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role of the spinsterish Bunny Watson, head of the research department of a major TV network, the show had starred Shirley Booth, a masterful comedienne who was never much of a draw in the movies (despite having collected an Academy Award for her work in Come Back, Little Sheba). As with Time of the Cuckoo, Booth ceded a role she had created onstage to Hepburn, the crucial change of Bunny ending up with computer consultant Richard Sumner (instead of her boss) having already been effected in a draft screenplay. Adler had originally given the property to writer-producer Charles Brackett, who lasted scarcely three weeks on the assignment. (“It’s not my cup of tea,” Brackett fretted, “and every time I rewrite a scene it gets worse.”) Eventually, Desk Set was settled on the husband-wife team of Henry and Phoebe Ephron.

The initial offer from Fox was $250,000 for the Tracy-Hepburn combo, plus a 10 percent split of the gross after the film had earned double its negative cost in rentals. Kate didn’t like the up-front money, and there was friction between her and Bert Allenberg when she said as much directly to the studio. Fox upped the ante to $350,000 and 30 percent of the profits, which, profits being what they were in Hollywood, didn’t sound all that much better. Eager to meet a projected start date of November 1, Adler finally approved an offer of $400,000—$250,000 for Tracy and $150,000 for Hepburn—and 50 percent of the net profits. Tracy saw the first seventy-five pages of the Ephrons’ revised screenplay on October 2 and thought them only “fair.” Lastfogel finalized the contracts on October 22, the team splitting 10 percent of the gross after $4,400,500 and 20 percent after $4,750,000—an extraordinary deal for their first picture away from M-G-M.

Tracy’s dismay at the first seventy-five pages resulted in an all-day script conference between Hepburn and the Ephrons, Kate clad in her familiar white slacks and matching shirt. “That morning, she and Spence had read the script aloud and had marked where changes in his role, his lines, his activity, could improve the script,” recounted Henry Ephron. “By the end of the day we were on a friendly, warm basis, wildly enthusiastic when we got the script past a sticky spot and violently depressed when we didn’t.”

The second day they were joined by Walter Lang, the veteran Fox director who had been assigned the picture, and whose previous films for the studio had been the top-drawer musicals The King and I, There’s No Business Like Show Business, and Call Me Madame. The Ephrons considered Lang an ally—he had filmed their sly 1950 satire The Jackpot—and figured it would be “three against one” if they ever came to loggerheads with their leading lady. Someone had the idea to do a crucial scene—Sumner’s interrogation of Bunny by way of a personality test—on location, and Adler went for it. (“Shoot in New York, start at Fifty-seventh and Madison, outside the IBM building, and take them west on Fifty-seventh Street to Sixth Avenue where they would lunch at one of those outdoor Jewish delicatessens.”) Hepburn and Henry Ephron made a quick trip east to scout locations for the sequence.

Bogart, meanwhile, was fading rapidly. Tracy endured the gut-wrenching business of a visit on November 16 and found him frail and depleted. Pulling up a chair at the foot of the bed, he began to tell jokes, his coffee nearby, kidding around with his old friend as he always did. “He was great with Bogie when Bogie was sick,” said Lauren Bacall. “Katie used to say, ‘He was tortured before he went to your house, put on a great act when he was there, and was tortured when he left.’ ” That night, Tracy made a rueful note in his datebook: “Poor Bogie. Not long—2 months?”

In the following days, his mood sank—there was trouble with his new Lincoln, trouble with The Mountain, trouble with the revised script of Desk Set. On Sunday, the L.A. Times ran a piece by movie columnist Philip K. Scheuer titled “TV Offers a Second Look at So-Called Film Classics.” Leading the article was a case in point—Tracy’s own version of Dr.