“He listened,” said Millard Kaufman, “with every fiber of his entire body. It was almost to say he was leaning toward you to pick up every word. And then he knew a great deal about film. He knew what would work and he knew apparently what would not. I remember on more than one occasion we’d do a scene and the setup would be finished and John would say, ‘Thank you. Cut. Let’s go over here.’ And Spencer wouldn’t budge. He’d just stand there with his finger on his nose, the way he always does, and frown, and John would look over there and say, ‘Let’s do it once more.’ So, he was not a passive actor. He knew what was going on every minute of the time.”
John Ericson’s big scene with Tracy came at the top of the third act, when Macreedy knows that Smith and his men are going to kill him. Doc Velie (Brennan) has come over to Macreedy’s side, but there’s not much he can do without help.
“Tracy said to me, ‘What are the ideas in your head about this scene?’ ” Ericson recalled. “And I told him … He said, ‘All very good. You’ve got seven or eight things right there, but you’ve got to take the most important one—the one that works for you—and that’s the only hat you hang on the hat tree. That’s all, and you play that. Otherwise, it gets so cluttered up the audience is going to have a problem figuring out what’s going on. Because you’ve got seven different things going. The other six things can be underneath the surface, but you don’t let those out. You just have this one thing you hang your hat on.’ That was a wonderful piece of advice.”
When action was called, Tracy was positioned at the hotel registration desk, Brennan behind and a little to the left of him, Ericson on the other side of the desk in his nominal position as the clerk on duty. “Nobody’s helping him,” said Ericson,
and he’s talking to me, trying to get me to say what happened. And I won’t say anything. He finally takes a bottle of booze and sets it on the counter in front of me and says, “It’s going to take a lot of whiskey to wash out your guts.” And I reach down to grab the bottle and take a swig. Sturges, I remember, had said, “John, now reach for the bottle.” So I look at the bottle and the scene’s not working.
It’s not working, and it’s getting to be quitting time for Mr. Tracy. (He quit at four o’clock every day. He was there bright and early, but he quit at four.) Finally, Tracy said to Sturges, “This scene isn’t working.” And I said, “Yes, it’s not working. I’m very uncomfortable in this scene.”
So Tracy says, “I’ll tell you what: Let’s call it a day. We’ll go at this in the morning.”
I said, “Great. Thank you.”
Sturges says, “Okay, quittin’ time!”
Next morning we come in, and we were getting ready for the scene again. Tracy comes out. “You know what’s wrong with the scene?” he says, and he looks at me. He looks at Walter Brennan. He looks at Sturges. And he’s waiting for somebody to respond. And we’re all afraid to respond because we’re thinking this genius here is really going to show us up, you know?
He said: “The problem is, when John goes for that whiskey bottle, we break eye contact. Can’t he just grab the bottle without breaking eye contact?”
I said, “I sure as hell can.”
Sturges said, “Okay, roll ’em.” So we did it, and that’s how the scene is.
The climactic face-off between Macreedy and Reno Smith takes place in the desert, Smith armed with a hunting rifle, Macreedy only his wits and his one good arm. Taking cover behind his jeep, Macreedy improvises a Molotov cocktail with an empty soda bottle and the gas in the vehicle’s tank. In order for the incendiary to have any value, the audience must know that Macreedy would be carrying matches.
“I had in the script,” said Millard Kaufman, “that Macreedy was a smoker. So to show a kind of determination (if you could call it that; anyway, it was theatrical) I had him at one point light a cigarette by taking a book of matches out of his pocket and, with one hand, flipping into a horseshoe shape a single match, [which he] rubs against the striking surface, and then he puts the flame to the cigarette. And Spencer calls and says, ‘Look, I’m an old man with arthritis. Why don’t I have a Zippo, which everybody in the army had? I still got a few of them.’ I said, ‘Fine.’ ”
Freed from a bit of business better suited to Lon Chaney in his prime, Tracy ignited the device with a common cigarette lighter and sent Ryan’s stunt double to a sizzling death. The last scene in the picture becomes a reversal of the first, the train pulling into Black Rock, Macreedy leaving the younger Komoko’s medal with the remaining townspeople as a way of giving them “something to build on.”
