James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  Tracy’s muscle at the studio, meanwhile, had never been greater. With the enormous success of Father of the Bride, he was once again polling as one of the nation’s top stars, and Father’s Little Dividend, thanks to promotional tie-ins with Sunbeam Bread, Libby’s Baby Foods, Lux Soap, FTD, Lane Bryant, and others, was drawing on a par with the first picture in places like Buffalo, New Haven, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. He went to bat for his boyhood pal, landing Pat—whom he still called “Bill”—a featured part in The People Against O’Hara at $4,375 a week on an eight-week guarantee. “Spence had to put on a wild, desperate fight to secure the role for me,” O’Brien said, “even threatening to walk out unless I was signed.”

  The two men lunched at the studio just five days after the deal was set, a pair of graying veterans in a picture full of youthful faces—Diana Lynn, William Campbell, James Arness, Richard Anderson. And when Tracy arrived in Manhattan for location work, Pat was there waiting for him, laid up with the flu like everyone else. “He wanted me to go out with him, but I just couldn’t raise my head. A little later, when he had gone out, I learned that the director and producer and some of the other players were also sick with the flu and that Spence had taken over the job of filming the background shots down at the fish market.”

  Production resumed in Culver City on March 19. Tracy’s character, Jim Curtayne, was written as a recovering alcoholic whose drinking had derailed a successful career as a criminal defense attorney. It was a grim and uncomfortable job for a man of his particular history, and where Pat was his usual gregarious self, taking the younger actors under his wing and proffering nonstop advice and encouragement, Tracy kept to himself, insular in a way he had not been on either of his two previous pictures. That he was trying to quit smoking at the time made him edgier still, and the other members of the cast were told to extinguish their cigarettes whenever he came onto the stage.

  “Anytime I saw him he was all business,” said James Arness, who had come to M-G-M to be in Dore Schary’s Battleground and was playing the young defendant, the title character in the picture. “No kidding around or having fun—anything like that. He would, as a matter of fact, be offstage most of the time … They would call him and he’d come in and any kind of light conversation going on came to a screeching halt.”

  John Sturges made a practice of rehearsing every scene, a departure from the old Metro routine where even run-throughs were a sometime thing. “The thing I remember most about Spence,” he said, “is the pleasure I had watching a scene played for the first time come alive by this man.” Sturges, as Arness remembered it, would have the chairs arrayed in a semicircle. “Mr. Tracy would be in the middle of this semicircle and the director would sit facing us. He would come onstage, walk up, ‘good morning’ briefly, and then we’d sit down and read through the scene, rehearse, and then get up and go onto whatever set it was and do it on its feet.” Tracy was, as far as Arness could tell, devoid of any technique. “It wasn’t an actor—this was a real guy in a real courtroom and you were on the stand.”

  As The People Against O’Hara worked its way toward completion, Katharine Hepburn left New York for London and the start of a new picture. Her world had been shaken by the death of her beloved mother just two weeks prior to her departure, and she had scarcely had a month’s rest since concluding her tour for the Theatre Guild. It had been four years since she had made a film apart from Tracy, and her unpopularity at the box office rivaled the days when she had been forced to buy herself out of her RKO contract. Producer Sam Spiegel induced her to play Rose in The African Queen at a fraction of her usual fee with the promise of a percentage of the profits—a shrewd bargain considering the film’s eventual popularity. Sweetening the deal was the prospect of working opposite Humphrey Bogart under the direction of John Huston. Both Tracy and Constance Collier feared for her health, but after pondering the offer she wouldn’t be dissuaded.

  Collier accompanied her to London, where the two took over a suite at Claridge’s, and Tracy made plans to follow—at least as far as Europe—as soon as O’Hara had been completed. Spiegel was holding the company together in fits and starts while Huston polished the script, and Hepburn wondered if there would be enough money to cover even the cost of their room. When Tracy did leave for New York on April 27, it was in the company of Benny Thau, who would be making the trip with him. Together, they caught Pat O’Brien’s opening as MC at the Plaza Hotel, then sailed for Naples on May 5 aboard the S.S. Independence. Obligingly, Tracy posed for press photos, perched on a rail on the ship’s top deck and by the interior window of his stateroom, at age fifty-one a distinguished elder statesman of the American motion picture industry.

