James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Work began in June 1946, with Louise playing herself, advising the young mother of a deaf baby girl that her child isn’t ready yet for nursery school and that, besides, there is only room for twenty children in the program. However, Louise continues, “We have room for you now, Mrs. Henry.”

  The storyline closely paralleled Louise’s own experience as a parent, the baby sleeping late, the mother trying to rouse her in her crib and then taking her to the doctor for an examination. Spence, of course, spoke the narration, and when he laments that the young Mrs. Henry will never hear her daughter say “Mother,” it mirrors his own comment from some twenty-two years earlier when he first learned that he himself was the parent of a deaf child.

  Modest but professional, Listening Eyes did an exceptional job of explaining the clinic and its role in the lives of families with deaf and hearing-impaired children, and in the end Mrs. Henry “experiences a moment never to be forgotten” when, for the first time, little Betsy Henry does indeed form the word “Mother.”

  The crowd at the Egyptian that night was composed mostly of industry types, Lana Turner on the arm of her future husband, millionaire socialite Henry J. “Bob” Topping, Jr., Louella Parsons holding court in the lobby, a generous representation of Metro brass and contract players, many fascinated at the prospect of seeing the Tracy family together onstage and hearing from a woman who had been out of the Hollywood swim for so long there were some people who assumed she was dead.

  “Mr. Tracy never talked about his family,” said Emily Torchia, who handled publicity for the event. “It was very hard for him to talk about John. I’ll never forget that night. He got up and made the most moving speech, how proud he was of John, how proud he was of Louise’s work. It was the hardest thing for him to do, and he did it. It was a beautiful speech. Everyone was there, and there wasn’t a dry eye. I’ve never, never forgotten it. It was one of the most impressive moments of my career.”

  * * *

  1 Released as Song of Love (1947).

  CHAPTER 23

  Adam’s Rib

  * * *

  When they finished State of the Union on December 6, 1947, both Tracy and Hepburn were eager to return east, Kate to see her family and caucus with Helburn and Langner, Spence to pursue a production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, also for the Theatre Guild. Working with O’Neill had been a long-held ambition, Tracy having initially been paired with the ailing playwright in 1943 when only revivals were on the table. Subsequently, O’Neill gave the Guild permission to stage The Iceman Cometh, the first new play of his to hit Broadway in twelve years, with A Moon for the Misbegotten and A Touch of the Poet to follow. Tracy had served notice on M-G-M in May, while deep in the midst of Cass Timberlane, that he intended to take a twelve-week leave of absence at the end of the year to do the play. Coupled with the six-week vacation due him upon the completion of every picture he made for the studio, he would have a total of eighteen weeks to rehearse and perform the show, with perhaps more time to be negotiated if all went exceptionally well.

  Iceman was not the critical nor commercial success everyone had hoped it would be, and when Moon for the Misbegotten encountered casting and censorship problems on the road, O’Neill asked that it be withdrawn until his health improved and that Touch of the Poet be similarly postponed. Capra held his cast in Los Angeles over Christmas as he supervised the editing of State of the Union and determined if any retakes would be necessary, an unusually lengthy process due to the timeliness of the material. (He had a newspaperman on retainer—Bill Henry of the L.A. Times—whose sole job it was to inject contemporary political references into the dialogue and make sure nothing in the script was suddenly rendered obsolete by national or world events.) Growing more impatient by the day, Tracy was granted the start of his vacation on December 29, with the possibility that he could still be recalled at the end of six weeks, pursuant to the terms of his contract.

  Still holding out hope the O’Neill play would somehow free up, he went off to Arizona to paint and ponder his future as an actor, as he would be turning fifty just as his current contract would be coming up for renewal. Langner offered another play, a consolation that lacked a woman’s part large enough for Kate, but Tracy already had mastered the self-loathing Melody, contradictory and full of bluster, and was as fixated on Poet as he had been on nothing else since Rugged Path. “He read that play to me several times,” Hepburn remembered. “O’Neill didn’t like stars. And he never did ask him to do it. Which, I think, is a great pity, because I think Spencer understood that character.” Langner remained convinced that if he could just arrange a meeting between Tracy and O’Neill, all doubts about the rightness of the package would be swept away.

