The director, Josef von Sternberg, had been engaged to give Lamarr the same glistening treatment he had given Marlene Dietrich a decade earlier. (Algiers, in fact, looked like a Sternberg picture, due in large part to the work of cinematographer James Wong Howe.) On the first day of filming, Sternberg attempted his first take at 10:20 in the morning, and wasn’t satisfied until 4:30 in the afternoon. Lamarr photographed well, but she had no energy and precious little personality. The story had her chasing Tracy’s character, a selfless doctor, but the material, in Sternberg’s judgment, was “silly.” He tried fixing the script but found he could do nothing with it. “Each detail of this film, on which I worked not more than a week, was predetermined by a dozen others,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Other directors were better fitted to participate in this kind of nonsense, although this may well be beyond the ability of anyone.”
The atmosphere on Sternberg’s set was tense. “He wouldn’t stand for any noise on the set,” said actress Laraine Day, who was playing a minor part in the picture, “and if you wanted to talk to him, you had to write your name on a blackboard and then he would deign to talk to you if he wanted to.” Tracy notched six months on the wagon, loafed, and played tennis—a new passion for which he was taking lessons. They started up again on November 14 with Frank Borzage directing, then again pulled the plug at the end of the same day. A week later, after further rewrites, they started the picture yet a third time with the title I Take This Woman. Soon, it was being referred to around town as I Re-Take This Woman.
Borzage was as friendly and easygoing as Sternberg was aloof. (“There’s no mistaking the easing of tension since Borzage took over the picture,” a visitor observed.) Disgusted with the script by Jim McGuinness, who, unsuited to women’s pictures, had turned in a lifeless assemblage of clichés, Tracy indulged in a brief flirtation with Hedy Lamarr, who, according to Billy Grady, was the subject of a one-night stand. Tracy was living at the Beverly Hills Hotel, prompting rumors of another separation. In addition to his usual habit of moving out for a picture, his wing of the house was under renovation, adding a bathroom and a dressing area. The rumors, he told Harrison Carroll, were “never more untrue.”
Indeed, he was back at home by mid-December, despite the fact that the picture was still very much in production. An exhibitors’ poll released on the twenty-third named him fifth in a list of the biggest moneymaking stars of the year, placing him ahead of such luminaries as Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, and Errol Flynn. Christmas was with family, Aunt Emma Brown visiting from Freeport, Carrie, Carroll and Dorothy, Weeze and the kids.
Spence and Louise at one of the infrequent premieres they attended as a couple. (SUSIE TRACY)
“I Take This Woman, starring Hedy Lamarr and Spencer Tracy, has been shooting for 60 days and nobody has been able to think of an ending for it,” Sheilah Graham reported in her column of December 26. “The great problem is whether or not to bring Hedy and Spencer together at the end. Oh, please let them have each other. I’m so tired of finales where the heroine goes off into a dark fadeout, wistfully followed by the eyes of the hero …” The seemingly interminable picture finished—to no one’s particular satisfaction—on January 19, 1939. A week later, Tracy was advised by Eddie Mannix that it had been “shelved indefinitely.”
“Just imagine,” Tracy said. “Hedy had to chase me all during the picture—and I had to run away! Imagine Hedy having to chase any man and not get him! Not only didn’t it make sense, but it made Hedy unglamourous. Well, anyway, Metro can’t say I didn’t warn them. I told them at the start the picture was no good, and for once I was right.”
After observing three days of Boys Town being filmed in Omaha, Tracy’s uncle Andrew got the idea to have a print of the completed film sent to Williamsville, in upstate New York, where Spencer’s eighty-three-year-old aunt, Sister Mary Perpetua, was living. Having taken her vows in 1875, the nun had never seen a moving picture, and Andrew thought Spencer’s playing a priest would be a terrific introduction to his work as an actor. Frank Whitbeck promised to arrange a showing, and everyone at the convent was invited to attend. Sister remembered Spencer all right—not as an actor but as a truck driver who came through Buffalo during the brief time he had been on the payroll at Sterling Truck. “A bum!” she’d erupt when his name came up. Pressed, she’d tell how she and another nun had been to downtown Buffalo and had seen his name on a marquee. “Humph! He never called me up, never wrote to me, never invited me out!” They couldn’t seem to make her understand that he wasn’t physically present at the theater, so her half-sister, Jenny Feely, went to Williamsville to be with her for the showing.
