CHAPTER 14
When Dore Schary began work on the script of Boys Town in December 1937, it was at the behest of John Considine, who had landed at M-G-M after his brief tenure at Fox. Considine, a lifelong Catholic, was struggling with the story of Father Edward J. Flanagan and his home for orphan boys, a project that seemed a natural for Spencer Tracy. Metro’s story editor, Kate Corbaley, had been looking for another “priest role” for Tracy since the release of San Francisco, and, in the case of Boys Town, parts could be arranged for both Freddie Bartholomew and Mickey Rooney.
Or so they thought. Considine had just pulled the plug on an unfinished screenplay by Bradbury Foote, having previously nixed treatments from Eleanore Griffin and the writing team of Walter Wise and Hugo Butler. Griffin, in fact, had traveled to Nebraska to meet the Reverend Flanagan, and her twenty-six-page story formed the basis of everything to come. All Considine knew of Boys Town, at least initially, was the material contained in a magazine article titled “The Boy Who Shot His Father,” and, at first, Flanagan feared he would make another orphanage picture “after the pattern of Oliver Twist.” Said Schary: “After reading what had been written and studying the history of Father Flanagan’s unique institution, I told Considine that the error holding up the project was casting Freddie Bartholomew in an atmosphere where he clearly didn’t belong. My suggestion was to do away with the character completely and concentrate on the relationship between Tracy as Father Flanagan and Rooney as the rough, unmanageable new recruit into Boys Town.”
Within days, the author of Ladies in Distress found himself aboard a train bound for Omaha. Being an Orthodox Jew, Schary had never before entered a priest’s home, and he wasn’t sure how to behave when Flanagan came ambling down the stairs. “I expected robes or something, but he came down in a coat and tie and said, ‘How are you doing?’ I said, ‘Very cold.’ He said, ‘A little scotch will take care of that.’ We had a couple of drinks and I fell in love with him. He was a darling fellow.”
Flanagan was tall, bespectacled, spoke with a slight brogue. “He didn’t look a bit like Tracy, but he had Tracy’s charm, his smile and twinkle.” The priest told his visitor that he had specifically asked Considine to send him a Jew: “I kept saying to M-G-M, ‘Don’t send me any Catholics. Why don’t you get hold of a young Jewish kid? He’ll know what I’m talking about.’ ”
“Now what would make you say a thing like that?” asked Schary.
“How do you think I got into this business? How do you think this place was built? Because a Jewish man understood what I was doing and gave me money.”
Schary had brought the outline of a new story, and Flanagan was pleased with what he saw. Over the next few days, story elements “flowed quickly and surely,” and a new treatment was on Considine’s desk by Christmas. Tracy, however, resisted all efforts to get him on board. (“I’m just a straight man,” he complained to Louise after reading the thing.) In January Dore Schary returned to Boys Town in the company of J. Walter Ruben, who was now assigned to direct the picture. Even with Jack Ruben attached—he had directed Riffraff—Tracy balked, unwilling to play another guy “with a collar turned backwards.”
As the pressure on the actor built, Yvonne Beaudry became increasingly conscious of his moodiness, his unpredictable funks. “Some days he sat grimly alone, his broad shoulders hunched, his face stony. Then, I hated to approach him with matters requiring his attention: letters and checks to sign, appointments to keep, telegrams and flowers to send … In some ways, Tracy reminded me of my father—a look in his eyes, a mocking expression on his ruddy face, which lit right up when he grinned. I responded to him with respect and a little awe. He was a lot bigger than I as well as older, though I deemed myself a buffer between him and the encroaching world.”
In the end, he was persuaded to take the part of Father Flanagan by Eddie Mannix. “He did it really because of Mr. Mannix,” Louise affirmed. “[Mannix] wanted to do that picture, and he wanted him to do it. [Spence] said [to me], ‘I just can’t turn it down.’ ” When the news reached Boys Town, Father Flanagan responded with a flattering letter to Tracy, obviously calculated to seal the deal: “Your name is written in gold in the heart of every homeless boy in Boys Town because of the anticipated picture you are going to make for us, and every boy here, and all of our alumni, are talking about you, thinking about you, and praying for you every day.”
A few days later, on February 10, 1938, Benny Thau notified the studio accounting office that Spencer Tracy was to be classified henceforth as a star.
A shrewd hand at the art of publicity, Father Flanagan knew the value of the Boys Town story—to Hollywood and to Boys Town itself. He accepted a paltry $5,000 fee for the film rights with the understanding that a successful motion picture could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the institution, perhaps even millions. On February 18, he arrived at Culver City in the company of Morris E. Jacobs, founding partner of Bozell & Jacobs. (It was Jacobs who came up with the famous image of one boy carrying another and the caption, “He ain’t heavy, Father, he’s m’ brother.”) The two men laid out an ambitious promotional plan that involved joining the reach and resources of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with publicity and media contacts forged by Flanagan and his organization over a span of twenty years. What they proposed was a major branding campaign for both Flanagan and Boys Town that would “win space in abundance in such magazines as Life, Time, Newsweek, and newspapers throughout the United States.”
Over lunch on that rainy Friday afternoon, Tracy met Father Flanagan for the first time. Clad in his leather flying jacket for Test Pilot, his face streaked with makeup, Tracy struggled to make conversation with the first living person he had ever been asked to play. “All actors,” he told the priest, “do everything possible to live their part—to be the very image of the person they are portraying. But few actors, Father, have the opportunity of being confronted by that person. That makes the going even rougher, for as I play this part I will be thinking not only of you but of what you will think of me … I’m so anxious to do a good job as Father Flanagan that it worries me, keeps me awake nights.”
What Father Flanagan saw in Tracy was a consummate actor already at work: “As he talked, I could feel his eyes upon me, studying my every little mannerism: the way I sat in the chair, the way I talked, the way I pushed the hair back from my forehead. I knew he was studying me—the man he was going to become—as searchingly as I studied him. I almost knew what was running through his mind.” Photos were made of Flanagan with Tracy, with Mickey Rooney (who asked for his autograph), with actor Lewis Stone, a personal favorite. Jack Ruben suggested that Andrew Cain, one of the boys at Flanagan’s home, be considered for the role of Pee Wee, the mascot character in Dore Schary’s treatment, and Morris Jacobs thought it would make for good publicity to send the boy out to California for a test.
While still in the hospital, Tracy received a letter from Joe Kennedy. The newly installed ambassador congratulated him on his win as Best Actor and advised him that every time Kennedy himself won a prize he made someone give him a trip. He went on to suggest that Tracy should, therefore, make Metro give him a trip abroad. And though Spence wasn’t enthused about the idea, Louise thought it would “do him good” and worked to make it happen. Dr. Toland approved a leisurely cruise aboard the Panama Pacific liner Virginia with Dr. Dennis along to keep an eye on the patient. Louise, juggling her own set of responsibilities, would meet the ship in New York on April 11 and, after a five-day layover, sail with Spence for Genoa, the first planned stop on a three-week European holiday.
