I played a sailor named Skip. It’s a showy part. There’s a scene where I tell the kid, who doesn’t know if he’s gay or not, to come over, and I unzip my fly. And the audience gasped. I’m sure they thought I was about to flop something out. And the kid, who was played by a brilliant young actor named Ralph Williams, comes toward me and then stops and breaks down. I zip my pants back up and laugh at him.
Like I said, a showy part.
The second act opens with me alone on the stage, laughing. When the curtain rose my eyes came up and I did what you’re never supposed to do: I looked into the audience. This action is called breaking the fourth wall, and it reminds them that what they’re watching isn’t real. But I did it. I looked out and thought, Oh my God, there’s Tennessee Williams! There’s Elia Kazan! There’s Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty! What the hell’s my line?
I couldn’t remember the line! So I kept laughing. I laughed and laughed . . . and laughed . . . and laughed some more. Then God said, “Okay, he’s suffered enough, I’ll let him remember the line.”
—
AFTERWARD I WAS in my dressing room (if you could call it that: it was a tiny cubbyhole at the top of a winding staircase), and Tennessee Williams came back and said, “Young man, I never saw anybody hold a laugh that long in my whole life! I’m going to write a play for you.” Then William Inge came in and said, “I loved what you did with that laugh! I’m going to write a play for you.” And then there was a knock on the door and it was Ben Gazzara. I’d never met Ben, but he was the hottest actor on Broadway and I liked his work.
“What guts!” he said. “What fuckin’ guts to laugh like that, and to keep it going that long!”
“Well, you know, Ben,” I said. “I thought about it and figured, if you’re gonna do it, really do it!”
Look, We’ve Come Through closed after three performances. In his review of the play, the New York Times critic said, “Please don’t let these young actors go to Hollywood.” I left the next day.
Spencer Tracy
Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA, brought me to Hollywood and said I’d be a big star. Wasserman was a powerful man. If he predicted rain, everyone put up umbrellas, so Universal signed me to a seven-year contract. It was at the tail end of the studio system and there were only a few of us. Clint Eastwood was there doing Rawhide, Doug McClure was in The Virginian, and Bob Fuller was in Laramie.
They tried to give us acting classes, but we wouldn’t go. People with clipboards would come around to warn us that if we didn’t attend class we’d be suspended, but we never went and we were never suspended. If you were in a hit show, you had that leeway.
I was in a series called Riverboat, which was set on the Mississippi before the Civil War. It was one of the worst shows on television, but it had more viewers than any of the top ten shows today. Darren McGavin played the captain and I was the pilot, Ben Frazer, but I thought of him as Dum-Dum the Whistleblower, because that’s all I did. Every so often they’d cut to me up in the wheelhouse and I’d toot the whistle. When they did give me a line it was something like “Do you think the Indians will attack?” And there must be a warehouse full of my close-ups somewhere, because none of them ever got on the screen.
Stanley Kramer was on the Universal lot directing Inherit the Wind (1960), the film version of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s play about the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” with Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond, a character based on Clarence Darrow, and Fredric March as Matthew Brady, modeled on William Jennings Bryan. By then I’d seen all of Tracy’s films and he was—and still is—my idol. He could play any part, from a simple Portuguese fisherman in Captains Courageous (1937), to a shady sports agent in Pat and Mike (1952), to the head of a war crimes tribunal in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961).
I didn’t have much to do on Riverboat except pull that whistle, so I had plenty of free time. I knew all the guards, and they’d let me sneak onto the sound stage where Tracy was shooting. I stood in the back watching them film the climactic courtroom scene where Drummond cross-examines Brady. Fredric March was a great actor, but he did things one way. Spencer Tracy surprised you on every take.
Tracy quit every day at five p.m. It was in his contract. It didn’t matter if he was in the middle of a scene, at five sharp he’d go to his trailer. I’d follow him from a distance, hoping he’d notice me.
