James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Frank McHugh could remember a night at one of the regular Boys’ Club dinners when Tracy said he was considering the picture and asked the others if they thought he should do it. Lynne Overman spoke up and advised against it.

  “Why?” asked Tracy.

  “You would not be good in it,” he said quietly.

  Tracy, a bit of indignation now creeping into his voice, asked, “Why would I not be ‘good in it’?”

  “Nobody,” said Overman, “ever is.”

  John Lee Mahin, Fleming’s frequent collaborator, had been on the project since April, working under Saville’s direct supervision and sticking closely to the 1931 screenplay by Percy Heath and Samuel Hoffenstein. Tracy, as it turned out, had an entirely different conception of the character, one that was intensely personal and, to him, painfully obvious. “I will never forget,” said Adela Rogers St. Johns, “the time that he explained to me that … there was supposed to be some magic, evil drink that Dr. Jekyll invents that turns [him] into Mr. Hyde. And this is a magic formula. And Spence said, ‘Nothing but liquor. That’s all. He’s just trying to show you that you can be Dr. Jekyll, and if you drink enough booze you end up in the gutter as Mr. Hyde. That’s all there is to it—it’s just booze.’ And I said, ‘Well, you ought to know.’ And he said, ‘I do know. That’s why I’m telling you!’ ”

  Tracy elaborated:

  I had always been fascinated by the story and saw it as a story of the two sides of a man. I felt Jekyll was a very respectable doctor—a fine member of society. He had proposed to a lovely girl and was about to marry her. But there was another side to the man. Every once in a while, Jekyll would go on a trip. Disappear. And either because of drink or dope or who-knows-what, he would become—or should I say turn into?—Mr. Hyde. Then in a town or neighborhood where he was totally unknown, he would perform incredible acts of cruelty and vulgarity. The emotional side of Jekyll was obviously extremely disturbed. The girl, as his fiancée, is a proper lady. But as his fantasy whore, the girl matched his Mr. Hyde. She would be capable of the lowest behavior. The two girls would be played by the same actress; the two men would be me.

  Tracy had the idea of doing the transformations from Jekyll to Hyde entirely without makeup, as he remembered Barrymore having done them in 1920: “The change was not essentially physical. It went deeper than that. It was his soul that turned black. As a matter of fact, Mr. Hyde would have been better able to carry out his diabolical crimes had he been handsome, suave, polished. Not only that, but a handsome Mr. Hyde would have been more believable and the contrast between his appearance and personality more interesting.”

  On December 16, he dined with Saville, Fleming, and Mahin, and they ran the silent Jekyll and Hyde. Barrymore, they discovered, did the transformation in one shot but, once established as having changed to Mr. Hyde, relied on makeup to put across the effect. The look was in some respects subtle and in other ways outlandish, with putty fingers extending the hands and a phony chin accentuating the actor’s scarecrow frame. The results inconclusive, the men decided to make a test to see if a strictly cerebral version of the story was even possible. Meanwhile, with Mahin’s completed script in the bank, Saville turned to journalist and playwright John L. Balderston, whose name had been associated with some of Hollywood’s most prominent horror pictures, including Dracula and Frankenstein. Balderston reviewed Mahin’s work and began framing the problem by setting forth the dual nature of man and Plato’s metaphor of the soul as a charioteer driving two horses—the good horse and the bad horse.

  On December 23, Tracy, who had just finished with the Boys Town sequel, shot a test of the initial transformation scene as written by Mahin. The following day, Christmas Eve, he screened the test and sadly pronounced it “no good.” Said Mahin, “They made tests without makeup, but he couldn’t bring it off, he couldn’t contort his face enough.” Fleming thought they’d have another go after the first of the year, but Tracy’s enthusiasm for the part evaporated. Convinced he could never pull the thing off and would simply make a fool of himself, he started maneuvering to get out of the commitment. Fleming kept him on board, certain they were onto something extraordinary, but Tracy remained unhappy for the balance of the project.