Never having learned to relax, Tracy dreaded a six-week absence from the studio. (“He’s the restless type,” Clark Gable said of him. “Maybe it’s the Irish in him. The only time he’s contented to be where he is is when he’s working.”) He fretted about the huge London crowds that reputedly met stars visiting from the States. (Louise asked him what he’d do if he were Robert Taylor “and really had something to worry about.”) He also heard he would be expected to wear white tie and tails at formal functions. (“They go in for that a lot over there, don’t they?”) Once he was resigned to the trip, he visited Bill Powell in the hospital, where the forty-five-year-old actor was himself recovering from surgery.
Earlier in the month, Powell had discovered bleeding and was diagnosed with rectal cancer—the exact same disease that had taken the life of John Tracy at the age of fifty-four. Surgeons recommended complete removal of the rectum, but that meant Powell would have to evacuate into a bag for the rest of his life, something he said he just couldn’t abide. Instead, he chose the option of a “temporary” colostomy and a program of radiation. With the lower colon bypassed, the cancer was removed, but it would be six months before Powell would know if it was gone for good. He was, Tracy noted, “pretty blue and sick” that particular afternoon.
Tracy had a morbid fear of disease—cancer in particular—and the talk with Powell obviously stuck with him. The trip through the canal began pleasantly enough, but then he developed a mysterious itch (“… but good!” he wrote in his book). It worsened, and he spent his thirty-eighth birthday in agony, convinced that he, too, had rectal cancer. He could remember how his father had wasted away under the disease, the terrible sight of such a powerful and energetic man in death: “I looked at what was left—just practically nothing. I couldn’t find that big, proud, Irish son-of-a-gun in the remains. And right then and there I made plans. Anything like that ever happened to me, I’d check out … I’m scared. It’s a thing there’s no prevention for. There’s nothing you can do. We’re helpless. Sitting ducks. If it hits, it hits. And when that’s the way your father goes—or your mother—it’s only natural to live with the specter of it. Or try.”
Denny had a look at him and told him no, he didn’t think so, but that he’d arrange for treatments when they reached port. The passengers were respectful, kept their distance. “Of course, I was sick … I still walked with a cane … but they didn’t speak to me or ask for autographs. When we arrived in New York, though, boy!” At the Twenty-first Street pier Tracy was surrounded by longshoremen who wanted autographs and mobbed by a star-struck crowd of women, one of whom wanted to kiss him and was seen pleading with a cop for permission to do so. When they arrived at the Sherry-Netherland, Denny located an oncologist and Tracy had his first x-ray treatment—the same sort of radiation therapy his father endured and that Bill Powell undoubtedly had in his future. No relief. “Rectal trouble terrible,” he wrote on the twelfth. “Itch awful,” he added the next day.
They didn’t see any shows—he couldn’t sit long enough to enjoy one. Test Pilot opened at the Capitol Theatre, and the end of Lent contributed to a fabulous gate of nearly $60,000 in the first week alone. Critics generally thought the picture well done, albeit overlong, and most commented on the brevity of Tracy’s part. At the hotel he sat for a couple of interviews, calmly sipping from a glass of ginger ale, giving no indication of the turmoil within.
The Tracys went their separate ways in New York, Spence roaming the city like a wounded tiger, his posture and gait warning strangers away. Selena Royle “saw a figure coming down the street, all hunched over and with a hat over to one side in that way of his, and I knew it had to be Spence … so I went up to him and threw my arms around him and said, ‘Well, you always said you wanted to be as good as Lionel Barrymore, and now you are … and better.’ ”
The daily treatments continued, and all he wished by now was to be home again. On Saturday, April 16, the UP reported a “mild relapse” that caused him to cancel reservations on the Italian liner Rex. “Tracy will sail Wednesday with his wife for a three weeks’ vacation,” the dispatch continued, but he no longer cared about making the trip. “More treatment,” he glumly noted that day. “And more” the following, Easter Sunday. If he went to Mass at St. Patrick’s, as he always tried to do, he made no mention of it. Prayer, desperate and all-consuming, may finally have had an effect, though, for on Tuesday, April 19, the itch was suddenly gone, and there was, after three weeks of constant torture, genuine and blessed relief.
He found himself at the Lambs that night, but the atmosphere was depressing, most of his old pals having decamped for Hollywood. He dined with actor Wallace Ford—who was playing Of Mice and Men at the Music Box—and the two engaged in a “friendly” dispute over a check for $5.60. Sometime that night, with all the dread of the last month having drained from him completely, he took a drink after seven months and two weeks of sobriety.
Actor David Wayne, new to Broadway, happened onto the scene in the club’s fabled taproom: “The huge supply of liquor that was stacked behind the bar he swept off and hurled to the floor and about the room. It looked as if a hurricane had struck. I know, because I walked into the place a few hours after the destruction began. It was awesome! Some two days later he was still on his feet amidst the ruins of the club, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The by-laws at that time forbade the expulsion of any member as long as he remained on his feet.”
According to Wayne, the studio had an ambulance standing by so that when Tracy “finally collapsed” he could be lifted aboard and driven to a waiting plane. Six long days passed before the siege came to an end. Attempts to contact Louise were unsuccessful; first she was “in” and then, when advised as to what the club was calling about, she was “out.” As someone party to the event observed: “What she should not see, she would not see.”
Billy “Square Deal” Grady, the former Broadway agent who described himself as the studio’s “eyes and ears” in New York, secured two plane tickets west, but after nearly a week of steady drinking, Tracy was in no shape to be seated alongside civilians. Grady quietly turned in the tickets, and M-G-M chartered a private plane out of Newark at a cost of $3,000. In Los Angeles, Tracy managed to slip away and went missing for six days. At no time did he attempt to contact Louise, nor Carroll, and there were no sightings at any of his usual haunts. “No one was able to find him,” said Dore Schary, “until it occurred to somebody to look in the polo stables he had. And they found him there asleep—and quite under the weather.”
He was hospitalized, and the consulting physician on the case told him and Louise that if he continued to drink as he had that season, in five years he would be dead.
“Unfortunately, Spencer Tracy is still very much under the weather,” John Considine delicately advised Father Flanagan in a letter on April 27, when Tracy was in fact missing and nowhere to be found. “He was all ready to sail for Europe but at the last minute decided that it would be better for him to come back to his home and try and recuperate from the effects of the serious surgical operation he underwent a month or so ago. I shall let you hear from me again as soon as I get some definite information about his condition.”
On May 3, with Tracy in the hospital, Considine sent the Reverend Flanagan a copy of Dore Schary’s latest version of the screenplay, which combined early material from Eleanore Griffin with Schary’s own progressive drafts, designed to make Flanagan’s character less a straight man and more the idealistic young priest who willed his boys’ home into being. Where reality intervened, Schary had a melodramatic equivalent to make the same point: the gradual dawning on “Father Eddie” that serving the needs of homeless boys would prevent them from growing into homeless men became a tense monologue from a condemned prisoner on the night of his execution. The mysterious source of the original seed money for the home—presumed by many to be Omaha attorney Henry Monsky—became a benevolent pawnbroker, standing shoulder to shoulder with the priest throughout the film.
