Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [484]
John Tracy subscribed to Look, but Louise saw the article first. “John doesn’t need to see this,” she said to Susie, and the rest of the week was spent deflecting questions of how the issue could have gone astray. (Susie herself chose not to read it.) Eddie Lawrence was surprised at how Dan Mich had apparently reneged on his pledge to let Tracy see the article, perhaps having forgotten their original bargain in the two years it took to get the piece into print. “Of course,” he said, “you can never trust ’em anyhow.”
Davidson later claimed that Tracy had talked openly of his relationship with Hepburn during their 1960 interview (speaking of her as “Kate, my Kate”), but publicist Pat Newcomb, who Davidson said was present at the meeting, had absolutely no memory of such an exchange. (Newcomb met Tracy through R. J. Wagner and Natalie Wood but said that Tracy never spoke of Hepburn in front of her, either privately or in an interview.) Joe Hyams saw a more basic distinction: “We were local reporters [unlike Davidson] and, of course, we knew that Rock Hudson was gay and things like that, but we’d have never written about it. He was a national reporter; maybe that’s why he did it. For us, that would have been a betrayal. We could have lost all our contacts. So it never occurred to me to write about Tracy and Hepburn.”
On a more positive note, Tracy received his eighth Academy Award nomination for Judgment at Nuremberg but ended up losing to Maximilian Schell, who, in his acceptance speech, praised the picture, its director, and the other members of the cast, “especially that grand old man, Spencer Tracy.” Tracy called him and said, “You son of a bitch! I don’t mind you winning the award, but calling me the grand old man, as if I’m some sort of ancient monument, is just too much!”
The film itself was wildly successful as a two-a-day roadshow attraction, playing sellout houses for months in New York and Los Angeles and drawing heavily in cities like Washington and Toronto. As was frequently the case with highbrow entertainment, though, the film never caught on in general release, where its extreme length limited the number of showings a theater could manage. Produced on a budget of $3,170,000, Judgment at Nuremberg recorded a domestic gross of approximately $4 million and extended a near-perfect record of losses for Stanley Kramer at United Artists.
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1 Despite his early work with the Group Theatre, Montgomery Clift did not consider himself a Method actor. His technique, in fact, was remarkably similar to Tracy’s, although Clift was not the quick study that Tracy happened to be. Described by Lee Strasberg as the “perfect Method actor” because he came by it naturally, Tracy thought Stanislavsky’s emotional or “sense memory” technique, when misapplied, encouraged overacting—the doing of more than was necessary. Method actors, he felt, sometimes obscured the meaning of the text in the crafting of a performance. “If I remember correctly,” said Chester Erskine, “he said, ‘They don’t let it breathe.’ ”
CHAPTER 32
Something a Little Less Serious
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I’m tired of controversy,” said Stanley Kramer in October 1960. “After I finish my next picture, Judgment at Nuremberg, I’m making the biggest comedy in the history of the business—Something a Little Less Serious. It’s a long Keystone Kops comedy. Somebody said to me, ‘You should do something a little less serious,’ and so we used that as the title.”
The original title of the story had been So Many Thieves, and it was the brainchild of a transplanted Missourian named William Arthur Rose. Having settled in England at the end of the war, Rose became the journeyman screenwriter who in 1952 conceived a comedic gem about an antique auto race called Genevieve—an original script that won him the first of four Academy Award nominations. He went on to write a string of British classics: The Maggie, Touch and Go, The Ladykillers, The Man in the Sky, and The Smallest Show on Earth, four of which were for Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios. It was, in fact,