James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Dawn’s conception of Edison at age eighty-two was similarly spare; the first test was shot on November 20, and Tracy, when he saw the results, thought them “pretty good.” After the nerves and privations of the previous year, he was embarking on a job he genuinely found enjoyable, and his mood around the studio as well as at home was uncharacteristically buoyant and relaxed. With Louise resting in Santa Barbara, he had the kids to himself. He swam, lunched on the patio, played tennis with John, and dined with his mother.

  It couldn’t last.

  On Friday, November 24, he made the forty-minute drive to the studio for lunch, a habit he picked up when he wasn’t working to keep abreast of developments. “If I were to believe everything I read about myself and the roles I’m supposed to be lined up for,” he said, “I’d go crazy. Not only does M-G-M buy about twelve stories a year for me—if you’re to believe what you read—but all the other studios have options on my services too. This may sound flattering, but to me it’s just confusing.”

  He learned that day that Edison had been postponed in favor of yet another version of I Take This Woman, and his mood blackened accordingly. Bernie Hyman, the original producer, had thrown out the first sixty pages of Charlie MacArthur’s original story and turned it, in the words of MacArthur’s longtime collaborator, Ben Hecht, “from a civilized comedy into a Darkest-Metro soap opera.” Tracy was glad when the picture was shelved. “It was so bad,” he told Gable, “we had to make retakes before we could even put it on the shelf. And when we put it on the shelf, we had to promise the other pictures there that it was only for one night.”

  He officially got the word the following Monday, and spent the entire day in conference with the new producer, Larry Weingarten. No one was deluded as to the artistic merits of the film, but Metro had close to $1 million tied up in it thus far, and the goal was to get the thing into releasable shape. There was also Mayer’s championing of the project, Lamarr being for him the equivalent of Goldwyn’s Anna Sten, a personal obsession whose appeal was always somewhat lost on the public. Lamarr’s first M-G-M release, Lady of the Tropics, had flopped at the box office. “They didn’t want me to make I Take This Woman,” the Old Man told the actress defiantly. “Well, now we will make it.”

  On the set of I Take This Woman with Louise and Susie. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  Whole sequences would be salvaged from the earlier version, while enough new material would be shot to substantially reshape the story. Tracy returned to the studio on December 1 to fight with Eddie Mannix over the requirement that he make the new scenes, but it was a losing battle considering there was no possible way to remove him from the picture without completely reshooting it from scratch. The only consolation was that the new material would be directed by Woody Van Dyke, who was sure to finish the thing as quickly and cheaply as possible. (“There’s nothing wrong with it that $200,000 or $300,000 can’t fix,” Van Dyke had reportedly said.) Tracy returned to Encino, where a nervous stomach plagued him all weekend. Filming resumed on Monday, December 4. “Worse than ever,” he wrote in his book.

  Van Dyke was in rare form. “[Y]ou did one rehearsal, you shot it, and you printed it,” said Laraine Day, who had been with the picture all along. “That was it. There was no fooling around with anything. You just knew your lines. You could blow your lines, you could change them all over, and he wouldn’t change printing it. As long as you hit your marks, Woody Van Dyke would say ‘Print it’ and he would finish the picture in 23 days.”

  Weingarten, who had already done a picture with “One-Take Woody,” knew his routine all too well. “Now Mr. Van Dyke was an alcoholic,” he once explained to a roomful of film students, “but he was right there all the time. But you could set your watch the moment he left the studio. At five o’clock he was out the door and went for the alcohol. And we used to run out of sets. We’d have five for the day, and the art department would call screaming, ‘He’s going to be through!’ What are they going to shoot next? And if another set wasn’t ready, out he went.”

  As Tracy announced to Sheilah Graham when she walked on the set one day, “This is where I came in—a year ago!”

  He saw a rough cut of Northwest Passage on September 22 and, despite all the misgivings, thought it a “great adventure.” Stromberg still had a lot of tinkering to do, and Tracy would spend a total of thirty-two days on retakes. The prospect of a second film grew remote when Germany’s invasion of Poland closed off much of the European market. Even so, the studio had a backlog of other pictures in the queue for him—one after another—and as he looped the last strands of dialogue in early January 1940, he put Leo Morrison to work seeking a substantially greater amount of time off between pictures. As part of the ensuing negotiation process, he was obliged to endure a three-hour session with L. B. Mayer—an experience he would happily have dispensed with had there been a way to get around it.

