There was no grand tumble, at least not on location, but rather a controlled leavening that put everyone on edge. The night of the Téléphérique incident, Wagner found Tracy in the hotel bar, where he was “completely drunk—gone! It was startling, because he had become an entirely different person.”
Tracy was given to quicksilver twists of temperament that alcohol only served to exacerbate. “Strangely, he was very talkative and friendly, actually charming,” said Frank Westmore, “telling all sorts of fascinating Hollywood stories, even as his head sagged lower and lower on his chest. He ordered another round of drinks.” It looked as if he would be in for an early night when he abruptly snapped to and hurled a brandy snifter at the face of the bartender.
“As I remember,” said Wagner, “the bartender made some kind of remark. And out of that remark Spence took exception and picked up his glass. It came out of nowhere, just out of nowhere. Flash anger.” Wagner stuck his right hand out to deflect the glass and reflexively closed his hand in on it, shattering it in his palm and driving the shards deep into his middle fingers.
“Tracy was oblivious to everything by then,” Westmore said, “and didn’t even know that he was being wrestled from his chair by members of his crew and hustled up to his room. I helped our company doctor as he stitched and bandaged Bob’s hand, meanwhile pondering the practical consideration of how I would mask the gashes for the remainder of the film.” Westmore was able to cover the injury with a combination of collodion and makeup, neatly concealing the stitches. “A contrite Tracy watched the procedure, barely remembering what had happened the night before.”
Fortunately, the light improved and Tracy and Wagner were able to begin working together. They and the crew were usually roped together in groups of four, lest someone disappear into a hidden ravine, and they wore crampon spikes to keep from slipping. The members of the company came to dread the rending sounds of the avalanches, which they could hear more often than see. “I was very, very frightened of the mountains and the crevices,” Wagner admitted. “We were on a piece up there and saw an avalanche, and it was at least a mile away, and we backed up when we saw that thing break. And I remember in the book they referred to the sound as ‘the tearing of silk.’ And it was that.”
At the end of a full workday, Tracy was too tired to create much trouble. “Conditions are a little better,” Caplan, obviously relieved, reported to the studio. “Tracy has settled down a little. He is a natural born crabber. I had it out with him and we seem to be friends. He is going to work Sunday (tomorrow) as a favor to Bill [McGarry] and myself. The last two days of shooting we have done a lot of work but [neither] I nor Bill can quite understand the way Eddie is shooting … He is very evasive. He is transferring a lot of work to the studio on account of Tracy. This means we will have a lot of plates and need many rock sets.”
Lloyd Shearer, the West Coast correspondent for Parade, observed Tracy in the hotel bar, impassively sipping milk and absorbing a lecture from Harry Mines, the unit publicist. “We have a still photographer,” Mines was heard to complain, “and his job is to take pictures. You won’t let him, and I think that’s pretty uncooperative.”
Tracy had a long and well-deserved reputation for coming off at photographers who got in his line of sight, clicked while a scene was in progress, or otherwise got on his nerves. Pat Elsey could remember kneading the tension from his shoulders after an ill-timed candid was snapped on the set of Northwest Passage. Bill Self once saw a studio photographer come up and take his picture while the two men were deep in conversation. “Spence turned to him and said, ‘You’re going to click yourself right out of the business.’ Well, at that point, the guy faded away.”
On location for The Mountain, 1956. (ROBERT WAGNER)
Tracy ran a hand across the weathered face he once likened to an outhouse door and fixed Mines with a withering stare. “Did you mention the word ‘job’?” he demanded, allowing the word to hang in the air.
Well, I’ve got a “job” too. I’ve got a job to act in this picture, and I mean to do it as well as I can. I’m not going to let anyone interfere with that. I get up at 5:30 every morning, and we’ve got to hike up the mountain. It’s 10, 12, 13 thousand feet up. How many times have you been up, Harry? Once? Well, the air’s pretty thin up there, and after you trudge for two hours, it’s a little hard to breathe. I stand in the snow with a pack on my back and I try to give the scene everything I’ve got. I’m concentrating on the lines and the mood and the take, and then in the middle I suddenly hear camera shutters clicking. I’m sorry, but it breaks my concentration. I know that stills have to be taken, but let’s shoot ’em a little distance away.”
