James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  It was like a badge of honor, a pattern she had no interest in breaking. “I don’t think anything destroyed Spencer,” she said, “except the fact that he had produced a son that was very severely handicapped and he felt responsible for it. And he was absolutely unable to face it … I never interfered in a stupid way. And I never tried to moralize about the evils of drink. And if I interfered in a clever way, why, it wouldn’t be interfering, would it? Well, I’d just try to change the atmosphere. But a drinker is going to stop on his own. I think you can very seldom influence anyone to stop.”

  And so with Kate Hepburn at his side, Tracy began a period in which he tried moderating his drinking rather than stopping it entirely, a shaky proposition when, as Audrey Caldwell once observed, all he needed was “a dessert with rum in it” to set him off.

  Joe Mankiewicz believed Tracy and Hepburn well matched because “if you were going to be in an intimate relationship with Spence it had to be one where essentially you took care of him, waited on him, cleaned up after him. Spence was in your care. On good psychological grounds the alcoholic is in that infantile position. He renders himself helpless, which is a state of infancy and which is the most powerful position that the human being is ever in. He has to be taken care of as an infant. He has to be wiped and dried and fed and dressed and cleaned as an infant. And Kate, I think, wanted to do that.”

  Tracy never touched booze around Louise and the kids, and neither Johnny nor Susie could remember ever having seen him with a drink in his hand. One evening he drove Lincoln Cromwell out to the ranch for dinner. “We spent the night there, and I remember, after Spence had gone to bed, the long conversation Louise and I had concerning her feelings about Spencer and their marriage. Finally, she asked my advice: Should she divorce him? While I could certainly see her side of the situation, my basic loyalty was to Spencer and I felt that if he had wanted a divorce, he would have asked for it. I replied to her that since most things seemed to be going smoothly between them, without a lot of emotional strain, I could not see what a divorce would accomplish. In short, I advised her to do nothing.”

  In October Tracy was asked to appear at a rally of twelve thousand War Chest volunteers in Colorado, headlining a three-hour bill of entertainment that included opera star Mona Paulee, the eighty-piece symphonic band from Buckley Field, a soldier chorus of sixty voices, and the stars of the WACavilcade, a national touring company of thirty. Studio publicist Hal Elias was assigned to go with him.

  Prior to going I had never met him, and Howard Strickling, who was head of publicity, called me into his office one day and he [said], “I want you to meet Spencer Tracy.” So Tracy knew that I was to accompany him to Denver—that was where the war bond drive was supposed to take place. And he said, “Hal, I want one thing understood.” He said it very sternly. “Nobody is going to tell me when and how much to drink.”

  He was very self-conscious of his heavy-drinking reputation. And I said, “Spence, I’m not making this trip to be a guardian and tell you when and what to drink. I’m merely there to protect the publicity interests of M-G-M and YOUR interests.” That settled it. Now we arrived in Denver, and we retired to a beautiful suite of rooms. I’ll never forget—there was a dining room table in the middle of the room, and it was loaded with liquor of every description. They knew it was Spencer Tracy, and they knew he was a heavy drinker. So he looked at it and said, “Hal, give all these bottles to the motorcycle escort who brought us over here.” And Spencer Tracy didn’t take one drink during the entire trip.

  Tracy returned to M-G-M to make added scenes for A Guy Named Joe, which, like Keeper of the Flame, had run afoul of the Production Code. The War Department had never been enthusiastic about the picture and only grudgingly provided cooperation after two major revisions in the screenplay. (“The presence of hovering ghosts of deceased pilots, and the unreal, fantastic, and slightly schizophrenic character of the scenario hardly combine to produce a sensible war time film diet,” the chief of the Information Branch complained.) The picture’s ending, as written by Dalton Trumbo and staged by Fleming, had Irene Dunne’s character crashing after the bombing of an enemy ammunition dump, thereby reuniting her with Tracy’s Pete Sandidge at the fade-out. The PCA’s Joe Breen objected to the ending on the presumption that Dorinda’s commandeering of the bomber—intended for the Van Johnson character—constituted a willful act of suicide, which was, under the Code, never to be “justified, or glorified, or used specifically to defeat the ends of justice.” Everett Riskin’s office had new scenes ready on November 4, and Irene Dunne and her husband were flown in from Mexico City for the reopening of production. With the mandated fixes and some revised miniature work, A Guy Named Joe finally finished on December 4, 1943, after 107 days before the cameras. Tracy started his next picture the following morning.

