Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [385]
Filming was set to begin on December 15, 1952. There was concern over the title—Years Ago implying a nostalgic riff for the elderly—and the Kanins suggested Fame and Fortune as a substitute. With the sets already standing and the film comprised mostly of interiors, Cukor insisted on two weeks of rehearsal, after which he proposed to shoot the entire picture in just three weeks.3 It was, as Jean Simmons later noted, “most unusual” but the ideal way of getting such an intimate production up on its feet. Mastering the American accent was the most difficult part of the job for the London-born actress, and she worked with a coach over the entire course of production. “There was a wonderful woman,” said Cukor, “who was a most distinguished voice production teacher, Gertrude Fogler, and Jean is a very talented and accomplished actress, and within a week she sounded exactly like an American girl of that period and of that class and did it very subtly.”
After six days of rehearsal, Tracy wrote Garson Kanin in Paris: “We are going along well with the work. The girl ‘Ruth’ is, I venture to say, just about the greatest talent these old misty rum-soaked eyes have seen! ‘Pipe’ and very short haircut—characterization for Clinton—hair short for ‘youth,’ so they told me, since mother is played by Shirley Temple.4 Otherwise, same old fellow as in Plymouth Advent[ure], which is playing to the worst business since they took the hay out of the balcony.”
June Dally-Watkins, meanwhile, was back in Los Angeles after her grand tour of Europe, gathering marriage proposals as she went and expressing “pretty deep stuff” (Kanin’s words) on the subject of Spencer Tracy. In Rome, however, she had become involved with actor Gregory Peck, who was much closer to her own age, and who invited her to accompany him to Paris, a proposal she fearfully and foolishly—as she later acknowledged—declined. By the time she got back to California, she was homesick and eager to return to Sydney. Tracy had a car and driver meet her at the airport.
“He had also organized my hotel accommodation and began to turn up his efforts to seduce me: ‘Why stay at the hotel? Move in with me while you’re in town.’ Maybe Spencer would have cherished me, but I wasn’t about to take the risk of finding out. By now I knew of his relationship with Katharine Hepburn and was curious as to why she never appeared or attended any of the social gatherings that I went to with Spencer.”
Hepburn, of course, was still in New York, finishing up her run in The Millionairess. Tracy took June to the Bogarts’ annual Christmas party on the twenty-fourth, and to Cukor’s another night for dinner. “After I rejected Spencer’s advances, he continued to treat me well and respect me. He even arranged for one of his cars to be at my disposal. It was the first time I had driven an automatic car, and it came with a remote control to open his garage door. I’d go around the block to his house again and again to test the remote control, such was its novelty value.” Benny Thau invited her to the M-G-M lot and suggested the establishment of a personal development school for the studio’s starlets. Arthur Loew was smitten as well and mounted a campaign to keep her in Hollywood. Kate arrived back in California at just about the time Dally-Watkins left for home, but she didn’t stay for long.
“One time I was playing a scene,” Jean Simmons recalled. “I was having a bit of trouble, and she sort of put her head around the corner. I heard him say, ‘Get out of here!’ I thought, ‘My God, you can’t talk to Kate Hepburn like that!’ But I knew she was there, and I think that’s why I was getting nervous.”
The actual filming of Fame and Fortune got under way in January 1953. Tracy had lost weight and was in a far more agreeable frame of mind than for Plymouth Adventure, where his moodiness and his baiting of Dore Schary had been the talk of the studio. “He didn’t seem intense