CHAPTER 13
With the completion of his scenes for Victor Fleming, Tracy went into his next picture without a break. As he remembered it, “they hauled me out of the water on a Saturday afternoon when we finished Captains Courageous. Monday morning, I was standing in the middle of the street of a shell-torn village on the back lot, and Woody Van Dyke was ordering Harry Albiez, his prop man, to outfit me to the last cartridge.”
The film version of a pacifist best seller, They Gave Him a Gun was initially to have been directed by Fleming, who saw it as “a great anti-war document.” Then, when Captains Courageous ran seriously over schedule, Tracy was instrumental in getting Van Dyke to do it instead. He liked the speed at which Van Dyke worked and the fact that he wasn’t fussy like Borzage or Lang. (Having just finished with Manuel, Tracy unconsciously lapsed into his quasi-Portuguese dialect during an early take and Van Dyke printed it anyway.) Replacing Jean Harlow as nurse Rose Duffy was Gladys George, a stage and screen veteran whose nomination for Best Actress (for Paramount’s Valiant Is the Word for Carrie) paralleled Tracy’s own for Best Actor.
Around the time of the Academy Awards banquet, Tracy was shooting battleground scenes in Chatsworth, a short drive from his Encino ranch on the same five hundred acres where exteriors for The Good Earth had been filmed. The winners, announced with considerable hubbub on the night of March 4, 1937, surprised practically no one, in part because they had been accurately handicapped in the trades as well as in the Los Angeles Times, giving the Best Actor nod to Paul Muni and Best Actress to Luise Rainer for her performance as Anna Held in M-G-M’s The Great Ziegfeld. With Metro claiming the most employees among the academy’s voting membership of approximately eight hundred, it was widely presumed that Rainer would win the award, as Norma Shearer, nominated for Romeo and Juliet, already had one. “Critics,” according to the Hollywood Citizen News, “generally were of the opinion that Spencer Tracy as the priest in San Francisco ran Muni the closest race and that had he been placed in the [new] category of Supporting Actor he might have won that hands down.”
Van Dyke finished They Gave Him a Gun in twenty-four days, remarkable given the logistics of the shoot. Tracy completed his scenes on March 20 and spent most of the following week lolling on the Carrie B waiting for the inevitable punch list of retakes that followed every Van Dyke production. He was back at work on the twenty-ninth when Susie had her tonsils and adenoids out at Good Samaritan Hospital. Then, granted a six-week leave of absence, he prepared to enter the hospital himself, placing a natural gift for morbidity on full display as he hopelessly garbled the doctor’s prognosis and convinced himself he had cancer.
“I haven’t been telling people because I wanted to wait until it was over,” he confided to Howard Sharpe, who had just completed a multipart biography of him for Photoplay, “but I’m going into a hospital tomorrow and I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of coming out of it. Except in a hearse. And if I do come out, I may never be able to speak again.”
What doctors had actually told him was that there was a fifty-fifty chance his vocal cords would be damaged as a result of the surgery. Overall, they assured him, the operation was “not serious” and the only threat to his life would be in the unlikely event the gland was malignant. All the same, he spent the morning of April 6 finalizing his will and concluding morosely that he couldn’t afford to die. “They take everything, one way or another,” he told Sharpe. “I don’t know what Louise and the kids would do.”
He went to Confession, then entered the hospital with only a hardcover novel to keep him company. (“Hope [I] come back to finish this nice book,” he wrote that night in his datebook.) His sole visitor the next morning was Jean Harlow, who told him she’d dropped around “for a game of handball.” The surgery took all of thirty minutes, and Tracy seemed slightly disappointed the gland wasn’t cancerous. Howard Strickling’s office put out the news that Tracy had simply had his tonsils out, but someone from the Associated Press reached Dr. Clarence Toland, who actually performed the operation, and most AP members accurately reported the surgery was to correct “a chronic thyroid ailment.”
While Tracy was in the hospital, They Gave Him a Gun was sneaked in Huntington Park. Harry Rapf had eliminated all the antiwar lines, save one, and that one line got such a terrific ovation at the preview that Eddie Mannix ordered all the others restored. No one seemed particularly happy with the picture, and Maurice Rapf, the producer’s son and one of three credited writers on the script, remembered hearing somewhere that Tracy had refused to play Fred Willis as a scoundrel because, according to Rapf, he was certain audiences would no longer “accept him as a heel.” Writing in his datebook, Tracy himself thought the picture “bad” and the character of Willis nothing more than a “nice dumb guy.” In other words, a mugg.
Predictably, the reception accorded They Gave Him a Gun didn’t engage him nearly as much as that for Captains Courageous, which had its gala premiere at L.A.’s Carthay Circle on the night of May 14, 1937. Where Gun was essentially a programmer—albeit with some high-powered talent attached—Captains Courageous was a two-a-day roadshow attraction, a genuine event in the world of film. Unfortunately, the press preview at Grauman’s Chinese a few weeks earlier had taken some of the gleam off the film’s official opening, and a lot of top names passed on the privilege of paying five dollars apiece to see it again. Even with invites and comps worked in, the 1,500-seat theater was only half full, something of an embarrassment for M-G-M’s Strickling, who also had to contend with several hundred union pickets.
Tracy, however, seemed oddly relieved by the forced intimacy of the evening, and although the reaction at the press preview had been overwhelmingly positive, he was still unsure as to how his work would be received by the general public. All he could see in his own performance were the tricks of the characterization—the makeup, the curly hair, the dime store accent. (At Grauman’s, a man had patted him on the head and said, “All you needed was a derby hat.”) Two lines of Portuguese had to be dubbed by another actor, and those lines grated every time he heard them. “This is Freddie’s night,” he told the radio audience in all sincerity, “and that’s how it should be.”
But the audience could see that night what Tracy could not: a glowing portrayal of all that was good and profound in a simple man of the sea. The mechanics of the performance mattered not nearly so much as its heart, and Louella Parsons reported bursts of applause from the likes of Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Columnist Harrison Carroll, having passed on the press preview, marveled at the film’s power to move such a jaded crowd: “Of all the stiff-shirted gentlemen and the décolleté ladies in the audience, I doubt if there was a single one who did not weep with Freddie Bartholomew over the death of Spencer Tracy, the story’s lovable Manuel. The relationship of these two has been made into a masterpiece of screen sentiment.”
Tracy gave Victor Fleming full credit for the success of Captains Courageous. (SUSIE TRACY)
Audiences, perhaps aware the picture wasn’t another Mutiny on the Bounty, took their time embracing it. In Los Angeles, it started building after a dismal first few days, posting a second-week gross considerably better than the first. In New York, it followed The Good Earth into the elegant little Astor, Loew’s premiere house for roadshow attractions, and did well without ever quite reaching capacity business. Pushing the film with characteristic candor, Tracy talked to any number of journalists, both foreign and domestic. He told Philip K. Scheuer he thought his performance “hammy” but was nevertheless convinced it was a great picture.
