CHAPTER 15
Tracy saw Stanley and Livingstone in a studio projection room on April 11, 1939, and thought it only fair. “Might be entertaining, not great,” he wrote in his book. “Predict fair bus[iness], fair reviews. Just so-so.” He left the next day for another try at the European vacation that had gone so disastrously awry the previous year. Frank Whitbeck accompanied him as far as Omaha, where a meeting had been scheduled with Father Flanagan and Bishop Ryan to discuss the possibility of a sequel to Boys Town.
Tracy wasn’t keen on the idea, but he felt a profound sense of responsibility toward Father Flanagan and the young citizenry that had embraced him so fervently. The studio cleared a profit of more than $2 million on the picture, yet the institution itself had seen only $5,000 in rights money. Also, the tidal wave of donations Flanagan expected after the film’s release failed to materialize, and contributions, in fact, dropped sharply, supporters assuming that Boys Town was suddenly flush with cash. Perversely, the only thing the movie succeeded in boosting was the number of applicants for admission, most of whom had to be turned away. “Next time I come to Hollywood,” Flanagan told the New York Times, “I’m going to get myself an agent.”
Tracy arrived in New York on April 16 and spent the week playing tennis, taking long walks around the city, and seeing shows. As always, he delighted in the big musicals—the Noël Coward revue Set to Music, Olsen and Johnson’s Hellzapoppin’, Jimmy Durante and Ethel Merman in Stars in Your Eyes. He dined one night with Helen Hayes and Charles MacArthur, another with Beatrice Lillie. Louise arrived on the twenty-first, and they sailed for England the same day.
(PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
The weather was beautiful, the seas calm. They reached Cherbourg on the morning of the twenty-sixth, Southampton later that afternoon. Tracy had heard the British crowds were fierce, but he was completely unprepared for the near riot that greeted him as the boat train pulled into Waterloo Station. The place was mobbed, mostly by fur-clad women eager to get a glimpse of the star of Boys Town. “The crowd that charged him on the platform must have been at least a thousand strong and at times looked nasty,” the British film critic Caroline Lejeune reported. “It was a case of get out or get under.” A porter and six women were trampled in the melee; Arturo Toscanini, famed conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, was swept off his feet and flung against a baggage truck.
The railway police closed in around the Tracys, and since they couldn’t slip them down the milk chute as they had Robert Taylor, they drew all the near-side blinds on the train and then moved them through the off-side doors into an empty down-train, which they then ran back along the tracks to the last wayside station. Police told the throng, “Your hero has left,” but the women milled for hours, bouquets and orchids in hand, meeting all the trains as they arrived. “The crowd was still whooping and waiting at Waterloo,” Lejeune’s dispatch concluded, “when Mr. and Mrs. Tracy, rather white about the gills and a good deal shaken, slipped out unseen at Vauxhall onto a bare platform under the cold April stars.”
They shook up the staff at Claridge’s by rising at six the next morning, strolling the empty streets of London, Spence toting his 16mm movie camera, returning in time for a nine o’clock breakfast. They saw the changing of the guard, then took off for Windsor Castle. “What am I doing in London?” he said in answer to a reporter’s question. “Nothing. Just let London look after me. I have been trying to get here for two years. It was hardly worthwhile coming for such a short time, but I was determined to make this trip.” The studio arranged a formal news conference—his first ever—and he fielded questions while sipping a glass of Vichy. What did he think of London? What struck him most about it? “I’ve got to think fast,” he said. “People will try and make me pronounce on politics. Those questions have to be answered guardedly.” No, he said, he’d never had a proposal in the post. “An Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood? No, that’s something I’ve never heard of.”
He was asked about his newest picture. “I haven’t seen a finished version of Stanley and Livingstone,” he lied. “I don’t know—maybe it’s all right. You could take that subject fifty ways. I am sure that when I say ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume’ it’ll be one almighty laugh in every hall.” He said his next picture would be Northwest Passage with Wallace Beery and Robert Taylor, and then probably The Yearling. “I think that’s one of the finest books I’ve ever read. I’m hoping we’ll get round to it this summer.”
It rained almost every day. They saw Joe Kennedy, played tennis with his daughters Pat and Eunice, lunched with the Kennedy family. (“All the Kennedys,” Tracy once said, “remind me of my father.”) In Paris he discovered Maxim’s, with its crocks of thick yellow cream, and spent an evening in the company of actor Jean Gabin, the stocky Parisian “Everyman” whose career had, in many ways, paralleled his own. Gabin, he said, wanted him to remain in Paris and make a picture. “I will tell you what we do,” Gabin said. “We will make one picture here and then we will forget all about movies and go fishing—for a year.” Tracy suggested that Gabin come to Hollywood and make a picture there. “I can hardly talk French,” the actor responded. “How could I learn to talk English?”
Tracy enjoyed every minute of his time in France. In London the autograph hunters pursued him on bicycles. In Paris he was never once asked for his signature. “You’d go in a shop to buy something and order it delivered to your hotel. Invariably with the delivery would come a note from the shopgirl who waited on you to this effect: ‘I did not wish to embarrass you by telling you how much I enjoyed your last picture, so I am expressing that enjoyment in this note.’ ” They sailed from Le Havre on May 5, arrived at Southampton that evening, and left for home at midnight, affording Spence a brief look at Ireland, which, as far as he was concerned, made the entire trip worthwhile.
