CHAPTER 19

Not the Guy They See Up There on the Screen

Within days of receiving Matie Winston’s letter, the one that urged her to “take another flier,” Louise Tracy was presented with the opportunity she craved. “I’ve always had to have a project,” she later said. “Never occurred to me that it might be a big business.” Louise had met somebody who was part of a group of older people who were hard of hearing. “They met every so often, played cards and complained,” she said. “I felt that I wanted to get more deeply interested. I wondered what was going on and what could be done … I met once with them, but I didn’t know enough.”

Through the group she learned of a workshop at the University of Southern California for social workers, teachers, and parents of the hard of hearing. She took Johnny, now eighteen and home from school, and met Dr. Boris Markovin, who was the director of a reading clinic at USC. “He just asked, asked, asked questions,” she said of Dr. Markovin. “He want[ed] to know everything about everything.

“He said, ‘Mrs. Tracy, why don’t you do something for the deaf?’

“I said, ‘What could I do?’

“ ‘Well, of course you [could] do something. Didn’t you ever think of anything you’d like to do?’

“Then I said, ‘I guess if there was anything that I would like to do, it would be to have a little nursery school where children and their mothers could learn together.’

“ ‘Do it!’ he said.”

Dr. Markovin asked her to give a talk at the workshop banquet. When Louise wondered what she’d say, he told her just to tell them what she had told him. “You tell them this story,” he said, and she said that she would try.

Putting aside The Story of John, Louise worked up a speech and read it to Spence, who was preparing to start Keeper of the Flame. He thought it was great. “It was just about John and the difficulty of being deaf,” she said. “I know I was scared stiff.” She talked about coping with her son’s deafness, her struggle to find help, her realization that a deaf child could be taught. State schools for the deaf didn’t admit children until the age of six; who was supposed to teach them before six? “Maybe a dozen of us had heard about this program and Dr. Markovin had rounded them up. [We] had our punch and talked about the possibility of doing something. These were mostly mothers of young children. That was quite a step forward because somebody had to take the lead, and Dr. Markovin kept pushing me. He said, ‘Can’t we all meet someplace? Can’t we meet at your house?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll set a date …’ ”

The meeting took place on July 18, 1942, when fifty mothers crowded into the modest Tracy ranch house on White Oak. Louise called the meeting to order and introduced a speaker from the California Society of Crippled Children, who told the mothers that it was up to the parents of a handicapped child to see that things were done for him or her. Most parents, he said, wanted to pass their cares on to somebody else. An organization of parents could accomplish more than a single person. A Mrs. Richard Simon of San Francisco sent a plan for the formation of such an organization, its goals centering on prevention, education, rehabilitation, and employment. A roundtable discussion touched on matters of doctor education, audiometer tests for schoolchildren, and a lessening of the dependence on private schools, “because each school believes the way they teach is the right way.”

A motion was made for Louise to take the chairmanship.

I finally got my wits about me and I said I didn’t know what I could do. They were looking at me. “The only thing I have is a correspondence course from the Wright Oral School. If we can form kind of a group and start meeting together, maybe we can do something.” So we started, and our first meeting was at the Biltmore Hotel. They let us have [a meeting room] for five dollars. It was just at the beginning of the war; transportation was going to be difficult. I think we started to meet every two weeks … Dr. Markovin popped up again and said, “Why don’t you go down to the [university]?” He was head of a reading clinic and he said, “We have a little back porch.” It was really makeshift. We had one meeting there, and then Dr. Markovin said we could go in the office there, which had been a living room, at a certain time of day.

We had to look for a teacher. She was very nice and smart, but she had no idea about talking to parents. She gave lists of books they could read, but they wanted something that you could do right now. After about four meetings, I said, “Well, this is pretty bad.” In the meantime, I must have been looking around. I had heard of the parent-teacher leaders—there were about 14 of them—engaged by the Department of Education. They got this program going and met on a Saturday … I never envisioned having children coming to the clinic. It was simply to pool our experiences, [but] they brought these children along with them. It was an all-day meeting. Each mother was given one child—not her own—to observe so they could look objectively, and the teacher gave them a thing to look for. The teacher got all the mothers together and talked to them about child development, and she asked them what they had observed.

There were just twelve mothers to start—thirteen counting Louise—and still attendance lagged. “We hung on by a thread,” she said. In September Dr. Rufus von Kleinschmid, the president of USC, offered the use of a two-story cottage at 924 West Thirty-seventh Street. The first meeting of the Mothers of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children took place at the newly acquired “Mothers’ Clinic” on October 17, 1942. A course on child guidance was announced, and Mrs. Florence Browne offered to give whatever spare time she had to the testing of children for hearing disorders. Louise reported that two checks had been received: one for five dollars and the other for $1,000. She asked that members donate as much furniture as possible so that the money could be spent on equipment, and she called upon each mother to give at least one day a month to act as “hostess.”

The call went out for volunteers to paint floors, and officer elections were held. “We got some furniture … we got some carpeting … we did some painting.” Once they had a telephone and some letterhead, Louise felt emboldened enough to hire a secretary. When she settled on a candidate, she told the woman it wasn’t much of a job “but someday it might be.” As they all worked toward an official opening, she hung a shingle over the door of the plain mustard-yellow house at the edge of the campus. It read

JOHN TRACY CLINIC

·  ·  ·

In the year following the rousing reception for Woman of the Year, there was only Tortilla Flat to keep the Tracy name in front of some 80 million domestic moviegoers, and even the kindest of critics greeted that picture with muted enthusiasm. He was announced for a film with Wallace Beery, an immigration epic for King Vidor, and a Byron Morgan story called By the People. Betty Rogers let it be known that he was her personal choice to play her late husband in Warners’ planned biography of Will Rogers—a prospect Tracy privately found horrifying—and Fox was anxious to borrow him to play A. J. Cronin’s gentle priest in Keys of the Kingdom. The Yearling remained a possibility, and he at one point shot a test with Roddy McDowall replacing the rapidly growing Gene Eckman as Jody, but all the studios, not just M-G-M, were being pressured to increase their war content in the months immediately following Pearl Harbor, and an outdoor fable set in the 1870s would now have to wait for peacetime.

