Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [370]
Schary, who had hoped to get the film under way sometime over the summer of 1951, apologized for unnecessarily bringing Tracy home from Europe and offered to send him back at the company’s expense—officially for conferences with the Kanins, unofficially to be with Kate, who had just arrived back in London from Africa and was looking at several weeks of interiors before finishing The African Queen. The People Against O’Hara was previewed on the night of July 20, and Tracy was off the next morning for New York, pulling into town in the midst of a seasonal heat wave.
While in Europe, Tracy spent the company’s money lavishly, covering most meals and car expenses to the tune of nearly $7,000—only about 30 percent of which could legitimately be charged to the continuity of Pat and Mike. He shopped for the family, did some interviews, went to Mass at Notre Dame. Kate came over from London on August 4 and they saw a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition together, dining at the Coq D’Hardi that evening and kicking the story around with its authors. “I keep remembering seeing her in Paris with Spencer,” said Lauren Bacall, who was there over the Bank Holiday with her husband Humphrey Bogart and John Huston. “She was wearing a dress. Spencer refused to take her out unless she wore a dress. She wore one of the two dresses that she owned and she was glowing, brimming over with joy.”
Garson Kanin found the inspiration for Pat and Mike while watching a tennis lesson given Hepburn one day by four-time Wimbledon champion Bill Tilden. “She plays tennis like an actress,” Kanin observed, “with a great sense of form and style.” Her part of a “lady athlete” evolved quickly, followed a short time later by an amalgam of all the Lindy sports promoters he had ever known—the Tracy side of the equation. But while the title characters sprang forth fully formed, the plotting of the thing gave the authors fits. They darkened the husband’s character, put Mike at the center of a scheme to throw a game, and had him falling desperately in love with Pat halfway through the story. No good; the relationships were all wrong.
Hepburn’s input was sharp and detailed; Tracy’s was more tempered and generalized. The material, Kate remembered, was “very intimately discussed between us all, which I think was an enormous help to everyone concerned. It was very ‘ensemble’ in spirit. And things we didn’t like, or which irritated one, or you didn’t understand, you were able to state it, which one doesn’t always get an opportunity to do in this business. It was not just friendship, but an artistic collaboration.” In the space of a few hours, they began to move the story toward the form it would eventually take.
Kate had to fly back to London on the sixth, leaving Tracy to a city shimmering with neon and light rain. It was a place he could only truly enjoy at sunrise and sunset, when he could go out in public and was less likely to be recognized. He and Ruth discussed Years Ago—she was writing the screenplay—and one night he was coaxed out of his room and his daily routine for a walk along the Champs-Élysées, a stroll that ended abruptly with a ringside table at the Lido. He appeared to be enjoying himself, a Coke conspicuously at hand, when a band of American acrobats pulled him up onto the stage and proceeded to make him part of a human pyramid. He was furious, reducing the check to confetti and threatening the manager with a bill from the William Morris Agency. Flash photos had been taken, and