Tracy had just a week off between the finish of I Take This Woman and the start of Stanley and Livingstone, and his subsequent five-week vacation was more hurried than relaxing. He was idle seven weeks before the start of Northwest Passage, but there was tremendous uncertainty surrounding that project and endless rewrites. Seven weeks into production, only half the projected film was complete, and he was looking at a comparable period of time to finish the other half. Then they were talking of putting him directly into another picture or attempting to salvage the decidedly worthless Hedy Lamarr vehicle for yet a third time. On August 10, 1939, as the exterior scenes at Crown Point were being filmed, Tracy wired Leo Morrison instructing him, as per Louise’s suggestion, to arrange a six-month leave of absence or, barring that, to get him out of his M-G-M contract altogether.
He was in the studio tank matching river shots—the famed “human chain” sequence—when Frank Whitbeck advised him that word of his telegram had reached Eddie Mannix. He spent the next morning—August 24—in the tank again, then went home in the afternoon with a bad head cold. In a state of terrible fatigue he wrote Mannix directly:
Frank told me that you seemed upset because of my wire to Leo Morrison which, I understand, reached you secondhanded. I was just as much upset at feeling I had to wire Morrison, but you must realize that the stress of the moment and general conditions, coming together as they did, and the fact that I seemed out of touch with anyone at the studio may have had something to do with it. Anyway, I am sorry it happened because, whatever the problem, I certainly have no desire to hurt you.
The problem seems to be the culmination of many things, and it seems to me that the only thing to do is to get away for an indefinite period upon the completion of this picture. If I were ill physically, that would be the only thing I could do, and, as I certainly am mentally, it seems the only alternative which holds some hope. That may not solve it, but the fact remains that the problem is there and, at the moment, I am at a total loss as to just how to work it out.
At the outset, please believe that in no sense is there any quarrel with the studio or with anything they have done in my regard. I hope I appreciate that without Metro and the help I received here Heaven only knows where I would be now. Whatever arises out of this, I sincerely hope it will never be considered anything but a situation which must be worked out with complete good feeling between the studio and myself.
I am fully cognizant and appreciate to the utmost that the pictures I am given are the best pictures that the studio has to offer, and the parts, the best that any actor could hope for. It is just that I hope to prolong my value to the studio; to protect my health, both mental and physical, and to preserve whatever it is that I have as long as I can for my family.
I once promised Mr. Mayer and you, too, I think, that if the time ever came when I felt I should stop, I would tell you. It seemed to me that the time has come. Louise has gone through trying periods with me, and is going through probably the most trying now, and feels as I do.
I feel that perhaps, in the future, if an arrangement could be made whereby I could do a picture, then have a definite vacation period, the mental stress I subject myself to, or inflict upon myself, during the making of a picture would be lessened with the knowledge that, when I finished, I might relax. I say might.
I realize your great problems in regard to production, and I want to be fair. That is why I want you to know immediately how I feel, and I also would like to have the matter settled as I probably have eight more weeks of hard work on this picture, and I would like to do it with as much peace of mind as possible.
You may not be in sympathy with some of the foregoing, and you may even think it self-indulgence—I hope that it is not. Some of us have strange problems—all of us different ones—and no one rule can be set to govern any, or all, of us. At any rate, what I have said here has been written after many sleepless nights of thought, and it is honest. After all, I have little to gain by all this except, I hope, some peace of mind.
Tracy was still in bed on the twenty-eighth, running a fever of 102 degrees, when Mannix and the M-G-M legal department started grappling with the question of how to respond. An oral statement of the company’s attitude was recommended unless there was a definite refusal on Tracy’s part to render services at the start of his next picture. Nobody wanted to antagonize him while Northwest Passage was still in production, and so the studio interiors and the film’s early scenes in the village of Portsmouth were made in an atmosphere of affable silence. “He was very intuitive,” Robert Young said of Tracy, “and whatever he did, he just always came out right. [Vidor] never talked to him. I mean, what’s the point in talking to him? Tracy, sort of, almost unconsciously, knew more about how that scene should be played than the director did.”