After a few days he took pity on me and said, “Are you an actor, kid?”
“The jury’s still out on that, sir,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I’m gonna give you some advice.”
I thought he might repeat his famous words “Know your lines and don’t trip over the furniture,” but he said, “It’s a great profession, as long as nobody catches you at it.”
That’s still the best acting advice I’ve ever had: Don’t let anyone catch you acting.
I could never catch Tracy acting. He made it look so easy. Everything he did on-camera was completely natural. He just behaved. When he ate, he ate. He chewed fast and talked with his mouth full. Most actors take small bites so they can speak their lines clearly and make it easier for the film editor to duplicate the action over several takes. But Tracy ate like he was starving, no matter how many takes he did.
When I asked how he did it, he said, “I just eat.”
And when I questioned how they matched shots, he said, “That’s not my job.”
For a few weeks we met every day at five o’clock and talked, mostly about sports, but occasionally about acting. I always called him Mr. Tracy because he never said, “You can call me Spence, kid.”
One day he said, “Did you learn anything today, kid?”
“Yes, sir. That I’ll never be as good as you.”
He laughed.
It was a thrill to make him laugh, and I began to relax in his presence. But I still called him Mr. Tracy.
One day he said, “What’s the matter, kid? You look pissed off.”
I told him that a director on Riverboat wasn’t allowing me any freedom as an actor.
“Fuck ’im, just do it,” Tracy said.
“I don’t think he’d like that.”
“Fuck him!” he yelled. “What’s he gonna do, fire you?”
“He just might.”
“Well, find out!”
I spoke up to the director, and not only did he not fire me, we became friends.
—
LEE MARVIN told me that he and Tracy worked up some business for the scene in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) where Tracy gets off the train. In rehearsals Lee had a pencil in his mouth and he was moving it from side to side. When Tracy didn’t complain, Lee thought, Wow, this is my scene. But when the camera rolled, Tracy, in character, pulled the pencil out of Lee’s mouth and threw it on the ground. Tracy’s character in that picture was missing an arm, but you bought that he was a tough customer. How many actors could pull that off? In another scene, Lee was futzing around with Tracy’s tie. In the third take, Lee reached up and grabbed the knot of the tie and Tracy said, “Don’t do that, kid. I’m too old and too rich.”
Tracy’s personal life was full of demons. He battled depression and alcoholism, disappearing on binges for days on end. He was embarrassed about being an actor even though he was a master, and once told me that he considered plumbing a more honorable profession. He was Catholic and I think he felt guilty about his extramarital relationship with Kate Hepburn. And God knows why, but he blamed himself when his son was born deaf.
But I didn’t know all that then, and one day I said, “Mr. Tracy, you make everything you do on the screen look so easy. Is anything hard for you?”
“Yeah, kid,” he said. “Life.”
Riverboat was a big, expensive show with wonderful guest actors like Eddie Albert, Dan Duryea, Paul Fix, John Ireland, Raymond Massey, John Hoyt, and William Bendix. I’d grown up watching them on the screen, and I tried t
o soak up as much as I could from them. They all went out of their way to encourage me, and most of them gave me the same advice: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” There was something very tender about it. They seemed to know that I was vulnerable behind the wiseass front, and they didn’t want me to get hurt.
But not Darren McGavin. He was the star of the show and never let me forget it. He went out of his way to make me look bad on-camera. I knew very little about film acting, and nothing about the dirty tricks actors play on one another. The viewer’s eye goes to movement, so Darren was always fiddling with something. He was so good at it, I found myself watching him in fascination. Another trick he’d use to keep me off balance was to rehearse a scene one way and do it differently in the take.
The funny thing is, he was a good actor who didn’t have to resort to all that crap. He was interesting in The Rainmaker on Broadway, as Mike Hammer on TV, and as a dope dealer in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). People probably remember him best as the goofy father in A Christmas Story (1983).
