James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  The fog, which had been thick all morning, began to break, and the afternoon passed without getting a single shot in the can. They dismissed the company at four o’clock, returning to Avalon, and tried again the next morning with only marginally better luck. The fog held long enough to get the scene in three takes, Rosson covering it from the barge, the camera platform, and the deck above. Tracy was impressed by Freddie Bartholomew’s dedication to the role, jumping over the side of the boat in order to get what he considered to be sufficiently wet after having been shot with a hose and doused with a bucket of water. “The kid can take it,” he said admiringly. “I hand it to him.”

  Again the fog cleared, and the adult cast spent the rest of the day learning to cut bait. Part of the ship’s forecastle had been converted to a schoolroom for Bartholomew, his stand-in Ray Sperry, and sixteen-year-old Mickey Rooney. “We had a full schedule,” Rooney recalled, “a long shoot every morning, then art, history, social studies, arithmetic, composition, grammar, spelling, botany, physiology, and hygiene in the afternoon.”

  Tracy hated having his hair curled for Captains Courageous. Here he submits to M-G-M stylist Larry Germain, 1936. (MIKE GERMAIN)

  Fleming wrote: “We had purposely set out in October in order to take advantage of the fog. But for days after we began to work, either the sun would break through or the wind would cause a break in the mist.” They cruised over to the Isthmus for a brief scene of dialogue with Bartholomew and Rooney, but then the fog broke there as well. “[A]ll the actors and crew were fishing off the back of the boat,” Tracy remembered. “Fleming said, ‘Goddamnit, we’re going home!’ And then we went back to Catalina to get the stuff we had left in the hotel, and Fleming was in such a hurry to get away that he was using a speedboat [while] the rest of us were going to use a big tug. He walked out on the pier to jump into his speedboat, and the speedboat took off and he went into the water—with his white [pants], all dressed up.” The We’re Here and the Cushman proceeded to Santa Monica to await further orders.

  There was process work to be done, but Tracy’s scenes were limited to Harvey’s time on the water, and the other material—the boy’s school days and his life at home—could go on without him. He spent all day at Riviera on October 4, practicing in the morning and watching a game in the afternoon. Then he attended the riotous preview of Libeled Lady in the evening. It was, he liked to tell people, the first picture he had ever had to dress up for, preferring, of course, to “slop around” in his shirtsleeves, uncreased trousers, and an old pair of shoes. As he watched the breakneck comedy unspool, he said he couldn’t get over the feeling that he was watching a man “who had just put on a clean shirt.” When it was over, he turned to Louise and asked her what she thought of his wardrobe. “Well,” she allowed, “they did look pretty new.”

  However much the picture made Tracy’s neck itch, Libeled Lady went over big with the press, and the reviews the next day were, in Tracy’s estimation, “great.” Confident he was in “the best comedy of the year,” he touched M-G-M for a $5,000 loan and went off again looking for a boat. He inspected Johnny Weismuller’s at Santa Monica and took a demo trip in heavy seas on one named, appropriately enough, Fury. The studio took up his option a full six months early, and within a week he had closed on a forty-foot gaff-headed ketch called Resolute. Following the example of Frank Borzage, who named his yacht the Rena B. after his wife, Tracy christened the boat the Carrie B in honor of his mother.

  He was back at the studio on October 21, still unsure of his performance and grumbling as they fussed with his hair. (“It took me two hours every blessed day to get my hair curled.”) The screenwriters, principally John Lee Mahin, who did the final draft of the script with the knowledge that Tracy would be playing the part, kept Manuel’s words in the spirit of those Kipling had given the character, accomplishing the effect with syntax and emphasis. (“Ah ha!” said Manuel, holding out a brown hand. “You are some pretty well now? This time last night the fish they fish for you. Now you fish for fish. Eh, wha-at?”)

  Said Tracy: “We got an educated Portuguese to advise us.3 He told me that if you put an Italian, a Spaniard, and a Portuguese in the same room and listen to them talk with your eyes closed, you can’t tell which is the Portuguese, which is the Italian, and which is the Spaniard. So I sort of made up my accent as I went along. Maybe some of it was phony. I don’t know.”

