It was an admirable stance in the spring of 1952, but by the following summer all bets were off, and even 3-D was no longer the grind house novelty it had been just a few months earlier. The Actress drew solid trade notices, Variety praising its “excellent word-of-mouth values,” and the film opened well at New York’s Trans-Lux 60th Street, a former newsreel emporium usually given over to British fare like The Holly and the Ivy and Tight Little Island. The bigger Broadway theaters were showcasing the bigger M-G-M releases—Mogambo, Torch Song, Lili, Julius Caesar. Tracy’s performance was warmly received, Bosley Crowther declaring it worthy of yet another Academy Award. “For the vitality that Mr. Tracy puts into this role of a poor but earnest father who is confused because his little girl is determined to become an actress is worth a bottle of vitamin pills. The sense that he gives of a good man, harassed with making ends meet and with all the other vague frustrations to which the domesticated male is heir, yapping about his difficulties but bearing his burdens honorably, is such as to give other humans the spirit and humor to bear their own.”
The Actress left the Trans-Lux after a respectable eight-week engagement, scarcely noticed amid the hoopla accompanying a record run for The Robe, which offered Jean Simmons in color and widescreen at the nearby Roxy. Left to fend for itself in an increasingly hostile market, the picture ended up posting a loss of nearly $1 million—a horrendous showing for a star of Tracy’s caliber. Weingarten felt the film lacked a happy ending and had wanted to “frame” the story with the successful Ruth in a wraparound, an idea Cukor opposed.
As Clinton Jones, flanked by Jean Simmons and Teresa Wright in The Actress, the film version of Ruth Gordon’s autobiographical play Years Ago. (SUSIE TRACY)
“Failure,” said Dore Schary, “is a more common occurrence than success, and most times, the reasons for failure are apparent—so you swallow and go on to the next effort. But The Actress was beautifully played, written, and directed, and was one of those failures that depress you. It’s like pitching a no-hitter but losing one to zero.”
Tracy arrived back in New York aboard the Queen Elizabeth on September 29, 1953, Hepburn following by air the next day. M-G-M had agreed to count The Old Man and the Sea as one of the pictures on Tracy’s contract, loaning him, in effect, to himself for a straight payment of $150,000. Production was set to begin in February 1954, provided Tracy could complete another picture for Metro in the interim. He had, however, rejected a screenplay for Bad Day at Honda, forcing a complete rewrite. And Digby, a sort of Flight to the Islands set in Scotland, wouldn’t be ready for production until the completion of Old Man. When 20th Century-Fox put in for him in October 1953, Tracy’s schedule was not only clear but, for once, he was eager to work.
In August, as Tracy was ailing in the south of France, Darryl Zanuck was spinning story ideas. At hand was a draft screenplay, a new version of House of Strangers set in the old west. At Sol Siegel’s behest, Richard Murphy had taken Philip Yordan’s screenplay for the earlier picture, which had been directed by Joe Mankiewicz, and transposed it with such fidelity that Zanuck feared they had “adhered too closely to some of the elements that made the original picture a box office disappointment even though it was a fine picture.”
A downbeat tale of family feuds and hatreds, its principal motivations were money and lust, things that, in Zanuck’s estimation, always produced “a sort of sickening feeling in the pit of the stomach.” To take the curse off it all, he proposed a racial divide: three older sons against a younger brother by a different mother—an Indian. “The boys are now only half brothers. Joe [the youngest] is only half-caste. Matt [the father] is the squaw man … I can see only Spencer Tracy as Matt. With contact lenses, Jeffrey Hunter would make a wonderful Joe. He is young and he has guts and he has high cheekbones. The other three brothers should be on the Irish side like Tracy.”
The deal for Broken Lance was set in mid-November, bringing Metro $250,000 for ten weeks. Astonished at the price, Tracy exacted $40,000 of the amount as a donation for the clinic. He then lay low in Los Angeles, speaking with Cukor mostly by telephone and scarcely communicating at all with the Kanins, who, by then, were situated in England. He was back in New York with Hepburn when the loan to Fox was announced to the press, the two of them spotted as they crept into a performance of Teahouse of the August Moon. Kate had committed to filming The Millionairess in England with Preston Sturges adapting and directing. It would put her in London at just about the time Zanuck’s western was set to begin, but with the Hemingway picture now delayed a year—until Tracy had finished out his M-G-M contract—they would likely have the summer together in Europe.
