James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  And so, on December 20, 1935, Tracy took the pledge and declared himself on the wagon.

  Norman Krasna was a hot commodity, a balding twenty-five-year-old at work on a slick comedy for Clark Gable when an article in the Nation gave him an idea for a play. There had been a lynching in San Jose following the kidnapping of a department store heiress, and Krasna began to wonder what would have happened if the men they hanged had been innocent. “I told my idea to [M-G-M story editor] Sam Marx and [producer] Joe Mankiewicz. They were crazy about it.”

  Sometime later, after Krasna had left M-G-M, Mankiewicz told the story to Louis B. Mayer. Mayer found the subject distasteful but told Mankiewicz, who had exactly one picture to his credit, that he could do it anyway. “I’m going to let you make this film, young man, and I’m going to spend as much money advertising this picture as Irving Thalberg spends on Romeo and Juliet. Otherwise, if it fails, you’ll always say we didn’t get behind it properly. This way, I’m going to prove to you that this picture won’t make a nickel. Now go make it!”

  When they phoned Krasna in New York to purchase the story, he said he had pretty much forgotten it. “I had to dictate it as he’d told it to me,” Mankiewicz said, “so that he could sell it to M-G-M.” The two pages that bagged Krasna a $15,000 payday told the story of Joe Wilson, a young lawyer on his honeymoon in California’s Imperial Valley. A sheriff’s assistant throws him in jail on the day a kidnapping has taken place. The men of the town decide to lynch the alleged perpetrator and a mob forms around the jail. Word reaches the governor, who dispatches a troop of militia to guard the jail. Unable to get to the prisoner, the angry townspeople set fire to the building instead, burning it to the ground. “The gimmick, the hook, the invention, the inspiration,” said Krasna, “is that he is still alive.” When Joe appears to witness the hangings of the vigilantes who left him for dead, the district attorney stops the executions in the nick of time. As Joe sinks into a chair, he buries his head in his hands and says, “But they killed my dog—didn’t they?”

  Mankiewicz already had the ideal director for Krasna’s story in the person of Fritz Lang. David O. Selznick, Mayer’s son-in-law, had brought Lang to the studio in 1934. Selznick put him on a project called The Journey and paired him with a writer named Oliver H. P. Garrett, but nothing ever came of it. As a screenwriter, Mankiewicz had been assigned to work with Lang because he could speak German.

  “I went over and talked to Fritz a couple of times, and I found it very difficult to work with him because he had his office all rigged up as though it was a German office at UFA. He had drawings—what they call a storyboard today—all around the walls. He was working on a version of an old film he made in Germany called Dr. Mabuse. He wanted to make an American version which would involve a crooked district attorney. I got very confused, because I just didn’t see stories that way. I wanted to know the characters in the film before we started picking camera angles.”

  Selznick left the studio to form his own company, and Mankiewicz told the front office he wanted Lang as the director of Mob Rule. In America, Lang’s reputation was based largely on his brilliant 1931 production of M, the story of a man hunted down as a murderer of children. He drew the assignment to direct Mob Rule about the same time Tracy encountered Mankiewicz for the first time at the M-G-M commissary.

  About to start Riffraff, Tracy heard the story in much the same way L. B. Mayer had, but his reaction was much different: “I remember playing The Baby Cyclone in Boston the night Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted,” he later said. “The execution was to take place at midnight, and when I got out of the theater at eleven o’clock, the Boston Common was filled with people protesting the execution. The undercurrent of violence was frightening. It’s easy to see, after watching a thing like that, how mob hysteria can whip up riots or lynchings.”

  Lang and screenwriter Leonard Praskins began work on a script by looking at the story from three different perspectives: the wife (“a typical American girl, married to a man in a very good social position”), the mob (“people in a small town—blacksmiths, gas station men, tailors, uneducated people”), and the man through whose character they decided all three of the stories could most effectively be told.