  The Seventh Cross was the story of seven escapees from a German concentration camp in 1936. It was written by Anna Seghers, a Communist refugee who had made her way to Mexico in the opening days of World War II and obviously knew of what she wrote. The commandant swears he will return all the escaped men and display their bodies on crudely fashioned crosses in the prison yard as a lesson to the others. It is the one who ultimately escapes to freedom, George Heisler, who leaves the seventh cross empty.

  When published in 1942 by Little, Brown, Seghers’ book was an immediate best seller, moving more than three hundred thousand copies in the space of twelve days. Pandro S. Berman, the producer responsible for most of Kate’s pictures at RKO, got Metro to buy the rights and subsequently sent the draft script, by first-time scenarist Helen Deutsch, to M-G-M contract director Fred Zinnemann for his “opinion.” Zinnemann had graduated to B-level features after serving an apprenticeship in the studio’s short subject department. He already knew the book well and thought it would make a very good movie. His participation, it turned out, was contingent upon Tracy’s approval.

  Zinnemann approached the project with characteristic zeal, marking up his copy of the novel and storyboarding the entire movie with his own thumbnail sketches. On his heavily annotated copy of Deutsch’s October 22 script he wrote, “This is about the dignity of human beings.” He ran a number of Tracy’s M-G-M pictures and decided to model Tracy’s performance on his work in Fury. He did a good deal of character analysis and wanted Tracy to see The Informer. He also thought Tracy needed to lose weight for the role. Since the entire picture was set in Germany, standing sets on Lot 2 had to be modified, and the supporting cast became a colorful collection of refugees and character people headed by the husband-wife team of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.

  Cronyn, making only his third film, bonded instantly with Zinnemann, who was bullied by a headstrong cinematographer in the person of Karl Freund. “His lighting took hours,” Cronyn remembered. “Walking onto the set, threading one’s way through the light stands, was like entering a bamboo thicket, and some lamp or other would inevitably get nudged and have to be refocused.” Tracy had worked with Freund before and knew him to be punctilious and overbearing, but Zinnemann was completely thrown by him. “Freund was anything but a friend,” said Zinnemann. “He was loud, slow, and obstreperous; working with him was like pulling out teeth, one by one.” Within days the picture was behind schedule.

  “Zinnemann was first chosen as director for The Seventh Cross,” said Katharine Hepburn, “and Spencer did not know him [other than he’d] done some picture in Germany, and I cannot remember the name of it.3 Very distinguished, so Spencer said, Okay, he would take [him]. After a week, Metro wanted to yank Freddie Zinnemann off that picture. They were not satisfied with what he was doing, and Spencer said, ‘My friends, if you yank him, I’m joining him. You can make up your minds to that. You should not have suggested him in the first place. Now you have to give him the chance.’ ”

  Backing down, Berman, who was also overseeing the production of Dragon Seed, peopled the stage with surrogates, including Helen Deutsch (who was, said Zinnemann, “possessive about changing
a dot or a comma”) and his longtime assistant, Jane Loring. “I felt it was very important to get across the fact that just because you were a German it didn’t mean automatically that you were a monster,” Zinnemann said, “which at the time many people thought was the case—naturally enough, in view of what was going on. The film was a study of the people Tracy met when he was running for his life, people who were forced by his presence to get off the fence, one way or the other; either they helped him or they didn’t help him. Some took great personal risks; others, who were old friends, turned their backs and wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

  Morale was low, and Tracy’s dark moods were sharpened by the drinks he now permitted himself at the end of each workday. Hume Cronyn thought him “a lovely man” who had a “rough tongue” on occasion, particularly after having imbibed a few. Seated one evening in Tracy’s dressing room, drink in hand, Cronyn shot to his feet when Hepburn, whom he had never before met, walked in. “Spence was feeling morose,” said Cronyn, “and made no effort to move or introduce us. Perhaps he assumed we knew one another. I introduced myself. We shook hands and she said, ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything—please sit down.’ She was tall, slim, beautiful, and very direct, and her look was as firm as her handshake. I was aware that she was appraising Tracy and conscious of his mood.”

