James Curtis

by Spencer Tracy: A Biography

  The script went to New York, where Nicholas Schenck took it to be another of Schary’s pricey morality tales—a dated story of antique prejudices—and said he didn’t think Schary should do it. Within days, an item in the Hollywood Reporter indicated that the film was being put off “indefinitely.”

  “The quarrel,” said Schary, “was healed finally by Mr. Schenck saying he’d let me make the picture. He wouldn’t oppose it. The whole argument took place during the time when I was having this whole series of problems about my attitudes toward the job, and I certainly said—and I felt it very strongly—that if I had to fight to make this picture, there was no point in staying around.”

  In January 1954 Tracy agreed to do the film after Highland Fling but was never completely on board. “I think his opinion may have been colored by some people at the studio who felt it would be a very unsuccessful picture,” Schary suggested.4 “We then spoke again [in April] and he said, ‘What do you really think will happen with this picture?’ I said, ‘Spence, this is not a twelve-million-dollar picture. But if it’s successful, if we do it well and it comes off, it’s the kind of picture that will receive perhaps the penetration of Crossfire5 and, if you’re good in it, I think your chances for recognition are wonderful in it.’ Well, he didn’t know. So he left very undecided that day. There were some things about the script that bothered and disturbed him … In the beginning he was not enthusiastic.”

  Tracy was in London when Kaufman’s final draft, eliminating the opening narration, was okayed for production. It would be a couple of weeks before he learned that Highland Fling had been canceled and that Bad Day had been moved up to a July 15 start date with Vincente Minnelli directing. To Schary’s mind, Minnelli had the advantage of having made two pictures with Tracy. He was, however, just coming off the demanding musical fantasy Brigadoon and was reluctant to take it. John Sturges signed on with scarcely a month’s notice and quickly saw the opportunities in marrying the sweep of widescreen with the desolate stretch of wreckage known as Black Rock.

  “The people at Metro didn’t really have any faith in CinemaScope or the concept of widescreen,” Sturges said.

  They were enamored of 3-D, which to me was the passing fancy—not widescreen, which was obviously the picture of the future. So then word came back from New York: “Make one in widescreen. They’re doing business.” So I rushed up and said, “Now with the orders from New York, let me make one.” They said, “You don’t want to make this one—there’s nobody in it.” I said, “What’s that got to do with it?” Well, to them, if you had widescreen, that meant thousands of extras, thousands of togas, amphitheaters with Christians being mauled by lions, and so on. They said, “What are you going to do with all that space?” I said, “Well, the idea of a man, Tracy, in a black suit standing against this empty space. Doesn’t that tell you something? Isn’t that better the bigger the screen?”

  Sturges envisioned a panorama of complete isolation, a place where a handful of people could hold a grim secret between them. He had, said J. J. Cohn, “an idea that it ought to be done on location. Dore turned to me and said, ‘What do you think, Joe?’ I said, ‘Well, I think we can do it on lot number three, but I don’t think it would be too much of a difference to shoot on location. Why not let John Sturges go and pick a location, then we’ll figure the cost.’ So John Sturges went out and, I think, [selected] Lone Pine, if I remember rightly.”

  It was indeed Lone Pine, some two hundred miles due north of Los Angeles, where Greed, Gunga Din, High Sierra, and countless B-westerns had been filmed and where every angle offered a fresh expanse of the rugged Owens Valley. They found a spur on an old Southern Pacific easement that could, with care, support the modern streamliner that delivers Macreedy to Black Rock and sent a crew up to build a cluster of wind-worn buildings, a task that took all of eleven days.

  According to Schary, Tracy appeared in his office one day toward the start of production. “Kid, you can get yourself a new boy,” he said. “I’m not going to do the movie.” This came as no surprise to Schary, who had grown used to Tracy’s vacillations. Mannix was in talks with Bert Allenberg and the William Morris office over a new three-year term for Tracy, and Schary may have interpreted this particular maneuver as a negotiating tactic. Tracy had, however, been up all night convincing himself he wasn’t up to the job—that he hadn’t prepared enough, that he wasn’t going to be good enough—for, as his datebook shows, he was awake until 5 a.m. and only able to sleep with the aid of four and three-quarters Seconal capsules.

