Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [477]
Tracy’s twitting of Lancaster may also have had something to do with the fact that Lancaster had been nominated for an Academy Award for his work in Elmer Gantry—and that he was the odds-on favorite to win. (The other nominees for Best Actor were Trevor Howard for Sons and Lovers, Jack Lemmon for The Apartment, and Olivier for The Entertainer.) When Lancaster, in fact, did win the award on the night of April 17, he thanked even “those who voted against me” and was careful to bring the statuette onto the set at Universal City the next morning so that he could show it to Tracy. A week later, Tracy committed to playing General William T. Sherman in How the West Was Won, an all-star western to be directed, in part, by John Ford.
As the various cast members completed their big scenes, attention fell naturally to Tracy as he prepared to deliver the verdict of the tribunal. Dietrich was often with him in photographs taken on the set, sleek in black slacks and top, welcoming his visitors, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas among them. “We laughed a lot together since his sense of humor was like mine,” Dietrich said. On the night they filmed a walk through the rubble of Nuremberg, standing sets on the back lot dressed to suggest bolstered landmarks still erect after the ravages of war, she brought apple strudel for the crew and could be observed huddling with Tracy as they sipped hot chocolate. “You’re really not my type,” he’d tell her. “You’re Continental; I’m just an old fart.” (They were, in reality, a mere twenty months apart in age.) “Spencer Tracy was a very lonely man,” Dietrich concluded, “or so he seemed to me.”
The morning of the verdict began like most others, the courtroom packed with extras and the principal cast members (Dietrich, this time, included). The core of the scene had timed out at six minutes, the rest—the entry of the judges, the passing of the sentences, the dissenting opinion of Judge Ives (Ray Teal)—brought it to approximately nine minutes, uncomfortably close to the capacity of a single film magazine. “During rehearsals,” said Kramer, “Spence commented on the length of the speech and wondered if there were some way in which he could do it all the way through. We thought about it and finally came up with the solution that worked.”
Following the film’s completion, Kramer, with a publicist’s zeal, gave the length of the speech as thirteen minutes and fourteen seconds and claimed that he had used two cameras to capture it—one starting at the beginning, the other starting at the seven-minute mark. Marshall Schlom remembered it differently: “Stanley had asked me to get the verdict, type it, capital letters, triple-spaced. He had told me, ‘I’m going to take your typed verdict, I’m going to put it in a folder, and I’m going to tell him just to read it.’ I was standing there when he went up to Tracy and said, ‘Spencer, here’s your folder. You can bring it in with you. Just open it up, and all you have to do is read it. Marshall has typed it out, it’s in capital letters, it’s triple-spaced. You shouldn’t have any problems with it.’ Tracy said, ‘Okay.’ He had no intention of doing that, not one. But we had no inkling of that.”
Tracy entered with the folder in hand, sat, opened it, and, without looking down, began to speak:
The trial conducted before this Tribunal began over eight months ago. The record of evidence is more than 10,000 pages long and final arguments of counsel have been concluded. Simple murders and atrocities do not constitute the gravamen