  Hepburn turned to him and said cheerfully, “How are you doing, old man?”

  “On my ass.”

  “Problems?”

  But he was drinking and didn’t bother to answer. She continued, “I think I’ll get myself a drink.”

  Cronyn got up again. “Can I get it for you?” he said.

  “She told you to sit down!” Tracy snapped, as though Cronyn were hard of hearing. Cronyn sat down, and presently Kate joined them.

  “Spence seemed withdrawn into sullen reverie. I wondered what was wrong; he’d been talkative enough before Miss Hepburn arrived, despite the irritation he expressed over the time it was taking to light our scenes. Miss Hepburn talked to me, ignoring Spence’s silence. She asked me about the film and what I was playing; she knew the script well. She was charming. At one point she produced a cigarette and I got up to light it for her. That did it.”

  Tracy exploded: “Why don’t you two find a bed somewhere and get it over with?”

  “I stood there, frozen, until the match burned my fingers,” said Cronyn. “Miss Hepburn just smiled.”

  Tracy waved him down. “Sit down, for Christ’s sake! You keep bouncing around like corn in a popper!”

  Cronyn finished his drink and got out as quickly as possible; there was something about Kate’s presence that addled Tracy, as if she were revealing a dark secret about the two of them she had no business exposing. It wasn’t jealousy, Hepburn insisted: “No. No, he’d had a few.”

  Joe Mankiewicz, who knew both men intimately, agreed, though not quite for the same reason. “Hume had done two things that were irritating Spence. Jumping up from that seat when she came in and jumping up now. ‘Let me do it for you.’ Because it’s obviously ‘good manners,’ because Kate Hepburn, in my life, in my world, is perfectly capable of fixing her own friggin’ drink if the drinks are there. If it’s troublesome to get, well … And getting up as she comes into the room! Again, at our age and our status in the business, we don’t do that. But if you’re Hume…‘and I got up to light her cigarette!’ ” He laughed. “Knowing Spence, he’s picked the three spots where his temper is going boom, boom, boom!”

  There may have been yet another reason for Tracy’s irascibility. Ingrid Bergman had been back on the M-G-M lot shooting Patrick Hamilton’s Victorian thriller Gaslight, and one day she was photographed on the set of A Guy Named Joe talking with Tracy and Irene Dunne. As soothing as Kate’s presence could be, it could also be disruptive, for she had fallen deeply in love with a man who could never tell her that he loved her.4 “I have no idea how Spence felt about me,” she wrote in her memoir. “I can only say I think that if he hadn’t liked me he wouldn’t have hung around.” But now it was Kate who was hanging around, and she was going through a period where she was obsessed with him. Hairstylist Helen Hunt once told Katharine Houghton of a time when Hepburn staked out the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel with a loaded shotgun, certain that Tracy was fooling around on her—presumably with Bergman. “Kate,” said Houghton, “was fiercely jealous of Bergman.”

  Sexually, Tracy and Hepburn were simpatico—so much so that Kate confided to their friend Eugene Kennedy that she had once asked a doctor if Spence could get injections to “lower his libido.” Emotionally, they were on different planes, and she was very possibly crowding him at a time when he felt particularly vulnerable to bad publicity. He laid out Sheilah Graham one day over a “veiled allusion in the column regarding his private life” and he was rapidly adopting Kate’s policy of never talking to the press, ever.

  Ingrid Bergman, in costume for Gaslight, visits the set of A Guy Named Joe. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  Tracy’s irritability became the stuff of legend during the making of The Seventh Cross, in part because there were an unusual number of observers on the set. “I never tried missing a scene when Tracy was playing,” Hume Cronyn said. “His method seemed to be as simple as it is difficult to achieve. He appeared to do nothing. He listened, he felt, he said the words without forcing anything. There were no extraneous movements. Whatever was provoked in him emotionally was seen in his eyes.” Said Zinnemann, “When a signal from the M-G-M grapevine said that he was about to do an important scene, all the young hopeful contract players would sneak on the stage and, lost in awe and fascination, would watch him from protective darkness.”