“We arrived in the morning at Cobb, and the sun was shining and there was Ireland before us. I’ve never experienced so deep a thrill. I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. This is where my grandparents had come from—this was my real homeland and the sensation was almost overpowering in its intensity. I was up on the bridge with Paddy, the old Irish pilot, and I guess he knew what was going on in my heart, because he smiled at me. ‘God bless you, lad,’ he said, ‘the door latch is always out.’ Some day, I’m going to Ireland and I’m going to take Pat O’Brien with me. What a time Pat would have over there.”
The return trip was nasty in comparison to the going—fog, rain, and rough seas, and the ship pitched furiously. Tracy was planning to meet up with Lincoln Cromwell in New York, as he was anxious for the young man to take his second year of internship in Europe. He was offering, in fact, to pay travel expenses for Cromwell and his new wife to make an investigatory trip over the summer. Upon docking, however, he was advised that his mother had suffered a stroke in Los Angeles, and he and Louise left for Chicago within hours. They were relieved to find Carrie doing “pretty well” in California and that her doctors expected her to make a complete recovery.
In Los Angeles he sat for a long interview with Ed Sullivan and seemed genuinely altered by the experience of visiting Europe. It appeared that everyone he encountered in England and France had seen Boys Town, and that the picture struck an undeniable chord with every segment of the audience.
After nearly a decade in Hollywood, Tracy had come to regard the broad canvas of the screen as a public trust, a place where the great social issues of the day could be defined and portrayed and where the spiritual values of hope and goodwill could be reinforced. The best characters, he said, gave voice to the ideals of the common man and sent people home “feeling that there was dignity to life and to living, and some point to muddling along.” He couldn’t help but note that after five years of indifferent pictures at Fox—virtually none of which had a transformative effect on an audience—he had risen to the very pinnacle of stardom on a core group of productions at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—Fury, San Francisco, Captains Courageous, and Boys Town. “I’ll tell you what I’d love to play: Grapes of Wrath. That is a story that has tremendous social significance to it. It’s big, important. It has guts. I wish that Darryl Zanuck could borrow me from Metro and Jim Cagney from Warners for that one. I promise you that we’d play the hell out of it, or at least die in the attempt.”
He went on to tell Sullivan that he thought Robert Morley’s rangy performance in Oscar Wilde “great”—it was the one Broadway play he had permitted himself—but he found the material itself repulsive, dealing as it did with the historic trial for pederasty (“gross indecency”) that led to Wilde’s undoing. “I left the theater feeling ashamed to have seen such a play. I felt sort of unclean, because to a normal person the topic is almost obscene. The play itself obscured the performance. After all, experienced actors shouldn’t have to prove they can give great performances. That should be taken for granted. The most important thing is for the play itself to have a buoyant effect on the audience.”
While Tracy refused to take the Academy Award seriously as a symbol of artistic merit, it did bolster his standing within the industry and underscore his growing popularity with the moviegoing public. Progressively more space was being devoted to him in newspapers—particularly by the syndicated columnists—and the yearly number of articles in the fan magazines had more than quadrupled since 1935. He naturally withdrew from such heightened interest, preferring to talk with Dick Mook and Gladys Hall and Ed Sullivan and, sometimes, to Louella Parsons, who always invoked their Freeport connections. (Parsons was born in Freeport in 1881 but had moved to Dixon, thirty miles south, by the time of Tracy’s birth in 1900.) Journalists were always hanging around the sets at Metro, but they were all carefully supervised and prohibited from talking to the stars without an okay from Howard Strickling.
Tracy did talk to journalists when he traveled, particularly in New York, where he figured he might one day return to the stage. “I had wires from Sam Behrman and Guthrie McClintic last season asking me if I were available for a play,” he told William Boehnel of the World-Telegram, “but when I replied that I thought I might be able to arrange it I never heard from them again. Maybe I’d better stick to Hollywood.” The more he worked with “some of the big directors,” he told his pal Mook, the more he realized what “really fine things” could be done in pictures. “I still hope to do more plays on the stage, but I’m still not big enough in pictures to dictate the terms of my contract. And the mounting quality of pictures compensates for not being able to do worthwhile stage plays—if I were lucky enough to find them.”
Emboldened by Tracy’s public comments, Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild approached him in the spring of 1939 with the idea of his starring in a revival of Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. He couldn’t argue with the quality of the material, and the play hadn’t been seen on Broadway since 1923, when a young Basil Sydney played the rebel Dudgeon. There was a whole generation of playgoers who had never seen it, Helburn argued, and another that had probably forgotten it. “And it occurred to me that now that Shaw has at last yielded to the movies [withGabriel Pascal’s production of Pygmalion], this one will be bound to come along soon and perhaps you and Metro might have ideas about it similar to mine.”
Louise thought it would be good for him to get out of Hollywood and the deadening routine of making movies, if only for a short while. “The motion picture business is a very demanding one in some ways,” she said.
Very. And it was very difficult [to adjust to it]…[Spence] was going to come out [to Hollywood] anyhow—the money and everything else was interesting—but I think he felt that this was something he could do in the daytime and then [he] would be free … Of course, that was not true. His nights were taken: he read scripts and then he studied for the next day. And although he didn’t do much studying, he thought a great deal about it. He even worked over weekends … He took it very, very seriously, and … he thought about so many little things. People say he’s so natural, [that] he just gets up and talks. He used to laugh about people saying things like that. If they but knew the time you take to just give that little bit, that particular line you throw away, its own thing. It wasn’t anything you just got up and did—that natural thing—and he did a great deal of that at night.
