Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [453]
Tracy was back in Los Angeles on November 25 when Bert Allenberg suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at the home of client Danny Kaye. Allenberg lingered two days at Cedars of Lebanon and died without regaining consciousness. Tracy was an active pallbearer at Sinai Temple on the twenty-eighth, as were Joel McCrea, Edward G. Robinson, Stewart Granger, Benny Thau, Leo Durocher, and Frank Capra.
It had been a lousy year, rife with disappointment, and being named Best Actor by the National Board of Review did little to bolster his spirits. He considered the Old Man far and away the toughest part he’d ever played and resented all the press about the tank and the phony marlin and such. (“Unless you can arrange for someone to deliver a live 3,000-pound marlin to you once a day for the sharks to chew up, how are you going to do the story?”) He also thought parts of The Last Hurrah overcooked—particularly Minihan’s wake and the death scene in which the cardinal comes to call.
“You liked all that schmaltz,” he said accusingly when his cousin Jane told him she loved the film. “Yes, I did,” she insisted. “That’s where we were all from.” And then there was that line she thought so marvelous: “We’re not all descended from kings, you know.”
He saw Ethel Barrymore, who was twenty-one years his senior, and said gloomily, “Ethel, I’m getting old.”
“Yes,” she said, “just like Jack and Lionel and me …”
When Tracy hit his blue moods, Hepburn redoubled her efforts to look after him. Dina Merrill recalled a day in March 1959 when she saw Hepburn standing in line at the airport. “I said, ‘Kate, where are you going?’
“ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Spencer is going to make The Devil at 4 O’Clock in Martinique, and I’m going down to find him a house to live in.’
“As if nobody else could do that!” Merrill exclaimed. “She wasn’t even in the picture!”
The Devil at 4 O’Clock promised to be yet another rough shoot, the sort of location picture Tracy hated to do. It was the last deal Bert Allenberg had set up for him, and he stuck with it despite learning, just after the first of the year, that producer Fred Kohlmar had no script, no director, and a projected start date of April 15. It was, Tracy told Abe Lastfogel, impossible, and he was no less dubious when he learned the West End’s Peter Glenville would likely direct the film. He finally saw forty-two pages of script on January 21 and thought them terrible. He sent Lastfogel back to Columbia’s Sam Briskin and asked that production be postponed until an entirely new script could be developed. A subsequent meeting with Glenville revealed the new writer to be Bridget Boland, the woman who had written The Prisoner, the first of only two movies Glenville had ever directed. “Start June 1???” Tracy wrote in his book. “I doubt!!”
He was also reviewing the draft screenplay for Inherit the Wind and cabling his comments to Stanley Kramer, who was in Australia filming On the Beach. A hit, The Defiant Ones had garnered nine Academy Award nominations, adding considerable luster to the other projects on Kramer’s schedule. Unwilling to sacrifice Wind for something as ephemeral as Devil at 4 O’Clock, Tracy had Columbia agree to a stop clause that guaranteed his release no later than September 1, 1959.
Once again, he found himself an unwilling participant in the annual Oscar race. The Old Man and the Sea had made a number of ten-best lists, and it was widely assumed that Tracy would be nominated for either the Hemingway picture or Last Hurrah. Of the four other nominees, handicappers assumed Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, both with nominations for The Defiant Ones, would cancel each other out, leaving the field to Tracy, Paul Newman (for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), and David Niven (who had taken the part Olivier was to have played in Separate Tables). The Los Angeles Times’ Philip K. Scheuer declared his preference for Old Man and the Sea, noting that, as virtually its only actor, Tracy should get the major credit