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Now he would give voice to his convictions and pay tribute to the woman who had made herself an indispensable part of his life for more than a quarter century. “And here I came to visit that particular day,” said Karen Kramer. “Kate came up to me: ‘You must be very quiet—Spence is working.’ I said, ‘Kate, I’ve been in the business many years. I’m not going to speak, so don’t worry about it.’ ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but you’ve got to be quiet to stay. This is a very important part of the picture.’ She was being a director. Spencer would just look and roll his eyes.”

Seated next to Roy Glenn, Sr., a veteran of previous films with Sidney Poitier and the Amos ’n Andy TV series, Tracy began:

MATT

Now Mr. Prentice, clearly a most reasonable man, says that he has no wish to offend me and wants to know if I’m some kind of nut. And Mrs. Prentice says, like her husband, I’m a burnt-out old shell of a man who can’t even remember what it’s like to love a woman the way her son loves my daughter…

There were breaks throughout the day, during which Tracy rested. “Our reaction shots were done without him, at least mine were,” said Katharine Houghton. “I vividly remember pretending like mad that I was watching and listening to him.” Kramer plotted Tracy’s movements around the room as if choreographing a dance number, the goal being to position Hepburn in the shot at significant moments, Spence, appropriately enough, in the foreground, Kate, eyes glistening, in the soft focus of the background.

Tracy continued when filming resumed:

And strange as it seems, that’s the first statement anybody’s made to me all day on which I’m prepared to take issue. Because I think you’re wrong. You’re as wrong as you can be. I admit that I hadn’t considered it. Hadn’t even thought about it. But I know exactly what he feels for her, and there is nothing—absolutely nothing—that your son feels for my daughter … that I didn’t feel for Christina. Old? Yes. Burnt out? Certainly. But I can tell you the memories are still there—clear … intact … indestructible. And they’ll still be there if I live to be a hundred and ten. Where John made his mistake, I think, was attaching so much importance to what her mother and I might think. Because in the last analysis it doesn’t matter a damn what we think. The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel … for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt … that’s everything.

The catch in his voice was as genuine as anything he ever displayed on the screen, and, by all accounts, Kate’s tears were just as real. “It was a superb, moving, and flawless performance,” wrote Charles Champlin, the columnist and film critic for the Los Angeles Times, who had been allowed on the set to watch, “and when at last Stanley Kramer, gently enough, said, ‘Cut,’ there was a burst of applause.”

Kramer captured reaction shots of them both, Kate, her lips quivering, Spence, smiling warmly, contentedly, back at her, and then the company broke for lunch. The afternoon was a long one, more resolution, a benediction of sorts for the two lovers soon to be off on their new life together. “Every person on that sound stage that afternoon became engrossed with Spencer Tracy’s character as that remarkable actor did his job,” Sidney Poitier wrote. “With unbelievable skill and finesse he dotted his i’s and flicked his commas, and hit his periods, and touched down lightly on his conjunctions on his way to making magic. We, his fellow actors in the scene, began falling under his spell until he had succeeded in converting all of us, one by one, into a single, captivated audience.”

At the conclusion of the scene, Christina marches forward and gives her husband a firm shake of the hand, a wry, congratulatory gesture for finally coming to his senses, another Tracy-Hepburn fade-out based on restraint and good sense, as any other actress on the screen would have tearfully thrown her arms around him and bawled like a baby. “They didn’t need to embrace,” Kramer later explained. “They never did embrace. They needed only to have the