“What’s the excitement?” the conductor asks as Macreedy climbs aboard. “What happened?”
“A shooting,” Macreedy says.
“Thought it was something. First time this streamliner’s stopped here in four years.”
“Second time,” Macreedy corrects as he disappears into the car.
Tracy left for Europe on August 30, stopping off in Manhattan to see New York Giants manager Leo Durocher and his wife, the actress Laraine Day. Troubled by the pinched nerve in his neck, he spent the month of September following a regimen of traction and heat treatments while attending the playoffs and the first two games of the World Series.
“We were just going into the winning streak that clinched the pennant,” Durocher remembered, “and I was able to keep him with us for the next two weeks by convincing him that I needed his advice. ‘How could you leave me now?’ I’d say every time he pleaded that they were waiting for him in Europe. ‘I can’t possibly win without your help.’ I kept him in New York while we were winning the first two games of the World Series and was aghast when he suggested that I would have to go the rest of the way without him.”
Tracy boarded the Andrea Doria on October 2 and was at sea when he got the news that the Giants had prevailed over Cleveland to win the world championship.
The voyage was smooth at first, the weather warm and clear, and he was able to limit his drug intake to a couple of Demerols. The water got considerably rougher the fourth day out, and he gobbled five Seconals on top of the pain medication, upsetting his stomach and keeping him confined to quarters for much of the following day. That evening, he laid off the barbiturates altogether and took some wine with his dinner. The next day he tried mixing a couple of Seconals with brandy to predictable results.
In 1977 King Vidor remembered back to a doctor he met aboard the steamer on its next crossing to Naples: “He’d been on the trip before, with Spencer, and he’s had to stay up each night talking with him, drinking with him. When Spencer got off at Genoa, he wouldn’t get off … he came right back on the same boat. So this doctor took another trip to rest up from Spence keeping him up at night the trip before!”
Tracy consulted a doctor who prescribed the spa cure at Montecatini Terme. He spent the next three weeks at the historic Tuscan baths, making day trips to Piza, Civitella, and Florence, seeing Michelangelo’s David and unfinished Pietà and losing himself in Will Durant’s book The Renaissance. Kate arrived on October 25, and they spent their days driving through the mountains and hill towns, picnicking on the beach, touring the countryside. By November 1, his use of Seconal was down to three capsules a night and he was sleeping more soundly. When he left for Rome on the eighth, he was completely drug-free for the first time in years.
From his rejuvenative Italian sojourn, Tracy returned to a world of aggravation in California. While in Montecatini, he had spoken with Louise by phone and learned that his estranged daughter-in-law, the one Johnny had announced his intention of divorcing, was in fact pregnant.
“Perfect!” he said.
Nobody was happy about it, least of all John. “I was there when Nadine told John that she was pregnant,” recalled Susie Tracy. “He just looked at her and said nothing. And then he turned and went back to his room. I think he was stunned.”
Louise had been house hunting, the State Highway Commission having routed the new Ventura Freeway through the property on White Oa
k. She hated the thought of moving after nearly twenty years on the ranch, even though Spence thought it time: “He had said for several years, ‘It’s a wonderful place, but it is not practical. Susie is growing … nobody is going to come out here to see her. It’s no good either from the standpoint of friends for John—everybody is over on the other side.’ They didn’t want to move, but he said it would be much better for the children. And then he said also the Clinic was quite a trek for me.”
Tracy was sure that Bad Day at Black Rock would be a disaster—a commercial long shot and a stinker to boot. Schary ran it for him just days after production closed, and an opening reminiscent of High Noon got the film off to a listless start. “Bad picture?” Tracy wrote in his datebook. “Nothing—mediocre. Grade B.”
Nothing the studio was offering promised to be any better. John Houseman wanted to pair Tracy and Montgomery Clift in a union drama called Bannon. Another picture, a western called Jeremy Rodock, had script and casting problems. The far more interesting action was coming from other studios. At Paramount, he had committed to The Mountain, based on a novel he had tried to option himself. William Wyler had proposed The Desperate Hours opposite Humphrey Bogart, and though Tracy wasn’t keen on the story, he took six weeks to say no, laying the blame to billing problems. Sol Siegel was offering The Captain’s Table, a broad comedy based on the novel by England’s Richard Gordon. And there was, of course, The Old Man and the Sea, for which Hemingway had agreed to yet another postponement.