  “Okay,” said Schary.

  Tracy, he recalled, seemed surprised. “You mean it’s okay? Really?”

  “Sure. I was supposed to make only twenty or twenty-two pictures this year. It won’t make a fuss if I lose one.” Schary then advised his recalcitrant star that Nick Schenck might well insist on suing him to recover the costs incurred in the run-up to the picture—sets and cast in particular—and estimated the total at $480,000.

  Tracy backed off, but not before eliciting a promise from Schary that he would make the dusty trip north to visit the set. The following week, John Sturges had his first and only conference with Tracy regarding the picture: “I anticipated various approaches to ‘Why can’t we do this in the studio?’ and, sure enough, they occurred. I talked him out of them. He said, ‘Well, you don’t want [the heat] to affect the acting, do you?’ I said, ‘Spence, you’re not going to tell me you can’t act in hot weather.’ And he laughed and he said, ‘I guess I’ll forget the rest of my speech.’ He wanted to build the set on the back lot.”

  Tracy went shopping for clothes at Rothschild’s, where he purchased a plain gray suit to wear in the picture. “He hardly had it altered,” said Millard Kaufman, “because he wanted it to look like [it belonged on] a guy that just got out of the Army. And it did. It didn’t really fit him the way that Gregory Peck, for example, would have had a suit fit.” Sturges recalled him discussing the clothes: “He said, ‘I figure [Macreedy’s] from the east, he’ll wear a hat, okay?’ And I said, ‘Sure, you can use [it] in the sun, the shadows, you know—for looks.’ He said, ‘Don’t think I won’t.’ And [he] showed up in that and it looked great.”

  On the morning of Sunday, July 18, 1954, Tracy set out for the western edge of Death Valley, where the temperature was one hundred degrees and a room awaited him at the Frontier Motel. John Sturges had assembled a stellar cast in the brief time allotted him. The role of Reno Smith, Macreedy’s nemesis in the picture, was filled by Robert Ryan, a human counterpart to the weathered surroundings of Black Rock. M-G-M contract player Anne Francis would be Liz Wirth, the solitary girl in the cast, John Ericson her timid, ineffectual brother Pete. Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, Ernest Borgnine, and Lee Marvin filled out the roles of the principal townspeople, the sixty-year-old Brennan making his fourth appearance in a picture with Tracy.

  “My first scene was after I had supposedly knocked [Tracy] off the road,” Borgnine remembered.

  The first scene we did together was when he comes back to town after that. My line was, “Well, if it’s not Macreedy, the world’s champion road hog.” I had been asked by Walter Brennan, “I understand you’re a fairly good country actor. I’d like to see your scene.” Everybody was watching. As Tracy came out of the car and started to cross, I forgot every line I had. All I could see were these two Academy Awards coming at me. And then my first line popped into my head. We did our scene, and then he walked through the door. The director said, “Cut! Print!” Walter Brennan went by and said, “Good enough.” And Tracy came back out: “Kid, you did all right. I like working with you. You look a man right in the eye.”

  At night, the company would adjourn to Lone Pine, where the daytime temperature was 112 degrees and there was little to do after dark. Tracy would open his room for snacks and cocktails, keeping strictly to soft drinks for himself. “It seemed like a form of torture almost,” Anne Francis remarked. “He would invite all the actors up to his suite at the end of the day for coc
ktails, and he’d sit there and drink his 7-Up while everybody else was having cocktails.”

  Hepburn was shooting Time of the Cuckoo in Venice, and there was a cable or a letter from her every day or two. Walter Brennan, whose politics were every bit as conservative as Adolphe Menjou’s, made the mistake of commenting one night on Kate’s supposedly leftist views, the memory of her appearance for Wallace still trailing her after seven years of innuendo. “He said that Katie didn’t have ‘good judgment’ or common sense,” Anne Francis remembered, “and that topped it for Tracy—he went icy cold.” The following day, Sturges found the two men weren’t speaking.