Tracy rejoined Hepburn in New York, where he was once again reported as taking a “rest cure” at a local hospital. When Keeper of the Flame opened there in February 1943, Kate was just finishing her run in Without Love and glad to be rid of it. The play had been profitable, but it was far from playing to capacity business and a credit to no one. Keeper continued a bleak streak for Hepburn, a good picture that could have been great without the meddling of Victor Saville and Leon Gordon and the rigid dictates of the Breen office. The notices were mixed, most offering up praise for Spence, indifference for Kate. (“Miss Hepburn is Hepburn,” the advance review in Variety noted, “with the usual mannerisms and studied delivery of lines.”) That her artificiality stemmed, in part, from her confusion over her character’s innocence or guilt at any given moment in the story was lost on everyone, save Tracy, Cukor, and, of course, Hepburn herself. All that she would allow, somewhat disingenuously, was that she was proud of Metro for not turning it into a “routine garden-variety love story.”

Donald Ogden Stewart, seemingly indifferent to the damage done to the third act of his screenplay, proclaimed Keeper of the Flame one of Hollywood’s “most important productions,” hailing an industry “which is now grown up and has begun to mature politically, with a full consciousness of present-day problems.” Stewart’s good-natured reception of the picture may have been due in part to Kate’s diligent fence mending, having belatedly come to the realization that the screenwriter had left Culver City hating her. She wrote him a desperate letter of explanation, expressing both affection and admiration and recounting how she had successfully seen Woman of the Year through the scripting process “[b]ut only after horrible scenes with everyone and his brother in all the conferences and everyone loathing me even though they used the stuff and would have been badly off without it.” She admitted that on Keeper of the Flame she was “as wrong as wrong” and supremely sorry for it.

Tracy and Hepburn in Keeper of the Flame (1943). (SUSIE TRACY)

“I was guilty as far as you were concerned of the great crime of that lot—lack of enthusiasm and excitement. May I add to this that for the first time in my life I am humbly—sweetly—desperately in love—was then, and frantically trying to understand this feeling and to become a woman rather than a working automaton which I have been for years—Don—try to understand and to forgive me—”

In later years Don Stewart embraced a story that had Louis B. Mayer witnessing the film for the first time at the Radio City Music Hall and storming out in a fury when he realized what the picture was really about. “I can’t vouch for it,” he said cheerfully, “but I’d be very happy if it were true.” Ironically, Keeper of the Flame managed to better the Music Hall’s first-week figures for Woman of the Year, confirming the box-office potency of the Tracy-Hepburn combination. A weak draw in rural playoffs, the picture nevertheless managed to outgross its predecessor, and work on the next Tracy-Hepburn collaboration began immediately.

Tracy, in the meantime, went into a wartime ghost story titled A Guy Named Joe. Producer Everett Riskin, the elder brother of screenwriter Robert Riskin, had been responsible for a number of Columbia’s upper-tier productions, including Theodora Goes Wild, The Awful Truth, and, most recently, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, a hit picture with a similar premise. It was Riskin’s notion to pair Tracy with Irene Dunne, his star from Theodora and Awful Truth, and it was at his behest that Dunne, one of the industry’s most prominent freelancers, was brought to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on a two-picture deal.

Tracy and Dunne knew each other casually—they were godparents to Pat O’Brien’s adopted son, Terry—but they had never before worked together. For her part, Dunne said that she admired Tracy’s work and was looking forward to the assignment. Tracy, who by now was rarely talking to the press, said nothing. Filming began on February 15 with Victor Fleming directing a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo. It was the fifth picture together for Tracy and Fleming—sixth counting the aborted Yearling—and the two men were typically chummy while Dunne, who had never before worked at M-G-M, sat quietly off to one side, knitting as the crew bustled around her. She was now forty-four years of age—old by Hollywood standards—and would soon slip into character parts. Fleming, she recalled, was not well, and nobody seemed terribly happy. It didn’t help that he scheduled an angry exchange between Dunne and Tracy as the very first scene to be shot. “It was winter,” she said, “it was dark and raining and the whole set was gloomy.”

Tracy’s relationship with Hepburn was common knowledge, and Dunne began work on A Guy Named Joe convinced he had wanted Kate for the picture, not her. Having started taking Dexedrine—in part to counter the dopey effects of the Nembutal he was now routinely gulping at bedtime—Tracy’s mood on the set was uncharacteristically buoyant. Dunne plainly thought him obnoxious: “The first few days, Spence was VERY difficult, testing me out. He badgered the director, Vic Fleming, and behaved badly until I told him to settle down.”

Tracy’s inclination to joke about his age put her on the defensive, given she was seventeen months his senior and acutely conscious of it. When he went up—blew a line—he said, “I guess I’m just getting too old. I might as well play character parts and stop kidding myself.” Similarly, Dalton Trumbo could remember watching some early rushes in the company of Fleming, Everett Riskin, and Eddie Mannix: “As the star appeared on the screen with his leading lady, a voice rumbled back from the darkness of the front row: ‘Look at that pair of overage destroyers!’ It was, of course, the incomparable Tracy in a moment of discontent.”