  Tracy’s relationship with Mayer had always been cordial but distant, and he was anxious to keep it that way. He never allowed his judgment to be superseded by Mayer, and Eddie Mannix once told him that Mayer didn’t like him because he knew that Tracy was “onto him.” Any dealings he had with the studio, he once said, were through Mannix or Benny Thau, the soft-spoken Austrian who handled contractual matters, or very occasionally through Nicholas Schenck, Mayer’s boss, who made the big decisions regarding the talent on the lot. Tracy’s deal permitted him six consecutive weeks of vacation in the first, third, fifth, and seventh years of the agreement, and eight consecutive weeks in the second, fourth, and sixth. But it never quite worked out that way, and so far in the current year he had been permitted just four consecutive weeks.

  The studio, for its part, was unwilling to sacrifice any measure of flexibility without building incentives into the deal that would serve to keep Tracy sober and available whenever he was supposed to be working. On January 9, 1940, Tracy met with Thau, who agreed to three consecutive months of vacation if he would do Edison, the Man, and The Yearling first. That plan lasted only long enough to get him on board for another picture with Clark Gable, and soon he found himself committed to three in a row: Edison, Boom Town, and The Yearling. On February 21 Thau and Mannix agreed to four weeks off between Edison and Boom Town, and as much as four weeks off between Boom Town and The Yearling (which would be another location shoot, tougher to accommodate). After The Yearling, Tracy was to have four consecutive months with pay. Through Leo Morrison, Thau offered a $25,000 bonus, returnable only were Tracy unable (or unwilling) to appear in Boom Town. Further, should he “take sick” after Boom Town and not do The Yearling, he would get only three months’ vacation, not the four he would otherwise have.

  Comfortable enough with the accommodation and girded for the work ahead, Tracy began Edison, the Man on January 15. With the concurrence of director Clarence Brown, he chose to play Edison as the beneficiary of divine guidance, a man doing God’s work for the benefit of mankind. “He was a very prayerful guy, you know, in his own way,” journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns pointed out. “I don’t think it was a church way particularly, but he said to me—I’m remembering the wonderful little talks we had when we were both working at Metro—‘You know, God showed Edison how to light up cities.’ He got very excited about the people he was playing and the characters he did.”

  Edison’s son asked that his father not be made to seem “too perfect” in the picture—cigars, he noted, had been substituted for chewing tobacco—and he suggested some leavening traits for the character, a certain tactlessness and, at times, downright rudeness that Tracy was able to incorporate into his performance. Everyone, from Henry Ford on down, commented on Tracy’s striking resemblance to the old man. For his part, Tracy found the picture a joy to make, and he was uncommonly accessible when journalists visited the set. One day, Gladys Hall pulled a “quickie” questionnaire on him, testing his patience:

  What was the first job at which you earned money? And what did you buy with it?

  “Selling newspapers
in Milwaukee. A ham sandwich.”

  What was the outstanding incident of your childhood?

  “When I tipped the ice box over on my brother.”

  When do you want to retire from the screen? And what would you do then? That is, do you have any special plans for the future?

  “Tonight. That answers the first half of your question. I have no special plans for the future. I only want to sleep and eat, eat and sleep. That answers the second half.”

  Have you any special fears?

  “Yes. I’m afraid of Garbo. Put that down.”

  Have you ever been so discouraged that you contemplated abandoning your career? If so, when?

  “Yes. About fifteen minutes ago. Just after the last scene.”

  What do you consider the most useless sport or pastime?

  “Staying awake.”

  What is your favorite book?

  “Steinbeck’s Red Pony.”

  Your favorite flower?

  “A rose … aw, I don’t know. Put down anything. What the hell’s the difference?”

