by Anne Edwards
* The four films starring Tracy and released in 1940 were: I Take This Woman (February 2), Northwest Passage (February 23) (both made the previous year), Edison, The Man (May 10) and Boom Town (August 30).
† Clark Gable was number-one box-office star in 1940, but the following year he and Tracy traded positions.
‡ Cary Grant’s salary above R.K.O. and Columbia’s loan-out fees (not known) was donated by him to the British War Relief Fund.
* Studios either charged other studios for loaning out their stars, or exchanged one star for another of equal status. Large sums were often made by the studios for the loan-outs, as in the case of Robert Mitchum. In 1946, when he co-starred with Hepburn and Robert Taylor in Undercurrent, he was paid $300 a week by his studio, which then collected $25,000 for six weeks from Metro. This happened mostly when a contract player made it big, especially early in his or her career.
* Joseph Leo Mankiewicz (1909– ) began as a screenwriter during the late years of silent films. In 1936, he turned to producing and was responsible for many major films at Metro—Fury (1936) with Spencer Tracy, The Gorgeous Hussy (1936), The Bride Wore Red (1937), A Christmas Carol (1938), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939) among them. He later became a director and twice won the Academy Award for Best Director: A Letter to Three Wives (1949) (also Best Screenplay), and All About Eve (1950) (also Best Screenplay). He made two more films with Hepburn: Woman of the Year (1942) and Suddenly Last Summer (1959).
CHAPTER
14
In Hollywood, the man who holds the title Vice-President in Charge of Production is all powerful, a supreme god to the thousands in his employ. His disapproval can smash the career of any one of them. At Warner Brothers during the thirties and forties under the Vice-President in Charge of Production Harry Warner, the brightest stars were made to punch a time card and the studio police force operated like the F.B.I. Louis B. Mayer was a less totalitarian godhead. Still, he held the reins tightly on the people who made his movies.
Spencer Tracy was one of the chosen—God’s own—so favored because Mayer was certain he could substantially increase Metro’s profit and ensure his personal status and fortune. At this stage of her early association with Metro, Kate was not among the elite. The Philadelphia Story had been a financial and critical success. But Kate had proved only that she could be good box office if starred in a tailored vehicle and backed up by other box-office favorites. And, though the film had won six Academy Award nominations, her performance among them for Best Actress,* she had lost the award to Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle (ironically one of the parts offered to her for a low fee before she had created Tracy Lord for the stage and screen). Kate’s next film, no matter how commercial the property, would have to co-star an actor with the box-office draw of a Grant or a Stewart.* Metro was in the prime of its golden years in 1941, but the studio had, besides Stewart, only three surefire male stars under contract: Clark Gable, Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy. On the other hand, they had an abundance of women stars who could compete with Kate for the same roles: Greta Garbo,† Greer Garson, Irene Dunne, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Margaret Sullavan. Added to this list were Hedy Lamarr, Myrna Loy, Lana Turner, Judy Garland and Esther Williams. Intelligently, Kate reasoned that her best chance would be to bring in her own film property, as she had with The Philadelphia Story, and it had to be one that Metro would want as much as she did.
In the spring of 1941, while Kate and Laura were vacationing in Florida, Garson Kanin had conceived an idea for a story with Kate in mind. He titled it The Thing About Women and based it blatantly on the character and personality of Dorothy Thompson, considered by some to be the first lady of American journalism. Time magazine had printed her photograph on a May, 1939 cover and stated, “She and Eleanor Roosevelt are undoubtedly the most influential women in the U.S.” Expelled from Germany in 1934 by Hitler’s personal order, she had become an international celebrity and returned to America as a columnist and commentator whose political opinions and warnings on the rise of a Third Reich were widely heard and read. Her marriage to the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Sinclair Lewis was the most celebrated literary union of the century. In 1935, Thompson had been chosen the Woman of the Year because (as author Mary Roberts Rinehart said in introducing her on that occasion), “she is the woman journalist at her best. She thinks and works like a man but remains very much a woman; and because she has made a success of her marriage with Sinclair Lewis, and that, I fancy, with that brilliant and talented person would be a career in itself for a woman.” (At this stage, Kanin had named the Dorothy Thompson character Tess Harding, after Laura Harding, and the name stuck.)