Dunne was also thrown by Tracy’s refusal to rehearse. “I don’t particularly like to rehearse a lot,” she said, “but I don’t like not rehearsing at all.” Fleming wasn’t terribly sympathetic, making it difficult for her to get her bearings. “We had trouble understanding each other,” she said of Tracy. “He was my hero. Then, when we started working, he got the idea that I thought he wasn’t a hero anymore. Which was not true. But he had this big mental thing, and there was even talk of taking me off the film. That’s one thing I’ll always say about L. B. Mayer. I knew they were going to be looking at some film, and I made up my mind I was going to be my best—my best, my best, my very best. So they came out of the projection room and Mayer said, ‘If we’re going to replace anybody, let’s replace Tracy.’ Which they never would have done, of course. But I’ll always remember that. And we ironed everything out, Tracy and I.”

Said Emily Torchia, “Victor Fleming was always boss on the set and Tracy was macho. It didn’t take a week before both of them were bringing tea for Irene and waiting on her. She’s a perfect example of the soft-spoken woman who turns men on more than sexpots.” Dunne would later recall the picture as her “most difficult,” not simply because of Tracy, but also because of the almost constant shifts in personnel. “I enjoyed working with Tracy,” she said in retrospect, “but physically we had a lot of problems like changing hairdressers and different makeup people. Cameramen. We had to change cameramen. All those things tend to make the thing not run smoothly.”

At first glance Fleming was as unlike Tracy as any man could be. Tall and spare with nervous gray eyes, he was, Eddie Lawrence remembered, a great cook, a real gourmet with fifty or sixty different recipes for bouillabaisse alone. “He’d taken a walking trip around the Mediterranean and up through France and every place he got a recipe.” Yet Fleming said at the time that he thought Tracy probably the only guy in the world who really understood him. “We’re alike: bursting with emotions we can’t express; depressed all the time because we feel we could have done our work better. When we were making A Guy Named Joe we had many differences of opinion, Spence and I. Many times he came into the office here, mad as the devil about something. He’d just sit on that divan over there and we’d tremble at each other for five minutes without saying a word. Then he’d get up and walk out, and we’d both feel better.”

Actor Van Johnson joined the company in early March, playing Ted Randall, the young airman who becomes Irene Dunne’s love interest in the wake of Tracy’s death. At twenty-six, Johnson found himself cast in the awkward role of swain to a woman old enough to be his mother. It took Fleming’s sensitive but no-nonsense direction to put their relationship across in a way that wasn’t jarring—nor even particularly noticeable—to the audience. “I finished the first take,” Johnson remembered, “and Mr. Fleming said, ‘Print that.’ I looked to Tracy for approval. He said, ‘Is that the way you’re going to play it?’ Well, I shriveled. He was joking, of course.”

Director Victor Fleming (right, with his back to the camera) looks on as Tracy and Irene Dunne dance to the strains of “Wonderful One” for A Guy Named Joe. Note the makeshift corral that keeps the two stars in focus. (SUSIE TRACY)

Tracy recalled that Johnson had once asked for his autograph outside Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills, and he was naturally disposed to taking younger actors under his wing. “He liked young actors,” said Barry Nelson, who was playing a featured role in the picture, “and he tried to help them—not so much in telling you how to read anything, but he certainly was a role model. He came on always perfectly prepared—long speeches, whatever. You would think he’d been out carousing all night or something, and he had that way about him on the set as if nothing mattered too much, but you knew that he’d worked very hard the night before. He was not only letter perfect but interpretation prefect.”

Production moved at Fleming’s usual deliberate pace until the night of March 31, 1943, when Van Johnson was critically injured while driving a group of friends to the studio to run off a print of Keeper of the Flame. Broadsided at the intersection of Venice and Clarington, just a block north of the main gate, he was thrown from the car and ended up with his head braced by the curb. “My face was wet,” he said, “and I thought it was raining, but it was blood … My nose was up against my eyes, and my scalp had come unstuck. They lifted it up like a flap and poured in handfuls of sulfa.”

At the hospital Johnson overheard a doctor say, “He’ll never work in pictures again, even if he does live.” Down three quarts of blood, he was only able to survive, it was theorized, because regular donations at the Red Cross had conditioned his system. Reportedly, Tracy was the first person from the studio permitted to see him. “Van Johnson is so sick from that automobile accident,” Sheilah Graham reported in her column of April 7, “that his doctors are afraid to operate.”

Fleming shut down the picture because Johnson, playing a young recruit under Tracy’s ghostly tutelage, was in almost every scene. As discussions centered on whom they’d get to replace him, Tracy went to Irene Dunne and urged a show of solidarity. “I was in the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, all packed in ice, and the eye was closed, and they put a plate in my head,” said Johnson, “and that was when Irene Dunne and Spencer Tracy went to Mr. Mayer and said, ‘Let us wait for Van.’ That gave me a goal, it gave me sunlight at the end of the tunnel, because everybody said, ‘He won’t photograph …’ ” Eddie Lawrence remembered the gesture as a measure of the regard Tracy had for a young actor who considered him a mentor. “Now that was really something to do,” he said, “because that was a [matter] of time commitments. And Spence went down there to see Van practically every day until Van came back. They stopped the picture because of Spence. For Van Johnson, they wouldn’t stop the picture. Spencer had to put his weight in there because they wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

They resumed filming with a double on April 13, but there was only so much work they could do without showing the young flier’s face or hearing his voice. Within a week, A Guy Named Joe was shut down indefinitely.

