James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  “Spencer Tracy plays the priest, and it’s the most difficult role in the picture,” Joe Bigelow, acknowledging the significance of Tracy’s achievement, wrote in Variety.

  It was a daring piece of writing to begin with, and only the most expert and understanding handling could have kept it within the proper bounds. This man of the cloth would not be unusual in real life, but on the screen he’s a type never attempted before. His slang—he calls Gable “mugg” and “sucker” good naturedly—is the sort usually associated with men of lesser spiritual quality; in this instance the lingo is casually uttered by a character dressed in the vestments of the church. It’s explained that he was born on the Barbary Coast and that he and Blackie were raised together, and that qualifies his “eccentricities.” Tracy makes him human and refreshing, and his performance precludes any possibility of offense.

  There was hardly a review published anywhere that wasn’t a rave, and even in summer, when business was typically slow, the crowds were phenomenal. In New York, Variety dubbed it “the smash of the town,” going up against a particularly strong slate of competing pictures that included the latest Shirley Temple movie and W. C. Fields’ hit comedy Poppy. “All signs point to a terrific $60,000 the first week, backed by a campaign that worked hard to push this one to a high peak. It’s the best business the Cap[itol] has done in as long as the boys want to remember, and a run of three or four weeks appears assured.”

  The film, in fact, climbed to nearly $70,000 that first week, and held nicely over the Independence Day weekend. The story was the same in other cities as the release widened, and Tracy dutifully went on the CBS network’s Camel Caravan to push the picture. Underrehearsed and flat, he performed a scene from Saturday’s Children with Rosalind Russell and failed to impress the few trade reviewers who managed to catch the show. Radio was building into a bonanza for big-name movie personalities who could command as much as $5,000 an appearance, but it held little attraction for Spencer Tracy, who didn’t consider it acting to stand in front of a microphone while holding a script in his hand.

  With both Fury and San Francisco in release simultaneously, network radio made little difference to him. In his review of the latter in the New York Times, Frank Nugent pointed to “another brilliant portrayal by Spencer Tracy” as the two-fisted Father Mullin. “Mr. Tracy, late of Fury, is heading surely toward an award for the finest performances of the year.” And columnist Ed Sullivan, who was actually appearing onstage with Fury at Loew’s State, filed a story with Silver Screen magazine in which he labeled Tracy “The Best Bet of the Year” for true stardom.

  “A year ago,” Sullivan wrote,

  it was Victor McLaglen who won the Academy Award for the year’s outstanding performance in The Informer. This year, Tracy will be in the forefront of the select group who will fight it out for the premiere award of the celluloid pundits … His Father Tim will be recognized in every Catholic parish in America, and perhaps the original walked the streets of Milwaukee when Spencer Tracy was going to the public schools there. It was the integrity of the priestly portrait that Tracy paints which lifted him high among the Hollywood performers. Here is no raucous individual, nor one seeking your sympathy with obvious hokum—here is no compromise—Father Tim is as great a feat of make believe as Laughton’s Captain Bligh or the Rothschild who was born in the genius of George Arliss, or the Juliet of Norma Shearer. This is magnificent work, on a high plane.

  Almost on cue, Tracy was announced as having won the Screen Writers Guild award for Fury and would take the honor again in July for his work in San Francisco. Life was good and getting better all the time. He played polo nearly every day at Riviera or on the field of the Will Rogers estate. When Sol Wurtzel wired him in mid-July, congratulating him on his performance in the Lang picture, he added that he hoped that he and Mrs. Tracy had enjoyed their trip to Honolulu. Tracy replied:

  HAD WONDERFUL TRIP. MRS. TRACY DID TOO BECAUSE I STAYED ON WATER WAGON.

  Of all Spencer Tracy’s early pictures, Ed Sullivan liked The Show-Off best.

