James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  The scrutiny followed her to Brisbane, where the Old Vic Company opened at His Majesty’s Theatre on July 18. “Katharine Hepburn’s first waking thought today was to put a call through to Spencer Tracy,” the Brisbane Telegraph reported. “Spencer Tracy, though 10,000 miles away, was the only person who would get a word from Miss Hepburn this morning. It is understood that the Old Vic star phones him daily. A Sydney message says it is rumored that Spencer Tracy may take a brief holiday at Surfer Paradise during the Old Vic three-week season in Brisbane. For the whole morning, Miss Hepburn remained in her room at the city hotel, surrounded by the knick-knacks she insists on carrying around the world. These include three portraits of Spencer Tracy.” Sheilah Graham picked up on all the Queensland crosstalk and ran a slightly more oblique item in her New York Mirror column: “Katharine Hepburn, now in Australia, is spending something like 100 dollars a day in phone bills to her long-time love … that’s love.”

  Hepburn was also working her way through the loss of Constance Collier, her almost daily phone calls, her wires and letters. “We miss Constance so much,” Theresa Helburn wrote her, “I realize what her loss must mean to you. You have really lost two mothers in a comparatively short time. But at least you had two wonderful ones.”

  There was more to discuss than strictly personal matters. Through Bert Allenberg, Kate was negotiating with Hal Wallis to play Lizzie Curry in Paramount’s adaptation of The Rainmaker. Wallis wanted to pay $135,000, but Hepburn was holding out for $150,000 and director approval. (Wallis would not agree to a deferred deal, similar to the one Hepburn made for The African Queen, in which she would accept half her normal fee up front in exchange for a cut of the profits.) She would talk with Tracy by phone, then Tracy would relay her messages to Allenberg.

  “Spence told me today about his talk with you and your approval of the financial terms and your strong feeling about the director,” Allenberg wrote her on July 15, “hence, I will attempt to make the deal on the basis of you having full director approval.”

  In London the year before, Jane Feely had said: “Someday I may need you.” And now she did. In a call from Seattle, she relayed the news that her eighty-one-year-old mother, Spence’s beloved aunt Jenny, was in the hospital, gravely ill with cancer of the esophagus. She asked that he come to Renton, and instantly word came back that he would.

  “Practically the next day, the arrangements were made,” Jane said.

  He was going to come by himself, which was unusual. I had not thought to say, “You come, too, Carroll.” And I think that hurt Carroll’s feelings. Carroll, of course, was the one that you always talked to in order to get in touch with Spence … A broken hip was what put [my mother] in the hospital, and then they did the exploratory things, checked and found out that she had the cancer … One of the nurses said, “We have a patient down there in room twenty-three, and she thinks that she’s related to Spencer Tracy.” They were kind of watching her, you know? And so the next day he arrived, and that nurse was flabbergasted.

  They had a couple of good visits in the hospital. My mother had a tremendous sense of humor. When she first saw him, she said to him, deadpan, “Have you got work?” I think he liked talking with her, maybe more than he did with his own mother, because his mother was a very sad person; she mourned the loss of her husband until she died. I think also that he was a little afraid of her, and he certainly didn’t want to offend her in any way.

  When the subject turned to Carroll, he echoed the words he had once spoken to Frank Tracy: “Carroll … I don’t know what to do about Carroll. Carroll should have gone back to Wakashan, had his own life, his own success …”

  “He was a great success as a husband!” Jenny Tracy interjected. Spence’s face, Jane recalled, was stricken at the remark.

  They went on to talk about family and about the old days, and she did not ever, either in my hearing or when they had a private talk, talk about [the fact that] she knew she was dying. I’m certain she did [know], but, in our family, nobody told anybody that anyone was sick or dying. I think it took an awful lot more out of him than I had any idea that it did. I didn’t realize how stressful it was for him to get on a plane by himself, come over here into a strange area.

  I had dinner with him at the Olympic Hotel—we didn’t go into the dining room, we had dinner in a suite—and we had a good visit about Ireland, and how fun it had been. We talked, because I was thinking, “What am I going to do?” He said, “You don’t worry. You need a cushion, and here is the beginning of it.” And he left a check for two or three thousand dollars. “Don’t have any worries about taking care of her. Do whatever you have to do.”