Vidor finished the first half of the picture on September 15, 1939, and the cast was retained on salary while Stromberg and Talbot Jennings polished the second half of the script. The standoff that Mannix had feared would come with the completion of Northwest Passage never took place. Tracy’s constant fretting over expenses—John’s care and education, Louise and Susie, Carroll, their mother, his aunt Mame’s medical bills, his aunt Jenny and her daughter—would only intensify were his income suddenly to cease. (“He worked so hard and had such a big tow line,” as his cousin Jane put it.) He’d never be able to relax, and if he did take six months off, he could never be sure they’d still want him when he came back. “I couldn’t do that,” he finally said to Louise. “I couldn’t stay away like that and wonder. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it.”
One of the steadying mechanisms in Tracy’s life was a weekly dinner with a few pals to talk shop and swap stories. It started with actor Frank McHugh’s wife, whose stepfather was a minister in West Hartford, Connecticut. They were trying to raise money for a Sunday school program, and someone got the idea of sending a blank autograph book out to Frank, who was at Warner Bros. with Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney. “Now Frank NEVER asked anybody for autographs,” said Mrs. McHugh, the actress Dorothy Spencer, “but he said, ‘Well, for Katherine [Dorothy’s mother] I’ll do it.’ ” Four loose pages from the book were dispatched, with the request that Frank sign one and have the other three signed by O’Brien, Cagney, and Spencer Tracy.
“Spence was at M-G-M,” Frank McHugh recalled, “and I did not know his home address or phone. So I sent a letter and the blank page to him [at the studio] and asked him to sign. He did, and enclosed a letter in the return [envelope] to the effect that he thought it was rather sad that old friends, living in the same town, had to communicate by mail, and suggested that the four of us get together for dinner. In the meantime, Jim and Spence had dinner together and talked it over and decided that the four of us should get together regularly and talk and dine. That is: Spence, Jim, Pat, and myself. Which we did.”
The meetings began in February 1939. O’Brien drank scotch, but McHugh was on the wagon and Cagney didn’t drink at all, save for an occasional glass of wine. They’d go out for dinner and end up at the Trocadero for ice cream and cookies. Actor Lynne Overman was the first added member, McHugh having known him since 1926. Dry and insinuative, Overman was, in McHugh’s words, “one of the wisest, wittiest, and gentlest companions” he’d ever known. “He had a keen sense of good taste for [the] excellent but simple things of life. Food and drink seemed to be his hobby. You could also add ladies.” Frank Morgan and Ralph Bellamy later completed the core group, and it became a Wednesday night tradition, the various members dropping in and out as their work schedules permitted. Their wives, who never joined in, called it “the Boys’ Club.”
According to Cagney, it was columnist Sidney Skolsky who hung the name “Irish Mafia” on the group, although Morgan was German, Bellamy was English, and Allen Jenkins, who joined in occasionally, was of early American stock. “There was no thought of it having anything to do with our Irishness,” Cagney said. “But Skolsky, of course, had to make a big thing of it and call it the I
rish Mafia. Such nonsense. We happened to be people who liked each other and that is all.”
Stromberg continued to wrestle with Northwest Passage into November 1939. Originally the plan had been to film the entire book and release it with an intermission, as David Selznick intended to do with Gone With the Wind. When King Vidor wrapped the first half, however, it was over two hours in length and had cost more than $2.5 million—extraordinary for its time. And, unlike GWTW, the picture had, for all practical purposes, an all-male cast and virtually none of what was politely referred to at the time as “feminine interest.” At a negative cost of $4 million, Northwest Passage would surpass Ben-Hur as the most expensive picture in M-G-M’s fifteen-year history. In November it was prudently decided to finish the picture with a new ending and release it as Northwest Passage (Book I—Rogers’ Rangers) with the intention of filming Book II as a separate feature once Book I had proven itself commercially.
