In later years Crawford appeared to be of two minds about Tracy. In her autobiography, published during his lifetime, she said it was “inspiring” to play opposite him, and in a public statement several years after his death, she called him “one of the most beautiful men” she’d ever known. “Pure male with a mixture of small boy attitudes which made him beguiling beyond belief.” Privately, though, she expressed real bitterness over Mannequin, contending that Tracy was so miscast “he made an absolute muddle out of my part, which wasn’t all that great to begin with.” She continued: “At first I felt honored working with Spence, and we even whooped it up a little bit off the set, but he turned out to be a real bastard. When he drank he was mean, and he drank all through production. He’d do cute things like step on my toes when we were doing a love scene—after he chewed on some garlic.”
Tracy, of course, was completely dry during the making of the film and for a considerable time thereafter. (His datebook entry for October 4: “1 month on the wagon instead of 21 months! Jackass!”) Crawford’s anger was surely over the fact that it was Tracy who ended the dalliance and not Crawford herself. Her obsessive-compulsive behavior and slavish devotion to the business of being a movie star would quickly have grated on him, and when the brief sexual infatuation had faded, he would have lost no time in distancing himself. A few months later, he reportedly came off at her while rehearsing “Anna Christie” for the Lux Radio Theatre. “For crissake, Joan, can’t you read the lines?” he erupted as she nervously fumbled with her script. “I thought you were supposed to be a pro.”
Joan Crawford and Tracy in a candid moment on the set of Mannequin (1937). (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Tracy had been off radio since February, when Louis B. Mayer, under pressure from exhibitors, imposed a ban on broadcasting for all contract players. The practice of putting film stars on the air in tab versions of their latest pictures had been blamed for weak showings at the box office, and The Good Earth and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney became the first Metro releases with no radio exposure whatsoever. By summer the blanket restriction appeared to be loosening, and Loew’s gave its consent for the American Tobacco Company to enter into agreements with six reigning M-G-M personalities, Robert Taylor, Myrna Loy, and Tracy among them, to appear on programs sponsored by the company and produced by its agency, Lord & Thomas. The studio retained the right of script approval, and American Tobacco agreed to supply each artist’s “smoking needs” with a carton a week of Lucky Strike cigarettes.4 Tracy didn’t appear for American Tobacco during the run of the agreement, but was among the stable of stars—which included virtually everyone other than Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer—to appear on Metro’s own weekly program, a frantic vaudeville of premium names known collectively as Good News of 1938.
Tracy disliked radio, but the money it paid made it difficult to refuse. Here he prepares for a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of “Arrowsmith” in October 1937. With him are Fay Wray and host Cecil B. DeMille. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
The show, a historic collaboration between M-G-M and the Maxwell House division of General Foods, originated from Hollywood’s El Capitan theater every Thursday night (so as not to conflict with movie attendance on Fridays and Saturdays). Jeanette MacDonald, Allan Jones, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Judy Garland, Sophie Tucker, and Buddy Ebsen all crowded into the first broadcast on November 4, and Tracy, along with Joan Crawford, Robert Young, Mickey Rooney, and Ted Heeley, was part of the second installment on November 11. Having seen Mannequin at the studio only two days before (“Stinks!” he wrote in his datebook), he and Crawford now performed an episode from the picture, really just a teaser, thus discharging his contractual obligation to make such an appearance. The next time he emoted on Good News, he collected a fee of $3,500 for his trouble.
Tracy had just committed to making a picture called Test Pilot for Victor Fleming when, on November 20, 1937, Eddie Mannix’s wife was killed in a bizarre automobile accident outside of Palm Springs. Bernice Mannix had gone to the desert with family friends and had gambled into the early morning hours at the Dunes, a popular nightspot run by a Detroit mobster named Al Wertheimer. Wertheimer was driving her back to the desert home of Joe Schenck, where she and a niece were staying, when he suddenly swerved to avoid a tow truck that had stopped for a stalled car on the highway. Slamming on the brakes, Wertheimer lost control of his coupe, which left the pavement and overturned, throwing its driver clear but crushing its thirty-seven-year-old passenger. Reached at home, Eddie Mannix was rushed by air to Banning, where the body had been taken. The couple had been married eighteen years.
