James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  She suggested an early dinner at the eccentric Mission Inn, hoping to keep him “out of harm’s way” by eating before the others got back. “We were finishing a very glum dinner when the prodigals returned. ‘Look at ’em!’ Spence growled. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ They had indeed gone to a bar and got clobbered. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do now?’ He answered ominously, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ As we passed their table, Gable and Fleming were being relentlessly buoyant. I stopped to blast them, but Spence, after a very curt nod, bolted. When I ran after him, he had vanished.”

  Loy got her friend Shirley Hughes and combed the downtown bars, but they couldn’t find him anywhere. The next morning, Tracy didn’t show for work, and everyone suddenly assumed the worst.

  We were stuck there on location unable to shoot without him while calls buzzed between March Field and M-G-M. “My God,” Victor moaned to Benny Thau, “we’ve got a situation on our hands!” I thought, “Yeah, you sure have, and you damn well deserve to have one, too.” A few minutes before noon, Spence strolled nonchalantly onto the set, bid everyone a jaunty good morning, and went to work. When Gable and Fleming started threateningly toward him, I headed them off, took them aside, and gave ’em hell: “Haven’t you clowns done enough? How dare you do a thing like that? You know he has to be careful. Where are your brains?” I really laid them out while Spence worked smugly on.

  At the core of Test Pilot was Tracy’s mother hen relationship with Gable, a quality Fleming sought to emphasize in his notes, a level of camaraderie and affection between men normally reserved for stories of war and dire sacrifice. That Tracy managed a kind of primal jealousy between Gunner and Loy’s character, Ann, is a testament to their on-screen chemistry and the way the two men were balanced under Fleming’s knowing direction. Where Loy has Gable’s attention, his interest in all things sexual, Tracy has his heart, and the perilous work they do together bonds them in a way that no woman ever could. Tracy understood the equation, had worked it through to an extent that Gable, perhaps, had not. That he saw their interaction for what it was is clear from a comment he made in the fall of 1957, while attending a screening at the home of actress Laraine Day. The picture was Bombers B-52, and as it started, one of the massive old B-17s used in the earlier movie rolled into view. “That plane was used in the picture Test Pilot,” he said aloud, “in which Myrna Loy and I were both in love with Clark Gable.”

  On location for Test Pilot with Myrna Loy and Clark Gable, 1937. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  Gable, as it turned out, was living at the Beverly Wilshire while making the picture, so over the course of production Tracy spent a lot of time with Joe Mankiewicz. The urbane, pipe-smoking producer didn’t drink, which made his house at the beach a safe haven as well as a handy place to flop. “We saw each other several times a week,” Mankiewicz said. “I got to know him very well. And I got to know Louise very well. It was very strange; we went dancing, we went to the theatre, we’d have dinner, we’d laugh a lot. Go to the fights with Spence.”

  It was while Tracy was staying with him that Mankiewicz got a glimpse of the preparation that went into a Tracy performance. “I would come home at night and pass his bedroom door and he’d be working. He’d be working extremely hard…[H]e’d come to the set the next day and say to the continuity girl, ‘What are we shooting today, kid?’ and she’d [think], ‘Oh my God, he doesn’t know his lines.’ But in fact he’d worked all night long. He was fully prepared.” It was, perhaps, the legacy of the boy magician, the instinct that compelled him to hide all the work, to keep the secrets to himself, leaving the impression that it all came out of thin air, effortless and magical, a thing of mystery and wonder.

  Part of Tracy’s calculation for Test Pilot was the game of one-upmanship he and Gable liked to play. “I came home and Spence was in the guest room,” said Mankiewicz.

  I heard the sound of cracking nuts. Now I opened his door and he was sitting there and he was cracking walnuts. I said, “What’s that all about?” He says, “I’m just thinking up a little something here.”…And I went to bed. Well, when the film came out, apparently what happened was that he’d suggested to Victor Fleming, “Look, Vic, while this is going on … give me something to do with my hands at least. I mean, I got a bowl of nuts or something that I can crack while this scene is being played.” Well, Fleming thought that was a marvelous idea. The prop man came up with a bowl of walnuts, and to everybody’s surprise Spence cracked these walnuts in between lines from Gable to Loy and Loy to Gable … The soundtrack was completely laced with cracking walnuts, and you had to cut to Spence repeatedly in order to justify this sound.6 Now that’s not an instinctive bit; that’s a man who takes his work very seriously.

