Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [427]
Tracy and Hepburn (and her friend Laura Harding) were to share a fully staffed seaside estate at Tarara, about ten miles outside of Havana. Nothing was said about his condition the next morning, and he swore off the booze then and there. (“NO DRINKS IN MORNING OR THEREAFTER!!!!!!!”) He submitted to a beach workout with Brown, saw Zinnemann at his house, and was told how happy the director was to have him. What he referred to as the “1st Court Martial by Hayward and Zinnemann” didn’t come until the following afternoon. Told how much he “had them frightened,” given the money involved, Tracy promptly offered to withdraw from The Old Man and the Sea. “Zinnemann said if I left he would,” Tracy afterward noted. “I said I would think it over!”
The second court-martial, which occurred on the thirty-first, took on the tone of an intervention when Hemingway joined in. “You’re a rummy!” the author said accusingly. “What the hell! Admit it!” He went on to dare him to get out the Bible and swear to the ten years of sobriety he claimed. “[Again] I offered to withdraw,” Tracy recorded, “but said I would have to stay if they sued. They would.”
The company quickly divided into armed camps—Page and Zinnemann on one side, Tracy and Hepburn on the other. Kate, as always, was fiercely protective of Spence, ever vigilant in matters of abuse or perceived disrespect, and could strike with the ferocity of a rattlesnake. Among the production team, she was awarded the code name “George Arliss” after the long-faced British character actor with the prominent cheek bones. Hemingway, who couldn’t abide a man who could not hold his liquor, found it impossible to utter the name of the star of his film and took to tartly referring to him simply as “the artist.”
Tracy’s deal called for a rate of $5,769.24 a week for twenty-six weeks beginning April 15, 1956, the official start of the picture. Hemingway left that same day for the Cabo Blanco Fishing Club in Peru, intent on photographing the film’s marlin sequences. Once on salary, Tracy could be given calls, and Don Page asked him to go to Cojimar where they would shoot all the beach scenes and get together with the technical adviser, a Cuban fisherman who would get him acquainted with handling the oars and the lines.
“Whose idea is that?” Tracy asked, and he was told by Page that it was Zinnemann’s and his own.
“He said he didn’t know whether he would do it then or wait until we started shooting on Monday the 23rd,” Page recounted in a memo. “At that time, the Old Man’s boat will be tied up as we will be using it.” Clearly agitated, Tracy then raised the subject of his first night in Cuba and the matter of his drinking. He said “all Hollywood knew about it” and that Page must have done a lot of talking. “I straightened him out, and told him that if he felt I was a stool pigeon I would just as soon get off the picture right now. He feels no one in the company likes him and he doesn’t like anyone connected with us. As for his promise to lose weight, it seems to me that he is as heavy now as he has always been, and I recall Mr. Zinnemann stating to Mr. Hayward that if Tracy did not lose the necessary weight that he would not start the picture with Mr. Tracy, as he would be laughed right out of the theater.”
For the part of Manolo, Zinnemann settled on eleven-year-old Felipe Pazos, Jr., the brown-eyed son of a prominent Cuban economist. Tracy appeared for a wardrobe test with the boy on April 21, and Hayward wired his enthusiastic approval of the results from his offices in Burbank. Actually getting some film exposed, however minor the footage, seemed somehow to relieve all the tensions of the previous month.
“Tracy is behaving fairly well these days,” Zinnemann related in a note to Hemingway. “He went out with us in a pretty rough sea. It didn’t seem