James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  However much trouble the “I presume” line gave him, Tracy’s most impressive moment in the film came with his impassioned address before the Society of British Geographers, a speech totaling nearly four hundred words. King wanted to capture the scene in a single take, Stanley barely suppressing his rage at the society’s skeptical membership. “Dr. Livingstone is out there!” he insists, building to a crescendo. “He is old and he is sick and he needs your help to carry on the great work he has undertaken—the work that is indicated, however inadequately, upon those maps. Reject those maps, withhold your aid, and you destroy him. Reject those maps and you close Africa for a generation to come. Reject those maps, gentlemen, and you break faith with the greatest geographer and one of the greatest men of our times!”

  Covered by two cameras, the stirring speech was unlike anything Tracy had yet attempted, three and a half minutes of uninterrupted screen time, flawlessly delivered, a virtuoso turn in a film that was otherwise more stoic than exciting. Gladys Hall, present on the set and expecting an interview, thought he “might really tuck in his chin this time, beetle his eyebrows and go ‘Harrummph!’ and give me the business,” but instead he went over, ever conscious of downplaying the work he always put into the job of acting, plopped down in a chair beside her, and said, “Ever hear the one about the drunk …?”

  Toward the end of production, Hedy Lamarr, newly married to Fox writer-producer Gene Markey, visited the set, hailing him as “Spennzer” and standing in for actress Nancy Kelly for a shot where Stanley is standing on the deck of an East Indian steamship and looking down at the character of Eve Kingsley. Only the week earlier, Tracy had told Sheilah Graham that Lamarr was “in a spot” with the shelving of I Take This Woman. “Do you realize,” he said, “it will be six months at least before the public sees Hedy in a picture? That makes a year off the screen for an actress who has made only one picture. Her next picture must be good—and don’t think Hedy doesn’t know it.”

  He did a Lux broadcast the night of March 27, then boarded a train for Sun Valley, Idaho, to shoot the Wyoming Territory sequence that opens the picture. He worked all day on the twenty-ninth, leaving for home at 11:00 p.m. and arriving back in Los Angeles on the morning of March 31. He had time for tennis with Louise and a swim in the pool before reporting back to the Fox lot. He celebrated his birthday the following week with tennis, seven periods of polo, and dinner at home with Louise and the kids. He was thirty-nine years old and, as he told his family and friends, he was beginning to feel it.

  * * *

  1 Pat O’Brien’s performance as Father Jerry Connolly, a character clearly patterned after Father Tim, didn’t come until the release of Warners’ Angels With Dirty Faces in November 1938.

  2 Officially, Tracy’s participation in Stanley and Livingstone was entirely separate from the deal for Power and was apparently based on Tracy’s personal conviction that he did indeed owe Fox another picture.

  3 There was no panting in the take that was used, just the weary realization on Stanley’s part that after nine months on the African continent his quest has finally paid off. “Dr. Livingstone,” he says with growing certainty as the figure approaches, adding the “I presume” as an afterthought.

  CHAPTER 15

  A Buoyant Effect on the Audience

  * * *

  Tracy saw Stanley and Livingstone in a studio projection room on April 11, 1939, and thought it only fair. “Might be entertaining, not great,” he wrote in his book. “Predict fair bus[iness], fair reviews. Just so-so.” He left the next day for another try at the European vacation that had gone so disastrously awry the previous year. Frank Whitbeck accompanied him as far as Omaha, where a meeting had been scheduled with Father Flanagan and Bishop Ryan to discuss the possibility of a sequel to Boys Town.

  Tracy wasn’t keen on the idea, but he felt a profound sense of responsibility toward Father Flanagan and the young citizenry that had embraced him so fervently. The studio cleared a profit of more than $2 million on the picture, yet the institution itself had seen only $5,000 in rights money. Also, the tidal wave of donations Flanagan expected after the film’s release failed to materialize, and contributions, in fact, dropped sharply, supporters assuming that Boys Town was suddenly flush with cash. Perversely, the only thing the movie succeeded in boosting was the number of applicants for admission, most of whom had to be turned away. “Next time I come to Hollywood,” Flanagan told the New York Times, “I’m going to get myself an agent.”