  The Seventh Cross was unusual for a Tracy picture in that he played the first thirty minutes with no dialogue. On the run, the guards and their dogs after him, the SS keeping watch, George Heisler is a hunted man, desperate and worn. To achieve the effect, he submitted to a Prussian haircut and a gray-toned makeup job accentuated by the fact that he had dropped eight pounds in as many weeks. When a writer from Time magazine dropped by the set in January 1944, Tracy described himself as “a box of chocolates broadened out into a character actor” and explained the drop by noting that the war had curtailed his normal supply of sweets. By the time Signe Hasso, the Swedish actress, arrived to play the last act as Tracy’s love interest, he was tense and withdrawn at times but had settled into a more comfortable frame of mind, helped, perhaps, by the fact that Karl Freund had fallen ill and had been replaced for a spell with Robert Surtees.

  “To work with Tracy was the easiest thing in the world,” Hasso later wrote. “We rehearsed once and that was it. I remember the director, Fred Zinnemann (it was his first big picture) got a bit nervous about only one rehearsal, but Tracy said, ‘I know my lines. Signe knows hers. Let’s have a cup of tea while they set the lights. And you too, Fred. You need a cup of tea.’ Fred wasn’t so sure that he needed any tea, but, of course, off he went for a tea session, where no work was discussed. We talked about life in general, and Fred grew more and more nervous. However, when the scene was lit and the camera ready to shoot, we did it in one take. And Fred was again happy.”

  When Frederick Othman, Hollywood correspondent for the United Press, visited the set, Tracy was in a pretty good mood, noting dryly that this was the first time in years that a man and wife—meaning the Cronyns—had played a man and wife on the screen and just as well, too. He then charged Jessica Tandy, making her American film debut, with walking into a scene just to take her husband’s paycheck away from him. This, he suggested, set a bad precedent, even as Tandy herself blushed and denied the whole thing. Only once she was out of earshot did he allow that Tandy was “one of the finest actresses ever to get into the movie business.”

  Relaxing in his dirt-caked pants, his torn sweater and greasy leather jacket, he went on to discuss work in general, saying that although a film actor made a lot of money, he usually earned every cent in the loss of many of the joys that other people too
k as a matter of course. Sunshine, for instance. “I think, probably, that the only man who can be happy all the time under contract to a movie studio is a dumb one, the really dumb one who signs up to act for five years and who does exactly that, without a care or a worry about the sort of thing that is handed him. There are some people like that in pictures, and I think they are the only ones who have licked the problem of being happy, though in Hollywood.”

  A Guy Named Joe was released during the filming of The Seventh Cross, having drawn rave reviews in press previews arranged hastily to get the film onto the market as M-G-M’s Christmas attraction. Van Johnson’s callow performance sounded a sour note to only a few of the New York critics, who overall lauded the film for its deft management of a difficult subject and decried only the Breen-induced ending that caused it, in the words of one reviewer, to “virtually explode” in her face. The trade notice in the Hollywood Reporter diplomatically suggested that the finale would satisfy the majority of audiences, “although there can be debates about who should get the girl.” Bosley Crowther, less forgiving, condemned “a finish that is as foolish as anything we’ve seen—and which thoroughly negates the film’s philosophy, which is against heroic stunts and one-man shows.”

  Whatever the picture’s failings, both Tracy and Dunne were praised elaborately, the Reporter noting how Tracy’s abilities “permit him to make more out of a simple ‘gosh’ than many actors achieve from a Shakespearean soliloquy.” Its arrival triggered a powerful rush at the box office, leading to seven strong weeks at the Capitol Theatre at a time when the public’s demand for “demilitarized” fare was growing. With total billings of $5,363,000, A Guy Named Joe surpassed even San Francisco to become Tracy’s highest-grossing film ever. In early January, with a new contract almost ready to sign, Tracy told columnist Harrison Carroll he was refusing all assignments for at least three or four months because he wanted to visit camps and bases instead. “I worked on A Guy Named Joe for eleven straight months,” he said, “and you can’t go on tour with retakes, extra scenes, and work hanging over your head. When I visit camps next time, I want to feel I don’t have to hurry back.”