  In Culver City, Capra was hoping to preview State of the Union the first week in February, which would enable him to serve notice for retakes just short of the February 8 cutoff date. Dubbing stretched on, however, and the initial preview got pushed back a week, prompting Sam Briskin to ask Tracy, through Leo Morrison, for a week’s extension on the deadline—something Tracy proved unwilling to grant. Lighting a fire under Capra, he said Liberty would have to pay him a daily retainer to go beyond the contractual notification period, knowing the company had come in some $450,000 under budget. Capra, as it turned out, didn’t need him after all, and on February 9, 1948, Eddie Knopf spoke to Tracy in Palm Springs and asked him to travel to London to see Robert Morley in Morley’s and Noel Langley’s hit play Edward, My Son, and, while there, to make some background shots for the picture version, which Knopf said he expected to start by the end of March.

  Tracy, unhappy to be assigned a part so resolutely British, said at first that he would go to England but not make any location shots without being paid for them. Eddie Mannix, concerned he might be angling to break his contract, gave orders that Tracy was not to be required under any circumstances to make the shots, completely sidestepping the issue of whether or not he should have been given the picture to begin with.

  Tapped for Arnold Holt, a ruthless, class-obsessed businessman who alternately charms and throttles his way from shopkeeper to peer of the realm, Tracy was seemingly the only star on the M-G-M roster who could reasonably be expected to handle the role—despite his refusal to attempt an accent. Having paid $160,000 for the screen rights, the studio could ill afford to lose him. Knopf engaged Donald Ogden Stewart to write the screenplay, and it was Stewart who suggested making the character Canadian, which solved the accent problem without making Tracy any happier. George Cukor’s assignment as director was a further attempt at mollification.

  On February 18, Tracy dutifully set out for New York in the company of Knopf, his wife Mildred, and Cukor, but then said that he would not see the play for fear he’d be unduly influenced by Morley’s lusty performance. He thought Morley a wonderful actor, witty and florid, but as unlike himself as any actor could be. Playing a part that Morley had specifically written to be played by Morley would be little short of ridiculous, and playing it straight would naturally rob it of its leavening strokes of finish and humor. Moreover, the part called to mind Tracy’s only other attempt at a British character, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and the derision it engendered. “I know Spence so well,” Louella Parsons commented, “and he thinks he’s going [to England] now, but will he actually go when the time comes? He’s not much on traveling too far from the home base.”

  Louella, of course, was right. Spence joined Kate in New York on February 22 and declared he was staying put, leaving Cukor and the Knopfs to travel on without him. There was still some hope that he could meet Eugene O’Neill and loosen up Touch of the Poet for a fall production, but the playwright had been hospitalized with a shoulder fracture and, although he was receiving visitors, he deflected a meeting with Tracy. Privately, O’Neill told Lawrence Langner, “I don’t believe I could live through a production.”

  Suddenly concerned he had produced no income in the new year, Tracy had Leo Morrison advise M-G-M that he would report back to the st
udio on April 1 and ask that his salary for the rest of the year be prorated accordingly. He was back in Los Angeles by March 21, when he met with Cukor and Don Stewart to begin work on the script. Metro was planning a wide opening for State of the Union, promising “red hot, up-to-the-minute entertainment” so timely that it would be hitting hundreds of screens simultaneously, one of “the greatest mass bookings in America’s top theaters that has ever been undertaken in the history of our business.” Indeed, the film had its world premiere in Washington on April 7, 1948, Capra seated alongside Harry S. Truman, who was mulling a run for the office he had ascended to with the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

  “President Truman, according to those who watched closely—as presidential reactions always get watched—has a habit, much like a small boy watching a chase sequence, of lifting himself slightly from his seat when what he sees on the screen excites and interests him,” said Charles Alldredge, the assistant secretary of the interior. “That’s how he reacted to the story of a good man presidential candidate who almost lost himself and finally won out over himself and the bosses by appealing frankly to the people.” Truman requested a print for the presidential yacht, then ordered yet another showing at the White House, after which he announced at a capital dinner: “There will be a Democrat in the White House in 1949, and you’re looking at him!”