Tracy thought he might make a quick trip to New York to meet with Theresa Helburn, but then the decision was made to go ahead with Northwest Passage—despite the fact there was only half a script—and by July 4 he was in McCall, Idaho, for the start of production. It wasn’t a picture he particularly wanted to make anymore, and although he kicked about going, the whole project had been designed around him and there was no getting out of it. His location work so far had been limited to Riverside, Catalina, La Jolla—day trips. Boys Town meant twelve days in Nebraska, but apart from the heat they weren’t exactly roughing it. Northwest Passage would be an altogether different experience—six weeks on the banks of Payette Lake, a hundred miles north of Boise near the Oregon border. It would be an unusually physical shoot with a lot of river work, a lot of stunt work, a lot of people.
Tracy’s character was a colonial frontiersman and Indian fighter, a man as lean and rugged as the times and the terrain could make him. Yet he had ballooned to 189 pounds—the heaviest he had ever been—and hardly looked the part. He vowed that he would lose ten pounds in time for the picture, but as far as Louise could tell, the day he left for location he had lost just two of them. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “The food is going to be terrible, and between that and the heat and the ticks and getting up at five-thirty in order to start shooting at seven, I’ll be thin enough when we reach the trek back from St. Francis. And there won’t be a drug store or a sundae anywhere within miles.” When she saw him off at the station, she noticed a large box of chocolates tucked under the coat he had draped over one arm. “Just a little present mother gave me,” he said airily.
To make the trip he recruited Pat Elsey, his trainer and masseur, to come with him and help get him into shape. Elsey would be in addition to his stand-in, Jerry Schumacher, and his new dresser, Larry Keethe. Louise would come to visit at some point during the ordeal, and although the studio would have a doctor on site, he persuaded Howard Dennis to be there for at least the first week. Director King Vidor, while amused at the posse Tracy gathered, had to admit the picture depended on him, and were he to fall ill or somehow injure himself, the entire mechanism would grind to a halt. “He was well taken care of,” Vidor said. “I guess in the long run it was more important that he remain well than anyone else.”
Tracy, who had been attached to the film for nearly two years, thought Kenneth Roberts’ best-selling novel a great read but was increasingly dubious about filming the entire story, which could rival the anticipated running time of Gone With the Wind. Book I of Roberts’ novel covered Major Robert Rogers’ daring incursion deep into enemy territory during the French and Indian War, culminating in his raid on the Abenaki Indian village of St. Francis, where the village and fully a quarter of its population were destroyed. Book II—the second half—followed Rogers’ later years, his life as a profligate, his descent into alcoholism and financial ruin. It was the same trajectory Tracy observed in the play Oscar Wilde, and he feared that Rogers’ fate would obscure his performance, as Wilde’s downfall, in his judgment, had obscured Morley’s. “I’ll play him up to the point where he has achieved his objective,” Tracy declared, “but I’ll be darned if I’ll play him when he becomes a drunkard. Audiences won’t want to see him in that stage of his life.”
Roberts’ 709-page book was published in June 1937 and was already in its eighth printing when M-G-M bought the picture rights in September of that year, planning to make Northwest Passage its first feature in the radiant new Technicolor process. Woody Van Dyke was the first director assigned to the film, and it was Van Dyke who spent two weeks scouting locations in British Columbia. Tracy was the studio’s “immediate choice” to play Major Rogers; the sunburn he got in Hawaii in May 1938 had been requested specifically for the purpose of making Technicolor costume tests. Van Dyke fell away from the project over delays and a scheduling conflict, and King Vidor, whose direction of The Citadel the previous year had brought him an Academy Award nomination, was selected to replace him. Vidor brought Laurence Stallings, one of his favorite writers, to the project, and the two men quickly figured out a way to incorporate both halves of Roberts’ novel into a single coherent screenplay. “Hunt Stromberg, the producer, didn’t go for it,” Vidor remembered, “so he had a writer named Talbot Jennings come in and begin work.”
Vidor memoed Eddie Mannix: “As yet there is no complete story line upon which Mr. Stromberg and I have agreed … The trek to St. Francis and the return within the next few days will be in good shape … But I want to go on record here that I am definitely against starting the production without a full script, so that we know where we are going.” Jennings began revising Stallings’ screenplay while Vidor made preparations to leave for McCall under protest. “At this time,” he said, “I had to bring the production up to the location because the water level of the lake where we were shooting was going down. We had to start filming right away. When I was leaving, Stromberg told me, ‘By the time you finish the first part of the picture, I’ll have the second part sent up.’ ”
The company had taken over a huge summer resort camp on the shore of the lake, and some four hundred actors and technicians—including Tracy, Robert Young, Walter Brennan, Nat Pendleton, and Isabel Jewell—were housed there. A tent city for the 450 Indians used in the film stood three miles north of the main camp. A special train from Los Angeles brought twelve carloads of props and three additional carloads of uniforms and costumes. There were seventy-five rough-looking characters—mostly stunt personnel—imported from Hollywood to play the principal men under Rogers’ command. Another 175 were recruited from among the local lumberjacks and miners. French frontiersmen and oarsmen were also hired locally, and many did double duty as the day’s work required. The Idaho National Guard supplied the 225 British soldiers needed to man Fort Ticonderoga; in all, it was said the company employed over fifteen thousand extras and bit players.
