CHAPTER 12
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 loyalists 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.
“Spencer Tracy plays the priest, and it’s the most difficult role in the picture,” Joe Bigelow, acknowledging the significance of Tracy’s achievement, wrote in Variety.
It was a daring piece of writing to begin with, and only the most expert and understanding handling could have kept it within the proper bounds. This man of the cloth would not be unusual in real life, but on the screen he’s a type never attempted before. His slang—he calls Gable “mugg” and “sucker” good naturedly—is the sort usually associated with men of lesser spiritual quality; in this instance the lingo is casually uttered by a character dressed in the vestments of the church. It’s explained that he was born on the Barbary Coast and that he and Blackie were raised together, and that qualifies his “eccentricities.” Tracy makes him human and refreshing, and his performance precludes any possibility of offense.
There was hardly a review published anywhere that wasn’t a rave, and even in summer, when business was typically slow, the crowds were phenomenal. In New York, Variety dubbed it “the smash of the town,” going up against a particularly strong slate of competing pictures that included the latest Shirley Temple movie and W. C. Fields’ hit comedy Poppy. “All signs point to a terrific $60,000 the first week, backed by a campaign that worked hard to push this one to a high peak. It’s the best business the Cap[itol] has done in as long as the boys want to remember, and a run of three or four weeks appears assured.”
The film, in fact, climbed to nearly $70,000 that first week, and held nicely over the Independence Day weekend. The story was the same in other cities as the release widened, and Tracy dutifully went on the CBS network’s Camel Caravan to push the picture. Underrehearsed and flat, he performed a scene from Saturday’s Children with Rosalind Russell and failed to impress the few trade reviewers who managed to catch the show. Radio was building into a bonanza for big-name movie personalities who could command as much as $5,000 an appearance, but it held little attraction for Spencer Tracy, who didn’t consider it acting to stand in front of a microphone while holding a script in his hand.
With both Fury and San Francisco in release simultaneously, network radio made little difference to him. In his review of the latter in the New York Times, Frank Nugent pointed to “another brilliant portrayal by Spencer Tracy” as the two-fisted Father Mullin. “Mr. Tracy, late of Fury, is heading surely toward an award for the finest performances of the year.” And columnist Ed Sullivan, who was actually appearing onstage with Fury at Loew’s State, filed a story with Silver Screen magazine in which he labeled Tracy “The Best Bet of the Year” for true stardom.
“A year ago,” Sullivan wrote,
it was Victor McLaglen who won the Academy Award for the year’s outstanding performance in The Informer. This year, Tracy will be in the forefront of the select group who will fight it out for the premiere award of the celluloid pundits … His Father Tim will be recognized in every Catholic parish in America, and perhaps the original walked the streets of Milwaukee when Spencer Tracy was going to the public schools there. It was the integrity of the priestly portrait that Tracy paints which lifted him high among the Hollywood performers. Here is no raucous individual, nor one seeking your sympathy with obvious hokum—here is no compromise—Father Tim is as great a feat of make believe as Laughton’s Captain Bligh or the Rothschild who was born in the genius of George Arliss, or the Juliet of Norma Shearer. This is magnificent work, on a high plane.
Almost on cue, Tracy was announced as having won the Screen Writers Guild award for Fury and would take the honor again in July for his work in San Francisco. Life was good and getting better all the time. He played polo nearly every day at Riviera or on the field of the Will Rogers estate. When Sol Wurtzel wired him in mid-July, congratulating him on his performance in the Lang picture, he added that he hoped that he and Mrs. Tracy had enjoyed their trip to Honolulu. Tracy replied:
HAD WONDERFUL TRIP. MRS. TRACY DID TOO BECAUSE I STAYED ON WATER WAGON.
Of all Spencer Tracy’s early pictures, Ed Sullivan liked The Show-Off best.
In fact I was so impressed by it that in the following day’s column, I suggested that he was the brightest possibility among the younger coast actors … And then came Fury from the pen of Norman Krasna. There was plenty of raw meat in this one, meat enough for a Killer Mears to sink his teeth in, and sufficient shading to establish the contrast of restraint and furious bitterness … But Fury was not quite enough. It was reminiscent, you see, of Killer Mears. Tracy was on the way, but he needed something completely different, a part completely removed from blood-and-thunder. And he found that as the priest in San Francisco, for when he donned the clergyman’s collar, it was Hollywood’s benediction.
Tracy later told Sullivan that he was the first writer to come out and predict full stardom for him at a time when no one else could see it. “You’ll never know how much it meant to me at that particular moment—and you’ll never know how much I hoped you were right.”
