Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [450]
When Hepburn went off to Greece in May 1958, it was in advance of Tracy’s own planned arrival in Italy, where he would again visit the works of Michelangelo and the sites associated with the life of the great artist. During the course of Last Hurrah, Tracy and Jack Ford had talked of filming the life of Il Divino, and Tracy thought some time in Florence and Rome and particularly Carrara would serve as inspiration. As soon as Kate was gone, though, he seemed to lose his focus, loafing at home and occasionally driving out to the beach.
“Spence was down with us Saturday and Sunday,” Chet Erskine reported in a letter to Kate on May 27, “and, the weather being beautiful, we had a marvelous time. The sea was calm but cold, as usual, and the swimming grand. Spence went in with me, and afterward we toasted in the sun and gossiped in our customary manner. He read parts of your letter concerning the wonders of Greece and we pondered the possibility of bringing the Acropolis over here and setting it up in the hills behind our houses where we could enjoy it without the inconvenience of travel …”
Eddie Lawrence, who also owned a house at Malibu, remembered Tracy from this period: “He would come up every once in a while. I really think he was lonesome.”
Tracy’s favorite thing in the world was to drive up the coast, the top down on his Thunderbird, the wind blowing through his hair. Occasionally he’d take Sally Erskine with him, driving as far as they could and then stopping for lunch. She never saw him take a drink, but he would talk about it. “He would say, ‘Oh, Sally, I used to be in the gutter.’ He told me the most horrible things about himself. I was somebody new to confess to, perhaps—I don’t know what it was, perhaps younger.”
Tracy’s spirits were buoyed somewhat by the trade reviews for The Old Man and the Sea, which were extraordinary by any standard. Jack Moffitt, weighing in for the Hollywood Reporter, called it “a beautiful piece of visual poetry” and averred that Tracy’s work as the Old Man was “so intimate and revealing of universal human experience that, to me, it almost transcended acting and became reality.” Variety went further, labeling the picture a screen classic: “One of Tracy’s remarkable achievements, adroitly guided by Sturges, is almost a negative one, but actually the most important. Despite that he is on the screen fully three-quarters of the picture, much of it by himself, his presence does not become oppressive. He has no one to play off of, no other actor by whose presence he can achieve contrast or relief. Within the limitations of the role he can only strive for minute shadings. He does this to create one of the screen’s memorable roles.”
In June the movie was screened at the Venice Film Festival and Expo 58 in Brussels, and it was requested for fests in Brazil and Canada. Tracy was still in town on June 12 when Kate called from Rome to say that she would be returning to New York in a few days. He wired the Kanins in Paris to expect him after a “short stay” in Manhattan, but he was still in California when Hepburn touched down at Idlewild. She was back in L.A. on the seventeenth, back preparing his dinner, back snuggling at his side for TV, back being all that she could be for him. There would be no trip to Europe, though he would continue to think and talk about it well into the fall.
When Stanley Kramer started working in the property department at Fox, moving furniture on and off sets, the year was 1933 and Spencer Tracy was one of the twelve name attractions on the company