  I went to the airport with him when he left. We stopped to have a cup of coffee at the counter. It was amazing—nobody approached him. Everything was just fine until a waitress came with his cup of coffee. As she was pouring the coffee, she was staring at him and she poured the coffee all over the counter. “Oh!” He was able to laugh over that one. When we talked afterward about Mama, he said, “You know, she does not demand attention—she commands it. All I can think of with her sitting in that bed is Ethel Barrymore.” There were so many things about her that were dramatic enough, I think, to appeal to him.

  Jenny’s time in the hospital was brief—six weeks—and Spencer underwrote it. When she died, word came through Carroll that the funeral expenses were to be covered, too.

  The Mountain, at first glance, would have seemed an unlikely vehicle for Spencer Tracy. The work of the prolific Russian-born novelist and historian Henri Troyat, it told the story of a retired mountain guide pressed back into service when an airliner crashes in the French Alps. Based on an actual event, the 122-page novel was first published in the United States in 1953. Tracy read a review of the book in England; subsequently, he gave it to Eddie Dmytryk. “It’s a simple story,” he later said, “full of honest suspense and character, a Cain and Abel tale of two brothers on a mission to a wrecked airplane in the Alps. They fight the elements, themselves, and each other. It depicts the contrast of good and evil. An emotional back-breaker, believe me.”

  He tried getting Metro to buy the rights, only to learn that Paramount had snapped them up for the bargain price of $10,000. Within a couple of months, Tracy had made a deal with Don Hartman, Paramount’s production chief, to star in the picture as soon as he was free of his M-G-M contract. Alpine weather conditions dictated a start in late August or early September, when the snow level would be at seven thousand feet and the daytime temperature at Luzern would be a very tolerable sixty-five degrees. Dmytryk signed on in May while Tracy and Sam Zimbalist were locking horns over Tribute to a Bad Man. The irony was lost on no one that Tracy gained his release from that picture on the basis of altitude, only to step into a part that would put him at elevations considerably higher than the six thousand feet he found so debilitating at Montrose.

  Tackling the script was the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, whose previous job for Paramount had been the listless Humphrey Bogart comedy We’re No Angels. Agreeing with Tracy that the story was essentially “Cain and Abel on a mountain,” MacDougall deliberately simplified the two brothers—the older one embarking on one last climb to rescue survivors, the younger intent more on looting the crash site than on checking it for signs of life. The result became a treatise on the nature of human greed, a sort of snowbound Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

  Having carefully balanced the story between the two competing characters, MacDougall clashed with Dmytryk over the casting of twenty-five-year-old Robert Wagner as brother to the fifty-five-year-old Tracy. “To me, as a primal contest between simple good and simple evil, it called for an equality of forces involved,” MacDougall said. “Wagner seemed to me to be a born loser in a contest with Tracy. I am not questioning the ability of Wagner as an actor by this, merely stating my approach to the subject. I had written the part with Charlton Heston in mind.1 As an antagonist for Tracy, it seemed to me the outcome of the contest would be in doubt
with a stronger man. With Wagner, I felt that the younger man would emerge as being petulant rather than powerfully evil. Also, of course, the mountain climbing contest of man against nature did not play as well as it might have with a stronger pair.”

  Dmytryk explained his rationale: “Spence had had a good relationship with Robert Wagner during the shooting of Broken Lance; he also had a very realistic attitude regarding his own box office appeal. He felt that Wagner might attract the younger and larger audience and suggested we try to borrow him from 20th. I agreed with his analysis (as it turned out, we were both somewhat in error) and 20th was willing, so R.J. was set.”

  As an added gesture of both fondness and respect, Tracy spoke to Paramount and arranged for the billing clause of his contract to be modified, permitting Wagner’s name to be placed above the title, the first time the younger actor had been accorded equal billing with a star of Tracy’s stature.

