Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [510]
“Yes.”
“Now, if your aunt comes back in the room, change the subject.”
“Okay.”
“What do you think happens when you die?”
Houghton recalled:
This was a conversation that had no end, a metaphysical conversation, but I didn’t have my aunt’s attitude that it was not something intelligent people talked about. She would be happy to talk about sex or vivisection or anything you wanted to talk about, but you couldn’t talk about anything to do with life after death. Spencer would say, “She thinks that when you die you just rot in the ground.” So he wouldn’t talk about it in front of her. There were a few priests that he was friendly with, and I know he talked with them about metaphysics, so I was sort of a poor substitute for a priest when they weren’t around.
I said, “Well, I can tell you what I don’t think happens.” He said, “What?” And I said, “I don’t think you go to Hell or Heaven.” He said, “You don’t think I’m going to pay for my sins in Hell?” I said, “No.” He said, “What do you think is going to happen to me?” I said, “I think that your spirit will live on and that all kinds of wonderful and mysterious things will happen to you.”
What he was really thinking when he would ask me these questions, I don’t know. But he did say to me, “I’m going to pay for my sins. I’ve not been a good person, and I’m going to pay for it.” I would say, “I think you have paid for it. I think you pay for your sins on this earth, in this life. I don’t think it’s going to happen after you die.” He’d say, “Shhh—here she comes.” So then we’d talk about something else. And then she’d go out of the room again.
I’d say, “Come on, Spencer. You’ve been a wonderfully positive influence in this world on millions of people whom you don’t even know. You can’t just discount that.” And he would say, “I haven’t done anything worthwhile except for the John Tracy Clinic.” So all the peccadilloes, the other women, the fights, the binges—whatever it was that was going through his mind as his litany of sins—haunted him.
Production moved ahead fitfully, Tracy channeling all the energy he could muster into his time before the camera, brightening and then fading again like a manually powered lightbulb. “I think,” said Marshall Schlom, “he was embarrassed that it got down to this, that his career ended up with his not being able to act the way he normally would act. We were all pulling for him, obviously, [but] in Judgment at Nuremberg he was a vital man. He wasn’t vital on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner at all. We supported him, and we felt badly for him. And it was as if he was thinking, ‘Okay, you’re sensitive and I’m letting you down.’ I think he was that kind of a man, that he had that kind of integrity. I personally felt very badly because I had to stand there and say his words for him. And I know how he must have been embarrassed about that.”
By the middle of April, Tracy’s energy was flagging, and Kramer reverted to his original plan. Each day Tracy would arrive on the stage at ten o’clock, made up and ready to work, and the filming of the master shot would generally be the first order of business. Kramer would move in for Tracy’s close-ups, the few over-the-shoulder shots that were deemed necessary, and then he would leave for home when the company broke for lunch.
“Kramer tried to work him as little as possible,” said Katharine Houghton, “and when he did work, almost always only his shots were done. He was always letter perfect, and sometimes improvised some amusing dialogue. It was a big thing every time he did a scene and it got in the can.” More acutely aware than anyone of what was riding on the picture, Tracy took to calling out to Sam Leavitt, Kramer’s director of photography, “Did you get any of it, Sam?”
Between shots he would sit calmly drinking from an ever-present glass of milk, an ice cube bobbing on its surface. (“Milkman, milkman!” he would call. “If I couldn’t have my one glass of beer at night, I’d really be through.”) Jack Hamilton, a senior editor from Look, came to the set