Pat and Mike (1952)
Adam’s Rib got me through my first anxiety attack. I was living in a townhouse in Don Mills with my mother and my sister. Photos back then show me tanned, dark curly hair, with sensuous lips, smiling through glasses. But I was terrified — and I didn’t know why. I was obsessed with a lifeguard, then with Domenic — an Italian trumpet player, and then with Joel Quarrington (Paul Quarrington’s brother who lived down the road and was some kind of musical genius). At the time I wasn’t able to put two and two together. Then all of a sudden I was engulfed in fear. If you’ve ever experienced an anxiety attack you’ll know what I mean. Even speaking of it now seems unlucky, like I may bring one on. You become immobile with it, and yet inside you are feverish and desperate. So my mother would talk me down. I needed her, she was the only one I needed, the only one who could save me. I remember after one of our talks — either saying to her, or thinking to myself — well I can go and watch Adam’s Rib, and I’ll be okay. When I submerge myself in that world, everything is alright. I guess that explains writing this blog when I’m sitting here, slightly lost, feeling like I should be doing something else, looking out my too dark window wishing there was something going on outside; knowing there isn’t. So what is it about Tracy and Hepburn — about Adam’s Rib — that saved me? When I was young I thought it was all about Hepburn, now I think it might have been Tracy; but no, of course, it’s the two of them together. It’s love as perfect as you could imagine it. They seem to be falling into it all the time, and they don’t want to, necessarily — they don’t know it’s happening — of course they resist, and I was going to be fine as long as I could imagine that happening to me. Pat and Mike is slighter than Adam’s Rib — it’s the later film, it’s also written by the same husband and wife team Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, and it’s a feminist film, even more so — and more subtle than Adam’s Rib, which has the feisty Hepburn fighting for women’s rights. Pat and Mike is a more personal journey; Hepburn’s boyfriend is not good for her, it’s a simple as that, and when she finds someone who is, it’s a surprise for her as well as us. Tracy plays the working class con-artist so perfectly, he’s a little man filled with himself and his own ego; he loves to hear himself talk, and he talks a lot of nonsense, and he should be contemptible — that is compared to her younger, handsomer guy. But he has one thing on his side. He actually loves her. But ‘loving someone’ is not just something you say, it means something here— understanding who they are. That’s a tough one. I certainly didn’t know how tough it was when I first saw this film. I wanted desperately to be in love, but I certainly didn’t associate such a thing with any of the young men I was so platonically obsessed with, nor would I have known what it meant at the time. I think I would have only understood it through Hepburn’s eyes — gazing confoundingly and adoringly at the short, pudgy, and inconsequential Tracy. Now I understand that Tracy truly loves her because he appreciates who she is and what she wants — that she is and must be an athlete and a star — and her previous boyfriend did not. Love is not just adoring someone, it’s encouraging them to be who they are and not being threatened by it. That’s the tough part. Because they might end up happier than you are, or more successful than you are, or just a better person than you, but the point is you want them to be happy, no matter what, and what makes them happy is what makes you happy. It sounds unselfish, but it’s not. I was overwhelmed by Tracy’s performance. Hepburn claimed that all he ever did was say the lines with intent — which would put him in the David Mamet school of acting — Mamet’s hair-brained theory being that one doesn’t have to play a character in order to ‘act.’ Tracy is unquestionably playing a character -- sorry Mr. Mamet -- he becomes Mike, the same way that he becomes the judge in Judgement at Nuremberg (all twisted forehead and crossed eyebrows) here he simply is Mike, who would make you laugh — because when he starts trying to sell you something you kind of have to laugh. The product he’s selling doesn’t matter, ever, it’s just the sales pitch, it’s what made Trump president — hate to say it — but it’s true. A good salesman makes you forget what he’s selling and then you pay for the stuff and then say what the f- did I just buy? When he’s telling Hepburn that she mustn’t smoke, or drink, or eat fatty foods, and she — against her own impulses — is buying it, well it’s Tracy’s belief in his own salesmanship that she’s falling in love with. It’s a virtuoso performance, and a meta-theatrical one, because Mike is not Tracy, but Tracy manages to sell us a piece of goods called Mike. The expression on his face when she proceeds to beat up two thugs who are attacking him (one of them by the way is a young Charles Bronson) is priceless and true; he is dumbfounded and then hurt. And he says “Don’t get me wrong, but I think a ‘he’ should be a ‘he’ and a ‘she’ should be a ‘she’" — or something to that effect. You’re damn right, Spencer Tracy. Now don’t pillory me. Don’t write my epitaph. Don’t set out with a machine gun to take me down. I love ‘male and female,’ it will never go away, and it never should. So why then am I man who loves men? Who’s the ‘he’ and who’s the ‘she’ in my relationships? But don’t you get it? That’s not the point. Tracy and Hepburn knew, Kanin and Gordon knew: it’s all a game. It’s a game where someone’s got the power and then someone takes it away, and someone acts submissive and someone acts in charge, and it hypnotises us because we live and breathe power games and eat them like fire. Hepburn is a liberated woman who knows she can only realize herself through the love of a man who actually loves her, because she doesn’t act exactly like a woman. But if there was no such thing as ‘woman’ she would simply be a nothing — Shakespeare’s word for vagina — but please note, nothing also means infinity, and how do you love that? I haven’t explained it correctly; what I mean to say is, it’s all just a game — and if you don’t like games then please don’t rain on our parade. And please don’t yell at me simply because you’ve forgotten how to play.
