying to quit smoking at the time made him edgier still, and the other members of the cast were told to extinguish their cigarettes whenever he came onto the stage.
“Anytime I saw him he was all business,” said James Arness, who had come to M-G-M to be in Dore Schary’s Battleground and was playing the young defendant, the title character in the picture. “No kidding around or having fun—anything like that. He would, as a matter of fact, be offstage most of the time … They would call him and he’d come in and any kind of light conversation going on came to a screeching halt.”
John Sturges made a practice of rehearsing every scene, a departure from the old Metro routine where even run-throughs were a sometime thing. “The thing I remember most about Spence,” he said, “is the pleasure I had watching a scene played for the first time come alive by this man.” Sturges, as Arness remembered it, would have the chairs arrayed in a semicircle. “Mr. Tracy would be in the middle of this semicircle and the director would sit facing us. He would come onstage, walk up, ‘good morning’ briefly, and then we’d sit down and read through the scene, rehearse, and then get up and go onto whatever set it was and do it on its feet.” Tracy was, as far as Arness could tell, devoid of any technique. “It wasn’t an actor—this was a real guy in a real courtroom and you were on the stand.”
As The People Against O’Hara worked its way toward completion, Katharine Hepburn left New York for London and the start of a new picture. Her world had been shaken by the death of her beloved mother just two weeks prior to her departure, and she had scarcely had a month’s rest since concluding her tour for the Theatre Guild. It had been four years since she had made a film apart from Tracy, and her unpopularity at the box office rivaled the days when she had been forced to buy herself out of her RKO contract. Producer Sam Spiegel induced