Pictures at a Revolution (52 page)

The wedding, even more than the
Loving v. Virginia
decision, brought the subject of interracial marriage to the forefront of the national conversation about race, with articles and editorials that typically focused on such issues as where “mixed” couples could live and what biracial children would have to endure and offered vague and uneasy prognostications about what intermarriage would “lead to”. As late as 1965, a Gallup poll revealed that 72 percent of southern whites and 42 percent of northern whites remained opposed to intermarriage.
²⁰
And Columbia Pictures had little interest in stirring up controversy; the studio's New York publicity office kept out of the press all stills in which Poitier was seen kissing Houghton, marking them with red X's and the word
HOLD.
²¹

Whatever else he thought critics might throw at him, Stanley Kramer was now certain that he wouldn't be accused of irrelevance, since there was still nothing approaching a national consensus on the subject. He was wrong.
Life
magazine's Richard Schickel was the first major critic to review
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, which opened on December 11, and he tore it apart, insisting that “as usual, Kramer is earnestly preaching away on matters that have long ceased to be true issues…. Where to begin discussing the ineptitude with which the nightmare is realized on the screen?” Schickel directly attacked the very decisions on which Kramer had built the movie—especially the choice to make Poitier's character “not just an ordinarily decent chap, but…a regular Albert Schweitzer,” the contradiction inherent in a man of Prentice's passion and independence submitting to the will of his fiancée's parents, and the creation of Houghton's character as an “imbecile” oblivious to the effect her engagement would have on her family. Schickel exempted only Hepburn and Tracy from his contempt, writing that “for me, at least, their performances in this movie are beyond the bounds of criticism.”
²²

“
Life
magazine was the gospel back then,” says Karen Kramer. “We thought that review was going to kill the picture.” Schickel's turned out to be only the first of several terrible notices for the movie, but even critics who couldn't stand Kramer's direction or Rose's stacked-deck storytelling were stopped in their tracks by Hepburn and Tracy. “Kramer is simply not a very good director,” wrote Andrew Sarris. “The lumbering machinery of his technique is always in full view.” But he was as swept up as everyone else by the couple's final moments together on screen, especially by the shot in which the camera seemed to catch Hepburn's tears during Tracy's monologue, which he called “a moment of life and love passing into the darkness of death everlasting…anyone in the audience remaining dry-eyed through this evocation of gallantry and emotional loyalty has my deepest sympathy.”
²³
The New Yorker
's Brendan Gill wrote as if there were no distinction at all between the actors and their characters: “When he turns to her…it is, for us who are permitted to overhear him, an experience that transcends the theatrical.”
²⁴
Newsweek
's Joe Morgenstern complained that “the film might have been made a decade or two ago with its painted sunsets, sclerotic photography, glaucomic process shots and plastic flowers pummeled by floodlights” but called Tracy and Hepburn “glorious actors playing very good parts.”
²⁵

Only the oldest and mildest critics on the beat thought Kramer was up to anything revolutionary or dangerous.
Variety
was relieved that it was “non-sensational,” “balanced,” and (remarkably) “free of preaching.”
²⁶
The
New York Post
's Archer Winsten, who had been reviewing movies since the 1930s, called it a “trip into the realms of living, breathing, fiery contemporary controversy,” noting that “you can't say it couldn't happen here. The Dean Rusk family appears to have fronted for this very film.”
²⁷
Even Crowther, who endorsed the movie warmly, admitted that it “seems to be about something more serious and challenging than it actually is” and wondered what Poitier's character could possibly see in Houghton's.
²⁸

But liberal writers united in savaging the compromises and stereotypes inherent in what the
Los Angeles Times
' Charles Champlin called its “safety-first approach.”
²⁹
The reviewer for
The Nation
announced that he walked out after twenty minutes.
³⁰
In the
National Catholic Reporter
, Father Andrew Greeley titled his piece “Black and White Minstrels” and, flinching at Tillie the housekeeper's embarrassing punch lines (“Civil rights is one thing, but this here's somethin' else!”), he wrote, “Laugh? I thought I'd die.”
³¹
And in
Harper's
, Robert Kotlowitz predicted the movie would face resistance “in both the South and in the Northern ghettoes. In the South…it will surface those ancient sexual anxieties about mixing the races; in the ghettoes…it can only insult its audience. I would not want to watch
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
in a Watts or Harlem movie house, where it may well be stoned by young Negroes.”
³²

As it turned out, Kramer's movie didn't run into trouble in the North, the South, the ghettos, or anywhere else; it was an immediate blockbuster, the highest-grossing movie Kramer, Hepburn, Tracy, or Poitier had ever made, and the biggest success in the history of Columbia Pictures. Where its critics received the film as a timid and neutered issue picture, audiences saw it as a benign, often very funny, and finally touching portrait of discomposure, a glimpse at every strained smile, awkward pause, and gentle groping toward humanity that would unfold if Sidney Poitier walked unannounced into the home of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Watching two of the most self-assured stars in screen history not know how to behave in front of a black man—which was exactly how the two of them, particularly Hepburn, had chosen to play it—may not have ignited any revolutions, but it made for a genuinely crowd-pleasing comedy. As Arthur Knight predicted correctly in
Saturday Review
, “the very elements that prevent it from coming to grips with its potentially explosive material are probably also the ones that would commend it to a wide audience.”
³³

