Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [468]
“How much does he get?” Martin asked. “A quarter of a million?”
“Well, I’m not going to quote this …”
“I’ll see him myself. I’ll find out.”
“How much did you say?”
“A quarter of a million? A picture?”
“Oh, come now.”
“You mean a lot more than that?”
“Twice that. Twice that. And against ten percent of the gross. The Other Fellow gets twice that! Or seven-fifty or something.”
“I did Lancaster when he was working for Mark Hellinger and wasn’t even doing anything.”
“Now he gets half a million,” Tracy said. “I shouldn’t tell you—don’t tell him. I only know that because …”
Tracy was called for more of Bernie Hamilton’s death scene, a quick reaction shot, a couple of lines called up to where Sinatra should have been standing. “Frank wasn’t there. A fellow came down and said to me, ‘That’s the best scene you’ve ever played in your entire career.’ And I was looking at a stick. So I said, ‘Well maybe I should have played the whole thing to a stick.’ ” When he returned to his dressing room, the shot in the can, Tracy had scarcely been gone ten minutes.
“Well, that didn’t take long, Spence,” Martin said.
“Well,” said Tracy, deadpan, “I’m awful good … No, the truth is they shoot it once with me and they figure, well, we can’t get any better from the son of a bitch. It’s like trying a suit on me. You know it’s only so far you can go.”
* * *
1 The schedules show that March had a 7:00 a.m. makeup call, while Tracy was given a 9:00 a.m. call.
2 Actress Joan Plowright, whom Olivier was soon to marry, was also in New York, appearing at the Lyceum in A Taste of Honey.
CHAPTER 31
The Value of a Single Human Being
* * *
Frank Tracy sat in his Florida apartment and contemplated the spectacle of Dorothy and Louise Tracy. “Dorothy and Louise were two very different kinds of people,” he said. “Dorothy and Louise, my God. Nothing wrong with Dorothy morally or whatever, but she was a chatterbox. Never stopped talking. Drive you right out of your mind. My dad used to say, ‘For Chrissake, is she coming over here? God, as soon as she hits the door, that’s it.’ Never had anything to say. Nothing was ever amusing, informative, nothing. Carroll would just sit there and smile.”
In particular, Frank recalled a time when Carroll and Dorothy Tracy were visiting Freeport. “I was home for a weekend or something, and I remember sitting in the living room talking about Spence and Louise. My mother or father said, ‘Well, they never got divorced. That’s a plus.’ And Dorothy said, ‘Well, of course not. She’s not going to give up being Mrs. Spencer Tracy. She’s never going to give that up.’ They seemed very … the word isn’t bitter … critical maybe. I was very surprised.”
Dorothy’s perception of Louise and her use of the name was more widespread than Frank could have imagined. Many in Spence’s circle felt the same way, though Kate herself never said a word. “Being Mrs. Spencer Tracy publicly was more important than being the wife of Spencer Tracy,” George Cukor said of her, but it was simplistic to assume that Louise somehow needed to bask in the glow of her husband’s celebrity. “She was certainly a saint,” Jane Feely said, “but in the very best sense of being a saint. She was a true servant of God and a true carrier of the cross, but in a very human way, which is what a saint is. She grew and grew and grew, that woman … Especially as she grew in stature with the Clinic, she became a person of whom she could be very proud, and of whom Spencer was very proud. Whatever she may have felt, whether she knew or she didn’t know, she knew who she was. Maybe better than he knew who he was. And I think he envied that. She had found herself in that.”
Louise was now sixty-four, as white-haired as her husband and no longer able to manage an enterprise that had grown beyond her wildest dreams in size and complexity. “I am trailing the Clinic