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By Root 3465 0

8, 1955, he was confined to his suite at Claridge’s under a doctor’s care and attended by a pair of nurses. He took his last drink on April 2 (“FINI,” he wrote in his datebook) and spent the rest of the week “recuperating.” He passed his fifty-fifth birthday with a cake but otherwise saw no one other than Kate. “Poor Spence must necessarily be alone a good deal,” Constance Collier mused to Hepburn in a letter, “though I suppose you have your evenings together, you can’t be working at night.” The Kanins, stopping at the hotel while Ruth was appearing in The Matchmaker, attempted “endless abortive and unsuccessful telephone calls” but could make no contact. When he left for home on the ninth, Tracy did so without contacting them, and nearly two months would pass before Gar could manage a letter.

Back at the studio, Tracy ran On the Waterfront and became enthused at the idea of Eva Marie Saint for Jeremy Rodock. (“Wonderful,” he wrote in his book.) Wise and Zimbalist were equally high on the idea, but Saint turned the part down within a matter of days. (“Par for the course,” said Tracy.) They tested Constance Collier’s latest protégée, Marjorie Steele, the wife of A&P heir Huntington Hartford, but the test was weak and Steele had little experience. By the time David Selznick turned it down on behalf of Jennifer Jones, pointing out how similar the role of Rodock was to that of Devereaux in Broken Lance, Tracy was having serious qualms about doing the picture.

“I talked to Spence,” Collier wrote Hepburn on the sixteenth. “He is very unhappy and feels your leaving him for so long and doesn’t seem to understand why you do it—but he calmed down—and I think will come on [to New York]. He is to call me tomorrow and we will make arrangements. You must keep him happy until you go and the time will not seem so long.7 I hope everything will be alright over there and you will get things straightened out. Don’t let anything delay your return if Spence come[s] on.”

The growths removed from his face in London, Tracy learned, were malignant, and it was recommended that another spot on his face be tested. The biopsy was set for April 25 in Los Angeles, which turned out to be a bad day all around. He awoke with stomach cramps and a mild temperature and was attempting to sleep them off when he got the news that Constance Collier had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of seventy-seven. She had been like a second mother to Hepburn, a personal as well as a professional mentor, and it fell to Spence to phone Kate in London and break the news. A week later, he motored to San Francisco in a driving rain to meet her as she prepared to leave for Sydney on Qantas. He had Carroll with him, and the two of them attended Mass together at Old St. Mary’s.

The day Hepburn departed, he learned he had yet another malignancy and that surgery would be necessary. He was up at 3:00 a.m., on the road at 5:30, back home again by two in the afternoon. He dined alone that night and needed the help of six Seconals to get to sleep. The surgery took place at St. Vincent’s Hospital on the morning of May 12, 1955. The doctor had to go in deeper than he expected, and while all basal cell eruptions were removed, it was feared there would be scarring that could delay the start of the picture. The matter of casting the girl had become a dispiriting problem; nobody seemed to want the part. Schary may have thought it had something to do with the title, for he changed it to Tribute to a Bad Man, one he had a particular liking for, having previously hung it on one of John Houseman’s pictures.8

After both Eva Marie Saint and Jennifer Jones turned it down, the studio put forth a Greek girl named Irene Papas, who had made what Benny Thau termed an “exciting test.” Papas was in Rome, but could be in California on a few days’ notice, having been put under contract with virtually no vetting of any kind. Sam Zimbalist talked of putting a new writer on the screenplay, but then nothing happened, and when Tracy asked to see the test of the new girl, he was told they were going