James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Most prominent among the kids was seven-year-old Bobs Watson, who played the diminutive Pee Wee. “In one of the first scenes,” he remembered,

  I come in and ask for candy, and they establish that I get it. In the next scene when I come in for candy, he gives me some and asks, “Have you brushed your teeth?” I hadn’t brushed my teeth and I lie about it and say, “I lost my toothbrush.” “Lost it? Well, we’re going to have to do something about this” and he makes a big deal about it, which plays on my guilt. So I start to put the candy back. Just before we shoot the scene, Norman Taurog, the director, said, “Bobby, now when you’re putting the candy back, don’t look at it. Reach in your pocket, take it out, and look Uncle Spencer right in the eyes.” And I’ll never forget those eyes.

  Watson’s great talent was his ability to cry like no other child in pictures, and Taurog never had to resort to the usual tricks—stories of dead dogs, dying grandparents, and the like. “I can’t explain it,” he once said, “but when tears were needed, I cried, and they were honest and real. In Boys Town, when Mickey Rooney left, it really broke my heart. I used to see Rooney and Spencer Tracy in a very idealized way.” Tracy, he remembered, was fatherly and warm. “Often, after a scene, he’d reach over and hug me and take me on his lap. I felt like a little puppy. I would follow along and stand close, hoping he’d call me over, and often he would. He’d say, ‘How’re you doing?’ and put his arm around me.”

  Tracy and Rooney never really warmed to one another, despite press feeds to the contrary. “During lunch,” said one Boys Town alumnus, “Tracy comes in and then they serve him his food, and Mickey used to agitate him. They had this long table, so Mickey comes in [and sits] across from him and [takes] off his shoes and socks and put[s] them right up in front of the plate. Oh, Tracy, he was burning a hole through it.” Frank Whitbeck once confided to a friend that his principal role on the Boys Town location, other than to shoot a one-reel featurette called City of Little Men, was to keep “Tracy off the booze and Mickey Rooney off the girls.” At a dinner one night, Whitbeck froze when he saw a waiter pouring wine into Tracy’s glass, but Tracy, just a few weeks sober, never touched it.

  The filming attracted huge crowds of spectators—as many as five thousand a day—and Father Flanagan had to spend most of the money he was paid by M-G-M on repairs to the property. Tracy, who disliked location work under the best of circumstances, ducked under an umbrella whenever he wasn’t needed, Schumacher bringing him water and the makeup man running cubes of ice across his forehead. “The crew had a great time,” said Gene Reynolds. “The women of Omaha just rolled for them. Any kind of connection with Hollywood, I guess. Even the prop boys were getting laid.”

  The company worked eleven straight days in Omaha, finishing on the afternoon of July 7, 1938. Tracy slipped out of town on a Union Pacific Streamliner the next morning at two, riding up front with the engineer and having himself a grand time. Back at Culver City, the cast and crew of Boys Town settled in for another four weeks of interiors.

  Between shots, Tracy went about the business of breaking in a new secretary, having lost Yvonne Beaudry to an auto accident. With a sprained back and a pronounced limp, Yvonne went home to New England after finding him a replacement, a red-headed Irish girl in her mid-twenties named Peggy Gough. Unlike Beaudry, Peggy had no ambitions to be a journalist or a world traveler and was an experienced secretary. She wasn’t terribly busy, especially when her boss was out of town, so she was assigned to help Johnny by typing the stencils for a weekly newspaper he had started publishing.

  At the age of eleven, Johnny took up pencil and paper and declared he was going to draw a comic strip, slipping his earliest efforts under his mother’s door. “Certainly the ‘drawings’ were the worst I ever had seen,” she said. “We were in hysterics—behind his back. It was his first effort of any kind to do anything, to make something, entirely by himself, and no first efforts, I am sure, ever have met with greater acclaim. And we had to admit that every few days brought marked improvement.”