The official opening of John Tracy Clinic took place on the evening of February 1, 1943. After introductions at Norris Hall on the USC campus, the nearly three hundred attendees were invited to tour the old clapboard house on West Thirty-seventh, where classes on child psychology were ongoing and where a new series of Saturday morning talks would focus on the formation and development of the elementary sounds of speech. A correspondence course, based on a long-discontinued one from the Wright Oral School, was in its early stages of development, and a nursery school observation group had just been added. On prominent display was the clinic’s first publication, Suggestions to the Parents of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children by Louise Treadwell Tracy. At the open house, Doris Jackson, who would soon fill the role of secretary to Mrs. Tracy, observed the founder’s husband keeping very much to himself and doing his best to go unnoticed amid the festivities of the open house. “I can remember Mr. Tracy—him rubbing his hand down the woodwork saying, ‘This is nice …’ ”

At first, said Louise, Spence seemed pleased she had decided to name the clinic after John; then, after thinking about it, he didn’t think it was such a good idea after all.

He felt it was a great mistake to have called it that, because the impression became so firmly ingrained with people that this was the Tracys’—they were paying for everything, and then they thought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was paying for it. The things were just absurd. We needed money. We couldn’t have taken care of the whole thing even had we wanted to. It was too much money, and also we felt it was not ourselves, it was too big a thing, that if it were as worthwhile as we thought, and as necessary, everybody should have a hand in it, because then it was everybody’s and it would be much bigger. This was not a little family thing at all.

Contributions for the first year came to $1,440, while expenses ran close to $5,000. “Mr. Disney was one of the first contributors we had. I remember he gave us a hundred dollars. Before we were organized or incorporated or anything, I signed a little letter. I had my nerve, but then they didn’t have all the restrictions they have now. So I just wrote a little letter and we had it printed and I got a list of names from one of those people who furnish names. It was a silly list of five-thousand people, and a lot of people were on that list who couldn’t give ten cents. We sent it out, and out of the five-thousand, we had maybe sixty contributors. Not too many, but one of them was Mr. Disney, who I was sure would.”

At its inception, John Tracy Clinic was the first institution of its kind that was entirely free, and the only one that was exclusively for the parents of deaf and hearing-impaired children. It was a model destined to cost money; the Wright Oral School had charged one hundred dollars for its correspondence course alone and couldn’t come close to breaking even. When they had stretched their meager resources as far as they could, Louise went to Spence: “He thought about it, and we talked about it a little, and he said, ‘How much do you figure it would cost for a year? Would ten-thousand dollars be enough?’ I said, ‘My heavens, yes, that would be wonderful.’ So he gave us the ten thousand and he said, ‘We’ll try it and see what happens.’ And he really, for the first three years, with very minor exceptions—these nickels and dimes that we got from a few people—he furnished all of the money.”

In March the clinic began offering tests for mothers coping with the emotional and psychological stress of parenting a child with special needs. All manner of kids were being brought to the clinic—not just the hearing impaired—and although testing wasn’t mandatory, Louise found that all the mothers seemed to want it. All had experienced the same basic stages of denial, anger, and grief, and all benefited from the kind of emotional support they could only get from one another. Louise drew on her own experiences in shaping the program, arranging for the help and services she wished that she’d had when her own little boy was not yet six and she was constantly being advised to wait until he was older—precious learning years being lost forever. She was also intimately aware of the damage the birth of a handicapped child could inflict on a marriage and that while it was too late for her and Spence, other marriages could be addressed and saved with the psychological counseling they never had for themselves.

Louise went to Howard Strickling at M-G-M and asked how they could get publicity. He said there was no problem, that he would make some phone calls, and articles appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Hearst papers, and May Mann’s syndicated “Going Hollywood” column. Mann described a woman who typically came to work in a simple blue suit and hat to match, a ring of linked platinum horseshoes—studded with diamonds and rubies, a gift from Spence—on the small finger of her right hand, her simple white gold wedding band on her left, down on her knees scrubbing the floors before the kids came in. “The children must not sit on dirty floors,” she told the clinic’s new executive secretary. “You can run a typewriter. I can’t. But I know how to scrub and clean.”

News of the clinic spread quickly; inquiries poured in. In July the clinic initiated its first summer session, an intensive six-week course for mothers and children set up by Mary New of the Lexington School for the Deaf. Miss New came from New York without salary—only the barest of expenses were paid—and presided over a program designed specifically for parents and children who came from out of state and couldn’t otherwise participate. Sixty-two years later, Carol Lee Wales, who attended the last two weeks of that first summer session, could still vividly recall the old frame building and the playground, and the tutor helping her with her speech during individual sessions upstairs. “She would put my hand on her cheek or throat to feel the sounds, and we blew on feathers or tissue to see the breath sounds.”

Spence was preparing to write another $10,000 check when he told Louise it was time to formalize the arrangement. “If I’m going to give all this money,” he said, “we’ve got to set something up. You have to incorporate or else I can’t take it off on the income tax.” To get it all together, Louise instinctively turned to her polo buddies, the closest and most enduring circle of friends she had. She called Neil McCarthy, the millionaire sportsman and attorney whose racing silks were represented at all the major tracks, and asked him what to do about incorporating. “It’s very simple,” he said. “I’ll do it for you. I’ll be your secretary.” Then he said, “You know, you have to have some people to incorporate.” She called Walt Disney, whom she had first met “riding and playing out on the dirt field. He played with all the women. He was a beginner, you see, and he just loved it for the fun. Both he and Roy Disney played. So I called him and asked if he would go on the board, maybe be the vice-president. ‘Sure,’ he said. So we had him and Mr. McCarthy and then Mrs. Caldwell, Mrs. Orville Caldwell, one of my very best friends.”

