Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [474]
At age fifty-nine Dietrich was playing an athletic woman in her forties. “She was nice,” said Widmark, “but she used to drive Tracy crazy. He didn’t use makeup and she had to fix up to the nines. He’d go nutty waiting to do their scenes together.” Hepburn, with her father, was touring the Middle East—Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan—leaving Tracy to pass the time with Dietrich between shots. “She was very respectful,” said Marshall Schlom. “She liked being the star attraction normally, but with Tracy there she knew her place … She was a good cook, apparently, and she loved to be friendly and shmooze and laugh and be joyful. Around Tracy, though, she was much more sedate, quieter, letting him have the stage.” Dietrich would later describe Tracy in her autobiography as “the only really admirable actor with whom I worked.”
Tracy began talking of retirement again, saying another picture would be anticlimactic after Judgment at Nuremberg. He turned down Otto Preminger, who wanted him for Advise and Consent, and was also said to have been Harper Lee’s choice for Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Bob Yager remembered a telling remark that Tracy made to photographer Phil Stern, who was shooting The Devil at 4 O’Clock in Hawaii for Globe Photo. Stern had taken some pictures of Tracy—portraits—and when he showed him the prints he said, “I think they’re very, very good character shots of you.” Tracy examined the images impassively. “When you get to my age,” he said, “it is hard to say when a picture is a wonderful character study or when it’s just a picture of an old man.”
As expected, he drew another Oscar nomination for Inherit the Wind, even as Fredric March, another two-time winner, was shut out of the running. Tracy was clearly pained by the omission, even as he sought to distance himself from the proceedings. “I have to admit to you—Freddy—that I am wondering a bit if maybe the votes were tabulated in Cook County…,” he wrote in acknowledging his costar’s gracious wire of congratulations. “But I thank you—a good Democrat—for giving me the benefit of the doubt—and how I miss you in the daily entanglements of Stanley Kramer’s camera moves.”
To press such as Pete Martin or Joe Hyams, Tracy rarely missed an opportunity to alienate the voting membership of the academy. “I care about a great many things,” he told Martin, “but I sure as hell don’t give a fiddler’s damn about the Academy Awards, and I was honest from the beginning. I never did. When I was winning it, and when I was nominated a great many times.”
Nor did he buy Martin’s suggestion that a nomination somehow brought paying customers to see an otherwise underperforming film. “I was nominated for Old Man and the Sea,” he said, “which grossed fifteen dollars, seven of which they found in the aisle. I was nominated for Bad Day at Black Rock, which was not a success at the box office. It has nothing whatever to do with it. Maybe the awards, but the actors nominate. And the actors nominate if they think you give a good performance. What the hell has the picture got to do with it? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.”
Tracy in his rented home on the George Cukor estate. The chair was an old horsehair rocker that Hepburn had reupholstered. (HEARST COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA)
Nevertheless, Columbia pulled The Devil at 4 O’Clock from its scheduled summer release, spotting it instead for the fall, presumably in the belief that by now any Tracy performance, regardless of the material behind it, merited a nomination.
Montgomery Clift paced the floor of his room at the Hotel Bel-Air, struggling for words. “I can’t really answer you honestly,” he said. “I was offered $300,000 for another role. That would have been the highest per diem ever paid. But what I did, I don’t consider it—what’s the word? I knew it yesterday … altruistic. It’s not altruistic on my part. People milk pictures, and I felt