“The man to be thanked because Captains Courageous turned out as well as it did is the director, Victor Fleming. You’ll never know what he went through—six months, mostly on a process stage with only three sections of boat to work with, the stinking smell of fish, Freddie Bartholomew limited to four hours of work a day—and Fleming himself sick as a dog half the time.” To Gladys Hall he added: “He must have done a magnificent job, because it was the first picture of mine I ever saw where I sat and forgot all about myself, lost track that that was me up there.”
Ida Zeitlin thought she caught something of Manuel’s glow in a story Carrie Tracy told her about the family’s move to New York in 1927. Carrie was lonely for her friends in Milwaukee, and asked her husband if he wasn’t as well. “Well, no, Mother, I can’t say that I am,” John Tracy replied. “I just walk down Fifth Avenue and look at those wonderful buildings and stop in at that beautiful cathedral, and—well, what is there to be lonesome about?” And Zeitlin was reminded of Manuel bent over his vielle and telling Harvey about the songs his father wrote: “Songs about the sun and the sea, songs about the clouds, big songs about the wind and the storms, and little songs too about the tip of my mother’s nose. Oh, my father, he feel beautiful inside!”
The release of Captains Courageous brought another wave of fan mail, and with it came offers of boats and ship models and long, rambling letters from Snug Harbor, the New York–based home for retired seamen. One envelope contained an invitation to cross the Atlantic in a thirty-four-foot ketch with the builder-owner, “age 62 and sound as a dollar.”1 Another, from an ex-army flyer, invited him to fly a low-wing monoplane across the ocean. “The publicity value of your presence,” the writer concluded, “would repay me for the slight risk involved.” A federal prisoner in Leavenworth offered to take him on a hunt for pirate treasure in the Caribbean if only Tracy could secure his release. Gold Star mothers wrote, having seen him in They Gave Him a Gun, and mail was still coming from his having played a priest, much of it now from Europe and Asia.
“I know that in my own case it never came so forcibly till now that pictures and the people in them carry a heavy responsibility,” he said. “That wasn’t the fact where the theatre was concerned. People weren’t particularly swayed by a show or an actor or actress. At least not to the extent that their personal lives were affected. But pictures evidently go deeper.”
Outwardly, the Tracy marriage was as solid as ever, and Spence credited Louise’s forbearance, as he always did, for making it so. “She doesn’t nag, you see. She respects my individuality, asks nothing,” he explained one day during a joint interview. “If I say suddenly in the afternoon that I’m going to Ensenada for a few days, she doesn’t ever ask why. She doesn’t say, ‘How long will you be gone? What’re you going to do down there? Can’t you take me with you?’ She just smiles and tells me she hopes I’ll have a good time.”
“But it’s a mutual freedom,” Louise interjected. “He does the same. I never ask if I may do something; the choice is mine. The reason for most divorces is this business of husband and wife keeping tabs on each other. I don’t wonder most of them go crazy. Anyway, if each really loves and trusts the other, what’s the sense in prying about?”
It had been a year and a half since Tracy had taken a drink of anything stronger than tea. “No, not even a beer,” he said.
Not even light wines. Nothing. And there’s all the difference between night and day in the way I feel now. Everything is different. Me. Our home life. It just isn’t the same at all, in any way. It’s normal now. It’s comfortable … I get a kick out of life such as I never had when I was on the merry-go-round. We take long drives in the evening, Louise and I. We sit home evenings and read and talk. We plan trips. The kids and I go swimming together. And riding. There’s a flavor in doing all the so-called “little things.” We have one or two couples in for dinner, the Walt Disneys, the Van Dykes, the Pat O’Briens.2 That’s social enough. We have our polo crowd, of course.
Despite such statements, Jane Feely could sense real tension when she came to visit over the month of June 1937. The ranch wasn’t movie star fancy nor nearly as spacious as the rented house on Holmby. One entered the sizable living room directly off the front porch. There was no grand portico, no entrance hall. The sideboard was an old pine dresser, gleaming with brass and copper and Delft chinaware. The refectory table and chairs—there was no dining room—were hand-made and could seat ten in a pinch. The sofas were covered in cretonne, the overstuffed chair a splashy yellow. There were bookshelves, framed photos, a piano off to one corner. Down a long hall were the master bedrooms, in Spence’s case severely plain in terms of decor. (“I never met anyone who so despises chi-chi,” Dick Mook once commented, “and there is not one piece of furniture in the entire room that is not utilitarian.”) Louise’s room was almost as simple and, as with Spence’s, done entirely in maple. Johnny’s room, over in the new wing, was the nicest in the house, built for maximum exposure to the sun. Four-year-old Susie’s room was nearly as devoid of frippery as her mother’s, and the kitchen was done in tones of orange and red. The living space that got the most use was the screened-in porch out back, where most of the family’s summer meals were taken. Out past the swimming pool was the bunkhouse where Jane stayed. Spence had originally thought he might live out there himself, but the central heating didn’t extend that far, and the only source of warmth during winter was a small fireplace.
Within days of Jane’s arrival, Jean Harlow died unexpectedly of kidney disease at the age of twenty-six. Tracy was at the studio that day and was struck speechless by the news. Helen Gilmore, an editor with Bernarr MacFadden’s Liberty magazine, came upon him in the studio cafe. “I can’t believe it,” he said, staring out the Venetian blinds. He told of Harlow’s visit to Good Samaritan just ahead of his surgery and how it turned out to be the same hospital in which she died. Earlier, in a piece for Screenland, Tracy had celebrated Harlow’s spirit, relating, for instance, how she had given him a black eye shooting a scene for Riffraff. (“She meant to pull her punch, but overplayed her hand.”) On Libeled Lady he considered himself the least of the four stars, referring to himself around the set as “Zeppo.” Harlow, he said, “did something for me that no one else had ever done, moved me physically around to put my face further into the picture, saying, ‘Get your mug in there, will you?’ ”
Louise had heard things about Harlow—her drinking, her affairs, and her rumored abortions—and had little to say when Spence brought the news. “He came home,” said Jane,
and I remember being in the room when he was telling Louise about it, and she said, “Well, you know, there are stories …” Something under her breath. And he said, “The HELL with those stories! Anytime I ever worked with her she arrived on time, she knew her lines, and she was ready to work. I don’t care what she did or who she did it with—I don’t believe any of it and I don’t want to hear any of it! As far as I’m concerned, she was a co-worker that I had a great deal of respect for.” Words to that effect. He did a tremendous defense of Jean Harlow and he said, “I understand it’s a Christian Science funeral, but this is one I will go to.”
[Louise] would say, “I’m just not at home with those people.” But she did go to Jean Harlow’s funeral. “If you’re going, I’ll go with you.” She came to a great deal more understanding of herself than she was ever given credit for, I think, and was able to live with herself so much more peacefully … I would see her being buffeted, ignored by so-called Hollywood inner circles … She was having to buy into stuff that she knew was really crass. Spencer knew it was crass, that it was really the seamy side of life … There was anger between those two people, [and] every so often it would erupt.