  “It was extraordinary,” said Wagner, “and it made a big difference in my career because it took me out of being homogenized with all these other people. He made very sure that I had a dressing room at Paramount and that I was on dressing room row with all of them, so I was there with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Spencer Tracy, Bill Holden, me. He did that for me. I said to him, ‘Jesus, Spence, thank you so much.’ He said, ‘That’s okay, I wanted you to have it.’ He was sure that I had the same thing.”

  However much he initially wanted to do the film, Tracy began to tense up as the start of production grew near. He fretted over individual lines of dialogue, disapproved of the supporting cast assembled by Dmytryk—Claire Trevor, William Demarest, Barbara Darrow, Richard Arlen.

  The prospect of a long plane trip filled him with dread, for the actor who hated location work above all others had somehow committed himself to the ultimate location picture. “I can’t do it,” he finally said to Dmytryk. “It’s just not the part for me. How about Gable? I think he’s free, and he’d be perfect. Or Robert Young?” Dmytryk was gently reassuring but at a point decided that Tracy needed—and wanted—a firm hand. “When he stalled again, I simply said the car and driver would be calling to take him to the airport at a certain time, and I would expect to see him there. That was it. He showed up.”

  To calm Tracy’s nerves on the flight that took them to Europe, R. J. Wagner presented him with a St. Bernard medal, Bernard being the patron saint of mountaineers. “He wore it on a chain around his neck throughout the trip and never once took it off.” They paused for a few days in Paris, putting up at the Raphael and taking in the nightlife. Bert Allenberg saw Tracy there and dutifully reported back to Hepburn that he was looking and feeling fine: “He was leaving the next morning for Chamonix and seemed to be in excellent spirits.” Dmytryk bought a convertible, planning to have the car shipped back to the States.

  “The three of us drove together from Paris to Geneva,” Wagner recalled, “then up to Chamonix and the French Alps to get acclimated. That was the first time ever that there had been a company up there shooting.” Their arrival at Chamonix preceded the start of production by a couple of weeks, time to acclimate and train with Charles Balmat, a prominent Alpine guide whose ancestor, Jacques Balmat, was said to have been the first to climb Mont Blanc in 1792.

  “Mr. Tracy is very unhappy with his accommodations,” production manager Harry Caplan advised his office in Los Angeles, the Hotel Les Alpes being something less than the Sun Valley resort Tracy had evidently envisioned. “We offered to rent (he proposed it) a chateau so that he could have more privacy. However, before looking at some chateaus, I took A. C. Lyles [Dmytryk’s assistant producer] to the Le Savoy Hotel and Lyles agreed with me that he (Tracy) and all the Paramount staff might be better off there … Tracy is one of those artistic people who is a complainer. The room is filthy, the rugs, beds are dirty, and the food (being pension plan) has no variety or selection to it.”

  Caplan had started out in the thirties as prop man to the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields, so he was used to difficult talent. It fell principally to Eddie Dmytryk to nurse Tracy along while the company was on location. “Our unit is definitely being run by Mr. Tracy,” Caplan reported a couple of days later.

  Eddie kowtows to his every wish. As a result, it is hard to get organized. We found Tracy a chalet (apartment) but now he doesn’t want it. I added some rugs to his room [and] am employing an English-speaking chamber maid, and we are painting the doors and closets in his room … Tracy has been complaining because the coffee isn’t here. He complains and criticizes at the drop of a hat. This location is very difficult and trying and this added problem does not make it any easier for us. He is very evasive about okaying wardrobe and Eddie sides with him. The reason I wired for new shirts is because he says these we brought are too small. [Assistant director] Bill [McGarry] has brought him three other types to no avail … I have a feeling Mr. Tracy is not going to do the things that Mr. Dmytryk said he would. He walked over about one mile of mountain today and gave up, returning to the hotel. He hasn’t as yet gone to the top of the Teleferique.

  The advantage of locating the shoot on the Aiguille du Midi in the Mont Blanc massif of the French Alps was the Téléphérique de l’Aiguille du Midi, the historic aerial tramway that climbs the north face of the mountain, depositing its passengers near the top of the 12,800-foot summit. In terms of facilitating the transport of both equipment and personnel, it was unmatched anywhere in Europe and effectively made location work for The Mountain feasible. Tracy’s distrust of the thing was obvious, and he had plenty of time to formulate disaster scenarios as he haggled with Caplan and struggled for rest.