  In fact I was so impressed by it that in the following day’s column, I suggested that he was the brightest possibility among the younger coast actors … And then came Fury from the pen of Norman Krasna. There was plenty of raw meat in this one, meat enough for a Killer Mears to sink his teeth in, and sufficient shading to establish the contrast of restraint and furious bitterness … But Fury was not quite enough. It was reminiscent, you see, of Killer Mears. Tracy was on the way, but he needed something completely different, a part completely removed from blood-and-thunder. And he found that as the priest in San Francisco, for when he donned the clergyman’s collar, it was Hollywood’s benediction.

  Tracy later told Sullivan that he was the first writer to come out and predict full stardom for him at a time when no one else could see it. “You’ll never know how much it meant to me at that particular moment—and you’ll never know how much I hoped you were right.”

  If settling something so “completely different” on him had finally made audiences sit up and take notice, it was a tactic that bore repeating. In lieu of loan-outs to Wanger and RKO, which would have produced solid pictures but more of the same, Tracy was cast alongside William Powell, Jean Harlow, and Myrna Loy in a screwball comedy called Libeled Lady. Comedy, of course, wasn’t a stretch for him—it had been his forte in stock—but most moviegoers hadn’t seen him in one, and never, for that matter, in the sort of hard-driving part that typified the screwball genre. Powell, Harlow, and Loy were among the biggest draws in the industry, and equal billing in such a powerhouse company could only serve to enhance Tracy’s standing with both exhibitors and the general public.

  Based on a clever story by Wallace Sullivan, Libeled Lady had Tracy back in a newsroom setting as an editor whose paper is threatened with ruination when it mistakenly puts an heiress in the middle of a London scandal and is sued for libel. In short order, Tracy’s character, Haggerty, marries off his fiancée (Harlow) to Chandler (Powell), who then sets about to seduce the litigious heiress (Loy). Tracy handled the part with such aplomb that his work appeared effortless. (“Walking on the set, if you didn’t know him, you’d take him for one of the workmen,” said Sidney Skolsky.) There was, however, tension between Harlow and Powell, who were in a difficult relationship together. The delectable Loy, meanwhile, was newly married to producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr., and Tracy made an elaborate show of his disappointment.

  “He moped around pretending to pout, playing the wronged suitor,” Loy wrote. “He set up a ‘Hate Hornblow Table’ in the commissary, announcing that only men I had spurned could sit there. So all these men joined him who were supposed to have crushes on me, which they didn’t have at all. It was just a gag, but Spence made his point.”

  Libeled Lady was being directed by Jack Conway, a restless, red-faced Irishman who would jump to his feet at the slightest provocation and act out a scene as he wanted it played. He knew how the action should look up on the screen, but his way of staging often stifled his actors and kept them from taking flight. Libeled Lady would be a perfectly serviceable screwball comedy—that most delicate of movie genres—but would lack the frantic grace of Twentieth Century or My Man Godfrey.

  Tracy did his best to be courteous to the various reporters Howard Strickling’s people brought to the set, but he had never grown comfortable talking about himself and, after four years of doing so, felt he had run out of things to say. When one asked, “In what have you found your greatest happiness as an actor?” he answered, “In the cashier’s office.” As columnist Sheilah Graham, newly arrived in Los Angeles, observed, “he would do his best to smile at me, but I knew he wanted me to ask my questions and be gone.”

  In Honolulu, Tracy discovered coconut cake and coconut-flavored ice cream and, being on the wagon, ate continuously, particularly sweets. “One day,” Louise recalled, “Spencer said, ‘I’m beginning to gain weight. You’ll have to watch that for me.’ And with that he dumped the problem in
my lap. In spite of one diet and another of energy-giving but supposedly non-fattening foods, his weight continued to go up. I discovered through a friend that between meals Spencer was downing three chocolate ice cream sodas in one sitting.” When he began Libeled Lady on July 13, Tracy recorded his weight as 180 pounds. Since he wasn’t carrying the picture, there were a lot of days off. On the twenty-first he baled hay and saw his weight drop to 177. On the thirty-first—Louise’s birthday—he played polo and tipped the scale at 178.

