James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Lang later blamed Mankiewicz and the administrators of the Production Code for being forced to shoot an alternate ending in which Tracy and Sidney embrace in court and actually kiss at the fade-out. “A man gives a speech that … is very well written and extremely well delivered, and then suddenly, for no reason whatsoever—in front of the judge and the audience and God knows who—they turn around and they kiss each other. For me, a perfect ending was when he said, ‘Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me.’ You could have shown a closeup of Sylvia Sidney—she’s very happy—he could look at her—period.”

  The idea of the kiss came from somewhere inside M-G-M, as the Production Code Administration’s correspondence on the film makes no mention of it. The order to reshoot the close-up of Katherine may well have come from Sam Katz, whose memory of those first desperate rushes would surely have suggested a climactic embrace for the couple. In communicating the order to retake the shot, Mankiewicz told Lang, speaking of the original ending, “Frankly, I agree with you that if this holds up before an audience, it is to be preferred as an ending.” Dutifully, both Tracy and Sidney played the scene as prescribed, and Fury finished after fifty-five turbulent days.

  “It was a horrendous test under fire,” Mankiewicz concluded, “particularly for someone like Spencer. It was an important part, an emotional part. And then, of course, to have … a finish of which everybody connected with the picture can only be ashamed.” It wasn’t the clinch that undercut the film’s impact when it had its initial showing, though, but rather the scene in which Lang had the voices and images of the convicted men following Joe down those deserted streets of the city. “We had a first preview,” said Mankiewicz, “at which the film was literally laughed off the screen because Lang had [that] sequence in which ghosts chased Spencer Tracy through the streets. He turned around and the ghosts would disappear behind trees à la Walt Disney. Obviously, that sequence had to be cut out of the film, but Fritz refused to cut anything. It was Eddie Mannix who fired Fritz off the lot and told me to cut the film.3 The subsequent preview was a smashing success, after that one deletion, and the reviews were rapturous.”

  But with the motivating sequence removed from the picture, Lang was left to flounder when questioned about the surrendering of Joe Wilson. “I’ve often been asked if Tracy gives himself up because of social consciousness or something like that,” he said to Peter Bogdanovich in 1965. “I don’t think so. I think this man gives himself up because he can’t go on living with an eternal lie—he couldn’t go through life with it. It’s too easy an explanation to say social consciousness makes me do something. One acts because of emotions, personal emotions.”

  Fritz Lang left M-G-M a bitter man, blaming Joe Mankiewicz for the cutting of a key sequence and the sweetening of the climax. After the film’s release, Mankiewicz approached him at the Hollywood Brown Derby and offered his hand in friendship and congratulation, and Lang, to his later regret, refused it. His dislike of Tracy was more subtle, as he never had anything but praise for Tracy’s performance in the film. Yet he told Mankiewicz’s biographer, Kenneth L. Geist, that Tracy’s alcoholism had indirectly delayed the picture. “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. I assume that’s where he’d disappear after lunch, since he didn’t come back till 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’s habit was to have a rubdown at lunch—and a brief nap if he could manage it—but he was present throughout for Fury and only a conflict with the San Francisco company could have deprived Lang of his services. Mankiewicz, furthermore, thought Lang’s insinuation ludicrous. “I don’t think Spence went to whorehouses!” he erupted when asked to comment on Lang’s statement in 1992. “He was much too busy with the ladies! If there ever was an actor who had no reason EVER to go to a whorehouse, it was Spencer Tracy!” He called Lang’s statement “the most unbelievable lie” and then went into the business of the three-hour delay. “How can that be? When Clark Gable was late one half-hour, forty minutes late, on a Victor Fleming movie … Eddie Mannix showed up on the set. Because the [assistant director’s] report goes in: ‘Mr. Gable showed up at such-and-such a time …’ And they come right down. ‘Why were you late?’ Clark, forty-five minutes late, and they ate his ass out. Those stories … if he didn’t show up til four o’clock, what did the crew do? These things are impossible, but they are believed.”

