Pictures at a Revolution (43 page)

Hepburn took one journalist after another and gave them exactly what they wanted: good copy. She railed against sexual frankness (“Elia Kazan's book [
The Arrangement
, about a middle-aged married man who takes a mistress] is the most REPULSIVE point of view about sex”); about the new European cinema (“I saw
Blow-Up
and thought it an absolute bunch of claptrap…a lot of twaddle that winds up with a lot of poor, wretched, underfed things playing tennis WITHOUT a ball”);
²¹
about the uselessness of psychiatry, a favorite and tellingly persistent theme of hers; about Jacqueline Susann's
Valley of the Dolls
(“straight pornography”); and about her loathing for on-screen nudity (especially when it featured “people with bosoms smaller than mine”). When she heard herself becoming too prissy or sour, she could switch gears immediately: Suddenly she would sing the praises of daring British movies like
Georgy Girl
or
Alfie
, remarking, “I think it's too bad that we can't, in this country, compete with that market and produce a picture that doesn't have to appeal to so many people.” She started finding a useful tone of endearing self-disparagement (“I suppose people may be rather fond of me as they are of an old building”).
²²
And most surprising, she talked about Tracy in warmer and more personal terms that she had ever allowed herself to use publicly, even taking a cheerfully conspiratorial tone with visiting writers. “Listen, I'll be the easy one to get—I gab a lot,” she told
Look
. “It's Spencer we have to work on. He gets melancholia if he thinks too much about the past.” In talking about Tracy, Hepburn may have revealed more of the complexity of their relationship than she realized. Describing their on-screen sparring, she said, “The woman is always pretty sharp and she's needling the man, sort of slightly like a mosquito…and then he slowly puts out his big paw and slaps the lady down, and that's attractive to the American public.” She even said to Tracy, in front of a writer, “I'm the most necessary person on this here set. I'm just here for you to pick on.” Above all, she always remembered to sell the movie, telling reporters that she believed interracial marriage would soon become routine and letting them know that “there's no bunk in our movie—we play tennis WITH the ball.”
²³

The emergence of a new, more open Hepburn was a result of some genuine softening on her part, but it was also the end product of what one reporter called a “minuet” of careful negotiations;
²⁴
the visits were orchestrated by Columbia Pictures and by Howard Strickling, MGM's longtime publicity chief and the man who had successfully kept Tracy's problems out of the press for twenty years. Reporters from approved publications arrived on the set with an understanding that no rumor of Hepburn and Tracy's personal relationship, whatever it was, was to make its way into print; old-Hollywood decorum was to be observed. Accordingly, Hepburn and Tracy had separate trailers and dressing rooms. “Even then,” says Marshall Schlom, “they always played it very low-key. She would go to her dressing room, but then she would bring lunch to his.”
²⁵
When the press was present, everyone knew their roles. Houghton was called in for interviews and struck the right note of pert enthusiasm and unflappability. Poitier was gracious and modest, trotting out a story—as did Kramer—that he was so nervous about his first time acting with stars of Hepburn and Tracy's magnitude that Kramer had to send them home and let Poitier say his lines to empty chairs. Tracy's illness seems a far more likely explanation of that anecdote than Poitier's nerves, but, says Houghton, “there was always a facade. There was just no way anybody was going to betray what was going on at the time with the seriousness of Spencer's fragility.”
²⁶

For Poitier,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
felt, in some ways, like a creative step backward after the revitalizing challenge of his work with Rod Steiger on
In the Heat of the Night;
his character, Prentice, was the film's straight man, a paragon of accomplishment and good manners who existed primarily to generate comic reactions in the characters around him. “In this film we are first and foremost, it seems to me…presenting entertainment with a point of view,” he told a reporter, expressing his reservations as politely as possible. “I really don't quite understand what I think of it in racial terms.”
²⁷