  What became his favorite scene in the picture was also its simplest, Manuel out singing under the stars, Harvey tentatively making his approach. Tired of Harvey’s attitude, Manuel wishes he would go away and continues to sing and play his vielle as the boy peppers him with questions.

  “What do you keep singing for?” Harvey demands.

  “Because I like to sing,” Manuel says.

  “I never heard that song before.”

  “Me neither. I just make ’em up.”

  “You can’t write songs.”

  “I don’t write ’em. I just find ’em in my mouth.”

  “A song can’t be any good like that—when you just make it up.”

  “Say—that best kind songs.” He taps his chest. “When you feel good inside—like, like trade wind—she just come out.”

  “Aw, people learn songs. Songs aren’t just inside of people like that.”

  “Say, sometime a song so big and sweet inside I can’t get ’im out. And then I look up at stars and maybe cry, I feel so good.” And then he peers searchingly into Harvey’s eyes and says, “Don’t you ever feel like this?” And when the boy returns the same sullen and belligerent face as before he says, “No, guess you don’t.”

  The challenge with Manuel was to put him across as a genuinely happy man without making him seem like an idiot. Tracy gained his screen effects largely out of the strength of his own personality, as the actor’s art, at its most basic level, is the bringing of something of one’s self to a role. He wasn’t a character actor in the sense that Paul Muni was, yet here he was in makeup with his hair curled, reciting his lines with the suggestion of a Portuguese accent. It was absolutely essential to avoid an air of masquerade in the part, and Tracy portrayed Manuel’s strength and good nature as a gift from God. Manuel is curious, philosophical, humble but never subservient. Fleming seemed happy with the attack, but it was Tracy’s first time with Fleming and he wasn’t so sure he could trust him.

  Freddie Bartholomew could sense Tracy’s insecurity: “I had warm feelings for Spencer Tracy, but there was—curiously—a sense of competitiveness that he felt towards me. I’m not trying to say that I was wonderful and he wasn’t—I don’t mean that at all—but I think he felt that, ‘Ooh, wait a minute. The kid’s running off with the picture and this is not necessarily a good idea.’ ”

  They were back out on the ocean in November, midchannel with the Cushman, the Bluegill, the Flying Swan, the Elizabeth K. Brown, and nine other schooners brought down from Seattle and the Alaska halibut fleet, the dories putting overside and pulling away, a storm approaching steadily from the northwest. With a ten-day leave of absence, Tracy pulled alongside the We’re Here one day to show off the Carrie B. “Slick as a whistle,” he said proudly. “A forty-footer that will sleep six, and that I can handle myself if necessary. Captain Hersey came over in a dory and I showed him around. He even took the wheel for ten minutes and admitted that she ‘wasn’t so bad.’ ”

  Tracy wanted everyone to see the new boat, and Dick Mook wrote of one particular Sunday afternoon when he took a group of friends out past the breakwater at Wilmington and had trouble getting back. “There is a drawbridge that must be raised to let sailing vessels into the harbor. We came back late in the afternoon when traffic across the bridge was at its heaviest. Naturally, traffic was held up while the bridge was raised to let us through. But Spence, new to navigation and knowing little about steering, couldn’t quite get the boat through.” Motorists waiting to cross the bridge grew irate, honking their horns and raining insults down on the captain of the Carrie B. One driver caus
tically advised Tracy that he could get the boat through if only he would turn it on its side. “Spence,” said Mook, “flushed a lobster red.”

  Shots of the dories racing back to the We’re Here were made on November 20, Harvey falling in as he tries to pass a heavy trawl tub to the deck. Fleming spent at least an hour rehearsing the shot, wanting it on the first try so as not to leave Bartholomew in the cold water any longer than necessary. “Stubby Kruger, out of camera range, was all ready to dive in if Tracy had difficulty hauling Freddie back into the dory,” Captain Hersey recorded,

  but Freddie was sure everything was going to be all right. The kid has nerve, all right. A second dory was ready to race over if there was any hitch, and Mr. Fleming himself had a leg over the rail and wouldn’t have hesitated to drop in. Tracy’s dory came up alongside. As he reached for the forward dory hook, Freddie put one foot on the gunwale, started to pass up the trawl tub, and took a backward header. Tracy, quick as a flash, reached over, grabbed him by the collar as he came up, got a grip with his other hand on the lad’s trousers, and pulled him in as if he was landing a codfish. It was all over in a few seconds. We hauled up the dory, rushed Freddie below, stripped him, dried him, rubbed him down, and put him between blankets in a bunk where Mr. Barrymore, Charley Grapewin, Tracy and others came down and kidded him about his Olympic high-dive.

