James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Tracy, who had been attached to the film for nearly two years, thought Kenneth Roberts’ best-selling novel a great read but was increasingly dubious about filming the entire story, which could rival the anticipated running time of Gone With the Wind. Book I of Roberts’ novel covered Major Robert Rogers’ daring incursion deep into enemy territory during the French and Indian War, culminating in his raid on the Abenaki Indian village of St. Francis, where the village and fully a quarter of its population were destroyed. Book II—the second half—followed Rogers’ later years, his life as a profligate, his descent into alcoholism and financial ruin. It was the same trajectory Tracy observed in the play Oscar Wilde, and he feared that Rogers’ fate would obscure his performance, as Wilde’s downfall, in his judgment, had obscured Morley’s. “I’ll play him up to the point where he has achieved his objective,” Tracy declared, “but I’ll be darned if I’ll play him when he becomes a drunkard. Audiences won’t want to see him in that stage of his life.”

  Roberts’ 709-page book was published in June 1937 and was already in its eighth printing when M-G-M bought the picture rights in September of that year, planning to make Northwest Passage its first feature in the radiant new Technicolor process. Woody Van Dyke was the first director assigned to the film, and it was Van Dyke who spent two weeks scouting locations in British Columbia. Tracy was the studio’s “immediate choice” to play Major Rogers; the sunburn he got in Hawaii in May 1938 had been requested specifically for the purpose of making Technicolor costume tests. Van Dyke fell away from the project over delays and a scheduling conflict, and King Vidor, whose direction of The Citadel the previous year had brought him an Academy Award nomination, was selected to replace him. Vidor brought Laurence Stallings, one of his favorite writers, to the project, and the two men quickly figured out a way to incorporate both halves of Roberts’ novel into a single coherent screenplay. “Hunt Stromberg, the producer, didn’t go for it,” Vidor remembered, “so he had a writer named Talbot Jennings come in and begin work.”

  Vidor memoed Eddie Mannix: “As yet there is no complete story line upon which Mr. Stromberg and I have agreed … The trek to St. Francis and the return within the next few days will be in good shape … But I want to go on record here that I am definitely against starting the production without a full script, so that we know where we are going.” Jennings began revising Stallings’ screenplay while Vidor made preparations to leave for McCall under protest. “At this time,” he said, “I had to bring the production up to the location because the water level of the lake where we were shooting was going down. We had to start filming right away. When I was leaving, Stromberg told me, ‘By the time you finish the first part of the picture, I’ll have the second part sent up.’ ”

  The company had taken over a huge summer resort camp on the shore of the lake, and some four hundred actors and technicians—including Tracy, Robert Young, Walter Brennan, Nat Pendleton, and Isabel Jewell—were housed there. A tent city for the 450 Indians used in the film stood three miles north of the main camp. A special train from Los Angeles brought twelve carloads of props and three additional carloads of uniforms and costumes. There were seventy-five rough-looking characters—mostly stunt personnel—imported from Hollywood to play the principal men under Rogers’ command. Another 175 were recruited from among the local lumberjacks and miners. French frontiersmen and oarsmen were also hired locally, and many did double duty as the day’s work required. The Idaho National Guard supplied the 225 British soldiers needed to man Fort Ticonderoga; in all, it was said the company employed over fifteen thousand extras and bit players.

  Tiny McCall, population several hundred, was overwhelmed by the hordes seeking employment on the film. “There were quite a few unsavory characters joining the gold rush,” Vidor’s assistant director, Harrold Weinberger, recalled, “including a half dozen or so whores up from Boise and other points south or north, and a troupe of professional gamblers … The hookers were occupying half the rooms in the small and only hotel in town. I saw them all many times about town. They weren’t bad at all to look at. They were prospering. I was told their rates ran from $10 to $25 a trip. Pretty good for the 1939 economy … The hotel management must have gotten some kind of cut considering all the towels and linens that were required.”

