Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [394]
The Actress left the Trans-Lux after a respectable eight-week engagement, scarcely noticed amid the hoopla accompanying a record run for The Robe, which offered Jean Simmons in color and widescreen at the nearby Roxy. Left to fend for itself in an increasingly hostile market, the picture ended up posting a loss of nearly $1 million—a horrendous showing for a star of Tracy’s caliber. Weingarten felt the film lacked a happy ending and had wanted to “frame” the story with the successful Ruth in a wraparound, an idea Cukor opposed.
As Clinton Jones, flanked by Jean Simmons and Teresa Wright in The Actress, the film version of Ruth Gordon’s autobiographical play Years Ago. (SUSIE TRACY)
“Failure,” said Dore Schary, “is a more common occurrence than success, and most times, the reasons for failure are apparent—so you swallow and go on to the next effort. But The Actress was beautifully played, written, and directed, and was one of those failures that depress you. It’s like pitching a no-hitter but losing one to zero.”
Tracy arrived back in New York aboard the Queen Elizabeth on September 29, 1953, Hepburn following by air the next day. M-G-M had agreed to count The Old Man and the Sea as one of the pictures on Tracy’s contract, loaning him, in effect, to himself for a straight payment of $150,000. Production was set to begin in February 1954, provided Tracy could complete another picture for Metro in the interim. He had, however, rejected a screenplay for Bad Day at Honda, forcing a complete rewrite. And Digby, a sort of Flight to the Islands set in Scotland, wouldn’t be ready for production until the completion of Old Man. When 20th Century-Fox put in for him in October 1953, Tracy’s schedule was not only clear but, for once, he was eager to work.
In August, as Tracy was ailing in the south of France, Darryl Zanuck was spinning story ideas. At hand was a draft screenplay, a new version of House of Strangers set in the old west. At Sol Siegel’s behest, Richard Murphy had taken Philip Yordan’s screenplay for the earlier picture, which had been directed by Joe Mankiewicz, and transposed it with such fidelity that Zanuck feared they had “adhered too closely to some of the elements that made the original picture a box office disappointment even though it was a fine picture.”
A downbeat tale of family feuds and hatreds, its principal motivations were money and lust, things that, in Zanuck’s estimation, always produced “a sort of sickening feeling in the pit of the stomach.” To take the curse off it all, he proposed a racial divide: three older sons against a younger brother by a different mother—an Indian. “The boys are now only half brothers. Joe [the youngest] is only half-caste. Matt [the father] is the squaw man … I can see only Spencer Tracy as Matt. With contact lenses, Jeffrey Hunter would make a wonderful Joe. He is young and he has guts and he has high cheekbones. The other three brothers should be on the Irish side like Tracy.”
The deal for Broken Lance was set in mid-November, bringing Metro $250,000 for ten weeks. Astonished at the price, Tracy exacted $40,000 of the amount as a donation for the clinic. He then lay low in Los Angeles, speaking with Cukor mostly by telephone and scarcely communicating at all with the Kanins, who, by then, were situated in England. He was back in New York with Hepburn when the loan to Fox was announced to the press, the two of them spotted as they crept into a performance of Teahouse of the August Moon. Kate had committed to filming The Millionairess in England with Preston Sturges adapting and directing. It would put her in London at just about the time Zanuck’s western