Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [460]
Tracy completed Inherit the Wind on Friday, December 18, and spent Christmas with the family—Carroll and Dorothy, Louise, the kids. He and Larry Keethe caught a red-eye to New York the following week, Tracy enclosing himself in a suite at the Waldorf Towers and briefly tumbling off the wagon. There was talk in the columns of him and Clark Gable reteaming for the film version of Irwin Shaw’s Two Weeks in Another Town, but the only firm commitment on his calendar was The Devil at 4 O’Clock. His blood pressure was high—over 200—and a tooth that had been giving him trouble was found to be cracked. He rested a few days, went out for a long walk finally on January 7. “Flowers for Kathy,” he noted in his datebook.
Lauren Bacall was starring at the Lyceum Theatre in Goodbye, Charlie, and Tracy and Hepburn made one of their infrequent forays into the Broadway theater district to see her. “At one performance I knew someone special was out front,” she remembered, “but I didn’t know who—from the rumbling backstage, it must be someone important. I was afraid to think it might be Spence and Kate—they would never come together, and he’d never come at all, I didn’t expect that. But when the curtain came down, into my dressing room walked Katie—adorable, warm, loving—full of compliments. And then the door opened again and in he walked. I threw my arms around him—he’d actually come to the theater and sat out front through the whole play. It moved me beyond words.”
Most of Tracy’s meals were taken at Hepburn’s home on Forty-ninth Street. Dinner sometimes included the Kanins, Bobby Helpmann, Larry Olivier on a couple of occasions. About this time, actor Larry Kert was renting the top floor apartment in Stephen Sondheim’s house just to the east. One afternoon, he later told a friend, he was looking out the window, over the back garden, when he saw Kate doing the same thing from her window next door. “And then,” he recounted, “I saw a pair of hands on her shoulders. The next thing I knew, Spencer Tracy was behind her, gazing out over Katharine Hepburn. It was like a dream, I thought I was in a movie.”
A writers’ strike was looming on the coast, threatening to disrupt Columbia’s plans to put The Devil at 4 O’Clock into production. Tracy stayed east, noting “heart flutters” that gave him cold sweats and kept him to his bed. Three cardiograms showed nothing—all normal—and he was told the flutters “mean nothing.” Louise was traveling on the East Coast—Washington, Pensacola—and they talked almost daily. Abe Lastfogel called to say that Frank Capra was interested in directing Big Deal with Tracy and Sophia Loren and asked if he could be home by Monday. The next day Tracy left by rail, stopping at the Blackstone in Chicago and arriving back in L.A. on February 8, 1960.
The picture foremost in Tracy’s mind that spring wasn’t the movie for Fred Kohlmar, nor even his proposed pairing with Sophia Loren, but rather a project that had been gathering momentum for three years. It originally came to him by way of Philip Langner, the son of Theatre Guild founder Lawrence Langner and his wife, Armina Marshall. Langner had been scouting properties when over the transom came a teleplay destined for the noted CBS anthology series, Studio One. Titled “A Child Is Waiting,” it tackled the difficult subject of institutionalized care for the mentally retarded. Langner saw in it a possible adaptation