Flanagan responded by inviting Considine, screenwriter John Meehan, director Norman Taurog—Jack Ruben having fallen ill—and Tracy to Omaha for a conference over the script, but Tracy, eager to make the fiasco of the New York trip up to Louise, elected instead to take her on a quick cruise to Hawaii, vowing to return in time for the start of Boys Town on June 2. Their two weeks in Honolulu came off without incident; on their way home he was able to note in his book: “One month sober—Wonderful!!!” With the script unfinished, the picture didn’t actually start until the sixth, new pages coming daily from Meehan and Jack Mintz, a writer and gag man brought onto the picture by Taurog.
Tracy had previously appeared in two pictures with Mickey Rooney, but there was no interaction between the two of them on Riffraff and very little on Captains Courageous. Since finishing the latter, Rooney had appeared in nine features, two in the newly inaugurated Andy Hardy series with Lewis Stone and Fay Holden. On Boys Town, the seventeen-year-old Rooney would share over-the-title billing with Tracy, a remarkable rise in prominence since joining M-G-M (at $150 a week) in August 1934. “Mickey Rooney,” said Joe Mankiewicz, “was a pretty cocky little fellow … When Tracy and Rooney met on the set of Boys Town, Rooney started playing games … While Spencer was talking, Rooney would sort of play with his handkerchief in his pocket, or adjust his tie, or the stale sort of scene-stealing bits, and Tracy turned to him the very first day and said, ‘I understand you claim to be the world’s greatest scene stealer. Let me tell you something, you little snot. The moment I catch you trying to louse up a scene I’m in, I’ll send you to Purgatory. You’ll wish you’d never been born, because I can do it.’ And he made Rooney believe that.”
After a week shooting the early scenes between Father Flanagan and the incorrigible Whitey Marsh, Rooney went off to complete Love Finds Andy Hardy and Tracy moved on to the founding of Flanagan’s first home for boys in 1917, solid, largely factual material that paired him with actors Leslie Fenton and Henry Hull. With his weight down to 170, Tracy was able to play two slow chukkers of polo on June 8, his first in nearly seven months. It was like being back at the beginning again, having to nerve himself into taking the field, the adrenaline high all but forgotten, the fear almost insurmountable. “I darn near died,” he said, recalling the occasion. “I can’t enjoy the game anymore. It’s a worry now. I get to thinking, ‘Maybe nothing will happen, but I might take a spill. Then the picture stops. And people get thrown out of work.’ ”
On June 22 unit manager Joe Cooke wired Boys Town from Salt Lake City:
ARRIVE OMAHA THURSDAY MORNING. COMPANY WILL ARRIVE SATURDAY. WOULD RATHER YOU NOT MENTION ARRIVAL SO AS TO KEEP CROWDS AWAY.
Of course the company of fifty-eight was the biggest, by far, ever to hit Nebraska. When they arrived early in the evening of the twenty-fifth, several thousand jammed Omaha’s Union Station to catch glimpses of Tracy and particularly Mickey Rooney, who had become just about the hottest thing in pictures. Henry Hull was along, as were actors Gene Reynolds, Frank Thomas, Bobs Watson (and his mother), Jimmy Butler, Sidney Miller, Donald Haines, and Tommy Noonan. All others—director Taurog, his first and second assistants, the script girl, two sound engineers, first and second cameramen and assistant, second-unit cameraman and assistant, wardrobe man, makeup man, cashier, two prop men, three grips, a stills man, a welfare worker, five electricians, a camera car driver, writers Meehan and Mintz, associate producer O. O. “Bunny” Dull and a secretary, and a publicity trailer unit headed by Frank Whitbeck (with cameraman, assistant cameraman, and grip)—were able to pass unnoticed.
Tracy, accompanied by Carroll and his stand-in, Jerry Schumacher, was welcomed by Father Flanagan and Omaha mayor Dan Butler, who presented both him and Mickey Rooney with floral keys to the city. The formalities over, Spence gamely made his way to a waiting cab, enduring another mob scene at the Fontenelle Hotel. “The lobby was crammed with people who claimed to be relatives of Mickey Rooney,” reported the Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star, “or to have gone to school with Spencer Tracy.”
Taurog spent all day Sunday scouting locations on the Boys Town campus. Monday morning, the first shots were made just after nine, a shrill whistle signaling quiet, gold foil reflectors augmenting a battery of booster lamps in the already sweltering heat. Tracy, sunburned from Hawaii, needed only a little lotion to take the shine off, a little graying at the temples his only makeup. Mintz, in Dubonnet shirt and white jacket, pipe in hand, studied each scene from the sidelines, looking for bits of business to inject, as Taurog, in helmet and brown pants, sat motionless next to the camera. By noon the temperature had hit 105 degrees and only dipped below 100 after nightfall.
Directing his first film under a new M-G-M contract, Taurog proved equal to his reputation as a skilled handler of children. Still, all the young principals in Boys Town were professional actors, and nothing a director could say would match the primal impact of playing opposite a man of Tracy’s gifts, looking into his eyes and establishing a connection.
“He was artless,” said Gene Reynolds, who played the handicapped Tony Ponessa in the picture. “You never caught him acting. He was very facile. He would take in what you gave him, process it, and give it back.” Sidney Miller, the bookish Mo Kahn, thought Tracy the best listener in the world: “When I did a scene in Boys Town, I swear those eyes bore into mine.” Tracy, he recalled, was once asked by the cameraman to cheat his look to Miller’s right ear. “He refused. He wouldn’t look away from my eyes. If they wanted his full face, they were going to have to bring the camera around.”
Most prominent among the kids was seven-year-old Bobs Watson, who played the diminutive Pee Wee. “In one of the first scenes,” he remembered,
I come in and ask for candy, and they establish that I get it. In the next scene when I come in for candy, he gives me some and asks, “Have you brushed your teeth?” I hadn’t brushed my teeth and I lie about it and say, “I lost my toothbrush.” “Lost it? Well, we’re going to have to do something about this” and he makes a big deal about it, which plays on my guilt. So I start to put the candy back. Just before we shoot the scene, Norman Taurog, the director, said, “Bobby, now when you’re putting the candy back, don’t look at it. Reach in your pocket, take it out, and look Uncle Spencer right in the eyes.” And I’ll never forget those eyes.