  Sheilah Graham came upon him one day as he was handing a one-hundred-dollar check to Woody Van Dyke. “It’s a bet I had,” he explained. “I bet Woody that I Take This Woman would never be released.” Quickly changing the subject, he mentioned The Yearling and Billy Grady’s nationwide search for a boy to play Jody. “Whoever he is,” said Tracy, “he’s a star already. The part is so surefire that the boy should be put under contract for five years right away—without waiting for the picture to be completed. Three or four years ago, Mickey Rooney would have been fine for the part, but I can’t see him cuddling a fawn now … not unless Fawn was the name of a girl.”

  The studio pulled a sneak preview of Northwest Passage in New Rochelle (five hundred cards, Tracy noted) but was unable to get the picture into theaters until February 1940, as the demand for prints of Gone With the Wind was taxing the capacity of Technicolor’s processing plant. After seeing it, author Kenneth Roberts discharged his agent, but the preview notice in Daily Variety was wildly favorable, describing it as “the kind of stuff male audiences look for but seldom find. Very little romance. A few flashes only of a few women. No lovemaking. No dalliance. No man-woman emotional problems. Tough, hard stuff in the morning of America, during the French-Indian War, when frontiersmen now known as patriots had to be about their bloody chores in settling the right of sovereignty over a continent.”

  When Metro finally did release the picture (“as one would release a wounded duck,” Roberts suggested) it was warmly welcomed by both the public and the critics, some of whom considered it worthy of a place alongside Selznick’s masterpiece as one of the signal achievements of the talking screen. The world premiere in Boise predated its New York opening by several weeks, and anticipation began to build as a national ad campaign revved an otherwise lethargic market. Northwest Passage opened big at the Capitol Theatre, where it remained through Holy Week, eventually posting worldwide rentals in excess of $3 million. Coming hard on the humiliation of I Take This Woman—which was a critical as well as commercial disaster—it was good news for Tracy, who hadn’t had a hit for his home studio in eighteen months.

  With Edison in the can, he drove to Palm Springs for a long weekend at La Quinta and was introduced by Tim Whelan to Greta Garbo. “It would be a pleasure, Mr. Tracy, to play in one of your pictures sometime,” Garbo said to him. “And I would be delighted to play even a butler in one of your films, Miss Garbo,” he responded. Garbo had been contemplating a biography of Marie Curie, the Polish scientist and discoverer of radium, for a couple of years, and Tracy’s participation would ease the concerns of Eve Curie, youngest daughter of the title character, who feared the casting of Garbo as her mother would overshadow the equally important work of her father, Pierre. But with Boom Town looming, it would take the unlikely postponement of The Yearling to make it happen.

  Tracy spent his fortieth birthday golfing with Eddie Mannix and producer-director Victor Saville, newly arrived from England. Three days later he started Boom Town, a big, brawling tale of Texas wildcatters originally purchased for Gable, Tracy, and Myrna Loy in the heady days following the release of Test Pilot. Tracy had no objection to doing the picture, and despite the tensions between them on Test Pilot, he and Gable maintained a genuine affection for one another. “They spent half their time, each one trying to understand the other,” Adela Rogers St. Johns said. “Gable looked at Tracy as the greatest actor in the world. He would stand at the edge of the set and watch him in utter admiration of the acting ability … Tracy adored Gable, as everybody did. He would say, ‘Can’t act, doesn’t care, and everybody loves him better than any actor that was ever born.’ ”

  When Gable attended the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind, Tracy shot off a congratulatory wire:

  “GONE WITH THE WIND” MAY BE THIS YEAR’S GREATEST PICTURE BUT I STILL REMEMBER “PARNELL.”

  The principal screenwriter on Boom Town was John Lee Mahin, who had as his source a novelette from Cosmopolitan magazine called “A Lady Comes to Burkburnett.” With Myrna Loy unavailable for the part of the lady, producer Sam Zimbalist took the extraordinary step of borrowing Claudette Colbert from Paramount, thus reuniting the two Academy Award–winning stars of It Happened One Night. Hedy Lamarr campaigned for the fourth role, a seductress who didn’t appear until the top of the third act, and the picture suddenly took on a size that made it one of the most anticipated of the season. Early on, the Metro sales team decided to showcase Boom Town as a solo attraction at premium prices, the rationale being its stellar cast made it “like four pictures in one.”

