On the morning of February 12, 1937, Tracy, with a philosophical grin, slipped down from the mast and into the studio tank, tangling himself in the wreckage, his wetsuit hidden under the water, the camera on a crane overhead, the microphone boom on a skiff to one side, Fleming and Hal Rosson on a skiff to the other. A couple of uniformed nurses stood on the sectional deck of the We’re Here in case of an accident. At a signal from Fleming the storm began.
“And what a storm!” columnist Robbin Coons observed.
Huge paddles churn up a frothy sea, clouds of spray fly with a roar from a towering wooden reservoir, and a huge funnel batters Tracy’s head with wind. The waves rise higher, higher, engulfing him, knocking him about as he yells his dialogue. Rescuers are John Carradine—just up from the flu—Dave Thursby, and Jack Stirling, all of whom get nearly as drenched as Tracy. And they do the scene three times. Before the last take Tracy, submerged in his art if ever an actor was, catches me leering on the sidelines and jeers, “You like to try it? If you’ve got to laugh, you might stay out of my line of vision!” But another wave breaks over him before I can explain it wasn’t laughter but an expression I always wear when wondering whether Metro is trying to drown Tracy.
The six-page scene took three long days to shoot, the exchange between Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew playing primarily in close-ups. Screenwriter John Lee Mahin, who was present during much of the shoot, was puzzled early on by Fleming’s distant staging of the scenes with Bartholomew. “I said, ‘Geez, this is a beautiful kid, Vic. It seems to me you’re not getting the close-ups of this kid.’ He said, ‘Wait till we need ’em. Wait till they’ll have some effect.’ I said, ‘Well, when will that be?’ He said, ‘When he starts crying and breaking. That’s when we’ll go in to see him.’ And this tough bastard starts to move in on him. He was right.”
In an ever-rising state of panic, Harvey crawls out onto the splintered mast of the We’re Here. “You’re all right, aren’t you? You aren’t hurt, are you Manuel?” And Long Jack, floating alongside Manuel, calls out to the captain. “The drift is tightenin’ it! You got to cut loose, Disko—or it’ll take him in half!” And Harvey, scrambling into a dory, glances around at the somber men on deck and then back at Manuel.
“No!” he gulps.
“We ain’t cuttin’ loose,” Disko returns, “unless it’s gonna help you free Manuel!”
And Manuel calls out, “You cut him away, Disko! You hear me?”
Resigned, the captain says, “Get me an ax,” knowing that cutting the line is a task that only he can do.
“No!” pleads Harvey. “Captain Disko! No!”
With Freddie now within inches of Tracy’s face, Fleming managed the most intimate of exchanges against the commotion of Barrymore’s futile attempts at rescue, the ax’s blows registering ominously on the soundtrack, Tracy bobbing and wincing in pain, striving mightily to convince the boy that he’s really okay. “We have good times together, eh, little fish? We laugh, we sing, so you smile now. Come on, little fish …”
“Long Jack can fix it. You’ll be all right, won’t you Manuel?”
“Manuel, he be watching you. You be best fisherman ever.”
And as the ax severed the line, the apparatus pulled Tracy down into the water and out of sight, Freddie clawing at the surface, the men restraining him, the cold finality of the moment weighing on both him and the audience.
Freddie Bartholomew managed the scene with tremendous restraint, on the verge of tears as the terror grips him yet never out of control, never permitting himself to completely let go. Tracy understood that it was Freddie’s scene more fully than it was his own, and he played it as would an expert straight man, feeding the lines the boy could respond to, giving him the spotlight even as Fleming insistently cut to Manuel. In the end, it’s the audience’s empathy with Harvey, and not Manuel’s brave exit, that so powerfully puts the scene across.
“Well, I got away with it,” Tracy said after it was all over. “Want to know why? Because of Freddie, because of that kid’s performance, because he sold it 98%. The kid had to believe in Manuel, or Manuel wasn’t worth a quarter. The way he would look at me, believe every word I said, made me believe in it myself. I’ve never said this before, and I’ll never say it again. Freddie Bartholomew’s acting is so fine and so simple and so true that it’s way over people’s heads. It’ll only be by thinking back two or three years from now that they’ll realize how great it was.”
