As the pressure on the actor built, Yvonne Beaudry became increasingly conscious of his moodiness, his unpredictable funks. “Some days he sat grimly alone, his broad shoulders hunched, his face stony. Then, I hated to approach him with matters requiring his attention: letters and checks to sign, appointments to keep, telegrams and flowers to send … In some ways, Tracy reminded me of my father—a look in his eyes, a mocking expression on his ruddy face, which lit right up when he grinned. I responded to him with respect and a little awe. He was a lot bigger than I as well as older, though I deemed myself a buffer between him and the encroaching world.”
In the end, he was persuaded to take the part of Father Flanagan by Eddie Mannix. “He did it really because of Mr. Mannix,” Louise affirmed. “[Mannix] wanted to do that picture, and he wanted him to do it. [Spence] said [to me], ‘I just can’t turn it down.’ ” When the news reached Boys Town, Father Flanagan responded with a flattering letter to Tracy, obviously calculated to seal the deal: “Your name is written in gold in the heart of every homeless boy in Boys Town because of the anticipated picture you are going to make for us, and every boy here, and all of our alumni, are talking about you, thinking about you, and praying for you every day.”
A few days later, on February 10, 1938, Benny Thau notified the studio accounting office that Spencer Tracy was to be classified henceforth as a star.
A shrewd hand at the art of publicity, Father Flanagan knew the value of the Boys Town story—to Hollywood and to Boys Town itself. He accepted a paltry $5,000 fee for the film rights with the understanding that a successful motion picture could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the institution, perhaps even millions. On February 18, he arrived at Culver City in the company of Morris E. Jacobs, founding partner of Bozell & Jacobs. (It was Jacobs who came up with the famous image of one boy carrying another and the caption, “He ain’t heavy, Father, he’s m’ brother.”) The two men laid out an ambitious promotional plan that involved joining the reach and resources of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with publicity and media contacts forged by Flanagan and his organization over a span of twenty years. What they proposed was a major branding campaign for both Flanagan and Boys Town that would “win space in abundance in such magazines as Life, Time, Newsweek, and newspapers throughout the United States.”
Over lunch on that rainy Friday afternoon, Tracy met Father Flanagan for the first time. Clad in his leather flying jacket for Test Pilot, his face streaked with makeup, Tracy struggled to make conversation with the first living person he had ever been asked to play. “All actors,” he told the priest, “do everything possible to live their part—to be the very image of the person they are portraying. But few actors, Father, have the opportunity of being confronted by that person. That makes the going even rougher, for as I play this part I will be thinking not only of you but of what you will think of me … I’m so anxious to do a good job as Father Flanagan that it worries me, keeps me awake nights.”
What Father Flanagan saw in Tracy was a consummate actor already at work: “As he talked, I could feel his eyes upon me, studying my every little mannerism: the way I sat in the chair, the way I talked, the way I pushed the hair back from my forehead. I knew he was studying me—the man he was going to become—as searchingly as I studied him. I almost knew what was running through his mind.” Photos were made of Flanagan with Tracy, with Mickey Rooney (who asked for his autograph), with actor Lewis Stone, a personal favorite. Jack Ruben suggested that Andrew Cain, one of the boys at Flanagan’s home, be considered for the role of Pee Wee, the mascot character in Dore Schary’s treatment, and Morris Jacobs thought it would make for good publicity to send the boy out to California for a test.
While still in the hospital, Tracy received a letter from Joe Kennedy. The newly installed ambassador congratulated him on his win as Best Actor and advised him that every time Kennedy himself won a prize he made someone give him a trip. He went on to suggest that Tracy should, therefore, make Metro give him a trip abroad. And though Spence wasn’t enthused about the idea, Louise thought it would “do him good” and worked to make it happen. Dr. Toland approved a leisurely cruise aboard the Panama Pacific liner Virginia with Dr. Dennis along to keep an eye on the patient. Louise, juggling her own set of responsibilities, would meet the ship in New York on April 11 and, after a five-day layover, sail with Spence for Genoa, the first planned stop on a three-week European holiday.