Tracy saw Mannix the next afternoon and was an active pallbearer at the High Mass celebrated in Beverly Hills the following morning (as were Harry Rapf, Clark Gable, Woody Van Dyke, and Hunt Stromberg). He went straight from Good Shepherd to Riviera, where he played furiously and lost to a six-goal champion. That evening, he sat with Mannix, Howard Strickling, and others at the former’s modest two-bedroom house on Linden Drive. The following morning, Spence and Louise left to accompany Mannix, his niece Alice, and Strickling on the train back to Boston, where Bernice would be laid to rest. “I remember seeing Uncle Eddie and Tracy going back for hot fudge sundaes, I guess to keep Tracy away from the booze,” Alice said. “They ate a lot of hot fudge sundaes between L.A. and Boston.”
Eddie Mannix couldn’t have children, so Bernice had adopted her nieces and nephews and loved having them around. They all crowded into their grandmother’s house at Somerville, where Margaret Fitzmaurice had presided over the first Catholic family to move into town. She had nine children, made her own soap, and saw that their three-story house—and all the kids—were spotless. Tracy was immediately taken with her, her quiet dignity and the fact that she made wonderful marble cake without a recipe.
The first afternoon, rubbing his hands together, Tracy said, “Grandma, what kind of ice cream would you like?”
“Oh, I think strawberry,” she said after a moment.
And so Tracy put on his hat and coat and walked down the long driveway, past a clutch of onlookers, ignoring them completely, and hied himself up the hill to a little store where he could buy a pint of strawberry ice cream. Then he took her by the hand, led her into the kitchen, and sat for the next hour, just the two of them, eating the ice cream and talking. The next day, following the funeral, he repeated the exercise, and when it came time for him and Louise to leave, he took her face in his hands and kissed her gently on both cheeks. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met,” he said softly.
As they drove away, Grandma Fitzmaurice was glowing. “What a nice man,” she said to her granddaughter Jean. “Who is he?”
Even if Eddie Mannix’s own mother-in-law didn’t know who Spencer Tracy was, millions of moviegoers did. Just a week before he left for Boston, Tracy sat for another talk with Ed Sullivan, whose dispatch the following day carried the headline NEW RAGE IS SPENCER TRACY. Sullivan wrote: “Voting contests that are being conducted throughout the country to determine the ranking cinema heroes and heroines reveal that American girls are switching from Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power, or at least the type they represent, to the more stalwart type of hero suggested by Spencer Tracy. Every poll shows that Tracy is gaining by leaps and bounds, and theater managers say that the bulk of his votes are coming from girls and women who have become a trifle wearied of gentler heroes and want their romance raw, rough, and resolute.”
The New Rage and his wife arrived in Manhattan intent on seeing a few shows and ducking the press as much as possible. They paused briefly to pay their respects to Eddie Mannix’s own family in Fort Lee, where his brother owned a bar and staged cockfights. On Broadway they saw Room Service, Golden Boy, Hurray for What! (the new Ed Wynn show), and George M. Cohan in I’d Rather Be Right. They had a nice visit with George M. after the show, and were introduced to the former governor and presidential candidate Al Smith. Spence had to get back to Los Angeles for the start of the new Fleming picture,
but Louise lingered an extra week, primarily to do some Christmas shopping and see some old friends. When she returned on December 8, Spence had the news that Dr. Dennis had confirmed a hernia and that he was in for another operation after the first of the year. On the nineteenth he played his last game of polo for some time to come. (“Suffered terribly,” he wrote in his book.) Three days after that, he was fitted with a truss.
Test Pilot wasn’t a picture that either Tracy or Gable wanted to make. In Tracy’s case it collided with his plans to take his family to Europe, but he decided to do it once the studio offered to sweeten his deal. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, Nicholas Schenck bestowed a “starring contract” worth $6,000 a week—a bit of an exaggeration in that Tracy’s billing clause remained the same as before and the rate of compensation was only $4,000 a week. Still, it was a substantial bump from the $1,750 he had been getting, and he approached Test Pilot, at least at first, with a good deal of enthusiasm. In addition to Gable, he’d be appearing again with Myrna Loy and Lionel Barrymore, and Fleming, after the experience of working with him on Captains Courageous, had become just about Tracy’s favorite director. (“The most attractive man I ever met in all my life,” he told an interviewer.)