  During his time as director of Gone With the Wind, Fleming had been the object of a campaign by David Selznick to interest him in a new contract player, the Swedish import Ingrid Bergman. Selznick made sure that Fleming saw Intermezzo, Bergman’s American film debut, and that he subsequently considered her for a role in his first picture to follow GWTW, which Jekyll and Hyde would likely be. Bergman, twenty-four, was already at work at M-G-M in a picture called Rage in Heaven, and on December 18 she shot a test for Jekyll and Hyde with actor Edward Ashley as Dr. Jekyll. Bergman was apparently tested for the part of Beatrix, Jekyll’s fiancée and traditionally the ingenue part in the play. She was, however, “fed up” playing nice girls, and when she saw the test, her instincts told her the better role would be that of Ivy the barmaid—Miriam Hopkins in the 1931 version—and she put in for that part instead. As Saville remembered it, “Ingrid came to Fleming and me and suggested the roles should be reversed and she should play the prostitute. The idea was immediately appealing. The obvious photogenic purity of Bergman would react to the evil part of the good Dr. Jekyll.”

  By late January, Bergman was set for Ivy but the part of Beatrix was yet to be cast. In fact, much of the supporting cast was still in question, except for Donald Crisp and the English actor-director Peter Godfrey. Tracy, Fleming, and Saville had broken the characters of Jekyll and Hyde into numbered variations and were making—and remaking—tests of each. Tracy’s Jekyll makeup was generally okay, but the Hyde makeup was still to be tested. The Jekyll wardrobe was ready for fittings, but the Hyde wardrobe was at a standstill until Tracy, Fleming, and Saville could agree on the amount of padding for each of the four changes in the script—which was being rewritten.

  On the matter of the transformations, it seemed as if every department on the lot had been mobilized to come up with a solution. The Cartoon Department would have a preliminary test by the end of the month, and cinematographer Paul Vogel was trying various methods suggested by tint and lab specialist John Nickolaus. Olindo Ceccarini, an authority on color photography as well as sound, had pretty much exhausted the possibilities of blue light, while Jack Dawn’s makeup department was preparing a test of hand transformations. Nobody had yet undertaken to watch Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version, in which the initial transformation was accomplished with a filtering method keyed to colored makeup. Apparently no one wanted to be influenced by—or accused of merely copying—a version that was not simply well regarded but had actually won an Academy Award for Fredric March.

  Increasingly nervous and unhappy, Tracy dreaded the start of the picture and was unable to get to sleep most nights until two or three in the morning. On January 28 he took Johnny to the studio to see “the Jekyll & Hydes of old” and to watch all of the tests he had made. “Pred[ict] Jekyll & Hyde will be bad,” he wrote in his book later that night. “Picture & I will get panned by critics. This will be big bust.” Louise dragged him off to La Quinta for a long weekend—he had given her a new Lincoln Model 57 coupe for Christmas—and they spent their days on the tennis court. (“Weeze won the championship,” he noted.) They drove home, stopping at Pomona on a Sunday night to see a preview of Men of Boys Town.1 “Too saccharine,” he concluded. “Dull and unbelievable. Will not do as well as original.”

  Fleming had Jekyll and Hyde laid out so as to shoot all the Jekyll script first, then all the Hyde script, and then the transitions from Jekyll to Hyde and vice versa. Still lacking final decisions on Hyde and the transformation scenes, he was nevertheless able to begin filming on the morning of Tuesday, February 4, 1941. Tracy, in a miserable mood, commemorated the occasion in his book: “Start of Jekyll & Hyde, what may well be the worst picture ever made. It will get panned, I will get panned—It will flop!”

  Since both Fleming and Trac
y wanted a closed set for the Hyde passages, it was thought best to get the press in and out early while Tracy was still in the guise of Dr. Jekyll. Cast at the last minute as Beatrix was M-G-M contract player Lana Turner, whose previous output for the studio had been limited to B-picture romances and musicals. Given Bergman’s earlier roles and Selznick’s stewardship, it was assumed that Turner would be playing Ivy, not Bergman, so there was an element of surprise in revealing Turner to the world as the virginal daughter of Sir Charles Emery.

