Within days of Jane’s arrival, Jean Harlow died unexpectedly of kidney disease at the age of twenty-six. Tracy was at the studio that day and was struck speechless by the news. Helen Gilmore, an editor with Bernarr MacFadden’s Liberty magazine, came upon him in the studio cafe. “I can’t believe it,” he said, staring out the Venetian blinds. He told of Harlow’s visit to Good Samaritan just ahead of his surgery and how it turned out to be the same hospital in which she died. Earlier, in a piece for Screenland, Tracy had celebrated Harlow’s spirit, relating, for instance, how she had given him a black eye shooting a scene for Riffraff. (“She meant to pull her punch, but overplayed her hand.”) On Libeled Lady he considered himself the least of the four stars, referring to himself around the set as “Zeppo.” Harlow, he said, “did something for me that no one else had ever done, moved me physically around to put my face further into the picture, saying, ‘Get your mug in there, will you?’ ”
Louise had heard things about Harlow—her drinking, her affairs, and her rumored abortions—and had little to say when Spence brought the news. “He came home,” said Jane,
and I remember being in the room when he was telling Louise about it, and she said, “Well, you know, there are stories …” Something under her breath. And he said, “The HELL with those stories! Anytime I ever worked with her she arrived on time, she knew her lines, and she was ready to work. I don’t care what she did or who she did it with—I don’t believe any of it and I don’t want to hear any of it! As far as I’m concerned, she was a co-worker that I had a great deal of respect for.” Words to that effect. He did a tremendous defense of Jean Harlow and he said, “I understand it’s a Christian Science funeral, but this is one I will go to.”
[Louise] would say, “I’m just not at home with those people.” But she did go to Jean Harlow’s funeral. “If you’re going, I’ll go with you.” She came to a great deal more understanding of herself than she was ever given credit for, I think, and was able to live with herself so much more peacefully … I would see her being buffeted, ignored by so-called Hollywood inner circles … She was having to buy into stuff that she knew was really crass. Spencer knew it was crass, that it was really the seamy side of life … There was anger between those two people, [and] every so often it would erupt.
Louise had enrolled Johnny in a ballroom dancing class in the hope it would improve his coordination. The class met once a week, and the final session was a party attended by parents and guests. Louise took Jane, who danced with several of the boys, and afterward she took the kids for ice cream. It was late by the time they got back to the ranch, laughing and full of high spirits, and Spence was there pacing the floor. “Where the HELL have you been?” he demanded, his face purple with rage. “I’ve called every hospital, I’ve called the cops, I’ve called everybody! I thought you were going to be home by ten o’clock!”
“Why, we were … nothing … We just went out and had—”
“WHY in the HELL didn’t you CALL?”
“Well,” said Louise, “I would call, Spencer. I thought you’d be in bed.”
“By God, you’ve got this girl here visiting who doesn’t even belong to us, and this boy here. God knows you could have been banged up on the highway …”
Jane struggled to get away as quickly as possible.
God, he’d worked himself into a state, probably because he didn’t have anything else to do. He was just furious. Even then, she didn’t come back at him—“Well, why didn’t you come with us?” She just calmly took it. So many times she just sort of took those tirades. Anything to keep peace. And anything not to lower herself. And that just made him madder, I think. There are always those kinds of problems in a marriage, but this one had to be lived so publicly … I think his self-esteem was very low. By the same token, I think Louise’s was not. I think she was comfortable. She knew her limitations, but the thing I don’t think she knew was how deeply hurt and vulnerable and wounded she was. I don’t think she admitted those things.
The last time Jane had visited, the Loretta Young affair was heating up and Spence had been working for Frank Borzage. Now, four years later, she found him again working for Borzage, the same meticulous approach to coverage visibly wearing on him after working for such decisive and hard-charging men as Fleming and Van Dyke. The picture was Big City, a romance of modern-day New York in which Tracy had been paired with one of Metro’s prestige properties, the German-born stage actress Luise Rainer. She had recently won the Academy Award for her role in The Great Ziegfeld, and her subsequent work in The Good Earth established her as one of the screen’s top actresses. So far, however, she had failed to catch on with the public, and Big City was an obvious attempt to commonize her.
Putting Tracy opposite Luise Rainer ensured she had someone of equal weight to play against. She was, however, showing the signs of disenchantment that would end her movie career after three short years in California, and her attitudes didn’t play well with her new costar, at least not at first. “I can remember his coming home one day in time for dinner,” Jane said. “God, it was hot and he was just wilted. He said, ‘I hauled that Viennese lump3 up and down those stairs twenty times today! God!’ I remember his saying something about talking to her about the work, Stanislavsky and the Group Theatre. He said to her, ‘Why don’t you and I go to New York and live in a garret?’ ”
Rainer, who didn’t click with Borzage and thought the picture “pretty idiotic,” kept mainly to herself. At the same time, Tracy was preoccupied with the fact that Weeze was in Good Samaritan for a biopsy, having noticed a lump on her breast. It was, as it turned out, benign, a simple cyst, but she would be in over the weekend, and Spence, relieved and fidgety, figured his costar was not so much a snob as a profoundly unhappy woman whose recent marriage to the New York–based playwright Clifford Odets was already on the rocks.
