James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Tempers were short from the beginning. The principal problem was the yearling itself. Since most deer are born within a narrow May–June window and grow quickly, the studio’s animal handler, a former elephant trainer named George Emerson, conspired to have a small fleet of does timed to give birth in successive weeks so that Fleming and company would always have a newborn available. Breeding began in October 1940; Emerson presided over a small zoo on Lot 4 and gathered a veritable menagerie of trained animals for use in the film. When it came time for shooting to begin, they were all loaded into a pair of rail cars especially designed for the movement of livestock and transported to the central Florida location.

  In the two years since the film’s announcement, fifteen-year-old Gene Reynolds had grown too old to play Jody, and a hectic search was launched to find a replacement. Billy Grady hit nine cities in twelve days and shot tests of maybe thirty kids. It was, however, the first boy on his first stop in Atlanta who bore the most uncanny resemblance to the author’s conception of what Jody should look like, and twelve-year-old Gene Eckman was ultimately given the part. Imported to Culver City for training, Eckman was enrolled at the studio schoolhouse with instructions to spend as much time as possible with the deer being raised by Emerson on Lot 4. The boy was allowed to read the script but told not to memorize the dialogue. Josephine Dillon, Clark Gable’s first wife, was given the task of coaching him and moderating his thick Georgia accent.

  “We will not be able to take tests of clothes with Spencer Tracy and the boy until this coming Monday,” Sidney Franklin advised his brother Chet, who was directing the second-unit work in Florida, “which is unfortunate, but there is nothing we can do about it. He has been playing Mr. Hyde to such an extent that we’re afraid to put him with the boy for fear he would tear him to pieces. It seems to be affecting his disposition, so we have to leave the poor guy alone until he gets out of character which we hope will be Monday.”

  Fleming made some tests, simple process shots on a treadmill in which Tracy and Eckman were seen ambling down a forest pathway. Said Eckman, “I remember Victor Fleming told me, ‘Gene, stop looking at Spencer Tracy like a star. He’s your father.’ It was one of the first scenes I made with Tracy and he was very nice. I remember he sat down at that point to help me get over this awe of him … We worked it out so that we could carry on a conversation and I wouldn’t feel so out of place.”

  Though author Rawlings had sent him a warmly inscribed copy of The Yearling when he was first confirmed for the role, Tracy was physically wrong for the part of Penny Baxter and he knew it. In the book, Penny is described as having “grown to maturity no bigger than a boy. His feet were small, his shoulders narrow, his ribs and hips joined together in a continuous fragile framework.” Tracy, on the other hand, was broad and solid and weighed nearly two hundred pounds. Publicist Eddie Lawrence was assigned to accompany him to Ocala, and Lawrence caught up with him just as he was emerging from a projection room after running the tests. “Spence,” Lawrence began, “what a pleasure to do this journey with you—” Tracy cast a burning eye in Lawrence’s direction and, in a voice dripping with disgust, said, “Looks like I ATE the boy!” and stalked off.

  Casting for the part of Ma Baxter was contentious, Fleming being dead set against the popular favorite, British stage and film actress Flora Robson, who had the long, plain look the story demanded. “Fleming was violently pro-Nazi,” said Anne Revere, the New York–born actress who was instead given the part. “This was ’41, we hadn’t entered the war … and he was violently opposed to the English and anyone who was interfering with the boys over there. So he wouldn’t have her, he was against all English.” Revere had played a one-day bit as an aggrieved mother in Men of Boys Town and gained Tracy’s endorsement. Fleming initially told her she had the “wrong bony structure” for the role but tested her anyway. “When they put Spence in the part,” she said, “they tried to make him look small by getting everything else very big … They took me and duped me up; they put great platform shoes and a big bosom on me, and tried to make me look very large.”

  For Tracy, the experience was a replay of Northwest Passage, but in a climate not nearly as agreeable, the palmetto and scrub holding in the heat like a damp blanket. “He is, with the possible exception of Mr. Fleming, the hardest-working man on the 79,000-acre lot,” Sidney Whipple observed during a visit to the set for the New York World-Telegram. “He routs himself out of bed at 6 o’clock in the morning and thereafter is in the field. He worries and frets and deprecates his own talent. He rehearses his lines and practices for constant improvement in his action. He squats in the sun-baked cornfield for interminable conferences with director Fleming. He completely submerges himself in the character. When he disappears after a 12- or 14-hour workday, it is either to engage in further conferences with Mr. Fleming over the script and tomorrow’s shooting or, more rarely, to engage in a little fishing in nearby Lake George. This is his only recreation.”

