Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [415]
There was a time, back in the heyday of the studio, when such a move might have been possible, particularly for a star of Tracy’s magnitude. But 1955 wasn’t 1940, M-G-M no longer dominated the world entertainment landscape, and the economics of picture making had irrevocably changed. The men who had come up in the time of Mayer and Thalberg, of block booking and studio-owned theater chains, were having to reorient their thinking to the new realities of the marketplace, where flickering black-and-white pictures on a home TV set generally trumped the big screen as long as those flickering pictures were free.
Dore Schary was troubled in later years by the widely held presumption that Tracy had been fired from M-G-M. “That’s crazy. That’s crap. Total crap,” he erupted when asked about it in 1978. “A stupid story. A ridiculous, stupid story.” Tracy had completed three of the four pictures required of him under his contract, and the contract was up as of August 1, 1955. “I would never have fired Spencer Tracy,” Schary insisted. Might he simply have been at the end of his rope? “I would never have been at the end of my rope with Spence. He was always worried whether a picture was good for him, whether he wanted to do it. Back and forth. But that is not true … Just … not … true. And I would know that.”
Schary thought that maybe Robert Wise was part of the problem, that he had no real knowledge of the culture at M-G-M. Years of coddling on the part of the studio had created a dependency that Wise couldn’t possibly understand. “He just got scared,” Schary said of Tracy. “He began to get short of breath. A guy like Tracy needed a father [in a director]. He needed someone around to kind of look after him. And I don’t think Wise gave him that. I think another director might have solved that problem, pulled him through the picture. But Spence was by then pretty well convinced that he was very sick.”
On June 25, 1955, Tracy made the following entry in his datebook: “Finished at Metro! June 18 last salary day. Phone by Allenberg to Thau. Eddie M. away!!! The end of 20 years. Feel I did my best for last pic.”
Eddie Mannix was stunned when he returned to the studio and was briefed on what had taken place in his absence. “Well,” he demanded, “why the hell didn’t you take it down to three thousand feet and do the picture?”
* * *
1 News photos of the two seated together at Santa Monica’s Club Del Mar, where the event took place, were enough to prompt the following item in Dorothy Kilgallen’s column: “Lovely Grace Kelly’s newest admirer is a Hollywood star who has been Katharine Hepburn’s close pal for years.”
2 Cooper’s trouble was due to a bad back.
3 Claridge’s had requested that Hepburn not wear trousers in the “public rooms” of the hotel, which, of course, included the lobby. Hepburn’s solution, rather than to wear a dress when visiting Tracy, was instead to come up in the service elevator. Management at the Connaught imposed no such restriction.
4 Kate later admitted that she, too, never cared much for Black Rock.
5 One of Schary’s signal achievements at RKO, Crossfire (1947) was based on Richard Brooks’ 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole.
6 According to Millard Kaufman, the Breen office restricted the use of karate chops “because it wasn’t fighting heroically. Dore said, ‘What the hell? The guy’s got one arm.’ And so they let it get by.”
7 Hepburn once told David Lean she was “almost certain” that if she and Tracy had married, it wouldn’t have lasted. “She was saying that it’s almost impossible to hope that anyone, husband or wife, can understand what it’s like when this creative thing takes hold and they find themselves suddenly pushed aside into fourth or fifth place.”
8 The release title was The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
CHAPTER 28
The Mountain
* * *
Tracy’s removal from