Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [438]
When Walter Lang called them to the set, Hepburn slipped out of the white slacks she was wearing and back into Bunny Watson’s prim business suit. The set, an almost exact copy of the Broadway original, was crowded with the steel-gray console, whirring processing cabinets, and flashing display screen of Emmarac, the enormous job-killing computer Sumner has installed on the main floor of the library. Scene completed, she changed back into her slacks and blouse and greeted Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, visiting from an adjacent stage where Leo McCarey was shooting An Affair to Remember. They launched into a spirited discussion of Kate’s decision to do The Merchant of Venice at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford. (“It’s better to try something difficult and flop,” she said, “than to play it safe all the time.”) When Lang again wanted them, Hepburn had to be bodily dragged away by Tracy, who added a small kick for good measure.
On the thirty-third day of production, they played their longest scene in the film together—eight pages of material in which Bunny and Sumner dine on fried chicken in Bunny’s apartment. Gig Young, playing her boss and longtime boyfriend, comes in on the exchange and finds both of them in bathrobes, Sumner having gotten drenched in a cloudburst. Then Joan Blondell arrives, adding a note of farce to the sequence and giving Tracy an audience for an improvisational exit, a Skeltonesque turn as a drunk that left the atmosphere giddy.
“2 days scheduled—done by 2:30—Katie wonderful,” he noted proudly in his book. They finished interior work on the picture two days later, the final shot featuring the trademark Tracy-Hepburn kiss, Kate with her back to the camera, Spence drawing her to him in perfect symmetry with their first screen embrace sixteen years earlier. It would be, Tracy had said, their last picture together. “Who is going to hire us after this?” he asked, acutely conscious of his age, his white hair, the ever-deepening lines in his face. “He felt he was too old for the part,” Lang remembered, “and he was; but Katie wanted him and I wanted him. We all wanted him, so he did it.”
Included in the principal cast and crew of Desk Set were three notorious drinkers—Tracy, Gig Young, and cinematographer Leon Shamroy. “Shammie” was by far the most practiced, a brusque, cigar-chomping raconteur who played the horses prodigiously. “It was obvious that Katie really had kind of a schoolgirl crush on Shamroy,” said Henry Ephron, “and Phoebe said, ‘Katie, what do you see in Shammie?’ She said, ‘He’s a rascal.’ ” On their last night of shooting they were on the Fox lot’s New York street, where Bunny and Sumner catch a ride with a coworker and his quarrelsome family. Staged in a driving rain, the scene took from midnight to 5:30 in the morning to complete. “Shammie had a bottle of whiskey. Spence said, ‘Goodbye, everyone!’ grabbed the empty bottle of whiskey, and said, ‘See you in June!’ and took off.”
Desk Set closed four days under schedule and $131,800 under budget. Buddy Adler was so pleased he phoned Fox president Spyros Skouras from the projection room. (“Good news was so scarce around the studio those years,” commented Henry Ephron.) When a preview was set for Pasadena, Ephron called Hepburn and extended an invitation. “Thank you,” she responded, “but we never go to previews.” Tracy took the phone: “Henry, would you send a script to my son John? Send it to the Tracy Clinic. His mother will take him to the preview, and if he’s read the script beforehand,