By Christmas, Tracy was in Palm Springs, polishing his riding skills and doing his best to drop some weight. Responding to a chatty New Year’s letter from the Kanins, he wired:
STARTED NEW YEAR RIGHT. WHOOPING COUGH. NOW DESERT TRY TO LEARN WHICH END HORSE TAKE MY PLACE. AS CUKOR QUOTE OLE WESTERN STAR ON TRAIL TO BARN UNQUOTE.
He was back in Los Angeles when Emily Torchia made a seemingly impossible bid for his attendance at the Golden Globes dinner, where he was a likely win as Best Actor for The Actress.
“Of course I’m not going,” he said gruffly.
“It’s very important,” she pleaded.
“I know. Howard Strickling told you to come down here and ask me.” He thought a moment. “Okay, I’ll go. IF you get yourself a date. And you get me a date … with Grace Kelly.”
He knew Clark Gable had been squiring the twenty-four-year-old actress around London. Having been nominated herself as Best Supporting Actress for Mogambo, Kelly was a good sport about it and went, though she declined Tracy’s invitation to go out for a drink afterward.1 “But he got so much pleasure out of teasing Clark Gable,” said Torchia. “ ‘I had a date with Grace Kelly!’ ”
That previous August, Tracy and Gable had reconnected in Paris, having not seen each other in nearly a year. They did the town, Tracy uncaring, for once, at the prospect of being seen in public. There was great camaraderie between them, and Gable had already made the decision not to re-sign with Metro, his well-known antipathy for Dore Schary being only one of the reasons. (“As far as M-G-M is concerned,” said Clarence Brown, “Dore Schary was the beginning of the end.”) The studio had offered Gable a new two-year contract but refused his demand for a percentage of the profits on his future pictures, something virtually all top-tier freelancers were getting. He resented never having gotten a piece of Gone With the Wind, which had grossed nearly $100 million, and was mad at the studio’s refusal to give him a 16mm print of the picture.
Tracy escorted Grace Kelly to the Golden Globes dinner in Santa Monica, 1954, but the actress declined an invitation to drinks afterward. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
“He was disgusted, upset, and angry,” said Howard Strickling, “and he wanted no part of M-G-M ever again.” Gable’s final day on the lot, when he posed for a few stills and cleaned out the remaining items in his dressing room (one of which was a framed Parnell poster), came on March 2, 1954. When he drove through the back gate for the last time, having firmly declined the offer of a farewell party, Tracy was on location near the Arizona border town of Nogales, making his first scenes for Broken Lance.
Zanuck had committed to the picture in a big way, giving it an all-star cast, a $2 million budget, and the full CinemaScope treatment. Originally paired opposite Tracy on a seven-week guarantee was Dolores Del Rio, returning to the American screen after an absence of twelve years. Richard Widmark was cast as the eldest of the Devereaux sons, Hugh O’Brien and Earl Holliman his younger brothers. And filling the roles of the young lovers in the film were Fox contract players Robert Wagner and Jean Peters. Wagner, in particular, was gaining in popularity, having appeared in a string of increasingly prominent pictures, the latest of which, Henry Hathaway’s $3 million production of Prince Valiant, was set for an April release.
“He saw me in a picture I did called Beneath the 12-Mile Reef,” Wagner recalled, “and
said, ‘This kid would be great.’ ” Tracy wanted him for the role of Joe, the half-breed son of Matt and Señora Devereaux originally envisioned by Zanuck as going to Jeffrey Hunter. Wagner shook Tracy’s hand at the Golden Globes, thanking him for the boost and telling him how much he was looking forward to being in the picture.
“Well, I am too, son,” Tracy said.
“The first time I ever saw him,” Wagner continued,
was at Riviera, where he got hurt once playing polo. I was just a kid, and he got hit with the ball or something. I remember he was on the grass and all these guys were out there, and then he got up and got back on the horse and I thought, “Wow, is that great!”
