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he returned from Peru, declared that he, too, was unhappy with the boy, describing him as “a cross between a tadpole and Anita Loos.” In a letter to his friend Gianfranco Ivancich, Hemingway seemed resigned to the situation: “As you know, there was some difficulty with the artist, but they say that is all straightened and we have a docile artist now, but to me in the stills I saw last night he still looked very fat for a fisherman and the boy looks very tiny. There is nothing that a rubber fish cannot fix. In later stills he looks much better and he is such a good actor he can probably surmount most things.”

Work moved to the Old Man’s shack and, according to Tracy’s diary, Zinnemann demanded the replacement of the boy. A call was put into Hayward, and the producer arrived in Havana on June 4. Though Tracy had managed to drop seventeen pounds, Zinnemann still considered him too heavy to play the role, and Pazos’ size only served to emphasize his girth.

“Tracy was most certainly a problem,” Zinnemann said. “He was not doing his job. Everybody, except Leland Hayward, was a problem, including myself. There were a lot of egos on that movie.” Hayward lined up with Zinnemann and Hemingway in calling for the boy’s replacement. Zinnemann became convinced that Tracy was out to sabotage the picture: “He seemed malevolent and hostile. The crew hated him and he hated them back. Day after day, there was the sense that no progress was being made on the picture.”

Anonymous squibs began to appear in the press: “Spencer Tracy’s newest all-day buddy is Cuban dictator Batista. They play golf together every morning. Batista’s caddies also carry machine guns around the course.” And: “Spencer Tracy and another gent had one of the bloodiest fist fights in Havana’s history. Ernest Hemingway had to be restrained several times from massacring Tracy all over Cuba.”

In 1992 Zinnemann recalled a second drinking episode “which interrupted shooting for several days.” A thirdhand reference to Tracy and Hemingway having broken up a bar is unconfirmed in any of the memos or wires preserved in the Jack Warner, Leland Hayward, Fred Zinnemann, Ernest Hemingway, or Warner Bros. collections, and Peter Viertel, in his 1992 memoir Dangerous Friends, includes no such story. Zinnemann only remembered that Hemingway once threatened to go looking for Tracy with a shotgun “but that was just one of those silly gestures of his.”

Hayward clashed with Zinnemann over the director’s insistence on doing as few process shots as possible and scolded him for making three shots of Tracy that could easily have been done on the Warner lot in Burbank. Zinnemann decided to make the long shots on the ocean with Tracy’s double, saving close-ups for the process stage. In exchange for the time off, Tracy agreed to give the company four additional weeks. Then Hayward, channeling Warner, told Zinnemann that he had to start the second-unit work in Cojimar no later than July 25 “or else.”

When Tracy visited the set to say good-bye on June 13, Zinnemann asked him to stay until Hayward arrived for a “showdown.” On the sixteenth, Tracy had a call from Hemingway “apologizing for madness, etc.” That same day, Zinnemann received a cable from Jack Warner:

SAW DAILIES INTERIOR CUBAN CAFE CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY YOU DID NOT SHOOT INDIVIDUAL OF TRACY WHEN YOU WERE THERE AND LIGHTED FOR IT … YOU ARE SHOOTING TOO MANY SUPERFLUOUS TAKES AND SCENES…

Specifically, Warner was objecting to a flashback shot over Tracy’s shoulder (to cover his age) even though its composition was clearly indicated in the script. Said Zinnemann: “Shooting most of the movie in the studio tank seemed to be the only way out; unfortunately, I could not see how this could be done … Suddenly the story seemed pointless. It made little sense to proceed with a robot pretending to be a fish in a studio tank pretending to be the gulf stream with an actor pretending to be a fisherman.” His withdrawal from the picture was reported in Louella Parsons’ column of June 23, 1956.

“The argument had nothing to do with Spence,” Leland