Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [391]
When Reinhardt handed him the revised screenplay in New York, he was 100 percent certain that Tracy was bound to love it. And then it was Reinhardt who was dumbfounded when Tracy said after reading it, “This is not for me.” Said Reinhardt: “I first thought that he was joking, but then I realized that I was to witness this strange mind pulling the final switch on me. His actual objections were, incidentally, of a very minor nature … What shocked me most, however, was that he suddenly seemed concerned about Dore’s reaction. He kept saying, ‘I think Dore will be disappointed.’ And ‘after all, Dore’s suggestions have been more or less disregarded.’ ”
Back at the studio, both Schary and Mannix dismissed Tracy’s behavior as typical of his preproduction jitters. “I remembered Spence’s original attitude toward this project when we were still on our way over,” Reinhardt said in a letter to Kanin. “I could not rid myself of the impression that what he uttered in Paris was mostly lip service and that he never really wanted to make this picture, at least not now.” Schary thought the script much better than it had been, but he still had serious doubts about the “clarity of the theme.” Charles Schnee, the line producer on the project, liked it very much. Mannix, too, thought it much improved, while Kenneth MacKenna, the studio’s story editor, expressed disappointment. All had considerable doubts about the commercial potential of a film so intimate, so lacking in romance, spectacle, excitement. When Tracy delivered the death blow over lunch with Schary, he spoke “purely as an actor,” presumably with serious doubts about carrying so much of the load. After nearly a year’s work, the plug was unceremoniously pulled on Flight to the Islands just six weeks before it was set to go before the cameras. Tracy never addressed Kanin directly on the subject, and Kanin never let on that he knew from Reinhardt exactly what had happened.
Besides, Kanin had other projects before Tracy: an idea for a picture based on Benjamin Franklin’s years in France, to be written in collaboration with either Thornton Wilder or Bob Sherwood. Then another for him and Kate, to be made in Europe and known, at various times, as Cat and Mouse and It Takes a Thief. Kanin wrote the opening, which George Cukor described to Gavin Lambert:
You were on a European train and you saw a lady in black sitting in one corner of a compartment, all alone. The camera moved very slowly up close to this lady—and it was Spence dressed as a widow. Then you discovered he was the head of a currency-smuggling gang based in Zurich. Spence was going to appear throughout the picture in different disguises. People in the State Department knew this chicanery was going on, and they got the best T-man from the Treasury—and it was Kate. She had this ruthless drive and purpose, and she was going to track him down and bring him to justice, like whoever-it-is pursues Valjean in Les Miserables. Then halfway through the picture she realizes she’s stuck on him.
Tracy, Cukor suggested, may simply have felt that he and Hepburn were “getting too old” to do that sort of a film, but he just as likely was in no mood to make another picture with her, and neither, it would seem, was she in any hurry to do another with him. It appears she knew of his affair with Gene Tierney—Katharine Houghton believed so—and may well have been aware of the Kanins’ role—particularly Gar’s—in abetting it. Tracy, moreover, was wild at the prospect of doing The Old Man and the Sea—Pulitzer and, as it would turn out, Nobel Prize–winning material—and nothing else could be nearly so attractive. He acknowledged to Leland Hayward he was “perfectly willing” to make a comparatively “bum” movie in order to get sprung from M-G-M to make Old Man, but instead he made a handshake