Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [590]
27 “good character shots”: Bob Yager to Pete Martin.
28 “Cook County”: ST to Fredric March, 3/3/61, Fredric March Papers.
29 “I care about”: ST to Pete Martin.
30 “I can’t really answer”: Los Angeles Times, 3/19/61.
31 “very low point”: Richard Widmark to David Heeley and Joan Kramer, Los Angeles, 12/17/85 (TH).
32 “greatest reactor”: Bosworth, Montgomery Clift, p. 360.
33 “If I remember”: Erskine, Spencer Tracy: A Biographical and Interpretive Symposium, p. 60.
34 adjusted his dialogue: The blue pages for Judgment at Nuremberg are in the Montgomery Clift Collection at New York Public Library.
35 “a better job”: Marshall Schlom to the author, via e-mail, 4/10/09.
36 “Julie Harris”: Hollywood Citizen News, 3/22/61.
37 “cliché come true”: Ibid.
38 “It meant a lot”: “Richard Widmark Part II.”
39 “a performance!”: Hollywood Citizen News, 3/22/61.
40 “almost a symbol”: New York Times, 4/30/61.
41 “laughed a lot”: Marlene Dietrich, Marlene (New York: Grove Press, 1989), p. 110.
42 “not my type”: Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend, p. 408.
43 “very lonely man”: Dietrich, Marlene, p. 242.
44 dissenting opinion: It’s interesting to note that Judge Kenneth Norris, the third member of the tribunal, was played by actor-director Kenneth MacKenna. In 1928 MacKenna was, very briefly, Katharine Hepburn’s leading man in The Big Pond. For years he was also head of the Story and Scenario Department at M-G-M. In 1941 it was MacKenna who handled the purchase of Woman of the Year.
45 “During rehearsals”: Los Angeles Times, 8/28/61.
46 Lancaster approached: Erskine, Spencer Tracy: A Biographical and Interpretive Symposium, p. 71.
47 “almost conked”: Ft. Pierce (Fla.) News Tribune, 5/15/61.
48 “What a bore”: Sunday Express, 5/21/61.
49 “ ‘look at these pictures’ ”: Interview with Ardmore, 7/5/72.
50 “Every writer ought”: Abby Mann to ST, 7/10/61, Abby Mann Collection, USC.
51 “AFTER FINISHING NUREMBERG”: ST to Abby Mann, 7/18/61 (courtesy of Abby Mann).
52 set a budget: Cost figures on The Devil at 4 O’Clock are from the Mervyn LeRoy Collection (AMPAS).
53 “Kate’s the lunatic”: Higham, Kate, p. 191.
54 “I wanted Spencer”: Ibid., p. 188.
55 “she got him set up”: Stanley Kramer to Heeley and Kramer.
56 press conference: Details of the world premiere in Berlin are from Los Angeles Times, 12/14 and 12/24/61; New York Times, 12/15/61; and Variety, 12/27/61. See also Bob Considine, “ ‘Judgment’ is Potent,” New York Journal American, 12/18/61.
57 “There was a buffet”: Stanley Kramer to Heeley and Kramer. “At the end of the screening the applause came almost exclusively from the foreign element in the theater,” Harold Myers reported in Variety, “and it seemed as if the locals were stunned into silence.”
58 “fair and human”: Variety, 12/27/61.
59 “reservations”: Variety, 10/18/61.
60 “raw force”: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Movies: Judgment at Nuremberg,” Show, December 1961.
61 “I had a friend”: Frank Tracy to Selden West.
62 “quite disturbed”: Eddie Lawrence to Selden West.
63 “Tracy is ornery”: Bill Davidson, “Spencer Tracy,” Look, 1/30/62.
64 “Kate, my Kate”: Bill Davidson, Spencer Tracy: Tragic Idol (New York: Dutton, 1988), p. 145. Tracy did indeed submit to an interview with Bill Davidson (likely in 1960, rather than 1959 as the author states). However, Davidson used very few direct quotes from Tracy in his Look profile, and the “interview” recounted in his book is fascinating in its clumsy inventions. The suggestion that Tracy would sit for an on-the-record interview with an unfamiliar journalist and refer to Hepburn as “Kate, my Kate” is, in itself, ridiculous. Davidson quotes Tracy (supposedly in 1959) on the subject of his daughter, Susie: “Would you believe it but that little button wrote herself the cutest little book about a little girl teaching a deaf cat to cope, and she got it published. And she’s also turning into one helluva little photographer.” In reality, Susie Tracy never picked up a camera until two years after her father’s death. Moreover, the book Tracy allegedly refers to, Pritt,