Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [405]
At night, the company would adjourn to Lone Pine, where the daytime temperature was 112 degrees and there was little to do after dark. Tracy would open his room for snacks and cocktails, keeping strictly to soft drinks for himself. “It seemed like a form of torture almost,” Anne Francis remarked. “He would invite all the actors up to his suite at the end of the day for cocktails, and he’d sit there and drink his 7-Up while everybody else was having cocktails.”
Hepburn was shooting Time of the Cuckoo in Venice, and there was a cable or a letter from her every day or two. Walter Brennan, whose politics were every bit as conservative as Adolphe Menjou’s, made the mistake of commenting one night on Kate’s supposedly leftist views, the memory of her appearance for Wallace still trailing her after seven years of innuendo. “He said that Katie didn’t have ‘good judgment’ or common sense,” Anne Francis remembered, “and that topped it for Tracy—he went icy cold.” The following day, Sturges found the two men weren’t speaking.
Tracy’s scenes with Robert Ryan were a highpoint for the people on location, Ryan conforming, in Millard Kaufman’s words, to “D. H. Lawrence’s disturbing observation of the American hero as ‘cold, hard-eyed, isolate and a killer.’ The characterization applied equally well to Ryan’s American heavy.” A taut confrontation between the two men was staged as if an idle conversation between two Midwestern schoolboys, Tracy seated on a bench, his eyes downcast, Ryan casually standing before him, hands folded in front, squinting into the sun and speaking with the softness of a chaplain. (“Komoko. Sure, I remember him. Japanese farmer. Never had a chance …”)
“We never rehearsed,” said Ernest Borgnine. “If [Tracy] rehearsed, I never saw it. They just said, ‘Let’s shoot it.’ On Bad Day, when Tracy is sitting on the bench and Robert Ryan is talking to him, Tracy has his head down. And I’m there thinking, ‘Nobody’s going to be looking at him.’ And on screen you couldn’t take your eyes off him. And Bob Ryan was doing everything but loosen his pants.”
John Ericson recalled,
I was sitting on the porch there—you know, the one in the opening shot. They were down by the gas station … The whole crew was around there, and they were down there for quite a while. I got tired of sitting up there in the sun, and so I said to whoever I was with, “I’m going to go and see what they’re doing.” Because I could hear them talking away, and I thought they must be having a discussion about the scene … So I started ambling down the road, and I got halfway down, shuffling in the gravel and all, and then I stopped. “Oh, my God—that’s the scene they’re doing!” It sounded like they were having a conversation, and everybody was just standing around, taking notes or watching to see what’s going to be next. So I tiptoed on up there, and there was Tracy doing his close-up with Robert Ryan off camera. And I thought to myself, “My God, he makes those words sound like they’re coming out of his mouth.” They weren’t written, you know? He’s really thinking before he answers. When he opens his mouth, he reacts to what he’s heard.
After the scene, Tracy flopped into a chair next to Millard Kaufman. “Ryan is bristling with a kind of cerebral muscle, you know, and he’s a tough guy. And Spencer sits down next to me and says, ‘Does Ryan scare you?’ At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about, and then I realized he was talking about the scene that he had just finished. So I said, ‘No, I’ve known Bob Ryan for years. He’s a fine man. No, he doesn’t scare me.’ And Tracy said, ‘Well, he scares the hell out of me.’ ”
Much to Tracy’s satisfaction, Dore Schary did indeed make his promised appearance on the hottest day of the shoot, when the location temperature climbed to 114 degrees. “Dore, you got a great script here,” Tracy told him that day. “However, the critics are going to love it, but nobody’s going to go see it.” And then, echoing