Tiny McCall, population several hundred, was overwhelmed by the hordes seeking employment on the film. “There were quite a few unsavory characters joining the gold rush,” Vidor’s assistant director, Harrold Weinberger, recalled, “including a half dozen or so whores up from Boise and other points south or north, and a troupe of professional gamblers … The hookers were occupying half the rooms in the small and only hotel in town. I saw them all many times about town. They weren’t bad at all to look at. They were prospering. I was told their rates ran from $10 to $25 a trip. Pretty good for the 1939 economy … The hotel management must have gotten some kind of cut considering all the towels and linens that were required.”
Tracy managed to endear himself to actor Robert Young during their first morning on location. “We were in this renovated camp which had been unused for about 20 years,” Young said, “so you can imagine what kind of shape it was in … So they stuck up a service tent and the caterer brought the tables and chairs and the stove and everything else in there. Well, we went to breakfast, or whatever the hell the first meal was that we had there, and Spence stood up, threw the plate clear across the tent.” They had been served powdered eggs. “Oh, it was awful. He went right to the unit manager [and] said, ‘When you correct the situation, I’ll be back. I’ll be on the set. Otherwise, don’t bother me. Don’t even talk to me.’ Well, you don’t think the telephone wires didn’t get hot the next day. I don’t know how the hell they produced it that quickly, but the next day there was a new unit manager. It was the most incredible transformation you ever saw. Overnight, there was a complete transformation; we had the most divine food … I watched him and I thought to myself, man that’s great. That’s power.”
Filming began with Rogers’ address to his men, crudely mapping their route on a surface of rock. One of the men graphically describes the atrocities of the Abenaki warriors against their fellow Rangers, then Rogers goes on to suggest fates of a similar sort for the settlers on the border farms—the survivors of whom now comprise much of his force. (“If it was over quick, they were lucky.”) Grimly determined, they say nothing, all eyes fixed on their leader. “Now, if there’s any man here who doesn’t want to follow me against these Indians, he can step out now and nothing will be said at home.” And, of course, no one does.
Tracy held Rogers taut during the scene, letting the words and the images grip the audience with the harshness of their clarity. Maintaining Rogers’ intensity during the balance of the film while avoiding a one-note performance would be a cruelly taxing job. The first two weeks on location involved some of the heaviest physical labor of the entire shoot, particularly an arduous sequence in which the Rangers drag their whaleboats over a steep hill to elude the French. “I said, ‘Well, just include me out,’ ” Walter Brennan, who was making his third picture alongside Tracy, remembered. “They said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Rogers’ Rangers only lugged those boats over the hill once. We lugged them over ten times and they were real boats.’ Boy, that was a strenuous job …”
Tracy was no happier than Brennan, and there were exchanges between King Vidor and Hunt Stromberg about the possibility of bringing the entire company home. “Young, Brennan and I wore out our Rogers’ uniforms in two days,” Tracy said. “Pine branches, boulders, underbrush, swamp, mud, river rocks and things …” Robert Young, playing the fictional Langdon Towne, could remember having to strip outside his cabin each night—as did all cast members—and throw his clothes onto a sheet to more clearly see the ticks crawl off. “We weren’t wearing buckskin, we were wearing suede, or something like that, to approximate buckskin. We grew our beards. We weren’t allowed to wash our clothes, and we went through mud and slime and … oh, unbelievable. It kept getting worse, and then we’d hang those things out at night and they would turn sour. If you got on the downwind side you couldn’t stand it; you’d faint. [It would] make you throw up, it was so bad.”
Even with Pat Elsey on hand, Tracy had to be bullied into the routine of a daily rubdown and dry clothes. “He becomes so thoroughly the character that he is portraying that he forgets to take the sort of precautions which he needs as a star,” Elsey said at the time. “He depends on me to take those precautions for him.” King Vidor thought Tracy a bit of a pill, even as, in Vidor’s estimate, he made up for it. “As long as somebody’s giving you a marvelous performance, you just don’t worry about the little things.” Tracy, he said, wasn’t difficult to handle or direct, but he did have his days.
He kept threatening that he was going home from location. I tried and tried to think up something to do. Finally, I told my assistant director to go over to Boise, find a good-looking woman and put her on salary secretly, buy her some nice-looking clothes, and employ her to just come and sit and watch the shooting. You know, as a tourist. And so we did this. It gave Spencer someone to play up to, you know? To perform for. He’d go over and talk to her between takes. But one day, after about four days of this, she came over to me and said, “It’s a nice easy job, Mr. Vidor, a pleasant job. But do I have to ride around in his automobile and listen to his problems?” Well, we told her she’d have to handle that herself. But that’s all she was employed to do—just be there, sit and watch like a tourist. And it worked! All of a sudden, he stopped talking about rushing home.
Stromberg, in Culver City, was sending new pages up nearly every day, convinced that Talbot Jennings was investing his scenes with “more strength and emotional warmth” than Stallings had managed. Tracy hated shooting with revised dialogue, which reminded him of the old days in stock where part of the job was forgetting old material while absorbing the new. On July 20 he cabled Eddie Mannix:
SERIOUS CHANGES IN DIALOGUE JUST BEFORE SHOOTING ARE BAD ENOUGH IN THE STUDIO, BUT HERE THEY ARE IMPOSSIBLE ON TOP OF PHYSICAL HANDICAPS. SOME DECISION MUST BE MADE AS TO WHAT WE ARE GOING TO SHOOT. I HAVE STUDIED AND BELIEVE IN NEW JENNINGS SCRIPT AND THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO SHOOT IT. I ALSO UNDERSTAND VIDOR’S POSITION IN WANTING TO COMBINE [THE] TWO, BUT I CANNOT ASSUME RESPONSIBILITY FOR PERFORMANCE WHEN THIS IS DONE ON THE SET.