If settling something so “completely different” on him had finally made audiences sit up and take notice, it was a tactic that bore repeating. In lieu of loan-outs to Wanger and RKO, which would have produced solid pictures but more of the same, Tracy was cast alongside William Powell,Jean Harlow, and Myrna Loy in a screwball comedy called Libeled Lady. Comedy, of course, wasn’t a stretch for him—it had been his forte in stock—but most moviegoers hadn’t seen him in one, and never, for that matter, in the sort of hard-driving part that typified the screwball genre. Powell, Harlow, and Loy were among the biggest draws in the industry, and equal billing in such a powerhouse company could only serve to enhance Tracy’s standing with both exhibitors and the general public.
Based on a clever story by Wallace Sullivan, Libeled Lady had Tracy back in a newsroom setting as an editor whose paper is threatened with ruination when it mistakenly puts an heiress in the middle of a London scandal and is sued for libel. In short order, Tracy’s character, Haggerty, marries off his fiancée (Harlow) to Chandler (Powell), who then sets about to seduce the litigious heiress (Loy). Tracy handled the part with such aplomb that his work appeared effortless. (“Walking on the set, if you didn’t know him, you’d take him for one of the workmen,” said Sidney Skolsky.) There was, however, tension between Harlow and Powell, who were in a difficult relationship together. The delectable Loy, meanwhile, was newly married to producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr., and Tracy made an elaborate show of his disappointment.
“He moped around pretending to pout, playing the wronged suitor,” Loy wrote. “He set up a ‘Hate Hornblow Table’ in the commissary, announcing that only men I had spurned could sit there. So all these men joined him who were supposed to have crushes on me, which they didn’t have at all. It was just a gag, but Spence made his point.”
Libeled Lady was being directed by Jack Conway, a restless, red-faced Irishman who would jump to his feet at the slightest provocation and act out a scene as he wanted it played. He knew how the action should look up on the screen, but his way of staging often stifled his actors and kept them from taking flight. Libeled Lady would be a perfectly serviceable screwball comedy—that most delicate of movie genres—but would lack the frantic grace of Twentieth Century or My Man Godfrey.
Tracy did his best to be courteous to the various reporters Howard Strickling’s people brought to the set, but he had never grown comfortable talking about himself and, after four years of doing so, felt he had run out of things to say. When one asked, “In what have you found your greatest happiness as an actor?” he answered, “In the cashier’s office.” As columnist Sheilah Graham, newly arrived in Los Angeles, observed, “he would do his best to smile at me, but I knew he wanted me to ask my questions and be gone.”
In Honolulu, Tracy discovered coconut cake and coconut-flavored ice cream and, being on the wagon, ate continuously, particularly sweets. “One day,” Louise recalled, “Spencer said, ‘I’m beginning to gain weight. You’ll have to watch that for me.’ And with that he dumped the problem in my lap. In spite of one diet and another of energy-giving but supposedly non-fattening foods, his weight continued to go up. I discovered through a friend that between meals Spencer was downing three chocolate ice cream sodas in one sitting.” When he began Libeled Lady on July 13, Tracy recorded his weight as 180 pounds. Since he wasn’t carrying the picture, there were a lot of days off. On the twenty-first he baled hay and saw his weight drop to 177. On the thirty-first—Louise’s birthday—he played polo and tipped the scale at 178.
He went into the picture knowing he’d be doing his next assignment under protest, and when, in July, his commitment for The Plough and the Stars was very publicly canceled, it was, the New York Times reported, because “an unrevealed script is being rushed that is planned to give Tracy his most impressive role.” That role, developed over the preceding six months, was that of the Brava fisherman Manuel in Victor Fleming’s planned picturization of the late Rudyard Kipling’s only American novel, Captains Courageous.
Fleming, forty-eight, had been directing movies, westerns in particular, since 1919, and had previously been a cameraman, first for Allan Dwan and Marshall Neilan, later for the Army Signal Corps. In 1929 he teamed with writer-turned-producer Louis D. “Bud” Lighton to make The Virginian. Fleming landed at M-G-M in 1931, and Lighton joined him there four years later. Almost immediately the two men began work on a screen version of the Kipling story. Much of the casting was settled early on: Lionel Barrymore as Disko Troop, the captain of the We’re Here,Melvyn Douglas as Kipling’s rail tycoon, updated to the director of a modern steamship line, Freddie Bartholomew, Metro’s David Copperfield and Selznick’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, as the spoiled rich boy who is whipped into shape during a summer season on the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic.
The eventual screenplay, the collective work of four men, shifted much of the story burden to Manuel, the simple Portuguese fisherman who, in Kipling’s novel, rescues young Harvey from the water. Whoever played the character would need his skin darkened and would have to master an accent. Tracy wanted no part of it. “Fought against it like a steer,” he admitted. “Thought the characterization would be phony. Didn’t see how the pieces would fit together. Didn’t know where I could borrow an accent.”
