Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [500]
There were chest pains, which had to be checked to make sure they weren’t something new. They usually turned out to be muscular, but then there were also the colds and rashes, malaise and nausea. “And, of course, they were all major problems for him. Somebody who was a little more stable wouldn’t have called a doctor. [To him] these were major things, major episodes.” On December 8 his heart was skipping beats, an old problem that had persisted for decades.
“I talked to him at length at home and it became apparent that much of the agitation was because Kate and I were urging him to take exercise. And he got upset about that. And the skipped beats were because he got upset about us advising him to get off his fanny and do something instead of sitting in that wonderful chair he had. And then the skipped beats made him even less inclined to get out of his chair. It was a vicious cycle.”
Among those who found their way to St. Ives in the days following Hepburn’s occupancy were some of the Catholic priests who wrote to Tracy, men who, in many cases, came of age at a time when he was redefining the public face of the church in San Francisco and the Boys Town pictures. While Kate had no personal interest in religious dogma of any sort, she readily indulged the spiritual needs Spence so clearly had without ever really understanding just how deeply held they were. One such priest who made the trek up Doheny was Eugene Kennedy, a professor of psychology at Loyola University, Chicago, who had written in the days following the news of Tracy’s brush with death. Father Kennedy found himself struck by the few distinctive accents that softened the room in which Tracy spent so much of his time—the stormy Vlaminck seascape above the desk, the stuffed goose suspended in full flight, the bowls of freshly cut flowers. He found his host clad in tan slacks and a dark blue cardigan, clutching a ball for Lobo.
“Your letter touched me very much,” Tracy told him as they entered his bedroom, stark in its simplicity. “To hear from priests and nuns who were praying for me …” His eyes glistened as he reached for a wooden Madonna he had found in Chamonix. “This is something I truly love,” he said, barely above a whisper. “It’s so simple …” Dinner was ready—roasted stuffed chicken as prepared by Ida Gheczy of George Cukor’s staff—but there was still a minute or two to talk without Kate overhearing. “You know,” Tracy continued, “I thought about being a priest once; I guess every Catholic kid does, or did anyway. I don’t know how they feel with all these changes taking place. Now Pope John XXIII, he was my kind of Pope. But with this Vatican II, I’m not sure that priests believe in sin anymore or still hear confessions.” He paused a moment, then caught the priest’s eyes.
“You still know how to?” he asked.
In the lean times that followed the dissolution of Ealing, William Rose tinkered with the idea of a play, a farce concerning a white family in South Africa whose only daughter appears one day with a black man she is intent upon marrying. By 1958 Rose had the story fully developed for the stage. In 1959 and again in 1961, he tried without success to interest various people, including Stanley Kramer, in filming it. At the time, Kramer naturally thought of Sidney Poitier, who was soon to star in Kramer’s Pressure Point—a picture he was producing but not directing—but both he and Rose were in the midst of preparing It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and there wasn’t any time—or creative energy—left to expend on the development of another comedy. The idea did, however, stick in Kramer’s mind, and one day on the set of Mad World he mentioned it to Tracy.
“The substance of that conversation was, ‘I don’t know whether I will ever do it, but Rose has a hell of an idea, a hell of a part for you.’ And I said, ‘I think what would be terribly interesting—I don’t know whether she is interested, but co-starring you and Katharine Hepburn in starring roles as a vehicle …’ The role I described to Mr. Tracy was a successful, liberal man