“She was in a wheelchair,” Jenny’s daughter, Jane, said of the nun, “and they wheeled her in to see the movie of her nephew as Father Flanagan. All the nuns were there and they thought it was great, it was wonderful, and they congratulated her afterwards. ‘Wasn’t that wonderful?’ they’d say. ‘Yes,’ she’d say, ‘Father Flanagan, he was a good man. He had an orphanage, you know.’ Because she had run an orphanage. Mama said she wasn’t really sure that she connected Spencer with Father Flanagan.”
Boys Town drew fresh attention to Tracy’s work as a priest, coming as it did some two years after his turn as Father Tim in San Francisco, as no one had stepped up and attempted another modern priest in the interim.1 The reviews of the New York dailies weren’t quite as laudatory as the ones that had come out of the press preview, Frank Nugent, for one, pointing out the “artificial plot leverage” that came to the rescue once the screenwriters realized they had made Whitey Marsh “too tough a nut to crack” in the natural development of the story. “The highway accident involving Pee Wee, his little chum; the bank robbery and kidnaping; the flood of tears in the last reel, strike a too-familiar discord. It manages, in spite of the embarrassing sentimentality of its closing scenes, to be a consistently interesting and frequently touching motion picture.”
Tracy’s performance was universally praised, and several prominent critics predicted another Oscar win. When Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times omitted his name from his annual list of proposed nominees, the volume of Schallert’s mail swelled in protest. (One letter objecting to the snub was signed by thirty-six students from Santa Monica Junior College.) “The omission is duly recognized,” Schallert assured his readers in a follow-up, “and certainly Spencer Tracy merits a place in the nominations for both his performances in Test Pilot and Boys Town. And from a practical standpoint, Mr. Tracy could win the Academy statuette again this year if the voters in the organization are so minded. In fact, Mr. Tracy’s qualifications as an actor would entitle him to win the award almost every year.”
Boys Town was a big commercial success, taking in over $4 million in worldwide billings. As Schallert discovered, there was broad popular support for Tracy’s Best Actor nomination, and when the announcement came down on the night of February 5, 1939, nobody was surprised other than perhaps Tracy himself. The nominations, made by Class A members of the Screen Actors Guild, put James Cagney up for his work in Angels With Dirty Faces—a terrific performance—as well as Charles Boyer (Algiers), Robert Donat (The Citadel), and Leslie Howard (Pygmalion). M-G-M came away with four productions, including Boys Town, in the Best Picture category. Norman Taurog was nominated for Best Director, John Meehan and Dore Schary for Best Screenplay, Schary and Eleanore Griffin for Best Original Story. In all, Boys Town took five nominations.
Tracy thought himself merely competent in the role of Father Flanagan, and talk of another honor frankly made him uncomfortable. “It isn’t that I think it is disrespectful or sacrilegious to play a priest,” he hedged, “but I think a role of this kind demands more than is in one’s power to give. Long after I’m forgotten, Father Flanagan will go down in history as one of the great humanitarians of the century.” Privately, he feared people would confuse the man with the actor and vote for the priest and his good deeds, not for a performance that was, by his own reckoning, pretty routine. He w
as relieved when Cagney was thought to have a big lead in the early balloting, then less so when Variety reported the “general belief” the winner would be either Cagney or himself.
“Only an actor like Mr. Tracy and an actor like young Mickey Rooney, or someone equally good, could possibly carry a story without any love interest for more than ninety minutes and make you like it,” wrote William Boehnel of the New York World-Telegram. (SUSIE TRACY)
The festivities at the Biltmore didn’t begin until eleven o’clock on the night of February 23, and the awards for acting weren’t announced until well past midnight. Bette Davis’ win for Jezebel had been expected, but Tracy’s win over Cagney and the others was considered an upset. When Tracy, in black tie, stepped up to the trophy-laden center table and began to speak, Louise could see he was embarrassed. “I could tell by the tone of his voice,” she said. “He wasn’t himself at all.” Handed the Oscar by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, he took a long moment to collect his thoughts. “I honestly do not feel that I can accept this award,” he said, his eyes cast downward. “I do not deserve it. I can accept it only as it was meant to be for a great man—Father Flanagan, whose goodness and greatness must have been enough to shine even through me.”