“I was married to a wonderful man, whom I dearly loved,” Rainer said, “but it wasn’t working, and, of course, it was a great heartache for me. While I was doing Big City with Spencer I had a friend-secretary, a woman, and he asked her, ‘Does Miss Rainer like sailing?’ And Hannah, my secretary, came to me and said, ‘Mr. Spencer Tracy says do you like sailing?’ I was pretty much down and out inside, so I said to her, ‘I don’t know. What kind of sailing?’ Anyway, to make a long story short, he had a boat, I think in San Pedro, and we all spent the weekend together.”
They powered out to Long Point, on the front side of Catalina, arriving around 2:30 on a Sunday morning. “He was terribly sweet and dear, but I think he was a bit shy of me, too, knowing also that I was perturbed at the time. He was sensitive to that and, moreover, I did not have the average Hollywood personality. I was more quiet—or whatever you may call it—but he was immensely kind and dear and comforting.” It was hot and sunny that next day—no breeze—and they didn’t get back to the yacht club until early evening. That night was the night Tracy made a note in his datebook: “18 months—1 year and a half—without a drink!!!”
After a rough first week, the mood on the set of Big City lightened, and when Borzage kept at a tense scene all morning and well past noontime, shooting it “up, down, and around,” Tracy said to him pointedly: “How about LUNCH, Mr. Lang?” Borzage smiled wanly, ordered one final take, then dismissed the company, Tracy making off to the commissary with a visiting journalist. “It isn’t worth it,” he moaned, clearly beat from roiling the same emotional energy over and over. “None of this is. Oh, I have no kick coming. The money is fine and I like it out here. But making pictures is a terrible tax on your health, and nothing is worth that.” Watching his weight, Tracy ordered cottage cheese and matzos for lunch, then added lamb chops and ice cream when the waitress said, “Is that all you’re going to have?”
Tracy and Luise Rainer listen as director Frank Borzage explains a scene on the set of Big City, 1937. (SUSIE TRACY)
By the time Sidney Skolsky watched a scene being made toward the end of production, he could truthfully report to his r
eaders that Tracy and Luise Rainer were enjoying themselves. Rainer’s technique—if one could call it that—was not unlike Tracy’s own. “I never acted,” she said. “I felt everything.” And she eschewed makeup, as much, at least, as an actress at M-G-M would be allowed. Tracy told Elizabeth Yeaman he thought Helen Hayes the screen’s finest actress, but quickly added that he also admired Sylvia Sidney, Beulah Bondi, and Rainer, who, with her big soulful eyes and her self-done hair, projected a waiflike quality unique among his leading ladies.
Indeed, whatever success Big City achieved as a film was due in large part to the brittle chemistry that developed between its two unlikely stars, both of whom, at least initially, would have preferred doing something else entirely. Said screenwriter Dore Schary, who had once shared the stage with Tracy as a minor actor in The Last Mile, “Those of us working on the film had a marvelous time—a happy time—but while the trade reviews were good, the picture simply didn’t work. Perhaps Sam Goldwyn in his infinite wisdom was right when he said, ‘A happy set means a lousy picture.’ ”
On June 26, 1937, a week after Louise’s release from the hospital, she and the kids sailed for Hawaii. Spence was in the midst of Big City, working most days, and urged them to go on without him. In Hawaii, Louise took the children to see Captains Courageous; Johnny had already seen it, but this would be Susie’s first time watching her dad on screen. The accent and the curly hair didn’t fool her, and when it came time for him to slide away, Freddie calling after him, she was agape. “I just sat staring at the screen in disbelief,” she said. “I was stunned, and Mother said, ‘No, no, Daddy’s fine. He’s at home.’ In retrospect, I think I was probably too young to see it, and I have trouble watching that scene to this day.”
Tracy took a suite at the Beverly Wilshire for the balance of the shoot. They finished Big City late on the evening of July 27 and he left the hotel the following morning, spending his next few days aboard the Carrie B. He was struggling with the boat, anxious to keep it and yet increasingly unable to justify the expense for what were largely weekend getaways. He was bringing home $1,734.25 a week, but was still supporting his polo habit and a small stable of racehorses, the most prominent of which, April Lass, had finished in the money her very first start. Louise and the kids got back on August 7, and she and Spence went out to Riviera that same afternoon, playing five chukkers together, the first time either had been on a horse in over a month. The next day, Spence recorded his worst game ever, Walter Ruben, picture executive Ken Fitzpatrick, and Walt Disney all having played “horribly.” His time on the boat had obviously taken its toll, and he made the decision that it had to go.
There was talk of reteaming Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew in Kipling’s Kim, which had been in development a couple of years, but more immediate plans had him going into the next Joan Crawford picture, a shopgirl trifle called Three Rooms in Heaven. Tracy wasn’t happy about the assignment—he disliked Crawford’s work as an actress and knew the picture would do him no credit. Mook thought it simply the part’s size that galled him, but for Tracy it was more basic than that: “If I’m any kind of actor, I can make a run-of-the-mill part come to life. I don’t mind her part being fatter or larger than mine. I’d a lot rather people would leave a theater wishing they had seen more of me in the picture than have them go out feeling they had seen too much. The thing that upsets me about this picture is that that girl is such a phony. And it comes through in her portrayals.”
