Pictures at a Revolution (34 page)

Poitier's own breakthrough working on
In the Heat of the Night
came during the night-long filming of the scene in which Gillespie shares a drink with Tibbs and the two men warily recognize each other as intelligent and lonely kindred spirits—a scene that ends when Gillespie, embarrassed by his own vulnerability, abruptly remembers himself and angrily shuts out Tibbs's gesture of sympathy. In an early draft, Stirling Silliphant had made the abrupt transition too explicit, having Gillespie snarl, “Don't treat me like
I
was the nigger!” His rewrite was more subtle, but both actors still felt there was more to explore in the exchange. A thunderstorm had blown into Sparta, and the drumming of the water on the tin roof of the set delayed the shoot for hours. While Jewison, Steiger, and Poitier sat in a parked car trying to stay warm and waiting for the skies to clear, they talked about possible improvisations, with Meta Rebner in the backseat taking notes on the dialogue. Although they eventually filmed the sequence largely as Silliphant had written it, Poitier and Steiger found they shared an exploratory spirit, and as they allowed themselves to think and speak as they imagined Gillespie and Tibbs would, they came to like and trust each other. Steiger tried out his theory that the characters had in common “respect for their manhood and professionalism, their refusal to lie, their refusal to be insulted. So they were brothers that way.”
²¹
Poitier, meanwhile, came down hard on himself for “pretending, indicating, giving the
appearance
of experiencing certain emotions, but never, ever, really getting down to where real life and fine art mirror each other.”
²²
By the end of that night's shoot, a bottle of whiskey had been emptied and a deeper friendship had been cemented.
²³
“There had been something missing in the film until then,” says Jewison, “and working on that scene provided it.”
²⁴

By the time Lee Grant arrived in Illinois, Poitier was, for the first time in years, energized by the work he was doing. Grant's ex-husband, Arnold Manoff, a screenwriter whose blacklisting had derailed her career as well as his own, had died a year earlier, and the actress threw herself into her two scenes as a grieving widow with pent-up pain and Method specificity, even asking that a strand of hair be placed in a brush she was holding that was supposed to have belonged to the murder victim. “I was the perfect candidate to play that woman at that moment,” she says. “I came to that set with real baggage, and while it was not a subject I needed to go anywhere near as a person, as an actress it was a gift. And Sidney was totally clued in—we improvised, we connected as if there were a magnetic field between us. Working with him was like ballroom dancing.”
²⁵

As Poitier started finding his own way into his character during the autumn he spent in Sparta, it became all too easy for him to put himself inside the anger, isolation, intelligence, and impatience of Virgil Tibbs. When Silliphant pared down the screenplay, a subplot he had originally planned about Tibbs's growing friendship with a local black mechanic and his family had all but disappeared, so Poitier was virtually the only black man on set. He was, as ever, pleasant and collegial to his co-workers; one weekend, he took the entire cast on a road trip to St. Louis, where Harry Belafonte was performing a concert with Nana Mouskouri. But on many evenings, Poitier kept to himself as much as possible, sitting alone during meals, watching the white men around him from a distance. During one dinner break, recalls William Schallert, “I was sitting at the table with the actors playing the town council members, and one of the guys was talking about what his character would say, and he used the word
nigger
. Sidney Poitier overheard and came up to us, and he was very offended by it. Poitier wasn't thin-skinned, but he was keeping himself on edge. It was a misunderstanding and was cleared up easily, but it was indicative of a kind of heightened sensitivity.”
²⁶

Poitier had pushed Jewison to cut as many uses of the word as he could, but he knew that it had to stay in the movie, and, helped by his costar, managed to draw on his own disgust and rage for his performance. “He and Rod Steiger developed a really good rapport,” says Terry Morse. “We were on this little jail set for a scene between the two of them. We would do a master shot, and then Rod's close-up, and then Sidney's—and for Sidney's close-up, Rod would feed him his lines off camera with exactly the same intensity, just as loud and as fiercely as he had in his own close-up, and he would say,
‘Nigger!'
just to get his eyes popping out. And it worked. After they were done, they grabbed each other and just laughed.”
²⁷

Poitier also came to trust Jewison, and when the director asked him if he would be willing to travel to Dyersburg, Tennessee, for a week to shoot the scenes in which Gillespie and Tibbs drive past a cotton field and then confront the racist industrialist who practically owns the town, he agreed. Poitier had told Jewison about his brush with white racists in Mississippi—in fact, Jewison added a scene in which white drivers rear-end Tibbs's car and nearly run him off the road after he heard about Klansmen following Poitier and Belafonte—and the director promised him that the shoot would be done quickly, with no publicity, and with heavy security. “I promise you'll be protected,” he said, “and I promise you we'll all stay together.”
²⁸