  Tracy arrived in New York on April 16 and spent the week playing tennis, taking long walks around the city, and seeing shows. As always, he delighted in the big musicals—the Noël Coward revue Set to Music, Olsen and Johnson’s Hellzapoppin’, Jimmy Durante and Ethel Merman in Stars in Your Eyes. He dined one night with Helen Hayes and Charles MacArthur, another with Beatrice Lillie. Louise arrived on the twenty-first, and they sailed for England the same day.

  (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  The weather was beautiful, the seas calm. They reached Cherbourg on the morning of the twenty-sixth, Southampton later that afternoon. Tracy had heard the British crowds were fierce, but he was completely unprepared for the near riot that greeted him as the boat train pulled into Waterloo Station. The place was mobbed, mostly by fur-clad women eager to get a glimpse of the star of Boys Town. “The crowd that charged him on the platform must have been at least a thousand strong and at times looked nasty,” the British film critic Caroline Lejeune reported. “It was a case of get out or get under.” A porter and six women were trampled in the melee; Arturo Toscanini, famed conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, was swept off his feet and flung against a baggage truck.

  The railway police closed in around the Tracys, and since they couldn’t slip them down the milk chute as they had Robert Taylor, they drew all the near-side blinds on the train and then moved them through the off-side doors into an empty down-train, which they then ran back along the tracks to the last wayside station. Police told the throng, “Your hero has left,” but the women milled for hours, bouquets and orchids in hand, meeting all the trains as they arrived. “The crowd was still whooping and waiting at Waterloo,” Lejeune’s dispatch concluded, “when Mr. and Mrs. Tracy, rather white about the gills and a good deal shaken, slipped out unseen at Vauxhall onto a bare platform under the cold April stars.”

  They shook up the staff at Claridge’s by rising at six the next morning, strolling the empty streets of London, Spence toting his 16mm movie camera, returning in time for a nine o’clock breakfast. They saw the changing of the guard, then took off for Windsor Castle. “What am I doing in London?” he said in answer to a reporter’s question. “Nothing. Just let London look after me. I have been trying to get here for two years. It was hardly worthwhile coming for such a short time, but I was determined to make this trip.” The studio arranged a formal news conference—his first ever—and he fielded questions while sipping a glass of Vichy. What did he think of London? What struck him most about it? “I’ve got to think fast,” he said. “People will try and make me pronounce on politics. Those questions have to be answered guardedly.” No, he said, he’d never had a proposal in the post. “An Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood? No, that’s something I’ve never heard of.”

  He was asked about his newest picture. “I haven’t seen a finished version of Stanley and Livingstone,” he lied. “I don’t know—maybe it’s all right. You could take that subject fifty ways. I am sure that when I say ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume’ it’ll be one almighty laugh in every hall.” He said his next picture would be Northwest Passage with Wallace Beery and Robert Taylor, and then probably The Yearling. “I think that’s one of the finest books I’ve ever read. I’m hoping we’ll get round to it this summer.”

  It rained almost every day. They saw Joe Kennedy, played tennis with his daughters Pat and Eunice, lunched with the Kennedy family. (“All the Kennedys,” Tracy once said, “remind me of my father.”) In Paris he discovered Maxim’s, with its crocks of t
hick yellow cream, and spent an evening in the company of actor Jean Gabin, the stocky Parisian “Everyman” whose career had, in many ways, paralleled his own. Gabin, he said, wanted him to remain in Paris and make a picture. “I will tell you what we do,” Gabin said. “We will make one picture here and then we will forget all about movies and go fishing—for a year.” Tracy suggested that Gabin come to Hollywood and make a picture there. “I can hardly talk French,” the actor responded. “How could I learn to talk English?”

