Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [526]
“I think Spencer and Laurette Taylor were the best actors I’ve ever seen,” she said. “They were both Irish and both had problems in their lives, but they were so direct. They had concentration.” As she got deeper into the subject of Tracy, her remarks veered toward intimacy and grew poignant. As an actor, she said, he was as simple and unadorned as “a baked potato.” In contrast, she described herself as “a dessert, with lots of whipped cream.” He had no mannerisms, she added. “He never got in his own way. I still do.” She listened to a question about Tracy and then answered carefully and with some feeling: “I think Spencer always thought that acting was a rather silly way for a man to make a living. He felt he should have been a doctor or something. We both came from backgrounds totally removed from acting. But he was of such an emotional balance, you know, that he had to be an artist.”
George Cukor saw Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner at an advance screening in November and couldn’t stop raving about it. “I think the film itself is one of the finest I’ve ever seen: human, dignified, passionate,” he told Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times. “I believe Katharine feels the same way, and that’s why she’s allowing herself to be interviewed to promote it, something she almost never does. In a sense, she’s doing it as an act of gratitude to Kramer, who cast Tracy in the picture even though his life was no longer insurable. It was a tremendous risk, and we must be grateful to Kramer for taking it.”
Noël Coward wired Kate the moment he saw it:
HOW WONDERFUL THAT DEAR SPENCE’S LAST PERFORMANCE COULD BE ONE OF THE FINEST HE HAS EVER GIVEN WHICH IS SAYING A GREAT DEAL.
Her response: “What a wonderful, lovely looking, sensitive creature I’ve spent so much of my life with. I know that I am lucky—he kept me hopping and I never had time to think about myself. So—on again, alone …”
The trade notices were unabashedly ecstatic, Variety predicting “torrid b.o. response throughout a long-legged theatrical release.” And while the opinions of the press were divided along predictable lines, the older generation praising the film extravagantly, the younger despising almost everything about it, Tracy’s performance was singled out for praise in nearly every instance. “He and Miss Hepburn glisten with style,” Robert Kotlowitz wrote in Harper’s Magazine. “They are crusty, tough, intelligent, and sentimental, the essence of Yankeeness. Without even holding hands, they manage to suggest that they have had a bracing physical life together. Their intimacy crackles on the screen, and it is their exchanges—snapping and barking and laughing at each other—that give the film its only reality.”
Tracy, Brendan Gill wrote in the New Yorker, gave “a faultless and, under the circumstances, heart-breaking performance…[B]eing aware that it was the last picture he would ever make, he turned his role into a stunning compendium of the actor’s art; it was as if he were saying over our heads to generations of actors not yet born, ‘Here is how to seem to listen,’ ‘Here is how to dominate a scene by walking away from it.’ Moreover, the very words he spoke were written for him deliberately as ‘last words.’ ” And, added Joe Morgenstern, “when Tracy gives his blessings to the lovers in a noble speech that was written as a melodrama’s climax and may now serve as an artist’s epitaph, when he says his say about youth and yearning and whether an old, white-haired man is necessarily a burned-out shell who can no longer remember the passion with which he has loved a woman, then everything wrong with the film is right and we can see, through our tears, that the hero we worshiped was just what we always knew he was, an authentically heroic man.”
Even a skeptic as hidebound as Andrew Sarris fell under the spell of the film’s final minutes, Mrs. Prentice’s accusation that Drayton had forgotten true passion still ringing