  Tracy’s scenes with Robert Ryan were a highpoint for the people on location, Ryan conforming, in Millard Kaufman’s words, to “D. H. Lawrence’s disturbing observation of the American hero as ‘cold, hard-eyed, isolate and a killer.’ The characterization applied equally well to Ryan’s American heavy.” A taut confrontation between the two men was staged as if an idle conversation between two Midwestern schoolboys, Tracy seated on a bench, his eyes downcast, Ryan casually standing before him, hands folded in front, squinting into the sun and speaking with the softness of a chaplain. (“Komoko. Sure, I remember him. Japanese farmer. Never had a chance …”)

  “We never rehearsed,” said Ernest Borgnine. “If [Tracy] rehearsed, I never saw it. They just said, ‘Let’s shoot it.’ On Bad Day, when Tracy is sitting on the bench and Robert Ryan is talking to him, Tracy has his head down. And I’m there thinking, ‘Nobody’s going to be looking at him.’ And on screen you couldn’t take your eyes off him. And Bob Ryan was doing everything but loosen his pants.”

  John Ericson recalled,

  I was sitting on the porch there—you know, the one in the opening shot. They were down by the gas station … The whole crew was around there, and they were down there for quite a while. I got tired of sitting up there in the sun, and so I said to whoever I was with, “I’m going to go and see what they’re doing.” Because I could hear them talking away, and I thought they must be having a discussion about the scene … So I started ambling down the road, and I got halfway down, shuffling in the gravel and all, and then I stopped. “Oh, my God—that’s the scene they’re doing!” It sounded like they were having a conversation, and everybody was just standing around, taking notes or watching to see what’s going to be next. So I tiptoed on up there, and there was Tracy doing his close-up with Robert Ryan off camera. And I thought to myself, “My God, he makes those words sound like they’re coming out of his mouth.” They weren’t written, you know? He’s really thinking before he answers. When he opens his mouth, he reacts to what he’s heard.

  After the scene, Tracy flopped into a chair next to Millard Kaufman. “Ryan is bristling with a kind of cerebral muscle, you know, and he’s a tough guy. And Spencer sits down next to me and says, ‘Does Ryan scare you?’ At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about, and then I realized he was talking about the scene that he had just finished. So I said, ‘No, I’ve known Bob Ryan for years. He’s a fine man. No, he doesn’t scare me.’ And Tracy said, ‘Well, he scares the hell out of me.’ ”

  Much to Tracy’s satisfaction, Dore Schary did indeed make his promised appearance on the hottest day of the shoot, when the location temperature climbed to 114 degrees. “Dore, you got a great script here,” Tracy told him that day. “However, the critics are going to love it, but nobody’s going to go see it.” And then, echoing Nick Schenck’s concerns, he added, “It’s out of its time.”

  Tracy made the five-hour trip home that evening, driving out to the valley on Saturday to discuss John’s plans for a divorce after fifteen months of marriage.

  The release of Broken Lance came on July 29, 1954, when the picture opened its New York engagement at the Roxy Theatre. Tracy had seen it twice, once by himself, again with Louise and the kids. (Weeze thought the picture good and said it would do excellent business; Spence judged his own performance more harshly and thought he had overacted in spots.) The trade notices were wonderful, Variety proclaiming “a grownup CinemaScope, a process that has lived up to the pioneer The Robe.”

  Tracy and Robert Ryan play a tense exchange for Bad Day at Black Rock. Director John Sturges, in sunglasses and white cap, is seated next to the camera. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

  Presented in four-track magnetic sound, Broken Lance promised audiences the kind of visual and aural thrills they now seemed to demand in pictures, and it came close to matching the success of The Robe in its initial engagements. The family dynamics and Tracy’s commanding performance as the hard-bitten Devereaux also seemed to resonate across generational and cultural lines.

  “I thought I put my old man in Broken Lance,” screenwriter Richard Murphy commented, “and my son says, ‘Goddamn, there’s dad.’ So I guess the father’s universal. I went to Japan later on, and have a very dear friend over there, whom I met when I was shooting Three Stripes in the Sun, and the guy said to me, ‘I saw Broken Lance—it’s exactly like my father!’ Tracy didn’t look very Japanese, but I can see what the guy meant.”