I had a resistance to my being in the movies from my father, you know. He didn’t want me to go into the movie business. So when Spence saw me in this movie and asked me to be in Broken Lance with him, it was great because he put his arm around me and he said, “You can really go someplace.” And I was one of a hundred and fifty good-looking young guys with a lot of hair in Hollywood.
As a boy, Wagner had lived at the Bel Air Country Club, where he occasionally caddied for Clark Gable. “He was always a terrific guy. I told him I got a job with Spence: ‘Jesus, can you imagine? I am going to do a movie with Spencer Tracy.’ He said to me, ‘Grab a prop and keep moving, kid.’ ”
Counting unbilled bits, Wagner had appeared in twelve motion pictures by the time of Broken Lance and thought he knew something of screen acting.
The first scene I had with Spence, we were on location in Arizona and we had to ride up into this sequence. I don’t remember what the dialogue was, but he said something like, “Were they here? Where did they go?” This guy says, “They went down that way.” And Spence says, “Did you hear that?” And I say, “Yeah, they went that way I guess.”
He said, “What? What was that? Can you bring it up a little next time so I can hear the cue?” And we ride back the next time and I bring it up a little. [Afterward,] I said, “Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t think there were very many people who could underplay you.”
He said, “Come here.” And he’d get that sort of face. “Come here!” He had this portable dressing room, and [we went inside and he] shut the door and sat down. He said, “Do you really think you could underplay me? Do you really think you could? Because you could never underplay me. That is not the point. What are you thinking about that for? Why would you be thinking that you could underplay me? Why don’t you think about playing the scene and being honest in it and bringing something of yourself to it and taking all this other stuff out of the way? Why don’t you think about that instead of being a smartass son of a bitch and trying to underplay me?”
I could see he was really starting to get hot. I said, “Yes sir, Mr. Tracy. You are absolutely right, and thank you very much.” He said, “Kid, get out of here!” But the fact that he took the time to do that was a big thing.
Directing Broken Lance was Edward Dmytryk, a former cutter who had graduated from formula product at Paramount to the first wave of film noir at RKO. Known as one of the Hollywood Ten, Dmytryk had rebuilt his career after a stretch in prison (and a controversial appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee) with a series of pictures for producer Stanley Kramer, the last of which, The Caine Mutiny, was still awaiting release. For Broken Lance, Dmytryk peopled the Santa Cruz Valley with a cast and crew numbering 130 individuals, along with forty steers and twelve unusually spirited horses.
Tracy and Dmytryk got on famously, in part because the director recognized the level of effort his fifty-three-year-old star was putting into his work. “He’d agonize over everything. He was searching for the character’s key.” Finding himself in a character was never easy for Tracy, and a long drive at the end of a workday gave him time to ponder the seemingly endless problem of inhabiting another man’s skin. For accommodations, Tracy chose to alternate between the Arizona Inn in Tucson, seventy miles from where the Broken Lance company was based, and Pantano Ranch, Lew Douglas’ 100,000-acre spread some thirty miles north at Sonoita.
Dmytryk knew that Tracy had played polo but wasn’t aware that it had been a number of years since he had last been on a horse. Tracy noted that Clark Gable refused to ride on camera and that Gary Cooper had to be hoisted into the saddle and would only ride at a slow walk.2 “Spence did everything but say flatly that he didn’t want to ride, and I refused to take any hints. So, when the time came, he rode, and he rode extremely well—all of which added to the authenticity of the scenes.”
Settling in, Tracy briefly turned his attentions to Jean Peters—who was being wooed by Howard Hughes—and persuaded her to dine with him. Otherwise, he took his meals at the Douglas ranch or back in Tucson, where he attended Mass and frequently ate alone. Dolores Del Rio, her visa having been held up in Washington “pending investigation of her political affiliations,” was replaced by Katy Jurado, another Mexican actress, nineteen years her junior and in the international spotlight for a flashy supporting role in High Noon. Jurado arrived in Nogales on March 9 and stayed for the remainder of the location schedule, taking on a dour character part in lieu of the smoldering seductresses she frequently played in her native country.
