Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [443]
Warners’ New York office finally caught up with him on the twenty-fifth. Tracy told them he had the Asiatic flu and would not be meeting with the press at all. He thought he might still go to Europe and was looking at cars for the trip as late as the twenty-eighth. At 2:30 the following morning he abruptly decided he wanted to go back to California. Kate made the flight on two hours’ notice and was there on St. Ives with him that night to serve dinner.
As The Old Man and the Sea inched toward completion, Tracy faced a logjam of properties vying for his attention. The most promising of these, however, went away within days.
Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had acquired the rights to the two Terence Rattigan one-acts known collectively as Separate Tables, and the offer had been made for Laurence Olivier to direct and star in the picture. Olivier and Vivien Leigh traveled to Los Angeles to finalize the deal. Spence, of course, had known Vivien since 1940, when he presented her with the Oscar for Gone With the Wind. Later, he helped Larry master his Midwestern accent when Olivier was preparing for the part of the tragic Hurstwood in William Wyler’s production of Carrie. The two men were subsequently photographed together on the set of Father’s Little Dividend, but their paths seldom crossed. “I have often thought we both sensed an affinity in our fates,” Olivier wrote, “as people well might who felt that their lives are a bewildering mixture of incredibly good and incredibly bad fortune.” It was over dinner at George Cukor’s that Olivier was seized with the notion of adding Tracy to the cast as the hard-drinking writer John Malcolm. He put the idea to Tracy as a sort of fait accompli.
“Won’t Burt Lancaster want the part?” Tracy asked.
“No,” Olivier assured him. “He’s agreed that you do it.”
What Olivier didn’t tell Tracy was that he had put the request forth in the form of an ultimatum and that the reaction of the “Young Duke” was sharper than anyone expected. “We had a party to celebrate,” Tracy remembered, “and then the Oliviers flew home. When he arrived, a call was waiting from Hollywood. Lancaster had decided he wanted the role. ‘Either Tracy does it or you can’t have us,’ Larry said. But Lancaster was determined. Larry rang me that night. ‘Well, old cock,’ he said, ‘we’ve all been fired.’ I said, ‘That’ll teach you to ask for me.’ ”
Far more resilient as a pending project was Ten North Frederick, from the best-selling novel by John O’Hara. Tracy was first sent the book in February 1956, with Fox saying they’d buy it if he would agree to do it. As with The Power and the Glory, O’Hara began the novel with a corpse and then unfolded the story of Joe Chapin in flashback. Trapped in a sterile marriage, Joe falls in love with a younger woman named Kate. Hemmed in by social convention, he decides that he must remain with his wife. “The practice of love had gone out of their life together; they continued to live in the same house, eat their meals together, expose themselves to the intimacies of living together; and Edith could count on Joe to pay the bills … There was nothing, certainly in the public prints or in the public view that could be inferred to be proof or hint of a change in their relationship … they behaved toward each other with the same precise politeness they had observed all their lives.” Meanwhile, unable to marry Kate, Joe Chapin methodically drinks himself to death.
With Laurence Olivier on the set of Carrie (1952). (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
“WOW!” Tracy wrote in his book. “Not for me!”
Nothing more was said about Ten North Frederick until Buddy Adler showed such an unbridled enthusiasm for Desk Set. He called Tracy one day in March 1957 and expressed hope that something could be worked out for the O’Hara story, which was being