  Emboldened, Capra hit the promotional trail, knowing that neither Tracy nor Hepburn could be counted upon to give the picture much in the way of support. Yet, when the film opened at Radio City on April 22, it was the two principal stars who garnered the lion’s share of the press, Bosley Crowther finding Tracy “a much more attractive-looking candidate than anyone who has yet declared” and Kate giving “every assurance of making the most stylish First Lady we’ve had in years.” Warmly greeted in nearly all critical corners, the movie performed well at the box office, though not quite up to expectations and nowhere near the record run of I Remember Mama, which had just preceded it at the Music Hall.

  With topicality as its primary selling point, State of the Union played off quickly, posting domestic rentals in the range of $3.5 million—not bad, but lower than for Cass Timberlane, which demonstrated much greater appeal among women and had the added help of a best-selling book as its basis. It disappeared by the end of the year, never to be reissued nor widely shown on television.

  Decades later, when Ronald Reagan exceeded his allotted time at a New Hampshire debate, the moderator ordered his microphone cut off. “I paid for this microphone!” Reagan famously stormed in protest. So obscure by then was State of the Union that practically no one recognized it as one of Tracy’s lines from the picture.

  In terms of publicity, Spencer Tracy generally did less to promote his movies than any star since Garbo—initially to cover his drinking, later because Kate herself had such an aversion to the press. (Her father disapproved of personal publicity of any kind, or anything else, for that matter, that smacked of “showing off.”) Gradually, Howard Strickling tightened access to the point where he was not talking to journalists at all. “They used to say, ‘He’s a prick and he doesn’t want to see anybody,’ ” Tracy explained. “They were partly right.”

  The only promotional efforts he made over the spring of 1948 were in support of John Tracy Clinic, which had officially been in operation now for five years. He broke his radio embargo to appear on Louella Parsons’ ABC broadcast and made himself available for photos when Sophie Tucker turned over a $1,000 check to the clinic’s building fund. The premiere of Cass Timberlane netted another $10,000 for the fund, and it soon got so he was better known around the lot for the clinic than for the pictures he was making.

  “If somebody approached him,” said June Caldwell, Eddie Mannix’s secretary, “and had a problem with a child in the family, or if anyone needed help from the clinic, he was very sympathetic to that and he would make arrangements … I know of incidences [where people who] were working around the studio went down to the set and waited until he got a chance to talk to them, and he’d say, ‘Certainly,’ and he would give them a name and he would be helpful.”

  With the expansion of the clinic’s board to eighteen members it was no longer practical to hold meetings at the ranch. When meetings shifted to the Biltmore downtown, Tracy started looking for a graceful exit. “We’d have a dinner meeting,” Louise said. “One of the things that bothered him was that everybody had to pay for their own dinner. He thought that was absurd. He wouldn’t come to one and not pay for the whole dinner. He invited them and he said, ‘This is on me.’ He couldn’t see anybody else paying money for something that he would be involved in. I said, ‘They’re paying for their own.’ He said, ‘I know, but they shouldn’t have to do that.’ ”

  Alathena Smith, the clinic’s staff psychologist, first came upon him one day by chance. He and John had pulled up in front of the main cottage in John’s station wagon, and it was the young man driving that first caught her notice, not his famous parent. “I was very attracted to him,” she said of John. “I observed his limping and I knew before he rounded the station wagon that this was a well-raised young man, taught to be polite.” Instantly, she could sense the gulf between father and son, the inability of John to communicate with his dad on anything more than a superficial level. “The agony in his father’s eyes [tore] my heart to pieces … to see a man not able to express feelings, deep feelings that you can’t express…[They were only] on the cottage property for a moment, and all I can tell you is my antennae picked up agony, and the special kind of agony that I associate with not being able to get across and express yourself openly with warmth. I’d seen it before, knew about it … I think this was the trouble—the inability to communicate feelings [on the part of] both of them.”

