Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [425]
In 1943, Andrew B. Tracy visited his famous nephew on the set of A Guy Named Joe. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Kate’s Old Vic tour ended in Perth on November 11, and she quietly returned to town via American Airlines on the sixteenth. That night Tracy noted in his book: “Din[ner] with Old Rat [with food] from Chasen’s.”
Filming finally concluded with scenes inside the wreckage of the plane on the nineteenth, and again he dined alone with Kate, as he had every night since her return. When she flew back to New York on the morning of the twentieth, she called from the airport, and again that evening from Hartford. In a few days she was off to London, where she would be making a picture with Bob Hope. In the nine eventful months just ended, Spence had seen Old One exactly four days.3
In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Jane Feely came to California for an extended visit, and she met the Tracys at Chasen’s one night for dinner. Spence had brought two Christmas presents for her, one of which was a Madonna of hammered brass he had found for her in Chamonix.
With Edward Dmytryk. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
It was a beautiful thing, and then a little carving of the Last Supper, one of those tiny, tiny things that he had picked up over there. And we had a nice visit. He said that he was cooking for himself, and it was obvious, of course, that he wasn’t at home—he had eaten wieners for the whole last week. And there was this feeling that he was lonely, that he was standing apart from the rest of them at the table. I detected a little sadness there, but thought: “It is none of your business. Stay out of it.” It was hard to be very, very loyal to Louise and to think as much of her as I did, and also think as much of him as I did … That dinner was kind of strained. It was—oh, you know, they talked back and forth about family matters and what everybody was doing, what John was doing, but there were two different people, two different households. It was as if he was living in one country, and she in another.
On December 24, Tracy attended the Bogarts’ annual Yuletide party, where he noticed singer Rosemary Clooney peering out a picture window, a study in holiday sadness. They’d met, but she knew him mostly from the movies.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, staring out the window alongside her.
“I don’t know,” she said, her husband, José Ferrer, dancing with Betty Bacall just a few feet away. “I’ve never been to a party on Christmas Eve. I guess I’m just homesick.”
His voice was strong, but he was not unkind.
“Get used to it,” he said.
Nineteen fifty-six would at last be the year of The Old Man and the Sea. Fred Zinnemann had signed on as director after two years of hesitation—John Ford, Vittorio De Sica, David Lean, and John Sturges were discussed in the interim—and Peter Viertel had produced a screenplay in collaboration with Ernest Hemingway that Tracy, for one, thought “great.” Leland Hayward had made a distribution deal with Warner Bros. that called for full financing and, after the picture returned twice its negative cost, 50 percent of the gross. In December Tracy recorded a scratch track narration so that he could “come to grips with the characterization” and show that he could carry the descriptive voice-over in Viertel’s script as well as the thoughts and words of Santiago, the Old Man.
“I had a good feeling about the way he approached the characterization of the Old Man,” Zinnemann said in a letter to Hemingway. “As to the descriptive part, I think that it will have to be read like poetry; like a ballad, with an underlying rhythm to it. Spencer tended to read these descriptive parts a bit too objectively, rather like a report. I think that when we do the final narration, it should give the impression