Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [411]
Disgusted, Tracy doped himself extravagantly—ten Seconals—and boarded a flight to New York for his annual physical, this time at Harkness under the supervision of Dr. Dana Winslow Atchley. Kate, meanwhile, had committed to a six-month tour of Australia with Bobby Helpmann and the Old Vic, a company of twenty-eight players performing Measure for Measure, Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice under the direction of Michael Benthall.
Tracy arrived in Manhattan in time to see the opening of Black Rock on February 1, an event only in the sense that he didn’t expect it to do well at all. M-G-M’s big picture of the moment was a reissue of Camille, and Broadway in general was in the grip of near-zero temperatures. The film performed nicely in its opening stanza at the Rivoli, bolstered, no doubt, by exceptional notices—novelist John O’Hara called it “one of the finest motion pictures ever made”—and Tracy’s concurrent appearance on the cover of Life magazine. (“A Great Star Ages Gracefully” was the title of the accompanying article.) It all faded quickly, though, the weather crippling practically every attraction apart from The Country Girl, Cinerama Holiday, and Garbo’s 1936 classic, which inspired long lines and set house records at the Normandy. Bad Day at Black Rock was gone by the time Tracy returned to Los Angeles on the twenty-seventh.
As predicted, Grace Kelly declined Jeremy Rodock, citing a poor script, and Tracy began wondering if he was making the right choice. The story was by Jack Schaefer, the author of Shane, but it was only a short story, and somehow it resisted the efforts of screenwriter Michael Blankfort to give it a plot. Director Robert Wise met Tracy for the first time at a conference in early March.
“He was practically selling me on the picture,” Wise remembered, “he was so enthusiastic.” They talked about locations. “We had the idea of getting high up in the mountain scene and hav[ing] lovely green meadows, lakes, and mountains all around as the setting for it. We thought that would be a good change in the background for a western. Tracy called me the next day and asked, ‘Bob, do you think we’re really right about that? Do you think it’s going to be good for me?’ He was getting all kinds of second thoughts about it, so I found myself having to buck up his enthusiasm for it.”
Thau and Schary expressed concerns that Tracy did not “feel committed to Rodock.” Tracy’s worries weren’t assuaged when Grace Kelly went public on the suspension Metro had handed her, confirming she had declined the picture after reading the script. “I’m not trying to be difficult or temperamental,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I just don’t feel I’m right for the part in Jeremy Rodock.”
By the middle of March, Zimbalist had Blankfort working on a complete revision of the screenplay, and Tracy agreed to a three-month extension that would free him to travel to Europe. In New York he dined with Mannix and Howard Strickling, met Constance Collier for tea, and spent forty-five minutes on the phone to Kate in London. He flew over on the eighteenth, slept soundly the first night, then fell back into his Seconal habit, popping as many as seven capsules a night.
Hepburn was, of course, deep into rehearsals for her upcoming tour of Australia but found time for dinner most nights, and they occasionally could be seen walking together in Hyde Park. On the twenty-fourth he had two rodent ulcers removed from his face, aggravating the fear of cancer he had long held within him. The procedures were described to him as routine, and the medication caused him to sleep nearly six hours the following night. But then late the next evening, in his suite at Claridge’s, he fell off the wagon, scribbling in his datebook: “1 AM,” the drawing of a bottle, and the words “Here we go.”
Between March 27 and April