I don’t know why he thought I was a threat. I guess it was because I was younger. Or maybe what I said to TV Guide had something to do with it. When they asked me what I thought of Darren, I said, “He’s going to be very disappointed the first Easter after his death.”
He was an ornery son of a bitch and he threw his weight around. He abused the crew and mistreated the women who guest-starred on the show. He took a run at all of them, and he was the opposite of suave. He’d back them up against the wall so they couldn’t move. That would be called sexual harassment now, and I didn’t like it. I finally said something to him one day.
“You’ve got to understand that you’re not Mike Hammer,” I said.
He didn’t appreciate that and we almost came to blows.
At the end of the first season I realized I was on a dead-end street and I asked Universal to release me from the show. When they refused, I got cranky and threatened to blow up the damned boat. They got nervous and called my agent, Monique James, who told them, “If he says he’s going to blow it up, that’s exactly what he’ll do.”
They decided I wasn’t worth the trouble.
Bette Davis
I always had a thing for Bette Davis. Watching her on the screen as a kid, I knew she was special. When I first came to Hollywood and met her, she was everything I thought she’d be and more: tough and strong, but in her own strange way very sexy. Fortunately, Bette liked me. She had said nice things about me in the press, and the first time I saw her in person, I was amazed that she was only that tall. But I wouldn’t have fought her with an axe. I’d rather have Ray Nitschke tackle me. And if I was in a dark alley, I’d want her right behind me.
At the start of our friendship, Bette couldn’t quite figure me out, but when she did, or thought she did, we got along great. She was always kind to me, very generous and encouraging, saying she thought I would do well in films. In the last years of her life, we became great pals. On occasion she allowed me to be her escort, and let me tell you, taking Bette Davis to an event—the seas parted.
Bette loved to gossip about the people she’d worked with, and one of the first things she ever told me was that she couldn’t stand Errol Flynn. They were both under contract at Warner Bros. and made several films together, including The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), in which she plays Queen Elizabeth I in that funny makeup. She had her eyebrows removed and her hairline lifted two inches to give the illusion of baldness under a red wig. The eyebrows never grew back and she had to pencil them in for the rest of her life.
Bette had wanted Laurence Olivier for the part of Lord Essex and was unhappy with Flynn. She thought he was arrogant and unprofessional, and she didn’t bother to hide it. She would insult him in front of the crew, and in one rehearsal she slapped him so hard it made his eyes water.
I never formally met Flynn, but I thought he was a terrific athlete who moved beautifully. I used to see him around the Warner Bros. lot, but never had the courage to talk to him. A stuntman friend of mine knew him, and one day Flynn asked him to come by his dressing room for a drink. My friend took me with him. We knocked on the door, and after Flynn invited us in, we opened the door to see a girl on her knees giving him head.
Flynn grinned at us and said, “I don’t fuck anymore because it interferes with my drinking.”
Bette disliked Flynn, but she hated Joan Crawford. When I met Crawford, I didn’t care for her either. I didn’t like that she was mean to people in the crew, and I wasn’t crazy about her work. I caught her acting too many times. Way over the top. And the men she worked with—Zachary Scott and that kind of weak-kneed actor—she ate them up and spat them out. I don’t think Crawford liked me, either, probably because she knew I had a crush on Bette and it pissed her off.
Crawford was all about image. She played the movie star thing to the hilt. She never left the house unless she was made up to the nines and never missed a chance to ingratiate herself with a fan. She’d sign autographs in the pouring rain; she’d sign people’s whatever. She acted the way she thought a big star was supposed to act. Bette would certainly sign an autograph if somebody asked her under the right circumstances, but she didn’t go crazy and thought Crawford was a big phony about it. Only a saint could truly have that much patience, and Crawford was no saint.
Bette was of Yankee stock from Lowell, Massachusetts. She was born Ruth Elizabeth, but gave herself a new name as a kid, taken from a Balzac novel. Her father was a patent lawyer who left when Bette was seven, leaving her mother, Ruthie, to support Bette and her younger sister, Bobby.