  Though Tracy thought Fury a “great document” and a “powerful movie,” he maintained a respectful silence on the subject of its legendary director and vowed never again to work with the man. “Fritz Lang, the director, is a German,” he said tartly in his only public comment on the subject, “and has a technique all his own.”

  * * *

  1 Wellman’s claim to the contrary, this was the only documented fight between the two men.

  2 It was Hopkins who once referred to one of the M-G-M producers as “the asbestos curtain between the audience and the entertainment.”

  3 “It’s all very well for you directors to want to make pictures with messages in them,” Lang said he was told, “but just remember that Cinderella paid this company $8 million last year—and $8 million can’t be wrong.” The Cinderella story on the current schedule, of course, was San Francisco.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Best Year

  * * *

  Louise Tracy saw little of her husband over the spring of 1936. He was, in fact, in the midst of shooting both San Francisco and Fury when it came time, after years of renting, to move the family to a place of its own.

  The Tracys bought in the rural flatlands of the San Fernando Valley, a sprawling region that encompassed practically everything north of the Cahuenga Pass and south of Santa Barbara. A single-story ranch house with two bedrooms, the residence was modest compared to the Cooper property, eight acres on a two-lane road called White Oak just north of Ventura Boulevard in the residential suburb of Encino. The house was nestled in a grove of orange trees, a long driveway leading up from the road. Dick Mook could remember being routed out of bed one morning to see the property Tracy had just purchased.

  “The house could not be plainer or simpler,” Spence enthused. “It’s the grounds that make it look pretentious. Why, if it weren’t for the grounds—if this house were sitting on a small lot—any stock player making $100 a week could own it. It’s so small and so plainly furnished that we’ll only have to keep a cook and a houseboy.” And, Mook added, a field hand to tend the horses, the grove, the chickens, the alfalfa…

  Tracy had several rooms added—known collectively as “the children’s wing”—and broke ground on a swimming pool around the time of his thirty-sixth birthday. On the rare day off he cut alfalfa or tended the horses or took in the games at Riviera, where he would watch from the sidelines and count the days until he could get back into the action.1 Fury was previewed May 18 at the Fox Wilshire, and despite Lang’s displeasure over the trims Mankiewicz had been forced to make, the first reviews, as Tracy would note in his datebook, were “marvelous.” The man from Daily Variety saw a “consummate exhibition of a man whose tolerant, compassionate nature is galled to maniacal vengeance against men who, without justification, sought to burn him in jail.” It was, said the Hollywood Reporter, the best thing Tracy had ever done. Gratified, he played six relatively carefree periods of polo the day following their publication and celebrated five full months of sobriety. Three days later, he and Louise boarded the famed Matson luxury liner, the S.S. Lurline, and sailed for Hawaii.

  On the sidelines at Riviera with Walt Disney, circa 1936. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  The crossing took five days and was mercifully free of entreaties from the studio. The weather was beautiful, and Tracy worked on his tan between naps, champagne receptions (where he stuck to tea and soft drinks
), and movies in the ship’s theater. Louise reveled in the social scene, posing for photos, swimming and reading, dancing when she could get Spence out onto the floor. When they docked at Honolulu a crowd was waiting, mostly kids but more than a few adults, and they all surged forward, brandishing notebooks and tablets and pencils sharp enough to draw blood. “Mr. Tracy!” they called. “Please, Mr. Tracy!” Piled high with leis, he would stop, sign, try to move on, stop again, sign again. “It looked hopeless,” reported the Star-Bulletin, which covered the arrival. “No man could sign all those notebooks. Tracy did his urbane best but the hunters grew.” It took a couple of traffic cops to clear the way so that the party, under the guidance of the local M-G-M rep, could get to a waiting car. They took off for the Royal Hawaiian, where they’d be staying for two weeks, maybe longer. Veteran waterfronters said he had drawn more autograph hounds than any passenger since Shirley Temple.

  Fury was released nationally while the Tracys were on Oahu, opening at the Capitol Theatre in New York on June 5. Coming at the tag end of the 1935–36 season, it almost looked as if the film were being dumped, as Fritz Lang was fond of claiming. There was, however, very little in the way of competition, and Mayer, convinced it would die like a dog, had promised he would push it. Loew’s commandeered the electric sign running over the Astor Theatre, where The Great Ziegfeld was still drawing crowds, and pumped Fury in a big way.

