Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [464]
The $2.2 million movie generated little heat in its initial openings, despite some of the strongest reviews of Tracy’s career. A boycott active within 17,000 American Legion posts was likely a factor, as actor-screenwriter Nedrick Young had pleaded the Fifth when asked to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953. (Under the pseudonym of Nathan E. Douglas, Young had collected an Academy Award for his work on The Defiant Ones.) Kramer fired back at National Commander Martin B. McKneally, characterizing the Legion’s announced stand against “a renewed invasion of American filmdom by Soviet-indoctrinated artists” as “reprehensible” and “as totally un-American as anything I can imagine.” His principled stand did nothing to win him—or Inherit the Wind—many friends in the heartland, where UA’s flawed release strategy had, unfortunately, placed the picture ahead of its New York and Los Angeles openings.
As originally scheduled, The Devil at 4 O’Clock would have prevented Tracy from actively promoting the picture, which, surprisingly, he told Kramer he would do. Then Sinatra, alarmed at Tracy’s withdrawal, went to work on him, as Tracy was, in effect, the only reason Sinatra was doing the picture. Kramer pushed off the start date of Nuremberg, hoping to free up Tracy for a round of promotional appearances, and Tracy left for Hawaii two days later.
Kate, who thought Liam O’Brien’s screenplay a bore and wasn’t overly fond of Sinatra, went under protest, having finished at Stratford only a week earlier. Actor Kerwin Matthews, cast as a young priest sent to the island to take over for Father Doonan, could vividly remember the malevolent glint in her eye: “The first day on location on Maui—standing exactly where the first pilgrims landed on a Hawaiian island—I met the Hepburn thing. I had a present for her—a book to read, Hawaii, which would explain so much about the islands. I gave it to her. She walked out on a pier and threw the book in the ocean, saying, ‘Who wants to know anything about this awful place?’ Because she was always next to Spence, no one had a chance to talk to him. No one got a chance to know him, even though I tried constantly.” Hepburn, said Mervyn LeRoy, kept a wary eye on Tracy at all times. “She never interfered with us in any way, and never tried to offer any suggestions. She just watched Spence.”
Actor Gregoire Aslan, who had worked with such heavyweights as Alec Guinness, Orson Welles, and John Huston in a career spanning two decades, was nonplussed at the prospect of making a picture with Tracy. He recalled that he was visiting his sister and her family in London when he caught Inherit the Wind at the Astoria. “Well,” he said, “I thought it was near perfect. And I came back shaking and saying to my brother-in-law, ‘I have just witnessed the greatest performance, and I wonder if I’m not going to act with the greatest actor in the world?’ I was terribly moved. I try to be the character myself when I’m playing something, and when I play with him I have not an answer but I get the answer from the Catholic priest he’s playing. So it’s not a surprise it’s just so easy.” Kerwin Matthews concurred: “Our working together was magic—he was always patting me on the shoulder at the end of each take. We could have been good friends; [he could have been a] ‘father figure’ to me, as was Lee J. Cobb.”
A highlight of the four-week trip was the celebration of Mervyn LeRoy’s sixtieth birthday on October 15. More than seventy people attended the party, which was organized by LeRoy’s wife Kitty and held at Kula Lodge, 3,200 feet up the slopes of Maui’s Haleakala volcano. Smoked black wattle steaks were served, and Sinatra sang the lyrics to four songs written expressly for the occasion by Sammy Cahn.
“When it came Tracy’s turn to give his talk,” publicist Bob Yager remembered,
he got up there and he said that he wanted to welcome Mervyn LeRoy into the Sixty Club. LeRoy was sixty years old, and Spencer is sixty years old, and he said he has welcomed James Cagney, he has welcomed