Watson’s great talent was his ability to cry like no other child in pictures, and Taurog never had to resort to the usual tricks—stories of dead dogs, dying grandparents, and the like. “I can’t explain it,” he once said, “but when tears were needed, I cried, and they were honest and real. In Boys Town, when Mickey Rooney left, it really broke my heart. I used to see Rooney and Spencer Tracy in a very idealized way.” Tracy, he remembered, was fatherly and warm. “Often, after a scene, he’d reach over and hug me and take me on his lap. I felt like a little puppy. I would follow along and stand close, hoping he’d call me over, and often he would. He’d say, ‘How’re you doing?’ and put his arm around me.”
Tracy and Rooney never really warmed to one another, despite press feeds to the contrary. “During lunch,” said one Boys Town alumnus, “Tracy comes in and then they serve him his food, and Mickey used to agitate him. They had this long table, so Mickey comes in [and sits] across from him and [takes] off his shoes and socks and put[s] them right up in front of the plate. Oh, Tracy, he was burning a hole through it.” Frank Whitbeck once confided to a friend that his principal role on the Boys Town location, other than to shoot a one-reel featurette called City of Little Men, was to keep “Tracy off the booze and Mickey Rooney off the girls.” At a dinner one night, Whitbeck froze when he saw a waiter pouring wine into Tracy’s glass, but Tracy, just a few weeks sober, never touched it.
The filming attracted huge crowds of spectators—as many as five thousand a day—and Father Flanagan had to spend most of the money he was paid by M-G-M on repairs to the property. Tracy, who disliked location work under the best of circumstances, ducked under an umbrella whenever he wasn’t needed, Schumacher bringing him water and the makeup man running cubes of ice across his forehead. “The crew had a great time,” said Gene Reynolds. “The women of Omaha just rolled for them. Any kind of connection with Hollywood, I guess. Even the prop boys were getting laid.”
The company worked eleven straight days in Omaha, finishing on the afternoon of July 7, 1938. Tracy slipped out of town on a Union Pacific Streamliner the next morning at two, riding up front with the engineer and having himself a grand time. Back at Culver City, the cast and crew of Boys Town settled in for another four weeks of interiors.
Between shots, Tracy went about the business of breaking in a new secretary, having lost Yvonne Beaudry to an auto accident. With a sprained back and a pronounced limp, Yvonne went home to New England after finding him a replacement, a red-headed Irish girl in her mid-twenties named Peggy Gough. Unlike Beaudry, Peggy had no ambitions to be a journalist or a world traveler and was an experienced secretary. She wasn’t terribly busy, especially when her boss was out of town, so she was assigned to help Johnny by typing the stencils for a weekly newspaper he had started publishing.
At the age of eleven, Johnny took up pencil and paper and declared he was going to draw a comic strip, slipping his earliest efforts under his mother’s door. “Certainly the ‘drawings’ were the worst I ever had seen,” she said. “We were in hysterics—behind his back. It was his first effort of any kind to do anything, to make something, entirely by himself, and no first efforts, I am sure, ever have met with greater acclaim. And we had to admit that every few days brought marked improvement.”
One day he asked how Walt Disney got Mickey Mouse into the paper, and his mother had to explain, somewhat carefully, how Walt Disney had been an adult when he broke into print, and that Johnny might well be able to do so once he had grown into adulthood himself. That, however, wasn’t the sort of answer he wanted to hear, and he decided he would start his own newspaper to hasten the process. What he wanted, it turned out, was extra copies of his drawings to send his grandmother and others, and Louise told him that when he got his paper together they would find a way of getting it printed. It took a year and a half and a lot of help from his private tutor to get out the first issue, a weekly he called The News. Soon its production took the place of what had come to pass for an education.
“The schooling was insufficient,” Johnny later wrote. “It seems to me I spent too much time on the newspaper and fooling around … I didn’t have the vocabulary to study and think. A dictionary was quite handy all the time, but I didn’t use it much. [My tutor] didn’t understand the needs of a deaf child. Of course, obviously too, I was lazy and not curious intellectually. I was thinking of the newspaper, every issue of which I was very anxious to send out, and of ‘Jack Smith,’ a comic strip which I had just created to be drawn for the paper.”
They bought him a secondhand duplicating machine and some stencils. Most of the “news” in the News concerned the Tracys—new movies, polo triumphs, comings and goings. The cover of the first issue carried a drawing of Mickey Mouse, courtesy of Walt Disney. It said: “Good luck to Johnny Tracy!”
Boys Town finished on August 6, 1938, and had its first sneak in Inglewood on the fourteenth. Tracy was unimpressed. “Carroll,” he said to his brother as they left the theater, “that’s the worst picture I ever saw.” There were, however, laughs, applause, and tears, as Dore Schary remembered it, and at the conclusion the audience cheered.
There had been some discussion of having the world premiere in Washington—Flanagan had at one time been sold on the idea—but then came rumblings from within Omaha, the mother city, and the insult of being bypassed. “Washington—no!” the Most Reverend James H. Ryan, bishop of Omaha, thundered. “It would not do Boys Town a particle of good to have the premiere there. If it has to be away from Omaha, make it at least New York.” Father Flanagan lobbied Frank Whitbeck: “In reality Omaha gave us our first start and gave us our first building—and paid for it—and it is now our chance to pay back our debt to Omaha by having the premiere here.” The matter was pretty much in the hands of the distribution people, but Frank Whitbeck had a word with Al Lichtman, a Loew’s vice president, who in turn took the matter up with H. J. Shumow, manager of the Omaha exchange.
Tracy at his Encino ranch with daughter Susie and son John, circa 1938. (HERALD EXAMINER COLLECTION, LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY)
Father Flanagan and Bishop Ryan were invited to California, where they were feted at a studio luncheon. L. B. Mayer posed for pictures between the two men, Tracy with his arm around Flanagan’s shoulder and Rooney, on his best behavior, talking animatedly with the bishop. Next came the season opener of Good News, with Tracy and Rooney performing punchy little scenes from the movie, followed by Mayer’s introduction to the nationwide listening audience of the real Father Flanagan.
After the broadcast, the studio contingent motored crosstown to Westwood for the official press preview, an event that went better than anyone could have hoped. “There was applause several times as the picture progressed,” Gus McCarthy of the Motion Picture Herald wrote. “Generally, however, the spectators watched and listened silently, but they almost tore up the seats at the finish.”
As Daily Variety reported, “Pure sentiment, the decent, courageous, unselfish impulses of men and boys, time after time was applauded as no picture in years has been approved. This spontaneous outburst is the keynote to the showmanship the offering represents, and to the kind of showmanship which may sell Boys Town for one of the season’s smash money makers.” Tracy, said the Hollywood Reporter, “gives a brilliant, restrained performance that should put him in direct line for a second Academy Award. Even when he is not seen on the screen, his guiding presence is felt every moment.” No one seemed to differentiate between the honest, understated footage of Father Flanagan’s early struggles and the overheated melodrama that highjacked the picture once Mickey Rooney made his appearance. Boys Town packed a sentimental wallop, and every review that came out of the showing was an unqualified rave.