Poitier's reticence was unsurprising. William Rose's script offered a good deal of genuinely funny social comedy revolving around Tracy and the spectacle of, as Cecil Kellaway's monsignor put it, “a broken-down old phony liberal [coming] face-to-face with his principles.” But when the movie aimed for a more direct and contemporary take on race, the results were hopeless. In the first scene in the movie to feature two black characters talking to each other, the Draytons' suspicious maid, Tillie, corners Prentice while she's out of earshot of her employers and confronts him about his intentions. “I got something to say to you, boy!” she says. “You think I don't see what you are? You're one of those smooth-talkin' smart-ass
niggers
just out for all you can get with your black power and all your other troublemaking nonsense. And you lissen here! I brought up that chile from a baby in her cradle and ain't nobody gonna harm her none while I'm here watchin'! You read me, boy?” Isabel Sanford, hired for $600 a week to play Tillie,
²⁸
would go on to become well-known to TV viewers a few years later as part of the cast of
All in the Family
and
The Jeffersons;
she played the scene with tremendous comic vigor, and Kramer himself added the “black power” line as a fainthearted nod to the news,
²⁹
but nothing could save the scene from the mammy clichés of a screenwriter who was completely out of touch with the civil rights movement and who couldn't even imagine Poitier's character would have a word of reaction to the dressing-down. And Poitier had rarely had to say a worse line than Prentice's jab at his own father (Roy Glenn): “Not until you and your whole lousy generation lay down and die will the weight of you be off our backs…. You think of yourself as a colored man—I think of myself as a
man
.” The screenplay was surely to blame for that moment, but in part, it echoed words Poitier himself had spoken just a year earlier; talking about his role in the western
Duel at Diablo
, he had said, “I play a guy, not a Negro.”
³⁰

In fact, Kramer had taken pains to smooth out anything that might disturb white moviegoers. In an early draft of the script, Rose had had Prentice's father tell off Matt Drayton: “Calm down? Now, listen, you better let me tell you something. Have you got any idea at all of what a Negro doctor in the United States is up against?” He goes on to say that marriage to Joey would mean “throwing away everything he's ever done or ever
hoped
to do! I mean he would be
ruined
!” Kramer crossed it out.

The dissonance between the cloistered world of
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
and the racial maelstrom of 1967 America became impossible to ignore when actress Beah Richards arrived on the set to film her scenes as Prentice's mother. Richards was a well-regarded stage actress and a deeply committed political activist who wrote a column for the civil rights publication
Freedomways;
by 1967, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI had been keeping a file on her for sixteen years. At forty-six, she was just seven years Poitier's senior, but she usually played characters who were older than her actual age—“I was everybody's mother, from Sidney's to James Earl Jones's,” she said. Richards was furious about the lack of opportunities offered to African American performers, and she wasn't alone: Months after she had won a Tony nomination for James Baldwin's 1965 play,
The Amen Corner
, her director, Frank Silvera, took out a trade ad complaining that since the nomination, she had received only a single acting offer, “one day's work as a maid.” Just a few months earlier, she had played opposite Poitier in
In the Heat of the Night
as the character Stirling Silliphant had once imagined as a sort of voodoo abortionist. She had made just $2,500 for the role
³¹
and never knew when—or if—another offer would be coming. Now she was put in a synthetic gray wig and dressed in pearls, white gloves, and a modest hat; her character was made to look like a loyal old housekeeper who has just come from a president's funeral. Prentice's mother was meant to embody the kind of soft-spoken, well-kept, epitome-of-dignity little old black lady who Kramer and Rose thought would put white audiences at their ease, but having to return to the kind of role that had made her into what one reviewer later called “the best sweet-and-sensitive Negro mother in all of show business,” Richards was openly unhappy. Her speech to Spencer Tracy was, in the words of her friend Ossie Davis, a reminder that “‘These children are in love, and love is all that we need to consider.'…Now, Beah knew that was a lie…. At the same time, it was a chance at that level to make any statement at all, so she made it with authority.”
³²

Richards brought great delicacy and restraint to her scenes, especially to her poignant and exquisitely performed speech to Tracy about how old men can no longer remember or understand passion, but by the end of her work on the movie, says Houghton, “I felt that she hated all of us. She was a formidable presence and a very angry person. She never misbehaved in any way. But I felt that there was no way, as a young white woman, that I could ever be redeemed in her eyes. And I totally understood that, and I didn't think the film really did a whole lot to ameliorate that situation. It was a big reality check—it must have been horribly difficult for her to even get those lines out.”