  Fleming, even with the deliberate pace of production, wasn’t getting what he wanted. “I was only on the set twice,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings said in a letter to a friend,

  and I could tell Fleming wasn’t satisfied with Anne Revere or the boy. He was very nervous, taking sleeping tablets, etc., and felt he could handle things much better on the Hollywood sets. The wind registered on the sound track, not sounding like wind at all, etc. The boy, Gene Eckman, in looks and personality seemed quite all right, but the sound man had me listen in, and it was true, as he complained, that the boy was not enunciating and his lines were not registering. Tracy was bored and morose, Anne Revere is not Ma Baxter as I visualize her, but had a fine pioneer look and I thought she was all right, but she didn’t seem too “put out” emotionally in the one scene I saw her do.

  “I will be the first to say I was not ready for it,” Anne Revere acknowledged. “I hadn’t had enough experience in pictures. But I was not the cause of the debacle. First, they couldn’t understand the kid. And Spence would laugh and say, ‘Well, I’m only a hundred pounds overweight.’ The whole thing started to look absurd! So finally they packed it up and took it home.”

  Tracy commandeered a new Cadillac the production manager had purchased and, hiring a driver, proposed that he and Eddie Lawrence ride over to Jacksonville to catch a train. When they got to Jacksonville, Tracy told Lawrence he liked riding in the car and was in no hurry to get home. “You know, Eddie, American Airlines goes through St. Louis—we’ll go to St. Louis.” When Lawrence said that he was going to call the studio, Tracy said grandly, “Oh, forget the studio!”

  Said Lawrence, “He loved to needle you—a lot. So finally, going through Georgia, I saw this old fashioned praline factory, and they had big bags of pralines hanging down. And I knew Spence, so I gave the boy six bucks (or whatever it was) and I said, ‘You take Mr. Tracy over—’ and in the meantime I called the studio. They said, ‘Good God, where is Spencer?’ Because this was after [it was known that he had] periodic problems … I told ’em, ‘Look, I’ll keep in touch with you. There’s nothing else I can do. Tracy’s fine—he hasn’t had a drink.’ ”

  With Gene Eckman and Anne Revere in one of the few stills to emerge from the Florida location of The Yearling. (ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES)

  From Atlanta they moved on to Nashville, where they put up for the night at the Hermitage and, with M-G-M’s pull, got the Presidential Suite.

  And then the next morning Tracy said, “Look, we’ll go to Chicago.” I said, “All right, Spencer, we’ll go to Chicago.” So we went up through all that wonderful country…[and] we got to the Blackstone Hotel. And they scared me to death. The guy who took the bags said, “Oh, Mr. Tracy, I’m the one who bought you the booze, remember?” Oh boy, here we go, here we go, here we go. But we didn’t. I had the most wonderful four days with Spencer. He was warm, he was friendly, we walked a lot, went to the lake… Helen Hayes was in town, and he called her and we had dinner at the Ambassador East, and I remember sh
e kind of laid him out. He was talking about, oh, he wanted to go back into theatre. And she said, “Spencer. Sunday matinees, you know. And night shows? I don’t think you’d care for that.” But it was a pleasant time until finally Spence said, “I guess we’d better get home.”

  Tracy objected when Lawrence said that he would get him a compartment and take a roomette for himself. “No, no, no,” he said. “A compartment to sit up in, and a compartment to lie down in, and I want you to have a compartment. Three compartments.” As soon as they boarded the train, Lawrence, remembering his first encounter with his charge on the set of Riffraff, sought out the porter. “Look,” he said. “This compartment? You never, never knock on the door, never, never bother the occupant. Don’t even make up the beds.” That night on the Chief they ordered steaks, and Tracy, who marked three years of sobriety on May 1, made the only reference Lawrence ever heard to his alcoholism. “Eddie,” he said glumly, “I’d love to have a glass of beer. But you know if I have one beer I’m gone.”