  Joe was also fond of Louise, enjoyed being with her. “Louise was a very attractive woman. Lovely dark hair, clear complexion, soft eyes. We went dancing, and I could always make her laugh. Very literate. Intelligent. Spence never said anything the least derogatory about her, never any of those asides that let you know he was trapped.”

  A dozen times Joe was on the verge of asking his friend “what the hell went wrong” between the two of them. “But fortunately, and unfortunately, I’d done enough work in psychiatry to know, to figure it out for myself what it was.” Tracy spent Christmas morning with the kids, the afternoon with Louise at Santa Anita, then returned home to the beach in the evening. Johnny’s deafness, Louise’s forbearance were things he could no longer face on a daily basis. He beat an emotional retreat, born of a need to function, a need to survive.

  “He didn’t leave Louise,” Mankiewicz said. “He left the scene of his guilt.”

  Just after the first of the new year, Louise returned to Honolulu, intent on spending the entire month of January away from home. Spence was working most days, plagued by headaches and the insomnia that had always afflicted him, fueled as it was by the countless cups of tea and coffee he consumed as part of his daily ritual. Crawling out of the black hole of depression was impossible in the middle of the night, when his thoughts ran wild and he endured the torment of his sins. Desperate for sleep, he arrived on the set more worn out than ever, cranky and nervous and sometimes at wit’s end. Someone suggested a massage, and he found a rubdown eased the pain in his head and helped him to relax. He took to noting the sleep he got each night in his book: 3:30 a.m. to 6:50 a.m. without a massage, 12:30 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. with one.

  He met Joseph P. Kennedy one night at dinner with Mannix and M-G-M’s Billy Grady and took note of the fact that the current chair of the U.S. Maritime Commission was soon to become America’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Mannequin opened in New York on January 20, 1938, and, much to its costar’s astonishment, was a hit despite some decidedly mixed notices. Production on Test Pilot ground on into February, a seemingly endless picture to make.

  On February 2, to celebrate Gable’s thirty-seventh birthday, a corner of Stage 12 was done up coronation style, and Tracy had Gable’s stand-in wheel in a huge cake topped with a candy crown. “I wear this Irish costume, King Gable, to remind you of Parnell,” the man announced. “Always remember it, Kingey, because the theater owners will never forget it.” Eddie Mannix came down to the set and placed the crown on Gable’s head as Tracy egged him on. Then Judy Garland sang a specially written song on the subject of the King’s worst film ever. Gable sought his revenge a few days later when he had the hot fudge sundae that always appeared at the finish of Tracy’s lunch made with a perfectly formed scoop of mashed potatoes. Tracy dug into the thing and devoured it down to the last spoonful without ever changing expression.

  Tracy always credited his first Academy Award nomination to an extraordinary run of pictures, going as he did from stark drama to screwball comedy in the space of five months. He talked about the “sudden break” of both Fury and San Francisco and how two in a row had been “something to shout about” when Libeled Lady came along and took him in an entirely different direction. “This business of achieving
dramatic effect on the stage or screen is principally a matter of contrast,” he said at the time. “A thing is dramatic only when it is presented in contrast with something else …”

  The awards were going through a metamorphosis, and where there were scarcely seven hundred academy members selecting the winners for 1936, an agreement with the Screen Actors Guild placed the nomination process in the hands of the guild’s senior members for the year 1937. The winners, in fact, would be selected by both the senior and junior memberships of SAG, as well as the member bodies of the Directors and Writers guilds, a total of some fifteen thousand workers. The nominations were announced on the night of February 6, 1938, and although Tracy thought he had a weaker overall résumé for the year—They Gave Him a Gun, Big City, and Mannequin flanking Captains Courageous—he was again included among the nominees, as were Charles Boyer (for Conquest), Fredric March (A Star Is Born), Robert Montgomery (Night Must Fall), and Paul Muni (The Life of Emile Zola).