The launching of Boys Town on the M-G-M lot. Left to right: Mickey Rooney, Bishop James H. Ryan, Louis B. Mayer, the Reverend Edward J. Flanagan, and Tracy. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
On Sunday, September 4, Tracy, Rooney, Flanagan, Ryan, and actress Maureen O’Sullivan left for Nebraska and the world premiere of the picture. When their train arrived in Omaha on the sixth, it was met by an estimated twenty thousand people, and the crowd swelled to more than thirty thousand for the premiere the next evening. One hundred and ten policemen and another forty firemen struggled to maintain control as the crush filled Douglas Street along two city blocks and spilled over onto side streets, threatening to snap the steel wire barriers strung for the event. Fans lined the rooftops and leaned out of office windows. Tracy, taking in the spectacle, said, “This thing makes a Hollywood premiere look like a dying hog.”
Inside the Omaha Theatre, all 2,500 seats were filled as a procession of local dignitaries welcomed the filmmakers. O’Sullivan made a brief appearance, and the Boys Town a cappella choir sang. Father Flanagan spoke of the good he hoped the movie would accomplish, and the showing began with the roar of the M-G-M lion. As in Westwood, applause punctuated much of the film, particularly when Omaha landmarks were recognized or mentioned. At the fadeout, Father Flanagan was asked to escort Tracy and Mickey Rooney to the stage, where Tracy stood with his arm around Rooney as he had in the picture. After saying, “Words fail me for the first time,” Rooney predicted another Oscar for his costar. Tracy’s first words in the hushed auditorium were inaudible, as if stifled by emotion. Then he was heard to say: “You thanked us for coming here. We should get on our knees to you.” He proceeded to return Rooney’s compliment, telling the crowd that Rooney was destined to become “one of the great actors of his day.”
Still neither an admirer of the script nor of his own performance, Tracy chose his next words carefully. “I do not like to stand here stripped clean of Father Flanagan,” he said, adding that if the picture was great, it was because “the great goodness and sweetness and beauty of the soul of this man shines even through me to you.”
During his days at Fox, when Tracy misbehaved it generally hit the papers. His tangles with the police made the wire services, and his relationship with Loretta Young was about as public as one could get. His hospitalization in 1934 was explained as a polo accident, but other episodes were reported with a fair degree of accuracy. Had he torn up the Lambs Club while working at Fox, word likely would have gotten out; the Lambs membership was too far-ranging and included press agents and columnists. Fox management lacked the wherewithal—and likely the willingness—to stifle unflattering ink. In the Fox model, theaters and real estate were the assets, not the contract players Winnie Sheehan hired by the dozens. And, like most other studios, Fox didn’t build stars because Fox—Sheehan and Wurtzel in particular—didn’t know how. With no investment to protect, a second-tier player like Spencer Tracy could make a drunken scene in Yuma, and the police and the press were free to say whatever they wanted. That all stopped when Tracy joined M-G-M.
The joint philosophy of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg was that the stars on the payroll were hard-dollar assets in the same sense that equipment and real estate were assets—more so in the case of Metro because the Loew’s theater circuit was considerably smaller than those of Fox and Paramount. Mayer was fond of likening talent to precious stones: “If you have a diamond or a ruby, you take care of it, you put it in a safe, you clean it and polish it.” It was the only business, he once said, where the assets walked out the gate every night. After Thalberg’s untimely death, the stars weren’t nurtured quite as creatively as before, but the men Mayer and Thalberg had put into place shared their values and attitudes, and principal among them was Howard Strickling.
The quintessential company man, Strickling had been a publicist for the old Metro organization before the merger that created Metro-Goldwyn. He left because he expected to get fired anyway, and Mayer found him working in Paris for Rex Ingram. Persuaded to join the newly assembled company, Strickling set about building the largest and most efficient publicity machine the industry would ever know. “Early on,” he said, “I learned that people need help, and the secret of my job was learning how to help them. Help them and they help you. That’s what M-G-M was all about, and it was particularly true for the actors—most of them were insecure and overly sensitive and self-centered, so you had to convince them you had their best interests at heart.”
Strickling controlled access to the world’s greatest assemblage of contract talent, and when he and his staff “helped” a particular journalist or outlet, their “help” was expected in return. When something potentially damaging occurred, Strickling started working the phones. In cases where an incident occurred out of town, a representative was often dispatched. Strickling was close to Billy Wilkerson and had staff allocated to all principal branches of the media—newspapers, fan magazines, radio, the trades. Many of his senior people also had responsibility for three or four stars apiece, and some of them lived in constant terror of what one of their charges might say to the press. Mickey Rooney was irrepressible, a raging pint-sized package of hormones on a breakneck ride to Number One. Tracy needed more protection than supervision; he was plainspoken when talking to journalists, brutally frank with pals like Mook. “Ask Tracy an honest question,” said a columnist for the Washington Star, “and you are likely to get the most honest answer you ever heard.”
At first he was under watch, his reputation at Fox having preceded him. “We actors are like the children of very wealthy parents who keep a very close watch on us, have guards and spies set over us,” he observed not long after coming to Metro. “The studio is the mama and papa of the actor. The whole world, the press, the public are the guards and spies. We can’t really be ourselves much of the time.” Eddie Mannix and Billy Grady were his confidants, more or less responsible for keeping an eye on him. After New York and the Lambs Club, he was placed on a shorter leash, someone from the studio being omnipresent whenever he found himself out among the public. “It was a world unto itself,” Maureen O’Sullivan said, “and I would think that if M-G-M had a fault, they over-protected us. If there was bad publicity or something coming up, you took it up with Howard Strickling. Life was taken care of, and this spoiled us.”
Strickling had people who handled the distribution of photographs, others who coordinated special events—premieres, banquets, important visitors. Unit men responsible for individual pictures worked for Strickling, as did the people who arranged transportation and answered fan mail. “In Howard’s book,” said Ann Straus, one of his longtime employees, “M-G-M girls didn’t drink, they didn’t smoke, they didn’t even have babies. But he was a hard taskmaster. He wanted perfection, and he got it.” There were limits to Strickling’s reach, and his stuttering betrayed the constant pressure he was under—“It made it difficult to take dictation from him,” said Eddie Mannix’s secretary, June Caldwell—but he was on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and there was no aspect to the business of being a movie star that escaped his oversight.
It was not in Howard Strickling’s interest to make Tracy available to the press in October 1938. Just before Boys Town had its world premiere, Tracy learned he had been assigned a picture titled A New York Cinderella and he wasn’t at all happy about it. The story and script were designed to showcase an actress who had just six pictures to her credit, the most notorious of which was a Czechoslovakian feature in which she appeared nude and simulated orgasm. It was the sort of thing he thought he was finally past, and the problem ate at him as he trained eastward in the company of Bishop Ryan and Father Flanagan.
