Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [481]
While Hepburn went off to make the film in New York, Tracy remained in Los Angeles, watching television and weighing offers he had little interest in accepting. He had agreed to play Pontius Pilate in George Stevens’ much-delayed version of Fulton Oursler’s best-selling novel, The Greatest Story Ever Told, but it was an all-star affair, a “cut rate deal” as he described it. There was also talk of him doing The Leopard in Sicily for Luchino Visconti, but the choice had been somewhat forced on Visconti by Fox, which had specified one of four American box office stars as a condition of financing the film. (Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, and Burt Lancaster were the others.) Although he agreed to read the script, Tracy balked at spending five months on location or submitting to an interview with the director, and Lancaster wound up playing the part of the autocratic Prince Salina. Tracy was, in fact, settling into a pattern where he would work only for certain directors—Ford, Stevens, Stanley Kramer—and otherwise considered himself retired. That he was soon to be seen in two of the biggest films of the year scarcely seemed to matter, and he and Kate spent much of the remainder of the year apart.
The Devil at 4 O’Clock, though generally received as the superficial product it was, turned out to be Tracy’s biggest commercial success since Father of the Bride, with gross receipts amounting to $4,555,000. As an element of commerce, however, it lost more money than Inherit the Wind and Plymouth Adventure combined. Tracy made no comment on the fate of the picture, and his relationship with Sinatra seemed to survive the ordeal. Judgment at Nuremberg was the greater concern, and Kramer held firm to his plan for a December premiere in Berlin, despite an increasingly tense political climate that in August saw the closing of the border between East and West Berlin and the construction of a wall to prevent defections to the West.
“I wanted Spencer to go to Berlin for the world premiere,” Kramer recalled, “and Kate didn’t want him to go. I said, ‘How can you tell him not to go? The trip wouldn’t hurt him, and you said you’d go with him.’ She replied, ‘It seems such a stupid thing to do. What do you want to flaunt him in front of the Germans for?’ I said, ‘I’m not flaunting him. Willy Brandt’s invited us. Let’s go.’ She was reluctant, but finally she agreed.” Kramer had not seen Tracy and Hepburn together much—she was mainly out of town when Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg were made. “As soon as [they arrived in Berlin,] she got him set up in his place with all the pill bottles and everything, and all the prescriptions, and then took off his shoes and put on his slippers, and put his robe around his shoulders. She was like a nursemaid, really.”
More than three hundred newsmen from twenty-six countries had traveled to the partitioned city to cover the event, some 120 columnists and political commentators alone having been flown in via charter from New York. Tracy, as the film’s principal star, was closely questioned by reporters at a press conference. Did he believe every word he said in the script? “Yes.” Why did he take a role like this at this stage of his career? “Money.” (“Gelt!” an interpreter shouted in German.) To most questions he answered simply yes or no. Finally one journalist, apparently irked, asked, “Do you always answer just yes or no?”
“No!” he shot back.
Even with Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Maximilian Schell, Richard Widmark, and Judy Garland in attendance, the premiere was pretty much a bust. Tracy grew ill and left the Kongresshalle—just seven hundred yards from the Berlin wall—shortly after the film began. (A UA representative later explained it as a “flareup of an old kidney ailment.”) Most of the Germans attending the champagne dinner afterward were poker-faced, some thinking the film badly timed given the country’s division.
“There was a buffet for fifteen-hundred people,” Kramer recalled, “and only two-hundred showed. I had been raised to know that the perfect tribute at the end of a film was like at the