John Tracy Clinic’s first summer session, July–August 1943. Carol Lee Wales is the child whose painting Louise is admiring. (CAROL LEE BARNES)

Tracy filled his time away from A Guy Named Joe recording broadcasts for Armed Forces Radio and visiting hospitals up and down the California coast, shaking hands, signing autographs, posing for pictures. Occasionally he showed up at the Hollywood Canteen, where he was known to sing “Pistol Packin’ Mama” to the soldiers, a song he would eventually teach to Gary Cooper. Kate was in and out of town, keeping in touch by phone, permitting Spence to cover her airfare when she went to New York to visit her mother, who was ill, and her train fare when she returned. In May the studio announced that Tracy would star in They Were Expendable for producer Sidney Franklin, an unlikely occurrence with Joe hanging fire for the foreseeable future. On the twenty-fifth of that month, with Van Johnson still decidedly on the mend, Irene Dunne went on with her second picture for Metro, The White Cliffs of Dover, an earnest tearjerker inspired by Alice Duer Miller’s famous poem.

At the Hollywood Canteen. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

The meetings of the so-called Boys’ Club had become less frequent, though no less important to its individual members, who shifted from time to time. “When Spence was off the sauce, he was kind of a sour guy,” James Cagney recalled. “He would shun company, so I would have dinner with him alone. I think he was a very sad man. I made no demands on him. It was just small talk mostly.” The experience of public dining soured considerably for the group after Tracy’s 1942 binge, when retakes for Tortilla Flathad been held up several weeks. “It was never announced where we would have dinner,” Frank McHugh remembered. “It was a guarded secret. However, we could never elude ‘Square Deal’ [Billy] Grady. He would invariably show up and sit at another table alone. Keeping an eye on Spence, no doubt, [while he was working].”

Whenever they wanted privacy, the boys would meet at the home of one of the members. “All the wives,” said Dorothy McHugh, “were perfectly willing to arrange it and disappear, but whoever you had for a cook, it got to be this terrible rivalry. You know, who had the best dinner. Somebody would come home and say, ‘You should get that pie at the Cagneys! The best I ever tasted!’ ” When it came Spence’s turn, the group assembled at Kate’s rented house in Beverly Hills, “and she would be there with Ethel Barrymore and people like that. But, of course, the wives never went! She would maybe not have it be the Boys’ Club night, but would invite them to a dinner party.”

Van Johnson’s recovery was speedier than anyone expected, and work on A Guy Named Joe resumed in early July 1943. He still suffered from frequent headaches and fatigue and was left with facial scars that required heavy makeup and careful lighting to hide, but the effect was remarkably subtle, and the rushes betrayed no hint of the trauma he had been through. Irene Dunne was in a tougher spot, because Johnson’s return put her in the unenviable position of having to shoot two pictures simultaneously, portraying Dorinda the seasoned pilot on some days, the misty-eyed Susan Dunn on others. “I’ve always lived the characters I played,” she said, “and to be these two entirely different women at the same time was unbearable.”

Tracy’s Pete Sandidge¹ was one of his richest creations, a cocky hotdogger of a pilot who lent himself to endless colorations, unseen and unheard as he was by the earthly members of the cast. “He brought the art of reacting to a new height,” Barry Nelson observed. “I would get to see the dailies, and what I didn’t learn sitting on the set … because it’s very hard to see the expressions … you could see them in the close-ups and two-shots in the dailies. You saw how much he had added in his thought process of what that character was thinking when someone else was speaking … He was always right on the button; there was never a wasted movement, a wasted thought, never an extraneous one, great economy in his playing.”

In Sandidge, Louise could see Spence as he was at home, the sparkle in his eyes, the puckish Irish humor, the natural intensity of a man always up on his game. “I have seldom lost myself in a picture when he was on,” she once commented. “I was always watching him.” However, in A Guy Named Joe she could immerse herself, revel in it, forget, for a change, that it was a movie. “You can just see him as he was,” she said of it. “It was just so real. He had some of the same funny expressions. There were so many things he did … I liked him very much in A Guy Named Joe.”

Production was closed down once again in mid-August so that background plates could be made by a second unit in Florida. The Hollywood Victory Committee took the hiatus as an opportunity to propose a tour of the Pacific for Tracy that would take him to Hawaii, Canton, Fiji, New Caledonia, Brisbane, and Samoa beginning September 20 and continuing through the end of October. Tentatively agreeing to the plan, he was plainly dubious of making high-profile appearances where performances might be expected of him. “What can I do?” he said to Adela Rogers St. Johns. “I’m no good. I’m just an actor. I have to have a part and a play and everything, and how can you do that? I can’t talk well myself. I’m not the guy they see up there on the screen at all. I’m just a very ordinary man and probably not nearly as sure of things as they are. I can’t sing or dance or tell stories. Send someone who can make ’em laugh, somebody who has something to offer.”

