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ancient capital of Hawaii, when Tracy received word from his brother Carroll that Emma Brown, their venerable aunt Mum, had died in Freeport at the age of ninety. Famously parsimonious, Emma Brown had sent cash gifts to her nephews every Christmas—as if Spence needed the money. “She could send them a certain amount each year to help keep her taxes down,” Bertha Calhoun recalled. “They sent her fur coats and televisions, all kind of things she wouldn’t buy for herself … Any big thing in the house that you would consider a convenience—she wouldn’t buy that, so that’s what they’d give her for Christmas.” Spence said he wouldn’t come back for the funeral, that it would be a mob scene if he did. “When they buried Emma there were people there at the funeral hiding behind the tombstones because they thought Carroll was Spencer. It was terrible.”

Upon Carroll’s return to Los Angeles, Tracy withdrew from The Devil at 4 O’Clock, citing a conflict with the scheduled start of Judgment at Nuremberg. In a statement, Columbia’s Sam Briskin said the studio considered the Hawaiian location work “too hazardous” to assure the completion of Tracy’s scenes by December 16, the absolute drop-dead date for Tracy’s release to Stanley Kramer. In the meantime, Kramer was flogging the release of Inherit the Wind, which had its world premiere as a two-a-day attraction at London’s Astoria Theatre on July 7, 1960.

The early notices were superb, the trades rhapsodizing over every element of the picture—Kramer’s direction, Ernest Laszlo’s evocative black-and-white photography, Ernest Gold’s exquisitely restrained musical score, the stark vocals of Leslie Uggams. “Tracy has the lines, the ringing phrases and sentences, purposely homely at times, the insistence of mind over matter, the shafts of irony by which Bryan and the proponents of ignorance were routed,” James Powers wrote in the Hollywood Reporter. “He delivers them, and a deep humanity, by enormous conviction and force of intelligence.” Variety called Kramer’s pairing of Tracy and March “a stroke of casting genius. They go at each other on the thespic plane as one might imagine Dempsey and Louis would have had time and circumstance brought them to the same ring. Both men are spellbinders in the most laudatory sense of the word. If they aren’t two contenders in the next Academy sweepstakes, then Oscar should be put in escrow for another year.”

Curiously, the British public didn’t flock to the theater to see the heralded clash of the titans, and Kramer would later talk of forlornly standing in front of the Leicester Square cinema “with reviews I could have written myself” and watching as “no one came.” The American premiere was set for July 21 in Dayton, Tennessee—the site of the original courtroom battle—with several members of the original jury commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the trial. Kramer’s New York press representative, Meyer Beck, got in touch with John T. Scopes, the Louisiana geologist who, in 1925, was the man on trial for the teaching of evolution, and persuaded him to help promote the film, following a “carefully scheduled itinerary” that culminated in Scopes’ return to the town H. L. Mencken once famously dubbed “the buckle on the Bible belt.”

The mayor, who proclaimed a Scopes Trial Day, called the resulting crowd the second-largest in Dayton’s history. Scopes noted little change in the place—the Butler Act was still on the books and teachers were still required to sign a pledge that they wouldn’t teach evolution—and he said that he was certain the verdict would be the same were the trial to be repeated. “I enjoyed the movie,” Scopes later wrote in a memoir. “Of course, it altered the facts of the real trial. I was never jailed and I hadn’t met my future wife until years later in Venezuela. I didn’t mind such small liberties. They had to invent a romance for the balcony set. Also, Matthew Harrison Brady, the Bryanlike character, died nearer the close of the trial than Bryan had. What was important, though, the film captured the emotions in the battle of words between