Jewison booked the four actors he needed and the skeleton crew he planned to use into the Dyersburg Holiday Inn. Even in November 1966, “there was no other place we could find that accepted black people,” he recalls. “The Holiday Inn only did because it was a national chain that had an integrated policy by then.” The threat they all felt once they arrived in Tennessee was not imaginary. “Man, that was an experience for all of us,” says Jewison. “Nobody down there knew what we were doing, but the moment they found out the movie was about a black detective and they saw Sidney Poitier in an expensive suit…it upset people. There were pickup trucks circling the hotel at night, people getting drunk, driving into the courtyard, that kind of thing.”
²⁹

“Sidney was getting very uptight, and it was beginning to affect his concentration,” said Steiger, who stayed in a room that was connected to Poitier's. “We'd go into a restaurant and they wouldn't say anything, but they'd put down the plate so loudly and rudely they wouldn't have to.”
³⁰
One night, a drunk in a pickup truck screeched into the hotel parking lot and started banging on doors, shouting that he was trying to find his wife. Poitier told Jewison he was sleeping with a gun under his pillow. “The first one who comes through my door,” he warned the director, “I'm gonna blow him away.” Jewison, having discovered that the local police were unwilling to provide any security, got a couple of Teamsters to scare the young man off and quickly made plans to scale back the shoot and get his cast and crew out of Dyersburg as quickly as possible.
³¹

In the sequence shot in Tennessee, Haskell Wexler used long, slow pans to fill the frame with an archetypal southern landscape, as Gillespie and Tibbs drive down an empty stretch of road past a field where black workers in rags are picking cotton. “None of that for you, huh, Virgil?” Gillespie mutters, looking at them. Poitier looks at him with a calibrated expression of disbelief and resignation. Jewison didn't want the driving scene to use rear-projection photography; he needed to capture Poitier actually looking at the field workers. He shot quickly and unobtrusively. “We were not welcome,” says Terry Morse. “Usually, whenever you go on location, the people from the town show up to see who's there. But we didn't even have to keep crowds away during the cotton scene. They just didn't want to see us. And we didn't want to be there. As we approached the mansion, we saw some cattle next door that we decided we wanted in the shot, and the owner of the cattle said, ‘Just tell me when you want to shoot, and I'll move them so that they can be on camera.' So we were getting ready to do the shot, and I told him. And he turned around and yelled, ‘Hey, nigger! Move those cattle over!'”
³²

The next scene Jewison filmed is
In the Heat of the Night
's dramatic centerpiece. An elderly black butler named Henry ushers the two men into a greenhouse belonging to Mr. Endicott (played by Larry Gates, a New York television actor), a wealthy white bigot whom Tibbs believes knows something about the murder. What begins as a polite exchange of remarks about orchids turns ugly when Endicott compares the flowers to black people, who he says also require special “care and feeding.” When Tibbs coolly asks him a question that makes it clear he considers him a suspect, Endicott walks up to him and gives him a backhand slap across the face. Tibbs returns the slap instantly, and hard.

Endicott staggers backward, then turns to Gillespie. “You saw it?” he says.

“I saw it,” Gillespie replies.

“What are you gonna do about it?” says Endicott.

Gillespie's answer: “I don't know.”

“We only did the slap twice,” says Jewison. “I remember telling Sidney, ‘You can let him have it as long as you don't whack him right across the ear.' And Larry Gates was wonderful. He said to Sidney, ‘Don't worry about it—you hit me!' And they hit each other pretty good!”
³³
But as the scene progressed, it was, surprisingly, Steiger who ran into trouble. He tried saying “I don't know” a dozen different ways. The line “drove Rod crazy,” wrote Jewison. “Nothing he did with that short sentence made him happy…. ‘Rod,' I said, ‘the reason you say ‘I don't know' is because you really
don't
know what to do…. It's a situation you've never confronted before.'…We tried the scene again, and Rod said the line as if Gillespie…has come to a turning point in his life.”
³⁴