Tracy’s only work in dialect had been for The Mad Game, and that he had dodged by playing the scene in a hoarse whisper. “I’ll be leaping all over the continent with the dialect,” he warned Lighton and Fleming, both of whom assured him a character who had lived for years among the Gloucester fishermen could easily have picked up any of a dozen different accents. “I’ve always played rough-and-tumble parts,” Tracy added. “This story’s religion or something. Those scenes where he talks about his father—suppose I don’t bring ’em off? They’ll be horrible—sitting there in the boat, talking about Fisherman’s Heaven, a guy 37 years old—you’ll have your audiences reaching for bigger and wider hats.”
They prevailed upon him to take the script home and read it to Louise, who passed on virtually everything he was asked to do. Louise listened, as she always did, and said that she laughed at the idea that he could ever be anything but on the level. “I was in the stock company where he got his first part,” she told Ida Zeitlin of Modern Sceen magazine. “He had no tricks, no technique, he didn’t know how to make up and looked awful. What carried him through was his great sincerity and naturalness, which he had from the start. If Spence has any fault in acting, it’s that he doesn’t let himself go. He’s always afraid of being ‘hammy,’ so rather than over-play, he under-acts.” Then, echoing George M. Cohan, she said, “Whatever he’s done, I’ve always felt he had more to give, and in this part he’d have to let himself go and give it.”
Louise’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, Tracy still fretted over the matter of an accent:
I went to see every picture in town where an actor might be found speaking an accent—saw Eddie Robinson, Muni [in Black Fury], others. Then we scoured San Diego trying to find a Portuguese sailor to use as a model for Manuel. Finally we found our man. The chap came to the studio to see me. He was Manuel. The expression in his eyes, the way he walked, the way he sat, the way he used his hands, his knowledge of boats. Then he began to talk, and … he spoke better English than I do. When I asked him what he thought about my calling the kid my “leetle feesh,” he looked at me patiently—and a little pityingly—and said, “Do you mean little fish, Mr. Tracy?” I gave up.
By August Tracy was thinking of buying a boat. They had talked about it, he and Louise, and he told her he’d give up polo because a yacht would cost “a lot of dough.” She said, “So what? You don’t spend it in other ways. You may as well have your fun … I wish you wouldn’t give up polo, either. What’s wrong with having two sports?” Not knowing the first thing about navigation, he drove to Newport Beach and tried out a power cruiser, then went sailing the following week on a craft called Landfall.
When they decided to experiment with a new school, pulling Johnny out of Hollywood Progressive, he decided a boat would be too much of an added expense and gave up on the idea. Despite a thirty-four-mile drive each way, Johnny and Susie entered Brentwood Town and Country School in September 1936. “Susie,” said Louise, “was only four and, ordinarily, I do not think I should have started her to school so young, but she, too, needed companionship, and I learned that there were quite a number of even younger children there in nursery school.”
They made three days of tests for Captains Courageous in early September, Tracy’s skin darkened and his hair curled with an iron. “One day,” he remembered, “just after I’d had my hair curled, I walked down the stairs at Metro and heard a scream. I looked up, and Joan Crawford said, ‘My God, Harpo Marx!’ ” Eddie Mannix nearly talked him out of taking the role by warning him not to attempt an accent. “You’ll fall on your ass,” Mannix predicted. After viewing the test footage, Tracy agreed and urged Fleming to test “a couple of other fellows.” Then Sam Katz settled the matter by telling him that if he didn’t take the part, they wouldn’t make the picture at all. Tracy was still getting used to the idea when word spread on the morning of September 14 that Irving Thalberg had died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-six.
All the good things that had come to Tracy in that last year were the result of Thalberg’s faith in him. It bothered him that Riffraff hadn’t turned out better, but he liked to think that what had come since—Fury, especially, and San Francisco—had justified the trouble Thalberg had taken in bringing him to the studio. He attended the funeral at Wilshire Temple on the morning of the sixteenth, then drove himself out to Riviera and devoted the rest of the day to polo, as he generally did at times of stress, recording his weight at 180½ pounds.
“I finally talked myself into practicing dialect and putting up with having my hair curled twice a day, but the thought of singing gave me the shudders. I dodged the voice teacher, Arthur Rosenstein, for weeks. After I started taking lessons, I used to duck practice as much as I could. Then I just said, ‘Oh, what’s the difference?’ and let the old baritone rip.” He also took lessons in playing the vielle, the ancient stringed instrument—something of a cross between a mandolin and a hurdy-gurdy—on which Manuel accompanies himself.