  “Maybe,” suggested Robert Wagner, “he was just giving them trouble … I was below him in the hotel, and I could hear him pacing around because he had a very difficult time sleeping.” Hepburn, particularly, knew how rough the location was going to be on him and arranged for Margaret Shipway, David Lean’s script supervisor on Time of the Cuckoo, to serve as Tracy’s secretary, a soothing presence over the course of the shoot. In her tweed skirts and cashmere sweater sets, Shipway had a civilizing effect on the crew, always “smiling and friendly and interested” in whatever was going on, serving the same approximate role as the young woman from Boise who was hired to sit calmly and demurely alongside Tracy on the set of Northwest Passage.

  “Just a short line to let you know we started shooting today,” Maggie wrote Hepburn on the morning of August 29. “Weather is doubtful but the crew are all happy and keen. Have settled in this hotel now—they’ve painted Mr. Tracy’s bedroom—and apart from the dreadful smell of new paint he’s more comfortable … Mr. Tracy’s sense of humor is wonderful—we laugh and laugh. I think he’s a marvelous person. He talks about you all the time.”

  Shooting began with the making of stereo plates, POV shots, and long shots of the doubles in action. There was bad light all morning and hail by noon, causing the company to quit after lunch. Dmytryk found himself moving scenes around to take advantage of whatever light he could get, frustrating Harry Caplan’s attempts at creating a rudimentary schedule. Maggie Shipway worried that Tracy wasn’t eating very much and that the noise from a nightclub opposite the hotel was keeping him awake nights.

  R. J. Wagner was as unnerved by the extreme elevations as Tracy and just as wary of the new single-cable Téléphérique. “I didn’t want to get on that thing too many times, and we had to shoot up there. As a matter of fact, I had to shoot there. It wasn’t Spence, but Spence said he’d go with me. I was very hesitant about it always. Eddie Dmytryk was up there with the crew, and I had to come around and get up into this thing, and [Spence] said, ‘Come on. I’ll go with you.’ And it got halfway up, and it went off the cable!” The car had, in fact, lurched to a stop with such force that it swung up and hit the cable, shattering the glass. As it rocked back and forth, R.J. felt Tracy’s arm around him. “I thought we were falling … and boom! It stopped, and we looked out the window and we were hanging [by the protective iron coveri
ng that served as the wheel housing] in the middle of this cable.”

  At a sheer drop of eleven thousand feet, it was as heart-stopping a sight as either man had ever beheld. “Those damn things are scary enough when all is going well,” Dmytryk said, “but to be caught in one of those claustrophobic cubicles, swinging in the void …” Frank Westmore, the unit makeup man, was among the crew members observing the scene: “From our viewpoint on the Aiguille du Midi, we could see the little car below us, swinging wildly from side-to-side and bouncing frighteningly against a now-slack cable.”

  There was nothing the crew could do other than keep their eyes on the tiny figures gripping the safety bars inside the car. “So we wait,” said Wagner, “and they sent an open work car down. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, we’re going to have to get out of this thing and get in there?’ And then go up because it came from up above?’ I mean, it was very, very frightening. So they come down and they leave and then they back the thing down again. I think, ‘Jesus, it’s going back down.’ And, indeed, no, they put it back [on the cable], and it would go back up.” The car took what seemed like an eternity to make its way up to the platform.

  “When it ground its way into the station,” Westmore said, “Tracy staggered out looking twenty years older than he had that morning.” The irony of the incident was that once everyone had safely reached the summit, there was nothing to do but sit around and wait for a break in the light. Finally, they made a couple of shots for the trailer showing the crew sitting it out on the rocks. Then Tracy had to ride back down the mountain in the very same car that had balked carrying him up. “He went up there for me,” Wagner said of Tracy, “that is all I know. He was with me. He went up there because he knew that I was really frightened. I think it was after that experience, that next couple of days, that he got into drinking a little bit.”