Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [589]
68 “brilliant and engrossing”: New York Times, 10/13/60.
69 “first run houses”: Stanley Kramer to Pete Martin.
70 “double disappointment”: Stanley Kramer, American Film Institute Seminar with James Powers, 2/1/77 (AFI).
71 flop: According to records in the Stanley Kramer collection at UCLA, Inherit the Wind had a domestic gross of $1,100,000. In April 1962 it became one of the recent releases acquired by the American Broadcasting Company for its new Sunday night movie slot.
72 “good reporter”: Joe Hyams to Selden West, via telephone, 12/15/93.
73 “thought about directing”: New York Times, 11/3/60.
74 “rare exception”: Beverly Hills Citizen, 6/11/59.
75 “wonderful people”: Los Angeles Mirror, 12/5/60.
76 “By the end”: Kerwin Matthews to the author, 3/14/05.
77 “a lovely set”: LeRoy, Mervyn LeRoy: Take One, p. 211.
78 “I called him”: Stanley Kramer to Pete Martin.
79 “the boy’s big chance”: ST to Pete Martin.
80 “half a million”: Despite Kate Buford’s assertion in her biography of Lancaster that he was paid his usual fee of $750,000 for Judgment at Nuremberg, the actor’s contract in the Stanley Kramer collection shows that he was paid $500,000 and a percentage of the gross. Tracy’s compensation was adjusted to $375,000 to accommodate Lancaster’s percentage. Kramer himself took a producer’s fee of $75,000, deferring the $50,000 he was due as director of the picture.
81 “Frank wasn’t there”: ST to Pete Martin.
CHAPTER 31 THE VALUE OF A SINGLE HUMAN BEING
1 “Dorothy and Louise were two”: Frank Tracy to Selden West.
2 “Being Mrs. Spencer Tracy publicly”: Larry Swindell to the author.
3 “a saint”: Jane Feely Desmond to Selden West.
4 “trailing the Clinic”: Louise Tracy to Mary Kennedy Taylor, 1/12/58, Taylor Collection.
5 “very gratified”: Dr. Edgar Lowell to Jane Ardmore, 8/2/72 (JKA).
6 “absorb my life”: Ardmore, “Clinic,” 7/20/72.
7 “first person”: A kinescope of Louise Tracy’s remarks is at John Tracy Clinic.
8 “go to the back”: Ardmore, “Clinic.”
9 “art director”: William Self to the author.
10 “a lot of things”: Ruthie Thompson to the author.
11 “his eye trouble”: Ardmore, “John.” Although John Tracy Clinic was strictly oralist during Louise Tracy’s lifetime, many graduates of the program went on to learn American Sign Language (ASL), using speech and lipreading to communicate with the hearing world and ASL to talk with their deaf friends (and those hearing friends who knew ASL). Sign is almost universally regarded as more precise than lipreading.
12 “distribution objection”: Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (New York: Morrow, 1992), p. 407.
13 “Tracy’s no lodestone”: Abby Mann to the author, via telephone, 1/23/05.
14 “character was guilty”: Kate Buford, Burt Lancaster: An American Life (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 212.
15 “single scene”: Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 359. According to his friend Jack Larson, Clift was offered $200,000 to play Colonel Lawson, the part subsequently played in the film by Richard Widmark. Evidently Clift found the role of Petersen more interesting from an actor’s perspective and agreed to do it for expenses alone. “He had a car and driver on call twenty-four hours a day,” Larson recalled. “I’m sure they ended up spending more than $10,000 on his expenses.”
16 “ ‘pace-setting’ ”: Daily Variety, 2/20/61.
17 “hard ticket”: Variety, 3/8/61.
18 “still in use”: Spoto, Stanley Kramer, Film Maker, p. 229.
19 “Max Schell arrived”: Marshall Schlom to the author, Brea, Calif., 8/11/05.
20 “I acted less”: New York Herald Tribune, 12/6/60.
21 “An actor’s personality”: James Zunner, “Tracy: The Great Stone Face,” Cue, 7/12/58.
22 “what he really meant”: Erskine, Spencer Tracy: A Biographical and Interpretive Symposium, p. 15.
23 “he could play anything”: John Ford to Katharine Hepburn, n.d., John Ford Collection.
24 “Everyone in the crew”: Spoto, Stanley Kramer, Film Maker, p. 231.
25 “All you can do”: New York Times, 4/30/61.
26 “She was nice”: “Richard Widmark Part II,” Films in Review, May