  After a few days back at the studio, they suspended production while waiting for new backgrounds. Eddie Mannix okayed a two-week vacation on December 1, and the Tracys were on the Super Chief bound for Chicago the following morning. In New York they registered at the Sherry-Netherland and, intent upon catching as many shows as possible, took in Dead End on a matinee, followed by the Ziegfeld Follies with Fannie Brice and Bobby Clark that evening. After hours at the Cotton Club, they got caught up in a mob of autograph seekers, an experience Spence likened to a scene from Fury. With no big-name comedies competing against it, Libeled Lady was a big hit at the Capitol, and Metro’s New York office had the dailies queuing up to buy Tracy lunch.

  He loved the musicals—Red, Hot and Blue, On Your Toes. They saw Idiot’s Delight, Tovarich, then Stage Door on the tenth. They would have seen another that evening had Spence not caved—after first having said no—to an appearance on Rudy Vallee’s Royal Gelatin Hour (as the $1,500 fee would handily cover the cost of the trip). They dined with Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, caught Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, and were back on the train to Chicago the next afternoon. They were home on December 16 after five and a half exhilarating days on the town. Four days later, on the twentieth, Tracy celebrated one full year on the wagon.

  Yvonne Beaudry was newly arrived in California, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, when, at the age of twenty-eight, she landed a job at Selznick-International. Beaudry made the daily commute to Culver City with a woman who was one of the top secretaries at nearby M-G-M. Unhappy at Selznick, where she was secretary to a dyspeptic producer, Beaudry was asked by her friend if she cared to work for an actor—“never mind who.”

  “Did I!” she said. “Anything for release from my present employment. But an actor? ‘I hope it’s Spencer Tracy,’ I blurted out, considering he was the only thespian worthy of my efforts. My companion smiled mysteriously, let me off at Selznick’s, and drove on to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. An hour later, she phoned me for lunch at the M-G-M commissary, where, I supposed, I’d meet the actor.”

  Nothing happened over lunch, and Beaudry took the bus back to work in low spirits. About four o’clock, though, she had another call. “Can you come for tea in half an hour? Spencer Tracy will pick you up in his car.” Beaudry told her boss she was leaving for a job interview at Metro, and he simply nodded, anxious for the chance to hire somebody with more experience. “Evidently I’d been inspected at lunchtime and passed muster. I still wonder if Tracy hired me for my Hollywood get-up, which resembled his—a loose brown wool coat, a felt hat with the brim pulled down over one eye. Certainly he learned little about my qualifications at tea. He did all the talking, and I basked in the warmth of his presence, his smile.”

  Since the release of San Francisco, Tracy told her, he was getting lots of fan mail and needed a secretary to answer letters, send out autographed photos, paste clippings in a scrapbook. The salary would be twenty-five dollars a week, and she’d be based in his dressing room until an office came available elsewhere on the lot. Her first morning at work, Beaudry opened dozens of letters piled on the floor, on easy chairs, on a large table on which sat a typewriter, stationery, rosaries, and medals sent Johnny by his father’s fans. Atheists wrote, describing spiritual awakenings they experienced after watching his work as Father Mullin. (One British reviewer described the picture as “a more powerful, more convincing recall to religion than the cold and stilted one issued by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”) Some asked for spiritual advice, others for money.

  “You can’t live up to an idealistic role,” Tracy said. “I’m not competent to advise anyone about their spiritual problems. I’m groping myself. I suppose we all are.” After he played a young doctor in a radio adaptation of Men in White, an influx of letters came from broken and discouraged medical students who said they had drawn new hope and inspiration from his performance. Again, some asked for advice: “They made me feel pretty helpless. It’s no simple thing to advise an earnest youngster who is confused about life. You can’t ignore them, either. About all I can do is tell them to keep on trying. It’s trite, of course, but at least I believe it myself.” Then, of course, there were the usual crackpots that all celebrities hear from—inventors, hustlers, people looking for loans or investment dollars. A few, written in honest desperation, got his attention.