As for Poitier, he felt more resigned than angry. The “Negro in white face” article and the increasingly personal attacks from black writers on his choices of roles had stung. “He was very, very kind to me,” says Houghton. “He would talk to me when we were waiting for shots to be set up, but what I remember him talking about most was that he was tired of acting. He wanted to become a director—he felt that that was the only way he would be able to bring more black people into the business and tell different stories. He felt that as an actor, he had contributed as much as he could.”
³³

By early May, Tracy was in such rapid decline that he was missing entire days and working as little as six hours a week.
³⁴
“The on-the-set situation is tenser than tense,” associate producer George Glass wrote to a journalist. “Tracy fell ill over the past weekend and failed to show for yesterday's big scene, shooting of which will occupy all this week.” Hepburn was on guard at every moment; when Glass brought John Flinn, Columbia's director of publicity, onto the set, she berated him for allowing a “stranger” onto the production. When Glass explained who Flinn was, Hepburn, he wrote, “was taken about as far aback as she ever goes (an inch or so).”
³⁵

Kramer had worked around Tracy as much as possible, bringing in a body double for angles in which only his back was seen; as the shoot progressed, even the effort of standing exhausted his star, “and when he tired,” Kramer said, “it came quickly.” “He huffed and he puffed,” said Schlom. “He had difficulty even walking up a short flight of stairs.”
³⁶
But there would be no way to fake the actor's big scene—a climactic monologue in which Matt Drayton summarizes every argument for and against racial intermarriage that the other characters have made and then grants his blessing to his daughter and future son-in-law. The speech, which unfolds virtually uninterrupted over the last eight minutes of the movie, is a skillful and touching piece of screenwriting in which Matt wrenchingly articulates his love for Christina and then works his way toward a benevolent conclusion. The final words in the monologue blended Kramer's taste for heartfelt speechifying with Tracy's warm, commonsensical voice almost perfectly: “As for you two and the problems you're going to have, they seem almost unimaginable…. There'll be a hundred million people right here in this country who will be shocked and offended and appalled by the two of you…. You will just have to ride that out, maybe every day for the rest of your lives. You can try to ignore those people, or you can feel sorry for them and their prejudices and their bigotry and their blind hatreds and stupid fears, but where necessary, you'll just have to cling tight to each other and say, screw all those people.” (Just before production, Geoffrey Shurlock had warned Kramer that such a “coarse and vulgar expression” would not be approved “in a picture of this caliber,” but Kramer and Rose had kept it in, knowing Shurlock no longer had enough power to take it out.)
³⁷

“Spencer Tracy never fluffed a word,” Poitier wrote later. “Every person on the soundstage that afternoon became engrossed with [his] character as that remarkable actor did his job…. It was hypnotic watching that man pick up the pace here, slow it down there, take a pause here, smile there…all of it making sense—all of it believable. There was applause when he finished.”
³⁸
Poitier's words represented a warm and deeply felt appreciation of Tracy's talents, but also a beatification that bore little resemblance to the actual, far more arduous shooting of the speech. Kramer, aware of Tracy's memory problems and his difficulty breathing, broke the scene into tiny pieces and shot it over six full days, shooting a great deal of coverage of the other actors.
³⁹
He wanted Tracy on his feet for most of the scene, and Tracy badly wanted to deliver a strong performance for him. “Lots of people around here keep telling me how great I am, but you notice how it's Stanley who puts me to work,” he told his friend Garson Kanin. “I tell him my life expectancy is about seven and a half minutes, and he says ‘Action!'”
⁴⁰