Stromberg promptly made the decision to send Talbot Jennings to Payette Lake. Vidor and his crew were shooting the burning of St. Francis, an extraordinarily brutal sequence for its time, involving the same controlled-burn techniques pioneered for Gone With the Wind. Exposed negative was flown nightly to Los Angeles, where it was processed at Technicolor’s Hollywood plant and sent on to the studio. Stromberg would see the rushes and then have them sent to Payette via Boise where Vidor and his crew would have them screened in what was once a gambling hall.1 It took twelve days to complete the sequence, and by the time the final takes were made, the copper tubing that fed the flames with gasoline had literally melted away. The remains of the ten-acre village were doused with 150 gallons of kerosene, and the heat from the blaze was so intense it could be felt against the granite cliffs on the opposite side of the Payette River.
Tracy grew increasingly irritable as production wore on, anxious to finish and intolerant of anything that might cause a delay. “He had an expression,” Vidor remembered. “I think it was ‘Happy days!’ which meant they just were not worrying about the film, not worrying about anything. There is always a big group in a company like that; they have hours and hours to sit around and play cards and yak without having the responsibility of making the film. That always seemed to annoy him and he’d say, ‘Happy days, happy days!’ They were just making a lark out of the whole thing.”
On location near McCall, Idaho, with director King Vidor, 1939. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Tracy’s big speech in the picture comes when Rogers and his men reach Fort Wentworth and discover it abandoned. Running up ahead of them, Rogers takes in its weathered boards, the brush sprouting in its central yard, the utter emptiness of the place where they were to have had their first real food in weeks, and as his men approach excitedly, he leans up against a collapsed section of gate and breaks into tears. It was part of Vidor’s plan to signal a crack in Rogers’ heroic facade, a hint of the trouble to come in the second half of the story. Tracy, said Vidor, fought him bitterly: “At the end of the picture he breaks down for a minute when the British are not there to meet him at the fort. Well, Spencer didn’t want to cry. I persuaded him, though, and he did it, and I think he liked the results. But he didn’t want to, not at all. He said, ‘A strong man would never cry.’ ”
Pulling himself together, Rogers rallies his demoralized men. (“Now the first thing we have to do is get this fort in shape—for Amherst and his men when they get here with the food.”) And when they balk he launches into what was dubbed his “Moses speech” by King Vidor: “Moses went without the slightest taste of food for 40 days! He didn’t have any good cooked roots. No, not a thing. He didn’t have a single bite, did he Towne?” The first take was spoiled when the bulky Technicolor camera ran out of film, the second when Tracy stumbled over a word in a Bible passage. Vidor called for a third take, and Tracy did the entire three-minute-and-thirty-five-second speech flawlessly, his character teetering on the brink of madness, a shrewd amalgam of desperation and hope. When he finished there was dead silence. Vidor called “Cut!” and the crew erupted in a burst of applause.
More than any other bit in the picture, it was this one scene that caused Vidor to regard Tracy as just about the best actor with whom he ever worked. “Everything that Spence did,” he said, “came over with tremendous conviction.” Stromberg wired Vidor:
AGREE WITH YOU THAT SPENCER’S MOSES SCENE IS GREAT, JUST SCREENED IT WITH TALBOT AND WE WERE VERY ENTHUSIASTIC.
Vidor suggested that Stromberg communicate his enthusiasm directly to Tracy, and Stromberg did so, wiring:
HAVE SCREENED RUSHES FROM TWO TO THREE TIMES EACH DAY THEY ARRIVE WITH ONE SCREENING DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO SIZING UP YOUR PERFORMANCE AND TO SAY THAT I AM ENTHUSED AND ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE THAT WE ARE HEADED FOR A WONDERFUL ACHIEVEMENT IS PUTTING IT CONSERVATIVELY.
The company finished at Payette Lake on August 14 after forty-two days in the wilderness, and resumed work eight days later in the relative comfort of M-G-M’s Lot 3. Tracy had time for a few days at home, swimming and playing tennis, but there was no polo, and after two months away from the fields, he was anxious and sore and unable to sleep. He had played fairly regularly up until the death of Captain C.T.I. “Pat” Roark on February 21.
Roark, forty-three, was a nine-goal player, Irish-born and mourned on four continents. It was the first fatal accident among the game’s high-goal players, a very public reminder of how easily even a world-class player could lean forward and put a shot across the front of his horse and get the stick momentarily caught in its legs. Roark’s horse stumbled while up against a team of international cup players, threw him heavily to the ground, then rolled over and crushed him. Spence had played that morning at Alhambra’s Midwick Country Club, and he and Louise were among the horrified crowd of five thousand when the accident occurred later that same day. Roark lingered for two days without regaining consciousness, then died from his injuries following brain surgery.
Tracy took Pat Roark’s death hard. “I think he blamed himself for it,” said David Caldwell, who was fourteen at the time and whose parents, Orville and Audrey Caldwell, were among the Tracys’ closest friends. Had Roark played opposite Tracy that morning at Midwick? Could the six periods Tracy noted in his datebook have left Roark unduly fatigued? Off his game opposite the hard-riding cavaliers of Hurlingham? Had his horse been part of the morning action? (Tracy noted in his book that he had tried three different ponies that day.) The answers are all lost to time, and the field itself has long since been given over to development. Years later, in 1972, when Jane Ardmore asked Louise why Spence had given up the game, she said it was after the death of Captain Pat Roark, “a close friend.”