  Fleming spent four days shooting the ornate dinner party at which Jekyll first expounds his theories of good and evil, Beatrix demurely seated to his left. The table was designed to accommodate twenty guests and was divided into three sections so that one section could slide away to enable intimate shots of the other two. On the third day of coverage, director George Cukor brought W. Somerset Maugham to the set. With Tracy in his soup-and-fish, Cukor explained to the eminent British author that he was in the process of remaking Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When Tracy had finished playing the scene for the umpteenth time, Maugham turned to his host and asked, “Which one is he now?”

  Maugham, perhaps, had heard there wasn’t going to be any “ape makeup” in this version of the story. “We’re going to try to make Hyde a believable man,” Tracy told John Chapman, syndicated correspondent for the New York Daily News. “When the picture was first proposed I even suggested that Hyde never be pictured, except maybe the back of his ear or something like that, but it didn’t work out. But he’ll be a recognizable human being.” Visitors found that Tracy wasn’t as interested in discussing Turner as he was her luminous costar. “The Hyde part isn’t believable when you come right down to it. But if the audiences are convinced, I think it will be because of Ingrid Bergman. There is an actress! I don’t throw the word ‘great’ around—just use it on Helen Hayes and a couple of others—and I think Miss Bergman is great. She’ll make Hyde. It’s like Captains Courageous. Here I was with an accent picked up from all parts of the world, and I wasn’t believable. But there was Freddie Bartholomew looking at me wide-eyed and believing—so the audience did, too.”

  Eager and passionate, Bergman loved the role of Ivy and worked hard at it. “Ingrid,” said Victor Saville, “came to my office most mornings to perfect her accent—we decided on the very posh upper-Tooting style—‘Ouw, yereversonice, aren’t yer.’ ”

  Tracy saw Ingrid Bergman as the key to putting his Mr. Hyde across on screen. She campaigned for the role of Ivy and worked hard on her accent. (SUSIE TRACY)

  Tracy’s fascination with the actress soon extended to their off hours as well, and with Bergman’s husband in Rochester studying medicine, she had a lot of free time on her hands. The two first dined together on March 21, fittingly after all the Jekyll scenes had been completed and Tracy was now working exclusively as Hyde. He had taken a room at the Beverly Wilshire and was spending most weekends sailing with Jimmy Cagney. They dined again the following week, and again the week after. They celebrated his forty-first birthday on the set of the picture, with Myrna Loy and Mickey Rooney stopping by for cake. Louise took him to dinner that night at Ciro’s (with the Disneys) and then left the following day for New York to check up on Johnny.

  With Louise out of town, Tracy began dining with Bergman almost every night and continued to do so after the picture finished on April 12. Bergman, for her part, thought Tracy “wonderful” as a leading man and recorded as much in her diary. “I watched her relationship with Spencer on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” said John Houseman, a vice president for Selznick with responsibility for bringing Bergman along as an actress. “But that’s not uncommon in this business.”

  Fleming, whose work on the film was careful and studied, may have stirred the pot by investing the picture with a strong undercurrent of sexual tension, boldly Freudian in its exploration of the unconscious mind. The intensity of the scenes between Ivy and Hyde, their imagery and sadism, became the film’s most daring break with the versions of the past. (“So this is what has destroyed the world from the beginning, this poison, but it is a pleasant thing,” says Hyde.) With Bergman, Tracy was alternately solicitous and petty, conscious of giving her everything she needed as an actress, yet terrifically uncomfortable with the material and Fleming’s approach to it.

  By agreeing to play Hyde with makeup, Tracy surrendered his actor’s instinct to Fleming’s conception of the role, and it was never a satisfactory fit. Still, he managed Jekyll without the ramrod stiffness of Fredric March nor the matinee posings of John Barrymore. What he brought to the part was a profound normality that could be distorted and amplified as Hyde took control; the connection between the two sides of the character had never been as blatant. When first in the grip of his dark side, Jekyll examines himself in the mirror as a medical doctor might examine a patient. At once astonished and yet altogether fascinated, he says, “Can this be evil, then?” and bursts into a nervous laugh.