  He went into the picture knowing he’d be doing his next assignment under protest, and when, in July, his commitment for The Plough and the Stars was very publicly canceled, it was, the New York Times reported, because “an unrevealed script is being rushed that is planned to give Tracy his most impressive role.” That role, developed over the preceding six months, was that of the Brava fisherman Manuel in Victor Fleming’s planned picturization of the late Rudyard Kipling’s only American novel, Captains Courageous.

  Fleming, forty-eight, had been directing movies, westerns in particular, since 1919, and had previously been a cameraman, first for Allan Dwan and Marshall Neilan, later for the Army Signal Corps. In 1929 he teamed with writer-turned-producer Louis D. “Bud” Lighton to make The Virginian. Fleming landed at M-G-M in 1931, and Lighton joined him there four years later. Almost immediately the two men began work on a screen version of the Kipling story. Much of the casting was settled early on: Lionel Barrymore as Disko Troop, the captain of the We’re Here, Melvyn Douglas as Kipling’s rail tycoon, updated to the director of a modern steamship line, Freddie Bartholomew, Metro’s David Copperfield and Selznick’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, as the spoiled rich boy who is whipped into shape during a summer season on the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic.

  The eventual screenplay, the collective work of four men, shifted much of the story burden to Manuel, the simple Portuguese fisherman who, in Kipling’s novel, rescues young Harvey from the water. Whoever played the character would need his skin darkened and would have to master an accent. Tracy wanted no part of it. “Fought against it like a steer,” he admitted. “Thought the characterization would be phony. Didn’t see how the pieces would fit together. Didn’t know where I could borrow an accent.”

  Tracy’s only work in dialect had been for The Mad Game, and that he had dodged by playing the scene in a hoarse whisper. “I’ll be leaping all over the continent with the dialect,” he warned Lighton and Fleming, both of whom assured him a character who had lived for years among the Gloucester fishermen could easily have picked up any of a dozen different accents. “I’ve always played rough-and-tumble parts,” Tracy added. “This story’s religion or something. Those scenes where he talks about his father—suppose I don’t bring ’em off? They’ll be horrible—sitting there in the boat, talking about Fisherman’s Heaven, a guy 37 years old—you’ll have your audiences reaching for bigger and wider hats.”

  They prevailed upon him to take the script home and read it to Louise, who passed on virtually everything he was asked to do. Louise listened, as she always did, and said that she laughed at the idea that he could ever be anything but on the level. “I was in the stock company where he got his first part,” she told Ida Zeitlin of Modern Sceen magazine. “He had no tricks, no technique, he didn’t know how to make up and looked awful. What carried him through was his great sincerity and naturalness, which he had from the start. If Spence has any fault in acting, it’s that he doesn’t let himself go. He’s always afraid of being ‘hammy,’ so rather than over-play, he under-acts.” Then, echoing George M. Cohan, she said, “Whatever he’s done, I’ve always felt he had more to give, and in this part he’d have to let himself go and give it.”

  Louise’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, Tracy still fretted over the matter of an accent:

  I went to see every picture in town where an actor might be found speaking an accent—saw Eddie Robinson, Muni [in Black Fury], others. Then we scoured San Diego trying to find a Portuguese sailor to use as a model for Manuel. Finally we found our man. The chap came to the studio to see me. He was Manuel. The expression in his eyes, the way he walked, the way he sat, the way he used his hands, his knowledge of boats. Then he began to talk, and … he spoke better English than I do. When I asked him what he thought about my calling the kid my “leetle feesh,” he looked at me patiently—and a little pityingly—and said, “Do you mean little fish, Mr. Tracy?” I gave up.

  By August Tracy was thinking of buying a boat. They had talked about it, he and Louise, and he told her he’d give up polo because a yacht would cost “a lot of dough.” She said, “So what? You don’t spend it in other ways. You may as well have your fun … I wish you wouldn’t give up polo, either. What’s wrong with having two sports?” Not knowing the first thing about navigation, he drove to Newport Beach and tried out a power cruiser, then went sailing the following week on a craft called Landfall.

