James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  “Fine,” he said, and at that point in waltzed his date for the evening. Thau said, “Oh, do you know Dawn Addams?”

  Costume tests were made early in March, and Tracy’s captain’s outfit, with its knee-high boots, its braided coat, and its wide belt buckled tightly up around his belly, gave him a gnomelike appearance, rendering him shorter and rounder than he had ever before appeared on the screen, a sort of malevolent Mr. Pickwick of the high seas. Then he allowed them to darken his hair, which made him feel doubly ridiculous.

  As the film’s start date approached, Gene Tierney, to placate Tracy, was borrowed from 20th Century-Fox for a role that could have been played by almost anyone. Mollified, he permitted Dawn Addams to remain in the cast but drew the line at Peter Lawford, who had been set for the part of Gilbert Winslow, the affable scribe whose diary of the voyage forms the basis of a narration. “Lawford,” said Frank Tracy, “was never prepared and was kind of an airhead, I understand. And Spence did, literally, tell him, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ ”

  Ten days prior to the start of filming, Lawford was shunted to the lead in a romantic comedy called You for Me and the role of Winslow was filled by John Dehner, a radio commentator and sometime actor who had recently completed a part in Metro’s Scaramouche. Filming began on March 24, 1952, on M-G-M’s Joppa Square, a grouping of exterior sets on Lot 2 that stood in for medieval Europe in scores of pictures and incorporated the Prussian castle used in Conquest (1937).

  Since all the important action took place aboard the Mayflower, director Brown made the pricy decision to shoot the entire picture in sequence, keeping the whereabouts of the individual passengers and crew members straight and ensuring that the movements of the facsimile vessels matched the miniature work, which was extensive and taking place concurrent to the filming of the live action sequences. (The ship’s principal model was one-eighth the size of the one on Stage 30 and crewed by a set of mechanical dolls.) Some five months of second-unit footage had been shot off Honduras by Arnold Gillespie’s crew, covering all possible weather conditions and times of day for background plates.

  “Spence got me a part in Plymouth Adventure,” said Bill Self.

  I had nothing to do in it; Clarence Brown hated me, I’m sure, because he didn’t know what to do with me. I made five pictures with Spence, and in three of them I actually had a little something to do. In this one, I had nothing to do. One day, John was coming over to have lunch, and Spence came to me and said would I take John to lunch? I said, “I’d be happy to, but, you know, I’m in the first scene after lunch, doing nothing, but I’m in it.” And he said, “There’s not going to be a scene after lunch.” I said, “Oh?’ And he said, ’Yes. I have sent for Dore Schary. I’m getting out of this picture.” Now, most people would not “send” for the head of the studio, so I said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “Oh, I look like an idiot in this costume, they should have gotten Errol Flynn to begin with, it’s a boring story, I regret that I’m doing it, and I’m going to tell Schary I’m out. Take John to lunch. Don’t worry about the time you get back. I guarantee they won’t need you.” I said, “Fine.” So I went to lunch. I have no idea what happened at that meeting, but when I came back everybody had been ready to shoot the scene, so Spence was back in the movie. But the thing that impressed me and I remembered was that he didn’t go see Dore Schary, Dore Schary came to the set to see him.

  Miss G., pregnant with her second child, had retired, leaving Tracy with a new secretary. For one of the few times in his career, he seemed to be having trouble breaking character between takes, and he was as irascible as Captain Jones over the fifty-seven days needed to shoot the film. He took an immediate dislike to actor Lloyd Bridges, who, as Coppin, the master’s mate, was the captain’s henchman and the most prominent member of the ship’s crew. “I don’t know why he hated me,” Bridges said years later, shaking his head. Bill Self could recall Tracy referring to Bridges dismissively as “that radio actor,” as if someone who worked in radio was the lowest form of life. “Tries to do too much with his voice” was all Tracy would offer by way of explanation.