Then Tracy, according to Shearer, got to his feet, smiled good-naturedly, and said, “Don’t make me a heavy. Let’s go in and eat.” The next day, he spent two hours posing in the snow, giving the photographer his complete cooperation.
As unpopular as he was with Mines and Harry Caplan, Tracy was well regarded among the rank and file, having seen that the crew was made more comfortable after they were stuck at the Hotel Les Alpes. “You know Spence,” Wagner said. “Everybody loved him. He was wonderful and very funny and had a terrific edge on his humor.” When R.J. complained one day that Dmytryk was working him too hard—a measure of the location’s difficulty and the relative thinness of its air—Tracy handed him a stern look. “Young man,” he said as if back playing Father Flanagan, “you ought to get down on your knees every night and thank God you work in the most overpaid business in the world.”
There were constant delays getting equipment and personnel to location by foot and by jeep. Days were often overcast and no film could be exposed, while at other times it rained and snowed. Takes were ruined by mike shadow. Mercifully, one take was all that was usually necessary when all the elements cooperated. There was no coverage, and certain shots intended to be made on location—particularly close-ups—were deferred to the studio.
Much of the tension dissolved with the completion of the mountain sequences, and the company began working close to the hotel on the introductory scenes for Wagner’s character of Chris. (“You there—boy!”) A few miles from Chamonix was the town of La Tour, where the village scenes were shot, and where Claire Trevor and E. G. Marshall joined the company. Trevor would recall how Tracy adored R. J. Wagner—whom he called “Bobby”—and how Wagner loved him. Marshall would remember the relish with which Tracy read aloud a letter from Hepburn, who was in Melbourne at the time. “Only parts,” Marshall qualified. “We should all have such a correspondent.”
Location work on The Mountain ended with a retake, as the weather prevented further shooting at the village. After lunch, the B Unit went to the first Téléphérique station to shoot plates, and the ordeal was at last at an end. There was a party that night and a presentation to the guides who had made the whole expedition possible.
“It was quite a wingding,” Eddie Dmytryk recalled, “and, naturally, many toasts had to be drunk with the excellent local wines. Just as naturally, Tracy had to drink them.” Said Wagner:
It was the end of the location and everyone was rather relaxed. And he started off by stopping and having a beer, then a little piece of cheese, and everyone was all very happy … When we left [Chamonix], it was Claire Trevor, [her husband] Milton [Bren], myself. We were all in a van coming down the hill, and I remember Spence took his hat off and he went, “Whooow!” and flung it right out into the Alps. We got down to Paris, and it didn’t take much for him … Spence was very nervous about flying … I think he was very anxious, and when we got on the plane he had a few belts on the plane. We landed in New York and got on another plane to come to L.A., and he was out of control.
The flight was to be met at LAX by Louise and Susie, but Carroll headed them off, gravely whispering something in Louise’s ear. “It was the first inkling I ever had that he had a drinking problem,” Susie remembered. “On the way home, my mother explained it a bit, saying it was something he’d had to bat
tle all his life.”2
Where he went, whom he was with, is uncertain to this day. “Carroll came and got him,” said Wagner, “and they took him away.” Tracy’s datebook entry for the twenty-eighth carries a picture of a jug and the notation “Home TWA 11 PM drove.” The final two days of September show identical words: “out” and “orchestra.” (“He wasn’t belligerent,” said Wagner. “He said, ‘We’ll get the band and we’ll get together.’ ”)
“For the next six days,” wrote Eddie Dmytryk, “I received daily progress reports: This quiet, very private man was on the town, and in spades. I shot what few scenes I could without him, then closed down. On day seven, he was in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. I planned to restart production a week from that day, and in a week he showed up, ready to work. For a few days he had a bottle of milk constantly at hand. Then it was back to Cokes again and what Warren G. Harding called ‘normalcy.’ ”
Somewhat chastened after ten days of “illness,” Tracy became a model employee, welcoming visitors to the set—Cary Grant, Pearl Bailey, Jesse Lasky, Donald O’Connor—and cooperating with the press to the extent of handwriting the answers to eighteen questions submitted him by Jack Hirshberg of the studio’s publicity department. On what basis do you select your roles? one question asked. “Don’t just want to make movies at this stage of the game,” he replied. “I’m an old bastard. Hard to please.” Do you ever want to direct? “No. Lack patience to deal with actors.” Teet Carle, who had worked with Tracy as a publicist at M-G-M, was now publicity director at Paramount: “[Tracy] prompted the tops in good fellowship reunions when I met him in the studio café. I was his ‘old buddy’ whom he had missed. Maybe he, at long last, was sleeping better.”