Never having learned to relax, Tracy dreaded a six-week absence from the studio. (“He’s the restless type,” Clark Gable said of him. “Maybe it’s the Irish in him. The only time he’s contented to be where he is is when he’s working.”) He fretted about the huge London crowds that reputedly met stars visiting from the States. (Louise asked him what he’d do if he were Robert Taylor “and really had something to worry about.”) He also heard he would be expected to wear white tie and tails at formal functions. (“They go in for that a lot over there, don’t they?”) Once he was resigned to the trip, he visited Bill Powell in the hospital, where the forty-five-year-old actor was himself recovering from surgery.
Earlier in the month, Powell had discovered bleeding and was diagnosed with rectal cancer—the exact same disease that had taken the life of John Tracy at the age of fifty-four. Surgeons recommended complete removal of the rectum, but that meant Powell would have to evacuate into a bag for the rest of his life, something he said he just couldn’t abide. Instead, he chose the option of a “temporary” colostomy and a program of radiation. With the lower colon bypassed, the cancer was removed, but it would be six months before Powell would know if it was gone for good. He was, Tracy noted, “pretty blue and sick” that particular afternoon.
Tracy had a morbid fear of disease—cancer in particular—and the talk with Powell obviously stuck with him. The trip through the canal began pleasantly enough, but then he developed a mysterious itch (“… but good!” he wrote in his book). It worsened, and he spent his thirty-eighth birthday in agony, convinced that he, too, had rectal cancer. He could remember how his father had wasted away under the disease, the terrible sight of such a powerful and energetic man in death: “I looked at what was left—just practically nothing. I couldn’t find that big, proud, Irish son-of-a-gun in the remains. And right then and there I made plans. Anything like that ever happened to me, I’d check out … I’m scared. It’s a thing there’s no prevention for. There’s nothing you can do. We’re helpless. Sitting ducks. If it hits, it hits. And when that’s the way your father goes—or your mother—it’s only natural to live with the specter of it. Or try.”
Denny had a look at him and told him no, he didn’t think so, but that he’d arrange for treatments when they reached port. The passengers were respectful, kept their distance. “Of course, I was sick … I still walked with a cane … but they didn’t speak to me or ask for autographs. When we arrived in New York, though, boy!” At the Twenty-first Street pier Tracy was surrounded by longshoremen who wanted autographs and mobbed by a star-struck crowd of women, one of whom wanted to kiss him and was seen pleading with a cop for permission to do so. When they arrived at the Sherry-Netherland, Denny located an oncologist and Tracy had his first x-ray treatment—the same sort of radiation therapy his father endured and that Bill Powell undoubtedly had in his future. No relief. “Rectal trouble terrible,” he wrote on the twelfth. “Itch awful,” he added the next day.
They didn’t see any shows—he couldn’t sit long enough to enjoy one. Test Pilot opened at the Capitol Theatre, and the end of Lent contributed to a fabulous gate of nearly $60,000 in the first week alone. Critics generally thought the picture well done, albeit overlong, and most commented on the brevity of Tracy’s part. At the hotel he sat for a couple of interviews, calmly sipping from a glass of ginger ale, giving no indication of the turmoil within.
The Tracys went their separate ways in New York, Spence roaming the city like a wounded tiger, his posture and gait warning strangers away. Selena Royle “saw a figure coming down the street,
all hunched over and with a hat over to one side in that way of his, and I knew it had to be Spence … so I went up to him and threw my arms around him and said, ‘Well, you always said you wanted to be as good as Lionel Barrymore, and now you are … and better.’ ”
The daily treatments continued, and all he wished by now was to be home again. On Saturday, April 16, the UP reported a “mild relapse” that caused him to cancel reservations on the Italian liner Rex. “Tracy will sail Wednesday with his wife for a three weeks’ vacation,” the dispatch continued, but he no longer cared about making the trip. “More treatment,” he glumly noted that day. “And more” the following, Easter Sunday. If he went to Mass at St. Patrick’s, as he always tried to do, he made no mention of it. Prayer, desperate and all-consuming, may finally have had an effect, though, for on Tuesday, April 19, the itch was suddenly gone, and there was, after three weeks of constant torture, genuine and blessed relief.
He found himself at the Lambs that night, but the atmosphere was depressing, most of his old pals having decamped for Hollywood. He dined with actor Wallace Ford—who was playing Of Mice and Men at the Music Box—and the two engaged in a “friendly” dispute over a check for $5.60. Sometime that night, with all the dread of the last month having drained from him completely, he took a drink after seven months and two weeks of sobriety.