Louise had enrolled Johnny in a ballroom dancing class in the hope it would improve his coordination. The class met once a week, and the final session was a party attended by parents and guests. Louise took Jane, who danced with several of the boys, and afterward she took the kids for ice cream. It was late by the time they got back to the ranch, laughing and full of high spirits, and Spence was there pacing the floor. “Where the HELL have you been?” he demanded, his face purple with rage. “I’ve called every hospital, I’ve called the cops, I’ve called everybody! I thought you were going to be home by ten o’clock!”
“Why, we were … nothing … We just went out and had—”
“WHY in the HELL didn’t you CALL?”
“Well,” said Louise, “I would call, Spencer. I thought you’d be in bed.”
“By God, you’ve got this girl here visiting who doesn’t even belong to us, and this boy here. God knows you could have been banged up on the highway …”
Jane struggled to get away as quickly as possible.
God, he’d worked himself into a state, probably because he didn’t have anything else to do. He was just furious. Even then, she didn’t come back at him—“Well, why didn’t you come with us?” She just calmly took it. So many times she just sort of took those tirades. Anything to keep peace. And anything not to lower herself. And that just made him madder, I think. There are always those kinds of problems in a marriage, but this one had to be lived so publicly … I think his self-esteem was very low. By the same token, I think Louise’s was not. I think she was comfortable. She knew her limitations, but the thing I don’t think she knew was how deeply hurt and vulnerable and wounded she was. I don’t think she admitted those things.
The last time Jane had visited, the Loretta Young affair was heating up and Spence had been working for Frank Borzage. Now, four years later, she found him again working for Borzage, the same meticulous approach to coverage visibly wearing on him after working for such decisive and hard-charging men as Fleming and Van Dyke. The picture was Big City, a romance of modern-day New York in which Tracy had been paired with one of Metro’s prestige properties, the German-born stage actress Luise Rainer. She had recently won the Academy Award for her role in The Great Ziegfeld, and her subsequent work in The Good Earth established her as one of the screen’s top actresses. So far, however, she had failed to catch on with the public, and Big City was an obvious attempt to commonize her.
Putting Tracy opposite Luise Rainer ensured she had someone of equal weight to play against. She was, however, showing the signs of disenchantment that would end her movie career after three short years in California, and her attitudes didn’t play well with her new costar, at least not at first. “I can remember his coming home one day in time for dinner,” Jane said. “God, it was hot and he was just wilted. He said, ‘I hauled that Viennese lump3 up and down those stairs twenty times today! God!’ I remember his saying something about talking to her about the work, Stanislavsky and the Group Theatre. He said to her, ‘Why don’t you and I go to New York and live in a garret?’ ”
Rainer, who didn’t click with Borzage and thought the picture “pretty idiotic,” kept mainly to herself. At the same time, Tracy was preoccupied with the fact that Weeze was in Good Samaritan for a biopsy, having noticed a lump on her breast. It was, as it turned out, benign, a simple cyst, but she would be in over the weekend, and Spence, relieved and fidgety, figured his costar was not so much a snob as a profoundly unhappy woman whose recent marriage to the New York–based playwright Clifford Odets was already on the rocks.
“I was married to a wonderful man, whom I dearly loved,” Rainer said, “but it wasn’t working, and, of course, it was a great heartache for me. While I was doing Big City with Spencer I had a friend-secretary, a woman, and he asked her, ‘Does Miss Rainer like sailing?’ And Hannah, my secretary, came to me and said, ‘Mr. Spencer Tracy says do you like sailing?’ I was pretty much down and out inside, so I said to her, ‘I don’t know. What kind of sailing?’ Anyway, to make a long story short, he had a boat, I think in San Pedro, and we all spent the weekend together.”
They powered out to Long Point, on the front side of Catalina, arriving around 2:30 on a Sunday morning. “He was terribly sweet and dear, but I think he was a bit shy of me, too, knowing also that I was perturbed at the time. He was sensitive to that and, moreover, I did not have the average Hollywood personality. I was more quiet—or whatever you may call it—but he was immensely kind and dear and comforting.” It was hot and sunny that next day—no breeze—and they didn’t get back to the yacht club until early evening. That night was the night Tracy made a note in his datebook: “18 months—1 year and a half—without a drink!!!”
After a rough first week, the mood on the set of Big City lightened, and when Borzage kept at a tense scene all morning and well past noontime, shooting it “up, down, and around,” Tracy said to him pointedly: “How about LUNCH, Mr. Lang?” Borzage smiled wanly, ordered one final take, then dismissed the company, Tracy making off to the commissary with a visiting journalist. “It isn’t worth it,” he moaned, clearly beat from roiling the same emotional energy over and over. “None of this is. Oh, I have no kick coming. The money is fine and I like it out here. But making pictures is a terrible tax on your health, and nothing is worth that.” Watching his weight, Tracy ordered cottage cheese and matzos for lunch, then added lamb chops and ice cream when the waitress said, “Is that all you’re going to have?”
Tracy and Luise Rainer listen as director Frank Borzage explains a scene on the set of Big City, 1937. (SUSIE TRACY)
By the time Sidney Skolsky watched a scene being made toward the end of production, he could truthfully report to his readers that Tracy and Luise Rainer were enjoying themselves. Rainer’s technique—if one could call it that—was not unlike Tracy’s own. “I never acted,” she said. “I felt everything.” And she eschewed makeup, as much, at least, as an actress at M-G-M would be allowed. Tracy told Elizabeth Yeaman he thought Helen Hayes the screen’s finest actress, but quickly added that he also admired Sylvia Sidney, Beulah Bondi, and Rainer, who, with her big soulful eyes and her self-done hair, projected a waiflike quality unique among his leading ladies.
Indeed, whatever success Big City achieved as a film was due in large part to the brittle chemistry that developed between its two unlikely stars, both of whom, at least initially, would have preferred doing something else entirely. Said screenwriter Dore Schary, who had once shared the stage with Tracy as a minor actor in The Last Mile, “Those of us working on the film had a marvelous time—a happy time—but while the trade reviews were good, the picture simply didn’t work. Perhaps Sam Goldwyn in his infinite wisdom was right when he said, ‘A happy set means a lousy picture.’ ”
On June 26, 1937, a week after Louise’s release from the hospital, she and the kids sailed for Hawaii. Spence was in the midst of Big City, working most days, and urged them to go on without him. In Hawaii, Louise took the children to see Captains Courageous; Johnny had already seen it, but this would be Susie’s first time watching her dad on screen. The accent and the curly hair didn’t fool her, and when it came time for him to slide away, Freddie calling after him, she was agape. “I just sat staring at the screen in disbelief,” she said. “I was stunned, and Mother said, ‘No, no, Daddy’s fine. He’s at home.’ In retrospect, I think I was probably too young to see it, and I have trouble watching that scene to this day.”
Tracy took a suite at the Beverly Wilshire for the balance of the shoot. They finished Big City late on the evening of July 27 and he left the hotel the following morning, spending his next few days aboard the Carrie B. He was struggling with the boat, anxious to keep it and yet increasingly unable to justify the expense for what were largely weekend getaways. He was bringing home $1,734.25 a week, but was still supporting his polo habit and a small stable of racehorses, the most prominent of which, April Lass, had finished in the money her very first start. Louise and the kids got back on August 7, and she and Spence went out to Riviera that same afternoon, playing five chukkers together, the first time either had been on a horse in over a month. The next day, Spence recorded his worst game ever, Walter Ruben, picture executive Ken Fitzpatrick, and Walt Disney all having played “horribly.” His time on the boat had obviously taken its toll, and he made the decision that it had to go.