However daunting the role of Manuel seemed, the project had its compensations. Vic Fleming was inspirational and rugged, tall and natty with a poetic streak. Lionel Barrymore was Tracy’s boyhood idol, whom he had first seen onstage in Kansas City at the age of sixteen. Twelve-year-oldFreddie Bartholomew was a born actor—untrained but with tremendous screen presence—who had developed enough of a following to merit first-featured billing in a picture that had no stars. Tracy’s contract guaranteed him first-featured billing, and he had to sign a waiver in order to make the package work.
Preliminary filming had commenced nearly a year earlier, when a six-man crew left California for Massachusetts to make process backgrounds and incidental shots of the fishing fleet in and around Gloucester. Purchased on the scene was a two-masted schooner called the Oretha F. Spinney, which they rechristened the We’re Here of Kipling’s novel. With the M-G-M crew on board, the ship set sail for Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, where, as Fleming described it, “shots of the fishing fleet in every conceivable sort of rough winter weather” were filmed. The men then brought the ship down though the Panama Canal and sailed it up past Monterey and San Francisco to Coos Bay, Oregon, making fog shots along the way. By the time the cast and crew assembled on the morning of September 30, a second schooner, redubbed the Jennie Cushman, was moored alongside the We’re Here in the harbor at Avalon. A company of seventy-five crowded onto the two schooners, the ships trailing barges, water taxis, and speedboats, looking for fog and finding, for the most part, bright sun instead.
Captain J. M. Hersey and his crew got their first look at the actors when they clambered aboard the We’re Here at 7:30 a.m. “Of the whole bunch of them, Christian Rub looks most like a fisherman,” Hersey observed. “Tracy was sore because he had no sooner got aboard than a makeup man wanted to curl his hair.” Under the direction of cinematographer Hal Rosson, the morning was spent building a parallel out from the port rail to support a camera platform. Tracy, in a dory, practiced pulling into camera range for the scene in which Manuel scoops young Harvey out of the water. “This would be all right,” he said, “except for the hair curling business. It’s a wonder they don’t use perfume on me. Also, I’ve got to get in a few more licks on those oars. I handle a dory like a washerwoman.”
The fog, which had been thick all morning, began to break, and the afternoon passed without getting a single shot in the can. They dismissed the company at four o’clock, returning to Avalon, and tried again the next morning with only marginally better luck. The fog held long enough to get the scene in three takes, Rosson covering it from the barge, the camera platform, and the deck above. Tracy was impressed by Freddie Bartholomew’s dedication to the role, jumping over the side of the boat in order to get what he considered to be sufficiently wet after having been shot with a hose and doused with a bucket of water. “The kid can take it,” he said admiringly. “I hand it to him.”
Again the fog cleared, and the adult cast spent the rest of the day learning to cut bait. Part of the ship’s forecastle had been converted to a schoolroom for Bartholomew, his stand-in Ray Sperry, and sixteen-year-old Mickey Rooney. “We had a full schedule,” Rooney recalled, “a long shoot every morning, then art, history, social studies, arithmetic, composition, grammar, spelling, botany, physiology, and hygiene in the afternoon.”
Tracy hated having his hair curled for Captains Courageous. Here he submits to M-G-M stylist Larry Germain, 1936. (MIKE GERMAIN)
Fleming wrote: “We had purposely set out in October in order to take advantage of the fog. But for days after we began to work, either the sun would break through or the wind would cause a break in the mist.” They cruised over to the Isthmus for a brief scene of dialogue with Bartholomew and Rooney, but then the fog broke there as well. “[A]ll the actors and crew were fishing off the back of the boat,” Tracy remembered. “Fleming said, ‘Goddamnit, we’re going home!’ And then we went back to Catalina to get the stuff we had left in the hotel, and Fleming was in such a hurry to get away that he was using a speedboat [while] the rest of us were going to use a big tug. He walked out on the pier to jump into his speedboat, and the speedboat took off and he went into the water—with his white [pants], all dressed up.” The We’re Here and the Cushman proceeded to Santa Monica to await further orders.
There was process work to be done, but Tracy’s scenes were limited to Harvey’s time on the water, and the other material—the boy’s school days and his life at home—could go on without him. He spent all day at Riviera on October 4, practicing in the morning and watching a game in the afternoon. Then he attended the riotous preview of Libeled Lady in the evening. It was, he liked to tell people, the first picture he had ever had to dress up for, preferring, of course, to “slop around” in his shirtsleeves, uncreased trousers, and an old pair of shoes. As he watched the breakneck comedy unspool, he said he couldn’t get over the feeling that he was watching a man “who had just put on a clean shirt.” When it was over, he turned to Louise and asked her what she thought of his wardrobe. “Well,” she allowed, “they did look pretty new.”
