Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [386]
Cukor was skilled at creating a comfortable work environment—a necessity when shooting in tight spaces—but had the annoying habit of telling actors how to say their lines. Simmons had never met Ruth Gordon, so she looked to him for the proper cadence of speech. “I had to rely totally on George Cukor, who was so funny because he would get up and play my character—and it was oh so much better than I could possibly do … George would say, ‘This is how you do it.’ And then he would go up to Spence—and they were great friends—and start to do it and Spencer would just walk away. He’d say, ‘Shut up, George!’ ”
Clinton works himself into a state over money, the cost of food, the perpetual poverty he sees for himself. “I live on hash and stew and Louisiana cat meat, for all I know, and I got a taste for oysters and curry the way they used to fix ’em in Bombay.” When he discovers a thirty-five-cent theater magazine in his daughter’s room, he is apoplectic. “Thirty-five cents! Did you get stung thirty-five cents for this thing?” Cukor was struck by Simmons’ response to the force of Tracy’s fury: “Talk about people who can be scary. Spence could be scary. He and Jean Simmons adored each other, but when we rehearsed the scene his anger was so real that she started giggling. ‘I know I’m old and not much good,’ Spence said, ‘but does this broad have to laugh in my face?’ ‘No, keep it in, Jean,’ I said. ’When you’re absolutely terrified you piss yourself with a kind of laughter. It’s real.” Said Simmons of Tracy: “I was fortunate enough to have known him before I worked with him, and he was oh such a help to me because when you saw him work, it didn’t seem like acting at all. He just was. He was the most truthful actor I ever worked with.”
When Ruth rebels at her father’s dictum that she become a physical culture teacher, she sits her parents down and proceeds to assault them with recitation and song. “He loved and respected Jean Simmons,” said Cukor,
who gave a wonderful performance, and there was a scene when she wanted to be an actress and she stood on the steps in their house [and sang] and she was starting things off rather badly. And Spencer looked at her and he did something very funny: for no reason at all, he looked at the mother as though she had talked this girl into doing something. But then he looked at her with this eloquent face of his and his face changed color. And I said, “That was lovely.” He said, “Well, I remember when I told my father that I wanted to be an actor and he looked at me, this skinny kid with big ears, and he said, ‘Oh that poor little son of a bitch; he’s going to go through an awful lot.’ ”
As Tracy told it, it wasn’t the disappointment his father felt at his son’s not coveting a career in business, but rather concern the boy seemed to have so few of the essential gifts of an actor. “In the play it is so interesting,” said Cukor, “that both Ruth and her mother are scared to tell the father about her ambitions because they think he would object on purely conventional grounds, that she would become ‘fast,’ etc. They under-rate him. He has none of those conventional scruples, he’s just concerned that she be spared the disappointment and heartache in undertaking something for which she has no obvious qualifications.” Tracy also recounted how hurt he was when he told his girl of his ambitions. “She all but laughed at him,” Cukor related, “and it almost killed him when he overheard her making some cracks to her girlfriend. He must have been completely unlike her idea of what an actor should be, nothing like the leading man of the Milwaukee Stock Company—Bert Lytell, or a real matinee idol type.”
As Clinton speaks of his own wretched childhood, his mother’s suicide and workhouse conditions,