Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [371]
Tracy and the Kanins dined at Maxim’s one night toward the end of his stay, and the party of five included actress Gene Tierney, who was in the process of divorcing her husband of ten years, the French-born fashion designer Oleg Cassini. Tracy seemed uncommonly interested in the green-eyed beauty, who had been in pictures since 1940 and spoke French like a native. Having made a film on the Argentine pampas that previous winter, Tierney said something to the effect that she was eager to work again in the comfort of an American studio.
Tracy rose to the bait with the subject of Plymouth Adventure: “He asked me if I were interested in doing the role [of Dorothy Bradford],” Tierney said, “and that led to the commitment.” Two nights later, Tracy and the Kanins were back again, this time with Tierney alone completing a foursome.
“Pat and Mike with George Cukor was an agony to me,” Katharine Hepburn admitted. “He kept saying, ‘Sink the putt, Kate.’ Well, the putt was thirty feet on a sloping green. ‘Sink it. Sink it.’ And Babe Didrikson was in that picture, and she finally taught me how to sink that putt. When I sank that putt, I really just jumped up and down for joy. But George never realized how difficult anything was. At all. He was the funniest director in the world to have direct that picture.”
Tracy unwillingly joined a band of American acrobats onstage at the Lido in Paris. He later claimed to have destroyed all the photographic evidence, but this shot survived. (SUSIE TRACY)
Cukor was, of course, on the show because he had directed all the previous films the Kanins had written—three so far. He knew nothing of sports, had no interest in such matters, but thought of such a deficiency as a positive. “Too many pictures dealing with golf have been approached from the expert’s point of view,” he reasoned. “Nine hundred and sixty-five out of 1,000 moviegoers don’t know anything about the fine points of the game either. Therefore, if I can stage a golf match in a way that will interest me, then I’m pretty sure it will also look good to those 965.”
The screenplay revision of October 5 recast Pat as a basketball coach at Southern Tech, engaged to Alan Fletcher, who also works at the school. She enters a golf tournament, but her confidence in herself is undermined by Alan’s presence in the gallery. Mike sees her, gives her his card, and the script begins to crackle. Accompanied by the Kanins, Hepburn arrived in Los Angeles on October 10 so that talks with Cukor could begin. “Spencer,” she said, “never used to join those conferences we had, George and Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon—who wrote the scripts. We’d meet on the weekends, and Spencer would make a general comment on what he’d heard. During the reading of Pat and Mike, Spencer sat in a corner of the room when we had a reading of the script one night at George’s house.”
Tracy had already absorbed the words—which were not always easy to say in Mike’s particular brand of “left-handed English”—and the character had been rolling around his mind since those conferences in Paris. Gradually, he had worked out a manner of speaking, a way of seeing things that brought the character to life, a minor-league sporting man “far more real and complex” than the person the screenwriters had imagined. “Spencer,” said Cukor, “put his glasses on—we thought he would simply read the words—but suddenly he had departed and instead there appeared in his place this crude prizefighting manager of Pat and Mike. There was no sign of the Spencer Tracy we’d just seen there a minute before.”
In time, Pat Pemberton became