At the beginning of production, Tracy had notified Bill McGarry and Harry Caplan that he was accustomed to taking a ninety-minute lunch (although it was not mentioned in his contract). At the studio he fell into the habit of returning to the set thirty to forty-five minutes later than expected, setting off another round of internal hand-wringing. On the set he was reflective, telling Lloyd Shearer he was going to “take it easy” after The Old Man and the Sea.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not retiring. The only time an actor really retires is when they don’t want him anymore. I don’t think that’s true in my case, although maybe it is. But I don’t see any point in making run-of-the-mill pictures. People can get as much of that stuff as they want on television. I’m not money hungry, and what I’d like to do is make maybe one picture a year or even less. But I want the picture to be memorable, something substantial and worthwhile. When I get out of my Thunderbird these days, my back hurts. And it’s not because of the driver’s seat. It’s because I’m not a kid anymore. And if I’m going to do a picture, I want the story to be solid and meaningful and entertaining. When the public walks out of the theater where a picture of mine’s been playing, I want to feel that the people have gotten their money’s worth.
He was working interiors the day his uncle Andrew died in Freeport at the age of seventy-two. It wasn’t unexpected; Andrew Tracy, in his forty-second year at the bank, had endured a trumped-up embezzlement investigation that left his spirit broken. Spence had sent Carroll to Freeport for moral support, and Carroll had brought Gene Sullivan down from Milwaukee. Results of a lie detector test were inconclusive, and a grand jury refused to indict him.
“So the whole thing evaporated,” said Andrew’s son Frank.
And after that he was never any good healthwise. His mental attitude was very sour. A couple of times I met with him in Chicago at the Blackstone when Spence was going through. And Spence would say, “Jesus, your dad is in terrible shape.” I’d say, “Yeah, he is.” He’d say, “That goddamn bank. That’s all he’s got in his head. No wonder he couldn’t get by a lie detector—the goddamn bank was like his wife. Could accept no criticism, wouldn’t sign that non-indictment thing … it was loyalty.” I said, “That’s the way he is, Spence. That’s the way he is. He’s straight as an arrow. He’ll accept no criticism of his character or his actions.” And Spence said, “Well, it’s gonna kill him.” Spence was very good to him, very concerned. He used to call up from California: “How’s he doing today?” And when he died, he called and said, “I can’t make it. We’re finishing up The Mountain. This picture’s a stinker, and I want to get it in back of me. I hate it. I’ve been buried in the thing for so long. I think in two weeks we can wrap it up here, and I’m going to stay with it.”
Tracy’s loathing of a picture was, for once, well founded. By purposely reducing the Teller brothers to “simple good and simple evil,” Ranald MacDougall had robbed them of all shading. The Mountain was ill written, miscast, awkwardly staged—and almost everyone, at least secretly, seemed to know it. “Oh, God, that was a terrible picture!” Claire Trevor exclaimed in 1983. “It goes on forever and it’s bad. Spencer Tracy plays the older brother of Robert Wagner who was then a beanpole, he was so skinny. He looked like he was twelve years old, and Spence had already gotten heavy and old-looking. It was ludicrous.” Eddie Dmytryk admitted that he never should have done the picture: “[Tracy] was playing Bob Wagner’s older brother but looked like Bob’s grandfather. We poured him on the plane but he continued drinking back here. It was an awful situation. I realized I had become his keeper.”