  For Tracy, it wasn’t a particularly difficult shoot. Many of the exteriors were done in process, and the only real location work was a two-day stretch at the Taft oilfields near Bakersfield. Wardrobe, contractually the responsibility of the actor on a modern-dress picture, became a matter of swapping out clothes with genuine laborers. “Larry Keethe, our wardrobe man, thought I was crazy when we bought a bunch of new work clothes and went down to a building project around here, looking for a couple of workmen about my size. We traded the new outfits for those a couple of guys were wearing. They thought I was crazy, too. But you can’t look like a worker in the oil fields, walking into a picture in brand-new dungarees. They must be baggy and faded from sweat and dirt and many washings.”

  Tracy amused himself bantering with Gable, who usually gave as good as he got. When the King stalked onto the set during an early rehearsal, he delivered his first line but went up on the second. “Can you imagine that?” Tracy moaned with an exaggerated sigh. “The guy’s memory is down to one line now!”

  Later, Gable took a shot at Tracy while chatting with Harry Evans of Family Circle magazine. “Say,” he said, pretending not to notice his costar was within earshot, “did you hear that Tracy is going to do Ninotchka on the air with Rosalind Russell?” Evans, playing along, said that he had heard such a rumor but doubted his ears.

  “Well,” said Gable, hoisting his left eyebrow quizzically, “that should be a new experience for radio listeners. That Russell is smart, you know. Let him try to underplay her, and you know what will happen? He’ll drop his voice a little, and she’ll drop hers. He’ll take his next speech a little softer, she’ll whisper a little lower. He’ll mutter his next line, and she’ll murmur. The listeners will be twisting the knobs off their dials trying to hear what’s going on. And suddenly they’ll hear nothing, not a sound.” He paused a moment to observe Tracy. “And that,” he concluded, “will be the first time on record that two radio performers will have voluntarily gone off the air!”

  Claudette Colbert thought the back-and-forth between Gable and Tracy “better than a circus” but acknowledged that Tracy’s technique—what Louise called “that natural thing”—took some getting used to. “Here’s how it goes,” she said of her heaviest scene opposite him.

  I’ve tried to commit suicide, and I’m half hysterical and trying to explain my action to Spencer. Afte
r weeping and carrying on and just about knocking myself out, with him just standing there, I declare that he can never understand. “You could never know what it means to love anyone so much!” I scream. And after I stop on this high melodramatic note, he nods that big head of his a few times, sticks his chin out, looks up and away, and murmurs, “Yeah, yeah. I wouldn’t know about that.” And steals the whole scene! Not a person in the audience will remember what I said. The way that man underplays everybody keeps the audience listening for him to speak.

  Production was moving along beautifully when, on April 25, Gable was injured in the staging of a fight. Toward the end of the picture, Square John tries to knock some sense into Big John, who has gone off with the exotic Karen Vanmeer. (“In between the rough stuff,” said Tracy, “I had to sit around while the King played love scenes with Hedy Lamarr.”) Tracy later described the mishap to his friend Stewart Granger:

  One evening we tried to finish off a fight sequence, but there was one shot left over for the following morning, Gable taking a punch on the chin from me, off camera. I told them that I’d be goddamned if I was going to get up at the crack of dawn just to stand off camera and have my fist pass in front of Gable’s chin and told them to get someone else. They got a fighter, a real boxer. They stood him next to the camera and told him to throw a punch as Gable approached, but to “pull” it an inch away from Gable’s chin. Did he understand? Sure. Did he need a rehearsal? Hell, no. Okay. Camera, action, and the boxer let one go, forgot to pull it, and knocked Gable down. There was a stunned silence as Gable lay on the floor spitting out teeth. The boxer looked in horror at the movies’ most valuable human being whom he’d just disfigured. He took off out of the studio, out of L.A., and some think out of the country. He was never seen again. Gable accused me of fixing the whole thing. I just told him he needed a new set of teeth anyway.