Under the circumstances, it was hard for Tracy to get excited over another term at Metro. The studio was offering three pictures, nonexclusive, at $150,000 each, while Tracy’s freelance rate, first with Broken Lance, then with The Mountain, had been firmly established at $250,000. Moreover, Dore Schary was in trouble, losing ground with Schenck and unhappy with the way the industry in general was going. On December 28, 1954, Tracy met with Eddie Mannix at the studio and tentatively okayed the new three-year deal, Mannix agreeing to route all outside picture money through the studio so that it could count toward Tracy’s company pension. On January 7, 1955, Bert Allenberg followed up with a letter to Mannix outlining the contemplated deal, granting Metro preemptive rights but otherwise agreeing to loan Tracy’s services to other producers and studios when he requested it. Exempted were The Captain’s Table, The Mountain, and The Old Man and the Sea, all three of which were to be completed by the fall or winter of 1956. “I understand that you have not yet made it as a firm offer,” Allenberg wrote Mannix, “and that you will let me hear from you at such point.”
Although they were essentially the same age, Bert Allenberg was a stark contrast to the man he represented, tall and natty, a charming bankerlike figure where his impish partner Abe Lastfogel was more avuncular, a down-home type who grew up on New York’s East Side. Both had deep roots in the industry, Allenberg from his longtime partnership with the famously nurturing Phil Berg, Lastfogel from the early years of William Morris, which he joined as an office boy at the age of fourteen.
Bert Allenberg understood the care and feeding of a man as insecure as Spencer Tracy, while at the same time maintaining absolute credibility with men like Mannix, Thau, and Dore Schary. All had genuine affection for Tracy—Mannix and Schary in particular—and all had come to understand, each in his own way, the demons that sometimes possessed him. In the peculiar business they were in, men like Tracy, who could capture and retain for decades the fascination of a worldwide audience, were rare indeed, like the precious gems of which Mayer used to speak. There were, in fact, only a few leading men who shared the pantheon with Tracy—Gable, Bogart, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart. Cagney, maybe. Fred Astaire, if you counted musicals. And of them all, only Tracy was still part of the dwindling roster that had at one time boasted “more stars than there are in Heaven.”
Bad Day at Black Rock, its opening moments fixed by Herman Hoffman, had its first public showing at Loew’s 72nd Street Theatre in New York on December 8, 1954. Tracy, who was in town but did not attend, was told afterward the picture “held the audience spellbound,” a claim backed by the trade reviews, which were unanimous in their praise. He remained dubious until New Year’s Day, when calls came from Sam Goldwyn, Danny Kaye, Leland Hayward, and others. Incredulous, he wrote in his datebook: “Black Rock good???”
He conferred with Schary, Thau, and producer Sam Zimbalist on January 12 and tentatively okayed Jeremy Rodock with the understanding that the female lead was to be offered to Grace Kelly, who, with the December release of The Country Girl, was suddenly Hollywood’s hottest actress. Tacitly agreeing to do the picture, Kelly asked to see a script. Two days later, Thau called and said she was stalling. “BET TURN DOWN,” Tracy wrote in his book.
The situation became clearer over the following week: Kelly, an M-G-M contract player, had, with the exception of Mogambo, made her most notable films on loan-out—to Stanley Kramer for High Noon, to Alfred Hitchcock for Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, to Paramount for The Country Girl. Now George Stevens wanted her for Giant, and she was using Jeremy Rodock as a bargaining chip. Tracy was infuriated. “Wishes reserve decision,” he wrote in his datebook. “I wish replace fast. Studio inclined give her way. ‘I.E.’ loanout to Stevens’ Giant after ours. Her announcement reading script stupid because other girls asked if turndown—which obvious is—or wedge for Giant. Hell with Kelly. Get someone. ??? Bergman??? Call from Allenberg—told him facts of life re: his handling of business.”