  “Oh,” said Reggie Callow, who was first assistant director on the show,

  he moaned and groaned all through the picture … When we went on the deck it was raining, and the actors had to stand with the water coming down. Tracy would say, “I’m an old, old man; I can’t do all these things.” So we had to baby him. He wasn’t an old man; he was in his fifties then, but he always kept saying what an old man he was. If you gave him a ten o’clock call, and you didn’t get to him until about 10:10, he’d raise hell. He’d say, “Why am I called in at ten and it’s now ten after ten?” So I had a great idea: I said give him an eleven o’clock call, and if at ten-thirty we realized we weren’t going to get to him on time, I’d say, “Mr. Brown, would you mind skipping the next setup and set up Tracy?” So at eleven Tracy would walk in; he was always ready. I’d say, “Spencer, we’re ready for you.” And he’d say, “Oh boy, you’re the greatest.” After he did the first shot, he wouldn’t mind sitting in his dressing room for the rest of the day without being called. But he had to get that first shot on time.

  Predictably, Tracy picked up a cold, which didn’t improve his disposition. The tension between Schary and the actor he professed to admire above all others only seemed to mount during the filming of Plymouth Adventure, and it came to a head on May 7, when an item in Mike Connolly’s column in the Hollywood Reporter suggested “some fur” would fly over an interview Schary had given Lloyd Shearer for Theatre Arts magazine “in which Shearer writes: ‘The old Mayer group of stellar personalities—Gable, Garson, Astaire, Pidgeon, Tracy—is just about washed up with today’s predominantly young movie-goers, and Schary must find replacements.’ ” Schary heard from “three or four sources” that Tracy was “steaming” after having seen the item in Connolly’s “Rambling Reporter” and he quickly drafted a letter denying that he ever said such a thing.

  “To have this nuisance take place at any time is a lamentable experience for me,” he wrote, “but I wanted to write to you and tell you, firstly, that it should not concern you as an artist; and, secondly, that it must not concern you in terms of annoyance at me. In these awful days of tension and quick tempers and strained relationships, I must ask you as a friend and as a man of good will to dismiss directing your anger against me and the studio, because you must know, if you think about it, Spence, that such an attitude does not in any way reflect our thinking about you. I have told you before—and I’ll tell you again—I love you.”

  Having just passed his fifty-second birthday—and with his repeated lamentations about being “an old, old man”—it may have been important for Tracy to prove himself with a younger woman. Kate was in London, Louise busy with the completion of the new building. The Kanins were in New York, Cukor was in Europe, Carroll and Dorothy on a cruise. Gene Tierney, at thirty-one, was becoming increasingly aware of her wild mood swings, a symptom she would eventually come to recognize as manic depression. She was seeing actor Kirk Douglas, and in his autobiography, Douglas described an endearingly quirky young woman who had a lovely overbite and insisted on his entering through a window when he came to see her at night. (“Maybe it was an aphrodisiac. I didn’t question it.”) Douglas made the mistake of telling her that he didn’t want to get married—a sentiment he innocently thought they shared—and it seems it was around this time that Tierney chose to involve herself with Tracy. Apart from being one of the world’s most beautiful women, she was a bright gal and a lively companion. “When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant,” she said. “I felt smarter. I had secrets. I saw things no one else could see. I could see evil in a toothbrush. I could see God in a light bulb.”

  The intensity of the relationship—at least from Tracy’s perspective—was evident when Tierney informed Kirk Douglas that she would be marrying her costar while production of Plymouth Adventure was still under way. “This all happened so quickly, I didn’
t believe it,” Douglas wrote. “She showed me a saccharine letter that he had written, telling her that he wanted to arrange things so that they could go off together. ‘Gene, I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘First, Spencer’s married. He’ll never get divorced. Second, he has a very intense relationship with Katharine Hepburn, and he’ll never give it up.’ ” Douglas, of course, couldn’t have known Tracy’s state of mind, nor Tierney’s exact motivation in telling him they would be wed. “I made the mistake of being blunt about not wanting to get married, and here was another man writing a flattering letter telling her what she wanted to hear.”

