Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [447]
Thirty days into production, Tracy wearily commemorated his birthday. “58 years old,” he said in his book, “and feel 90.” He dined that evening with Louise and the kids, Kate typically making herself scarce. On April 7, work shifted to the Columbia Ranch in Burbank, where Ford began shooting exteriors.
Tracy plainly had fun making the picture, and the fireworks many anticipated between him and Pappy Ford never came. “[T]hey were both, shall we say, gentlemen of very strong habits,” Hepburn said, “and Spencer liked to take a nap in the afternoon. He could get up early and go to work, but just absolutely would wilt. So [John], instead of making a problem of this, used to say, ‘God, I’m exhausted. You know, I think we’ve done a full day’s work and I don’t know why the hell you don’t go home.’ And there were two enormously talented people sort of stalking around like prize bulls in the ring, having a deep understanding of each others’ wickednesses. It always used to entertain me.”
Night work on the ranch captured the events that follow Skeffington’s defeat at the hands of a telegenic Republican, the wooing of the electorate having evolved from hand-to-hand engagement to the sterility of the electronic age. The old line’s frustration with this turn of events is seen in the great pumpkin face of Ditto Boland, Skeffington’s loyal lieutenant, who is not quite so button-down as the others. Ed Brophy, making his final appearance in a feature picture, pulled out all the stops that night, racing up to his boss’ limousine and throwing his overcoat and his prized homburg to the sidewalk, stomping on them as he sputtered threats of physical violence. “I’m on my way over to that McCluskey’s headquarters! I’m gonna step right up and poke him in the eye! I’m gonna tell him to his face—”
As they rehearsed the scene, Tracy calming him and telling him to get ahold of himself, retrieving the hat (his “hamburger”) from the pavement and carefully pressing it back into shape, Ford eyed the plate glass storefront adjacent to campaign headquarters and decided to have Brophy let fly with a brick once Tracy’s car had cleared the shot. The sixty-two-year-old actor had just one chance of hitting the window dead square, and in the end it broke clean, the shattering of one generation’s traditions in service of another’s.
The rest of the night was spent setting up and staging a midnight victory parade for the opposing candidate, Skeffington making his way home on foot, a solitary figure in the foreground, the clamor and fire of a newer—if not necessarily better—administration fading off into the distance. It was a particularly long and complicated tracking shot, requiring the services of eight assistant directors and hundreds of extras, two hundred lighted torches, lapel pins as big as silver dollars. They didn’t finish until 5:00 a.m., but the resulting shot became one of the most prized in the Ford catalog.
The Last Hurrah didn’t finish in thirty-five days—Tracy never thought it would—but it did come in $200,000 under budget. Ford printed so many first takes that the final shooting ratio was just six to one—almost unheard of on a major feature. Tracy completed his final scene—Skeffington casting his vote on election day—at 4:10 p.m. on April 24, 1958. “Happy picture!” he wrote in his book. “Ford great!”
Just prior to finishing up The