Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [505]
The news got excellent play in the domestic press, and the accompanying photos showed Tracy looking better than he had in years, robust and smiling. In October, Bill Rose sent 102 pages consisting of “part dialogue, part discussion, and part treatment” that would form the basis of the screenplay. He returned to California in December and completed a first draft in early January 1967. As was his habit of forty years, Tracy gave Rose’s script to Louise for her reaction, and she, in turn, passed it along to Johnny and Susie. Nobody liked it—particularly Louise. (“I had to say I didn’t. I couldn’t say that I did.”) Spence and Louise had always been on opposite sides of the political spectrum, and as the kids had been reared in their mother’s church, so had they also come to subscribe to her political beliefs. “He was a Democrat,” said Susie, “surrounded by Republicans.”
Weeze didn’t much care for the subject matter, nor did she like Rose’s comedic treatment of it. Yet it was material both Spence and Kate felt strongly about; Tracy, in fact, had personally broken the color line at Romanoff’s in 1954 when he brought Willie Mays to dinner. (“Well, a gasp went up when a black man walked into the room,” said Laraine Day, who was married to Leo Durocher at the time. “Tracy just cut that right off and put him down at the table and pretty soon then everybody was eating again, after they got over the initial shock.”)
“We were all very taken aback that he was going to do a picture like that,” Susie remembered. “He came up to the house on Tower Road, and we walked around the motor court, all of us … He wanted to do it; I think he was a little testy that we weren’t more for it. My mother said, ‘Would you want Susie to marry a black man?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t care if Susie said she wanted to marry a fuzzy-wuzzy.’ I think he was just annoyed that we didn’t [like it] and that was the tack he took. He just sort of bristled at the whole thing.” Louise advised against doing the picture. “However,” she qualified, “if you must work, you won’t find an easier one, excepting for that long speech [at the end].”
With filming set to begin in March, only the role of the daughter was left to be filled. Kramer had decided that he didn’t need a big name in the part and was on the verge of giving it to Hepburn’s twenty-one-year-old niece, Katharine Houghton. In May 1964, when Houghton was still an undergraduate, Kate had sent over some pictures when Kramer was casting Ship of Fools. The following year, while passing through New York, Kramer caught Houghton in Garson Kanin’s staging of A Very Rich Woman at the Belasco. “She had a small part,” he remembered, “but she impressed me.” About the same time Carl Reiner read her for a part in Enter Laughing. “We had a wonderful time together,” Houghton recalled. “He was very funny about saying I was a good little actress but not a good Jew.” It was Reiner who reminded Kramer that Houghton was Hepburn’s niece.
In the fall of 1966, Kramer was bound for New York to see “many young actresses” when Hepburn told him, “You must see my niece.” Said Kramer: “I went, I saw her, and I was completely intrigued.” In California he asked Hepburn if she thought young Kathy was up to the role. “We discussed my trepidation that if it were not played very carefully it might be thought to be very silly, could go overboard very easily, but we wanted to maintain this attitude of almost never-never