He took to stick-and-balling at home with Johnny every morning, riding through the alfalfa behind the house, but grew increasingly anxious about it. He bought a life insurance policy—he was already covered for health and accident through Lloyd’s of London—but when he had dinner with a friend on the night of March 18, he was so “nervous [he] did not want to come home” and instead spent the night in a guest house. On the twenty-sixth—Passion Sunday—he went to Mass but ran late in the rain and missed lunch with the kids. That evening he visited the Flemings—Vic had assumed direction of Gone With the Wind—and stayed until midnight. “[I] thought I was nervous,” he observed in his book, “until I saw Victor. Bad shape.”
He managed seven chukkers of polo on his birthday and played in a charity game on Easter Sunday, but otherwise he didn’t go back again until May 19, after returning from his trip to Europe. He threw himself into tennis but wasn’t very good at it—Louise routinely beat him—and it didn’t counter his weight gains as effectively nor wear him out as thoroughly.2
Having Pat Elsey on location at Payette Lake helped get him through the picture, but massage could only treat the symptoms of the tension that was continually building inside of him. (“Spencer always had the motor running,” said Frank Tracy, “even as a kid.”) And being sixteen months sober meant he could no longer use booze as a release. “I was sorry to see him sell his boat,” Clark Gable remarked. “He used to work off excess steam on that. He’s a guy who needs something to help him work off excess steam.”
“It would be wonderful,” Tracy had told an interviewer that previous year, “if I could drop my worrying when I leave the set—not carry that home with me, not keep on agonizing after hours about whether a role is good or whether I’m giving it everything it could have. I don’t force my worries on other people as a rule, but I cannot escape them myself. That’s the penalty for working so hard at my job. I can’t get to sleep at night for the nerves jumping. And then I wake up in the middle of the night, thinking of something I should have done or ought to do.”
Louise said:
I saw that he was getting more and more nervous. I wanted very much for him, regardless of what it was, to just insist that he have six months or, if he had to, a year [off]—not just sometimes [when] he would have six months [off] but he would never know [when]. There might be three pictures come up, and he was always in the midst of something. If [we] could just leave and we could go someplace … I can remember we talked about [going] down in the West Indies, one of those places, and I felt that if he could just do that, just get away and really forget. [That if] he knew he wasn’t going to do a picture for, you know, a year maybe … and he did try to think about [it].
Tracy had just a week off between the finish of I Take This Woman and the start of Stanley and Livingstone, and his subsequent five-week vacation was more hurried than relaxing. He was idle seven weeks before the start of Northwest Passage, but there was tremendous uncertainty surrounding that project and endless rewrites. Seven weeks into production, only half the projected film was complete, and he was looking at a comparable period of time to finish the other half. Then they were talking of putting him directly into another picture or attempting to salvage the decidedly worthless Hedy Lamarr vehicle for yet a third time. On August 10, 1939, as the exterior scenes at Crown Point were being filmed, Tracy wired Leo Morrison instructing him, as per Louise’s suggestion, to arrange a six-month leave of absence or, barring that, to get him out of his M-G-M contract altogether.
He was in the studio tank matching river shots—the famed “human chain” sequence—when Frank Whitbeck advised him that word of his telegram had reached Eddie Mannix. He spent the next morning—August 24—in the tank again, then went home in the afternoon with a bad head cold. In a state of terrible fatigue he wrote Mannix directly:
Frank told me that you seemed upset because of my wire to Leo Morrison which, I understand, reached you secondhanded. I was just as much upset at feeling I had to wire Morrison, but you must realize that the stress of the moment and general conditions, coming together as they did, and the fact that I seemed out of touch with anyone at the studio may have had something to do with it. Anyway, I am sorry it happened because, whatever the problem, I certainly have no desire to hurt you.
The problem seems to be the culmination of many things, and it seems to me that the only thing to do is to get away for an indefinite period upon the completion of this picture. If I were ill physically, that would be the only thing I could do, and, as I certainly am mentally, it seems the only alternative which holds some hope. That may not solve it, but the fact remains that the problem is there and, at the moment, I am at a total loss as to just how to work it out.
At the outset, please believe that in no sense is there any quarrel with the studio or with anything they have done in my regard. I hope I appreciate that without Metro and the help I received here Heaven only knows where I would be now. Whatever arises out of this, I sincerely hope it will never be considered anything but a situation which must be worked out with complete good feeling between the studio and myself.
I am fully cognizant and appreciate to the utmost that the pictures I am given are the best pictures that the studio has to offer, and the parts, the best that any actor could hope for. It is just that I hope to prolong my value to the studio; to protect my health, both mental and physical, and to preserve whatever it is that I have as long as I can for my family.
I once promised Mr. Mayer and you, too, I think, that if the time ever came when I felt I should stop, I would tell you. It seemed to me that the time has come. Louise has gone through trying periods with me, and is going through probably the most trying now, and feels as I do.
I feel that perhaps, in the future, if an arrangement could be made whereby I could do a picture, then have a definite vacation period, the mental stress I subject myself to, or inflict upon myself, during the making of a picture would be lessened with the knowledge that, when I finished, I might relax. I say might.
I realize your great problems in regard to production, and I want to be fair. That is why I want you to know immediately how I feel, and I also would like to have the matter settled as I probably have eight more weeks of hard work on this picture, and I would like to do it with as much peace of mind as possible.