  Tracy enjoyed every minute of his time in France. In London the autograph hunters pursued him on bicycles. In Paris he was never once asked for his signature. “You’d go in a shop to buy something and order it delivered to your hotel. Invariably with the delivery would come a note from the shopgirl who waited on you to this effect: ‘I did not wish to embarrass you by telling you how much I enjoyed your last picture, so I am expressing that enjoyment in this note.’ ” They sailed from Le Havre on May 5, arrived at Southampton that evening, and left for home at midnight, affording Spence a brief look at Ireland, which, as far as he was concerned, made the entire trip worthwhile.

  “We arrived in the morning at Cobb, and the sun was shining and there was Ireland before us. I’ve never experienced so deep a thrill. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. This is where my grandparents had come from—this was my real homeland and the sensation was almost overpowering in its intensity. I was up on the bridge with Paddy, the old Irish pilot, and I guess he knew what was going on in my heart, because he smiled at me. ‘God bless you, lad,’ he said, ‘the door latch is always out.’ Some day, I’m going to Ireland and I’m going to take Pat O’Brien with me. What a time Pat would have over there.”

  The return trip was nasty in comparison to the going—fog, rain, and rough seas, and the ship pitched furiously. Tracy was planning to meet up with Lincoln Cromwell in New York, as he was anxious for the young man to take his second year of internship in Europe. He was offering, in fact, to pay travel expenses for Cromwell and his new wife to make an investigatory trip over the summer. Upon docking, however, he was advised that his mother had suffered a stroke in Los Angeles, and he and Louise left for Chicago within hours. They were relieved to find Carrie doing “pretty well” in California and that her doctors expected her to make a complete recovery.

  In Los Angeles he sat for a long interview with Ed Sullivan and seemed genuinely altered by the experience of visiting Europe. It appeared that everyone he encountered in England and France had seen Boys Town, and that the picture struck an undeniable chord with every segment of the audience.

  After nearly a decade in Hollywood, Tracy had come to regard the broad canvas of the screen as a public trust, a place where the great social issues of the day could be defined and portrayed and where the spiritual values of hope and goodwill could be reinforced. The best characters, he said, gave voice to the ideals of the common man and sent people home “feeling that there was dignity to life and to living, and some point to muddling along.” He couldn’t help but note that after five years of indifferent pictures at Fox—virtually none of which had a transformative effect on an audience—he had risen to the very pinnacle of stardom on a core group of productions at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—Fury, San Francisco, Captains Courageous, and Boys Town. “I’ll tell you what I’d love to play: Grapes of Wrath. That is a story that has tremendous social significance to it. It’s big, important. It has guts. I wish that Darryl Zanuck could borrow me from Metro and Jim Cagney from Warners for that one. I promise you that we’d play the hell out of it, or at least die in the attempt.”

  He went on to tell Sullivan that he thought Robert Morley’s rangy performance in Oscar Wilde “great”—it was the one Broadway play he had permitted himself—but he found the material itself repulsive, dealing as it did with the historic trial for pederasty (“gross indecency”) that led to Wilde’s undoing. “I left the theater feeling ashamed to have seen such a play. I felt sort of unclean, because to a normal person the topic is almost obscene. The play itself obscured the performance. After all, experienced actors shouldn’t have to prove they can give great performances. That should be taken for granted. The most important thing is for the play itself to have a buoyant effect on the audience.”

  While Tracy refused to take the Academy Award seriously as a symbol of artistic merit, it did bolster his standing within the industry and underscore his growing popularity with the moviegoing public. Progressively more space was being devoted to him in newspapers—particularly by the syndicated columnists—and the yearly number of articles in the fan magazines had more than quadrupled since 1935. He naturally withdrew from such heightened interest, preferring to talk with Dick Mook and Gladys Hall and Ed Sullivan and, sometimes, to Louella Parsons, who always invoked their Freeport connections. (Parsons was born in Freeport in 1881 but had moved to Dixon, thirty miles south, by the time of Tracy’s birth in 1900.) Journalists were always hanging around the sets at Metro, but they were all carefully supervised and prohibited from talking to the stars without an okay from Howard Strickling.

