Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [479]
“I was with a friend of mine,” Self recalled, “and I said to my friend, ‘If Kate’s here, chances are Spence is here.’ So we went around to the back of the Plaza where the elevator is, and I saw Spence over in the corner with his collar up and his hat pulled down, standing in the shadows.” Their eyes met, but Self, who hadn’t seen Tracy in years, kept his distance. “My friend said, ‘Oh, there’s Spencer Tracy. Go say hello to him.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t go near him with a ten-foot pole.’ He said, ‘You’re kidding. I thought you knew him.’ I said, ‘I do know him, but he’s hiding, and I’m not going to reveal his hiding place.’ I wouldn’t go near him … I never said a word to him, never acknowledged him or anything.”
Tracy boarded a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt on the evening of May 9, arriving in Germany the next morning, again, as he noted in his book, “loaded.” The five-hour drive to Nuremberg was followed by a day’s rest, after which he and Kramer and his crew got to work, capturing street scenes and generally opening the picture up as much as possible. On the sixteenth the company moved to Berlin, where a press conference took place. Additional exteriors finished the picture on May 20, exactly on schedule. The same day, Tracy received Roderick Mann, film columnist for the Sunday Express, in his suite at the Berlin Hilton. Sipping coffee, he told Mann that he had just been reading a piece on Gary Cooper, who had died of cancer the previous week: Was he really an actor? Or just a personality?
“What a bore those arguments have become,” he moaned. “I thought Cooper was great. I hardly knew him, but I always admired him. What could he have done better in a film like High Noon? Played it with a broken arm or an accent? Cooper used to be very proud because John Barrymore once said of him: ‘He never makes a wrong move on the screen.’ The truth is Cooper hardly ever made any move. He didn’t have to, he was so good … I remember Garson Kanin, the playwright, once asking me what I thought was the most important thing about acting. ‘Learning the blasted lines,’ I said. Another time someone asked me what was the first thing I looked for in a script. ‘Days off,’ I said.”
He finished his coffee and carefully put the cup down on the table. “I never watch my old movies on TV,” he continued. “Or any old movies, come to that. Too many of my friends are dead. I don’t want to be reminded. How can I watch an old Bogart film? Bogie was a friend of mine. I saw a lot of him before he died. I can’t watch him now; I switch the set off. In Hollywood, where you’re dead you’re very dead. Sometimes you’re even dead before you’re dead. They’re always happy to give you a boost on the way. Like that special Academy Award for Gary Cooper. Until they did that nobody even knew he was ill. Why couldn’t they have left him alone? Bogie, Gable … now Cooper. All my contemporaries are going. Who knows? Maybe it’ll be my turn to bat next.”
With Judgment at Nuremberg out of the way, Tracy and Hepburn returned to Frankfurt, where they spent two days driving along the Rhine and taking in the countryside. From there they traveled to Paris, an eight-hour trip, stopping once again at the Raphael and meeting up with the Kanins for dinner. The next two weeks were idyllic—rising early, walking the city, eating elaborately. A toothache put an end to it all on June 10, complicating Tracy’s last days in the city with dental appointments. They boarded the Queen Elizabeth in Cherbourg on the fifteenth, taking adjoining staterooms for a five-day voyage that was foggy and unusually rough. (When advised, upon arrival,