  In May, word went around town that Dick Mook had died of a stroke in Memphis at the age of fifty-three. Five days later, Father Flanagan suffered a fatal heart attack while in Europe on a tour of Austria and Germany. Tracy was hit hard by the sudden death of a man so closely aligned with him in the public mind, furiously pacing the floor and craving a drink as at no other time in the three years since his last. “I watched my father walk the floor and bite his lips until they bled to keep from drinking,” he had told his cousin Jane, “and I know what he went through.” And now, alone with his aunt Jenny, he paced and he chewed, he paced and he chewed. “I’m not going to be like my father,” he said with his voice cracking, tears welling in his eyes, blood trickling down his chin. “I’m not. I’m going to lick it!”

  A wire went out to Patrick Norton, Monsignor Flanagan’s assistant, who was in the process of returning to Boys Town the body of its founder:

  THERE IS NOT MUCH I CAN SAY, OTHER THAN TO EXTEND MY DEEP DEEP SYMPATHY TO THE BOYS IN THEIR GREAT LOSS. THE MEMORY OF A MAN AS GREAT AS HE WAS WILL HELP SUSTAIN THEM IN THEIR SORROW FOR HE WAS TRULY A FINE A[ND] GOOD MAN.

  Mercifully, Tracy was set to leave town again within a few days. M-G-M had revived a plan to make pictures at the former Amalgamated Studios, Borehamwood, under a new Anglo-U.S. films agreement that would enable American producers to use unremittable sterling for quota-qualifying productions.1 For Edward, My Son, the scheme meant that Tracy would be surrounded by an all-British cast, headed by the Scottish-born actress Deborah Kerr. Of the Americans involved, there would be only himself, Knopf, Cukor, and Donald Ogden Stewart. He and Kerr left for London aboard the H.M.S. Queen Mary on May 22, Howard Strickling and his wife Gail accompanying them at Tracy’s request.

  “I’ve come to work,” he told a dockside reporter upon his arrival, dispensing with the usual how-nice-it-is-to-be-here routine. “My new picture, Edward, My Son, should take ten or twelve weeks to make. If they get it over in eight weeks, I’ll be glad. The idea is to get in and get out fast. There should be no hanging around.” Asked the dreaded question about acting and his approach to it, he creased his brow, brick-red from the sun, and ran his tongue along his teeth, jutting his lower lip out in an expression of near pain. “You s
hould know all about acting,” he replied. “Britain has that side of the business sewn up. In America we have no actors to touch Olivier, Richardson, and Donat. Olivier is way out in front of anything we can produce. That is the tragedy of Hollywood. We are out of touch with the theatre and we have no real actors now. Our young boys lack theatre training.”

  He dismissed his alleged naturalness as an “instinct for the stage” and said that he had never really had to struggle to get on. “If you really want to know, it is just that I try no tricks. No profile. No ‘great lover’ act. I could never get by with things like that. I just project myself as I am—plain, trying to be honest. I am a guy who likes reading and an old man’s game of tennis. I leave the frills to the youngsters.”

  Metro had poured £1 million into capital improvements at Elstree (as the studios were now known), making it the largest and most modern production facility in all of Great Britain. Portions were still under construction when Tracy arrived on the scene, and war-era Romney huts still dotted the property. Accepting his fate with a kind of grand resignation, he commenced filming there on June 9, the lone American in a cast of classically trained actors that included Ian Hunter, Mervyn Johns, Felix Aylmer, Ernest Jay, and, from the play’s West End production, Leureen MacGrath. The pretense of the character’s being Canadian instead of English fooled no one, and the changing of his name from “Holt” to “Boult” (to avoid confusion with Sir Herbert Holt, the onetime chairman of the Royal Bank of Canada) did nothing to bolster Tracy’s own perceived legitimacy in the role. “If he sometimes appeared grumpy,” said Deborah Kerr, “it was because he was not altogether happy about himself as Boult.”