Two years later, a dinner had been staged in Thompson’s honor at the Astor Hotel, at which President Roosevelt’s mother, Mrs. Sara Delano Roosevelt, acknowledged in introduction, “No other individual so symbolizes the American qualities of courage, intelligence and recognition of the dignity of man. . . .” Tributes were read from Winston Churchill and presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. Shortly thereafter, an announcement was made that Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair Lewis had separated and filed suit for divorce. Give or take a few biographical details, Thompson’s life was the basic story of Woman of the Year (which the script was soon to be called). Like Thompson, Kate’s Tess Harding was also to be an international-affairs columnist and a fighting liberal once expelled from the Third Reich, on first-name terms with and the adviser to many leading political figures. Tess’s husband had become a sportswriter (also of great celebrity) for the same newspaper. Kanin had nothing more jotted down than the idea and a few suggestions for scenes between the principals, but he thought it had great potential for Kate and another friend, Spencer Tracy. Kanin, however, had committed himself to the U.S. Army to write and direct two documentaries* and was very involved in cleaning up his affairs. So he turned to his brother, Michael Kanin,† and Ring Lardner, Jr.,‡ with the suggestion that they develop the story further.
The two young writers had never worked together before; the teaming was Garson’s invention, confident that Mike could be counted on to adhere to the characters he had in mind and that Lardner would complement him because of his newspaper experience and his knowledge of both the sports and political worlds.
Within three weeks and entirely on speculation, they produced a treatment of about thirty thousand words in the form of a novella, written in the past tense and first person and narrated by the Tracy character. The script, still called The Thing About Women, was sent to Garson in New York, who in turn mailed it to Kate in West Hartford.
“It’s magnificent!” she told them. Discussion now turned to how best to sell the property as a package with Kate to Metro. The first thing agreed upon was that the script should not carry either of the authors’ names. There were two reasons for their remaining anonymous. One, neither had ever earned more than two or three hundred dollars a week (low pay in Hollywood), and Metro would want to pay them accordingly. And two, Lardner was known as a “trouble maker” because of his part in the Screenwriters Guild’s struggle for recognition; and William Fadiman, Metro’s chief story editor, had said publicly that he would never be employed by Metro. Kate decided that she would submit the property on her own without benefit of an agent so that the authors’ anonymity would not be jeopardized. With Lardner’s and Mike Kanin’s agreement, she now contacted Mankiewicz and told him he would be receiving a manuscript in which she would like to star opposite Spencer Tracy.
“Swell! Who wrote it?” Mankiewicz asked.
“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”
Before he could probe further, she disconnected and drove from West Hartford into New York. When she arrived three hours later, he had already called. Returning the call, she learned that he had received the script, read it and passed it on to Kenneth MacKenna, Kate’s mentor in her first stage appearance in Baltimore and now one of Metro’s story editors, who, in fact, was reading it at that moment in Mankiewicz’s living room. Kate asked to spe
ak to him.
“Who wrote it—[Ben] Hecht and [Charles] MacArthur [two extremely successful authors]? How much do they want for it?” MacKenna asked.
“That’s a secret for the present,” Kate said.
“Look, Kate; I can’t send up a story [to the front office] unless I know the author’s name and the price he expects!”
“I’m not going to tell you his name, and as for the price, all I’ll tell you is that it’s going to be high. I own the story, and I’m not going to sell it anyway, unless Tracy will play it.”
Within two days, Metro had read the script and sent it down to Tracy in Florida, where cameras on The Yearling, his current assignment, had just begun to roll. Tracy liked it and said he would do it when The Yearling was finished. Then the unexpected happened. Production on The Yearling suddenly halted. Location problems were cited, but the studio, after viewing the first rushes, was not satisfied that either the director or the young boy who co-starred with Tracy were right. The Yearling was to be temporarily shelved.* Tracy arrived back in California at about the same time that Kate was checking into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Kate was finally to meet her idol.