  When work on Black Rock resumed in Culver City on August 9, Tracy was at work on a painting of Mount Whitney he had started on location. The heat had been a considerable distraction, and in Culver City temperatures were twenty-five degrees cooler. The pressure that always accompanied the start of a film had dissipated; Sturges was working ahead of schedule, printing a lot of initial takes, supremely confident in the script, the actors, and the footage he had. “We shot almost no film at all—no negative, that is, because you shoot negative and then you print part of it—I think something like 86,000 negative [feet] for the whole picture. Only a handful of scenes were ever take two. Scene after scene after scene after scene was take one.”

  After the implicit threat of violence colors the whole tone of the film, it finally erupts in the town diner, where Coley Trimble (Borgnine) crowds Macreedy to the point of no escape. Tracy, anxious about the scene, went to Sturges and Millard Kaufman.

  “He was rather apologetic,” Kaufman remembered,

  and he said, “I need a double for this.” John said, “Why?” And he said, “Well, if I hit somebody, I don’t think I’d be able to stop.” Now that could mean one of two things: It meant that he was so involved in a fictional character that it became natural or realistic to him to such an extent that he would get carried away by it. It could also have meant that he simply didn’t want to do it, which happens quite often with actors who are bright enough to give you another excuse for it. And he certainly was that. I don’t know what it was. All I know is that he did not want to hit anybody, so we got a double—and if you notice in the picture, all the close stuff with Coley, Ernie Borgnine, is over Spencer’s shoulder and you don’t see his face because it wasn’t him.

  On location near Lone Pine for Bad Day at Black Rock. Left to right: Robert Ryan, Tracy, and studio head Dore Schary. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

  “I wondered,” said Borgnine,

  how the hell a man with one arm was going to fight me, and I’m a big husky guy. I went to John Sturges. “What do you have in mind?” [he said.] “Judo,” I said. And Sturges said, “Okay, do it.” So we got the stunt guy and worked out the scene.6 I figured I’d have somebody else double me, but Sturges wanted me to do it. Jesus Christ, what have I started? Well, I got ready and they put this piece of rubber in my hand full of blood. And we got started. I take the first blow, and his knee comes up and into my face and misses me by a quarter inch. I hit my face with the sponge and dropped it and the blood spurted out. And Spence was standing there watching and said, “Jesus Christ, they killed him!” Then I went through the [screen] door. In rehearsal, the door flew open. But for the take, they had closed the door, and locked it, and I can still see the screws flying out the door when I went through it. I picked up myself, and the take was fine. And then I went to find the son of a bitch that had locked the door. Well, no one would own up to it. Years later, I visited John Sturges in Cuernavaca, when he’s
shooting The Magnificent Seven, and he owned up to it. It was Sturges that had locked the door.

  Sturges said,

  We were interested in [Black Rock] as a film, and what could be called the “message” in the film, to us, gave it the dimension of reality in the characters. It fleshed them out, it made them meaningful, gave them points of view. You can’t play scenes at a surface level. That’s Spence’s great trick in acting. Well, it’s not a trick; he has great ability in acting. He wasn’t playing on top. He was playing what was underneath.

  He told me his method. It’s most interesting. I think it accounts for the substance in Spence’s work, certainly not just the talent of his ability on the screen. He would take the script, he told me, take it out to the desert, read it aloud, the whole script, not just his part, to evaluate not only the picture, [but] his relationship to it. And, perhaps most important of all from Spence’s standpoint, he said, was where he should come on and where he should lay back. You can’t hit all the time. You can’t overwhelm all the time. And Spence would lay away until those moments when he felt he should come on. And the nicest compliment I ever got as a director was when he said, “You know where those are too.” He said, “I can tell.” Then he would do that again—read it aloud. The only thing Spence ever suggested in a script were cuts of himself, so that he wasn’t on too much. Then he said that he prepared in a way that just kind of had to be a secret. He said, “It’s mechanical.” He’d memorize the lines, then he wouldn’t look at them for five days. So that when he looked at people, he was hanging onto them as if he was listening to them for the first time—because, in fact, he was. He wasn’t that sure what they were going to say.