The grace note of the scene is delivered, silently, by Endicott's butler, who stands still, holding a tray of lemonade, and witnesses both slaps. After Tibbs and Gillespie leave, he looks at Endicott and exits with a magnificently ambiguous shake of his head. In an unheralded piece of casting, the butler was played by Jester Hairston, a sixty-five-year-old actor, songwriter, and choral arranger. Hairston's grandparents had been slaves; he had attended Tufts University, worked with Ethel Waters, helped to conduct the choir for the all-black musical
Green Pastures
, and spent sixteen years on the radio show
Amos ‘n' Andy
. Hairston had suffered through every indignity show business could throw at him. “I was a native running around [in
Tarzan
pictures] with a ring in my nose,” he told an interviewer later. “I was a witch doctor.” On screen, the way Hairston shakes his head at Endicott connotes grave disapproval without specifying its target. But personally, Hairston knew exactly how he felt. “I looked as if to say to him, ‘You old son of a bitch…' I was disgusted with him smacking Sidney like that.” It was a slap that Hairston had waited his entire career to see a black man return in kind.
³⁵

“We had a couple of pickup shots left to do down there,” says Terry Morse. “But after that day, Norman said to Sidney, ‘Let's get out of here—we can do some of these shots back in L.A.' And we got on a plane that night.”
³⁶

W
hile Sidney Poitier was finishing
In the Heat of the Night
, Stanley Kramer was courting his costars for
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, which he now planned to direct in early 1967. Pulling the project together required a kind of diplomatic gamesmanship at which Kramer, as a veteran producer, was an expert: His plan was to convince Poitier that he already had Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn lined up, tell Tracy and Hepburn that Poitier was eager to make a movie with them, inform Columbia Pictures that all three stars were ready to go, and conceal the full extent of the film's potentially controversial subject matter from the press until the contracts were executed and the money was committed.
¹

Kramer had approached Poitier before the actor left New York for Illinois, meeting him at the Russian Tea Room and pitching William Rose's script almost apologetically by saying, “Look, the revolution is only a backdrop with a thing like this. This is an inventive comedy, an…entertainment.”
²
Kramer knew that Poitier would consider the chance to work with Tracy and Hepburn a much bigger inducement than the role of Prentice, which in Rose's most recent draft amounted to little more than a straight man around whom the other characters fluttered, stammered, and panicked. Poitier, who had almost never been offered an opportunity to act with stars of Hepburn and Tracy's generation and caliber, had hesitated only briefly. “I'm not in their league,” he told Kramer. “I'd get stagestruck and forget my lines.”
³
Nevertheless, he quickly agreed to take the part. Kramer's steeper challenge would be to coax Hepburn and Tracy out of a retirement that neither of them had actually planned. Hepburn was fifty-nine in 1966; she had made just one picture, Sidney Lumet's
Long Day's Journey into Night
, in the last eight years. After the film's completion, she had drifted away from the movie business to spend time nursing Tracy, who was now sixty-six and had been in failing health for as long as Kramer had known him. “Spencer was sick—seriously sick—on every movie he and Stanley made,” says Karen Kramer.
⁴

What the American public knew, or thought it knew, about Hepburn and Tracy's relationship was, even in the mid-1960s, the result of years of meticulous image crafting by the old-Hollywood studio machine and a compliant press corps. People knew that the couple had made eight movies together, starting with 1942's
Woman of the Year
. They knew that Tracy was married, and Catholic, and long estranged from his wife, Louise. And they knew, if they were avid enough followers of the movie business to read fan magazines and gossip columns, that Hepburn was his companion and that she stoically refused to make their relationship evident in any way that might embarrass Tracy or his wife. It takes a remarkable degree of finesse and public relations savvy to earn respect for the discretion with which you conduct an affair that everyone seems to know all about, but Hepburn had, over the years, become a skillful curator of her own image. Rumors about her relationship with Tracy had been printed in tabloids since the late 1940s, but by the early 1960s, they began to seep into the legitimate press as well. A 1962 profile of Tracy in
Look
magazine was the first to suggest that he and Hepburn shared an “unorthodox private life” and that he was given to unexplained disappearances and bouts of gloom and anger.
⁵
Although Tracy did not speak about his relationship with Hepburn, his participation in the piece suggested his tacit approval of the information it contained. Other magazines pointedly refused to pick up on the story, but by 1963, the widely syndicated Hearst columnist Dorothy Kilgallen was writing openly about them: “Katharine Hepburn could have her choice of several important Broadway plays, but she's turning down all New York offers to stay near ailing Spencer Tracy in Hollywood. Her devotion to him for more than two decades has been absolutely selfless.”
⁶
Hepburn rarely gave interviews in the early 1960s, nor did she speak publicly of her relationship with Tracy at that time, but sympathetic references to her self-denial and devotion still found their way into print with regularity.

