Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [509]
“I had all the words,” Poitier said. “Very well written scene too. And came time, and I’m thoroughly rehearsed. I knew everything I wanted to do. I was prepared to do my shadings, had little nuances here and there, was ready I thought. The quiet came on the set, as usually it does just before they roll. They rolled the camera, and I’m ready to start the scene and I started the scene. And suddenly into my mind came the realization that I am working in concert with these two people. I went up. I couldn’t remember a word. I blew every line for at least 45 minutes. I couldn’t—I couldn’t work. I was awestruck, actually. Simple as that.”
Hepburn said:
[H]e had played quite a few scenes with me first, which didn’t discombobulate him at all. He just was Sidney Poitier, a good actor. But when he first met Spencer, Spencer was sitting in the foreground … I was standing back … and Poitier comes in from the side to ask Spencer for his daughter’s hand in marriage. And Poitier came in and looked at Spence and couldn’t think of a word. Not a word. Just blank. So, Kramer said, “Well, let’s try it again.” And the same thing happened. He got about one line out and dried. So this was a rather serious situation. Kramer said, “Well, let’s do it tomorrow morning.” [The next morning] I said to Spencer, “I’m on my way. What time are you going to leave?” And he said, “I don’t know what time I’m going to leave. I may not go at all.” I said, “What the hell do you mean, you may not go at all? It’s Poitier’s big scene.” And he said, “Yes, that’s what I mean. I think he might be happier without those two old owls staring at him.”
So he didn’t go—I went. I thought, “Well, he’s just wrong.” But I thought, “Well, he’s pretty sensitive,” on my way down. So I went to my dressing room, and I wrote a note to Stanley Kramer and sent it over to him on the set. I didn’t appear. I said, “I’m here in case you want me.” And he had someone rush back and say, “Please stay where you are.”
Tracy began work on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in high spirits. (SUSIE TRACY)
With the picture under way, Hepburn did her best to manage the working environment at the studio as thoroughly as she controlled the living environment at home. “She wanted us all to learn how to play tennis at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Leah Bernstein, Earl Kramer’s secretary, remembered. Nothing and nobody escaped her attention, and she weighed in on matters of wardrobe, lighting, and camera angles, as well as the fine art of washing one’s own hair. She called it “keeping the set alive so everyone won’t go to sleep,” but she also admitted to a long-held ambition to direct a picture. “She and I had a strange relationship,” Kramer reflected, “because I loved Tracy, and I think he loved me, and, in a way, I felt for a while that Kate and I were rivals. Isn’t that a peculiar way to feel? Of course, we weren’t. But he’d keep saying to Kate, ‘Don’t bug him, don’t bother him. Jeez, he’s worked it out, for Christ’s sake.’ ”
Little escaped Kate’s notice. She was a constant presence on the set when Tracy was working. (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy worked a full day on his sixty-seventh birthday, playing his first scene with veteran actor Cecil Kellaway, who, at seventy-three, was having trouble mastering his lines. Tracy and Hepburn assured him it was “just one of those days” and stayed with him as Kramer made multiple takes, literally piecing his performance together line by line. That evening was like any other, dinner in the living room at St. Ives, Tracy in his horsehair chair, Kath to his right on the couch. “Your job is to entertain Spencer every time I go out of the room,” her aunt had told her, and Tracy, it seemed, was only too eager to engage her.
“Kath,” he said to