Hedy Lamarr was L. B. Mayer’s project, a dark, radiant beauty the old man first encountered in London. She was Hedwig Kiesler at the time, on the run from a bad marriage and a featured player in a handful of European movies. Like Luise Rainer, Kiesler had been with Max Reinhardt, who reportedly called her “the most beautiful woman in Europe.” Unlike Rainer, Kiesler was genuinely Viennese at a time when such a distinction was becoming increasingly important. Brought to this country, she was renamed “Lamarr” after the 1920s beauty queen Barbara La Marr, with Mayer taking personal charge of her career. He loaned her to producer Walter Wanger for her American debut in a stylish independent called Algiers. Tracy had seen the film, liked Charles Boyer’s work and thought the girl photogenic but had no interest in propping her up, particularly in a picture as vapid as New York Cinderella promised to be.
“I have often wondered,” Flanagan wrote Tracy on November 1, “how you came out with the making of that picture concerning which you sent the telegram to Mr. Mannix from the train. I hope that you did not have to make that picture, but there is so little that we hear at Boys Town that I am perfectly in the dark as to what picture you are making now.” By the time Tracy received the letter, he had already started the movie—a “stinker,” he noted in his datebook—and had seen it shut down after only a few days’ work.
The director, Josef von Sternberg, had been engaged to give Lamarr the same glistening treatment he had given Marlene Dietrich a decade earlier. (Algiers, in fact, looked like a Sternberg picture, due in large part to the work of cinematographer James Wong Howe.) On the first day of filming, Sternberg attempted his first take at 10:20 in the morning, and wasn’t satisfied until 4:30 in the afternoon. Lamarr photographed well, but she had no energy and precious little personality. The story had her chasing Tracy’s character, a selfless doctor, but the material, in Sternberg’s judgment, was “silly.” He tried fixing the script but found he could do nothing with it. “Each detail of this film, on which I worked not more than a week, was predetermined by a dozen others,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Other directors were better fitted to participate in this kind of nonsense, although this may well be beyond the ability of anyone.”
The atmosphere on Sternberg’s set was tense. “He wouldn’t stand for any noise on the set,” said actress Laraine Day, who was playing a minor part in the picture, “and if you wanted to talk to him, you had to write your name on a blackboard and then he would deign to talk to you if he wanted to.” Tracy notched six months on the wagon, loafed, and played tennis—a new passion for which he was taking lessons. They started up again on November 14 with Frank Borzage directing, then again pulled the plug at the end of the same day. A week later, after further rewrites, they started the picture yet a third time with the title I Take This Woman. Soon, it was being referred to around town as I Re-Take This Woman.
Borzage was as friendly and easygoing as Sternberg was aloof. (“There’s no mistaking the easing of tension since Borzage took over the picture,” a visitor observed.) Disgusted with the script by Jim McGuinness, who, unsuited to women’s pictures, had turned in a lifeless assemblage of clichés, Tracy indulged in a brief flirtation with Hedy Lamarr, who, according to Billy Grady, was the subject of a one-night stand. Tracy was living at the Beverly Hills Hotel, prompting rumors of another separation. In addition to his usual habit of moving out for a picture, his wing of the house was under renovation, adding a bathroom and a dressing area. The rumors, he told Harrison Carroll, were “never more untrue.”
Indeed, he was back at home by mid-December, despite the fact that the picture was still very much in production. An exhibitors’ poll released on the twenty-third named him fifth in a list of the biggest moneymaking stars of the year, placing him ahead of such luminaries as Robert Taylor,Tyrone Power, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, and Errol Flynn. Christmas was with family, Aunt Emma Brown visiting from Freeport, Carrie, Carroll and Dorothy, Weeze and the kids.
Spence and Louise at one of the infrequent premieres they attended as a couple. (SUSIE TRACY)
“I Take This Woman, starring Hedy Lamarr and Spencer Tracy, has been shooting for 60 days and nobody has been able to think of an ending for it,” Sheilah Graham reported in her column of December 26. “The great problem is whether or not to bring Hedy and Spencer together at the end. Oh, please let them have each other. I’m so tired of finales where the heroine goes off into a dark fadeout, wistfully followed by the eyes of the hero …” The seemingly interminable picture finished—to no one’s particular satisfaction—on January 19, 1939. A week later, Tracy was advised by Eddie Mannix that it had been “shelved indefinitely.”
“Just imagine,” Tracy said. “Hedy had to chase me all during the picture—and I had to run away! Imagine Hedy having to chase any man and not get him! Not only didn’t it make sense, but it made Hedy unglamourous. Well, anyway, Metro can’t say I didn’t warn them. I told them at the start the picture was no good, and for once I was right.”
After observing three days of Boys Town being filmed in Omaha, Tracy’s uncle Andrew got the idea to have a print of the completed film sent to Williamsville, in upstate New York, where Spencer’s eighty-three-year-old aunt, Sister Mary Perpetua, was living. Having taken her vows in 1875, the nun had never seen a moving picture, and Andrew thought Spencer’s playing a priest would be a terrific introduction to his work as an actor. Frank Whitbeck promised to arrange a showing, and everyone at the convent was invited to attend. Sister remembered Spencer all right—not as an actor but as a truck driver who came through Buffalo during the brief time he had been on the payroll at Sterling Truck. “A bum!” she’d erupt when his name came up. Pressed, she’d tell how she and another nun had been to downtown Buffalo and had seen his name on a marquee. “Humph! He never called me up, never wrote to me, never invited me out!” They couldn’t seem to make her understand that he wasn’t physically present at the theater, so her half-sister, Jenny Feely, went to Williamsville to be with her for the showing.
“She was in a wheelchair,” Jenny’s daughter, Jane, said of the nun, “and they wheeled her in to see the movie of her nephew as Father Flanagan. All the nuns were there and they thought it was great, it was wonderful, and they congratulated her afterwards. ‘Wasn’t that wonderful?’ they’d say. ‘Yes,’ she’d say, ‘Father Flanagan, he was a good man. He had an orphanage, you know.’ Because she had run an orphanage. Mama said she wasn’t really sure that she connected Spencer with Father Flanagan.”
Boys Town drew fresh attention to Tracy’s work as a priest, coming as it did some two years after his turn as Father Tim in San Francisco, as no one had stepped up and attempted another modern priest in the interim.1 The reviews of the New York dailies weren’t quite as laudatory as the ones that had come out of the press preview, Frank Nugent, for one, pointing out the “artificial plot leverage” that came to the rescue once the screenwriters realized they had made Whitey Marsh “too tough a nut to crack” in the natural development of the story. “The highway accident involving Pee Wee, his little chum; the bank robbery and kidnaping; the flood of tears in the last reel, strike a too-familiar discord. It manages, in spite of the embarrassing sentimentality of its closing scenes, to be a consistently interesting and frequently touching motion picture.”