However much the picture made Tracy’s neck itch, Libeled Lady went over big with the press, and the reviews the next day were, in Tracy’s estimation, “great.” Confident he was in “the best comedy of the year,” he touched M-G-M for a $5,000 loan and went off again looking for a boat. He inspected Johnny Weismuller’s at Santa Monica and took a demo trip in heavy seas on one named, appropriately enough, Fury. The studio took up his option a full six months early, and within a week he had closed on a forty-foot gaff-headed ketch called Resolute. Following the example of Frank Borzage, who named his yacht the Rena B. after his wife, Tracy christened the boat the Carrie B in honor of his mother.
He was back at the studio on October 21, still unsure of his performance and grumbling as they fussed with his hair. (“It took me two hours every blessed day to get my hair curled.”) The screenwriters, principally John Lee Mahin, who did the final draft of the script with the knowledge that Tracy would be playing the part, kept Manuel’s words in the spirit of those Kipling had given the character, accomplishing the effect with syntax and emphasis. (“Ah ha!” said Manuel, holding out a brown hand. “You are some pretty well now? This time last night the fish they fish for you. Now you fish for fish. Eh, wha-at?”)
Said Tracy: “We got an educated Portuguese to advise us.3 He told me that if you put an Italian, a Spaniard, and a Portuguese in the same room and listen to them talk with your eyes closed, you can’t tell which is the Portuguese, which is the Italian, and which is the Spaniard. So I sort of made up my accent as I went along. Maybe some of it was phony. I don’t know.”
What became his favorite scene in the picture was also its simplest, Manuel out singing under the stars, Harvey tentatively making his approach. Tired of Harvey’s attitude, Manuel wishes he would go away and continues to sing and play his vielle as the boy peppers him with questions.
“What do you keep singing for?” Harvey demands.
“Because I like to sing,” Manuel says.
“I never heard that song before.”
“Me neither. I just make ’em up.”
“You can’t write songs.”
“I don’t write ’em. I just find ’em in my mouth.”
“A song can’t be any good like that—when you just make it up.”
“Say—that best kind songs.” He taps his chest. “When you feel good inside—like, like trade wind—she just come out.”
“Aw, people learn songs. Songs aren’t just inside of people like that.”
“Say, sometime a song so big and sweet inside I can’t get ’im out. And then I look up at stars and maybe cry, I feel so good.” And then he peers searchingly into Harvey’s eyes and says, “Don’t you ever feel like this?” And when the boy returns the same sullen and belligerent face as before he says, “No, guess you don’t.”
The challenge with Manuel was to put him across as a genuinely happy man without making him seem like an idiot. Tracy gained his screen effects largely out of the strength of his own personality, as the actor’s art, at its most basic level, is the bringing of something of one’s self to a role. He wasn’t a character actor in the sense that Paul Muni was, yet here he was in makeup with his hair curled, reciting his lines with the suggestion of a Portuguese accent. It was absolutely essential to avoid an air of masquerade in the part, and Tracy portrayed Manuel’s strength and good nature as a gift from God. Manuel is curious, philosophical, humble but never subservient. Fleming seemed happy with the attack, but it was Tracy’s first time with Fleming and he wasn’t so sure he could trust him.
Freddie Bartholomew could sense Tracy’s insecurity: “I had warm feelings for Spencer Tracy, but there was—curiously—a sense of competitiveness that he felt towards me. I’m not trying to say that I was wonderful and he wasn’t—I don’t mean that at all—but I think he felt that, ‘Ooh, wait a minute. The kid’s running off with the picture and this is not necessarily a good idea.’ ”
They were back out on the ocean in November, midchannel with the Cushman, the Bluegill, the Flying Swan, the Elizabeth K. Brown, and nine other schooners brought down from Seattle and the Alaska halibut fleet, the dories putting overside and pulling away, a storm approaching steadily from the northwest. With a ten-day leave of absence, Tracy pulled alongside the We’re Here one day to show off the Carrie B. “Slick as a whistle,” he said proudly. “A forty-footer that will sleep six, and that I can handle myself if necessary. Captain Hersey came over in a dory and I showed him around. He even took the wheel for ten minutes and admitted that she ‘wasn’t so bad.’ ”
Tracy wanted everyone to see the new boat, and Dick Mook wrote of one particular Sunday afternoon when he took a group of friends out past the breakwater at Wilmington and had trouble getting back. “There is a drawbridge that must be raised to let sailing vessels into the harbor. We came back late in the afternoon when traffic across the bridge was at its heaviest. Naturally, traffic was held up while the bridge was raised to let us through. But Spence, new to navigation and knowing little about steering, couldn’t quite get the boat through.” Motorists waiting to cross the bridge grew irate, honking their horns and raining insults down on the captain of the Carrie B. One driver caustically advised Tracy that he could get the boat through if only he would turn it on its side. “Spence,” said Mook, “flushed a lobster red.”
