Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [426]
As the new year began, Hemingway defined their two principal problems: finding a boy to play Manolo and getting Tracy in “some sort of shape,” as he now weighed, stripped, 215 pounds. For the job he recommended a man named George Brown, an old friend and his own personal trainer, who could, he said, make Tracy “look as much like a Cojimar fisherman as possible” in the space of six weeks. When Tracy advised Zinnemann he would be going to Europe for a couple of months “to be near Katharine Hepburn,” it was arranged for Brown to meet him in Cuba around March 1, affording them six weeks of uninterrupted work. Tracy, however, did not go to Europe, despite word from Kate that she and Bob Hope were hopelessly mismatched and that the picture was, for all intents and purposes, a stiff. He remained in town, fielding offers from Columbia and Fox, loafing, watching way too much TV, and subsisting primarily on weenies and frozen dinners.
He saw The Mountain for the first time on February 17 and pronounced himself “disappointed” with the picture. “Mountain is failure—think must be ending,” he wrote in his datebook. “Wrong—always thought wrong. Phony. Should go back get brother. Or at least look at mountain at end. ??? Critics will pan. Some lukewarm. Very moderate business. Retakes for 3 days would fix.”
John had left Nadine and Joey, taking a room on Tower Road and once again joining the family dinners. Louise always had a lot to talk about; she was traveling regularly, had plans to add a new two-story wing to the clinic, and was in line for an honorary doctorate from MacMurray College, her fourth. “Clinic, clinic, clinic,” Spence would say, throwing the kids an exasperated look. They would usually have hamburgers when he came to dinner, sometimes chicken and maybe a vegetable (if Louise could force one down him). “Quiet, Susie,” she’d say to her daughter, “and let Father talk about himself.”
The Academy Award nominations were announced on the eighteenth, and once again both Tracy and Hepburn were up for top honors—Spence for Bad Day at Black Rock, Kate for Time of the Cuckoo (released in the United States as Summertime). Tracy was so unimpressed he didn’t even mention the nominations in his datebook. Both he and Kate would be in New York when the awards went off, neither paying the slightest attention. He left Los Angeles on March 6, already a week late, and did not begin training in New York until the twenty-first.
Zinnemann, meanwhile, was in Cuba fuming, contending that Tracy had let his partners down by not commencing his program of training until three weeks later than promised. The picture’s direct cost was estimated at $1,904,000 (plus $264,280 in overhead), based on the idea of doing everything straight, without process or traveling mattes, except for the action of the jumping fish. This accounted for sixty days of shooting in Cuba, seven days at the studio, and one day in New York. For interiors, a studio had been reopened in Havana that hadn’t been used in five years.
From New York, George Brown reported that Tracy, his diet supervised by Hepburn, was losing weight at a “very satisfactory” pace. He was not, however, submitting to a physical training routine designed to tone the muscles used in the work of fishing. According to Zinnemann, Hepburn didn’t want Tracy submitting to Brown’s workouts, and Tracy would be in much better shape “if George were allowed to do his work.”
When he left for Miami on March 26, Tracy’s weight still wasn’t where it needed to be and the scheduled start of production was scarcely two weeks away. Certain he was in for flack from both Zinnemann and Hemingway, he had two drinks aboard the plane to Miami, two more on the jump to Cuba. At Havana, he and Brown were met by Zinnemann and assistant director Don Page. They were taken to the Hotel Nacional, where Tracy insisted on ordering himself a Dubonnet cocktail. “He proceeded to have several,” said Page. When he arrived for dinner that evening at Finca Vigia, he was clutching