  “Spencer Tracy,” wrote Lang,

  is a lawyer, a very idealistic type of man who believes that the man is good, that crime is only a disease, that criminals are unhappy people and that the law is there to help them. He is an idealist, an optimist … When this lynching occurs to him his philosophy breaks down … This man must be made in black and white, not in color hues. Short scenes can give us this man’s character. Need no long dialogue scenes … I think his guilt is that this man who always believed that he was an idealist tries to do something for personal revenge. He does not try to understand how everything happened. He does not try to understand what drove these people to this uprising. He now has only one idea. He suffered unbelievably. He wants revenge. This is his guilt.

  One of the more memorable characters on the M-G-M lot was a former title writer and gag man named Robert E. “Bob” Hopkins. “Hoppy,” as he was known to just about everyone, was the closest thing to a handyman they had when it came to a script, and when he wasn’t on a set somewhere, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he was lurking in the studio commissary or standing on the corner—“the crossroads” they called it—ready to nab a producer and shout an idea at him. Tall and profane, Hoppy was easy to laugh off, but the words that shot out of him sometimes amounted to story gold if anyone bothered to pay attention.2

  “I was walking along the street one day on the lot,” recalled Jeanette MacDonald,

  and he yelled across, “Hey Jeanette, I’ve got a hell of an idea for you and Clark Gable.” He came rushing over to me. I said, “Oh you have? What is it?” So we stood there and he talked to me and told me this wonderful idea he had. I must confess it was exciting. But he said, “You know I can’t get to first base with the g.d. thing.” I said, “What do you mean, Bob?” He said, “Well, I’m getting the run-around. I try to see Eddie Mannix and he’s too busy, I’ve tried to see Thalberg and he’s too busy. I’ve just tried to see everybody and nobody wants to see me. Look, I think you could do something with it. They all like you up there. You go up and tell them you like the idea.”

  Hoppy’s idea had size and punch. According to Gottfried Reinhardt, son of Max Reinhardt and new to the studio, it consisted of just six words: “ ‘San Francisco—earthquake—atheist becomes religious.’ That was his idea.”

  MacDonald went to Mannix. “You see, at this point I was going pretty strong at Metro, having just done Naughty Marietta and Merry Widow, which surprised them all. Mannix said, ‘Would you like to do it?’ I said, ‘Yes I would like to do it, providing we get a decent script out of it.’ ”

  The earliest bit of extant writing on San Francisco is a draft of the opening sequence by Herman Mankiewicz, Joe’s elder brother, dated January 9, 1935. The full screenplay, however, was the work of Anita Loos, the tiny novelist and screenwriter who, like Hopkins, had spent her childhood in San Francisco. According to her, the character she and Hopkins envisioned for Gable was based on the late playwright and scam artist Wilson Mizner, who had once run a gambling house on Long Island. Sometime in April, Loos’ progress on the script was halted, presumably when Gable said he would not do the picture.

  “I was all for San Francisco,” MacDonald said,

  because I felt like the mother of it in a way. Since Hoppy had said, “This is a picture for you and Gable,” I was stuck with this, this idea had clung to me, and then I found out that Mr. Gable didn’t want to do it. The story that came to me from Mr. Mannix was, “Who wants to sit there with egg on his face while she sings? Nobody can do anything while she’s singing.” (He may not have used that expression then but that’s what he meant.) That was primarily his reason for not wanting to be in San Francisco.

  So they started to mention this one and that one and I kept saying, “No, no, no. It�
��s for Gable and me and I’ll wait.” They said, “What do you mean you’ll wait? Gable has another commitment. He says he doesn’t want to do it anyway.” “Will he do it after his other commitment?” “Well, yes, he has to. He doesn’t have it in his contract that he can sit back and say no.” I said, “All right, I’ll wait until this other commitment is finished.”