There was talk of reteaming Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew in Kipling’s Kim, which had been in development a couple of years, but more immediate plans had him going into the next Joan Crawford picture, a shopgirl trifle called Three Rooms in Heaven.Tracy wasn’t happy about the assignment—he disliked Crawford’s work as an actress and knew the picture would do him no credit. Mook thought it simply the part’s size that galled him, but for Tracy it was more basic than that: “If I’m any kind of actor, I can make a run-of-the-mill part come to life. I don’t mind her part being fatter or larger than mine. I’d a lot rather people would leave a theater wishing they had seen more of me in the picture than have them go out feeling they had seen too much. The thing that upsets me about this picture is that that girl is such a phony. And it comes through in her portrayals.”
He was being pressured to play another priest, something he vowed he would never again do. He put in for vacation time, anxious to return to Honolulu with Louise, but was told not to go because the Crawford picture would be starting within days. When he suddenly got permission to take two weeks, it came as a surprise and he forgot about Hawaii altogether, impulsively making arrangements to go on a fishing trip to British Columbia instead. He left for Seattle, settling in for the journey with a newspaper and a stack of magazines.
Aboard the Carrie B, circa 1937. (SUSIE TRACY)
At Puget Sound, Han Jamison, a local journalist and a genuine admirer who had just seen Captains Courageous, asked him why the shot of Manuel holding his nose as he was pulled underwater wasn’t cut from the picture. “Why Manuel wasn’t holding his nose,” Tracy replied, pronouncing it Man-oo-el. “He was crossing himself and the camera just happened to catch his hand as it passed his nose.” The answer seemed to satisfy his inquisitor, but it was yet another flaw in a performance that was, for Tracy, all too full of them, and for every sharp little point of imperfection, a stab of guilt, imperceptible at times but ever-present. He caught the boat on schedule, running on little, if any, sleep, and spent the morning of August 20 fishing off the coast of Canada. Then, later that same day, after exactly one year and eight months on the wagon, he took a drink—something, perhaps, as seemingly innocent as a single bottle of beer—and, as he later recorded in his datebook, “spoiled it all.”
Flying from Seattle to San Francisco, where he lingered over a long weekend, Tracy returned to the Beverly Wilshire to indulge in his longest and most serious bender in three years. From Monday, August 23, the pages of his datebook told the story: “Binge!” he wrote for most days, noting finally on Friday, September 3, “Came home—ended siege.” The next day he added: “At home sick—these are sad pages.”
And then: “Back on wagon! This time for [a] real stretch—”
Since the release of Fury, Joe Mankiewicz had been producing the Joan Crawford pictures for M-G-M. (“You’re the only one on the lot that knows what to do with her,” Mayer had said to him.) The collaboration had so far yielded mixed results, including Crawford’s only costume drama, The Gorgeous Hussy. The new story Mankiewicz had for her was an original by Katharine Brush, whose racy 1931 novel Red Headed Woman had been the basis of Jean Harlow’s breakout film. Submitted by agent Harold Ober, “Marry for Money” was considered excellent material but doubtful for pictures “unless the heroine is whitewashed a little.” Mankiewicz, who prided himself on “extracting the suds from soap opera” (as Crawford so eloquently put it), embraced it as a challenge of sorts and set to work on a script with playwright Lawrence Hazard.
Tracy was not an obvious choice for the millionaire shipping magnate who pursues Crawford’s noble character, but the pairing was consistent with the strategy of putting him opposite Metro’s biggest female attractions. Directing would again be Borzage, though the whole enterprise this time would be weighted toward the woman, with Tracy relegated to a supporting role. The result was a complete mismatch on the part of the two principals, their lack of screen chemistry exacerbated by a story in which Crawford’s fiercely straight-arrow character eventually marries—but does not love—Tracy’s. At thirty-two, Crawford was too old for the part of Jessie Cassidy, late of Hester Street, and, the carefully diffused lighting of George Folsey notwithstanding, looked it. Seemingly aware of all this, Borzage produced a remarkably static motion picture, long on dialogue and good looks, short on the kind of action that had come to distinguish Tracy’s better work on the screen. The only real surprise about Mannequin was that its two stars got on as well as they did.
Tracy went back into the studio a little sheepishly, having effectively delayed the start of Mannequin. He saw Borzage and Joan Crawford and had a long talk with Eddie Mannix, who, he noted, was “wonderful” about it. Norma Shearer asked him to make a test for the role of King Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette, a flattering proposition that would mark his first time in period costume. He met with director Sidney Franklin and saw the tests of other actors vying for the part. Saturday was spent rehearsing with Crawford in the morning, Shearer in the afternoon. The test was shot at night the following Thursday after a full day’s work. Tracy thought the result “no good” even though Shearer, much to his amazement, said that she liked it.
Mannequin finally got under way on September 14, and Tracy noted his weight at 176 1/4 in his datebook. He dug in again at the Beverly Wilshire and, at some point during the six weeks it took to shoot the picture, fell into an involvement with his costar, who had recently separated from actor Franchot Tone. Joan Crawford shared the signal quality of nearly all of Tracy’s women—availability. The affair, which apparently generated little, if any, emotional heat, extended beyond the picture, but not by very much. Crawford contracted pneumonia during production—or so she said—and stubbornly reported to work with a 102-degree temperature until her doctor intervened. Getting her back into shape took a few days, and Dr. William Branch whisked her out to the Uplifters Club on the pretext of getting some fresh air into her. She sat in the car, its doors locked, and watched as Dr. Branch and Tracy played polo. In time, she was stick-and-balling a bit, and after the picture wrapped, she and Spence spent a day posing for stills on horseback.
In later years Crawford appeared to be of two minds about Tracy. In her autobiography, published during his lifetime, she said it was “inspiring” to play opposite him, and in a public statement several years after his death, she called him “one of the most beautiful men” she’d ever known. “Pure male with a mixture of small boy attitudes which made him beguiling beyond belief.” Privately, though, she expressed real bitterness over Mannequin, contending that Tracy was so miscast “he made an absolute muddle out of my part, which wasn’t all that great to begin with.” She continued: “At first I felt honored working with Spence, and we even whooped it up a little bit off the set, but he turned out to be a real bastard. When he drank he was mean, and he drank all through production. He’d do cute things like step on my toes when we were doing a love scene—after he chewed on some garlic.”
Tracy, of course, was completely dry during the making of the film and for a considerable time thereafter. (His datebook entry for October 4: “1 month on the wagon instead of 21 months! Jackass!”) Crawford’s anger was surely over the fact that it was Tracy who ended the dalliance and not Crawford herself. Her obsessive-compulsive behavior and slavish devotion to the business of being a movie star would quickly have grated on him, and when the brief sexual infatuation had faded, he would have lost no time in distancing himself. A few months later, he reportedly came off at her while rehearsing “Anna Christie” for the Lux Radio Theatre. “For crissake, Joan, can’t you read the lines?” he erupted as she nervously fumbled with her script. “I thought you were supposed to be a pro.”