  Back at the studio, there was a hot session over the fate of The Yearling. “How can I,” Fleming reportedly asked, “make a picture whose essence is that people love each other, when no one in the cast loves anyone or loves being down there or loves making the picture?” The next day, Eddie Mannix floated the possibility of King Vidor taking over as director, and Tracy, who was friendly with Vidor but not particularly close, made no objection to the idea.

  Tracy made another test with Gene Eckman on May 27, and Eckman, he acknowledged, was “better” than before. However, according to Sidney Franklin, the studio was “more or less turning against the boy and the mother” and the problem of quickly recasting the roles became the film’s undoing. In June, Tracy appeared in tests with actresses Frances Farmer and Ruth Hussey, both as possible replacements in the part of Ma Baxter, but the animals were growing and the time for returning to Florida had passed. The Yearling, for reasons of weather and landscape as well as wildlife, had to be filmed in the spring. The decision to postpone it was made on June 13, 1941. The studio’s total investment at the time was estimated at $500,000.

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had its first sneak before a paying audience on June 18, but Tracy simply noted the event in his datebook with a question mark. One thing was certain: the scenes in which Jekyll turned into Hyde didn’t work and would have to be redone. Editor Harold Kress recalled that when he was first assigned the film he asked, “What about his changes?” They had hired, he discovered, some thirty animators to put close-ups of Tracy on cells because someone had sold Victor Saville on the idea. “Well,” said cinematographer Joe Ruttenberg, “there were many tests made … thousands of dollars spent on making experiments with certain chemicals that certain lights would change, and it didn’t work out at all.”

  Tracy resisted playing Mr. Hyde with makeup and regretted doing so for the rest of his life. (SUSIE TRACY)

  On July 14 Tracy returned to the studio to confer on the effects for Jekyll and Hyde. With the press preview only a week away, the changes would have to be made quickly. “We dissolved,” said Ruttenberg of the ultimate—and most obvious—solution. “We sat him down, tied his shoulders and put his head in one of those old fashioned still photographer’s gadgets to keep his head steady, and we kept grinding one or two frames at a time as the make up was being changed … It took hours … same position … It was like doing an animated film, you know.” Tracy, said Ruttenberg, patiently submitted to the tedious process of filming all three of the on-camera transformation scenes over the course of two long days. “He was very uncomfortable and very cooperative. He realized how much trouble it was.”

  Tracy saw Ingrid Bergman the night he finished with the new transformation shots, unconvinced they would make any difference and still fretting over his performance. The trade showing took place in Los Angeles on July 21, and the early returns were a lot more positive than he expected. Daily Variety faulted the film’s length, suggesting that Fleming held his scenes “beyond their fullest realization” but nevertheless pronounced the picture exceptional in every respect. The Reporter called it a “master screen work” and praised the “magnificent” performances of both Tracy and Bergman. “Tracy wisely chooses to play Hyde with the smallest application of makeup, and his face, though radically altered with the assistance of Jack Dawn’s creations, is no longer a visage designed to haunt little children. Tracy’s interpretation reaches deeper into the characterization, and his playing makes it more memorable for not being merely another protean feat. His Jekyll and Hyde is the top portrayal of a top actor’s career.”

  Tracy was in San Francisco with Bergman when Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had its world premiere at New York’s Astor Theatre on Tuesday, August 12, 1941. The following day, he saw the notices in the metropolitan dailies and carefully listed the good versus the bad in his book. “Worst panning for an actor ever received?” he wrote. “The horrible notices of ‘Mr. Hyde.’ He! he! All bad for [the] picture business [in] New York.” To be sure, the reviews were generally slams, and Tracy took the brunt of them, Bergman and even Turner coming off considerably better. Ted Strauss, in the Times, said that Tracy’s portrait of Hyde was “not so much evil incarnate as it is the ham rampant.”