Kilgallen's item was both true and incomplete. The public did not know that Tracy had been a blackout alcoholic for decades, that MGM had long kept a fake ambulance and paramedic costumes on hand in case the studio needed to haul him out of restaurants or public places when he threatened to cause a scene,
⁷
that Hepburn and Tracy may both have been bisexual,
^*
and that the passionate affair that was alluded to with increasing frankness by columnists and interviewers was in reality an on-again, off-again union that had become, by the mid-1960s, a kind of platonic quasi-marriage between old companions. Nonetheless, Hepburn and Tracy's closeness and affection were not simply a cover story for less acceptable realities; by the time Kramer approached the couple with
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, she really was looking after him, living in a bungalow near his on George Cukor's estate, cooking him meals, and trying to rouse his spirits and keep him alive.

Tracy looked and felt fifteen years older than he was. Thirty years of drinking had ravaged him; he had suffered from heart disease for ten years, he had ongoing respiratory problems, and he had spent much of his adult life fighting through periods of annihilating depression. In 1963, after making
It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
for Kramer, he had been hospitalized for two weeks with what the press was told was pulmonary edema but may have been a heart attack,
⁸
and it had taken a year for him to recover. In 1965, he went into the hospital for prostate surgery and, again, nearly died; during his six weeks in intensive care, both Hepburn and Louise Tracy were at his bedside, each making sure she never overlapped with the other.
⁹
When Tracy was finally released from the hospital, he went back to his bungalow; in the last year, he had almost never ventured out of the house.
¹⁰
He couldn't even bring himself to watch old movies on TV. “I'm about the only one left,” he said. “I can't watch Clark, and I can't watch Bogie. Maybe I'm just too conscious of time passing, especially since I got so ill. But I simply can't watch them. I'm too uncomfortable.”
¹¹
His discomfort was physical as well; there were days when he could barely catch his breath.

Hepburn had, as Kilgallen wrote, turned down work to be with Tracy, but not much had been offered; although her contemporaries Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland were all getting regular (if increasingly demeaning) work thanks to the spate of Grand Guignol horror movies that followed the success of
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
, Hepburn's record at the box office had always been spotty, and she had had only a couple of popular successes, 1951's
The African Queen
and 1959's
Suddenly, Last Summer
(the latter of which she loathed), in the last twenty years. Tracy, despite his illnesses, had been more visible in the last decade than she had; he and Hepburn both wanted to work, and he had been sober for years, but now he worried that his alcoholism had destroyed his ability to remember lines.
¹²
John Ford, an old friend, had offered Tracy a role in his 1964 western,
Cheyenne Autumn
, and Hepburn a part in 1966's
7 Women
,
¹³
but Tracy's poor health and Hepburn's unwillingness to be away from him prevented either of them from taking a job.

By the time Kramer approached Tracy, the director wrote in his autobiography, “I knew I would have to hurry…his health had deteriorated to such a degree that he spent most of his time…not bedridden, but house-ridden. He seemed to have too little energy left for normal exertion.”
¹⁴
Tracy liked Kramer, and neither he nor Hepburn bore any ill will toward the director for not having used Tracy in
Ship of Fools;
he clearly would not have been able to play the role even if Kramer had given it to him. Kramer knew just how, and how hard, to pressure the actor. “Stanley could talk to Spence like they were brothers,” says Karen Kramer. “No matter what Stanley was presented with [in terms of Tracy's health], he'd say, ‘I'm gonna do it with him—we'll make it work.' Even in
Judgment at Nuremberg
, when the studio wanted James Stewart, Stanley would say, ‘No, it has to be Spencer.'”
¹⁵
Other directors and producers assumed that Tracy was simply no longer functional; at the time Kramer approached him, the only other call he had gotten for a job was from William Dozier, the producer of ABC's campy, popular
Batman
series. “[He] said, ‘Didn't I have a grandchild who'd get a kick out of seeing Grandpa as a cameo on
Batman
,'” grumbled the actor. “Wasn't even one of those villain things.”
¹⁶

