Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [437]
Withdrawing the cup, he glances inside. “Right,” he says.
“Uh-huh.”
“That doesn’t happen to be the question.”
“Oh.”
He reads: “A train started out at Grand Central with seventeen passengers aboard and a crew of nine. At 125th Street, four got off and nine got on. At White Plains, three got off and one got on. At Chappaqua, nine got off and four got on. And at each successive stop thereafter, nobody got off and nobody got on until the train reached its next to the last stop, where five people got off and one got on. Then it reached the terminal.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” she smiles. “Eleven passengers and a crew of nine.”
“That’s not the question.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“How many people got off at Chappaqua?”
“Nine.”
He stops short of biting into his sandwich. “That’s correct,” he says.
“Yes, I know.”
A bemused look comes over his face. “Would you mind telling me how you arrived at that?”
“Spooky, isn’t it?” she says, shivering in the cold. “Do you notice that there are also nine letters in Chappaqua?”
Hepburn later characterized the eight-minute sequence as “a remarkable example of comedy acting between two people who really, more or less, knew what they were doing.” Fiercely proud of the work she and Spence were doing together, she scolded him when he branded a scene lousy (“You don’t know what you’re talking about—the director knows what he’s doing”) and demanded the full attention of the cast and crew when the two of them were at work.
“Kate saw me reading a magazine one day on the set,” Dina Merrill recalled, “and she came over. She said, ‘Dina, what are you reading?’ I said, ‘Oh, just an article in this magazine.’ She said, ‘I don’t want you ever to do that again. You’re a beginner here. You should watch Spence and me.’ Yes, ma’am! That was the last time I brought a paper or a magazine or anything to the set—and she was right.”
Tracy, who was averaging just three hours of sleep a night, was “dead tired” and irritable, certain Desk Set would be another clunk of a picture. “Lang is nice man,” he wrote on the sixteenth day of production, “but childish director. Ephron—producer—dumb. Bad pic[ture]. K. bad. Me bad.”
Owing to Tracy’s presence, Hepburn monitored every aspect of life on the set, even to the point of bringing props in from her own home. “She was a mother hen,” Merrill said, “worrying if he had a cold, or might catch one. It was like he was her child.” Her constant hovering irritated him, and he seized on every possible opportunity to put her in her place. “Shut your mouth,” he’d tell her. “Go back where you belong in vaudeville and keep out of here.” Dina Merrill found him “just as sweet as he could be” but full of hell: “He gave it to her pretty good; one day she came on the set with her hair pinned up in a horrible bun—she always looked like an old shoe anyway—and he was giving an interview. He stopped what he was saying, gestured at her and said, ‘And that, gentlemen, is our star!’ ”
Henry Ephron, fascinated by the obvious bond between them, haunted the set like a stagestruck teenager. “Tracy, we discovered, was incurably a mischievous kid. Once, when Hepburn left to go on the set, leaving me and Tracy together, he whispered, ‘She’s never forgiven me for Bergman.’ He said it affectionately … She must have loved him terribly. Phoebe once asked Kate what it was about Spencer that fascinated Kate. She said, ‘I’m like a little fly that buzzes around him all the time, and every once in a while he gives me a good swat.’ ”
When the AP’s Bob Thomas visited the set, he congratulated Hepburn on her Academy Award nomination for The Rainmaker and asked if she’d be attending the ceremonies. “Of course not,” she replied. “I didn’t even go when I won the Oscar for Morning Glory.” Tracy furled his brow as if trying to recall a past life. “Let’s see,” he said. “That was back in 1902, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” she returned, “and you won in 1901 and 1906.”
“These awards,” he said, waving off the subject, “don’t mean a damn thing. They may add some dough to a picture’s gross, but they don’t do anything for actors.