Shots of the dories racing back to the We’re Here were made on November 20, Harvey falling in as he tries to pass a heavy trawl tub to the deck. Fleming spent at least an hour rehearsing the shot, wanting it on the first try so as not to leave Bartholomew in the cold water any longer than necessary. “Stubby Kruger, out of camera range, was all ready to dive in if Tracy had difficulty hauling Freddie back into the dory,” Captain Hersey recorded,
but Freddie was sure everything was going to be all right. The kid has nerve, all right. A second dory was ready to race over if there was any hitch, and Mr. Fleming himself had a leg over the rail and wouldn’t have hesitated to drop in. Tracy’s dory came up alongside. As he reached for the forward dory hook, Freddie put one foot on the gunwale, started to pass up the trawl tub, and took a backward header. Tracy, quick as a flash, reached over, grabbed him by the collar as he came up, got a grip with his other hand on the lad’s trousers, and pulled him in as if he was landing a codfish. It was all over in a few seconds. We hauled up the dory, rushed Freddie below, stripped him, dried him, rubbed him down, and put him between blankets in a bunk where Mr. Barrymore, Charley Grapewin, Tracy and others came down and kidded him about his Olympic high-dive.
After a few days back at the studio, they suspended production while waiting for new backgrounds. Eddie Mannix okayed a two-week vacation on December 1, and the Tracys were on the Super Chief bound for Chicago the following morning. In New York they registered at the Sherry-Netherland and, intent upon catching as many shows as possible, took in Dead End on a matinee, followed by the Ziegfeld Follies with Fannie Brice and Bobby Clark that evening. After hours at the Cotton Club, they got caught up in a mob of autograph seekers, an experience Spence likened to a scene from Fury. With no big-name comedies competing against it, Libeled Lady was a big hit at the Capitol, and Metro’s New York office had the dailies queuing up to buy Tracy lunch.
He loved the musicals—Red, Hot and Blue, On Your Toes. They saw Idiot’s Delight, Tovarich, then Stage Door on the tenth. They would have seen another that evening had Spence not caved—after first having said no—to an appearance on Rudy Vallee’s Royal Gelatin Hour (as the $1,500 fee would handily cover the cost of the trip). They dined with Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, caught Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, and were back on the train to Chicago the next afternoon. They were home on December 16 after five and a half exhilarating days on the town. Four days later, on the twentieth, Tracy celebrated one full year on the wagon.
Yvonne Beaudry was newly arrived in California, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, when, at the age of twenty-eight, she landed a job at Selznick-International. Beaudry made the daily commute to Culver City with a woman who was one of the top secretaries at nearby M-G-M. Unhappy at Selznick, where she was secretary to a dyspeptic producer, Beaudry was asked by her friend if she cared to work for an actor—“never mind who.”
“Did I!” she said. “Anything for release from my present employment. But an actor? ‘I hope it’s Spencer Tracy,’ I blurted out, considering he was the only thespian worthy of my efforts. My companion smiled mysteriously, let me off at Selznick’s, and drove on to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. An hour later, she phoned me for lunch at the M-G-M commissary, where, I supposed, I’d meet the actor.”
Nothing happened over lunch, and Beaudry took the bus back to work in low spirits. About four o’clock, though, she had another call. “Can you come for tea in half an hour? Spencer Tracy will pick you up in his car.” Beaudry told her boss she was leaving for a job interview at Metro, and he simply nodded, anxious for the chance to hire somebody with more experience. “Evidently I’d been inspected at lunchtime and passed muster. I still wonder if Tracy hired me for my Hollywood get-up, which resembled his—a loose brown wool coat, a felt hat with the brim pulled down over one eye. Certainly he learned little about my qualifications at tea. He did all the talking, and I basked in the warmth of his presence, his smile.”
Since the release of San Francisco, Tracy told her, he was getting lots of fan mail and needed a secretary to answer letters, send out autographed photos, paste clippings in a scrapbook. The salary would be twenty-five dollars a week, and she’d be based in his dressing room until an office came available elsewhere on the lot. Her first morning at work, Beaudry opened dozens of letters piled on the floor, on easy chairs, on a large table on which sat a typewriter, stationery, rosaries, and medals sent Johnny by his father’s fans. Atheists wrote, describing spiritual awakenings they experienced after watching his work as Father Mullin. (One British reviewer described the picture as “a more powerful, more convincing recall to religion than the cold and stilted one issued by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”) Some asked for spiritual advice, others for money.
“You can’t live up to an idealistic role,” Tracy said. “I’m not competent to advise anyone about their spiritual problems. I’m groping myself. I suppose we all are.” After he played a young doctor in a radio adaptation of Men in White, an influx of letters came from broken and discouraged medical students who said they had drawn new hope and inspiration from his performance. Again, some asked for advice: “They made me feel pretty helpless. It’s no simple thing to advise an earnest youngster who is confused about life. You can’t ignore them, either. About all I can do is tell them to keep on trying. It’s trite, of course, but at least I believe it myself.” Then, of course, there were the usual crackpots that all celebrities hear from—inventors, hustlers, people looking for loans or investment dollars. A few, written in honest desperation, got his attention.