  All the while, Tracy was in touch with Hepburn by cable, advising her of plans to sail for England in June, possibly with the Kanins, possibly alone. The Clarence Browns and L. B. Mayer had taken him to dinner, and Old Man Mayer, he reported, was “absolutely insane” about the new house on St. Ives. When Kate sent reviews of her tour of the provinces, Spence wired back that they were wonderful, as were the initial notices for Pat and Mike. Tierney was committed to a second film for Metro, a Clark Gable picture to be shot in England, and since he was set to meet Kate in London as soon as he was cleared for travel, Tracy told Hedda Hopper he intended to heckle Gable from the sidelines as he played his romantic scenes with Tierney. Hopper commented: “Spence, who’s been making love to Gene in his picture, thinks the King needs some lessons,” pointedly adding that he would also be on hand for Hepburn’s London opening in The Millionairess.

  Tracy patched over his differences with Dore Schary and finished the movie, Brown boasting that they were able to make the entire movie on M-G-M’s Culver City lot, save just one scene of the landing of the first settlers, which was done on a beach near Oxnard. “I never heard him tell anyone in the cast what to do … I never saw him tell anybody anything,” Reggie Callow said of the director. “I don’t know how the hell he ever made the picture.”

  * * *

  1 Mankiewicz won three Academy Awards (if you count Best Picture) for All About Eve (1950).

  CHAPTER 26

  At Loose Ends

  * * *

  There is a fragment of black-and-white footage which constitutes the only filmed statement Spencer Tracy ever made on the subject of the clinic that bears his son’s name. He stands at a microphone, eyes downcast, a hand tugging nervously at his bow tie. Behind him are seated Dr. Rufus von Kleinschmid, Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron, and Goodwin Knight, lieutenant governor of the state of California. “This is certainly one occasion,” he begins hesitantly, “where I may truthfully say that as hard as I try, I can find no reason, no excuse to bring motion picture acting into this particular occasion. Because there is no motion picture actor, living or dead, absent or present, who had anything to do with the building of this clinic. It was built through the inspiration of John, I suppose, in the beginning, by his mother, and by her—” And at that point the film runs out.

  It was Saturday, May 3, 1952, and the clinic’s new $250,000 complex at 806 West Adams was in the process of being dedicated. A crowd of 250 jammed the new auditorium—really a multipurpose room—and more clustered at the doorways, straining to get a look. Louise, her hands calmly folded in front of her, said the clinic was “as much a movement as it is a place, and wherever you find parents gathered together and helping their children, you find John Tracy Clinic.” Then Spence, who had always determinedly remained in the background, was dragged into the meeting and spoke, as the Los Angeles Times reported, about a hundred words. According to the paper, the statement he begins in the film continued as follows: “—board of directors, and all of the others who have worked for it, the mothers and fathers of the children and all of the others who have helped.” He was loath to acknowledge the money he had personally given over the course of the previous decade, even though the clinic would not have survived its first five years without his support. “I didn’t do anything much,” he once told his cousin Jane. “I gave them a few bucks to get started.”

  The building drive, when initiated in 1946, expanded the clinic’s reach and established a broader fund-raising network than Louise had ever thought possible. In 1950, she was able to announce the purchase of one and a half acres of land near the USC campus after a substantial bequest from the estate of William Melvin Davey. And while the clinic was no longer dependent upon Spence’s M-G-M income for its survival, he still gave $20,000 to $30,000 a year, a measure of redemption for which he was truly grateful. “This method of getting deaf children mainstreamed and educated early is really something new that Louise is doing,” he said proudly, “and it is remarkable. It is ground-breaking.”

  He was in the midst of Plymouth Adventure and needed a reminder as to why he sometimes did the things he did on screen. Could he have gone freelance? Undoubtedly. Could he have exercised greater control over the pictures he made? Absolutely. But could he have managed the guaranteed income that made his support of the clinic possible? Not quite so likely—at least not so that he could see. Metro paid him an annual salary of $300,000. To make that kind of money as an independent, he’d have to make two or three pictures a year—more than he was currently averaging—and when he laid off, there would be nothing at all coming in. Further, he really didn’t know what he could ask on the open market and tended to devalue his own worth in comparison to others.