Spencer Tracy’s affair with Loretta Young had ended years before. Afterward, Tracy had become the kind of Hollywood character he had always despised, a black-tie regular at Ciro’s, filmtown’s choicest nightclub, but seldom attending without a beautiful young actress—Olivia de Havilland, Judy Garland—you name them, Tracy had dated them. People talked. Tracy was a married man; and though Louise was Episcopalian, Tracy’s dedicated Catholicism stood in the way of a divorce. Whenever he was filming in town, he took a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel; but he still considered his home the Hill (the ranch in the Valley where Louise and the children lived and on which they raised horses) and returned there from time to time.
Though the marriage had eroded, it had turned into a dependent friendship with strong ties. He and Louise had been married nearly twenty years, through tough times and good times, and she had always been there helping out, bolstering his ego, supporting his talent. Her own career—and though not a great talent, she had been more than competent—had been gracefully put aside not long after their son at ten months had been diagnosed as incurably deaf. And after the specialists had tried to convince her that John (named after Spencer’s father, John Tracy, an Irishman “with generations of good old Irish fighters behind him”) would never learn to speak and that he should be placed in an institution, Louise had dedicated her life with ferocious intensity to learning how to communicate with the child by teaching him to form sounds, to read, and finally to speak.
Close friends said that when Louise realized her son could not hear she took him that very day to a doctor and that when Spencer was told he went out and got drunk. John, an appealing child with Louise’s dark coloring and fine-cut features, soon became almost totally dependent on his mother. “1 wanted to help with the boy,” Tracy confessed, “but I was no damn good at it. I would come in after Louise had been working with him for hours and start undoing the good she had done. Maybe she had been working with him all day on a word like ‘shoe,’ showing it to him and saying the word over and over, trying to get him to read her lips. So I would pick up the damn shoe and throw it across the room and scare the poor kid half to death. I had no patience, and it’s amazing how much she had—and has.”
Tracy felt he had failed Louise all along the way with John and considered her entirely responsible for the fact that his son was now miraculously capable of attending college and living a life of his own. Louise had turned her full and considerable energies into helping to fund and build the John Tracy Clinic. By 1941, Louise’s dream had almost become a reality. Convinced that a child’s parents were his or her first and natural teachers, Louise had formed a group of parents (mostly mothers) of afflicted children and refurbished a small cottage at the University of Southern California, where she conducted meetings, sharing her successful approach in communicating with an unhearing child before the age of two.*
A man of any conscience or character could not easily walk out on a woman like Louise. How many times had she welcomed him home either drunk or from the arms of another woman—or both—without recrimination? Louise understood his frustration and guilt at not being able to communicate with John as she and their young daughter, Susie, did. Still, Tracy could never forgive himself for not learning John’s language better or for his own weakness where alcohol was concerned. Yet, somehow, Louise always found it in her heart to forgive him. Nevertheless, years had passed since they had truly been man and wife, a bold truth that seemed to concern him much more than it did Louise.
Spencer Bonaventure Tracy had been born with the twentieth century in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to fairly prosperous middleclass parents. A staunch Catholic with an unquenchable thirst for hard liquor, John Tracy was general sales manager of the Sterling Motor Truck Company. Young Spencer admired his father’s virile personality, but his mother—Caroline Brown Tracy, whose ancestors could be traced back to settlers in the colonies before the Revolution—drew his greatest love and respect. As a kid, he’d “never passed up many fights” and had an early “itch to travel.” At seven, he ran away from home, to be found, happily, eight hours later playing with “ruffians from the wrong side of the track.” At sixteen, while attending a Jesuit school—Marquette Academy—he felt called to the priesthood.