Neither Columbia nor the critics anticipated the breadth of the film's demographic appeal. Older moviegoers turned out in force to watch Hepburn and Tracy together one last time; younger audiences, among whom Poitier had built a big following with the release of
To Sir, with Love
, showed up to see him again; and for the first time, black moviegoers were recognized as a massive force at the box office. Two weeks before
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
opened,
Variety
published the results of a survey that showed that African Americans were going to the movies in numbers far greater than the studios had realized; in first-run theaters in large cities, they represented 30 percent of the audience. The figure, said the trade paper, “will perhaps astonish many white showmen…[but] this must…buttress the case for a more open-minded use of Negro actors…. It has become much too ironic to [rewrite] the part for a white actor if Sidney Poitier is not available or not interested.”
³⁴

In the South, Kramer's movie was not, initially, a sure thing. The worry expressed in
Variety
's review that “certain Dixie areas may not dig the film, sight unseen”
³⁵
was well-founded, at least until a crush of popular demand overcame the institutional resistance of theater chain owners. Beah Richards's family had to travel to Jackson, Mississippi, to see the picture, since no movie house in their hometown of Vicksburg would show it.
³⁶
One New Orleans theater owner showed the film but snipped out the brief shot of Poitier and Houghton kissing, a moment shown only in a rearview mirror as a cabdriver looks at them, annoyed.
³⁷
And in several cities, the Ku Klux Klan planned rallies, protests, and even attacks on theaters showing the movie; a scheme to throw tear-gas canisters into one theater was canceled at the last minute only when Klansmen discovered that the movie house was showing
To Sir, with Love
, a movie that local Klan leader Donald Heath apparently found less objectionable.
³⁸
But eventually,
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
played everywhere, the few lunatic-fringe protesters were swept aside, and in at least one regard, it did make history: Questions about the southern financial viability of a movie starring a black actor were never raised again.

As the movie took off, critics were still shaking their heads at its love-conquers-all message, complaining that Kramer and Rose had dodged every real problem intermarrying couples might face by virtually deracinating Poitier. Citing the moment when Prentice tells his father, “You think of yourself as a colored man, I think of myself as a man,”
The New Republic
's Stanley Kauffmann wrote, “Surely more and more Negroes today reject this washing-out of color and insist on thinking of themselves as Negroes.”
³⁹
But what
Esquire
's Wilfrid Sheed had called “the
Gentleman's Agreement
ploy, or, whoever thought that nice young man was a Negro?”
⁴⁰
had worked. Anyone, no matter how racist they might be, could enjoy the movie and congratulate themselves on finding Sidney Poitier an acceptable member of the family.
^*
Within a few weeks, even the title was part of the cultural lexicon. “Guess who's coming to dinner with the Rex Harrisons on Christmas Day?” wrote Radie Harris in
The Hollywood Reporter
. “Their colored maid, Ruby, that's who.”
⁴¹

 

Harrison and Rachel
Roberts had had a rocky summer after the completion of
Doctor Dolittle
. They returned to Portofino, where they spent time with, and quickly exhausted the patience of, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. During one long evening at the Burtons', Roberts sent their guests Tennessee Williams and director Joseph Losey running for the door when, in Burton's words, “she insulted Rex sexually, morally, physically…lay on the floor in the bar and barked like a dog…started to masturbate her basset hound.” Even Burton, no stranger to alcohol and excess, was shocked. “Rex is fantastically tolerant of her drunken idiocies,” he wrote in his diary after another incident a few days later. “She wouldn't last 48 hours with me and he's had it for seven years.”
⁴²
Harrison and Roberts spent the next couple of months miserably unhappy, filming an ill-considered version of Feydeau's
A Flea in Her Ear
together. By the time Harrison was called back into service by 20th Century-Fox for his final round of duties on
Doctor Dolittle
, he and Roberts were on better behavior. He drew the line at going to Peru, but he showed up, smiling and waving, for premieres in Paris, Scandinavia, New York, and Los Angeles. The Bricusses and the Newleys made the rounds as well. The guest lists weren't exactly a roll call of the New Hollywood—the Los Angeles roster included the Reagans, the Samuel Goldwyns, and Dean Martin
⁴³
—and nobody at the studio was harboring any illusions about what kind of critical reception awaited the picture. But Dick Zanuck and his lieutenants told themselves that it wouldn't matter—that if they just announced loudly and frequently enough how wonderful their “Christmas gift to the world” was, nobody would look too closely once they unwrapped the box. Reviewers, after all, had referred to Fox's last big musical repeatedly as “The Sound of Mucus,” and it was now the highest-grossing film in history. Maybe it wouldn't matter what they thought this time, either. “We've got $50 million tied up in…
Dolittle, Star!
and
Hello, Dolly!
,” Darryl Zanuck told John Gregory Dunne just before leaving for the London premiere. “Quite frankly, if we hadn't made such an enormous success with
The Sound of Music
, I'd be petrified.”
⁴⁴

With Academy Awards season approaching, the trade papers were, in those days, especially leery about stepping on the prospects of any expensive studio picture, and
Variety
ran a hilariously timid review that carefully noted that “the overall entertainment value of
Doctor Dolittle
is rather hard to pinpoint” and asked, “Is it a ‘good' motion picture? The answer varies according to what the individual expects for his money.” While murmuring a few words of complaint about “some slow periods and some insufficiently defined plot elements,” the paper swept aside its own objections and noted that over $400,000 of advance tickets had been sold in New York City alone, so the actual quality of the film might not matter. This wasn't irrelevant; if Fox could make
Dolittle
look like a hit for just a couple of weeks, releasing photographs of long lines and sellout crowds, road-show houses outside of New York might book it before word started to spread. “After a couple of years” in theaters,
Variety
predicted,
Dolittle
could even earn back its money.
⁴⁵