“I think of you many, many times, always look forward to your letters,” he wrote Lincoln Cromwell, now in his fourth year at McGill,
but I have been so busy the past year, myself, that I haven’t found much time for correspondence. Now I have a very fine secretary, so we hope things will be different … You have done beautifully, and I’m proud of you, and I want you to go on. Helping you has been a great source of pleasure and satisfaction, and I’m perfectly willing, even anxious, to have you continue in study for another year or two. How you choose to do this will be left practically to your own judgment. I have even thought of Europe for a year, if you feel that anything could be gained and your service to humanity enhanced by study there. I am anxious to see you this summer, when we will talk all these things over. May I tell you, Lincoln, the past year has been wonderful for me, too. It has been the best year that I have ever had in my work, besides being by far the best physically and mentally. We have a lovely farm in [the Valley], and Mrs. Tracy and the children are all well and happy. I have also a nice 40-foot sailboat which has given me a lot of pleasure, and I hope that this summer you and I can have a little cruise in it together. Enclosed please find [a] check, which I’m sure you can use.
Vic Fleming was ill, in the hospital for kidney stones, and Captains Courageous was on hold pending his recovery. Tracy went to the races, painted the barn, gave interviews focusing on the hard times he had seen before joining Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. “As everyone knows, no actor is any better than his last picture,” he said in a by-lined article for the Oakland Tribune. “And it isn’t reasonable to expect that every one of your pictures is going to be a smash hit. You may get two in a row or even three, or you may hit a jackpot consisting of Fury, San Francisco, Libeled Lady, and Captains Courageous, but not often.”
He gave the studio full credit for salvaging his career (“I was well on my way to being a tough heavy for keeps”) and he gave Louise credit for his sobriety. “The fact that I’m alive today, that I’m capable of any work or success—I owe to her. She’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever known.”
Fleming’s two-day stint in the hospital stretched to three weeks, and filming resumed with Jack Conway at the helm. The production was plagued by illness: John Lee Mahin, Barrymore, Charley Grapewin all came down with the flu. Then Tracy, during a routine checkup, was told he had a goiter. He had noticed his thyroid gland was “a bit swollen”; although it wasn’t toxic, he was told that it could, in time, obstruct his breathing. Dr. Dennis thought he should have it out “sometime.” Tracy was just out of the hospital—more tests—when he learned that he had been nominated for an Academy Award.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was at a low ebb in 1936, so many actors and writers having resigned during the formation of their respective guilds that neither the nominations nor the actual awards were considered representative of the industry at large. A nominating committee appointed by the academy president, director Frank Capra, came up with the contenders, which, for Best Actor, were Gary Cooper (in Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town), Walter Huston (in Dodsworth), William Powell (My Man Godfrey), Paul Muni (The Story of Louis Pasteur), and Tracy, who took the nomination for his work in San Francisco.
It was astonishing. Having resigned from the academy, Tracy hadn’t considered the possibility of a nomination, much less in the company of men like Huston and Muni, both of whom he regarded as better actors. Moreover, he had managed the trick with a mere seventeen minutes of screen time in a picture that ran just shy of two hours. Given the general antipathy toward the academy on the part of the Screen Actors Guild membership—which had boycotted the Oscars the previous year—he seemed a little embarrassed by the whole thing.
Fleming was back in time to shoot Tracy’s last and most difficult scene, the death of Manuel in the icy waters off Gloucester. Tangled in the broken topmast of the We’re Here, his legs and chest crushed, Manuel is as good as dead and he knows it. (“He’s got about five hundred pounds of wire stay cuttin’ and stretchin’ him down,” a crew member gasps, working the line.) Manuel calls out to the crew in Portuguese so that young Harvey won’t know what he is saying. To the tearful boy he is his usual carefree self, says he’s tired and that he’s going to ask Disko to let him go. “I want to go, little fish. I no good anymore fishing here. I go fish with my father. You …’member I say he keep seat for me in his boat?”
On the morning of February 12, 1937, Tracy, with a philosophical grin, slipped down from the mast and into the studio tank, tangling himself in the wreckage, his wetsuit hidden under the water, the camera on a crane overhead, the microphone boom on a skiff to one side, Fleming and Hal Rosson on a skiff to the other. A couple of uniformed nurses stood on the sectional deck of the We’re Here in case of an accident. At a signal from Fleming the storm began.
“And what a storm!” columnist Robbin Coons observed.