  One day he asked how Walt Disney got Mickey Mouse into the paper, and his mother had to explain, somewhat carefully, how Walt Disney had been an adult when he broke into print, and that Johnny might well be able to do so once he had grown into adulthood himself. That, however, wasn’t the sort of answer he wanted to hear, and he decided he would start his own newspaper to hasten the process. What he wanted, it turned out, was extra copies of his drawings to send his grandmother and others, and Louise told him that when he got his paper together they would find a way of getting it printed. It took a year and a half and a lot of help from his private tutor to get out the first issue, a weekly he called The News. Soon its production took the place of what had come to pass for an education.

  “The schooling was insufficient,” Johnny later wrote. “It seems to me I spent too much time on the newspaper and fooling around … I didn’t have the vocabulary to study and think. A dictionary was quite handy all the time, but I didn’t use it much. [My tutor] didn’t understand the needs of a deaf child. Of course, obviously too, I was lazy and not curious intellectually. I was thinking of the newspaper, every issue of which I was very anxious to send out, and of ‘Jack Smith,’ a comic strip which I had just created to be drawn for the paper.”

  They bought him a secondhand duplicating machine and some stencils. Most of the “news” in the News concerned the Tracys—new movies, polo triumphs, comings and goings. The cover of the first issue carried a drawing of Mickey Mouse, courtesy of Walt Disney. It said: “Good luck to Johnny Tracy!”

  Boys Town finished on August 6, 1938, and had its first sneak in Inglewood on the fourteenth. Tracy was unimpressed. “Carroll,” he said to his brother as they left the theater, “that’s the worst picture I ever saw.” There were, however, laughs, applause, and tears, as Dore Schary remembered it, and at the conclusion the audience cheered.

  There had been some discussion of having the world premiere in Washington—Flanagan had at one time been sold on the idea—but then came rumblings from within Omaha, the mother city, and the insult of being bypassed. “Washington—no!” the Most Reverend James H. Ryan, bishop of Omaha, thundered. “It would not do Boys Town a particle of good to have the premiere there. If it has to be away from Omaha, make it at least New York.” Father Flanagan lobbied Frank Whitbeck: “In reality Omaha gave us our first start and gave us our first building—and paid for it—and it is now our chance to pay back our debt to Omaha by having the premiere here.” The matter was pretty much in the hands of the distribution people, but Frank Whitbeck had a word with Al Lichtman, a Loew’s vice president, who in turn took the matter up with H. J. Shumow, manager of the Omaha exchange.

  Tracy at his Encino ranch with daughter Susie and son John, circa 1938. (HERALD EXAMINER COLLECTION, LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY)

  Father Flanagan and Bishop Ryan were invited to California, where they were feted at a studio luncheon. L. B. Mayer posed for pictures between the two men, Tracy with his arm around Flanagan’s shoulder and Rooney, on his best behavior, talking animatedly with the bishop. Next came the season opener of Good News, with Tracy and Rooney performing punchy little scenes from the movie, followed by Mayer’s introduction to the nationwide listening audience of the real Father Flanagan.

  After the broadcast, the studio contingent motored crosstown to Westwood for the official press preview, an event that went better than anyone could have hoped. “There was applause several times as the picture progressed,” Gus McCarthy of the Motion Picture Herald wrote. “Generally, however, the spectators watched and listened silently, but they almost tore up the seats at the finish.”

  As Daily Variety reported, “Pure sentiment, the decent, courageous, unselfish impulses of men and boys, time after time was applauded as no picture in years has been approved. This spontaneous outburst is the keynote to the showmanship the offering represents, and to the kind of showmanship which may sell Boys Town for one of the season’s smash money makers.” Tra
cy, said the Hollywood Reporter, “gives a brilliant, restrained performance that should put him in direct line for a second Academy Award. Even when he is not seen on the screen, his guiding presence is felt every moment.” No one seemed to differentiate between the honest, understated footage of Father Flanagan’s early struggles and the overheated melodrama that highjacked the picture once Mickey Rooney made his appearance. Boys Town packed a sentimental wallop, and every review that came out of the showing was an unqualified rave.

