Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [454]
In May Hepburn traveled to London to make Suddenly, Last Summer, for Sam Spiegel and Joe Mankiewicz. Based on Tennessee Williams’ play of the same title, the picture, which joined her for the first time with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, promised to be one of the year’s major releases. Tracy stayed behind, immobilized by Kohlmar’s frantic preparations for Devil at 4 O’Clock. In June he attended George Burns’ triumphant opening at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, then mourned the death of Ethel Barrymore with a rosary at Good Shepherd. In July he was reported by both Sheilah Graham and Hedda Hopper as visiting the set of Suddenly, Last Summer and taking part in a London charity event called Night of 100 Stars. When pressed by British reporters about how much he earned and how old he was—two matters with which Fleet Street always seemed unnaturally obsessed—he said: “I earn $300,000 every Friday. And I am 78 years old.”
He was back in Los Angeles for Natalie Wood’s twenty-first birthday and the party thrown in her honor by Frank Sinatra at Romanoff’s. There was talk of a picture with Sophia Loren, as Garson Kanin had written a script to be shot in Italy titled Big Deal. Over the phone, Tracy approved Kanin’s idea and the arrangements. Two days later, Abe Lastfogel called to say that the deal was not yet set. According to Tracy’s book, Kanin, who had not directed a movie since 1941, wanted $100,000 in cash, another $100,000 deferred, and 50 percent of the profits. “Now!” Tracy wrote in disgust. “Shenanigans!”
“The young actors who are coming along are interesting,” Tracy told William Weber Johnson of Time magazine.
They know so much about acting, how it should be done, and they are perfectly willing to tell you about it. I guess I’ve never really known about acting, how it should be done. And I remember George M. Cohan, who taught me more than anyone else ever has about the theatre—he and Jack Barrymore were probably the greatest we’ve ever had—I remember him telling me the same thing, that he really didn’t know how it was done, that you just do it. I guess maybe when I was a young punk in the theatre and people came backstage to say that I’d done a terrific job, I was the same way. And I was probably intolerant; I probably looked at older people and thought, “Why you old, fat slob, why don’t you quit?”
And then he gave his own ample girth a friendly pat.
George Cukor commented: “I’ve never had a really gifted, magical actor go into long explanations and long theories and long intellectualizing about the acting process … Tracy used to tell you, ‘Well, I certainly learned those lines, spoke those eight pages down to every if, and, and but. I knew every word.’ That’s all he would tell you. Now there was a great deal else that went on with him, but he wasn’t telling it to you. That would have taken the magic out of it somehow, to have chewed it all over beforehand.”
Cukor perceived a certain musicality to the way Tracy approached his work, a quality of speaking that came from the time when he first went on the stage in the early 1920s. Indeed, he could remember the way the young Katharine Hepburn struck him when he watched the screen test she had made for RKO, a scene from the Philip Barry play Holiday: “[T]hat was a period when there was a sort of slightly affected, almost singing way of speaking. There was a rhythm in the lines, and she spoke it that way. And it was a sort of rather grand life. They were all very swell. And Philip Barry had his own note as a writer, and she almost sang that note. As a matter of fact, years later she did another play of Phil Barry’s, and … Tracy said, ‘Yes, I thought all you people sang it so nicely, all of you.’ ”
Eddie Dmytryk picked