The source material, a manuscript titled Wings of Tomorrow, was by Frank “Spig” Wead, a former test pilot for the U.S. Navy who turned to writing after a freak accident left him confined to a wheelchair. A Wead story had been the basis of Hell Divers for M-G-M, and Ceiling Zero, based upon Wead’s book and play of the same title, had been a hit the previous season for Warner Bros. A studio reader thought Wings of Tomorrow had “everything that Ceiling Zero had as a play and a lot more besides…The characters are excellent, the dialogue fine, the whole thing top-notch.” It was, the report concluded, “suitable for Spencer Tracy.”
The reason Gable said he resisted the picture was that he didn’t understand “what the story was getting at,” a complaint echoed by Myrna Loy. As the movie took shape, it was Fleming’s enthusiasm that held the project together. Gable’s reticence may also have come from the shifting balance between his character, Lane, the test pilot, and Tracy’s, the no-nonsense mechanic, and the unthinkable possibility that Tracy could somehow end up with the girl. Originally, the property had been assigned to Lucian Hubbard, whose production of Wings won the first Academy Award for Best Picture. Hubbard put Bertram Millhauser on the script, but when he left to rejoin Paramount in the spring of 1937, the property passed to Bud Lighton, who worked out a whole new version of the story with John Lee Mahin. Fleming, one of Hollywood’s more prominent amateur pilots, became the obvious choice to direct. In the months following, the screenplay passed from Mahin to Vincent Lawrence, then Waldemar Young, and then to Wead himself.
Filming commenced on December 7, coincidentally the same day the results of the poll Ed Sullivan had mentioned were announced by the Chicago Tribune-News Syndicate. Conducted by fifty-five metropolitan newspapers, the survey of more than 20 million was to determine the “King” and “Queen” of Hollywood for the year 1937. On that day, Sullivan officially proclaimed Clark Gable and Myrna Loy the winners. Gable, with 22,017 reader votes, outdistanced Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, William Powell, Nelson Eddy, and Tracy, who came in sixth with 11,253 votes. Similarly, Loy outpolled Loretta Young, Jeanette MacDonald, Barbara Stanwyck, Sonja Henie, and Shirley Temple to take her title.
Gable, seemingly unaware of the promotion, “smelled a publicity stunt” when a delegation appeared on the set. “Anyway, they gave Myrna and me big plush crowns about a foot high, and they wanted to take pictures of us in them. I had visions of these big ears sticking out from under that crown. I backed away. So what did Tracy do? He used that as his cue to try every conceivable way to get that crown on me.”
The following morning, Tracy had the entire crew lined up as Gable walked onto the stage. At Tracy’s cue, the electricians and grips broke into a chorus: “Here comes the bee-yootiful king! All hail! All hail!” Gable, whom Tracy normally called “Moose,” took the ribbing good-naturedly enough, then he joined in with more of the same when Loy appeared moments later. Tracy laid it on so thick that Gable and Loy approached a joint appearance on Good News with a considerable amount of dread. “That broadcast tonight will be a photographers’ clambake,” Tracy said. “And you two are going to look very comical when those newspaper photographers start telling you to wear the crown over your right ear and then your left ear …” Loy came close to canceling out altogether before she learned they wouldn’t be required to pose in the crowns, as neither she nor Gable wanted Tracy to get his hands on those pictures.