One day on the lot a few weeks later, Tracy breezed into his dressing room and told Yvonne Beaudry they could see a runoff of the finished picture, which had taken five long months to shoot. Inside a studio projection room, they watched Manuel regenerate the pampered Harvey and then go to his watery grave. “When we emerged from the dark room into bright sunlight,” Beaudry remembered, “I was ashamed that my eyes were filled with tears. To my astonishment, Tracy’s eyes also were moist and red and he quickly hid them behind sunglasses.”
* * *
1 There was no “hazardous acts” clause in Tracy’s M-G-M contract, but the matter was taken up with a number of players after the death of actor Gordon Westcott in October 1935. Tracy informally agreed to refrain from playing polo during the production of a picture, as did Robert Montgomery and Clark Gable. Under pressure from their respective boards, studio executives Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck gave up the game altogether—Zanuck quite reluctantly—and, in time, so did Walt Disney.
2 Announced as Three Time Loser, the film was ultimately made and released as You Only Live Once (1937).
3 This was the Portuguese actor Rodrigo de Medicis.
CHAPTER 13
The New Rage
* * *
With the completion of his scenes for Victor Fleming, Tracy went into his next picture without a break. As he remembered it, “they hauled me out of the water on a Saturday afternoon when we finished Captains Courageous. Monday morning, I was standing in the middle of the street of a shell-torn village on the back lot, and Woody Van Dyke was ordering Harry Albiez, his prop man, to outfit me to the last cartridge.”
The film version of a pacifist best seller, They Gave Him a Gun was initially to have been directed by Fleming, who saw it as “a great anti-war document.” Then, when Captains Courageous ran seriously over schedule, Tracy was instrumental in getting Van Dyke to do it instead. He liked the speed at which Van Dyke worked and the fact that he wasn’t fussy like Borzage or Lang. (Having just finished with Manuel, Tracy unconsciously lapsed into his quasi-Portuguese dialect during an early take and Van Dyke printed it anyway.) Replacing Jean Harlow as nurse Rose Duffy was Gladys George, a stage and screen veteran whose nomination for Best Actress (for Paramount’s Valiant Is the Word for Carrie) paralleled Tracy’s own for Best Actor.
Around the time of the Academy Awards banquet, Tracy was shooting battleground scenes in Chatsworth, a short drive from his Encino ranch on the same five hundred acres where exteriors for The Good Earth had been filmed. The winners, announced with considerable hubbub on the night of March 4, 1937, surprised practically no one, in part because they had been accurately handicapped in the trades as well as in the Los Angeles Times, giving the Best Actor nod to Paul Muni and Best Actress to Luise Rainer for her performance as Anna Held in M-G-M’s The Great Ziegfeld. With Metro claiming the most employees among the academy’s voting membership of approximately eight hundred, it was widely presumed that Rainer would win the award, as Norma Shearer, nominated for Romeo and Juliet, already had one. “Critics,” according to the Hollywood Citizen News, “generally were of the opinion that Spencer Tracy as the priest in San Francisco ran Muni the closest race and that had he been placed in the [new] category of Supporting Actor he might have won that hands down.”
Van Dyke finished They Gave Him a Gun in twenty-four days, remarkable given the logistics of the shoot. Tracy completed his scenes on March 20 and spent most of the following week lolling on the Carrie B waiting for the inevitable punch list of retakes that followed every V
an Dyke production. He was back at work on the twenty-ninth when Susie had her tonsils and adenoids out at Good Samaritan Hospital. Then, granted a six-week leave of absence, he prepared to enter the hospital himself, placing a natural gift for morbidity on full display as he hopelessly garbled the doctor’s prognosis and convinced himself he had cancer.
“I haven’t been telling people because I wanted to wait until it was over,” he confided to Howard Sharpe, who had just completed a multipart biography of him for Photoplay, “but I’m going into a hospital tomorrow and I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of coming out of it. Except in a hearse. And if I do come out, I may never be able to speak again.”
What doctors had actually told him was that there was a fifty-fifty chance his vocal cords would be damaged as a result of the surgery. Overall, they assured him, the operation was “not serious” and the only threat to his life would be in the unlikely event the gland was malignant. All the same, he spent the morning of April 6 finalizing his will and concluding morosely that he couldn’t afford to die. “They take everything, one way or another,” he told Sharpe. “I don’t know what Louise and the kids would do.”