  Taut and unblinking, Hyde takes unrestrained glee in the languid terror of Bergman’s Ivy, all breathless and slow as if snared in a trap from which she can’t possibly escape. The design of the makeup wasn’t as outlandish as for previous incarnations, more an exaggeration of Tracy’s own familiar features, in keeping with the notion that it was Jekyll’s soul that turned black. The most obvious embellishment was a grotesque set of false teeth. Said Victor Saville, “We had to make six sets of teeth as the fangs fully developed—booming voice of Tracy from the stage, ‘Bring on the choppers!’ ”

  What Fleming and Mahin ultimately produced was a deft exercise in sadomasochism, something very different from the exploration Tracy had first imagined, a sort of tour of the psyche of an addict, the emotional need, the physical intolerance, the divide between the security of home and the debauchery of the street, the shame and self-loathing that withered the spirit, the mortal sin that, in the judgment of the church, killed the soul. Finding the intersection between actor and character—characters, in this instance, for he took to referring to himself as “we” around the set—was an abnormally draining process, fluid and imprecise and inordinately dependent upon Fleming’s oblique direction. “It isn’t often,” said Tracy, “that an actor is actually emotionally upset by a role. Mr. Hyde is one of the few I have played that took everything out of me.”

  The transformation scenes remained a problem, and as of April 7 they were yet to shoot the first time Jekyll takes the “dope” (as Saville, in a nod to Tracy’s concept, always referred to Jekyll’s mysterious potion). The final days were in some ways the toughest, as Hyde’s zeal begins to leave him, and all that is left is an unconstrained fury, bottled lightning in a corroded shell of a man. Tracy spent his days on the set barely speaking to others, his only respite his evenings alone with Bergman. It rained constantly during the course of the shoot, and his mood could not have been lifted by the release of Men of Boys Town, which came just days before the finish of the picture.

  Katherine Brown, Selznick’s story editor, came west with Bergman’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Pia, and Spence had all three to the ranch for a weekend. One night they went to King Vidor’s place for dinner and then, as Tracy later noted, “ditched the guests.” Their time together was rapidly drawing to a close: Bergman was preparing to do Anna Christie in Santa Barbara under John Houseman’s direction, while Tracy would be going east for the start of The Yearling. On his last day in town, a Monday, they played tennis in the morning, were apart in the afternoon, but together again for dinner, the tenth such occasion in the space of two weeks. The following day, Tracy boarded the Super Chief for Chicago, expecting to be gone for at least eight weeks.

  In mid-February Tracy lunched with Nicholas Schenck, the diminutive “general” of the Loew’s empire, and accepted the terms of a new deal that would expressly limit the number of pictures he could be required to make in a given year. The seven-year contract, which paid $5,000 a week, held the studio to three Tracy pictures in the first, third, fifth, and seventh years of the agreement,
and just two in the second, fourth, and sixth. In addition, Tracy would be permitted, under certain conditions, to return to the legitimate stage in each of the even years of the pact. His billing, which in the past had always been “first featured,” was now for the first time spelled out as “that of star or as that of a co-star with one or more other co-stars.” The new agreement, which was signed on April 15, 1941, retroactively took effect with the start of Jekyll and Hyde.2

  The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ tale of a boy’s life in inland Florida, was an immediate sensation when it was published by Scribner in March 1938. Sixty thousand copies were sold in the first month alone. M-G-M snapped up the picture rights for $30,000, and by September all the particulars were in place: Tracy would play Penny Baxter under Victor Fleming’s direction, with Gene Reynolds taking the role of Penny’s son, Jody. John Lee Mahin, who fell in love with the book and urged the studio to buy it, was at first to write the screenplay, but then Mahin clashed with producer Sidney Franklin, who said Mahin “didn’t realize the sensitivity of it” and had him put off the project.

  Franklin, who was producing the film version of Paul Osborn’s Broadway success On Borrowed Time, induced the playwright, who was new to screenwriting, to tackle The Yearling. Osborn, as it turned out, was an inspired choice, sensitive and knowing, and his script, completed in July 1940, was a masterful job. Second-unit work began the following January, as a full Technicolor crew, battling bugs and humidity, struggled to get shots on film that matched the fanciful compositions of California-based sketch artists.3 By the time Tracy arrived on May 2 at Ocala, where the company had leased a farm, some members of the dispirited crew had been on site nearly four months. Tracy and Fleming were worn out as well; having just finished Jekyll and Hyde, neither man had as much as a week’s vacation before nature mandated the start of The Yearling.