  With the awards now sanctioned by the guilds, Tracy seemed only slightly more at ease with the accolade, even as he conspired to avoid the March 3 banquet at the Biltmore Bowl. With Test Pilot due to wrap in a week, he was granted a three-week suspension to have his hernia operation, thus ensuring he would be in the hospital the night of the dinner. “He couldn’t handle open approbation,” Joe Mankiewicz said, “and he couldn’t handle being rejected. He was embarrassed when people told him he was a good actor, but he was terrified by the idea of people not telling each other he was a good actor.”

  When Tracy entered Good Samaritan on Monday, February 21, there wasn’t any widespread speculation he would win the Oscar, Muni again being the odds-on favorite with Montgomery a close second. However, due to heavy rains and flooding, the ceremony was postponed a week, somewhat endangering his plans to be completely unavailable. Then an infection set in, lengthening his stay in the hospital an equal number of days, and he was still safely laid up when Louise came to visit on the afternoon of March 10.

  “I kept feeling that I had to get home, that I should be there in case,” she remembered. “He said, ‘No, don’t go.’ Until finally his mother called and said, ‘You’ll have to come home right away. They say he’s going to get it.’ And I was still at the hospital!” Caught off guard, Louise had to wear what she had on hand, a full black dress, very sheer, embroidered with pink flowers. “I’ll never forget trying to dress. Poor Mother Tracy was frantic: ‘You’ll be late!’ ” (Her lateness was chronic; Spence always referred to her as “the late Mrs. Tracy.”) Publicist Otto Winkler collected her in a studio car, and as they inched down Grand Avenue toward the red-carpeted entrance to the Bowl, crowds of spectators strained for a look. Louise was seated with L. B. Mayer’s party, as were Robert Morley, the Sidney Franklins, the Hunt Strombergs, Bernie Hyman and his wife, the Weingartens, the Van Dykes, and Mervyn LeRoy. Norma Shearer, in a long-sleeved gown of shimmering white sequins, brought her mother.

  In most ways, it was a typical academy event. It started far past the hour set, and, as hosted by radio comedian Bob Burns, ran so late that someone suggested it should first have been previewed in Glendale. The crowd of 1,400—well over the room’s stated capacity—was packed in to the point of immobility. The new spirit of cooperation with the Guilds was evident in the prominence on the program of Robert Montgomery, the president of SAG, King Vidor, president of the Directors Guild, and Charles Brackett, vice president of the Writers Guild. James Francis Crow of the Hollywood Citizen News hailed it as “an Academy renaissance,” considering the precarious condition the organization had been in just twelve months earlier. “[S]ome,” Crow reported, “thought it would not survive.”

  The awarding of the Oscar for Captains Courageous, March 10, 1938. Left to right: Louis B. Mayer, Luise Rainer, Louise Tracy, and director Frank Capra. (HERALD EXAMINER COLLECTION, LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY)

  Presenters, including Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Irving Berlin, and W. C. Fields, had handed out a total of twenty-two statuettes, including another to Luise Rainer, when it came time to reveal the winner for Best Actor. Tracy’s name was announced, and the room exploded at the news of a genuinely popular win. Mayer escorted Louise to the podium, and academy president Frank Capra handed the Oscar to him. “It’s a great privilege,” said Mayer, “to be a stand-in for so great an artist and, great as he is as an artist, he’s still a greater man. I think the right one to receive this is his fine wife, Mrs. Tracy.” Mayer turned to Louise and handed her the award, and she stepped to the microphone. “Thank you for Spencer,” she said, “and for Johnny, and for Susie, and for me.”

  The line had been Spence’s idea in those last frantic moments at the hospital. (“If you have to go up, why don’t you say this?”) And like the hat he always wore cocked over his left eye, it was a sly tribute to his mentor Cohan, whose famous curtain speech from the days of the Four Cohans was always, “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you.”

  Crow, of the Citizen News, called it the “most gracious” moment of the evening, and when Louise later phoned Spence at the hospital, after appearing before newsreel cameras and repeating the line, he wept.

  * * *

  1 “He saw you in the picture,” said Gable sardonically. “He wants to get you out in the Atlantic alone.”