  You see, my contract called for so much a picture. I wasn’t on a long-term contract but on a picture-to-picture basis. So many pictures and each picture was a certain price and the price rose with each picture, plus a guarantee of so many weeks. After that, I got prorated money if it ran overtime. So when I found I would have to wait another six months in order to do a whole picture, contractually and financially they said, “Either we do it or we don’t do it, and how are we going to get around it?” I said, “I’ll wait” and they said, “What are you going to do about the pay?” I said, “I’ll just forfeit the pay. Just let it go, and I’ll sit out the six months that I should be paid for because I want Gable that badly. I think Gable is right for it.” Then some stupid person told Gable that I had said I would wait and that I had said I wanted him for my picture. He said, “Her picture??” You see? Immediately he was rubbed the wrong way.

  Work on the script resumed in the fall, when the film was assigned to producer Bernard H. Hyman, a Thalberg protégé, and W. S. “Woody” Van Dyke, the director of MacDonald’s two previous movies for the studio. (“We just seemed to think alike,” MacDonald said of Van Dyke.) The genial Hyman initiated a series of story conferences with Hopkins, Loos, her husband John Emerson, and Van Dyke, working not so much on developing the relationship between Gable’s character, Blackie Norton, and MacDonald’s Mary Blake, a prim country preacher’s daughter, but rather the more shaded and complex story of Blackie, the Barbary Coast gambler, and his childhood friend, Father Tim Mullin. It would be Mullin’s job, with the help of the 1906 quake, to open up Blackie’s spiritual side, and it had to be credible—couldn’t be sappy. Quickly, they got down to business: Blackie and Tim clashing over Blackie’s exploitation of Mary, Blackie’s frantic search for Mary before the hall is dynamited, Blackie thanking God when he finds she’s okay. It was, as Loos later described it, “unadulterated soap opera,” and the proper casting of the priest became the key to making it work.

  Typically, priests in movies were played by character men—Edward Arnold in The White Sister, Leo Carrillo in Manhattan Melodrama, Walter Connolly in Father Brown, Detective. Casting a lead actor as the priest in San Francisco would be a bold move, giving the conflict over Mary a sizzling undercurrent of sexual tension. When the idea of playing Father Mullin was first broached to Spencer Tracy (who was anticipating Mob Rule as his next picture), he was, as Louise put it, “a little dubious about doing a priest.” Not only did he feel a terrific sense of responsibility in representing the church to a mass audience, but there was also a hesitancy that grew from his own conviction that maybe he should never have become an actor in the first place. It was a thing he almost never spoke of, but Pat O’Brien heard him say it on more than one occasion, and he repeated it once to Shakespearean scholar and author John McCabe.

  “What was it, do you figure, Pat, that made Tracy such an unhappy man?” McCabe asked O’Brien one night over drinks at the Lambs Club. “It’s a real mystery, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s not,” O’Brien replied. “At least three times Spence told me why it was.” According to Pat, Tracy had never lost the deeply held nostalgia many Irish Catholic boys felt for the idea of being a priest, like one of the bright, enviable Jesuits from their prep school days. “Each time he told me he was pretty much in the bag, but he was telling the truth. I can remember once when he was looking out over the ocean, nuzzling a bottle, when he told me this. His unhappiness—he said—was that always deep down he had the feeling that perhaps he had spurned his real vocation—to the priesthood.”

  As Tracy once explained it, “I was seventeen, maybe sixteen, and I was going to a Jesuit school—Marquette Academy. And you know how it is in a place like that—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.”

  Had there, in fact, once been a calling? And was he now being asked to act a role he had spurned in real life? “I was awful scared of playing a priest,” he later acknowledged in an interview. “Sure, I couldn’t see myself in that part—or other people accepting me. I was afraid people would get mad at me for trying to play something like that.” To Van Dyke he put it more bluntly: “I’m a Roman Catholic and you know the thing that happened not long ago [meaning the affair with Loretta Young]. I wouldn’t have the crust to play a priest.” It was Van Dyke, he said, who talked him into it, who told him that he’d make him “eat” those words. “I honestly didn’t think I ought to try it. I said I’d go ahead if I had to, but I didn’t like the idea one bit.”

