Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [373]
The early material didn’t involve Tracy at all, and his character didn’t make his appearance until the second reel—long after the picture had been established in the audience’s collective mind as Hepburn’s. But where in the past she might already have started to grate on the crowd, her aloofness and self-assurance putting them on edge, she showed a winning vulnerability in Pat and Mike that was unlike anything else in her catalog. It comes as no surprise when she declines to throw a tournament at Mike’s not-so-subtle suggestion. (“You see her face? A real honest face. The only disgustin’ thing about her.”) And she’s plainly chagrined when she falters in the final moments of her match with Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
Tracy played with the cadences of the dialogue, the words having been arranged as they might form in the mind of a person like Conovan, ill educated but streetwise, a man within whom both wisdom and larceny collided in a jumble of syntax. “You see what happened anyway if youda been willing to happen on purpose you coulda been walking outta here with a nice bundle, with a bushel basket like I said? It just goes to show.”
And when he admires Pat’s retreating form in his Broadway vernacular, telling his diminutive associate, “Not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce,” he not only reveals the early depth of his feelings for her but delivers one of the most warmly remembered lines in the history of the movies.
“Gar had written a line,” said Larry Weingarten, “in which Spencer said of Kate, ‘She’s pretty well stacked.’ I said, ‘Do you know the meaning of this word? Kate is not well stacked. She has a small bust.’ I pressured him, Cukor pressured him, and he came up with another line, ‘There ain’t much meat on her, but what there is is cherce!’ It got the biggest laugh in the picture.”
Kanin himself remembered writing the line as “choice” and that it was Tracy who insisted on delivering it as “cherce.” Cukor, he said, made two takes, Tracy stubbornly sticking to the same reading for both. Mindful that Tracy “just flattened out” after the third or fourth take, Cukor obviously chose not to push it. “You’ve got to know that in directing … when to shut up, when to press.”
For his part, Tracy liked to recall what George M. Cohan once told him: “Whatever you do, kid, always serve it with a little dressing.” And so he took a perfectly serviceable line and, by filtering it through the prism of character, made it genuinely memorable. It was, as Bill Self learned, a process of refinement that never let up when he was shooting a picture. “Spence would say to everybody, ‘Oh, I didn’t sleep last night. I don’t know what scene we’re doing. Can I see the pages for a minute?’ All nonsense, according to Hepburn. He was up all night running his lines. I know in the few little scenes I was in with him, or any scene where I was on the set when they shot it, God help you if you blew a line or missed your mark. He was very intolerant of other actors not being totally professional.”
The sparring between Tracy and Hepburn lacked the sharp edges of Adam’s Rib, Cukor achieving a gentleness and a lightness of tone that made the comedy seem effortless. The reason it worked, the director maintained, was that none of them took themselves very seriously. “We batted ideas around like tennis balls, we all felt the lines and situations without any kind of ghastly solemnity. If we all laughed, a line went in.” And, as with Judy Holliday on their previous