You may not be in sympathy with some of the foregoing, and you may even think it self-indulgence—I hope that it is not. Some of us have strange problems—all of us different ones—and no one rule can be set to govern any, or all, of us. At any rate, what I have said here has been written after many sleepless nights of thought, and it is honest. After all, I have little to gain by all this except, I hope, some peace of mind.
Tracy was still in bed on the twenty-eighth, running a fever of 102 degrees, when Mannix and the M-G-M legal department started grappling with the question of how to respond. An oral statement of the company’s attitude was recommended unless there was a definite refusal on Tracy’s part to render services at the start of his next picture. Nobody wanted to antagonize him while Northwest Passage was still in production, and so the studio interiors and the film’s early scenes in the village of Portsmouth were made in an atmosphere of affable silence. “He was very intuitive,”Robert Young said of Tracy, “and whatever he did, he just always came out right. [Vidor] never talked to him. I mean, what’s the point in talking to him? Tracy, sort of, almost unconsciously, knew more about how that scene should be played than the director did.”
Vidor finished the first half of the picture on September 15, 1939, and the cast was retained on salary while Stromberg and Talbot Jennings polished the second half of the script. The standoff that Mannix had feared would come with the completion of Northwest Passage never took place. Tracy’s constant fretting over expenses—John’s care and education, Louise and Susie, Carroll, their mother, his aunt Mame’s medical bills, his aunt Jenny and her daughter—would only intensify were his income suddenly to cease. (“He worked so hard and had such a big tow line,” as his cousin Jane put it.) He’d never be able to relax, and if he did take six months off, he could never be sure they’d still want him when he came back. “I couldn’t do that,” he finally said to Louise. “I couldn’t stay away like that and wonder. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it.”
One of the steadying mechanisms in Tracy’s life was a weekly dinner with a few pals to talk shop and swap stories. It started with actor Frank McHugh’s wife, whose stepfather was a minister in West Hartford, Connecticut. They were trying to raise money for a Sunday school program, and someone got the idea of sending a blank autograph book out to Frank, who was at Warner Bros. with Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney. “Now Frank NEVER asked anybody for autographs,” said Mrs. McHugh, the actress Dorothy Spencer, “but he said, ‘Well, for Katherine [Dorothy’s mother] I’ll do it.’ ” Four loose pages from the book were dispatched, with the request that Frank sign one and have the other three signed by O’Brien, Cagney, and Spencer Tracy.
“Spence was at M-G-M,” Frank McHugh recalled, “and I did not know his home address or phone. So I sent a letter and the blank page to him [at the studio] and asked him to sign. He did, and enclosed a letter in the return [envelope] to the effect that he thought it was rather sad that old friends, living in the same town, had to communicate by mail, and suggested that the four of us get together for dinner. In the meantime, Jim and Spence had dinner together and talked it over and decided that the four of us should get together regularly and talk and dine. That is: Spence, Jim, Pat, and myself. Which we did.”
The meetings began in February 1939. O’Brien drank scotch, but McHugh was on the wagon and Cagney didn’t drink at all, save for an occasional glass of wine. They’d go out for dinner and end up at the Trocadero for ice cream and cookies. Actor Lynne Overman was the first added member, McHugh having known him since 1926. Dry and insinuative, Overman was, in McHugh’s words, “one of the wisest, wittiest, and gentlest companions” he’d ever known. “He had a keen sense of good taste for [the] excellent but simple things of life. Food and drink seemed to be his hobby. You could also add ladies.” Frank Morgan and Ralph Bellamy later completed the core group, and it became a Wednesday night tradition, the various members dropping in and out as their work schedules permitted. Their wives, who never joined in, called it “the Boys’ Club.”
According to Cagney, it was columnist Sidney Skolsky who hung the name “Irish Mafia” on the group, although Morgan was German, Bellamy was English, and Allen Jenkins, who joined in occasionally, was of early American stock. “There was no thought of it having anything to do with our Irishness,” Cagney said. “But Skolsky, of course, had to make a big thing of it and call it the Irish Mafia. Such nonsense. We happened to be people who liked each other and that is all.”
Stromberg continued to wrestle with Northwest Passage into November 1939. Originally the plan had been to film the entire book and release it with an intermission, as David Selznick intended to do with Gone With the Wind. When King Vidor wrapped the first half, however, it was over two hours in length and had cost more than $2.5 million—extraordinary for its time. And, unlike GWTW, the picture had, for all practical purposes, an all-male cast and virtually none of what was politely referred to at the time as “feminine interest.” At a negative cost of $4 million, Northwest Passage would surpass Ben-Hur as the most expensive picture in M-G-M’s fifteen-year history. In November it was prudently decided to finish the picture with a new ending and release it as Northwest Passage (Book I—Rogers’ Rangers) with the intention of filming Book II as a separate feature once Book I had proven itself commercially.
The core of the group that came to be known—erroneously—as the Irish Mafia. Left to right: James Cagney, Frank McHugh, Pat O’Brien, and Tracy. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
“I did the entire picture in three months of work,” Vidor recounted,
and at the end of that time I still had not received the second part of the script. I called the studio and they said, “Come back.” So I loaded up the trains with all of our stuff and we came back. When I saw the producer he said, “Keep the actors on salary. We’ll have it in another week.” They were sitting right where I had left them three months before. They were probably still working on the same line of dialogue. After another week no progress had been made, so the head of the studio said, “Take these people off salary.” I went to New York and started to work on something else. After I got to New York they called me up. Jack Conway had written a different ending to the story. We didn’t have jet travel then, so I said, “Okay, let Conway shoot the tag,” and left it at that.