Bette loved to talk about her four husbands. At twenty-four, she married her high school sweetheart, Harmon “Ham” Nelson. She said she was a virgin on her wedding day and “it was hell waiting.” They were together six years. Her second husband, Arthur Farnsworth, died suddenly after four years. Her third, William Sherry, sent her flowers every week until Bette discovered that she was paying for them. Her last husband was Gary Merrill, who plays Bette’s love interest in All About Eve (1950). Bette had just separated from Sherry, and Merrill was in a ten-year marriage. They fell in love on the set, divorced their spouses, and got married. It lasted ten years.
One of the three children from Bette’s marriages, Barbara “B.D.” Sherry, got married and became a born-again Christian. She tried unsuccessfully to convert Bette, then published a tell-all memoir like Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest that claimed Bette was an alcoholic and an abusive mother. It came as a total shock to Bette, who had no idea that B.D. felt that way about her, especially since she’d been supporting B.D. and her family for years. Bette’s son, Michael, and ex-husband Gary Merrill came to Bette’s defense, claiming that B.D. was motivated by the $100,000 advance for the book. Bette disinherited her and never spoke to her again.
We used to talk about it a lot. Bette told me that she never fully recovered from B.D.’s book, but said she was glad that it wasn’t as badly written as the Crawford book! “I failed to reach B.D.,” she said. “I think she had a lot of me in her, and that made it hard. I wish we could have had a better relationship.”
I told Bette, “I’m sorry, too. But it was her loss, because you’re very special.”
Bette would always smile when I said that. “You’re one of the few men who think that,” she’d say.
“Well,” I’d say, “that may not be entirely the men’s fault.”
And we’d both laugh.
Betty had the reputation of being tough to work with, but only if you were an actor or a director. She always got along with the crew. She wanted them all to like her, and they did, because she behaved like one of the guys. Every Friday night she threw a party for the crew and they all had a few drinks. And Bette could tip ’em back. She was wound so tight, I think alcohol relaxed her and eased her shyness. But I never saw her get drunk. I’m not a big drinker, but when we went out, I would try to matc
h her.
Finally she said, “You know, you don’t have to try to keep up with me.”
What a relief that was!
The best thing about having drinks with Bette was that at some point she’d start in on certain people and destroy them. Including Flynn. I felt bad about that and always wished she liked him because I liked him so much. One day, though, she’d finally had enough to allow her to admit, “By the end of the picture, I’d grown rather fond of him.”
Bette was the first to win ten Best Actress Academy Award nominations, and she took home two Oscars, for Dangerous (1935) and Jezebel (1938). At the peak of her career, her pictures were so profitable she was called “the fourth Warner brother,” and even her nemesis Jack Warner said she was “a great artist.” And as Bette herself would always point out, she did it all without the benefit of beauty.
Bette had the ability to make you believe in the character she was playing while never forgetting you were watching Bette Davis. She was always interesting on the screen, even if she was pushing a peanut up a hill with her nose. She wasn’t afraid to play unattractive characters, parts other actresses wouldn’t touch, parts that were dangerous and hard to bring off: killers, connivers, ugly ducklings. She always chose realism over glamour and wasn’t afraid to change her appearance to suit a role or to play characters older than herself. This was a big help later on, when she was able to shift easily into character parts. I once asked her whether she considered any other actress her equal, and without hesitation she said, “Anna Magnani. There’s only one of us in each country.”
We didn’t talk about acting much, but whenever she was asked about her approach, Bette would invoke Spencer Tracy’s no-nonsense advice, “Learn the lines and don’t trip over the furniture.” Or she’d quote Claude Rains: “Know your words and pray to God.” When I pushed her for her own advice she said, “Trust your intuition and just go in and do it.”
But Enough About Me: A Memoir Page 6