He went to Confession, then entered the hospital with only a hardcover novel to keep him company. (“Hope [I] come back to finish this nice book,” he wrote that night in his datebook.) His sole visitor the next morning was Jean Harlow, who told him she’d dropped around “for a game of handball.” The surgery took all of thirty minutes, and Tracy seemed slightly disappointed the gland wasn’t cancerous. Howard Strickling’s office put out the news that Tracy had simply had his tonsils out, but someone from the Associated Press reached Dr. Clarence Toland, who actually performed the operation, and most AP members accurately reported the surgery was to correct “a chronic thyroid ailment.”
While Tracy was in the hospital, They Gave Him a Gun was sneaked in Huntington Park. Harry Rapf had eliminated all the antiwar lines, save one, and that one line got such a terrific ovation at the preview that Eddie Mannix ordered all the others restored. No one seemed particularly happy with the picture, and Maurice Rapf, the producer’s son and one of three credited writers on the script, remembered hearing somewhere that Tracy had refused to play Fred Willis as a scoundrel because, according to Rapf, he was certain audiences would no longer “accept him as a heel.” Writing in his datebook, Tracy himself thought the picture “bad” and the character of Willis nothing more than a “nice dumb guy.” In other words, a mugg.
Predictably, the reception accorded They Gave Him a Gun didn’t engage him nearly as much as that for Captains Courageous, which had its gala premiere at L.A.’s Carthay Circle on the night of May 14, 1937. Where Gun was essentially a programmer—albeit with some high-powered talent attached—Captains Courageous was a two-a-day roadshow attraction, a genuine event in the world of film. Unfortunately, the press preview at Grauman’s Chinese a few weeks earlier had taken some of the gleam off the film’s official opening, and a lot of top names passed on the privilege of paying five dollars apiece to see it again. Even with invites and comps worked in, the 1,500-seat theater was only half full, something of an embarrassment for M-G-M’s Strickling, who also had to contend with several hundred union pickets.
Tracy, however, seemed oddly relieved by the forced intimacy of the evening, and although the reaction at the press preview had been overwhelmingly positive, he was still unsure as to how his work would be received by the general public. All he could see in his own performance were the tricks of the characterization—the makeup, the curly hair, the dime store accent. (At Grauman’s, a man had patted him on the head and said, “All you needed was a derby hat.”) Two lines of Portuguese had to be dubbed by another actor, and those lines grated every time he heard them. “This is Freddie’s night,” he told the radio audience in all sincerity, “and that’s how it should be.”
But the audience could see that night what Tracy could not: a glowing portrayal of all that was good and profound in a simple man of the sea. The mechanics of the performance mattered not nearly so much as its heart, and Louella Parsons reported bursts of applause from the likes of Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Columnist Harrison Carroll, having passed on the press preview, marveled at the film’s power to move such a jaded crowd: “Of all the stiff-shirted gentlemen and the décolleté ladies in the audience, I doubt if there was a single one who did not weep with Freddie Bartholomew over the death of Spencer Tracy, the story’s lovable Manuel. The relationship of these two has been made into a masterpiece of screen sentiment.”
Tracy gave Victor Fleming full credit for the success of Captains Courageous. (SUSIE TRACY)
Audiences, perhaps aware the picture wasn’t another Mutiny on the Bounty, took their time embracing it. In Los Angeles, it started building after a dismal first few days, posting a second-week gross considerably better than the first. In New York, it followed The Good Earth into the elegant little Astor, Loew’s premiere house for roadshow attractions, and did well without ever quite reaching capacity business. Pushing the film with characteristic candor, Tracy talked to any number of journalists, both foreign and domestic. He told Philip K. Scheuer he thought his performance “hammy” but was nevertheless convinced it was a great picture.
“The man to be thanked because Captains Courageous turned out as well as it did is the director, Victor Fleming. You’ll never know what he went through—six months, mostly on a process stage with only three sections of boat to work with, the stinking smell of fish, Freddie Bartholomew limited to four hours of work a day—and Fleming himself sick as a dog half the time.” To Gladys Hall he added: “He must have done a magnificent job, because it was the first picture of mine I ever saw where I sat and forgot all about myself, lost track that that was me up there.”