Tracy was happy to be done with the picture and hoped the issue of Book II would never come up again. “When a truly historical character is the hero of a bestselling novel, then you are really up against it,” he said wearily. “Everyone who reads the novel has his own picture of the physical and mental characteristics of a man like Rogers. The actor can read everything available on the character, pick out his more human or understandable traits, and go from there, discarding the unessentials. But he is likely to disappoint a lot of people … I have tried to get Rogers’ mental attitude, his psychology. I don’t know whether I have succeeded; I can only hope.”
While he was on location with Northwest Passage, enthusiasm at Fox was building for Stanley and Livingstone. On July 11 associate producer Kenneth Macgowan wired him at McCall:
THE PREVIEW WAS REALLY EXTRAORDINARY. WHEN WE GOT TO THE THEATER IN INGLEWOOD WE WERE DISMAYED TO FIND THAT ABOUT THREE-FOURTHS OF THE AUDIENCE RANGED FROM BABES IN ARMS AND FIVE YEAR OLDS TO HIGH SCHOOL BOYS AND GIRLS. THE AVERAGE AGE COULDN’T HAVE BEEN OVER FIFTEEN. TO OUR SURPRISE AND DELIGHT THEY WENT FOR THE PICTURE HOOK LINE AND SINKER. EVERY REACTION WAS SPLENDID.
By the time the press preview took place at the end of the month, Zanuck was talking up the idea of a sequel covering Stanley’s later life and career in politics, a notion predicated on the availability of Tracy, an increasingly unlikely proposition. Zanuck never got the flippant tone he sought to achieve for Stanley, and the Reporter thought the picture “almost severely scholarly in its approach.” It was, nevertheless, a big and appealing film, idealistic in its posture and grand in its scope, the African footage giving it the texture, in parts, of a documentary. That it lacked dramatic punch was more a failing of the screenplay than of the cast or the director, but it also lacked the kind of hokum that often distinguished a Hollywood biography, at least up to the end, where Stanley (hardly the salvationist the movie suggests) returns to Africa to the strains of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
Contrary to Tracy’s early assessment, Variety predicted “socko biz” for Stanley and Livingstone and turned out to be right. Strong billboard and snipe support from the studio—and some unseasonably rainy weather—helped fill the New York Roxy, where Tracy’s name meant considerably more than it had in the old days. The picture sustained a three-week stand, then went out as the first big Fox release of the new season. With I Take This Woman on the shelf and Northwest Passage still in production, it stood to be Tracy’s only release for the year 1939. “Wrong again!” he wrote in amending his earlier prognostication. “Big hit.”
Until Stanley and Livingstone, Tracy had been off screen for nearly a year—since Boys Town—an almost intolerable length of time for a major star. Yet his absence hadn’t affected his standing with either exhibitors or the public. “Comes the revolution!” wrote Edwin Schallert in anticipation of the year-end exhibitor polls.
This year, if any, there will be the biggest shake-up ever in the stars that rule the motion picture box office. Four years the top-notcher in most polls, Shirley Temple, will probably register in about third place. Clark Gable, runner-up to the child star, may hit shakily around fifth or sixth. The winners will list about as follows: Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Shirley Temple, Sonja Henie, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Deanna Durbin, Mickey Rooney, Errol Flynn, and Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne as a team. The order may not be exactly correct, but those are the ones likely to be supreme and all the charges and counter-charges against this writer may be duly filed around the end of the year when listings are more or less officially proclaimed.
Schallert’s predictions were largely accurate. Tracy placed third behind Rooney and Power in the Quigley poll of moneymaking stars, but firmly ahead of Gable, who came in fourth. Shirley Temple’s standing had fallen due to advancing age—she was eleven—and Gable’s one release of the season had been the atypical Idiot’s Delight. (He was otherwise offscreen making Gone With the Wind for Selznick.) In October, Fortune published the results of a survey by Elmo Roper that asked two questions of the moviegoing public: Who is your favorite movie actor? and Who is your favorite movie actress? To the second question, 4.6 percent of all respondents answered Bette Davis, followed by Myrna Loy, Jeanette MacDonald, Irene Dunne, and Norma Shearer in descending order. (Temple, who ranked first in 1937, placed sixth.) To the first question, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore placed second through fifth, respectively. In first place, named by 5.6 percent of all respondents, was Spencer Tracy.
Tracy photographed at his Encino ranch, January 2, 1941. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Buoyed, perhaps, by the milestone, Tracy began looking at boats again, casually at first, and then with a certain urgency, given that he could, at last, permit himself a modicum of luxury. Off days were spent at the ranch playing tennis with Louise, lunching on the patio and sometimes meeting friends for tea. He saw Cagney, O’Brien, and the others on Wednesday nights, and celebrated nineteen months of sobriety on the first day of December. He had a wonderful Christmas that year, playing polo at Riviera on the twenty-fourth and visiting the newly married Gables, who had settled in Encino, later that same evening. On Christmas Day he went to Mass as usual, then spent the balance of the day loafing at home. Dinner was with the children, Louise, his mother, Carroll and Dorothy. “Beautiful weather,” he wrote in his book. “Much to be thankful for.”
1 In addition to cinematographer Sid Wagner’s regular crew, a complete Technicolor crew of sixteen headed by William V. Skall was part of the company.
2 “He had a very good eye with quick movements,” Louise said. “Could have played a good game of tennis if he had started early enough. But he never cared about doing anything like that. The theatre, yes. You gave your best, but he played games for fun. He never cared who won.”