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By Root 3669 0

Last Hurrah, Tracy had a call from John Sturges: Ernest Hemingway had run The Old Man and the Sea and said that he liked it very, very much. Tracy was astonished; he himself wasn’t happy with the picture. Since shooting had wrapped at the end of August, he had been locked in an ongoing battle with Hayward over the handling of the soundtrack. Tracy’s preference had always been to play the Old Man silent and speak his words in voice-over, the same approximate technique that had been dubbed “Narratage” for The Power and the Glory. But nobody liked the idea of a $5 million silent movie, and he dutifully made a preliminary narration track for editing purposes, a dubbing job that took three days. In October, the film cut, he went back and did the final voice-over, which involved his speaking the narrative as well as the words and thoughts of Santiago, the latter in the voice of the Old Man. It was a technique that worked, despite all the hand-wringing that led up to it, and by the middle of November, Hayward could report to Hemingway that the picture was entirely finished “with the exception of a couple of minor inserts.”

On January 9 they had taken it to Riverside, where the reaction of a near-capacity house—which had come to see A Farewell to Arms—was so good the studio people were a little surprised. “Worth all the agony everyone went through—I think,” Louise reported in a letter to a friend. “Whether it is worth the ulcer Spence wound up with is a question. But it is a fine, fine picture.” Even Tracy thought the reaction good. “ ‘Old Man’ seemed to go well,” he wrote in his book the next day. “Think excellent, true pic. Should get good reviews. Business??? Very dubious.” He made some minor suggestions—things to cut—but when he ran the picture again in March, he found that not one of his changes had been made and his mood soured again. “[N]o suggestions followed—stinks!—will get panned.”

According to Hayward, Hemingway said the picture had “a wonderful emotional quality and is very grateful and pleased with the transference of his material to the screen. He thought Tracy was great (in light of his quarrels with him this is quite a compliment)…the photography was excellent … the handling of the fishing and the mechanical fish very good. Had some minor dislikes…[B]ut all in all he was terribly high on the picture and very pleased with it.”

For a second preview in May, Tracy wanted Betty Bogart to see it. “I went to the preview with Carroll Tracy,” she recalled, “and he was waiting for me at his house afterwards for the full report. Things like that meant something to him.” Her reaction was so positive it threw him, and he thought for a moment that he might be overreacting. “Is it great???” he wondered. A few days later he phoned Sturges about the changes he wanted. He was unhappy with the ending, the titles, and the scene toward the end with the tourists, which he thought out of tone with the rest of the sequence. Two days later, he had his answer: Warners refused to make any of the changes he wanted. That day he suffered the “worst ulcer pains yet” and the upset continued into the evening hours, when he irritably dined at Romanoff’s with the Durochers, the Wagners (Bob and Natalie), and Betty Bogart (with whom he gratuitously picked a fight). He was chronically tired, unhappy, ill, and uninterested in work.

When Tom Pryor of the New York Times visited the set of The Last Hurrah, it was, in part, to check a report that Tracy was looking upon the picture as his own professional swan song. “Well,” said Tracy, “twenty-eight years is a long time. I started with John Ford and it has been suggested that since he is directing this film it might be an appropriate time for me to call it quits. You know, the beginning and the end with Mr. Ford.” Asked who had made such a suggestion, Tracy took on a sardonic smile.

“I have heard the suggestion,” he replied. “In fact, I have been told that the people have voted for it.”

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1 The tension between Tracy and Hepburn may have been exacerbated by the appearance of an article in