  On January 24, 1936, the decision was announced by Edwin Schallert in the pages of the Los Angeles Times: “Instead of two stars of the first magnitude, San Francisco, [a] depiction of the old days in the great west coast city, is to have three luminaries. As is known, Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald for some time have been assigned to this cast, and yesterday Spencer Tracy was added … Start of San Francisco is programmed as soon as Gable returns from Mexico, which will be in about a week. Gable and Miss MacDonald have never previously appeared in a picture together, and casting Tracy with the stars is also an innovation.”

  Tracy had known Gable since 1929, when he replaced him in the troubled play that came to be known as Conflict. The following year, Gable was offered the role of Killer Mears in the West Coast production of The Last Mile. The offer had come from the husband-wife producing team of Louis MacLoon and Lillian Albertson, for whom Gable had worked off and on since 1925. Albertson caught Gable in New York, where he had just closed in a play at the Eltinge Theatre. Tracy was rounding up guards and executing hostages next door at the Harris, but Gable hadn’t yet seen him.

  “Here we were,” said Gable, “working alongside each other, and I couldn’t see his play and he couldn’t see mine—while mine lasted—because we worked the same hours, matinees included.” Gable and his wife caught The Last Mile: “I watched Spence as Killer Mears for two acts, and I said to myself, ‘That’s for me.’ I rushed out and wired the producer I was taking the midnight train.”

  Gable impressed playgoers at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles, where The Last Mile had a brief but notable run. John Wexley thought him better in the part of Mears than Tracy (“less self-conscious, more dynamic”) and director William Wyler shot a test of him for Universal. By the end of the year, Gable was under contract to M-G-M, while Tracy was similarly committed to Fox. “Hollywood didn’t have any Lambs Club where we could bump into each other,” Gable said, “but both of us went out more in those days. Every now and then we’d meet at some night club or some party and we’d sit around and take the picture business apart.” The two men also occasionally saw each other at Riviera, where Gable briefly tried polo and was, in Tracy’s early judgment, pretty good.

  They began shooting San Francisco on Valentine’s Day, 1936, Gable reeking of garlic in a rousing show of contempt for his leading lady. (“Gable is a mess!” she complained to her manager Bob Ritchie. “I’ve never been more disappointed in anyone in my life.”) Tracy did his first work as Father Mullin the following day and surprised some members of the crew with his level of professionalism. “I’d heard all the stories about him at Fox, that he’d go off on drinking sprees,” said Joe Newman, Van Dyke’s assistant director on the picture. “He didn’t on San Francisco; he was fine. He was always on time. He was perfect in his lines. Everything I’d heard about him, he erased.”

  Clad in black cassock and biretta, Tracy played a brief phone exchange with Gable, then presided over a nighttime organ recital at the rescue mission. MacDon
ald sang “The Holy City” (“Jerusalem, Jerusalem”), then took part in an expository scene in which Tracy provided the backstory on Blackie Norton, “the most Godless, scoffing and unbelieving soul in all San Francisco,” and a little on himself as well. “Blackie and I were kids together—born and brought up on the Coast. We used to sell newspapers in the joints along Pacific Street. Blackie was the leader of all the kids in the neighborhood, and I was his pal.” He tells her he’s tried to do something with Blackie for years, but that “maybe I’m not the right one.”

  It was one of the most critical movie scenes Tracy had ever played, and he played it as he played all scenes, with simplicity and honesty and a conviction that he was the character in all its natural shadings. The authority he exuded was unalloyed with theatrical tricks or the calculations of a leading man suddenly beyond his depth. If he had any fear, it was the fear of artificiality, the fear that lifelong Catholics would look at Father Tim and see a movie star pretending to be a priest and not the soul of a real priest, with a hardscrabble childhood in his background and wisdom as to the ways of the Barbary Coast.

  There was an effort to load Tracy’s principal scenes toward the front of the schedule, as the start of Mob Rule was looming and no one knew quite what to expect of Fritz Lang. There was tension between Gable and Van Dyke, Gable and the front office. “I like Tracy very much,” MacDonald wrote after two weeks on the picture. “There’s as much difference between the two as day from nite. Gable acts as tho’ he were really too bored to play the scenes with me. Typical ham.”