Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [507]
Poitier wasn’t a man with a chip on his shoulder, but he was sensitive to whites who may never have encountered blacks who were doctors, teachers, lawyers … or actors. “I must say I haven’t known any colored person particularly well,” Hepburn freely admitted at the time. “I’ve never had one as a friend. But I can’t see any difference and I’m sure there isn’t any difference. It’s all a question of a man is a man is a man.” Bill Rose’s script was as much about the generational divide in families as it was about race, all the parents in the story having presumably been born between 1900 and 1910, when the racial equation in America was vastly different. Poitier gave them the benefit of the doubt: “I looked at them as ordinary, decent folks. And in fact they turned out to be that—and a hell of a lot more. But they were anxious early on, for good reason, and they simply had to find out about me.”
It was, Poitier said, some evening.
When the delicious meal was over and the after-drinks had been served, Miss Hepburn encouraged Mr. Tracy to entertain us with some of the classic stories he had a reputation for spinning. They were delightful stories, beautifully told, but more arresting than the stories was Miss Hepburn’s reaction to them. Although she must have heard them dozens of times, she listened to each one with wide-eyed fascination, as if she were hearing it for the first time. It was heart-warming to see how much affection flowed between that man and that woman. He treated her with an offhand appreciation, but at the same time he obviously loved her. “Oh, Katie, just shut up and let me tell the story,” was one of the ways he showed her who was boss. And I got the impression that was the way she liked it.
Preproduction on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner began on March 6, 1967, when Kramer began making process plates and shooting car run-throughs at San Francisco International Airport. Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton, dressed to work, flew in the following morning to film exteriors at the airport and on the sidewalk outside the art gallery owned in the movie by Hepburn’s character, Christina Drayton. When, at the end of a long day, Houghton got to her room at the St. Francis Hotel, there was a message to call Kate.
“The film’s going to be canceled,” Hepburn told her niece. Spooked by the news of Tracy’s most recent edema attack, the insurance company had backed away, declining, in effect, to shoulder the risk of Tracy’s illness or death at any price. Working the phones—and unwilling to settle for another actor in the role of Matt Drayton—Kramer struck an eleventh-hour bargain with Frankovich and Stulberg, agreeing to defer his own $300,000 salary until the successful completion of Tracy’s scenes. “My head was on the chopping block,” he said. “Spencer was shot to pieces by all those years of drinking. If he died, I’d be ruined.”
Rehearsals began the following Monday on Columbia’s Stage 9, where the entire ground floor of the Draytons’ French Colonial home—entry hall, living room, study, sewing room, dining room, pantry, kitchen—had been erected. Designed by Robert Clatworthy, the set included a terrace and garden area, and a panorama of the city below. A conference table and ten chairs had been set up on the terrace, with floor heaters scattered about and six stage dressing rooms off to one side. Kramer got the cast on their feet the next day, working through the early scenes involving Houghton, Poitier, Hepburn, and actress Isobel Sanford as the family’s longtime housekeeper, Tillie. Tracy wasn’t required that day, and it was then that Kramer outlined his plan for getting the picture made.
“His idea,” said Marshall Schlom, “was that we would shoot up to about four or four-thirty, light for the next morning, and then, because of Tracy