  In Rome he met up with Kate and found the city “unbelievable” in its power and majesty. On the eighteenth, he was received in an audience with Pope Pius XII, an event he described as “truly the culmination of [a] lifelong anticipation.” His Holiness, he recounted, “received me at the same time he received 50 young crewmen from the U.S.S. plane carrier, the Coral Sea. It was a wonderful experience to be present when he talked with these young men and listened with such interest and sympathy to their adventures and problems. He commented sadly to me on their youth.” The Holy Father, he concluded, was “wonderful” and blessed a rosary he had brought for his cousin Jane.

  Hepburn left to start work on The African Queen on May 20. Tracy flew by Pan Am to Paris on the twenty-fourth—a terrifying experience when three of the plane’s four engines quit in midflight. Although he had said he would spend an entire month on the French Riviera, he lingered just two days before moving on to England. In London he checked in at Claridge’s and asked to be left “very much alone.” A few hours later, dressed in a flannel suit and navy tie, he ambled down the stairs and greeted a reporter from the Daily Mirror, seemingly grateful for the company and practically pushing the man into a waiting armchair. “I’m just a white-haired, middle-aged movie star,” he groused, shoving his lower lip out in a characteristic pose. “Who the hell cares about a guy like me?”

  He took Constance Collier to see Caesar and Cleopatra, walked the town a bit with Benny Thau, and wired that he was shipping back a Fiat station wagon he had purchased for Susie. Kate, said Collier, was in the Congo writing “horrifying” letters and having “an awfully tough time I think, even she admits it, and it is hard to get her to admit anything like that.”

  By return mail Constance advised her that Spence would be cabling her “and said I might tell you that M-G-M have a picture by Gar Kanin called ‘Mike and something’ for you and he, so that is thrilling and a lovely thing to look forward too [sic]. So hurry up with that stunt, darling, and get back home.” Spence, she added, was “longing for a letter from you saying things are a bit better. He is so desperately worried about you, but I know you and I think in spite of the terrible hardships you will find a way of getting a kick out of the place.”

  With Tracy in London, Hepburn naturally gravitated to John Huston for companionship. Huston remembered “the many nights I sat with Katie on the top deck of the paddle boat and watched the eyes of the hippos in the water all around us, every eye seemed to be staring in our direction. And we talked. We talked about anything and everything. But there was never an idea of romance—Spencer Tracy was the only man in Katie’s life.”

  Tracy, however, resented her absence and may well have been in the midst of a midlife crisis. He seemed unsettled, unhappy, acutely conscious of his age and weight. One night in London he dined with Bill and Edie Goetz—she being the elder daughter of Louis B. Mayer—and the actress Joan Fontaine, whom he had never before met. He was withdrawn, Fontaine remembered, and not particularly good company. Later, he called her at her hotel and asked her to have dinner with him the following evening. She replied that out of respect to Kate—whom she knew slightly—she could not consider seeing him alone. He made a lame attempt at recovery, explaining that while he and Hepburn were “terribly good friends,” they had a “completely platonic” arrang
ement.

  “That’s what they all say!” the actress responded, refusing to buy any of it. She left for Sweden within days, only to be greeted upon her arrival by another call from Tracy pressing her once again to see him when she returned to England. “I’m afraid not,” she returned, shutting him down as forcefully as she could. “Not only is there Kate to consider, but you are a married man.”

  “I can get a divorce whenever I want to,” came his reply. “But my wife and Kate like things just as they are.”

  Katharine Houghton believed that Tracy and her aunt were indeed going through a “rough patch” at the time, based on “inklings I got from scraps of things” that were said. “Losing himself in a beautiful woman was a bit like losing himself in drink, it seems to me, and he would go a long way to catching his prey, like telling Fontaine that he and Kate were just friends.” Hepburn, meanwhile, asked Phyllis Wilbourn, Collier’s secretary, to deliver a food parcel and some flowers to Tracy’s room at Claridge’s with a card signed “Lutie” (one of his many pet names for her).