  Tracy did talk to journalists when he traveled, particularly in New York, where he figured he might one day return to the stage. “I had wires from Sam Behrman and Guthrie McClintic last season asking me if I were available for a play,” he told William Boehnel of the World-Telegram, “but when I replied that I thought I might be able to arrange it I never heard from them again. Maybe I’d better stick to Hollywood.” The more he worked with “some of the big directors,” he told his pal Mook, the more he realized what “really fine things” could be done in pictures. “I still hope to do more plays on the stage, but I’m still not big enough in pictures to dictate the terms of my contract. And the mounting quality of pictures compensates for not being able to do worthwhile stage plays—if I were lucky enough to find them.”

  Emboldened by Tracy’s public comments, Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild approached him in the spring of 1939 with the idea of his starring in a revival of Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. He couldn’t argue with the quality of the material, and the play hadn’t been seen on Broadway since 1923, when a young Basil Sydney played the rebel Dudgeon. There was a whole generation of playgoers who had never seen it, Helburn argued, and another that had probably forgotten it. “And it occurred to me that now that Shaw has at last yielded to the movies [with Gabriel Pascal’s production of Pygmalion], this one will be bound to come along soon and perhaps you and Metro might have ideas about it similar to mine.”

  Louise thought it would be good for him to get out of Hollywood and the deadening routine of making movies, if only for a short while. “The motion picture business is a very demanding one in some ways,” she said.

  Very. And it was very difficult [to adjust to it]…[Spence] was going to come out [to Hollywood] anyhow—the money and everything else was interesting—but I think he felt that this was something he could do in the daytime and then [he] would be free … Of course, that was not true. His nights were taken: he read scripts and then he studied for the next day. And although he didn’t do much studying, he thought a great deal about it. He even worked over weekends … He took it very, very seriously, and … he thought about so many little things. People say he’s so natural, [that] he just gets up and talks. He used to laugh about people saying things like that. If they but knew the time you take to just give that little bit, that particular line you throw away, its own thing. It wasn’t anything you just got up and did—that natural thing—and he did a great deal of that at night.

  Tracy thought he might make a quick trip to New York to meet with Theresa Helburn, but then the decision was made to go ahead with Northwest Passage—despite the fact there was only half a script—and by July 4 he was in McCall, Idaho, for the start of production. It wasn’t a picture he particularly wanted to make anymore, and although he kicked about going, the whole project had been designed around him and there was no getting out of it. His location work so far had been limited to Riverside
, Catalina, La Jolla—day trips. Boys Town meant twelve days in Nebraska, but apart from the heat they weren’t exactly roughing it. Northwest Passage would be an altogether different experience—six weeks on the banks of Payette Lake, a hundred miles north of Boise near the Oregon border. It would be an unusually physical shoot with a lot of river work, a lot of stunt work, a lot of people.

  Tracy’s character was a colonial frontiersman and Indian fighter, a man as lean and rugged as the times and the terrain could make him. Yet he had ballooned to 189 pounds—the heaviest he had ever been—and hardly looked the part. He vowed that he would lose ten pounds in time for the picture, but as far as Louise could tell, the day he left for location he had lost just two of them. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “The food is going to be terrible, and between that and the heat and the ticks and getting up at five-thirty in order to start shooting at seven, I’ll be thin enough when we reach the trek back from St. Francis. And there won’t be a drug store or a sundae anywhere within miles.” When she saw him off at the station, she noticed a large box of chocolates tucked under the coat he had draped over one arm. “Just a little present mother gave me,” he said airily.

  To make the trip he recruited Pat Elsey, his trainer and masseur, to come with him and help get him into shape. Elsey would be in addition to his stand-in, Jerry Schumacher, and his new dresser, Larry Keethe. Louise would come to visit at some point during the ordeal, and although the studio would have a doctor on site, he persuaded Howard Dennis to be there for at least the first week. Director King Vidor, while amused at the posse Tracy gathered, had to admit the picture depended on him, and were he to fall ill or somehow injure himself, the entire mechanism would grind to a halt. “He was well taken care of,” Vidor said. “I guess in the long run it was more important that he remain well than anyone else.”