  Tracy managed to endear himself to actor Robert Young during their first morning on location. “We were in this renovated camp which had been unused for about 20 years,” Young said, “so you can imagine what kind of shape it was in … So they stuck up a service tent and the caterer brought the tables and chairs and the stove and everything else in there. Well, we went to breakfast, or whatever the hell the first meal was that we had there, and Spence stood up, threw the plate clear across the tent.” They had been served powdered eggs. “Oh, it was awful. He went right to the unit manager [and] said, ‘When you correct the situation, I’ll be back. I’ll be on the set. Otherwise, don’t bother me. Don’t even talk to me.’ Well, you don’t think the telephone wires didn’t get hot the next day. I don’t know how the hell they produced it that quickly, but the next day there was a new unit manager. It was the most incredible transformation you ever saw. Overnight, there was a complete transformation; we had the most divine food … I watched him and I thought to myself, man that’s great. That’s power.”

  Filming began with Rogers’ address to his men, crudely mapping their route on a surface of rock. One of the men graphically describes the atrocities of the Abenaki warriors against their fellow Rangers, then Rogers goes on to suggest fates of a similar sort for the settlers on the border farms—the survivors of whom now comprise much of his force. (“If it was over quick, they were lucky.”) Grimly determined, they say nothing, all eyes fixed on their leader. “Now, if there’s any man here who doesn’t want to follow me against these Indians, he can step out now and nothing will be said at home.” And, of course, no one does.

  Tracy held Rogers taut during the scene, letting the words and the images grip the audience with the harshness of their clarity. Maintaining Rogers’ intensity during the balance of the film while avoiding a one-note performance would be a cruelly taxing job. The first two weeks on location involved some of the heaviest physical labor of the entire shoot, particularly an arduous sequence in which the Rangers drag their whaleboats over a steep hill to elude the French. “I said, ‘Well, just include me out,’ ” Walter Brennan, who was making his third picture alongside Tracy, remembered. “They said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Rogers’ Rangers only lugged those boats over the hill once. We lugged them over ten times and they were real boats.’ Boy, that was a strenuous job …”

  Tracy was no happier than Brennan, and there were exchanges between King Vidor and Hunt Stromberg about the possibility of bringing the entire company home. “Young, Brennan and I wore out our Rogers’ uniforms in two days,” Tracy said. “Pine branches, boulders, underbrush, swamp, mud, river rocks and things …” Robert Young, playing the fictional Langdon Towne, could remember having to strip outside his cabin each night—as did all cast members—and throw his clothes onto a sheet to more clearly see the ticks crawl off. “We weren’t wearing buckskin, we were wearing suede, or something like that, to approximate buckskin. We grew our beards. We weren’t allowed to wash our clothes, and we went through mud and slime and … oh, unbelievable. It kept getting worse, and then we’d hang those things out at night and they would turn sour. If you got on the downwind side you couldn’t stand it; you’d faint. [It would] make you throw up, it was so bad.”

  Even with Pat Elsey on hand, Tracy had to be bullied into the routine of a daily rubdown and dry clothes. “He becomes so thoroughly the character that he is portraying that he forgets to take the sort of precautions which he needs as a star,” Elsey said at the time. “He depends on me to take those precautions for him.” King Vidor thought Tracy a bit of a pill, even as, in Vidor’s estimate, he made up for it. “As long as somebody’s giving you a marvelous performance, you just don’t worry about th
e little things.” Tracy, he said, wasn’t difficult to handle or direct, but he did have his days.

  He kept threatening that he was going home from location. I tried and tried to think up something to do. Finally, I told my assistant director to go over to Boise, find a good-looking woman and put her on salary secretly, buy her some nice-looking clothes, and employ her to just come and sit and watch the shooting. You know, as a tourist. And so we did this. It gave Spencer someone to play up to, you know? To perform for. He’d go over and talk to her between takes. But one day, after about four days of this, she came over to me and said, “It’s a nice easy job, Mr. Vidor, a pleasant job. But do I have to ride around in his automobile and listen to his problems?” Well, we told her she’d have to handle that herself. But that’s all she was employed to do—just be there, sit and watch like a tourist. And it worked! All of a sudden, he stopped talking about rushing home.

