Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [461]
Mann’s new play told the story of Dan Haywood, a humble jurist from “the backwoods of Maine” recruited to help preside over the military tribunals of the political and industrial leadership of Nazi Germany—the judges, lawyers, financiers, and businessmen who enabled the Third Reich to function. “It struck me as fantastic,” Mann said, “that perhaps the most significant trial in all history had never been treated artistically and little journalistically. Casual research unearthed an even more startling fact. Of the ninety-nine men sentenced to prison terms in the second of the Nuremberg trials, not one was still serving his sentence.”
Though Abby Mann had written “Judgment at Nuremberg” for television, from the outset he envisioned only one actor in the role of Judge Haywood—Spencer Tracy. Langner, through his parents, knew Katharine Hepburn and knew they could get the play to Tracy through her. “Kate,” Langner recalled, “was out at the Shakespeare festival in Stratford, which my father had started. She and Alfred Drake were starring out there, so Abby and I drove out to Stratford, where they had a guest house on the festival grounds where they put up the stars. We knocked on the front door, and Kate came to the door. There we were with our script. I said, ‘Oh, Kate, you look so wonderful. You’ve got a terrific sunburn …’ She said, ‘That’s not a sunburn! Those are spots!’ You can imagine my mortification; I turned a deep crimson.”
Hepburn did indeed get the script to Tracy, who liked what he saw so much that he said he would do it if they could line up a director and some financing. Mann spent nearly two years refining the play, writing in the interim for Matinee Theatre, The United States Steel Hour, Studio One, and, ultimately, Playhouse 90, which dramatized his story “Portrait of a Murderer” in 1958. Tracy subsequently put Stanley Kramer onto “Judgment at Nuremberg,” though Kramer was still in Australia shooting On the Beach when Playhouse 90 produced the play in April 1959, Claude Rains taking the role of Judge Haywood. “It is his tremendous responsibility,” Kramer later said of the character, “to decide whether [the four judges on trial in the story] merely carried out the law, as written by the Nazis, or were guilty of crimes against humanity.”
Kramer’s deal for the rights to the teleplay—$150,000 plus another $50,000 for Mann’s work as screenwriter—was finalized in January 1960. Tracy okayed the deal to star in the picture on February 16 for the same money as for Inherit the Wind—$250,000 against a percentage of the gross. With Nuremberg in the offing, he was relieved when Columbia pulled the plug on Devil at 4 O’Clock, citing a pending SAG strike for which Tracy had already signaled his support. It was just as well; Devil was to have been Tracy’s fourth film in a Roman collar, a whiskey priest tending the children afflicted with leprosy on a small volcanic island. With the cancellation, the film lost Peter Glenville, Bridget Boland, whose work on the script hadn’t yet been completed, and costar Sidney Poitier. There was still a chance Big Deal would come to fruition, but an attempt by Capra to set the picture up at United Artists collapsed over money, as neither Tracy nor Loren were considered bankable.
In May Kate left for Stratford for another season with the Shakespeare festival, and Tracy followed her east in the company of Abe Lastfogel. Alone in New York, he immediately started drinking again, a bout with the bottle that lasted three days. Following a day of recuperation, he checked into the Waldorf and was well enough to go to Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Kramer called, confirming that Laurence Olivier had been set for the role of Ernst Janning, the principal defendant in Judgment at Nuremberg. Delighted with the news, Tracy effectively blew off a dinner with Lastfogel