He was back on the set of Joe following Labor Day, his plans for the Pacific tour now conflicting with Fleming’s schedule and the studio’s need to keep him available for retakes once his vacation kicked in. Leo Morrison was in the process of negotiating a new contract when someone noticed it contained no provision for retakes during his vacation periods, which started at six weeks and could extend to twelve weeks if he did two consecutive pictures or twenty-four weeks if he elected to do a play. A Guy Named Joewrapped on September 20, 1943, with considerable miniature work yet to be shot, meaning it would likely be a month before the film could be previewed and any fixes identified. In lieu of the Pacific tour, Tracy agreed to go north into Alaska to visit some newly established bases, taking with him a small troupe of performers that includedMarilyn Maxwell, Nancy Barnes, and comedian Johnny Bond.

Kate was in the first days of filming Dragon Seed when he left, a growing anxiety over the mere act of flying taking hold of him as he arrived in Seattle. It had been many years since he had seen Lois and Kenny Edgers, now a dentist with a thriving practice, and with the weather fogging in plane traffic, he seized the opportunity to meet them for dinner. Walking into Spence’s suite at the Olympic Hotel, Kenny could see that he was on the phone with Louise. “Here’s Kenny now,” Spence said to her, “and you should see him. He has hardly any gray hair!” Tracy, of course, had begun to gray early. He had just been informed that the Alaskan base had no accommodations for the women in his troupe and that the weather was unsatisfactory. As they waited it out, the pressure mounted for a decision on his part.

Taking advantage of their proximity to Victoria, Tracy phoned Lincoln Cromwell, now also in private practice and with a young family. “Spence told me to get right on over there,” Cromwell recalled. “There was no saying no to the man, so I just closed my office and took the afternoon ferry across the Sound. Evidently, he needed me for moral support.” Tracy told Cromwell that his troupe was in a “state of rebellion” and many wanted to turn back. According to him, the actors and showgirls were afraid of flying and of entering a war zone, which Alaska technically was, and that he was having little success in reassuring them. “I was all for Spence, but after a day the truth of the situation became clear to me. He, himself, was the source of the fear and dissension circulating through the group.”

Tracy was plainly terrified of flying any farther, and the final omen had come the day before, when a waitress in the hotel coffee shop told him that she had also served Wiley Post just before he left on his fateful flight to Alaska with Will Rogers. “On a conscious level, Spencer appeared unaware that he was the author of the rapidly spreading ‘rebellion’ in his troupe. However, he finally acceded to the consensus and, after three days, they all returned by plane to Los Angeles.”

Kenny Edgers had a call from Spence at 4:30 one morning, asking him to come down to the Olympic and help him decide what to do.

He said he had been “directed” for so long that he’d lost the ability to make decisions. In these small hours, among other things, he said he envied me the necessity of making “either-or” choices. Either people made his decisions for him, or it was a matter of choosing some tangible item (car, clothing, etc.) and he could have anything he wanted. He had five Cadillacs and the planning of acquiring anything had lost its kick. So he worried about his public image. After he returned to Hollywood, he phoned me several times to inquire if Seattle papers had unfavorable publicity. No mention had been made and his days of agony were unnecessary.²

Tracy told Lincoln Cromwell the younger man obviously “needed a vacation” and insisted on his accompanying them on the flight back. For the next two weeks Cromwell saw him daily, staying with him in his two-bedroom suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Tracy had left him upon their arrival in L.A.

He went on up the hill to see Katharine Hepburn. Later that evening, he sent a limousine down to bring me up to her house … I knew that he and Mrs. Tracy had been living apart since my first year at McGill. At the party Spencer gave for me between my first and second years of medical school, Louise Tracy was conspicuous by her absence. I recall that I spent most of that evening sitting across the table talking with Katharine Hepburn, while Spencer tromped back and forth in front of the window, looking down at Hollywood below. He was still preoccupied with his aborted Alaska excursion. Miss Hepburn had grown up in a medical family … and she was interested in—and conversant with—a variety of medical topics. We had a long, spirited discussion about biology, medicine, and philosophy with Spencer participating little, if at all.

During the days, Spence went to work at the studio, and I drove around Los Angeles, renewing old friendships. He made his car available for my use, even requesting the Rationing Board to make more gas available for me. I repaid him by running some of his errands. One of these was to return a heavy parka he had borrowed from Jimmy Roosevelt to wear in Alaska. Spencer was a dedicated Democrat, with friends high up in the Roosevelt administration. In the evenings, we would go out to a restaurant to eat or have food sent up from the hotel. Spence did no cooking there. While still at medical school, I had been cautioned by Dr. Dennis to avoid alcohol—both the subject and the substance—when with Spencer. During this period, however, we usually had a couple of drinks before dinner, and Spence never over-indulged. At no time I was with him did he conduct himself as anything but a gentleman.

Kate was no more a drinker than Louise, but where Louise’s tactic was sheer avoidance, Hepburn would give him a drink and then challenge him to handle it. Like most Americans of the time, she considered the abuse of alcohol a failure of the will, though not necessarily the moral failing that temperance crusaders and prohibitionists contended. There’s every indication, in fact, that she never especially wanted Tracy to quit drinking altogether. He maddened her, grieved her at times, but never bored her. “You have to say, ‘What do you expect of life?’ I’ve known several men who drank too much and they were all extremely interesting.” To their friend Bill Self she was blunter still: “All of my men have been drunks.”

It was like a badge of honor, a pattern she had no interest in breaking. “I don’t think anything destroyed Spencer,” she said, “except the fact that he had produced a son that was very severely handicapped and he felt responsible for it. And he was absolutely unable to face it … I never interfered in a stupid way. And I never tried to moralize about the evils of drink. And if I interfered in a clever way, why, it wouldn’t be interfering, would it? Well, I’d just try to change the atmosphere. But a drinker is going to stop on his own. I think you can very seldom influence anyone to stop.”