Joan Crawford and Tracy in a candid moment on the set of Mannequin (1937). (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Tracy had been off radio since February, when Louis B. Mayer, under pressure from exhibitors, imposed a ban on broadcasting for all contract players. The practice of putting film stars on the air in tab versions of their latest pictures had been blamed for weak showings at the box office, and The Good Earth and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney became the first Metro releases with no radio exposure whatsoever. By summer the blanket restriction appeared to be loosening, and Loew’s gave its consent for the American Tobacco Company to enter into agreements with six reigning M-G-M personalities, Robert Taylor, Myrna Loy, and Tracy among them, to appear on programs sponsored by the company and produced by its agency, Lord & Thomas. The studio retained the right of script approval, and American Tobacco agreed to supply each artist’s “smoking needs” with a carton a week of Lucky Strike cigarettes.4 Tracy didn’t appear for American Tobacco during the run of the agreement, but was among the stable of stars—which included virtually everyone other than Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer—to appear on Metro’s own weekly program, a frantic vaudeville of premium names known collectively as Good News of 1938.
Tracy disliked radio, but the money it paid made it difficult to refuse. Here he prepares for a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of “Arrowsmith” in October 1937. With him are Fay Wray and host Cecil B. DeMille. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
The show, a historic collaboration between M-G-M and the Maxwell House division of General Foods, originated from Hollywood’s El Capitan theater every Thursday night (so as not to conflict with movie attendance on Fridays and Saturdays). Jeanette MacDonald, Allan Jones, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Judy Garland, Sophie Tucker, and Buddy Ebsen all crowded into the first broadcast on November 4, and Tracy, along with Joan Crawford, Robert Young, Mickey Rooney, and Ted Heeley, was part of the second installment on November 11. Having seen Mannequin at the studio only two days before (“Stinks!” he wrote in his datebook), he and Crawford now performed an episode from the picture, really just a teaser, thus discharging his contractual obligation to make such an appearance. The next time he emoted on Good News, he collected a fee of $3,500 for his trouble.
Tracy had just committed to making a picture called Test Pilot for Victor Fleming when, on November 20, 1937, Eddie Mannix’s wife was killed in a bizarre automobile accident outside of Palm Springs. Bernice Mannix had gone to the desert with family friends and had gambled into the early morning hours at the Dunes, a popular nightspot run by a Detroit mobster named Al Wertheimer. Wertheimer was driving her back to the desert home of Joe Schenck, where she and a niece were staying, when he suddenly swerved to avoid a tow truck that had stopped for a stalled car on the highway. Slamming on the brakes, Wertheimer lost control of his coupe, which left the pavement and overturned, throwing its driver clear but crushing its thirty-seven-year-old passenger. Reached at home, Eddie Mannix was rushed by air to Banning, where the body had been taken. The couple had been married eighteen years.
Tracy saw Mannix the next afternoon and was an active pallbearer at the High Mass celebrated in Beverly Hills the following morning (as were Harry Rapf, Clark Gable, Woody Van Dyke, and Hunt Stromberg). He went straight from Good Shepherd to Riviera, where he played furiously and lost to a six-goal champion. That evening, he sat with Mannix, Howard Strickling, and others at the former’s modest two-bedroom house on Linden Drive. The following morning, Spence and Louise left to accompany Mannix, his niece Alice, and Strickling on the train back to Boston, where Bernice would be laid to rest. “I remember seeing Uncle Eddie and Tracy going back for hot fudge sundaes, I guess to keep Tracy away from the booze,” Alice said. “They ate a lot of hot fudge sundaes between L.A. and Boston.”
Eddie Mannix couldn’t have children, so Bernice had adopted her nieces and nephews and loved having them around. They all crowded into their grandmother’s house at Somerville, where Margaret Fitzmaurice had presided over the first Catholic family to move into town. She had nine children, made her own soap, and saw that their three-story house—and all the kids—were spotless. Tracy was immediately taken with her, her quiet dignity and the fact that she made wonderful marble cake without a recipe.
The first afternoon, rubbing his hands together, Tracy said, “Grandma, what kind of ice cream would you like?”
“Oh, I think strawberry,” she said after a moment.
And so Tracy put on his hat and coat and walked down the long driveway, past a clutch of onlookers, ignoring them completely, and hied himself up the hill to a little store where he could buy a pint of strawberry ice cream. Then he took her by the hand, led her into the kitchen, and sat for the next hour, just the two of them, eating the ice cream and talking. The next day, following the funeral, he repeated the exercise, and when it came time for him and Louise to leave, he took her face in his hands and kissed her gently on both cheeks. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met,” he said softly.
As they drove away, Grandma Fitzmaurice was glowing. “What a nice man,” she said to her granddaughter Jean. “Who is he?”
Even if Eddie Mannix’s own mother-in-law didn’t know who Spencer Tracy was, millions of moviegoers did. Just a week before he left for Boston, Tracy sat for another talk with Ed Sullivan, whose dispatch the following day carried the headline NEW RAGE IS SPENCER TRACY. Sullivan wrote: “Voting contests that are being conducted throughout the country to determine the ranking cinema heroes and heroines reveal that American girls are switching from Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power, or at least the type they represent, to the more stalwart type of hero suggested by Spencer Tracy. Every poll shows that Tracy is gaining by leaps and bounds, and theater managers say that the bulk of his votes are coming from girls and women who have become a trifle wearied of gentler heroes and want their romance raw, rough, and resolute.”
The New Rage and his wife arrived in Manhattan intent on seeing a few shows and ducking the press as much as possible. They paused briefly to pay their respects to Eddie Mannix’s own family in Fort Lee, where his brother owned a bar and staged cockfights. On Broadway they saw Room Service, Golden Boy, Hurray for What! (the new Ed Wynn show), and George M. Cohan in I’d Rather Be Right. They had a nice visit with George M. after the show, and were introduced to the former governor and presidential candidate Al Smith. Spence had to get back to Los Angeles for the start of the new Fleming picture, but Louise lingered an extra week, primarily to do some Christmas shopping and see some old friends. When she returned on December 8, Spence had the news that Dr. Dennis had confirmed a hernia and that he was in for another operation after the first of the year. On the nineteenth he played his last game of polo for some time to come. (“Suffered terribly,” he wrote in his book.) Three days after that, he was fitted with a truss.
Test Pilot wasn’t a picture that either Tracy or Gable wanted to make. In Tracy’s case it collided with his plans to take his family to Europe, but he decided to do it once the studio offered to sweeten his deal. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, Nicholas Schenck bestowed a “starring contract” worth $6,000 a week—a bit of an exaggeration in that Tracy’s billing clause remained the same as before and the rate of compensation was only $4,000 a week. Still, it was a substantial bump from the $1,750 he had been getting, and he approached Test Pilot, at least at first, with a good deal of enthusiasm. In addition to Gable, he’d be appearing again with Myrna Loy and Lionel Barrymore, and Fleming, after the experience of working with him on Captains Courageous, had become just about Tracy’s favorite director. (“The most attractive man I ever met in all my life,” he told an interviewer.)