Tracy’s performance was universally praised, and several prominent critics predicted another Oscar win. When Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times omitted his name from his annual list of proposed nominees, the volume of Schallert’s mail swelled in protest. (One letter objecting to the snub was signed by thirty-six students from Santa Monica Junior College.) “The omission is duly recognized,” Schallert assured his readers in a follow-up, “and certainly Spencer Tracy merits a place in the nominations for both his performances in Test Pilot and Boys Town. And from a practical standpoint, Mr. Tracy could win the Academy statuette again this year if the voters in the organization are so minded. In fact, Mr. Tracy’s qualifications as an actor would entitle him to win the award almost every year.”
Boys Town was a big commercial success, taking in over $4 million in worldwide billings. As Schallert discovered, there was broad popular support for Tracy’s Best Actor nomination, and when the announcement came down on the night of February 5, 1939, nobody was surprised other than perhaps Tracy himself. The nominations, made by Class A members of the Screen Actors Guild, put James Cagney up for his work in Angels With Dirty Faces—a terrific performance—as well as Charles Boyer (Algiers), Robert Donat (The Citadel), and Leslie Howard (Pygmalion). M-G-M came away with four productions, including Boys Town, in the Best Picture category. Norman Taurog was nominated for Best Director, John Meehan and Dore Schary for Best Screenplay, Schary and Eleanore Griffin for Best Original Story. In all, Boys Town took five nominations.
Tracy thought himself merely competent in the role of Father Flanagan, and talk of another honor frankly made him uncomfortable. “It isn’t that I think it is disrespectful or sacrilegious to play a priest,” he hedged, “but I think a role of this kind demands more than is in one’s power to give. Long after I’m forgotten, Father Flanagan will go down in history as one of the great humanitarians of the century.” Privately, he feared people would confuse the man with the actor and vote for the priest and his good deeds, not for a performance that was, by his own reckoning, pretty routine. He was relieved when Cagney was thought to have a big lead in the early balloting, then less so when Variety reported the “general belief” the winner would be either Cagney or himself.
“Only an actor like Mr. Tracy and an actor like young Mickey Rooney, or someone equally good, could possibly carry a story without any love interest for more than ninety minutes and make you like it,” wrote William Boehnel of the New York World-Telegram. (SUSIE TRACY)
The festivities at the Biltmore didn’t begin until eleven o’clock on the night of February 23, and the awards for acting weren’t announced until well past midnight. Bette Davis’ win for Jezebel had been expected, but Tracy’s win over Cagney and the others was considered an upset. When Tracy, in black tie, stepped up to the trophy-laden center table and began to speak, Louise could see he was embarrassed. “I could tell by the tone of his voice,” she said. “He wasn’t himself at all.” Handed the Oscar by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, he took a long moment to collect his thoughts. “I honestly do not feel that I can accept this award,” he said, his eyes cast downward. “I do not deserve it. I can accept it only as it was meant to be for a great man—Father Flanagan, whose goodness and greatness must have been enough to shine even through me.”
Sensing the sincerity of his words, the crowd responded with “thunderous” applause. “I was all primed,” said Clark Gable, “to suggest that maybe they had counted the ballots for the year before by mistake. But he stopped me cold before I ever started.” Tracy dutifully beamed for the flash photographers, a cigarette in one hand, his statuette in the other. Heading for the door, he came alongside screenwriter Laurence Stallings. “I didn’t see Boys Town,” Stallings told him. “I don’t know whether you deserved the award for that or not, but you certainly deserve it for the performance you just gave.”
Greeting Bette Davis at the Academy Awards dinner. Davis collected the Best Actress statuette for Jezebel. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Tracy responded to Father Flanagan’s wire of congratulations:
THE CREDIT IS DUE YOU AND I AM GLAD WE GOT IT FOR THE SAKE OF BOYS TOWN.
He also wired Bobs Watson, whose trademark crying jags nearly stole the show: HALF OF THE STATUE BELONGS TO YOU. Two days later, on the night of February 27, Father Flanagan’s assistant brought a box to him. Inside was Tracy’s Boys Town Oscar, an added plate bearing the inscription:
TO FATHER FLANAGAN
WHOSE GREAT HUMAN QUALITIES, KINDLY SIMPLICITY AND INSPIRING COURAGE WERE STRONG ENOUGH TO SHINE THROUGH MY HUMBLE EFFORTS.
SPENCER TRACY
· · ·
In the four years since Spencer Tracy and Fox Film Corporation parted company, both had gone through extraordinary changes. Where Tracy was scarcely a blip on the box office barometer in 1935, a critics’ darling and little more, he was now fifth-ranked among all American film stars and had two Academy Awards to his credit. Similarly, where Fox had been limping along under the fitful leadership of Winfield Sheehan, Darryl F. Zanuck was now in charge of production, having taken over in the wake of a deal that merged 20th Century Pictures with Fox Film to create 20th Century-Fox. Under him, Fox became a writers’ studio—the polar opposite of M-G-M, where the writers worked in service of the stars. Screenplays at Fox were developed with little regard for who on the lot could play them, and when no one on the payroll proved suitable, Zanuck had no qualms about going outside and borrowing the people he needed.
When M-G-M, in effect, took over Tracy’s contract—moneywise it was a lateral move—Fox reserved the right to make one additional picture within a year’s time at a rate of $3,000 a week. It was almost a corporate face-saving device, something thrown in as an afterthought, and when Zanuck was apprised of their “gentlemen’s agreement” in March 1936, he expressed no interest whatsoever in taking advantage of it. Ironically, he was then in the early stages of developing a picture about Welsh journalist Henry Morton Stanley’s 1871 expedition in search of the Scottish missionary David Livingstone, the project that would ultimately bring Tracy back to the studio.
According to screenwriter Philip Dunne, Zanuck’s early attempts at a scenario were completely lacking in suspense and, from a historical perspective, “pure eyewash.” Failing to break the back of the story didn’t diminish Zanuck’s faith in the idea, however. In June 1937 he sent a thirteen-member crew, headed by second-unit specialist Otto Brower, to Africa to shoot authentic backgrounds and wildlife. Having previously been on safari himself, Zanuck gave Brower a list of locations—Lake Nakura for flamingo shots, Arusha for the Zanzibar sequence, Serengeti for various animals—and Mrs. Martin (Osa) Johnson as technical adviser. Included in the Brower company were three doubles, one calculated to match Tyrone Power, whom Zanuck envisioned for the lead. Over a period of four months Brower and his crew made nine camp moves across Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, exposing nearly a hundred thousand feet of film.
Prior to Brower’s departure, Zanuck had made Stanley and Livingstone part of the studio’s 1937–38 program, lining it up alongside Alexander’s Ragtime Band and In Old Chicago as his top pictures of the year. While Brower was away, Sam Hellman, Ernest Pascal, and Edwin Harvey Blum attempted screenplays. Zanuck thought Hellman’s dialogue weak: “Not dramatized enough—punch into personal story—too narrative.” By the end of the year, the project had been tabled. When Dunne and his writing partner, Julien Josephson, were assigned in the spring of 1938, they read all that had come before and tried to get out of it. Zanuck, in the meantime, had told the story to director Henry King, and it was King who suggested a complete reversal of Stanley’s motivation.