  The launching of Boys Town on the M-G-M lot. Left to right: Mickey Rooney, Bishop James H. Ryan, Louis B. Mayer, the Reverend Edward J. Flanagan, and Tracy. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  On Sunday, September 4, Tracy, Rooney, Flanagan, Ryan, and actress Maureen O’Sullivan left for Nebraska and the world premiere of the picture. When their train arrived in Omaha on the sixth, it was met by an estimated twenty thousand people, and the crowd swelled to more than thirty thousand for the premiere the next evening. One hundred and ten policemen and another forty firemen struggled to maintain control as the crush filled Douglas Street along two city blocks and spilled over onto side streets, threatening to snap the steel wire barriers strung for the event. Fans lined the rooftops and leaned out of office windows. Tracy, taking in the spectacle, said, “This thing makes a Hollywood premiere look like a dying hog.”

  Inside the Omaha Theatre, all 2,500 seats were filled as a procession of local dignitaries welcomed the filmmakers. O’Sullivan made a brief appearance, and the Boys Town a cappella choir sang. Father Flanagan spoke of the good he hoped the movie would accomplish, and the showing began with the roar of the M-G-M lion. As in Westwood, applause punctuated much of the film, particularly when Omaha landmarks were recognized or mentioned. At the fadeout, Father Flanagan was asked to escort Tracy and Mickey Rooney to the stage, where Tracy stood with his arm around Rooney as he had in the picture. After saying, “Words fail me for the first time,” Rooney predicted another Oscar for his costar. Tracy’s first words in the hushed auditorium were inaudible, as if stifled by emotion. Then he was heard to say: “You thanked us for coming here. We should get on our knees to you.” He proceeded to return Rooney’s compliment, telling the crowd that Rooney was destined to become “one of the great actors of his day.”

  Still neither an admirer of the script nor of his own performance, Tracy chose his next words carefully. “I do not like to stand here stripped clean of Father Flanagan,” he said, adding that if the picture was great, it was because “the great goodness and sweetness and beauty of the soul of this man shines even through me to you.”

  During his days at Fox, when Tracy misbehaved it generally hit the papers. His tangles with the police made the wire services, and his relationship with Loretta Young was about as public as one could get. His hospitalization in 1934 was explained as a polo accident, but other episodes were reported with a fair degree of accuracy. Had he torn up the Lambs Club while working at Fox, word likely would have gotten out; the Lambs membership was too far-ranging and included press agents and columnists. Fox management lacked the wherewithal—and likely the willingness—to stifle unflattering ink. In the Fox model, theaters and real estate were the assets, not the contract players Winnie Sheehan hired by the dozens. And, like most other studios, Fox didn’t build stars because Fox—Sheehan and Wurtzel in particular—didn’t know how. With no investment to protect, a second-tier player like Spencer Tracy could make a drunken scene in Yuma, and the police and the press were free to say whatever they wanted. That all stopped when Tracy joined M-G-M.

  The joint philosophy of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg was that the stars on the payroll were hard-dollar assets in the same sense that equipment and real estate were assets—more so in the case of Metro because the Loew’s theater circuit was considerably smaller than those of Fox and Paramount. Mayer was fond of likening talent to precious stones: “If you have a diamond or a ruby, you take care of it, you put it in a safe, you clean it and polish it.” It was the only business, he once said, where the assets walked out the gate every night. After Thalberg’s untimely death, the stars weren’t nurtured quite as creatively as before, but the men Mayer and Thalberg had put into place shared their values and attitudes, and principal among them was Howard Strickling.

  The quintessential company man, Strickling had been a publicist for the old Metro organization before the merger that created Metro-Goldwyn. He left because he expected to get fired anyway, and Mayer found him working in Paris for Rex Ingram. Persuaded to join the newly assembled company, Strickling set about building the largest and most efficient publicity machine the industry would ever know. “Early on,” he said, “I learned that people need help, and the secret of my job was learning how to help them. Help them and they help you. That’s what M-G-M was all about, and it was particularly true for the actors—most of them were insecure and overly sensitive and self-centered, so you had to convince them you had their best interests at heart.”