Tracy tried mightily in individual scenes, and occasionally he prevailed on a crowded soundstage when all eyes were upon him. Dmytryk described a scene toward the end of the picture in which Zachary recounts the climb and the rescue of the lone survivor, an Indian girl, and casts himself in a harsh light, insisting the hero of the day was his younger brother, killed in the process. “It is a long scene, running five to six minutes, interrupted only by one short question from E. G. Marshall near the beginning. I shot Tracy’s close-up first, as was frequently my custom, to ensure that this shot, in which most of this scene would be played, had all the freshness and spontaneity possible. As usual, Spence nailed it in the first take. At the finish, most of the crew was crying. I said, ‘Cut,’ and looked over at E.G. [Marshall]. Tears were streaming down his face. ‘I wish all the method actors could watch this man work—just once!’ he said.”
In 1943, Andrew B. Tracy visited his famous nephew on the set of A Guy Named Joe. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Kate’s Old Vic tour ended in Perth on November 11, and she quietly returned to town via American Airlines on the sixteenth. That night Tracy noted in his book: “Din[ner] with Old Rat [with food] from Chasen’s.”
Filming finally concluded with scenes inside the wreckage of the plane on the nineteenth, and again he dined alone with Kate, as he had every night since her return. When she flew back to New York on the morning of the twentieth, she called from the airport, and again that evening from Hartford. In a few days she was off to London, where she would be making a picture with Bob Hope. In the nine eventful months just ended, Spence had seen Old One exactly four days.3
In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Jane Feely came to California for an extended visit, and she met the Tracys at Chasen’s one night for dinner. Spence had brought two Christmas presents for her, one of which was a Madonna of hammered brass he had found for her in Chamonix.
With Edward Dmytryk. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
It was a beautiful thing, and then a little carving of the Last Supper, one of those tiny, tiny things that he had picked up over there. And we had a nice visit. He said that he was cooking for himself, and it was obvious, of course, that he wasn’t at home—he had eaten wieners for the whole last week. And there was this feeling that he was lonely, that he was standing apart from the rest of them at the table. I detected a little sadness there, but thought: “It is none of your business. Stay out of it.” It was hard to be very, very loyal to Louise and to think as much of her as I did, and also think as much of him as I did … That dinner was kind of strained. It was—oh, you know, they talked back and forth about family matters and what everybody was doing, what John was doin
g, but there were two different people, two different households. It was as if he was living in one country, and she in another.
On December 24, Tracy attended the Bogarts’ annual Yuletide party, where he noticed singer Rosemary Clooney peering out a picture window, a study in holiday sadness. They’d met, but she knew him mostly from the movies.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, staring out the window alongside her.
“I don’t know,” she said, her husband, José Ferrer, dancing with Betty Bacall just a few feet away. “I’ve never been to a party on Christmas Eve. I guess I’m just homesick.”
His voice was strong, but he was not unkind.
“Get used to it,” he said.
Nineteen fifty-six would at last be the year of The Old Man and the Sea. Fred Zinnemann had signed on as director after two years of hesitation—John Ford, Vittorio De Sica, David Lean, and John Sturges were discussed in the interim—and Peter Viertel had produced a screenplay in collaboration with Ernest Hemingway that Tracy, for one, thought “great.” Leland Hayward had made a distribution deal with Warner Bros. that called for full financing and, after the picture returned twice its negative cost, 50 percent of the gross. In December Tracy recorded a scratch track narration so that he could “come to grips with the characterization” and show that he could carry the descriptive voice-over in Viertel’s script as well as the thoughts and words of Santiago, the Old Man.
“I had a good feeling about the way he approached the characterization of the Old Man,” Zinnemann said in a letter to Hemingway. “As to the descriptive part, I think that it will have to be read like poetry; like a ballad, with an underlying rhythm to it. Spencer tended to read these descriptive parts a bit too objectively, rather like a report. I think that when we do the final narration, it should give the impression of rising out of a musical mood, created by one softly strumming guitar.”
James Curtis Page 92