  Stromberg, in Culver City, was sending new pages up nearly every day, convinced that Talbot Jennings was investing his scenes with “more strength and emotional warmth” than Stallings had managed. Tracy hated shooting with revised dialogue, which reminded him of the old days in stock where part of the job was forgetting old material while absorbing the new. On July 20 he cabled Eddie Mannix:

  SERIOUS CHANGES IN DIALOGUE JUST BEFORE SHOOTING ARE BAD ENOUGH IN THE STUDIO, BUT HERE THEY ARE IMPOSSIBLE ON TOP OF PHYSICAL HANDICAPS. SOME DECISION MUST BE MADE AS TO WHAT WE ARE GOING TO SHOOT. I HAVE STUDIED AND BELIEVE IN NEW JENNINGS SCRIPT AND THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO SHOOT IT. I ALSO UNDERSTAND VIDOR’S POSITION IN WANTING TO COMBINE [THE] TWO, BUT I CANNOT ASSUME RESPONSIBILITY FOR PERFORMANCE WHEN THIS IS DONE ON THE SET.

  Stromberg promptly made the decision to send Talbot Jennings to Payette Lake. Vidor and his crew were shooting the burning of St. Francis, an extraordinarily brutal sequence for its time, involving the same controlled-burn techniques pioneered for Gone With the Wind. Exposed negative was flown nightly to Los Angeles, where it was processed at Technicolor’s Hollywood plant and sent on to the studio. Stromberg would see the rushes and then have them sent to Payette via Boise where Vidor and his crew would have them screened in what was once a gambling hall.1 It took twelve days to complete the sequence, and by the time the final takes were made, the copper tubing that fed the flames with gasoline had literally melted away. The remains of the ten-acre village were doused with 150 gallons of kerosene, and the heat from the blaze was so intense it could be felt against the granite cliffs on the opposite side of the Payette River.

  Tracy grew increasingly irritable as production wore on, anxious to finish and intolerant of anything that might cause a delay. “He had an expression,” Vidor remembered. “I think it was ‘Happy days!’ which meant they just were not worrying about the film, not worrying about anything. There is always a big group in a company like that; they have hours and hours to sit around and play cards and yak without having the responsibility of making the film. That always seemed to annoy him and he’d say, ‘Happy days, happy days!’ They were just making a lark out of the whole thing.”

  On location near McCall, Idaho, with director King Vidor, 1939. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  Tracy’s big speech in the picture comes when Rogers and his men reach Fort Wentworth and discover it abandoned. Running up ahead of them, Rogers takes in its weathered boards, the brush sprouting in its central yard, the utter emptiness of the place where they were to have had their first real food in weeks, and as his men approach excitedly, he leans up against a collapsed section of gate and breaks into tears. It was part of Vidor’s plan to signal a crack in Rogers’ heroic facade, a hint of the trouble to come in the second half of the story. Tracy, said Vidor, fought him bitterly: “At the end of the picture he breaks down for a minute when the British are not there to meet him at the fort. Well, Spencer didn’t want to cry. I persuaded him, though, and he did it, and I think he liked the results. But he didn’t want to, not at all. He said, ‘A strong man would never cry.’ ”

  Pulling himself together, Rogers rallies his demoralized men. (“Now the first thing we have to do is get this fort in shape—for Amherst and his men when they get here with the food.”) And when they balk he launches into what was dubbed his “Moses speech” by King Vidor: “Moses went without the slightest taste of food for 40 days! He didn’t have any good cooked roots. No, not a thing. He didn’t have a single bite, did he Towne?” The first take was spoiled when the bulky Technicolor camera ran out of film, the second when Tracy stumbled over a word in a Bible passage. Vidor called for a third take, and Tracy did the entire three-minute-and-thirty-five-second speech flawlessly, his character teetering on the brink of madness, a shrewd amalgam of desperation and hope. When he finished there was dead silence. Vidor called “Cut!” and the crew erupted in a burst of applause.

  More than any other bit in the picture, it was this one scene that caused Vidor to regard Tracy as just about the best actor with whom he ever worked. “Everything that Spence did,” he said, “came over with tremendous conviction.” Stromberg wired Vidor:

  AGREE WITH YOU THAT SPENCER’S MOSES SCENE IS GREAT, JUST SCREENED IT WITH TALBOT AND WE WERE VERY ENTHUSIASTIC.

  Vidor suggested that Stromberg communicate his enthusiasm directly to Tracy, and Stromberg did so, wiring:

  HAVE SCREENED RUSHES FROM TWO TO THREE TIMES EACH DAY THEY ARRIVE WITH ONE SCREENING DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO SIZING UP YOUR PERFORMANCE AND TO SAY THAT I AM ENTHUSED AND ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE THAT WE ARE HEADED FOR A WONDERFUL ACHIEVEMENT IS PUTTING IT CONSERVATIVELY.