  “I think of you many, many times, always look forward to your letters,” he wrote Lincoln Cromwell, now in his fourth year at McGill,

  but I have been so busy the past year, myself, that I haven’t found much time for correspondence. Now I have a very fine secretary, so we hope things will be different … You have done beautifully, and I’m proud of you, and I want you to go on. Helping you has been a great source of pleasure and satisfaction, and I’m perfectly willing, even anxious, to have you continue in study for another year or two. How you choose to do this will be left practically to your own judgment. I have even thought of Europe for a year, if you feel that anything could be gained and your service to humanity enhanced by study there. I am anxious to see you this summer, when we will talk all these things over. May I tell you, Lincoln, the past year has been wonderful for me, too. It has been the best year that I have ever had in my work, besides being by far the best physically and mentally. We have a lovely farm in [the Valley], and Mrs. Tracy and the children are all well and happy. I have also a nice 40-foot sailboat which has given me a lot of pleasure, and I hope that this summer you and I can have a little cruise in it together. Enclosed please find [a] check, which I’m sure you can use.

  Vic Fleming was ill, in the hospital for kidney stones, and Captains Courageous was on hold pending his recovery. Tracy went to the races, painted the barn, gave interviews focusing on the hard times he had seen before joining Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. “As everyone knows, no actor is any better than his last picture,” he said in a by-lined article for the Oakland Tribune. “And it isn’t reasonable to expect that every one of your pictures is going to be a smash hit. You may get two in a row or even three, or you may hit a jackpot consisting of Fury, San Francisco, Libeled Lady, and Captains Courageous, but not often.”

  He gave the studio full credit for salvaging his career (“I was well on my way to being a tough heavy for keeps”) and he gave Louise credit for his sobriety. “The fact that I’m alive today, that I’m capable of any work or success—I owe to her. She’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever known.”

  Fleming’s two-day stint in the hospital stretched to three weeks, and filming resumed with Jack Conway at the helm. The production was plagued by illness: John Lee Mahin, Barrymore, Charley Grapewin all came down
with the flu. Then Tracy, during a routine checkup, was told he had a goiter. He had noticed his thyroid gland was “a bit swollen”; although it wasn’t toxic, he was told that it could, in time, obstruct his breathing. Dr. Dennis thought he should have it out “sometime.” Tracy was just out of the hospital—more tests—when he learned that he had been nominated for an Academy Award.

  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was at a low ebb in 1936, so many actors and writers having resigned during the formation of their respective guilds that neither the nominations nor the actual awards were considered representative of the industry at large. A nominating committee appointed by the academy president, director Frank Capra, came up with the contenders, which, for Best Actor, were Gary Cooper (in Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town), Walter Huston (in Dodsworth), William Powell (My Man Godfrey), Paul Muni (The Story of Louis Pasteur), and Tracy, who took the nomination for his work in San Francisco.

  It was astonishing. Having resigned from the academy, Tracy hadn’t considered the possibility of a nomination, much less in the company of men like Huston and Muni, both of whom he regarded as better actors. Moreover, he had managed the trick with a mere seventeen minutes of screen time in a picture that ran just shy of two hours. Given the general antipathy toward the academy on the part of the Screen Actors Guild membership—which had boycotted the Oscars the previous year—he seemed a little embarrassed by the whole thing.

  Fleming was back in time to shoot Tracy’s last and most difficult scene, the death of Manuel in the icy waters off Gloucester. Tangled in the broken topmast of the We’re Here, his legs and chest crushed, Manuel is as good as dead and he knows it. (“He’s got about five hundred pounds of wire stay cuttin’ and stretchin’ him down,” a crew member gasps, working the line.) Manuel calls out to the crew in Portuguese so that young Harvey won’t know what he is saying. To the tearful boy he is his usual carefree self, says he’s tired and that he’s going to ask Disko to let him go. “I want to go, little fish. I no good anymore fishing here. I go fish with my father. You …’member I say he keep seat for me in his boat?”