Huge paddles churn up a frothy sea, clouds of spray fly with a roar from a towering wooden reservoir, and a huge funnel batters Tracy’s head with wind. The waves rise higher, higher, engulfing him, knocking him about as he yells his dialogue. Rescuers are John Carradine—just up from the flu—Dave Thursby, and Jack Stirling, all of whom get nearly as drenched as Tracy. And they do the scene three times. Before the last take Tracy, submerged in his art if ever an actor was, catches me leering on the sidelines and jeers, “You like to try it? If you’ve got to laugh, you might stay out of my line of vision!” But another wave breaks over him before I can explain it wasn’t laughter but an expression I always wear when wondering whether Metro is trying to drown Tracy.
The six-page scene took three long days to shoot, the exchange between Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew playing primarily in close-ups. Screenwriter John Lee Mahin, who was present during much of the shoot, was puzzled early on by Fleming’s distant staging of the scenes with Bartholomew. “I said, ‘Geez, this is a beautiful kid, Vic. It seems to me you’re not getting the close-ups of this kid.’ He said, ‘Wait till we need ’em. Wait till they’ll have some effect.’ I said, ‘Well, when will that be?’ He said, ‘When he starts crying and breaking. That’s when we’ll go in to see him.’ And this tough bastard starts to move in on him. He was right.”
In an ever-rising state of panic, Harvey crawls out onto the splintered mast of the We’re Here. “You’re all right, aren’t you? You aren’t hurt, are you Manuel?” And Long Jack, floating alongside Manuel, calls out to the captain. “The drift is tightenin’ it! You got to cut loose, Disko—or it’ll take him in half!” And Harvey, scrambling into a dory, glances around at the somber men on deck and then back at Manuel.
“No!” he gulps.
“We ain’t cuttin’ loose,” Disko returns, “unless it’s gonna help you free Manuel!”
And Manuel calls out, “You cut him away, Disko! You hear me?”
Resigned, the captain says, “Get me an ax,” knowing that cutting the line is a task that only he can do.
“No!” pleads Harvey. “Captain Disko! No!”
With Freddie now within inches of Tracy’s face, Fleming managed the most intimate of exchanges against the commotion of Barrymore’s futile attempts at rescue, the ax’s blows registering ominously on the soundtrack, Tracy bobbing and wincing in pain, striving mightily to convince the boy that he’s really okay. “We have good times together, eh, little fish? We laugh, we sing, so you smile now. Come on, little fish …”
“Long Jack can fix it. You’ll be all right, won’t you Manuel?”
“Manuel, he be watching you. You be best fisherman ever.”
And as the ax severed the line, the apparatus pulled Tracy down into the water and out of sight, Freddie clawing at the surface, the men restraining him, the cold finality of the moment weighing on both him and the audience.
Freddie Bartholomew managed the scene with tremendous restraint, on the verge of tears as the terror grips him yet never out of control, never permitting himself to completely let go. Tracy understood that it was Freddie’s scene more fully than it was his own, and he played it as would an expert straight man, feeding the lines the boy could respond to, giving him the spotlight even as Fleming insistently cut to Manuel. In the end, it’s the audience’s empathy with Harvey, and not Manuel’s brave exit, that so powerfully puts the scene across.
“Well, I got away with it,” Tracy said after it was all over. “Want to know why? Because of Freddie, because of that kid’s performance, because he sold it 98%. The kid had to believe in Manuel, or Manuel wasn’t worth a quarter. The way he would look at me, believe every word I said, made me believe in it myself. I’ve never said this before, and I’ll never say it again. Freddie Bartholomew’s acting is so fine and so simple and so true that it’s way over people’s heads. It’ll only be by thinking back two or three years from now that they’ll realize how great it was.”
One day on the lot a few weeks later, Tracy breezed into his dressing room and told Yvonne Beaudry they could see a runoff of the finished picture, which had taken five long months to shoot. Inside a studio projection room, they watched Manuel regenerate the pampered Harvey and then go to his watery grave. “When we emerged from the dark room into bright sunlight,” Beaudry remembered, “I was ashamed that my eyes were filled with tears. To my astonishment, Tracy’s eyes also were moist and red and he quickly hid them behind sunglasses.”
1 There was no “hazardous acts” clause in Tracy’s M-G-M contract, but the matter was taken up with a number of players after the death of actor Gordon Westcott in October 1935. Tracy informally agreed to refrain from playing polo during the production of a picture, as did Robert Montgomery and Clark Gable. Under pressure from their respective boards, studio executives Jack Warner andDarryl F. Zanuck gave up the game altogether—Zanuck quite reluctantly—and, in time, so did Walt Disney.
2 Announced as Three Time Loser, the film was ultimately made and released as You Only Live Once (1937).
3 This was the Portuguese actor Rodrigo de Medicis.