Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [449]
2 Without the location work, Desk Set was budgeted at $1,997,470.
CHAPTER 30
Our Greatest Actor
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If Spencer Tracy considered retirement in the spring of 1958, he could be excused a certain pessimism. His first two films away from M-G-M had been commercial failures; even the potent Tracy-Hepburn combination was no longer considered box office magic. The Old Man and the Sea could never break even, no matter how much the public got behind it. And the grind of filmmaking wore on him as it always had.
“Spence,” said John Sturges, “could have been cast as the leader of the Irish revolutionary group very easily. He was a rebel, and he tolerated—but unwillingly—certain requirements of civilization. Also, he had within him this dynamo of jittery nervous energy, and you can’t carry that around all the time, find ways to express it. You have to wait a while. In a movie, scenes are lit, you have to ride in a car to work, and so on. And I’m sure they chopped away a bit at Spence. He said they did, anyhow.”
He watched his finances carefully; a balance sheet as of May 31 showed assets—cash, stocks, insurance, the house on Tower Road—amounting to $692,000. Expenses were primarily allowances—$2,500 a month to Louise, a like amount divided among others. When Andrew Tracy died in 1955, he took over the support of his widow, Mame. And, of course, there was always Carroll, who had to be provided for even when there was nothing coming in. Charitable contributions—primarily the clinic—amounted to $30,000 or more a year, and gifts accounted for another $10,000 or so. His own expenses were meager in comparison—generally no more than $1,000 a month.
Hepburn was touring Much Ado About Nothing during the early days of The Last Hurrah, but she kept in close touch by phone. The Much Ado company’s stage manager, Bernie Gersten, made the jumps between cities with her, and he would help with the luggage and whatnot at each successive hotel. Gersten reported that the first thing she did after checking in was to make two long-distance phone calls to announce her safe arrival: one to Spencer Tracy in California and one to her father in Hartford, Connecticut. When Hepburn returned from New York on March 10, she brought with her a container of Irish stew. “Dear Katy,” Tracy wrote in his book.
They were by now a familiar sight, as comfortable and inseparable as a pair of old shoes. Some nights they could be observed quietly browsing the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. On studio lots, shielded from the public, they were less circumspect, Tracy playing the role of the alpha dog to Kate’s humble and adoring mate. “She was meek and motherly,” said Sheilah Graham,
and you knew she lived only to please the man she treated as lord and master. He knew the extent of her devotion and played on it to the end. He seemed to delight in bawling her out—no one knew how it was in private. Once she stopped to tie her shoelace and he shouted, “What’s the matter, Kate?”
“Well, I—”
“Hurry up, goddamn it.”
She left the lace untied and ran … At the beach home of their friends [the Erskines] he would sprawl in an armchair like Professor Higgins with Eliza Doolittle and command, “Put another log on the fire, Kate.” And she would jump to attention and say, “Yessir,” like a junior officer to the captain, and get the wood while he watched … She would take anything from Spencer because she admired him so much. She was his slave, and he used his power over her. But he also knew he needed her.
“I think he was utterly dependent upon her,” said actress Betsy Drake, adding that there was a part of Tracy that could be cruel. “Whatever she did, she was vulnerable to him.” Yet Drake’s abiding memory of the two of them was at the “wonderful