Kramer urged Tracy to get out of the house and try some fresh air and exercise, a suggestion the actor brushed aside. He then told Tracy about the plot of
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, and the role he wanted him to play, Matt Drayton, a not-as-liberal-as-he-thinks-he-is newspaper editor in San Francisco. Tracy liked the story but insisted he couldn't take on that substantial a part. Years later, Kramer would tell one of Tracy's biographers that he roused the actor's competitive spirit by shrugging off his refusal and telling him that he would approach Fredric March (with whom Tracy had costarred in
Inherit the Wind
) instead.
¹⁷
If Kramer did say that, it was a bluff on which he never would have followed through; he was too aware of the iconic value that Tracy and Hepburn together would bring to the movie. “Stanley didn't want to do the movie without Spencer in it,” says Karen Kramer. “But this time, Spencer said, ‘I'm not well—I'm not gonna do it.' And Stanley said, ‘So what are you going to do—sit there and rot in that chair? Or are you going to get up and do something that means something? If you're going to die, die
doing
something.'”
¹⁸

It was Hepburn who cast what amounted to the tie-breaking vote by agreeing to costar in the movie herself and telling Kramer she would work on convincing Tracy to take the role. Kramer felt that “there might be two or three actresses who might be able to do this part,” including Vivien Leigh,
¹⁹
but he and Rose knew that only Hepburn could deliver Tracy to them, and they had threaded a great deal of flattery into the script they showed her, introducing her character as “a woman of extraordinary grace, with a quality of charm beyond a hack's powers of description and a strange imperishable beauty so finely and precisely drawn that it would take an Augustus John to define it. She makes us realize that a part of Joey's luck is that one day she'll be like her mother.”
²⁰
Hepburn was sold. Tracy was embarrassed by his own fragility, but knowing that both Hepburn and Kramer would protect him on the set by keeping his working hours to a minimum each day, he finally gave in.
²¹
On September 26, 1966,
The New York Times
announced that “one of Hollywood's legendary filmmaking teams and close friends in private life” would “come out of retirement” to costar with Poitier in the film.
²²
Part of the immense amount of anecdotal embellishment that accumulated around
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
in the years after its release was the suggestion that Kramer somehow tricked Columbia Pictures into bankrolling the movie by refusing to reveal its subject to the studio or by telling Columbia's board of directors that the film was about an intermarriage between a Christian and a Jew. In truth, Columbia knew exactly what the movie was about. The studio expressed some mild concern about how
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
would play in the South, but, as Walter Mirisch had done when he was planning
In the Heat of the Night
, they calculated that by keeping expenses low, they could make back their money if the movie performed strongly in other parts of the country. The picture's “racial theme” was announced right along with the casting. As long as Kramer kept his budget under $3 million, he would be able to make his movie.

The often repeated account of what followed in the months before the production of
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
illustrates Kramer's aptitude for turning the story behind a movie's production into a dramatic struggle designed to enhance the reputation of the film itself. As Hollywood lore has it, once Columbia found out that the film was about interracial marriage, the studio decided it had to be scuttled and used Tracy's poor health, which rendered him uninsurable, as an excuse to cancel the production. Only at the last minute was Kramer able to save the film by going to Hepburn and telling her that he would agree to defer his entire salary if she would defer hers; their pact thus reduced the financial risk to Columbia and essentially shamed the studio into proceeding.

But it's hardly likely that Mike Frankovich or Columbia's board of directors, looking at the millions of dollars that had been earned by MGM's interracial relationship drama
A Patch of Blue
, would suddenly have been stricken with terror at the subject matter of a Stanley Kramer movie. What really happened seems to have been a matter of business negotiation rather than high drama. The studio was legitimately worried about Tracy's health, and about the money it might lose if he died during production and Kramer had to recast the role with another actor. But by early November 1966, deal memos were already in place that reduced Columbia's risk considerably. Tracy was to receive top billing and be paid $200,000, not a cent of it up front—he would receive $50,000 upon completion of principal photography, $75,000 a year later, and the balance a year after that. He would not be covered by cast insurance, and, in a line that suggests how well-known in the industry Tracy's alcoholism, sudden disappearances, and relationship with Hepburn had become by then, the studio noted that “we have agreed to delete the morals clause per Tracy's previous contracts.” Hepburn was to receive $150,000 in three installments; like Tracy, she would see no money until the end of production. Hepburn also agreed to shoulder the expenses caused by any delays in shooting because of Tracy's health and to surrender her own salary entirely if the film had to be reshot with another actor, even if she chose to remain in her role. Poitier, already a bigger box office star than either of them, was offered the richest deal in the cast: $225,000, with weekly expenses that would bring his pay up to $250,000, plus a guarantee of 9 percent of the film's profits and billing above Hepburn.
²³