“Forget the silly business of the missionary befriending the boy from the work house,” Dunne wrote in his memoir. “The new Stanley has never even heard of Livingstone. He’s a hard-boiled city news reporter whose only ambition is to bust the Tweed ring in New York, but he’s browbeaten by his equally hard-boiled publisher, Bennett, into undertaking the search for Livingstone as a great publicity stunt for the newspaper … Kicking and screaming, as it were, Stanley—no longer handsome Tyrone Power but now rough Spencer Tracy—goes unwillingly to Africa.”
Tracy, who knew Zanuck from his polo days and Looking for Trouble, took time to meet with him while awaiting the start of A New York Cinderella. Expecting to do Northwest Passage in the spring, Tracy wasn’t enthused about a second consecutive adventure subject nor the prospect of spending half a year on location. A loose loan-out agreement existed between M-G-M and Fox as a result of the latter having loaned Tyrone Power to Metro for Marie Antoinette. In return, Zanuck expected Myrna Loy for The Rains Came and Tracy for Stanley and Livingstone.2 King had come aboard as director, and by November 26, 1938, Tracy was officially set for the film.
The script was finalized on January 18, 1939, and the picture, budgeted at $1,338,000, began shooting on February 2 at the Fox Hills studio Tracy had once considered home. Now merely a guest, he found himself assigned skater Sonja Henie’s dressing room, an insistent blue-and-white affair with lace trimmings and gewgaws throughout. He told columnist Harrison Carroll he was afraid to turn around for fear of knocking something over.
They were three weeks into production when the academy dinner took place, and both Tracy and Walter Brennan came away with awards. (Brennan was Best Supporting Actor for his work in Kentucky, his second win in three years.) The following morning, both men were applauded by several hundred extras when they stepped onto the set. Although the shoot went smoothly enough, Tracy fretted over the line “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” and argued against its inclusion in the script. A perennial punch line—the quote may even have been apocryphal—he could think of it only in the context of a joke and was convinced that audiences would laugh.
“He came to me one day,” recalled King,
and said, “You don’t mean to tell me that you’re going to do that old chestnut about Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” And I said, “We have to do it. We couldn’t do the picture without it.” He said, “I can’t say it, I can’t say it.” Well, this worried him to death, but he had neglected to think [about it]…I said, “Spence, did you ever stop to think that this man has had that fever, that swamp fever, just a few days before this? You’ve carried him through all this, and now when he comes into Dr. Livingstone’s place he can hardly walk. And he sees this man. He says, ‘Doctor … Livingstone …’ ” Spence says, “I could kill you, I could murder you. You played the scene for me and I didn’t have sense enough to think about it.”
When the time came, Tracy got the line out, but it took several takes, he said, because he couldn’t say it without laughing.3 He bet Zanuck’s associate producer, Kenneth Macgowan, the preview audience would laugh as well, and—to take the curse off—told the old joke about the drunk who wanders into a bar to whoever visited the set. Having weathered the making of Marie Gallante, King was understandably wary of Tracy. “In vino veritas,” he would later say. “Get someone drunk and you find out what they really are like. They’re either sweet and lovable or ugly and hateful. Spencer was an ugly drunk.” Tracy, however, was good-natured and cooperative on Stanley and Livingstone, and when King had to stop a scene between Tracy and Cedric Hardwicke because of airplane noise outside, Tracy ran his tongue up the side of his mouth and casually remarked, “Over at M-G-M we have soundproof stages.”
He later said:
I’m slowly improving. I don’t go through the agony I did when I was making four or five pictures a year. Boy, it’s awfully hard to be good four times a year. Nowadays, I’m making three. And I take time out to try to get laughs on the set. If an airplane flies overhead and action has to stop till the sound dies away, I don’t go higher than a kite. I take things more calmly now. But—I haven’t reached the ultimate in calmness yet. The sitting, waiting, still gets me. It’s the only thing that gives me a hankering for the stage. I’d like to go back—not to stay, but once every two or three years—just to get a performance out of my system in one evening.
However much trouble the “I presume” line gave him, Tracy’s most impressive moment in the film came with his impassioned address before the Society of British Geographers, a speech totaling nearly four hundred words. King wanted to capture the scene in a single take, Stanley barely suppressing his rage at the society’s skeptical membership. “Dr. Livingstone is out there!” he insists, building to a crescendo. “He is old and he is sick and he needs your help to carry on the great work he has undertaken—the work that is indicated, however inadequately, upon those maps. Reject those maps, withhold your aid, and you destroy him. Reject those maps and you close Africa for a generation to come. Reject those maps, gentlemen, and you break faith with the greatest geographer and one of the greatest men of our times!”
Covered by two cameras, the stirring speech was unlike anything Tracy had yet attempted, three and a half minutes of uninterrupted screen time, flawlessly delivered, a virtuoso turn in a film that was otherwise more stoic than exciting. Gladys Hall, present on the set and expecting an interview, thought he “might really tuck in his chin this time, beetle his eyebrows and go ‘Harrummph!’ and give me the business,” but instead he went over, ever conscious of downplaying the work he always put into the job of acting, plopped down in a chair beside her, and said, “Ever hear the one about the drunk …?”
Toward the end of production, Hedy Lamarr, newly married to Fox writer-producer Gene Markey, visited the set, hailing him as “Spennzer” and standing in for actress Nancy Kelly for a shot where Stanley is standing on the deck of an East Indian steamship and looking down at the character of Eve Kingsley. Only the week earlier, Tracy had told Sheilah Graham that Lamarr was “in a spot” with the shelving of I Take This Woman. “Do you realize,” he said, “it will be six months at least before the public sees Hedy in a picture? That makes a year off the screen for an actress who has made only one picture. Her next picture must be good—and don’t think Hedy doesn’t know it.”
He did a Lux broadcast the night of March 27, then boarded a train for Sun Valley, Idaho, to shoot the Wyoming Territory sequence that opens the picture. He worked all day on the twenty-ninth, leaving for home at 11:00 p.m. and arriving back in Los Angeles on the morning of March 31. He had time for tennis with Louise and a swim in the pool before reporting back to the Fox lot. He celebrated his birthday the following week with tennis, seven periods of polo, and dinner at home with Louise and the kids. He was thirty-nine years old and, as he told his family and friends, he was beginning to feel it.
1 Pat O’Brien’s performance as Father Jerry Connolly, a character clearly patterned after Father Tim, didn’t come until the release of Warners’ Angels With Dirty Faces in November 1938.
2 Officially, Tracy’s participation in Stanley and Livingstone was entirely separate from the deal for Power and was apparently based on Tracy’s personal conviction that he did indeed owe Fox another picture.
3 There was no panting in the take that was used, just the weary realization on Stanley’s part that after nine months on the African continent his quest has finally paid off. “Dr. Livingstone,” he says with growing certainty as the figure approaches, adding the “I presume” as an afterthought.