  “I think Spence’s ulcer has been a little tiresome,” Collier fretted in a subsequent letter.

  He has been having a doctor all the time and staying in bed a lot. It’s so silly of him to worry around with English doctors, they don’t know anything and it would be much better if he flew back and went straight to Boston for a few days to check up with the doctors who understand his case. We drove down to spend the day with Viv and Larry. Spence was absolutely charming, though I think he had a little pain. We left in the afternoon. I do think he behaved too beautifully. Larry and the men were drinking all around him and yelling and very gay and Spence never wavered with his ginger beer, or whatever he was drinking. It must have been very difficult.

  I think he has seen a good deal of Viv and Larry and they try to make him stay up late and it is very hard to resist that. Oh dear, how I wish you were here with him, I think he would stay in London and enjoy it. He loves the country so and it looks so wonderful. I lunched with him the other day at Claridge’s … Darling, if you get a chance, persuade them to come home. Do do it. Spence is hanging around here, wondering whether to wait for you and if you only get back a little sooner, he will wait, I am sure, but it is very lonely for him without you though he is longing to see you.

  Tracy did indeed leave town just a couple of days later, catching the Queen Mary and enduring one of the roughest crossings in the ship’s fabled history. The men were back in L.A. by June 20, Tracy, specifically, to discuss a picture Dore Schary desperately wanted him to make, a costume drama of the Pilgrims’ voyage to America, an unfathomable imperative with the deadly title The Plymouth Adventure. Schary had somehow become enamored of the story on the basis of a novel by Ernest Gebler, which had been purchased from galleys. Its acquisition was heralded in the Hollywood Reporter as “one of the biggest story buys in months,” even as Schary himself acknowledged that films about the Mayflower were invariably jinxed. Envisioned as a Technicolor extravaganza, the production head wanted the picture top-lined by several major stars, and his quest for a rock-solid Captain Christopher Jones inevitably led him to Tracy.

  “Dore Schary was sort of like a rabbinical student who feels badly about having become a mountebank,” said veteran costume designer Lucinda Ballard, who was newly married at the time to Howard Dietz. “He was so moralistic and always wanting to do something about God or the pilgrims, which people don’t want to see, and it really was one of the things that wrecked him in the end.”

  There was, in fact, a general feeling of disgruntlement among the old hands on the M-G-M lot, for Schary was a writer, not an administrator, and his bent for moralizing was milking all the sex and showmanship from the M-G-M brand. For a western called Lone Star, Schary had cut an unscripted shot of Ava Gardner strolling happily down a street, singing to herself, after an evening of obvious lovemaking with Clark Gable, maintaining the image was neither funny nor in good taste. Director Vincent Sherman could remember Tracy’s rueful comment upon hearing the story over lunch one day. “Since Schary took over,” he said, “there’s no fucking in M-G-M pictures.”

  L. B. Mayer hated Schary’s taste in material and, at the age of sixty-six, could feel himself being pushed aside by the younger man and his patron, Nicholas Schenck, whose relationship with Mayer had deteriorated to the point where the two men were no longer speaking. Thau, a Mayer partisan whose coolness toward Schary never wavered, had doubtless seen Mayer’s ultimatum coming and conspired to be out of the country when the inevitable rupture took place. As he and Tracy departed for New York, Mayer was rumored to be part of a syndicate looking to buy a controlling interest in Warner Bros. for $25 million.

  Reports of Mayer’s resignation were circulating anew as Thau and Tracy quietly knocked about London. The announcement came on June 22, 1951, when the old man issued a statement through a spokesman saying that he was quitting the company that bore his name but not the industry he had helped establish. “I am going to remain in motion picture production, God willing. I am going to be more active than at any time during the last 15 years,” Mayer was quoted as saying.