  2 When they entertained, which was rare, Louise always served the same thing—baked pork chop with a particular kind of baked apple. It was her signature dish.

  3 Luise Rainer was German, but to deflect growing anti-German sentiment the studio said she was Viennese.

  4 Tracy began smoking Luckies in the navy, but was never a heavy smoker.

  5 Tracy and Gable always shared the same table in the M-G-M commissary. “It was called the Directors’ Table,” said Howard Strickling. “Gable and Pidgeon and Bob Taylor, Tracy, and Cedric Gibbons, and all the writers. It was a big table, because there were 30 or 40 of them. They had this dice box, and low man paid for the lunch. If you had a three on the dice, it might cost you $35 or $40. Again, you might go along and eat for nothing for three weeks.”

  6 Another bit of business worked out between Tracy and Fleming was Gunner’s practice of sticking a wad of chewing gum on the surface of Gable’s plane before a flight. A good luck ritual, it’s an ominous sign when he neglects it on the altitude run that ends his life.

  CHAPTER 14

  Enough to Shine Even Through Me

  * * *

  When Dore Schary began work on the script of Boys Town in December 1937, it was at the behest of John Considine, who had landed at M-G-M after his brief tenure at Fox. Considine, a lifelong Catholic, was struggling with the story of Father Edward J. Flanagan and his home for orphan boys, a project that seemed a natural for Spencer Tracy. Metro’s story editor, Kate Corbaley, had been looking for another “priest role” for Tracy since the release of San Francisco, and, in the case of Boys Town, parts could be arranged for both Freddie Bartholomew and Mickey Rooney.

  Or so they thought. Considine had just pulled the plug on an unfinished screenplay by Bradbury Foote, having previously nixed treatments from Eleanore Griffin and the writing team of Walter Wise and Hugo Butler. Griffin, in fact, had traveled to Nebraska to meet the Reverend Flanagan, and her twenty-six-page story formed the basis of everything to come. All Considine knew of Boys Town, at least initially, was the material contained in a magazine article titled “The Boy Who Shot His Father,” and, at first, Flanagan feared he would make another orphanage picture “after the pattern of Oliver Twist.” Said Schary: “After reading what had been written and studying the history of Father Flanagan’s unique institution, I told Considine that the error holding up the project was casting Freddie Bartholomew in an atmosphere where he clearly didn’t belong. My suggestion was to do away with the character completely and concentrate on the relationship between Tracy as Father Flanagan and Rooney as the rough, unmanageable new recruit into Boys Town.”

  Within days, the author o
f Ladies in Distress found himself aboard a train bound for Omaha. Being an Orthodox Jew, Schary had never before entered a priest’s home, and he wasn’t sure how to behave when Flanagan came ambling down the stairs. “I expected robes or something, but he came down in a coat and tie and said, ‘How are you doing?’ I said, ‘Very cold.’ He said, ‘A little scotch will take care of that.’ We had a couple of drinks and I fell in love with him. He was a darling fellow.”

  Flanagan was tall, bespectacled, spoke with a slight brogue. “He didn’t look a bit like Tracy, but he had Tracy’s charm, his smile and twinkle.” The priest told his visitor that he had specifically asked Considine to send him a Jew: “I kept saying to M-G-M, ‘Don’t send me any Catholics. Why don’t you get hold of a young Jewish kid? He’ll know what I’m talking about.’ ”

  “Now what would make you say a thing like that?” asked Schary.

  “How do you think I got into this business? How do you think this place was built? Because a Jewish man understood what I was doing and gave me money.”

  Schary had brought the outline of a new story, and Flanagan was pleased with what he saw. Over the next few days, story elements “flowed quickly and surely,” and a new treatment was on Considine’s desk by Christmas. Tracy, however, resisted all efforts to get him on board. (“I’m just a straight man,” he complained to Louise after reading the thing.) In January Dore Schary returned to Boys Town in the company of J. Walter Ruben, who was now assigned to direct the picture. Even with Jack Ruben attached—he had directed Riffraff—Tracy balked, unwilling to play another guy “with a collar turned backwards.”