  William Boehnel of the World-Telegram devoted nearly half a page to the picture, the headline dubbing it “one of the most courageous in screen history.” Variety’s Abel Green thought it a “cinch critics’ picture” that would do well by word of mouth, a prediction confirmed by the Enquirer when it studied the trending at the Capitol box office and concluded that Fury was, in movie parlance, a “builder”—a film that was selling progressively more tickets as the week wore on. “Sylvia Sidney and Spencer Tracy until now have been players of secondary stardom, but Fury raises them to first magnitude box office popularity with the strength of its story and direction, as well as box office response.”

  The picture ran up domestic rentals of $685,000, then surprised everyone by doing an almost equal amount in foreign rentals—practically unheard of, apart from the films of Greta Garbo. It may have been a measure of Fritz Lang’s international reputation or simply the strength of its subject matter, but Fury logged worldwide billings of $1,300,000, surpassing Riffraff to make it the most popular of all of Tracy’s movies. Producer Walter Wanger, late of M-G-M, jumped at the chance to reassemble a winning package, and Tracy, much to his horror, found upon his return from Hawaii that he had been lent to Wanger for a second picture with Lang and Sylvia Sidney.2 With a commitment also under way for Tracy to go into The Plough and the Stars at RKO, the only diplomatic solution was to cancel all loan-outs and keep Tracy, suddenly hot and getting hotter, under the protective wing of his home studio.

  Tracy logged some of the best reviews of his career as the vengeful Joe Wilson of Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936). (SUSIE TRACY)

  Where Fox had pretty much left audiences to figure Tracy out for themselves, Metro was in the process of shaping his public image and building him into a top-flight attraction. His first three pictures had been a matter of getting his sea legs. The Murder Man was a programmer, Whipsaw a vehicle for Myrna Loy, Riffraff for Jean Harlow. No longer tethered to one of the studio’s big female attractions, Tracy caught fire with Fury, and audiences who, just a year earlier, had no clear handle on him, were suddenly turning out to see him. It was a transition that was nothing short of miraculous, but there was something else at work as well, a willingness on the part of the public to embrace a leading man who was not textbook handsome nor bigger than life.

  “What the movies need,” said actress Carole Lombard, as if speaking for a whole generation of filmgoers, “are more Clark Gables and Gary Coopers. By that I mean virile men stars. Right now there are three times as many [of] the milder romantic types. This needs to be changed.” The actors she included on her personal list of “he-men” were Randolph Scott, James Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Fred MacMurray, Charles Bickford … and Spencer Tracy. “Half the leading men today either can’t act, look like coal-beavers in dinner clothes, or make love like wrestlers.”

  If there was one man in the Metro organization responsible for Tracy’s rise, it was Edgar J. Mannix, vice president and general manager of the studio. Where Louis B. Mayer was the public face of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Eddie Mannix was often regarded as the private one, the man who supervised the supervisors at M-G-M, a professional Irishman who kept a clutch of shillelaghs outside the door of his office. Born in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Mannix was shanty to the bone, part of a gang of Irish street toughs making trouble for the Schenck brothers, whose Palisade Park extended into Fort Lee from Cliffside to the south. Nicholas Schenck, no less streetwise, heard they were lobbing rocks at the trolleys attempting to enter the park and said, “Find the leader and hire him!”

  Mannix started as a ticket taker for Schenck in 1910 and worked his way into management, eventually jumping to film production at the ramshackle studio on East Forty-eighth Street where Nick’s brother Joe made feature pictures starring his wife, actress Norma Talmadge. When Nick Schenck became vice president of Loew’s Incorporated in 1924, he sent Mannix west as comptroller and special assistant to Irving Thalberg, tasked with keeping an eye on Mayer.