  The company finished at Payette Lake on August 14 after forty-two days in the wilderness, and resumed work eight days later in the relative comfort of M-G-M’s Lot 3. Tracy had time for a few days at home, swimming and playing tennis, but there was no polo, and after two months away from the fields, he was anxious and sore and unable to sleep. He had played fairly regularly up until the death of Captain C.T.I. “Pat” Roark on February 21.

  Roark, forty-three, was a nine-goal player, Irish-born and mourned on four continents. It was the first fatal accident among the game’s high-goal players, a very public reminder of how easily even a world-class player could lean forward and put a shot across the front of his horse and get the stick momentarily caught in its legs. Roark’s horse stumbled while up against a team of international cup players, threw him heavily to the ground, then rolled over and crushed him. Spence had played that morning at Alhambra’s Midwick Country Club, and he and Louise were among the horrified crowd of five thousand when the accident occurred later that same day. Roark lingered for two days without regaining consciousness, then died from his injuries following brain surgery.

  Tracy took Pat Roark’s death hard. “I think he blamed himself for it,” said David Caldwell, who was fourteen at the time and whose parents, Orville and Audrey Caldwell, were among the Tracys’ closest friends. Had Roark played opposite Tracy that morning at Midwick? Could the six periods Tracy noted in his datebook have left Roark unduly fatigued? Off his game opposite the hard-riding cavaliers of Hurlingham? Had his horse been part of the morning action? (Tracy noted in his book that he had tried three different ponies that day.) The answers are all lost to time, and the field itself has long since been given over to development. Years later, in 1972, when Jane Ardmore asked Louise why Spence had given up the game, she said it was after the death of Captain Pat Roark, “a close friend.”

  He took to stick-and-balling at home with Johnny every morning, riding through the alfalfa behind the house, but grew increasingly anxious about it. He bought a life insurance policy—he was already covered for health and accident through Lloyd’s of London—but when he had dinner with a friend on the night of March 18, he was so “nervous [he] did not want to come home” and instead spent the night in a guest house. On the twenty-sixth—Passion Sunday—he went to Mass but ran late in the rain and missed lunch with the kids. That evening he visited the Flemings—Vic had assumed direction of Gone With the Wind—and stayed until midnig
ht. “[I] thought I was nervous,” he observed in his book, “until I saw Victor. Bad shape.”

  He managed seven chukkers of polo on his birthday and played in a charity game on Easter Sunday, but otherwise he didn’t go back again until May 19, after returning from his trip to Europe. He threw himself into tennis but wasn’t very good at it—Louise routinely beat him—and it didn’t counter his weight gains as effectively nor wear him out as thoroughly.2

  Having Pat Elsey on location at Payette Lake helped get him through the picture, but massage could only treat the symptoms of the tension that was continually building inside of him. (“Spencer always had the motor running,” said Frank Tracy, “even as a kid.”) And being sixteen months sober meant he could no longer use booze as a release. “I was sorry to see him sell his boat,” Clark Gable remarked. “He used to work off excess steam on that. He’s a guy who needs something to help him work off excess steam.”

  “It would be wonderful,” Tracy had told an interviewer that previous year, “if I could drop my worrying when I leave the set—not carry that home with me, not keep on agonizing after hours about whether a role is good or whether I’m giving it everything it could have. I don’t force my worries on other people as a rule, but I cannot escape them myself. That’s the penalty for working so hard at my job. I can’t get to sleep at night for the nerves jumping. And then I wake up in the middle of the night, thinking of something I should have done or ought to do.”

  Louise said:

  I saw that he was getting more and more nervous. I wanted very much for him, regardless of what it was, to just insist that he have six months or, if he had to, a year [off]—not just sometimes [when] he would have six months [off] but he would never know [when]. There might be three pictures come up, and he was always in the midst of something. If [we] could just leave and we could go someplace … I can remember we talked about [going] down in the West Indies, one of those places, and I felt that if he could just do that, just get away and really forget. [That if] he knew he wasn’t going to do a picture for, you know, a year maybe … and he did try to think about [it].