And so with Kate Hepburn at his side, Tracy began a period in which he tried moderating his drinking rather than stopping it entirely, a shaky proposition when, as Audrey Caldwell once observed, all he needed was “a dessert with rum in it” to set him off.

Joe Mankiewicz believed Tracy and Hepburn well matched because “if you were going to be in an intimate relationship with Spence it had to be one where essentially you took care of him, waited on him, cleaned up after him. Spence was in your care. On good psychological grounds the alcoholic is in that infantile position. He renders himself helpless, which is a state of infancy and which is the most powerful position that the human being is ever in. He has to be taken care of as an infant. He has to be wiped and dried and fed and dressed and cleaned as an infant. And Kate, I think, wanted to do that.”

Tracy never touched booze around Louise and the kids, and neither Johnny nor Susie could remember ever having seen him with a drink in his hand. One evening he drove Lincoln Cromwell out to the ranch for dinner. “We spent the night there, and I remember, after Spence had gone to bed, the long conversation Louise and I had concerning her feelings about Spencer and their marriage. Finally, she asked my advice: Should she divorce him? While I could certainly see her side of the situation, my basic loyalty was to Spencer and I felt that if he had wanted a divorce, he would have asked for it. I replied to her that since most things seemed to be going smoothly between them, without a lot of emotional strain, I could not see what a divorce would accomplish. In short, I advised her to do nothing.”

In October Tracy was asked to appear at a rally of twelve thousand War Chest volunteers in Colorado, headlining a three-hour bill of entertainment that included opera star Mona Paulee, the eighty-piece symphonic band from Buckley Field, a soldier chorus of sixty voices, and the stars of the WACavilcade, a national touring company of thirty. Studio publicist Hal Elias was assigned to go with him.

Prior to going I had never met him, and Howard Strickling, who was head of publicity, called me into his office one day and he [said], “I want you to meet Spencer Tracy.” So Tracy knew that I was to accompany him to Denver—that was where the war bond drive was supposed to take place. And he said, “Hal, I want one thing understood.” He said it very sternly. “Nobody is going to tell me when and how much to drink.”

He was very self-conscious of his heavy-drinking reputation. And I said, “Spence, I’m not making this trip to be a guardian and tell you when and what to drink. I’m merely there to protect the publicity interests of M-G-M and YOUR interests.” That settled it. Now we arrived in Denver, and we retired to a beautiful suite of rooms. I’ll never forget—there was a dining room table in the middle of the room, and it was loaded with liquor of every description. They knew it was Spencer Tracy, and they knew he was a heavy drinker. So he looked at it and said, “Hal, give all these bottles to the motorcycle escort who brought us over here.” And Spencer Tracy didn’t take one drink during the entire trip.

Tracy returned to M-G-M to make added scenes for A Guy Named Joe, which, like Keeper of the Flame, had run afoul of the Production Code. The War Department had never been enthusiastic about the picture and only grudgingly provided cooperation after two major revisions in the screenplay. (“The presence of hovering ghosts of deceased pilots, and the unreal, fantastic, and slightly schizophrenic character of the scenario hardly combine to produce a sensible war time film diet,” the chief of the Information Branch complained.) The picture’s ending, as written byDalton Trumbo and staged by Fleming, had Irene Dunne’s character crashing after the bombing of an enemy ammunition dump, thereby reuniting her with Tracy’s Pete Sandidge at the fade-out. The PCA’s Joe Breen objected to the ending on the presumption that Dorinda’s commandeering of the bomber—intended for the Van Johnson character—constituted a willful act of suicide, which was, under the Code, never to be “justified, or glorified, or used specifically to defeat the ends of justice.” Everett Riskin’s office had new scenes ready on November 4, and Irene Dunne and her husband were flown in from Mexico City for the reopening of production. With the mandated fixes and some revised miniature work, A Guy Named Joe finally finished on December 4, 1943, after 107 days before the cameras. Tracy started his next picture the following morning.

The Seventh Cross was the story of seven escapees from a German concentration camp in 1936. It was written by Anna Seghers, a Communist refugee who had made her way to Mexico in the opening days of World War II and obviously knew of what she wrote. The commandant swears he will return all the escaped men and display their bodies on crudely fashioned crosses in the prison yard as a lesson to the others. It is the one who ultimately escapes to freedom, George Heisler, who leaves the seventh cross empty.

When published in 1942 by Little, Brown, Seghers’ book was an immediate best seller, moving more than three hundred thousand copies in the space of twelve days. Pandro S. Berman, the producer responsible for most of Kate’s pictures at RKO, got Metro to buy the rights and subsequently sent the draft script, by first-time scenarist Helen Deutsch, to M-G-M contract director Fred Zinnemann for his “opinion.” Zinnemann had graduated to B-level features after serving an apprenticeship in the studio’s short subject department. He already knew the book well and thought it would make a very good movie. His participation, it turned out, was contingent upon Tracy’s approval.

Zinnemann approached the project with characteristic zeal, marking up his copy of the novel and storyboarding the entire movie with his own thumbnail sketches. On his heavily annotated copy of Deutsch’s October 22 script he wrote, “This is about the dignity of human beings.” He ran a number of Tracy’s M-G-M pictures and decided to model Tracy’s performance on his work in Fury. He did a good deal of character analysis and wanted Tracy to see The Informer. He also thought Tracy needed to lose weight for the role. Since the entire picture was set in Germany, standing sets on Lot 2 had to be modified, and the supporting cast became a colorful collection of refugees and character people headed by the husband-wife team of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.

