Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [462]
In Stratford, Hepburn was asked by Newsweek if there could be such a thing as an American—as distinct from a British—style of playing Shakespeare. “I don’t know,” she mused. “You’d have to take our greatest actor—who is he? Spencer Tracy, I imagine, and contrast him with their greatest—Larry [Olivier] or Gielgud. There’s something about the great American actor that’s like a clipper ship in action, a sort of heart’s directness. Spencer has it. He could do Shylock, or Lear, or Macbeth. We could do Macbeth together.” The thought, of course, horrified Tracy, who had little interest in Shakespeare and refused to stretch himself with the verse roles Kate was so doggedly tackling. “It was the thing she didn’t admire about Spencer,” Bill Self said, “and she told me this more than once: ‘You know, he has never reached his potential as an actor.’ She’s off doing Shakespeare, Spence is sitting by the pool. She often would say, ‘Spence has never reached his potential, but it’s his fault.’ Maybe he knew his limitations better than she did.”
Dutifully, Tracy returned for Kate’s opening in Twelfth Night on June 4, 1960, then he left her to the festival for the remainder of the summer, content to spend his time dieting and loafing back in California. There was talk of reviving Devil at 4 O’Clock with yet another script and Frank Sinatra joining the cast, but there was still no director and no firm commitment on Tracy’s part. Yet Fred Kohlmar, who harbored fond memories of Boys Town, seemed obsessed with the idea of Tracy in the role of the bad-tempered Father Doonan and pursued him with a fervor that was, to some, baffling. By the end of June, Mervyn LeRoy had signed on as director, but Sinatra still hadn’t formally committed. He was, however, anxious to make a picture with Tracy and was offered $600,000 to take the role of a convict temporarily consigned to a labor crew at Father Doonan’s South Seas hospital. Once he did commit, Sinatra did everything possible to accord Tracy the respect he was due, ceding first billing when, in reality, he was by far the bigger draw.
“When we did that film,” Sinatra remembered,
Mervyn LeRoy said to me, “We have a little problem with your desires and Spencer’s desires.” And I said, “Well, like what?” He said, “Well, you know, he likes to come in very early in the morning and he doesn’t want to work beyond four o’clock in the afternoon, and you want to come in later and work till six or seven o’clock.”…I said, “Well, what are we going to do about the problem?” He said, “I don’t know, but … you’re friends and he doesn’t want to talk to you about it. He doesn’t want to, you know, upset the apple cart, so to speak.” And I said, “Well, I’ll talk to him about it.” So I did. I went up to his house and we sat and had a cup of tea, and we talked about it. And I said, “Now we have a problem here.” “Oh,” he said, “naw, it’s no problem, Kid.” He said, “It’s going to be all right.” I said, “You know why?” I said, “Because what time do you want to start? Three o’clock in the morning? Four in the morning? I’ll be there.” He said, “No, no.” He said, “Now that’s going too far.” He said, “Well, you know, I just don’t want to work late in the afternoon.” And I said, “Well, you’re not going to be able to in this picture because of the lighting problem. In the mountainous areas where we’ll be shooting in Maui, we lose all the light at two o’clock, three o’clock in the afternoon.” He said, “No kidding?” I said, “That’s true. You’re not going to work beyond three o’clock.” He said, “Well, we can start anytime you want.” I said, “We won’t get any work done. We’ll have to start early.” So we did start shooting at seven or seven-thirty in the morning. So we got a full day’s work in.
An advance crew was working over the tiny town of Lahaina, the