Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [502]
This was, Kramer emphasized, before they had a script—it was just an idea and a package. “I told Mr. Tracy and Miss Hepburn we were trying to make a comedy of miscegenation.” Shortly thereafter, Kramer flew to New York and met Sidney Poitier at the Russian Tea Room. Poitier was enthusiastic about the idea of handling it as a comedy. “He, at the time, agreed that he thought it would be an adventure, and he told me that I had carte blanche to go ahead and feel he would be part of the project.”
It was only then that Kramer got back in touch with Bill Rose. “Stanley, who was in California, called me in the Channel Islands in Jersey and said, ‘I must have been out of my mind.’ I asked why and he said, ‘That story. I want it.’ I said, ‘Which story?’ He said, ‘The race comedy.’ He said that he had spoken to Tracy and to Miss Hepburn and to Poitier and that all three had reacted with great excitement and enthusiasm and that he had had time to think about the project and that he was determined to do it. He asked if I had been serious in my proposal, and I said that I had been.”
On July 5, 1966, Columbia formally agreed that Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier, and Samantha Eggar were preapproved for the project. Rose would receive $50,000 for his original story and another $150,000 for the screenplay (plus 7.5 percent of the profits). “My suggestions,” said Kramer, “encompassed a Negro maid who was involved in the story, the priest, but Mr. Rose had the fire for this story. He had the last scene written in the story, which he could recite almost verbatim as it finally appeared on the film up to and inclusive of the line, ‘Screw all the bigots. The thing for you to do is get married.’ He worked all the ideas backwards from that, really, because that was the theme of it, the importance of it.”
The development of the script took place during nighttime walks and meetings held in the drugstore at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “One of the things to which we devoted a good deal of time during those discussions,” said Rose,
was the question of the professional status of any of the central characters, and I recall specifically advancing the notion that the tone of the entire production was going to be very firmly set by the personality of Miss Hepburn. I asked that whereas Mr. Tracy was perfectly believable and acceptable in roles which ranged from a high court judge to an impoverished Cuban fisherman, that Miss Hepburn appeared to me to have distinct limitations and, for want of a better American word, an excess of class. Thus, it seemed to me it would make no sense if she played, say, the wife of a cop on the beat whose daughter became involved with a Negro cab driver. We discussed various possibilities for the character that Mr. Tracy was ultimately to portray, bearing in mind that he had to be a character of such class or status that it would be wholly credible for a personality of Miss Hepburn’s obvious status and class to have married. We considered among other possibilities that Tracy might be a United States senator or that he might be the head of a large engineering firm.
Tracy had reached a point in his life where offers had slowed to a trickle, primarily on the perception around town that he was either retired or too sick to work. Hepburn’s absence from the marketplace only reinforced such notions, and so it came as a surprise in mid-July when he attended a wedding reception for Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow. Kate had gone ahead with George Cukor, the bride’s godfather, and Tracy drove separately, pulling up at Edie and Bill Goetz’s house in his familiar old Thunderbird, the first time anyone had seen him in months. “He had no thought of going,” Cukor said, “but was appreciative of the invitation. Then he thought he might go, and he vacillated back and forth. Finally, he did attend the reception, and stayed only a little while, but of course he was the hit of the affair. He always enjoyed himself once he arrived somewhere … but he just hated to go.”
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