Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [436]
“When anyone is desperately ill,” said Kate, “you get a feeling, ‘Oh, dear, it’s going to be soon,’ which struck me. So Spencer and I went to the house, and [Bogart] was sitting in a chair in his bedroom—sitting in a wheelchair—and then we got up to go so as not to exhaust him. And I kissed him goodbye, walked over to the door, and Spencer walked over and patted his shoulder and said, ‘We’re on our way.’ And Bogie reached up with his hand and patted Spencer’s hand, looked at him, and said ‘Goodbye, Spence.’ ” The way he said it that night had special resonance, and they could both tell that he meant it. “When we were downstairs, Spence looked at me and said, ‘Bogie’s going to die.’ ”
“Very weak—semi-conscious,” was the way Tracy recorded the patient’s condition in his book that night. He spent the thirteenth—a Sunday—on “the hill” (as he referred to the house on Tower Road) dining with Louise, John, Susie. A call came the next morning from Betty Bacall—Bogart, she told him, had died at 3:00 a.m. Work on Desk Set was to begin within hours.
“I originally wanted him to deliver the eulogy,” Bacall remembered. “He called me up immediately and said, ‘I’d never get through it.’ It was just too emotional.” He told her he could have done it for someone he wasn’t as close to, but not Bogie, dear Bogie. “I remember when he delivered the eulogy at Walter Huston’s memorial. He was brilliant, but shaky.”
The mood on the set was somber as Tracy played his first scenes in the reference library of the Federal Broadcasting Company, initially with Dina Merrill, Joan Blondell, and Sue Randall, soon with Hepburn, who marches in with a box from Bonwit Teller under her arm.
“My name is Richard Sumner,” he says pleasantly, emerging from her office.
“Well, numerologically that’s very good,” she smiles, taking the advantage and offering her hand. “There are thirteen letters in your name.”
“You calculate rapidly.”
“Up to thirteen anyway.”
The verbal jousting in Sumner’s introduction to Bunny Watson followed the familiar Tracy-Hepburn pattern. “They did all their own blocking and rehearsing before they came on the set,” said Dina Merrill. “They knew exactly what they were going to do. All the director did was tell them where the camera was and work the other actors into the scene.”
There were no calls on the fourth day of production, as Tracy and Hepburn were freed to attend the memorial service at All Saints Episcopal Church. Tracy arrived, according to the Los Angeles Times, “grief deep-etched in his broad face.” Hepburn, the paper reported, was already there. “Katie,” said Bacall, “managed to get into the church before anyone else did, and she was sitting there when they came in.” As the service began at 12:30 p.m., John Huston reading the eulogy, a minute of silence was observed on the nearby Fox lot, where together Bogart and Tracy had made their first feature, Up the River, twenty-seven years earlier.
It was Walter Lang’s idea to stage the questionnaire scene—the one originally set to be done on location—on the roof of the network’s building some forty flights above Midtown, Sumner brown-bagging their lunches, pigeons everywhere, the spectacular New York skyline serving as backdrop. Sumner sets out coffee, sandwiches, takes out a notepad and a pen.
“Often, when we meet a person for the first time,” he begins, checking his notes, “some physical characteristic strikes us. Now, what is the first thing you notice in a person?”
“Whether the person is male or female,” Bunny replies.
Stifling a grin, he makes a note. “Now this is a little mathematical problem…,” he continues, catching himself and picking a cup up off the table. “Celery or olives?” he offers.
She peers inside. “Four olives, three pieces