The source material, a manuscript titled Wings of Tomorrow, was by Frank “Spig” Wead, a former test pilot for the U.S. Navy who turned to writing after a freak accident left him confined to a wheelchair. A Wead story had been the basis of Hell Divers for M-G-M, and Ceiling Zero, based upon Wead’s book and play of the same title, had been a hit the previous season for Warner Bros. A studio reader thought Wings of Tomorrow had “everything that Ceiling Zero had as a play and a lot more besides…The characters are excellent, the dialogue fine, the whole thing top-notch.” It was, the report concluded, “suitable for Spencer Tracy.”
The reason Gable said he resisted the picture was that he didn’t understand “what the story was getting at,” a complaint echoed by Myrna Loy. As the movie took shape, it was Fleming’s enthusiasm that held the project together. Gable’s reticence may also have come from the shifting balance between his character, Lane, the test pilot, and Tracy’s, the no-nonsense mechanic, and the unthinkable possibility that Tracy could somehow end up with the girl. Originally, the property had been assigned to Lucian Hubbard, whose production of Wings won the first Academy Award for Best Picture. Hubbard put Bertram Millhauser on the script, but when he left to rejoin Paramount in the spring of 1937, the property passed to Bud Lighton, who worked out a whole new version of the story with John Lee Mahin. Fleming, one of Hollywood’s more prominent amateur pilots, became the obvious choice to direct. In the months following, the screenplay passed from Mahin to Vincent Lawrence, then Waldemar Young, and then to Wead himself.
Filming commenced on December 7, coincidentally the same day the results of the poll Ed Sullivan had mentioned were announced by the Chicago Tribune-News Syndicate. Conducted by fifty-five metropolitan newspapers, the survey of more than 20 million was to determine the “King” and “Queen” of Hollywood for the year 1937. On that day, Sullivan officially proclaimed Clark Gable and Myrna Loy the winners. Gable, with 22,017 reader votes, outdistanced Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, William Powell, Nelson Eddy, and Tracy, who came in sixth with 11,253 votes. Similarly, Loy outpolled Loretta Young, Jeanette MacDonald, Barbara Stanwyck, Sonja Henie, and Shirley Temple to take her title.
Gable, seemingly unaware of the promotion, “smelled a publicity stunt” when a delegation appeared on the set. “Anyway, they gave Myrna and me big plush crowns about a foot high, and they wanted to take pictures of us in them. I had visions of these big ears sticking out from under that crown. I backed away. So what did Tracy do? He used that as his cue to try every conceivable way to get that crown on me.”
The following morning, Tracy had the entire crew lined up as Gable walked onto the stage. At Tracy’s cue, the electricians and grips broke into a chorus: “Here comes the bee-yootiful king! All hail! All hail!” Gable, whom Tracy normally called “Moose,” took the ribbing good-naturedly enough, then he joined in with more of the same when Loy appeared moments later. Tracy laid it on so thick that Gable and Loy approached a joint appearance on Good News with a considerable amount of dread. “That broadcast tonight will be a photographers’ clambake,” Tracy said. “And you two are going to look very comical when those newspaper photographers start telling you to wear the crown over your right ear and then your left ear …” Loy came close to canceling out altogether before she learned they wouldn’t be required to pose in the crowns, as neither she nor Gable wanted Tracy to get his hands on those pictures.
“After our would-be coronation,” Loy said, “Spence would hail Clark as ‘Your Majesty’; Clark would call Spence a Wisconsin ham, and Spence would counter with, ‘What about Parnell?’ ” (Ironically, Parnell, the story of the great Irish nationalist leader, had originally been purchased for Tracy but got earmarked for Gable in a textbook example of bad casting.) “From start to finish of [Test Pilot] we had laughs,” Gable said. “Ribbed each other constantly. It reached the point where it took us two hours to do one certain scene that should have taken 20 minutes. All because we started kidding about how we would probably ham it up, until we got such a cockeyed slant on the scene we couldn’t get halfway through it before one of us would laugh in the other’s face. The day [Tracy] was doing his death scene, I accused him of taking all day to die. ‘Gable,’ he said, ‘I’m just getting even for all the time you took making those love scenes.’ ”
Since Gable and Tracy rarely socialized off the set, it was widely assumed they didn’t like each other and that their supposed friendship was a sham, an invention of Howard Strickling’s publicity machine. By most accounts, though, the two men genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, and it was only by necessity their relationship was professional in nature and not as personal as it might otherwise have been. Gable’s drinking habits were widely known, and shortly after Tracy began working on the Culver City lot, the two men went off for lunch one day and disappeared. The studio, Tracy later told a coworker, sent people out looking for them, but nobody could find them, and they were gone two or three days. “I don’t know where the hell we were,” he said.
After he swore off alcohol in December 1935, Tracy kept a respectful distance, joking and lunching with Gable5 but resisting the after-hours invitations and the entreaties to go on hunting and fishing trips. Tracy had no stomach for hunting—as a kid he had killed a bird and never forgave himself—and the boozy world Gable inhabited with such aplomb would very quickly have proven lethal to the equilibrium Tracy struggled to maintain. “If you went out to Gable’s place,” said publicist Eddie Lawrence, “everything was king-size—all the glasses. You were drunk with one glass.” As Joe Mankiewicz put it, “You couldn’t be around Clark without drinking.”
Much of Test Pilot was shot on location at a variety of airfields in and around Los Angeles. San Diego’s Lindbergh Field stood in for Mineola, Alhambra for Wichita. The film’s opening scenes were made at Burbank’s Union Air Terminal, where John Tracy was introduced to Myrna Loy. (“What picture do you remember her in?” his father prompted. “Whipsaw!” responded Johnny.) Despite one Oscar nomination and the prospect of another, Loy thought Tracy needier than when she last worked with him. He seemed unsure of his performance opposite Gable and disinclined to accept Fleming’s assurances.
Gable had no pretensions when it came to his acting, and his admiration of Tracy’s singular gifts was boundless. “I always try to be my best with Spence the first take, and let that be the print,” he once told John Lee Mahin, “because if I start fooling around he’ll kill me.” Gable’s makeup man, Stan Campbell, could remember a sequence that Tracy, riding in the back seat of a car, dominated while Gable and Loy held the foreground. “Any other star but Clark would have had them cut that shot,” Campbell said, “but Clark was never jealous of his fellow players. When the film was screened, he said, ‘Look at that guy Tracy, sitting there doing nothing and stealing our scene.’ He thought it was wonderful that Spence showed up so well.”
If Fleming’s attentions toward Gable left Tracy feeling isolated, he must have felt even more so after an incident at Riverside’s March Field drove a wedge between them. After spending a crisp January morning shooting exteriors, the principals were invited to have lunch with some of the officers, who wanted to fly Gable, Fleming, and Tracy over to Catalina in one of the B-17 bombers being used in the picture. Myrna Loy, who wasn’t part of the conversation, overheard Tracy decline with thanks. “I noticed that the fliers seemed to understand what he was about, but Gable and Fleming started in on him, ragging him for not going. You know how men are. They made all sorts of demeaning cracks while Spence just sat there. It infuriated me, but not having heard the buildup I kept my mouth shut.”
