Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [452]
Kramer had been nursing a fascination with Tracy since his days at M-G-M, where, as a lowly cutter’s assistant, he had once introduced himself to his idol. “Everyone identified with Tracy from the time he started, when he was a redheaded tough guy—drunk, breaking the windows of cafes and being picked up by the police. Even in those early days nobody could really explain why it was that up against Mr. Movies—Clark Gable—everybody always wanted Tracy to get the girl. He was stocky and he underplayed it. He was kind of the good guy, full of sacrifice, the clichéd character. But, by gosh, he gave it so much more, and somehow you never wanted to see him go. Then, as his stature grew and he became the premiere character actor of his day, he had what a lot of fellows just dream about.”
Bert Allenberg drove a hard bargain. Sensing Kramer’s resolve, he held firm to a fee of $250,000. Tracy hadn’t had a hit since Bad Day at Black Rock, hadn’t made the top ten since Father’s Little Dividend, but he was still widely regarded as the gold standard among American film actors, the best Hollywood had to offer. “Kramer said that he wanted to direct it,” Tracy later recalled, “but that if I’d rather have another director he’d try to get whoever I wanted—Gar Kanin or whoever. But I’d seen the job Kramer did on The Defiant Ones and I told him that was good enough for me.”
The deal was settled just as The Old Man and the Sea and The Last Hurrah would again be putting Tracy’s drawing power to the test. Old Man came first, with a gala world premiere on October 7, 1958, to benefit the March of Dimes. Kate braved the crowds at New York’s Criterion Theatre, something she was ordinarily loath to do, trying her best to distract from advance press clouded with news of the picture’s troubles and its $5.5 million price tag. The notices were mixed, the critics admiring the filmmakers’ guts more than their results, but there were still some who applied the word “masterpiece” to the picture and none at all who mentioned the matter of Tracy’s weight. The first week’s take was surprisingly good—$32,000 for fourteen showings—and the picture continued to draw well into November. The pattern repeated itself in key cities around the country, intense interest in the first two or three weeks, then a precipitous dropoff that was both startling and ominous.
Columbia moved The Last Hurrah into the Roxy on the twenty-second, timing its appearance to the midterm elections, and the picture went over big despite heavy rains that, according to Variety, clipped as much as $20,000 off the first week’s gate. Metro’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was the town’s big winner in the comparably sized Music Hall, but Hurrah, helped by strong notices, held firm in its second week, bettering its first by some $15,000. It continued into its third and fourth weeks, falling off in much the same manner as Old Man and the Sea. In the end, neither film was a success, The Last Hurrah posting a loss of $1.8 million.
As both films were playing themselves out, their star was at Harkness Pavilion, where he had gone for a checkup, some forced dieting, and the removal of a basal cell eruption on his nose. He spent nearly two weeks at the exclusive facility, enduring a battery of tests and a series of cardiograms that showed, much to his dismay, no trouble at all. All the dieting, he decided, was at the expense of his ulcer, and he was still only