Actor David Wayne, new to Broadway, happened onto the scene in the club’s fabled taproom: “The huge supply of liquor that was stacked behind the bar he swept off and hurled to the floor and about the room. It looked as if a hurricane had struck. I know, because I walked into the place a few hours after the destruction began. It was awesome! Some two days later he was still on his feet amidst the ruins of the club, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The by-laws at that time forbade the expulsion of any member as long as he remained on his feet.”
According to Wayne, the studio had an ambulance standing by so that when Tracy “finally collapsed” he could be lifted aboard and driven to a waiting plane. Six long days passed before the siege came to an end. Attempts to contact Louise were unsuccessful; first she was “in” and then, when advised as to what the club was calling about, she was “out.” As someone party to the event observed: “What she should not see, she would not see.”
Billy “Square Deal” Grady, the former Broadway agent who described himself as the studio’s “eyes and ears” in New York, secured two plane tickets west, but after nearly a week of steady drinking, Tracy was in no shape to be seated alongside civilians. Grady quietly turned in the tickets, and M-G-M chartered a private plane out of Newark at a cost of $3,000. In Los Angeles, Tracy managed to slip away and went missing for six days. At no time did he attempt to contact Louise, nor Carroll, and there were no sightings at any of his usual haunts. “No one was able to find him,” said Dore Schary, “until it occurred to somebody to look in the polo stables he had. And they found him there asleep—and quite under the weather.”
He was hospitalized, and the consulting physician on the case told him and Louise that if he continued to drink as he had that season, in five years he would be dead.
“Unfortunately, Spencer Tracy is still very much under the weather,” John Considine delicately advised Father Flanagan in a letter on April 27, when Tracy was in fact missing and nowhere to be found. “He was all ready to sail for Europe but at the last minute decided that it would be better for him to come back to his home and try and recuperate from the effects of the serious surgical operation he underwent a month or so ago. I shall let you hear from me again as soon as I get some definite information about his condition.”
On May 3, with Tracy in the hospital, Considine sent the Reverend Flanagan a copy of Dore Schary’s latest version of the screenplay, which combined early material from Eleanore Griffin with Schary’s own progressive drafts, designed to make Flanagan’s character less a straight man and more the idealistic young priest who willed his boys’ home into being. Where reality intervened, Schary had a melodramatic equivalent to make the same point: the gradual dawning on “Father Eddie” that serving the needs of homeless boys would prevent them from growing into homeless men became a tense monologue from a condemned prisoner on the night of his execution. The mysterious source of the original seed money for the home—presumed by many to be Omaha attorney Henry Monsky—became a benevolent pawnbroker, standing shoulder to shoulder with the priest throughout the film.
Flanagan responded by inviting Considine, screenwriter John Meehan, director Norman Taurog—Jack Ruben having fallen ill—and Tracy to Omaha for a conference over the script, but Tracy, eager to make the fiasco of the New York trip up to Louise, elected instead to take her on a quick cruise to Hawaii, vowing to return in time for the start of Boys Town on June 2. Their two weeks in Honolulu came off without incident; on their way home he was able to note in his book: “One month sober—Wonderful!!!” With the script unfinished, the picture didn’t actually start until the sixth, new pages coming daily from Meehan and Jack Mintz, a writer and gag man brought onto the picture by Taurog.
Tracy had previously appeared in two pictures with Mickey Rooney, but there was no interaction between the two of them on Riffraff and very little on Captains Courageous. Since finishing the latter, Rooney had appeared in nine features, two in the newly inaugurated Andy Hardy series with Lewis Stone and Fay Holden. On Boys Town, the seventeen-year-old Rooney would share over-the-title billing with Tracy, a remarkable rise in prominence since joining M-G-M (at $150 a week) in August 1934. “Mickey Rooney,” said Joe Mankiewicz, “was a pretty cocky little fellow … When Tracy and Rooney met on the set of Boys Town, Rooney started playing games … While Spencer was talking, Rooney would sort of play with his handkerchief in his pocket, or adjust his tie, or the stale sort of scene-stealing bits, and Tracy turned to him the very first day and said, ‘I understand you claim to be the world’s greatest scene stealer. Let me tell you something, you little snot. The moment I catch you trying to louse up a scene I’m in, I’ll send you to Purgatory. You’ll wish you’d never been born, because I can do it.’ And he made Rooney believe that.”