Sensing the sincerity of his words, the crowd responded with “thunderous” applause. “I was all primed,” said Clark Gable, “to suggest that maybe they had counted the ballots for the year before by mistake. But he stopped me cold before I ever started.” Tracy dutifully beamed for the flash photographers, a cigarette in one hand, his statuette in the other. Heading for the door, he came alongside screenwriter Laurence Stallings. “I didn’t see Boys Town,” Stallings told him. “I don’t know whether you deserved the award for that or not, but you certainly deserve it for the performance you just gave.”
Greeting Bette Davis at the Academy Awards dinner. Davis collected the Best Actress statuette for Jezebel. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Tracy responded to Father Flanagan’s wire of congratulations:
THE CREDIT IS DUE YOU AND I AM GLAD WE GOT IT FOR THE SAKE OF BOYS TOWN.
He also wired Bobs Watson, whose trademark crying jags nearly stole the show: HALF OF THE STATUE BELONGS TO YOU. Two days later, on the night of February 27, Father Flanagan’s assistant brought a box to him. Inside was Tracy’s Boys Town Oscar, an added plate bearing the inscription:
TO FATHER FLANAGAN
WHOSE GREAT HUMAN QUALITIES, KINDLY SIMPLICITY AND INSPIRING COURAGE WERE STRONG ENOUGH TO SHINE THROUGH MY HUMBLE EFFORTS.
SPENCER TRACY
· · ·
In the four years since Spencer Tracy and Fox Film Corporation parted company, both had gone through extraordinary changes. Where Tracy was scarcely a blip on the box office barometer in 1935, a critics’ darling and little more, he was now fifth-ranked among all American film stars and had two Academy Awards to his credit. Similarly, where Fox had been limping along under the fitful leadership of Winfield Sheehan, Darryl F. Zanuck was now in charge of production, having taken over in the wake of a deal that merged 20th Century Pictures with Fox Film to create 20th Century-Fox. Under him, Fox became a writers’ studio—the polar opposite of M-G-M, where the writers worked in service of the stars. Screenplays at Fox were developed with little regard for who on the lot could play them, and when no one on the payroll proved suitable, Zanuck had no qualms about going outside and borrowing the people he needed.
When M-G-M, in effect, took over Tracy’s contract—moneywise it was a lateral move—Fox reserved the right to make one additional picture within a year’s time at a rate of $3,000 a week. It was almost a corporate face-saving device, something thrown in as an afterthought, and when Zanuck was apprised of their “gentlemen’s agreement” in March 1936, he expressed no interest whatsoever in taking advantage of it. Ironically, he was then in the early stages of developing a picture about Welsh journalist Henry Morton Stanley’s 1871 expedition in search of the Scottish missionary David Livingstone, the project that would ultimately bring Tracy back to the studio.
According to screenwriter Philip Dunne, Zanuck’s early attempts at a scenario were completely lacking in suspense and, from a historical perspective, “pure eyewash.” Failing to break the back of the story didn’t diminish Zanuck’s faith in the idea, however. In June 1937 he sent a thirteen-member crew, headed by second-unit specialist Otto Brower, to Africa to shoot authentic backgrounds and wildlife. Having previously been on safari himself, Zanuck gave Brower a list of locations—Lake Nakura for flamingo shots, Arusha for the Zanzibar sequence, Serengeti for various animals—and Mrs. Martin (Osa) Johnson as technical adviser. Included in the Brower company were three doubles, one calculated to match Tyrone Power, whom Zanuck envisioned for the lead. Over a period of four months Brower and his crew made nine camp moves across Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, exposing nearly a hundred thousand feet of film.
Prior to Brower’s departure, Zanuck had made Stanley and Livingstone part of the studio’s 1937–38 program, lining it up alongside Alexander’s Ragtime Band and In Old Chicago as his top pictures of the year. While Brower was away, Sam Hellman, Ernest Pascal, and Edwin Harvey Blum attempted screenplays. Zanuck thought Hellman’s dialogue weak: “Not dramatized enough—punch into personal story—too narrative.” By the end of the year, the project had been tabled. When Dunne and his writing partner, Julien Josephson, were assigned in the spring of 1938, they read all that had come before and tried to get out of it. Zanuck, in the meantime, had told the story to director Henry King, and it was King who suggested a complete reversal of Stanley’s motivation.