The minute the others left the table, Tracy leaped up from his seat, grabbed Loy by the arm, and walked her across the field to where a car was waiting to take them back to their hotel. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “What’s going on here?” He fumed silently for a time, then blurted it out: “Well, goddamn it, you know what would happen when I went with them. When they get off that plane, the first thing they’ll do is head for a bar. You know I can’t do that.” Then it dawned on her: he was afraid of falling off the wagon.
Said Loy, “Gable and Fleming didn’t understand this; I mean they refused to understand and had simply kept ragging him. Rather than risk a relapse, Spence had sat there in front of all those men and taken it. ‘You know I can’t do that,’ he repeated in the car to Riverside, trembling with anger. I tried to comfort him: ‘Yes, darling, I know you can’t do that, I know. Calm down, now. Quiet down.’ He was so mad I resolved then and there not to let him out of my sight.”
She suggested an early dinner at the eccentric Mission Inn, hoping to keep him “out of harm’s way” by eating before the others got back. “We were finishing a very glum dinner when the prodigals returned. ‘Look at ’em!’ Spence growled. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ They had indeed gone to a bar and got clobbered. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do now?’ He answered ominously, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ As we passed their table, Gable and Fleming were being relentlessly buoyant. I stopped to blast them, but Spence, after a very curt nod, bolted. When I ran after him, he had vanished.”
Loy got her friend Shirley Hughes and combed the downtown bars, but they couldn’t find him anywhere. The next morning, Tracy didn’t show for work, and everyone suddenly assumed the worst.
We were stuck there on location unable to shoot without him while calls buzzed between March Field and M-G-M. “My God,” Victor moaned to Benny Thau, “we’ve got a situation on our hands!” I thought, “Yeah, you sure have, and you damn well deserve to have one, too.” A few minutes before noon, Spence strolled nonchalantly onto the set, bid everyone a jaunty good morning, and went to work. When Gable and Fleming started threateningly toward him, I headed them off, took them aside, and gave ’em hell: “Haven’t you clowns done enough? How dare you do a thing like that? You know he has to be careful. Where are your brains?” I really laid them out while Spence worked smugly on.
At the core of Test Pilot was Tracy’s mother hen relationship with Gable, a quality Fleming sought to emphasize in his notes, a level of camaraderie and affection between men normally reserved for stories of war and dire sacrifice. That Tracy managed a kind of primal jealousy between Gunner and Loy’s character, Ann, is a testament to their on-screen chemistry and the way the two men were balanced under Fleming’s knowing direction. Where Loy has Gable’s attention, his interest in all things sexual, Tracy has his heart, and the perilous work they do together bonds them in a way that no woman ever could. Tracy understood the equation, had worked it through to an extent that Gable, perhaps, had not. That he saw their interaction for what it was is clear from a comment he made in the fall of 1957, while attending a screening at the home of actress Laraine Day. The picture was Bombers B-52, and as it started, one of the massive old B-17s used in the earlier movie rolled into view. “That plane was used in the picture Test Pilot,” he said aloud, “in which Myrna Loy and I were both in love with Clark Gable.”
On location for Test Pilot with Myrna Loy and Clark Gable, 1937. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Gable, as it turned out, was living at the Beverly Wilshire while making the picture, so over the course of production Tracy spent a lot of time with Joe Mankiewicz. The urbane, pipe-smoking producer didn’t drink, which made his house at the beach a safe haven as well as a handy place to flop. “We saw each other several times a week,” Mankiewicz said. “I got to know him very well. And I got to know Louise very well. It was very strange; we went dancing, we went to the theatre, we’d have dinner, we’d laugh a lot. Go to the fights with Spence.”
It was while Tracy was staying with him that Mankiewicz got a glimpse of the preparation that went into a Tracy performance. “I would come home at night and pass his bedroom door and he’d be working. He’d be working extremely hard…[H]e’d come to the set the next day and say to the continuity girl, ‘What are we shooting today, kid?’ and she’d [think], ‘Oh my God, he doesn’t know his lines.’ But in fact he’d worked all night long. He was fully prepared.” It was, perhaps, the legacy of the boy magician, the instinct that compelled him to hide all the work, to keep the secrets to himself, leaving the impression that it all came out of thin air, effortless and magical, a thing of mystery and wonder.
Part of Tracy’s calculation for Test Pilot was the game of one-upmanship he and Gable liked to play. “I came home and Spence was in the guest room,” said Mankiewicz.
I heard the sound of cracking nuts. Now I opened his door and he was sitting there and he was cracking walnuts. I said, “What’s that all about?” He says, “I’m just thinking up a little something here.”…And I went to bed. Well, when the film came out, apparently what happened was that he’d suggested to Victor Fleming, “Look, Vic, while this is going on … give me something to do with my hands at least. I mean, I got a bowl of nuts or something that I can crack while this scene is being played.” Well, Fleming thought that was a marvelous idea. The prop man came up with a bowl of walnuts, and to everybody’s surprise Spence cracked these walnuts in between lines from Gable to Loy and Loy to Gable … The soundtrack was completely laced with cracking walnuts, and you had to cut to Spence repeatedly in order to justify this sound.6 Now that’s not an instinctive bit; that’s a man who takes his work very seriously.
Joe was also fond of Louise, enjoyed being with her. “Louise was a very attractive woman. Lovely dark hair, clear complexion, soft eyes. We went dancing, and I could always make her laugh. Very literate. Intelligent. Spence never said anything the least derogatory about her, never any of those asides that let you know he was trapped.”
A dozen times Joe was on the verge of asking his friend “what the hell went wrong” between the two of them. “But fortunately, and unfortunately, I’d done enough work in psychiatry to know, to figure it out for myself what it was.” Tracy spent Christmas morning with the kids, the afternoon with Louise at Santa Anita, then returned home to the beach in the evening. Johnny’s deafness, Louise’s forbearance were things he could no longer face on a daily basis. He beat an emotional retreat, born of a need to function, a need to survive.
“He didn’t leave Louise,” Mankiewicz said. “He left the scene of his guilt.”
Just after the first of the new year, Louise returned to Honolulu, intent on spending the entire month of January away from home. Spence was working most days, plagued by headaches and the insomnia that had always afflicted him, fueled as it was by the countless cups of tea and coffee he consumed as part of his daily ritual. Crawling out of the black hole of depression was impossible in the middle of the night, when his thoughts ran wild and he endured the torment of his sins. Desperate for sleep, he arrived on the set more worn out than ever, cranky and nervous and sometimes at wit’s end. Someone suggested a massage, and he found a rubdown eased the pain in his head and helped him to relax. He took to noting the sleep he got each night in his book: 3:30 a.m. to 6:50 a.m. without a massage, 12:30 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. with one.
He met Joseph P. Kennedy one night at dinner with Mannix and M-G-M’s Billy Grady and took note of the fact that the current chair of the U.S. Maritime Commission was soon to become America’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Mannequin opened in New York on January 20, 1938, and, much to its costar’s astonishment, was a hit despite some decidedly mixed notices. Production on Test Pilot ground on into February, a seemingly endless picture to make.