Ida Zeitlin thought she caught something of Manuel’s glow in a story Carrie Tracy told her about the family’s move to New York in 1927. Carrie was lonely for her friends in Milwaukee, and asked her husband if he wasn’t as well. “Well, no, Mother, I can’t say that I am,” John Tracy replied. “I just walk down Fifth Avenue and look at those wonderful buildings and stop in at that beautiful cathedral, and—well, what is there to be lonesome about?” And Zeitlin was reminded of Manuel bent over his vielle and telling Harvey about the songs his father wrote: “Songs about the sun and the sea, songs about the clouds, big songs about the wind and the storms, and little songs too about the tip of my mother’s nose. Oh, my father, he feel beautiful inside!”
The release of Captains Courageous brought another wave of fan mail, and with it came offers of boats and ship models and long, rambling letters from Snug Harbor, the New York–based home for retired seamen. One envelope contained an invitation to cross the Atlantic in a thirty-four-foot ketch with the builder-owner, “age 62 and sound as a dollar.”1 Another, from an ex-army flyer, invited him to fly a low-wing monoplane across the ocean. “The publicity value of your presence,” the writer concluded, “would repay me for the slight risk involved.” A federal prisoner in Leavenworth offered to take him on a hunt for pirate treasure in the Caribbean if only Tracy could secure his release. Gold Star mothers wrote, having seen him in They Gave Him a Gun, and mail was still coming from his having played a priest, much of it now from Europe and Asia.
“I know that in my own case it never came so forcibly till now that pictures and the people in them carry a heavy responsibility,” he said. “That wasn’t the fact where the theatre was concerned. People weren’t particularly swayed by a show or an actor or actress. At least not to the extent that their personal lives were affected. But pictures evidently go deeper.”
Outwardly, the Tracy marriage was as solid as ever, and Spence credited Louise’s forbearance, as he always did, for making it so. “She doesn’t nag, you see. She respects my individuality, asks nothing,” he explained one day during a joint interview. “If I say suddenly in the afternoon that I’m going to Ensenada for a few days, she doesn’t ever ask why. She doesn’t
say, ‘How long will you be gone? What’re you going to do down there? Can’t you take me with you?’ She just smiles and tells me she hopes I’ll have a good time.”
“But it’s a mutual freedom,” Louise interjected. “He does the same. I never ask if I may do something; the choice is mine. The reason for most divorces is this business of husband and wife keeping tabs on each other. I don’t wonder most of them go crazy. Anyway, if each really loves and trusts the other, what’s the sense in prying about?”
It had been a year and a half since Tracy had taken a drink of anything stronger than tea. “No, not even a beer,” he said.
Not even light wines. Nothing. And there’s all the difference between night and day in the way I feel now. Everything is different. Me. Our home life. It just isn’t the same at all, in any way. It’s normal now. It’s comfortable … I get a kick out of life such as I never had when I was on the merry-go-round. We take long drives in the evening, Louise and I. We sit home evenings and read and talk. We plan trips. The kids and I go swimming together. And riding. There’s a flavor in doing all the so-called “little things.” We have one or two couples in for dinner, the Walt Disneys, the Van Dykes, the Pat O’Briens.2 That’s social enough. We have our polo crowd, of course.
Despite such statements, Jane Feely could sense real tension when she came to visit over the month of June 1937. The ranch wasn’t movie star fancy nor nearly as spacious as the rented house on Holmby. One entered the sizable living room directly off the front porch. There was no grand portico, no entrance hall. The sideboard was an old pine dresser, gleaming with brass and copper and Delft chinaware. The refectory table and chairs—there was no dining room—were hand-made and could seat ten in a pinch. The sofas were covered in cretonne, the overstuffed chair a splashy yellow. There were bookshelves, framed photos, a piano off to one corner. Down a long hall were the master bedrooms, in Spence’s case severely plain in terms of decor. (“I never met anyone who so despises chi-chi,” Dick Mook once commented, “and there is not one piece of furniture in the entire room that is not utilitarian.”) Louise’s room was almost as simple and, as with Spence’s, done entirely in maple. Johnny’s room, over in the new wing, was the nicest in the house, built for maximum exposure to the sun. Four-year-old Susie’s room was nearly as devoid of frippery as her mother’s, and the kitchen was done in tones of orange and red. The living space that got the most use was the screened-in porch out back, where most of the family’s summer meals were taken. Out past the swimming pool was the bunkhouse where Jane stayed. Spence had originally thought he might live out there himself, but the central heating didn’t extend that far, and the only source of warmth during winter was a small fireplace.
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