Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [492]
Hepburn was by now in full control of Tracy’s care, coordinating his medications, fixing his meals, maintaining his house, scheduling his guests. Her cooking was famously poor, and Frank Sinatra remembered being served a steak that “looked like it had been jumped on by 14 soccer players” when he came to visit. “However, in the middle of dinner the three of us are seated and having dinner, the lights went out. And I said to Shanty [his nickname for Tracy], ‘Where’s the fuse box?’ ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘No, no, no. She does all that kind of work. Kate—fix the lights.’ Sure enough, sure enough, she said, ‘Yes, Spensuh!’ And she got a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, and I swore that she was going to electrocute herself, but she knew exactly what to do.”
With Kate effectively making St. Ives her base in California (leaving Phyllis Wilbourn to occupy the birdcage), Tracy added a codicil to his 1961 will, bequeathing the contents of the house—furniture, fixtures, paintings—to his brother Carroll, who could in turn pass on to Hepburn everything that either belonged to her or that she wished to keep. She honored the simplicity of his home, the spare comfort designed into it, and did virtually nothing to alter it other than to move some clothes and a few personal effects into the spare bedroom. Close at hand at all times were oxygen (in case of another edema attack) and morphine (in the event of “cardiac distress”).
With Tracy in such delicate shape, the world premiere of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World nearly passed unnoticed within the little household. As with Judgment at Nuremberg, Kramer flew in members of the world entertainment press, taking over the Beverly Hilton and working a packed schedule of conferences, tours, and fetes. The press preview was set for November 3, 1963, at the new Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, followed by the invitational Mad World Ball with a number of cast members in attendance. The official world premiere took place four days later as a benefit for the Women’s Guild of Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Louise went and, as usual, called Spence the minute she was home. “He had been doing very serious things,” she later said. “I thought it was awful.” Kate subsequently saw the movie herself and pronounced it “funny as hell.” Tracy, as far as anyone knows, never watched it.
The early trade notices were wonderful, predicting big things at the box office, while the secular press was more divided, the reactions ranging from “wild and hilarious” (Bosley Crowther) to “appalled by nearly everything I saw and heard” (Philip K. Scheuer). Being, in some respects, the godfather of the picture, Crowther was one of the few major critics to comment at length on Tracy’s crucial role in the comic mechanism Kramer and Rose had so painstakingly devised.
“[I]t isn’t that Mr. Tracy is funny,” he wrote,
so much as it is that he is cynical and sardonic about this wholesale display of human greed and is able to move from this position into ultimate command of the hoard when the parties converge upon it and he is there to take it away. In this respect, Mr. Tracy seems the guardian of a sane morality in this wild and extravagant exposition of clumsiness and cupidity. While the mad seekers are tearing toward the money in their various ways—in automobiles that race each other in breathtaking sweeps on hairpin turns in the wide-open California desert, in airplanes that wobble overhead—Mr. Tracy sits there in wise compliance, the dignity of the law. And then, by a ruse I dare not tell you, he shows how treacherous his morality is.
Audiences kept the L.A. and New York reserved-seat engagements at capacity, while Kramer whittled away at the picture, stung by widespread comment that it was just too long, too loud, too much. When the murder of President John F. Kennedy occurred on November 22, attendance slumped badly at theaters across the nation as Americans remained glued to their TV screens. A rebound of sorts took place over the long