  Archer Winston in the Post chimed in by calling the role a “ham’s holiday,” and Cecelia Ager reported laughter at the Monday press screening in P.M. “They laugh,” she said. “It’s funny, watching Mr. Tracy’s sweet, strong face with the iron jaw that yet flexes with emotion take on the look of Frankenstein’s Karloff, Teddy Roosevelt, Victor MacLaglen, and finally Gargantua the Great, in orderly progression. (It’s just as funny when he does it backwards).” A scene of Hyde spitting grape seeds drew razzberries, and humorist Harry Hershfield, seated near Lee Mortimer of the Mirror, was heard to remark that he didn’t know Abbott and Costello had been “suddenly substituted for Spencer Tracy.” A few fell to the other side: Howard Barnes, Eileen Creelman, and Norton Mockridge all thought him superb, but the overall consensus was that Tracy’s Hyde was over the top, and it became a shame that would never leave him.

  Fortunately for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the public didn’t care what the critics thought, and the picture opened strong, the first Tracy picture to play the upscale Astor since Captains Courageous. Nicholas Schenck wired the ranch:

  WE ARE DOING THE BIGGEST BUSINESS OF ANY FILM THAT EVER PLAYED THE ASTOR. THIS INCLUDES “GONE WITH THE WIND,” “PYGMALION” AND “GOODBYE MR. CHIPS.” ALSO TODAY’S BUSINESS WHICH TOOK PLACE AFTER THE NOTICES IS BIGGER THAN YESTERDAYS WHICH WAS IN ADVANCE OF THE NOTICES PROVING THAT WE ARE A SUCCESS … THE PEOPLE THAT WE HAVE QUERIED COMING OUT OF THE THEATRE UNIFORMLY SAY THE PICTURE AND YOUR PERFORMANCE ARE EXCELLENT.

  Rain and cooler weather made the film strictly SRO at most performances, and it held to its remarkable pace in its second and third weeks as well. The studio, however, knew it had to do something about the laughs the picture drew, and Tracy’s datebook entry for August 15 reads as follows: “Studio cutting ‘Jekyll & Hyde’—but not en[ough]!” He was still holed up at the studio on the eighteenth (“Hydeing” as he put it) and the editing wasn’t completed until the night of the twenty-first, the improvements still nevertheless in time for the critical Labor Day weekend, the traditional start of the new season.

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde went on to broader critical acclaim elsewhere and worldwide billings in excess of $2 million. Tracy, however, could never reconcile the film’s success with the critical roundhousing he endured in New York. Perversely, he took to quoting the Abbott and Costello line whenever the subject of the film came up, erroneously attributing it to Cecelia Ager.

  Dick Mook told him that he didn’t seem himself at all, that since winning the Oscars he was only preoccupied with topping his own performances. Tracy didn’t agree with that, but he took a moment to formulate a response.

  “It wasn’t the awards,” he said finally. “Naturally I was flattered, but when I stop to think of some of the others who’ve received th
e awards, I don’t take them too seriously. Perhaps I do worry over my work, but it isn’t for fear I won’t get another award. It’s because I’m bothered about the poor parts I’m getting … I guess maybe I’m near the end of my rope. I’ve been in pictures almost twelve years now, and I’m not a juvenile anymore. Well, it was fun while it lasted and neither the stage, nor pictures, nor Hollywood owes me a thing. In fact, they’ve all been mighty good to me.”

  * * *

  1 Tracy’s title, for which he was awarded fifty dollars.

  2 Contrary to legend, Tracy’s M-G-M contract never called for top billing.

  3 Fleming had been so impressed with the continuity sketches of William Cameron Menzies on Gone With the Wind that he had key sequences for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde designed in the same manner. For The Yearling, he had the entire screenplay sketched in advance.

  CHAPTER 17

  Woman of the Year

  * * *

  I’m afraid you’re going to have trouble finding anything to photograph,” Louise Tracy told the photographer accompanying Dick Mook. “You see, we wanted a house that would be a home—a place that would be comfortable to live in rather than one that would look well in pictures but which would be depressingly formal. As a matter of fact, we have hardly any really good pieces.”

  There was the little tilt-top table that had belonged to Louise’s great-grandmother, as had the chairs on either side of it. And there was the sideboard—the old pine dresser with the new matching top—but everything else was contemporary maple, some pieces, like the dining set, built to order, while others came directly from the showroom floor. All serviceable, comfortable, but hardly showplace rare or extravagant by the standards of even small-town America. Louise wondered why any magazine would want to take pictures, much less publish them, but Mook was an old friend and had drawn an assignment for yet another intimate look at Spencer Tracy and his family.