Disgusted, Tracy doped himself extravagantly—ten Seconals—and boarded a flight to New York for his annual physical, this time at Harkness under the supervision of Dr. Dana Winslow Atchley. Kate, meanwhile, had committed to a six-month tour of Australia with Bobby Helpmann and the Old Vic, a company of twenty-eight players performing Measure for Measure, Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice under the direction of Michael Benthall.
Tracy arrived in Manhattan in time to see the opening of Black Rock on February 1, an event only in the sense that he didn’t expect it to do well at all. M-G-M’s big picture of the moment was a reissue of Camille, and Broadway in general was in the grip of near-zero temperatures. The film performed nicely in its opening stanza at the Rivoli, bolstered, no doubt, by exceptional notices—novelist John O’Hara called it “one of the finest motion pictures ever made”—and Tracy’s concurrent appearance on the cover of Life magazine. (“A Great Star Ages Gracefully” was the title of the accompanying article.) It all faded quickly, though, the weather crippling practically every attraction apart from The Country Girl, Cinerama Holiday, and Garbo’s 1936 classic, which inspired long lines and set house records at the Normandy. Bad Day at Black Rock was gone by the time Tracy returned to Los Angeles on the twenty-seventh.
As predicted, Grace Kelly declined Jeremy Rodock, citing a poor script, and Tracy began wondering if he was making the right choice. The story was by Jack Schaefer, the author of Shane, but it was only a short story, and somehow it resisted the efforts of screenwriter Michael Blankfort to give it a plot. Director Robert Wise met Tracy for the first time at a conference in early March.
“He was practically selling me on the picture,” Wise remembered, “he was so enthusiastic.” They talked about locations. “We had the idea of getting high up in the mountain scene and hav[ing] lovely green meadows, lakes, and mountains all around as the setting for it. We thought that would be a good change in the background for a western. Tracy called me the next day and asked, ‘Bob, do you think we’re really right about that? Do you think it’s going to be good for me?’ He was getting all kinds of second thoughts about it, so I found myself having to buck up his enthusiasm for it.”
Thau and Schary expressed concerns that Tracy did not “feel committed to Rodock.” Tracy’s worries weren’t assuaged when Grace Kelly went public on the suspension Metro had handed her, confirming she had declined the picture after reading the script. “I’m not trying to be difficult or temperamental,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I just don’t fe
el I’m right for the part in Jeremy Rodock.”
By the middle of March, Zimbalist had Blankfort working on a complete revision of the screenplay, and Tracy agreed to a three-month extension that would free him to travel to Europe. In New York he dined with Mannix and Howard Strickling, met Constance Collier for tea, and spent forty-five minutes on the phone to Kate in London. He flew over on the eighteenth, slept soundly the first night, then fell back into his Seconal habit, popping as many as seven capsules a night.
Hepburn was, of course, deep into rehearsals for her upcoming tour of Australia but found time for dinner most nights, and they occasionally could be seen walking together in Hyde Park. On the twenty-fourth he had two rodent ulcers removed from his face, aggravating the fear of cancer he had long held within him. The procedures were described to him as routine, and the medication caused him to sleep nearly six hours the following night. But then late the next evening, in his suite at Claridge’s, he fell off the wagon, scribbling in his datebook: “1 AM,” the drawing of a bottle, and the words “Here we go.”
Between March 27 and April 8, 1955, he was confined to his suite at Claridge’s under a doctor’s care and attended by a pair of nurses. He took his last drink on April 2 (“FINI,” he wrote in his datebook) and spent the rest of the week “recuperating.” He passed his fifty-fifth birthday with a cake but otherwise saw no one other than Kate. “Poor Spence must necessarily be alone a good deal,” Constance Collier mused to Hepburn in a letter, “though I suppose you have your evenings together, you can’t be working at night.” The Kanins, stopping at the hotel while Ruth was appearing in The Matchmaker, attempted “endless abortive and unsuccessful telephone calls” but could make no contact. When he left for home on the ninth, Tracy did so without contacting them, and nearly two months would pass before Gar could manage a letter.
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