“You know how it is in a place like that,” he later told a close friend. “The influence is strong, very strong, intoxicating. The priests are all such superior men—heroes. You want to be like them—we all did. Every guy in the school probably thought some—more or less—about trying for the cloth. You lie in the dark and see yourself as Monsignor Tracy; Cardinal Tracy, Bishop Tracy, Archbishop—I’m getting gooseflesh! . . . Every time I play a priest—and I’ve done my share* . . . every time I put on the clothes and the collar I feel right, right away. Like they were mine, like I belonged in them, and that feeling of being—what’s the word?—an intermediary—is always very appealing. Those were always my most comfortable parts. . . .”
After serving a year in World War I (he never had to fight abroad), Tracy struggled through two years at Ripon College in Wisconsin, at the end of which time his life work was set out for him. A well-received performance in a class play† made him decide to become an actor. His English professor agreed with his decision and wrote the director of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York suggesting Tracy appear for a tryout. It sounded like “a silly idea” to John Tracy, but he agreed to pay his son’s tuition for the first semester if Spencer could live on the thirty dollars a month he received as an ex-serviceman.
He and another future film actor, Pat O’Brien,* lived in a room in the West Nineties, “two steep, shady flights up” illuminated by “one flickering light bulb,” freezing in winter “when the gray wind came up Broadway from the direction of Macy’s,” suffocating in summer when the sun on the slate roof directly overhead made the heat something “out of Egypt.” They subsisted mainly on pretzels and water, but Tracy maintained that there was “something about going hungry that makes you discover the utmost of your resources.”
Three days after his father’s tuition money ran out, Tracy got a nonspeaking part as a robot in the Theatre Guild’s production of Karel Capek’s science-fantasy, R.U.R. When it closed five months later he took a job with a new stock company of which Louise was a member. From that point, Tracy was seldom out of work as an actor. He and Louise married in 1923. A year later John was born and the small family traveled in stock together. Tracy made his Broadway debut in a speaking part in George M. Cohan’s production of Yellow at the National Theatre on September 21, 1926. At the end of the final dress rehearsal, Cohan, speaking in front of the entire company, stood up and said, “Kid, you’re the best damn actor I ever saw!” and sat down again. Nonetheless, Yellow did not make him a star. After it closed, Tracy returned to stock and, with Louise as his leading lady,
appeared in a play a week for nine productions.
His big break came in 1930 when he won the lead role of Killer Mears in the all-male cast of the prison drama The Last Mile. Tracy was an overnight sensation. Hollywood called and he answered. Tracy and Humphrey Bogart were to co-star in the film adaptation. Within three years, Tracy had made sixteen films. By 1935 he was a major star. By 1936 he had gained the reputation of being one of the worst drunks in Hollywood, and alcohol wasn’t his only vice. Fritz Lang,* the autocratic German director who worked with Tracy in 1935 on Fury, revealed that “Spencer Tracy had a contract with Metro—because he drank like a fish—that if he had so much as a glass of beer they could throw him out. My friend Peter Lorre, a former drug addict, explained to me that when people are deprived of a craving, they turn to something else—Lorre to drink, Tracy to whorehouses . . . he’d disappear after lunch [and not] come back until four o’clock. I’d be sitting there with the whole crew wanting to work when he’d arrive and say, ‘Fritz, I want to invite the crew to have coffee.’”
Tracy would miss hours—sometimes days—of shooting. But he never appeared drunk on a set. Indeed, his preparation for a scene was awesome. Joe Mankiewicz, who produced Fury, recalled a week Tracy spent at Mankiewicz’s home in Malibu during production, a precaution he took to ensure his star’s appearance on the set for major scenes. Tracy was called upon to crack nuts in one, and he spent one entire night working on the most natural way to crack nuts. “Christ,” Mankiewicz says, “he used up five pounds of nuts and then he pretended on the set it had just occurred to him.” Despite his drinking, Tracy remained the ultimate film performer, and Metro’s great stars—Gable, Crawford, Harlow, Colbert, Lamarr—all wanted him as a co-star because “his masterful technique of underplaying was an unfailing corrective” to their excesses.