  A formal farewell followed on the twenty-fifth. (“Naturally, I regret severing the ties and relationships that have been built up over the years …”) Both Thau and Mannix took Tracy to dinner at Romanoff’s to assure him that all was well within the company. Tracy had an afternoon appointment with Mayer on the twenty-seventh to say good-bye, and was on hand when Mayer officially left, treading a red carpet laid at the door of the Thalberg Building, the assembled executives and secretaries applauding as he made his exit.

  There was a time when it seemed that Dore Schary’s story department functioned largely for the purpose of generating material for Spencer Tracy. In 1950 alone, no fewer than seven properties were supposedly allocated to Tracy and his schedule, when only two could actually be made. Yankees in Texas dealt with the relocation of a Connecticut aviation plant to Texas during the war; People in Love was an original from Karl Tunberg and Leonard Spiegelgass; Angels in the Outfield, a comedy about a ball team so bad that only a miracle could save it.

  Tracy resisted When in Rome, another comedy, because it had him playing a crook posing as a priest. Jealousy was one of those multipart affairs in vogue at the time, three stories of the green-eyed monster from three different perspectives, a different actress for each. He turned down Amigo, from a screenplay by Jo Swerling and Sy Bartlett, on the excuse that nobody could follow the late Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa. The flow continued into 1951 with greater success: Plymouth Adventure was always part of the mix, a bad idea that seemingly refused to go away, but January also brought the purchase of Ruth Gordon’s autobiographical play Years Ago, for which Tracy was set to play her father (a role taken on Broadway by Fredric March). And several months later, Pat and Mike was formally added to the M-G-M schedule, intended, as always, to be another vehicle for Tracy and Hepburn.

  Originally set as the second of Tracy’s two pictures for the year 1952, Pat and Mike got moved up on the schedule when the script for Plymouth Adventure ran afoul of its star. Then William Wellman, the original director, opted out. Schary offered the project to Mervyn LeRoy, who could tell it was a stiff without even bothering to read it. “Look,” he said, “I’ve been waiting my whole life to see Spencer Tracy with a gun and a turkey in his hands.” After nearly a year’s worth of research, outlines, and notes on the part of screenwriter Helen Deutsch, Clarence Brown agreed to direct the thing, though he said that he wouldn’t be available until November 1.

  Schary, who had hoped to get the film under way sometime over the summer of 1951, apologized for unnecessarily bringing Tracy home from Europe and offered to send him back at the company’s expense—officially for conferences with the Kanins, unofficially to be with Kate, who had just arrived back in London from Africa and was looking at several weeks of interiors before finishing The African Queen. The People Against O’Hara was previewed on the night of July 20, and Tracy
was off the next morning for New York, pulling into town in the midst of a seasonal heat wave.

  While in Europe, Tracy spent the company’s money lavishly, covering most meals and car expenses to the tune of nearly $7,000—only about 30 percent of which could legitimately be charged to the continuity of Pat and Mike. He shopped for the family, did some interviews, went to Mass at Notre Dame. Kate came over from London on August 4 and they saw a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition together, dining at the Coq D’Hardi that evening and kicking the story around with its authors. “I keep remembering seeing her in Paris with Spencer,” said Lauren Bacall, who was there over the Bank Holiday with her husband Humphrey Bogart and John Huston. “She was wearing a dress. Spencer refused to take her out unless she wore a dress. She wore one of the two dresses that she owned and she was glowing, brimming over with joy.”

  Garson Kanin found the inspiration for Pat and Mike while watching a tennis lesson given Hepburn one day by four-time Wimbledon champion Bill Tilden. “She plays tennis like an actress,” Kanin observed, “with a great sense of form and style.” Her part of a “lady athlete” evolved quickly, followed a short time later by an amalgam of all the Lindy sports promoters he had ever known—the Tracy side of the equation. But while the title characters sprang forth fully formed, the plotting of the thing gave the authors fits. They darkened the husband’s character, put Mike at the center of a scheme to throw a game, and had him falling desperately in love with Pat halfway through the story. No good; the relationships were all wrong.