After a week shooting the early scenes between Father Flanagan and the incorrigible Whitey Marsh, Rooney went off to complete Love Finds Andy Hardy and Tracy moved on to the founding of Flanagan’s first home for boys in 1917, solid, largely factual material that paired him with actors Leslie Fenton and Henry Hull. With his weight down to 170, Tracy was able to play two slow chukkers of polo on June 8, his first in nearly seven months. It was like being back at the beginning again, having to nerve himself into taking the field, the adrenaline high all but forgotten, the fear almost insurmountable. “I darn near died,” he said, recalling the occasion. “I can’t enjoy the game anymore. It’s a worry now. I get to thinking, ‘Maybe nothing will happen, but I might take a spill. Then the picture stops. And people get thrown out of work.’ ”
On June 22 unit manager Joe Cooke wired Boys Town from Salt Lake City:
ARRIVE OMAHA THURSDAY MORNING. COMPANY WILL ARRIVE SATURDAY. WOULD RATHER YOU NOT MENTION ARRIVAL SO AS TO KEEP CROWDS AWAY.
Of course the company of fifty-eight was the biggest, by far, ever to hit Nebraska. When they arrived early in the evening of the twenty-fifth, several thousand jammed Omaha’s Union Station to catch glimpses of Tracy and particularly Mickey Rooney, who had become just about the hottest thing in pictures. Henry Hull was along, as were actors Gene Reynolds, Frank Thomas, Bobs Watson (and his mother), Jimmy Butler, Sidney Miller, Donald Haines, and Tommy Noonan. All others—director Taurog, his first and second assistants, the script girl, two sound engineers, first and second cameramen and assistant, second-unit cameraman and assistant, wardrobe man, makeup man, cashier, two prop men, three grips, a stills man, a welfare worker, five electricians, a camera car driver, writers Meehan and Mintz, associate producer O. O. “Bunny” Dull and a secretary, and a publicity trailer unit headed by Frank Whitbeck (with cameraman, assistant cameraman, and grip)—were able to pass un
noticed.
Tracy, accompanied by Carroll and his stand-in, Jerry Schumacher, was welcomed by Father Flanagan and Omaha mayor Dan Butler, who presented both him and Mickey Rooney with floral keys to the city. The formalities over, Spence gamely made his way to a waiting cab, enduring another mob scene at the Fontenelle Hotel. “The lobby was crammed with people who claimed to be relatives of Mickey Rooney,” reported the Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star, “or to have gone to school with Spencer Tracy.”
Taurog spent all day Sunday scouting locations on the Boys Town campus. Monday morning, the first shots were made just after nine, a shrill whistle signaling quiet, gold foil reflectors augmenting a battery of booster lamps in the already sweltering heat. Tracy, sunburned from Hawaii, needed only a little lotion to take the shine off, a little graying at the temples his only makeup. Mintz, in Dubonnet shirt and white jacket, pipe in hand, studied each scene from the sidelines, looking for bits of business to inject, as Taurog, in helmet and brown pants, sat motionless next to the camera. By noon the temperature had hit 105 degrees and only dipped below 100 after nightfall.
Directing his first film under a new M-G-M contract, Taurog proved equal to his reputation as a skilled handler of children. Still, all the young principals in Boys Town were professional actors, and nothing a director could say would match the primal impact of playing opposite a man of Tracy’s gifts, looking into his eyes and establishing a connection.
“He was artless,” said Gene Reynolds, who played the handicapped Tony Ponessa in the picture. “You never caught him acting. He was very facile. He would take in what you gave him, process it, and give it back.” Sidney Miller, the bookish Mo Kahn, thought Tracy the best listener in the world: “When I did a scene in Boys Town, I swear those eyes bore into mine.” Tracy, he recalled, was once asked by the cameraman to cheat his look to Miller’s right ear. “He refused. He wouldn’t look away from my eyes. If they wanted his full face, they were going to have to bring the camera around.”
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