He was being pressured to play another priest, something he vowed he would never again do. He put in for vacation time, anxious to return to Honolulu with Louise, but was told not to go because the Crawford picture would be starting within days. When he suddenly got permission to take two weeks, it came as a surprise and he forgot about Hawaii altogether, impulsively making arrangements to go on a fishing trip to British Columbia instead. He left for Seattle, settling in for the journey with a newspaper and a stack of magazines.
Aboard the Carrie B, circa 1937. (SUSIE TRACY)
At Puget Sound, Han Jamison, a local journalist and a genuine admirer who had just seen Captains Courageous, asked him why the shot of Manuel holding his nose as he was pulled underwater wasn’t cut from the picture. “Why Manuel wasn’t holding his nose,” Tracy replied, pronouncing it Man-oo-el. “He was crossing himself and the camera just happened to catch his hand as it passed his nose.” The answer seemed to satisfy his inquisitor, but it was yet another flaw in a performance that was, for Tracy, all too full of them, and for every sharp little point of imperfection, a stab of guilt, imperceptible at times but ever-present. He caught the boat on schedule, running on little, if any, sleep, and spent the morning of August 20 fishing off the coast of Canada. Then, later that same day, after exactly one year and eight months on the wagon, he took a drink—something, perhaps, as seemingly innocent as a single bottle of beer—and, as he later recorded in his datebook, “spoiled it all.”
Flying from Seattle to San Francisco, where he lingered over a long weekend, Tracy returned to the Beverly Wilshire to indulge in his longest and most serious bender in three years. From Monday, August 23, the pages of his datebook told the story: “Binge!” he wrote for most days, noting finally on Friday, September 3, “Came home—ended siege.” The next day he added: “At home sick—these are sad pages.”
And then: “Back on wagon! This time for [a] real stretch—”
Since the release of Fury, Joe Mankiewicz had been producing the Joan Crawford pictures for M-G-M. (“You’re the only one on the lot that knows what to do with her,” Mayer had said to him.) The collaboration had so far yielded mixed results, including Crawford’s only costume drama, The Gorgeous Hussy. The new story Mankiewicz had for her was an original by Katharine Brush, whose racy 1931 novel Red Headed Woman had been the basis of Jean Harlow’s breakout film. Submitted by agent Harold Ober, “Marry for Money” was considered excellent material but doubtful for pictures “unless the heroine is whitewashed a little.” Mankiewicz, who prided himself on “extracting the suds from soap opera” (as Crawford so eloquently put it), embraced it as a challenge of sorts and set to work on a script with playwright Lawrence Hazard.
Tracy was not an obvious choice for the millionaire shipping magnate who pursues Crawford’s noble character, but the pairing was consistent with the strategy of putting him opposite Metro’s biggest female attractions. Directing would again be Borzage, though the whole enterprise this time would be weighted toward the woman, with Tracy relegated to a supporting role. The result was a complete mismatch on the part of the two principals, their lack of screen chemistry exacerbated by a story in which Crawford’s fiercely straight-arrow character eventually marries—but does not love—Tracy’s. At thirty-two, Crawford was too old for the part of Jessie Cassidy, late of Hester Street, and, the carefully diffused lighting of George Folsey notwithstanding, looked it. Seemingly aware of all this, Borzage produced a remarkably static motion picture, long on dialogue and good looks, short on the kind of action that had come to distinguish Tracy’s better work on the screen. The only real surprise about Mannequin was that its two stars got on as well as they did.
Tracy went back into the studio a little sheepishly, having effectively delayed the start of Mannequin. He saw Borzage and Joan Crawford and had a long talk with Eddie Mannix, who, he noted, was “wonderful” about it. Norma Shearer asked him to make a test for the role of King Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette, a flattering proposition that would mark his first time in period costume. He met with director Sidney Franklin and saw the tests of other actors vying for the part. Saturday was spent rehearsing with Crawford in the morning, Shearer in the afternoon. The test was shot at night the following Thursday after a full day’s work. Tracy thought the result “no good” even though Shearer, much to his amazement, said that she liked it.
Mannequin finally got under way on September 14, and Tracy noted his weight at 176 1/4 in his datebook. He dug in again at the Beverly Wilshire and, at some point during the six weeks it took
to shoot the picture, fell into an involvement with his costar, who had recently separated from actor Franchot Tone. Joan Crawford shared the signal quality of nearly all of Tracy’s women—availability. The affair, which apparently generated little, if any, emotional heat, extended beyond the picture, but not by very much. Crawford contracted pneumonia during production—or so she said—and stubbornly reported to work with a 102-degree temperature until her doctor intervened. Getting her back into shape took a few days, and Dr. William Branch whisked her out to the Uplifters Club on the pretext of getting some fresh air into her. She sat in the car, its doors locked, and watched as Dr. Branch and Tracy played polo. In time, she was stick-and-balling a bit, and after the picture wrapped, she and Spence spent a day posing for stills on horseback.
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