• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4018 0

a real stab at cleaning himself up. They talked about Flight to the Islands and Cat and Mouse, and then Tracy noticed a little rash on his side. Gar and Ruth tried telling him that it was nothing, but a doctor promptly diagnosed it as shingles (zona in French). As the doctor began treating the condition, his patient “suddenly got worried” about an operation that Kate had undergone. Spence hadn’t known about it but apparently found out after the AP picked up on the news and the New York Times printed it. By then, France was paralyzed by a general strike, almost all of the nation’s two million public workers having walked off their jobs, and it was impossible to phone or telegraph. With Tracy increasingly anxious, the inflammation plaguing him stubbornly refused to clear up. Finally and reluctantly, the Kanins drove him to Nice, where they put him on a plane bound for London. He kept promising to come right back, but they somehow knew that he wouldn’t.

Kate, whose surgery had been for skin cancers, flew to be with him in England, and it was there that they enjoyed a reunion, having had only minimal contact with one another since the completion of Pat and Mike. However good it was for Tracy and Hepburn, who were still in London together a month later, Kanin lamented the event as an opportunity lost.

“It was very, very sad,” he wrote. “The main reason for the sadness was that if only everything hadn’t gone wrong, that place would have proved a godsend to Spence. I think he would have piled up years of health, and I know that he would have wanted to stay quite a long time.”

* * *

1 It is unclear whether Tracy sent Schary a translated copy of Alf Sjöberg’s screenplay for a Swedish-language film of the same title, or Lagerkvist’s own two-act play based on the book.

2 As her early stand-in, Adelaide Doyle, recalled, “She was very close to her family and she called her mother all the time—maybe every day.”

3 The official schedule was twenty-four days.

4 Teresa Wright’s early movie roles were as a young girl, even though she was in her twenties. Born in 1918, Wright was thirty-four years old when she played Annie Jones.

CHAPTER 27

A Granite-like Wedge of a Man

* * *

That film … got more critical acclaim from the critics than any film I ever made in all the years,” said Larry Weingarten, reflecting upon the curious commercial fate of The Actress, “and we didn’t make enough to pay for the ushers in the theater … I like to think that that very week this picture was produced, color came into full bloom and CinemaScope. And we were black and white on a little screen.”

The industry was indeed awash with new technologies: widescreen, 3-D, stereophonic sound, and a whole host of new color processes, all employed with the intent of providing audiences with an entertainment experience they couldn’t get from television, where old movies were quickly becoming a programming staple. Dore Schary refused to be part of the panic, assuring a conference of exhibitors that “television will start to worry about us” if new pictures were good enough. “I have a hunch … people will ultimately accept television as something they can use when they choose to. I don’t believe that singing commercials, quiz shows, and 20-year-old potboilers will ever take the place of movies and other healthy diversions.”

It was an admirable stance in the spring of 1952, but by the following summer all bets were off, and even 3-D was no longer the grind house novelty it had been just a few months earlier. The Actress drew solid trade notices, Variety praising its “excellent word-of-mouth values,” and the film opened well at New York’s Trans-Lux 60th Street, a former newsreel emporium usually given over to British fare like The Holly and the Ivy and Tight Little Island. The bigger Broadway theaters were showcasing the bigger M-G-M releases—Mogambo, Torch Song, Lili, Julius Caesar. Tracy’s performance was warmly received, Bosley Crowther declaring it worthy of yet another Academy Award. “For the vitality that Mr. Tracy puts into this role of a poor