Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [401]
There was never any recognition of the fact that there was a Katharine Hepburn or that he was living away from home. It certainly was known, but I think my mother just simply did not accept it, and, of course, I didn’t either. I often wonder why in the world I didn’t think of it at the time, but my friend did. Phyllis knew it. She said, “Well, everybody knows.” And, of course, I said, “Yeah, well, so she’s here. Don’t ask me to introduce you!”
On July 1, Tracy rode with Kate to Southampton and boarded the Queen Mary. On the crossing with him were Benny Thau, Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, and the evangelist Billy Graham. The voyage was smooth, the weather warm and sunny. In New York he caught a TWA sleeper for Los Angeles, arriving back in the midst of a record heat wave.
Temperature fluctuations had come to bother him terribly, as did weather variations of almost any sort. He was now fifty-four years old—the age at which his father had died—and he was convinced he would not live much longer. Fixating on the Hemingway project, the words “Old Man” struck him as an apt label, and he used it constantly. He was, Leland Hayward said, “counting the weeks” until he could begin work on the picture.
There were now two screenwriters working on the project independently: in Europe, Hemingway had chosen Peter Viertel, John Huston’s frequent collaborator, while Hayward had selected Paul Osborn, an idea Tracy hailed as “brilliant.” They were still planning to shoot the film over the spring and summer of 1955, but now Hayward had two other major pictures to make: Mister Roberts, during which he was contending with director Josh Logan’s nervous breakdown, and The Spirit of St. Louis, the story of Charles Lindbergh’s history-making flight across the Atlantic.
The basis for Bad Day at Black Rock was a 1947 magazine story by Howard Breslin titled “Bad Time at Honda.” When actor-writer Don McGuire brought it to M-G-M in 1953, it was with the idea that he would adapt it to the screen. McGuire had been working in tandem with director Joseph Pevney at Universal-International, his best-known writing credit being the bizarrely fascinating Frank Sinatra vehicle Meet Danny Wilson. He took a crack at a screenplay, reportedly on spec, and though Dore Schary didn’t care for McGuire’s take on the material, the story appealed to the moralist in him.
Schary paid off McGuire, acquiring the underlying rights, and assigned the project to screenwriter Millard Kaufman, whose Take the High Ground was one of the production chief’s personal productions for the 1953–54 season. It didn’t seem like obvious screen material for Spencer Tracy, its hero being about thirty-five and a former platoon leader, but Schary almost immediately saw Tracy in the role of John J. Macreedy, a “granite-like wedge of a man” who had about him an air of “monumental dependability, self-confidence, and quiet humor.” As Schary’s daughter Jill wrote in 1963: “Daddy loves all stories about disastrous problems that are overcome. One of the major characters must be A Decent Human Being. To Daddy, the Decent Human Being looks like Spencer Tracy.”
“Dore,” said Millard Kaufman, “liked the idea of the persecution of the Japanese-Americans in World War II because he was a bit enraged by it, and so was I. So he asked me if I wanted to do it and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he gave me this thing.”
Once Kaufman began moving in the right direction, Schary re-teamed him with his High Ground director, Richard Brooks, and made the producer his newly appointed editorial executive, Charles Schnee. Early on came the matter of the title: John Wayne had just come out with a picture called Hondo, and they feared that calling their film Bad Day at Honda would confuse filmgoers into thinking they had already seen it. Kaufman’s first incomplete draft of the screenplay was titled Bad Day at Parma, a title that pleased no one. Then Kaufman, while location scouting in Arizona, came upon a post office and gas