  At the dedication of John Tracy Clinic’s new Adams Boulevard complex with longtime wardrobe man Larry Keethe and daughter Susie Tracy. (SUSIE TRACY)

  “Katharine Hepburn’s best-kept secret will join her in London soon.” It was Dorothy Kilgallen’s lead item on June 5, 1952, and, of course, Kilgallen was correct as far as Tracy’s intent was concerned. He had a date to fly east with Clarence Brown on the eighteenth and was sure of making a June 20 sailing of the S.S. America (on which Larry Weingarten had also booked passage). He declared on his passport application he would be gone four months, visiting England, France, Italy, and Sweden “for the combined purpose of business and pleasure” and told Louella Parsons he intended to rent a car and tour the continent. By the time he actually did set sail, however, he was on the Queen Elizabeth, not the America, it was July 1, not June 20, and his plan was to stay for no more than a month. On the ship were Walt Disney and his family, and Lewis W. Douglas and his wife Peg. Tracy, in a jocular mood, joined the Disneys one night for drinks. “Dad was kidding him about some woman who was chasing him all over the ship,” Diane Disney, who was eighteen at the time, remembered. “At one point, he turned to me and started telling me about Susie and all the things she was doing. He was obviously very proud of her.”

  Tracy and the Douglases had met in England, where he was making Edward, My Son, and Lew was U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Since leaving the post in 1950, Douglas, an avid sportsman, had served as chairman of the Mutual Life Insurance Company. Douglas told the Herald Tribune he would do some trout fishing along the Test River near Southampton and see a number of old friends, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Tracy added that he and the Douglases “might visit Norway together.”

  In London Kate was a hit in The Millionairess—more so than anyone expected—and all Tracy and Weingarten could manage was standing room. Gene Tierney was in town, making Clarence Brown’s picture with Gable, but Tracy spent a good deal more time with the actress’ mother, Belle, than with Tierney herself. “My mother thought he was the most tormented man she had ever met,” Tierney wrote of Tracy in her autobiography. “They had lengthy conversations about religion. She had returned to her Christian Science beliefs and could talk about them in an almost mystical way … A few times he asked me to lunch or dinner. He was relieved that my mother came along. These dates were perfectly respectable, but Tracy was watching the door in case Katharine Hepburn came in.”

  He was also stirring up picture material, having become enthused with Nobel laureate Pär Lagerkvist’s novel Barabbas, the story of the thief spared crucifixion instead of Christ. The character’s struggle to understand the nature of Jesus
, his skepticism and his yearning to believe, held special resonance for Tracy, and he sent Dore Schary a script derived from the book, eager for his reaction. Schary came back almost immediately, saying he believed the script fell “far short” of a successful project for American audiences. “Believe it excessively brutal and in many instances highly censorable,” Schary cabled. “Further feel that it is confusing in some aspects and that the final point will be remote to audiences at large.” Bert Allenberg of the William Morris office communicated Tracy’s desire to do it as an independent venture, and Schary offered to arrange a meeting with Nick Schenck to discuss the matter.1

  Tracy also went to bat for Garson Kanin, who had written a comedy-drama called A Flight to the Islands. Based on a story by Elizabeth Enright, it offered a part for Tracy that was not unlike Stanley Banks, a put-upon family man escaping for a day to another town, another life. He gets a job, rents a room, applies for piano lessons, meets a girl and learns her story. Schary was enthusiastic at first, but then gave the script to Larry Weingarten, who didn’t care for it at all, and to John Houseman, who said that he wasn’t interested in doing it either. Deciding it wasn’t material that could easily be dramatized, the production chief resisted an outright purchase, agreeing instead to an option deal which took months to settle.

  Schary had just announced a slate of eighty-three features either completed, shooting, or in development, fifty-three of which were to be finished by January 1, 1954. It was an absurd number of films given the economic realities of the day, and he seemed overwhelmed by the sheer volume of product. “Unable to understand reply sent me [by] Schary ten days ago,” Tracy wired Kanin in New York. “Stated all cleared, however confusion, slowness, and unawareness. You should understand by now plans indefinite. May slip from tightrope here any moment.”