The core of the group that came to be known—erroneously—as the Irish Mafia. Left to right: James Cagney, Frank McHugh, Pat O’Brien, and Tracy. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
“I did the entire picture in three months of work,” Vidor recounted,
and at the end of that time I still had not received the second part of the script. I called the studio and they said, “Come back.” So I loaded up the trains with all of our stuff and we came back. When I saw the producer he said, “Keep the actors on salary. We’ll have it in another week.” They were sitting right where I had left them three months before. They were probably still working on the same line of dialogue. After another week no progress had been made, so the head of the studio said, “Take these people off salary.” I went to New York and started to work on something else. After I got to New York they called me up. Jack Conway had written a different ending to the story. We didn’t have jet travel then, so I said, “Okay, let Conway shoot the tag,” and left it at that.
Tracy was happy to be done with the picture and hoped the issue of Book II would never come up again. “When a truly historical character is the hero of a bestselling novel, then you are really up against it,” he said wearily. “Everyone who reads the novel has his own picture of the physical and mental characteristics of a man like Rogers. The actor can read everything available on the character, pick out his more human or understandable traits, and go from there, discarding the unessentials. But he is likely to disappoint a lot of people … I have tried to get Rogers’ mental attitude, his psychology. I don’t know whether I have succeeded; I can only hope.”
While he was on location with Northwest Passage, enthusiasm at Fox was building for Stanley and Livingstone. On July 11 associate producer Kenneth Macgowan wired him at McCall:
THE PREVIEW WAS REALLY EXTRAORDINARY. WHEN WE GOT TO THE THEATER IN INGLEWOOD WE WERE DISMAYED TO FIND THAT ABOUT THREE-FOURTHS OF THE AUDIENCE RANGED FROM BABES IN ARMS AND FIVE YEAR OLDS TO HIGH SCHOOL BOYS AND GIRLS. THE AVERAGE AGE COULDN’T HAVE BEEN OVER FIFTEEN. TO OUR SURPRISE AND DELIGHT THEY WENT FOR THE PICTURE HOOK LINE AND SINKER. EVERY REACTION WAS SPLENDID.
By the time the press preview took place at the end of the month, Zanuck was talking up the idea of a sequel covering Stanley’s later life and career in politics, a notion predicated on the availability of Tracy, an increasingly unlikely proposition. Zanuck never got the flippant tone he sought to achieve for Stanley, and the Reporter thought the picture “almost severely scholarly in its approach.” It was, nevertheless, a big and appealing film, idealistic in its posture and grand in its scope, the African footage giving it the texture, in parts, of a documentary. That it lacked dramatic punch was more a failing of the screenplay than of the cast or the director, but it also lacked the kind of hokum that often distinguished a Hollywood biography, at least up to the end, where Stanley (hardly the salvationist the movie suggests) returns to Africa to the strains of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
Contrary to Tracy’s early assessment, Variety predicted “socko biz” for Stanley and Livingstone and turned out to be right. Strong billboard and snipe support from the studio—and some unseasonably rainy weather—helped fill the New York Roxy, where Tracy’s name meant considerably more than it had in the old days. The picture sustained a three-week stand, then went out as the first big Fox release of the new season. With I Take This Woman on the shelf and Northwest Passage still in production, it stood to be Tracy’s only release for the year 1939. “Wrong again!” he wrote in amending his earlier prognostication. “Big hit.”
Until Stanley and Livingstone, Tracy had been off screen for nearly a year—since Boys Town—an almost intolerable length of time for a major star. Yet his absence hadn’t affected his standing with either exhibitors or the public. “Comes the revolution!” wrote Edwin Schallert in anticipation of the year-end exhibitor polls.
This year, if any, there will be the biggest shake-up ever in the stars that rule the motion picture box office. Four years the top-notcher in most polls, Shirley Temple, will probably register in about third place. Clark Gable, runner-up to the child star, may hit shakily around fifth or sixth. The winners will list about as follows: Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Shirley Temple, Sonja Henie, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Deanna Durbin, Mickey Rooney, Errol Flynn, and Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne as a team. The order may not be exactly correct, but those are the ones likely to be supreme and all the charges and counter-charges against this writer may be duly filed around the end of the year when listings are more or less officially proclaimed.