“Forget the silly business of the missionary befriending the boy from the work house,” Dunne wrote in his memoir. “The new Stanley has never even heard of Livingstone. He’s a hard-boiled city news reporter whose only ambition is to bust the Tweed ring in New York, but he’s browbeaten by his equally hard-boiled publisher, Bennett, into undertaking the search for Livingstone as a great publicity stunt for the newspaper … Kicking and screaming, as it were, Stanley—no longer handsome Tyrone Power but now rough Spencer Tracy—goes unwillingly to Africa.”
Tracy, who knew Zanuck from his polo days and Looking for Trouble, took time to meet with him while awaiting the start of A New York Cinderella. Expecting to do Northwest Passage in the spring, Tracy wasn’t enthused about a second consecutive adventure subject nor the prospect of spending half a year on location. A loose loan-out agreement existed between M-G-M and Fox as a result of the latter having loaned Tyrone Power to Metro for Marie Antoinette. In return, Zanuck expected Myrna Loy for The Rains Came and Tracy for Stanley and Livingstone.2 King had come aboard as director, and by November 26, 1938, Tracy was officially set for the film.
The script was finalized on January 18, 1939, and the picture, budgeted at $1,338,000, began shooting on February 2 at the Fox Hills studio Tracy had once considered home. Now merely a guest, he found himself assigned skater Sonja Henie’s dressing room, an insistent blue-and-white affair with lace trimmings and gewgaws throughout. He told columnist Harrison Carroll he was afraid to turn around for fear of knocking something over.
They were three weeks into production when the academy dinner took place, and both Tracy and Walter Brennan came away with awards. (Brennan was Best Supporting Actor for his work in Kentucky, his second win in three years.) The following morning, both men were applauded by several hundred extras when they stepped onto the set. Although the shoot went smoothly enough, Tracy fretted over the line “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” and argued against its inclusion in the script. A perennial punch line—the quote may even have been apocryphal—he could think of it only in the context of a joke and was convinced that audiences would laugh.
“He came to me one day,” recalled King,
and said, “You don’t mean to tell me that you’re going to do that old chestnut about Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” And I said, “We have to do it. We couldn’t do the picture without it.” He said, “I can’t say it, I can’t say it.” Well, this wo
rried him to death, but he had neglected to think [about it]…I said, “Spence, did you ever stop to think that this man has had that fever, that swamp fever, just a few days before this? You’ve carried him through all this, and now when he comes into Dr. Livingstone’s place he can hardly walk. And he sees this man. He says, ‘Doctor … Livingstone …’ ” Spence says, “I could kill you, I could murder you. You played the scene for me and I didn’t have sense enough to think about it.”
When the time came, Tracy got the line out, but it took several takes, he said, because he couldn’t say it without laughing.3 He bet Zanuck’s associate producer, Kenneth Macgowan, the preview audience would laugh as well, and—to take the curse off—told the old joke about the drunk who wanders into a bar to whoever visited the set. Having weathered the making of Marie Gallante, King was understandably wary of Tracy. “In vino veritas,” he would later say. “Get someone drunk and you find out what they really are like. They’re either sweet and lovable or ugly and hateful. Spencer was an ugly drunk.” Tracy, however, was good-natured and cooperative on Stanley and Livingstone, and when King had to stop a scene between Tracy and Cedric Hardwicke because of airplane noise outside, Tracy ran his tongue up the side of his mouth and casually remarked, “Over at M-G-M we have soundproof stages.”
He later said:
I’m slowly improving. I don’t go through the agony I did when I was making four or five pictures a year. Boy, it’s awfully hard to be good four times a year. Nowadays, I’m making three. And I take time out to try to get laughs on the set. If an airplane flies overhead and action has to stop till the sound dies away, I don’t go higher than a kite. I take things more calmly now. But—I haven’t reached the ultimate in calmness yet. The sitting, waiting, still gets me. It’s the only thing that gives me a hankering for the stage. I’d like to go back—not to stay, but once every two or three years—just to get a performance out of my system in one evening.
James Curtis Page 48