On February 2, to celebrate Gable’s thirty-seventh birthday, a corner of Stage 12 was done up coronation style, and Tracy had Gable’s stand-in wheel in a huge cake topped with a candy crown. “I wear this Irish costume, King Gable, to remind you of Parnell,” the man announced. “Always remember it, Kingey, because the theater owners will never forget it.” Eddie Mannix came down to the set and placed the crown on Gable’s head as Tracy egged him on. Then Judy Garland sang a specially written song on the subject of the King’s worst film ever. Gable sought his revenge a few days later when he had the hot fudge sundae that always appeared at the finish of Tracy’s lunch made with a perfectly formed scoop of mashed potatoes. Tracy dug into the thing and devoured it down to the last spoonful without ever changing expression.
Tracy always credited his first Academy Award nomination to an extraordinary run of pictures, going as he did from stark drama to screwball comedy in the space of five months. He talked about the “sudden break” of both Fury and San Francisco and how two in a row had been “something to shout about” when Libeled Lady came along and took him in an entirely different direction. “This business of achieving dramatic effect on the stage or screen is principally a matter of contrast,” he said at the time. “A thing is dramatic only when it is presented in contrast with something else …”
The awards were going through a metamorphosis, and where there were scarcely seven hundred academy members selecting the winners for 1936, an agreement with the Screen Actors Guild placed the nomination process in the hands of the guild’s senior members for the year 1937. The winners, in fact, would be selected by both the senior and junior memberships of SAG, as well as the member bodies of the Directors and Writers guilds, a total of some fifteen thousand workers. The nominations were announced on the night of February 6, 1938, and although Tracy thought he had a weaker overall résumé for the year—They Gave Him a Gun, Big City, and Mannequin flanking Captains Courageous—he was again included among the nominees, as were Charles Boyer (for Conquest), Fredric March (A Star Is Born), Robert Montgomery (Night Must Fall), andPaul Muni (The Life of Emile Zola).
With the awards now sanctioned by the guilds, Tracy seemed only slightly more at ease with the accolade, even as he conspired to avoid the March 3 banquet at the Biltmore Bowl. With Test Pilot due to wrap in a week, he was granted a three-week suspension to have his hernia operation, thus ensuring he would be in the hospital the night of the dinner. “He couldn’t handle open approbation,” Joe Mankiewicz said, “and he couldn’t handle being rejected. He was embarrassed when people told him he was a good actor, but he was terrified by the idea of people not telling each other he was a good actor.”
When Tracy entered Good Samaritan on Monday, February 21, there wasn’t any widespread speculation he would win the Oscar, Muni again being the odds-on favorite with Montgomery a close second. However, due to heavy rains and flooding, the ceremony was postponed a week, somewhat endangering his plans to be completely unavailable. Then an infection set in, lengthening his stay in the hospital an equal number of days, and he was still safely laid up when Louise came to visit on the afternoon of March 10.
“I kept feeling that I had to get home, that I should be there in case,” she remembered. “He said, ‘No, don’t go.’ Until finally his mother called and said, ‘You’ll have to come home right away. They say he’s going to get it.’ And I was still at the hospital!” Caught off guard, Louise had to wear what she had on hand, a full black dress, very sheer, embroidered with pink flowers. “I’ll never forget trying to dress. Poor Mother Tracy was frantic: ‘You’ll be late!’ ” (Her lateness was chronic; Spence always referred to her as “the late Mrs. Tracy.”) Publicist Otto Winkler collected her in a studio car, and as they inched down Grand Avenue toward the red-carpeted entrance to the Bowl, crowds of spectators strained for a look. Louise was seated with L. B. Mayer’s party, as were Robert Morley, the Sidney Franklins, the Hunt Strombergs, Bernie Hyman and his wife, the Weingartens, the Van Dykes, and Mervyn LeRoy. Norma Shearer, in a long-sleeved gown of shimmering white sequins, brought her mother.
In most ways, it was a typical academy event. It started far past the hour set, and, as hosted by radio comedian Bob Burns, ran so late that someone suggested it should first have been previewed in Glendale. The crowd of 1,400—well over the room’s stated capacity—was packed in to the point of immobility. The new spirit of cooperation with the Guilds was evident in the prominence on the program of Robert Montgomery, the president of SAG, King Vidor, president of the Directors Guild, and Charles Brackett, vice president of the Writers Guild. James Francis Crow of the Hollywood Citizen News hailed it as “an Academy renaissance,” considering the precarious condition the organization had been in just twelve months earlier. “[S]ome,” Crow reported, “thought it would not survive.”
The awarding of the Oscar for Captains Courageous, March 10, 1938. Left to right: Louis B. Mayer, Luise Rainer, Louise Tracy, and director Frank Capra. (HERALD EXAMINER COLLECTION, LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY)
Presenters, including Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Irving Berlin, and W. C. Fields, had handed out a total of twenty-two statuettes, including another to Luise Rainer, when it came time to reveal the winner for Best Actor. Tracy’s name was announced, and the room exploded at the news of a genuinely popular win. Mayer escorted Louise to the podium, and academy president Frank Capra handed the Oscar to him. “It’s a great privilege,” said Mayer, “to be a stand-in for so great an artist and, great as he is as an artist, he’s still a greater man. I think the right one to receive this is his fine wife, Mrs. Tracy.” Mayer turned to Louise and handed her the award, and she stepped to the microphone. “Thank you for Spencer,” she said, “and for Johnny, and for Susie, and for me.”
The line had been Spence’s idea in those last frantic moments at the hospital. (“If you have to go up, why don’t you say this?”) And like the hat he always wore cocked over his left eye, it was a sly tribute to his mentor Cohan, whose famous curtain speech from the days of the Four Cohans was always, “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you.”
Crow, of the Citizen News, called it the “most gracious” moment of the evening, and when Louise later phoned Spence at the hospital, after appearing before newsreel cameras and repeating the line, he wept.
1 “He saw you in the picture,” said Gable sardonically. “He wants to get you out in the Atlantic alone.”
2 When they entertained, which was rare, Louise always served the same thing—baked pork chop with a particular kind of baked apple. It was her signature dish.
3 Luise Rainer was German, but to deflect growing anti-German sentiment the studio said she was Viennese.
4 Tracy began smoking Luckies in the navy, but was never a heavy smoker.
5 Tracy and Gable always shared the same table in the M-G-M commissary. “It was called the Directors’ Table,” said Howard Strickling. “Gable and Pidgeon and Bob Taylor, Tracy, and Cedric Gibbons, and all the writers. It was a big table, because there were 30 or 40 of them. They had this dice box, and low man paid for the lunch. If you had a three on the dice, it might cost you $35 or $40. Again, you might go along and eat for nothing for three weeks.”
6 Another bit of business worked out between Tracy and Fleming was Gunner’s practice of sticking a wad of chewing gum on the surface of Gable’s plane before a flight. A good luck ritual, it’s an ominous sign when he neglects it on the altitude run that ends his life.