Schallert’s predictions were largely accurate. Tracy placed third behind Rooney and Power in the Quigley poll of moneymaking stars, but firmly ahead of Gable, who came in fourth. Shirley Temple’s standing had fallen due to advancing age—she was eleven—and Gable’s one release of the season had been the atypical Idiot’s Delight. (He was otherwise offscreen making Gone With the Wind for Selznick.) In October, Fortune published the results of a survey by Elmo Roper that asked two questions of the moviegoing public: Who is your favorite movie actor? and Who is your favorite movie actress? To the second question, 4.6 percent of all respondents answered Bette Davis, followed by Myrna Loy, Jeanette MacDonald, Irene Dunne, and Norma Shearer in descending order. (Temple, who ranked first in 1937, placed sixth.) To the first question, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore placed second through fifth, respectively. In first place, named by 5.6 percent of all respondents, was Spencer Tracy.
Tracy photographed at his Encino ranch, January 2, 1941. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Buoyed, perhaps, by the milestone, Tracy began looking at boats again, casually at first, and then with a certain urgency, given that he could, at last, permit himself a modicum of luxury. Off days were spent at the ranch playing tennis with Louise, lunching on the patio and sometimes meeting friends for tea. He saw Cagney, O’Brien, and the others on Wednesday nights, and celebrated nineteen months of sobriety on the first day of December. He had a wonderful Christmas that year, playing polo at Riviera on the twenty-fourth and visiting the newly married Gables, who had settled in Encino, later that same evening. On Christmas Day he went to Mass as usual, then spent the balance of the day loafing at home. Dinner was with the children, Louise, his mother, Carroll and Dorothy. “Beautiful weather,” he wrote in his book. “Much to be thankful for.”
* * *
1 In addition to cinematographer Sid Wagner’s regular crew, a complete Technicolor crew of sixteen headed by William V. Skall was part of the company.
2 “He had a very good eye with quick movements,” Louise said. “Could have played a good game of tennis if he had started early enough. But he never cared about doing anything like that. The theatre, yes. You gave your best, but he played games for fun. He never cared who won.”
CHAPTER 16
Someone’s Idea of Reality
* * *
The triumph of Boys Town enabled John Considine to get approval for a project he had long wanted to do, a biography of Thomas Edison split into two movies—one his boyhood, the o
ther his years at Menlo Park. To play the Great Man, Considine had at his disposal the nation’s top male stars—Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy. He assigned Dore Schary, who had shared an Academy Award with Eleanore Griffin for his work on Boys Town, to develop both pictures in collaboration with Hugo Butler.
As subsequently rewritten by Talbot Jennings and Bradbury Foote, the screenplay for Edison, the Man, bore no greater resemblance to Edison’s life than Boys Town had to Father Flanagan’s, but it afforded Tracy the kind of inspirational role he was now actively seeking, and he embraced it with rare ebullience. On October 24, 1939, he and Howard Strickling boarded a train for Chicago at the invitation of Henry Ford, who had been Edison’s neighbor at Fort Myers and who had reconstructed Edison’s original laboratory complex on the grounds of his Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. From there the men traveled to New York and West Orange, where they spent the day with Edison’s widow and his son Charles, now assistant secretary of the navy.
Tracy was particularly cheered by nine reels of film provided by General Electric, pictures made in the twenties of Edison reenacting experiments, relaxing at his estate in Florida, being interviewed before a radio microphone by E. W. Rice, Jr., the late president of General Electric. Hearing Edison’s voice as an old man was of less use to Tracy than seeing his walk, his smile, his expressions when conversing with others. Tracy was taller by a couple of inches, but in overall appearance remarkably similar to the man shown in photographs from the 1870s. “We will make these changes,” Jack Dawn, the head of the M-G-M makeup department, decided. “Tracy’s hair will be parted on the right instead of the left and will be combed downward across the head instead of upward. We will make his eyebrows a little more bushy and his forehead slightly larger. There’s practically nothing to it.”
James Curtis Page 51