Tracy’s death scene, shot on the last day out, went contrary to the calamitous symphony of thunder and horse’s hooves that Zanuck had once conceived, Matt quietly slipping off the saddle, having died without anyone even knowing it. “He got so pissed off,” remembered Hugh O’Brien, “because, not mentioning any names, a couple of people blew their lines. He said, ‘Take a close-up of me lying here, goddamn it, then shoot around it, because I’m not going to lie here in the hot sun for another two hours!’ ”
Location work wrapped on the thirteenth, and Tracy, fueled by a gigantic thermos of coffee, drove all night to get back to L.A., hitting town just after noon and dining at the ranch in Encino that same evening. The “St. Ives Roy Rogers” seemed fine, Cukor dutifully reported in a letter to Hepburn, adding they’d had some “ecstatic notes” from Zanuck with regard to the rushes. Though Tracy had dropped five pounds during his time in Arizona, he had little hope of keeping it off.
Metro was talking Highland Fling (the aforementioned Digby) as his next picture, and Tracy drove out to Culver City to confer with Larry Weingarten and director Ronald Neame. Neame’s droll comedy The Million Pound Note (Man with a Million in the United States) had garnered considerable attention for its use of Gregory Peck in what otherwise would have been an art house attraction. Tracy met the Englishman for lunch at Romanoff’s, where he gave him a small sampling of his disenchantment with the studio.
“I found him down-to-earth, personable, and honest,” Neame said. “He gave me a warning, though. ‘M-G-M is a tricky studio. It’s a dangerous machine. The executives think nothing of mowing people down. The person who’ll help you deal with them is Kate Hepburn. She’s in London, and I’ll ask her to speak with you.’ Once back home, I met with her at Claridge’s. She is a brutally frank, incredibly articulate, and vehement lady. She spoke against the studio system generally, and M-G-M specifically. Her advice on how to survive amongst their hierarchy was simply, ‘Stay away from them!’ ”
Production on Broken Lance resumed at Fox Hills on March 19, 1954, and Tracy expressed satisfaction at having gotten through the riding scenes with a minimum of fuss. “At first I had been diffident at working with Tracy,” Dmytryk said,
but as the film progressed, I found he was very receptive to changes of inference or emphasis. Once only he resisted a suggestion of mine, and in doing so exhibited what was one of his greatest talents. In studying a scene we were to do in a couple of days, I found one long speech that was rather stiffly written. I had reworked it until I felt it was more playable. “Look, Eddie,” Tracy said, “I’ve already learned the words. Why don’t you let me try them the way they are? If you don’t like it, I’ll look at your rewrite.” I agreed, and later we shot the scene. He hadn’t changed a word in the original speech, but he broke it u
p and played with it in such a way that it seemed the most natural scene in the world.
Dmytryk likened Tracy’s handling of dialogue to the phrasing of an accomplished jazz singer, taking a “leaden line” and making it shine like gold. “The odd thing was that he felt it was nothing special—that it was just something that every actor owed his art.”
Richard Widmark had declined to sign a new contract with Fox, and Zanuck retaliated by assigning him to Broken Lance, where he was accorded fourth billing after Tracy, Wagner, and Jean Peters.
I told Tracy I was trying to get out of the movie, but it had nothing to do with him. I told him, “You’re the greatest actor, and I’ve admired you since I was a babe in arms.” He understood completely. Strangely enough, a few weeks later, we were shooting a scene and I had nothing to do—just stand around. It was Spence’s scene; he was doing all the talking. I happened to be standing in the wrong place or something, and he looked up and said, “Who the fuck do you think is the star of this picture?” I said, “Oh, Spence, come on.” Then he got embarrassed. That’s the other side of Tracy. He could be very petty and egomaniacal.
Tracy was impressed when he learned that Sol Siegel, the line producer on Broken Lance, was the same man who had fired Eddie Dmytryk from Paramount in 1940. That it was the same Sol Siegel who wanted him for a picture at Fox thirteen years later gave Dmytryk a measure of “personal vindication” that made the offer of Broken Lance irresistible. So when the AP’s Bob Thomas visited the set, Tracy puckishly appropriated the story, suitably embellished, and claimed for the first time that he himself had been fired from Fox in 1935. There was nobody to contradict him—Thomas didn’t know any better, both Winnie Sheehan and Sidney Kent were dead, and Zanuck hadn’t yet arrived on the scene when Tracy made the move to Metro.
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