  When they decided to experiment with a new school, pulling Johnny out of Hollywood Progressive, he decided a boat would be too much of an added expense and gave up on the idea. Despite a thirty-four-mile drive each way, Johnny and Susie entered Brentwood Town and Country School in September 1936. “Susie,” said Louise, “was only four and, ordinarily, I do not think I should have started her to school so young, but she, too, needed companionship, and I learned that there were quite a number of even younger children there in nursery school.”

  They made three days of tests for Captains Courageous in early September, Tracy’s skin darkened and his hair curled with an iron. “One day,” he remembered, “just after I’d had my hair curled, I walked down the stairs at Metro and heard a scream. I looked up, and Joan Crawford said, ‘My God, Harpo Marx!’ ” Eddie Mannix nearly talked him out of taking the role by warning him not to attempt an accent. “You’ll fall on your ass,” Mannix predicted. After viewing the test footage, Tracy agreed and urged Fleming to test “a couple of other fellows.” Then Sam Katz settled the matter by telling him that if he didn’t take the part, they wouldn’t make the picture at all. Tracy was still getting used to the idea when word spread on the morning of September 14 that Irving Thalberg had died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-six.

  All the good things that had come to Tracy in that last year were the result of Thalberg’s faith in him. It bothered him that Riffraff hadn’t turned out better, but he liked to think that what had come since—Fury, especially, and San Francisco—had justified the trouble Thalberg had taken in bringing him to the studio. He attended the funeral at Wilshire Temple on the morning of the sixteenth, then drove himself out to Riviera and devoted the rest of the day to polo, as he generally did at times of stress, recording his weight at 180½ pounds.

  “I finally talked myself into practicing dialect and putting up with having my hair curled twice a day, but the thought of singing gave me the shudders. I dodged the voice teacher, Arthur Rosenstein, for weeks. After I started taking lessons, I used to duck practice as much as I could. Then I just said, ‘Oh, what’s the difference?’ and let the old baritone rip.” He also took lessons in playing the vielle, the ancient stringed instrument—something of a cross between a mandolin and a hurdy-gurdy—on which Manuel accompanies himself.

  However daunting the role of Manuel seemed, the project had its compensations. Vic Fleming was inspirational and rugged, tall and natty with a poetic streak. Lionel Barrymore was Tracy’s boyhood idol, whom he had first seen onstage in Kansas City at the age of sixteen. Twelve-year-old Freddie Bartholomew was a born actor—untrained but with tremendous screen presence—who had developed enough of a following to merit first-featured billing in a picture that had no stars. Tracy’s contract guaranteed him first-featured billing, and he had to sign a waiver in order to make the package work.

  Preliminary filming had commenced nearly a year earlier, when a six-man crew left California for Massachusetts to make process backgrounds and incidental shots of the fishing fleet in and around Gloucester. Purchased on the scene was a two-masted schooner called
the Oretha F. Spinney, which they rechristened the We’re Here of Kipling’s novel. With the M-G-M crew on board, the ship set sail for Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, where, as Fleming described it, “shots of the fishing fleet in every conceivable sort of rough winter weather” were filmed. The men then brought the ship down though the Panama Canal and sailed it up past Monterey and San Francisco to Coos Bay, Oregon, making fog shots along the way. By the time the cast and crew assembled on the morning of September 30, a second schooner, redubbed the Jennie Cushman, was moored alongside the We’re Here in the harbor at Avalon. A company of seventy-five crowded onto the two schooners, the ships trailing barges, water taxis, and speedboats, looking for fog and finding, for the most part, bright sun instead.

  Captain J. M. Hersey and his crew got their first look at the actors when they clambered aboard the We’re Here at 7:30 a.m. “Of the whole bunch of them, Christian Rub looks most like a fisherman,” Hersey observed. “Tracy was sore because he had no sooner got aboard than a makeup man wanted to curl his hair.” Under the direction of cinematographer Hal Rosson, the morning was spent building a parallel out from the port rail to support a camera platform. Tracy, in a dory, practiced pulling into camera range for the scene in which Manuel scoops young Harvey out of the water. “This would be all right,” he said, “except for the hair curling business. It’s a wonder they don’t use perfume on me. Also, I’ve got to get in a few more licks on those oars. I handle a dory like a washerwoman.”