Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [433]
“Tracy was an actor, not a mountain climber,” Dmytryk wrote,
yet no one, in my opinion, ever made mountain climbing more real, more harrowing, or more perilous than he did. In one scene, while supposedly standing on an inch-wide ledge (I used inserts made with his climbing double to establish this) he reaches for a crack, finds it filled with ice, carefully takes out his ice ax and chips it away, replaces his ax in his belt, and finally, after a breathless pause, makes the short leap necessary to reach the next handhold. Throughout the scene, shot in close-up, he was standing on the bottom of an upturned apple box, perhaps eight inches off the ground, but you would have sworn it was a matter of life and death on Everest. That’s acting. In the final film I let the scene run without a cut, except for a couple of foot inserts—it must have lasted a full four minutes. Only an actor of Tracy’s caliber could have sustained a scene of this kind for so long.
The New York opening put Tracy on edge, and the day it took place he recorded a “big temper blow up with Kate.” To cool down, he took a drive up the coast in his new Lincoln convertible, returning in time for dinner on Tower Road.1 The notices weren’t terrible, he found, but neither were they laudatory. He listed them carefully in his book, noting where the film had been panned but where his own performance had been well received. The Times, the Post, Saturday Review, and Newsweek were all counted as bad; the Herald Tribune, the News, the New Yorker, and Time good—at least so far as his personal notices were concerned. Herbert Kupferberg of the Herald Tribune found Tracy’s work as Zachary Teller “intensely moving,” while Bosley Crowther described an actor who had allowed his rugged old guide to waver between “a vague sort of peasant valor” and gawking stupidity. “It is hard to determine how to take him, except as a first-class mountain goat.”
After eight years of exile in foreign locales, an unbowed Katharine Hepburn began work on The Rainmaker with the same “no press” policy that had made her such a headache for the publicity people at M-G-M. “We made inquiries with interviewers,” said Teet Carle, “and found that not one had any need (or desire) to do stories on her. I went on the set to tell her we would protect her and keep away media folks.”
It’s possible that Hepburn got wind of such widespread apathy, for in August 1956, having just retrieved Tracy from his latest New York misadventure, she sat for a formal one-on-one with Edwin Schallert, the drama editor of the Los Angeles Times. Schallert was conscious of how rare an occasion this was and said as much in the lede of his write-up. The paper played the story up big, giving it a prominent page-one placement and accompanying it with a generous head shot gamely peering out at the reader, eyes flashing, teeth shining, collar upturned, at forty-nine the “queen of the international stars” (as the caption would have it). The talk focused on the new movie, in which she had been paired with Burt Lancaster, but ranged over a number of topics, her travels, her likes and dislikes, and her by now legendary pictures with Spencer Tracy.
“It is regrettable,” she lamented, “that no one has been able to find a comedy, such as we formerly did, which would be suitable for us.” Within days, Fox production chief Buddy Adler was on the phone to Abe Lastfogel with just such a comedy, a modest hit on Broadway titled The Desk Set.
Adler had picked up the rights as part of an investment strategy that gave Fox an ownership stake in several plays, the final price in each case calibrated to the length of the play’s New York run. In the