Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [400]
Tracy dined alone at Claridge’s that night, downing three bottles of Guinness and tossing four Seconals in after them. “[F]or din[ner] Claridge’s—Helpmann!! and Hepburn!!” he noted the next evening. “No grog.” On June 3 he learned from Bert Allenberg that Highland Fling had been called off. Dore Schary followed up with a phone call, saying only that the picture was off “for this year” and that he would like to start Bad Day at Honda—retitled Bad Day at Black Rock—on July 15. In its thirtieth year as a production entity, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was reducing its feature film output by 40 percent. “Years ago, every picture made money,” Eddie Mannix explained. “Today every picture is a big gamble—but if you hit the jackpot you make a lot more.”
Tracy lingered in England, not only because Hepburn had committed to a film in Italy—Time of the Cuckoo for director David Lean—but because his cousin Jane was in Ireland visiting family and would soon be making her way to England. Jane’s mother, Spence’s aunt Jenny, had always maintained that she married her late husband because he said that he’d take her to Ireland. But then, of course, he never did.
“I was to go to London when I finished in Ireland,” Jane said,
because I had a cousin who lived there. I also had a very dear friend from Seattle who was working for the Air Force and lived in London, so I had two places to go where I wouldn’t be a burden or have to be put up by him. First we went in as a group, May and Donald [my cousins] and I, to have dinner at Claridge’s with him. Then I went to stay with my friend Phyllis for two or three days, and then Phyllis and I had dinner with him, and there was this young man whose name I can’t remember who was sort of the liaison for the studio. (He was the person who chauffeured him around.) [Spencer] asked for ice cream for dessert. Everybody else had a drink, but, of course, he didn’t. He said, “I own the third floor of Claridge’s and they don’t have any chocolate ice cream.”
I sensed how much he was annoyed or didn’t want people that he didn’t know coming up and tapping him on the shoulder. He couldn’t understand why this obsession. I think the idea of celebrity just appalled him. The fact that he was one bothered him. It didn’t amount to much in the long run because, I think, he was beginning, maybe a little bit at that time, to understand himself. Why he was there and, you know, what his life was about. I remember I thought at the time that he seemed as if he had worked so hard, and yet he didn’t feel that he had accomplished a great deal. I think that having a little bit of power over what he did was also something he wanted desperately. He knew I did a fair amount of reading and he said, “If you read anything let me know. We”—he would always say “we”—“need some ideas, we need some scripts, we need some writing that is decent.” He was telling us about Bad Day. He told us about the train that comes into this barren little town. And the man who gets off. We all said, “And then what happens?” And he said, “See the picture!” That was the one he was about to do.
And then, when Phyllis went home, we had another visit, and this man left so that he and I could have a private visit. We talked about my mother and about what a great gift this had been for me and for her and about little quirks about people in Ireland and my own family and how much we had meant to one another over the years. He said he envied me my Irish experience. He couldn’t get over the little things that I told him had happened there. The smile would just stay on his face, and he would just laugh and laugh of the various personalities and the people and the reception I got. I said to him, “Someday I may need you.” And he said,