  Strickling controlled access to the world’s greatest assemblage of contract talent, and when he and his staff “helped” a particular journalist or outlet, their “help” was expected in return. When something potentially damaging occurred, Strickling started working the phones. In cases where an incident occurred out of town, a representative was often dispatched. Strickling was close to Billy Wilkerson and had staff allocated to all principal branches of the media—newspapers, fan magazines, radio, the trades. Many of his senior people also had responsibility for three or four stars apiece, and some of them lived in constant terror of what one of their charges might say to the press. Mickey Rooney was irrepressible, a raging pint-sized package of hormones on a breakneck ride to Number One. Tracy needed more protection than supervision; he was plainspoken when talking to journalists, brutally frank with pals like Mook. “Ask Tracy an honest question,” said a columnist for the Washington Star, “and you are likely to get the most honest answer you ever heard.”

  At first he was under watch, his reputation at Fox having preceded him. “We actors are like the children of very wealthy parents who keep a very close watch on us, have guards and spies set over us,” he observed not long after coming to Metro. “The studio is the mama and papa of the actor. The whole world, the press, the public are the guards and spies. We can’t really be ourselves much of the time.” Eddie Mannix and Billy Grady were his confidants, more or less responsible for keeping an eye on him. After New York and the Lambs Club, he was placed on a shorter leash, someone from the studio being omnipresent whenever he found himself out among the public. “It was a world unto itself,” Maureen O’Sullivan said, “and I would think that if M-G-M had a fault, they over-protected us. If there was bad publicity or something coming up, you took it up with Howard Strickling. Life was taken care of, and this spoiled us.”

  Strickling had people who handled the distribution of photographs, others who coordinated special events—premieres, banquets, important visitors. Unit men responsible for individual pictures worked for Strickling, as did the people who arranged transportation and answered fan mail. “In Howard’s book,” said Ann Straus, one of his longtime employees, “M-G-M girls didn’t drink, they didn’t smoke, they didn’t even have babies. But he was a hard taskmaster. He wanted perfection, and he got it.” There were limits to Strickling’s reach, and his stuttering betrayed the constant pressure he was under—“It made it difficult to take dictation from him,” said Eddie Mannix’s secretary, June Caldwell—but he was on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and there was no aspect to the business of being a movie star that escaped his oversight.

  It was not in Howard Strickling’s interest to make Tracy available to the press in October 1938. Just before Boys Town had its world premiere, Tracy learned he had been assigned a picture titled A New York Cinderella and he wasn’t at all happy about it. The story and script were designed to showcase an actress who had just six pictures to her credit, the most notorious of which was a Czechoslovakian feature in which she a
ppeared nude and simulated orgasm. It was the sort of thing he thought he was finally past, and the problem ate at him as he trained eastward in the company of Bishop Ryan and Father Flanagan.

  Hedy Lamarr was L. B. Mayer’s project, a dark, radiant beauty the old man first encountered in London. She was Hedwig Kiesler at the time, on the run from a bad marriage and a featured player in a handful of European movies. Like Luise Rainer, Kiesler had been with Max Reinhardt, who reportedly called her “the most beautiful woman in Europe.” Unlike Rainer, Kiesler was genuinely Viennese at a time when such a distinction was becoming increasingly important. Brought to this country, she was renamed “Lamarr” after the 1920s beauty queen Barbara La Marr, with Mayer taking personal charge of her career. He loaned her to producer Walter Wanger for her American debut in a stylish independent called Algiers. Tracy had seen the film, liked Charles Boyer’s work and thought the girl photogenic but had no interest in propping her up, particularly in a picture as vapid as New York Cinderella promised to be.

  “I have often wondered,” Flanagan wrote Tracy on November 1, “how you came out with the making of that picture concerning which you sent the telegram to Mr. Mannix from the train. I hope that you did not have to make that picture, but there is so little that we hear at Boys Town that I am perfectly in the dark as to what picture you are making now.” By the time Tracy received the letter, he had already started the movie—a “stinker,” he noted in his datebook—and had seen it shut down after only a few days’ work.