  Stocky and rough-hewn, Mannix was a bulldog in both style and appearance, with big jowly cheeks and a powerful jaw. He excelled at labor relations, and when he turned on the charm there was nobody more ingratiating. He was a great storyteller, a man of the people, and he could get anyone on his side with a frank talk, a direct word, a pat on the back. His word was his bond, and more than one relationship was predicated on nothing more than a handshake. “Here,” Charles Bickford said to himself upon meeting him for the first time, “is a truthful man. If he were to tell me that he was about to slit my throat, I’d believe him.” Mannix could be rough stuff, hard on women and dangerous when crossed, but he was also a standup guy in a town full of weasels and, unlike Mayer, he always meant exactly what he said.

  Eddie Mannix took a proprietary interest in Tracy’s career, and it may well have been his idea, being a lifelong Catholic, to cast Tracy in the role of the priest in San Francisco. Certainly it was the most surprising bit of casting in a film for which casting was a big—if not the biggest—selling point. As the film’s release date approached, the mechanism designed to exploit a major picture went into overdrive. On the East Coast, Howard Dietz, general director of publicity, worked out the selling angles, the principal one being the first-ever pairing of Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald. The line “They were born to fall in love!” appeared in ads and on posters, targeting the female trade. The title itself suggested the action of the earthquake and the bawdy ways of the old Barbary Coast. And then there was Tracy’s presence and the obvious chemistry with Gable. (“It’s News When Spencer Tracy, Screen’s ‘Toughest Guy,’ Enacts a Priest!” declared a headline in the film’s hefty pressbook.) By design, the picture was a marketer’s dream.

  After John Hoffman’s ministrations put the earthquake right, there were at least two “sneak” (i.e., unannounced) previews of San Francisco to gauge unbiased audience reactions and fix a number of small problems—laugh lines that weren’t properly covered, dull spots to be excised. By the time of the official or so-called press preview on June 22 at the Fox Village Theatre, all the tinkering was done. There was a roped-off section in the center of the auditorium to which executives, directors, players, technicians, agents, secretaries, and their various guests fled after braving the gauntlet of autograph hounds and lobby lizards typically drawn to such events. Members of the working press surrounded the premium seats, as did claques of studio employees carefully interlarded with excited members of the general public.

  At the appointed time, a booming voice announced the evening’s “surprise” and a roar of applause went up as the showing began and the studio loyali
sts made sure the clapping continued until every significant name had rolled across the screen. Applause also greeted the principal members of the cast as they made their first appearances—Gable, MacDonald, Tracy, Jack Holt, Ted Heeley, and the others. MacDonald’s rousing song, “San Francisco,” was a sensation, and the magnitude 7.8 temblor at the top of the tenth reel handed the crowd a split second of genuine panic. Elizabeth Yeaman, covering the event for the Hollywood Citizen News, “peered frantically at the ceiling of the theater and endeavored to restrain an impulse to bolt for an exit.” A few spectators actually got to their feet.

  The conventions of the press preview were meant to bolster weak pictures and eke better notices out of reviewers who couldn’t tell the difference between an ovation and a calculated hullabaloo. But San Francisco didn’t need the help, and the local trades—the most jaded and the first to publish—described “burst after burst” of spontaneous applause for the spectacle, the music, the sheer excellence of the production. Neither Gable nor MacDonald had ever been better, and Tracy surprised and delighted everyone as the humble young priest. The effects were “amazing,” far and away the best ever. The movie delivered on every conceivable level, and the cards in the foyer (“How did you like the picture?”) were merely a formality; Hyman and his people had no intention of changing a frame.

  Conferring with his brother Carroll on the set of San Francisco. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  Some three hundred release prints were struck at a cost of approximately $140 a copy. Fresh from the lab, each “green” reel of positive stock was subjected to a waxing process designed to cut down on friction as it ran through the gate of the projector, minimizing scratches and keeping the prints in presentable shape for as many as 180 showings apiece. Processed, inventoried, and numbered, they were allocated to thirty-one domestic exchanges according to bookings logged by the company’s regional salespeople, with initial engagements in the Northeast held to the deluxe theaters of Loew’s Incorporated, the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. San Francisco opened in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and New York a few days after the Westwood Village preview. Where Fury aspired to a level of art rarely attained in the M-G-M model, San Francisco was an unabashed work of commerce, slick and professional.