“After our would-be coronation,” Loy said, “Spence would hail Clark as ‘Your Majesty’; Clark would call Spence a Wisconsin ham, and Spence would counter with, ‘What about Parnell?’ ” (Ironically, Parnell, the story of the great Irish nationalist leader, had originally been purchased for Tracy but got earmarked for Gable in a textbook example of bad casting.) “From start to finish of [Test Pilot] we had laughs,” Gable said. “Ribbed each other constantly. It reached the point where it took us two hours to do one certain scene that should have taken 20 minutes. All because we started kidding about how we would probably ham it up, until we got such a cockeyed slant on the scene we couldn’t get halfway through it before one of us would laugh in the other’s face. The day [Tracy] was doing his death scene, I accused him of taking all day to die. ‘Gable,’ he said, ‘I’m just getting even for all the time you took making those love scenes.’ ”
Since Gable and Tracy rarely socialized off the set, it was widely assumed they didn’t like each other and that their supposed friendship was a sham, an invention of Howard Strickling’s publicity machine. By most accounts, though, the two men genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, and it was only by necessity their relationship was professional in nature and not as personal as it might otherwise have been. Gable’s drinking habits were widely known, and shortly after Tracy began working on the Culver City lot, the two men went off for lunch one day and disappeared. The studio, Tracy later told a coworker, sent people out looking for them, but nobody could find them, and they were gone two or three days. “I don’t know where the hell we were,” he said.
After he swore off alcohol in December 1935, Tracy kept a respectful distance, joking and lunching with Gable5 but resisting the after-hours invitations and the entreaties to go on hunting and fishing trips. Tracy had no stomach for hunting—as a kid he had killed a bird and never forgave himself—and the boozy world Gable inhabited with such aplomb would very quickly have proven lethal to the equilibrium Tracy struggled to maintain. “If you went out to Gable’s place,” said publicist Eddie Lawrence, “everything was king-size—all the glasses. You were drunk with one glass.” As Joe Mankiewicz put it, “You couldn’t be around Clark without drinking.”
Much of Test Pilot was shot on location at a variety of airfields in and around Los Angeles. San Diego’s Lindbergh Field stood in for Mineola, Alhambra for Wichita. The film’s opening scenes were made at Burbank’s Union Air Terminal, where John Tracy was introduced to Myrna Loy. (“What picture do you remember her in?” his father prompted. “Whipsaw!” responded Johnny.) Despite one Oscar nomination and the prospect of another, Loy thought Tracy needier than when she last worked with him. He seemed unsure of his performance opposite Gable and disinclined to accept Fleming’s assurances.
Gable had no pretensions when it came to his acting, and his admiration of Tracy’s singular gifts was boundless. “I always try to be my best with Spence the first take, and let that be the print,” he once told John Lee Mahin, “because if I start fooling around he’ll kill me.” Gable’s makeup man, Stan Campbell, could remember a sequence that Tracy, riding in the back seat of a car, dominated while Gable and Loy held the foreground. “Any other star but Clark would have had them cut that shot,” Campbell said, “but Clark was never jealous of his fellow players. When the film was screened, he said, ‘Look at that guy Tracy, sitting there doing not
hing and stealing our scene.’ He thought it was wonderful that Spence showed up so well.”
If Fleming’s attentions toward Gable left Tracy feeling isolated, he must have felt even more so after an incident at Riverside’s March Field drove a wedge between them. After spending a crisp January morning shooting exteriors, the principals were invited to have lunch with some of the officers, who wanted to fly Gable, Fleming, and Tracy over to Catalina in one of the B-17 bombers being used in the picture. Myrna Loy, who wasn’t part of the conversation, overheard Tracy decline with thanks. “I noticed that the fliers seemed to understand what he was about, but Gable and Fleming started in on him, ragging him for not going. You know how men are. They made all sorts of demeaning cracks while Spence just sat there. It infuriated me, but not having heard the buildup I kept my mouth shut.”
The minute the others left the table, Tracy leaped up from his seat, grabbed Loy by the arm, and walked her across the field to where a car was waiting to take them back to their hotel. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “What’s going on here?” He fumed silently for a time, then blurted it out: “Well, goddamn it, you know what would happen when I went with them. When they get off that plane, the first thing they’ll do is head for a bar. You know I can’t do that.” Then it dawned on her: he was afraid of falling off the wagon.
Said Loy, “Gable and Fleming didn’t understand this; I mean they refused to understand and had simply kept ragging him. Rather than risk a relapse, Spence had sat there in front of all those men and taken it. ‘You know I can’t do that,’ he repeated in the car to Riverside, trembling with anger. I tried to comfort him: ‘Yes, darling, I know you can’t do that, I know. Calm down, now. Quiet down.’ He was so mad I resolved then and there not to let him out of my sight.”
James Curtis Page 44