Cronyn, making only his third film, bonded instantly with Zinnemann, who was bullied by a headstrong cinematographer in the person of Karl Freund. “His lighting took hours,” Cronyn remembered. “Walking onto the set, threading one’s way through the light stands, was like entering a bamboo thicket, and some lamp or other would inevitably get nudged and have to be refocused.” Tracy had worked with Freund before and knew him to be punctilious and overbearing, but Zinnemann was completely thrown by him. “Freund was anything but a friend,” said Zinnemann. “He was loud, slow, and obstreperous; working with him was like pulling out teeth, one by one.” Within days the picture was behind schedule.

“Zinnemann was first chosen as director for The Seventh Cross,” said Katharine Hepburn, “and Spencer did not know him [other than he’d] done some picture in Germany, and I cannot remember the name of it.³ Very distinguished, so Spencer said, Okay, he would take [him]. After a week, Metro wanted to yank Freddie Zinnemann off that picture. They were not satisfied with what he was doing, and Spencer said, ‘My friends, if you yank him, I’m joining him. You can make up your minds to that. You should not have suggested him in the first place. Now you have to give him the chance.’ ”

Backing down, Berman, who was also overseeing the production of Dragon Seed, peopled the stage with surrogates, including Helen Deutsch (who was, said Zinnemann, “possessive about changing a dot or a comma”) and his longtime assistant, Jane Loring. “I felt it was very important to get across the fact that just because you were a German it didn’t mean automatically that you were a monster,” Zinnemann said, “which at the time many people thought was the case—naturally enough, in view of what was going on. The film was a study of the people Tracy met when he was running for his life, people who were forced by his presence to get off the fence, one way or the other; either they helped him or they didn’t help him. Some took great personal risks; others, who were old friends, turned their backs and wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

Morale was low, and Tracy’s dark moods were sharpened by the drinks he now permitted himself at the end of each workday. Hume Cronyn thought him “a lovely man” who had a “rough tongue” on occasion, particularly after having imbibed a few. Seated one evening in Tracy’s dressing room, drink in hand, Cronyn shot to his feet when Hepburn, whom he had never before met, walked in. “Spence was feeling morose,” said Cronyn, “and made no effort to move or introduce us. Perhaps he assumed we knew one another. I introduced myself. We shook hands and she said, ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything—please sit down.’ She was tall, slim, beautiful, and very direct, and her look was as firm as her handshake. I was aware that she was appraising Tracy and conscious of his mood.”

Hepburn turned to him and said cheerfully, “How are you doing, old man?”

“On my ass.”

“Problems?”

But he was drinking and didn’t bother to answer. She continued, “I think I’ll get myself a drink.”

Cronyn got up again. “Can I get it for you?” he said.

“She told you to sit down!” Tracy snapped, as though Cronyn were hard of hearing. Cronyn sat down, and presently Kate joined them.

“Spence seemed withdrawn into sullen reverie. I wondered what was wrong; he’d been talkative enough before Miss Hepburn arrived, despite the irritation he expressed over the time it was taking to light our scenes. Miss Hepburn talked to me, ignoring Spence’s silence. She asked me about the film and what I was playing; she knew the script well. She was charming. At one point she produced a cigarette and I got up to light it for her. That did it.”

Tracy exploded: “Why don’t you two find a bed somewhere and get it over with?”

“I stood there, frozen, until the match burned my fingers,” said Cronyn. “Miss Hepburn just smiled.”

Tracy waved him down. “Sit down, for Christ’s sake! You keep bouncing around like corn in a popper!”

Cronyn finished his drink and got out as quickly as possible; there was something about Kate’s presence that addled Tracy, as if she were revealing a dark secret about the two of them she had no business exposing. It wasn’t jealousy, Hepburn insisted: “No. No, he’d had a few.”

Joe Mankiewicz, who knew both men intimately, agreed, though not quite for the same reason. “Hume had done two things that were irritating Spence. Jumping up from that seat when she came in and jumping up now. ‘Let me do it for you.’ Because it’s obviously ‘good manners,’ because Kate Hepburn, in my life, in my world, is perfectly capable of fixing her own friggin’ drink if the drinks are there. If it’s troublesome to get, well … And getting up as she comes into the room! Again, at our age and our status in the business, we don’t do that. But if you’re Hume…‘and I got up to light her cigarette!’ ” He laughed. “Knowing Spence, he’s picked the three spots where his temper is going boom, boom, boom!”

There may have been yet another reason for Tracy’s irascibility. Ingrid Bergman had been back on the M-G-M lot shooting Patrick Hamilton’s Victorian thriller Gaslight, and one day she was photographed on the set of A Guy Named Joe talking with Tracy and Irene Dunne. As soothing as Kate’s presence could be, it could also be disruptive, for she had fallen deeply in love with a man who could never tell her that he loved her.⁴ “I have no idea how Spence felt about me,” she wrote in her memoir. “I can only say I think that if he hadn’t liked me he wouldn’t have hung around.” But now it was Kate who was hanging around, and she was going through a period where she was obsessed with him. Hairstylist Helen Hunt once told Katharine Houghton of a time when Hepburn staked out the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel with a loaded shotgun, certain that Tracy was fooling around on her—presumably with Bergman. “Kate,” said Houghton, “was fiercely jealous of Bergman.”

Sexually, Tracy and Hepburn were simpatico—so much so that Kate confided to their friend Eugene Kennedy that she had once asked a doctor if Spence could get injections to “lower his libido.” Emotionally, they were on different planes, and she was very possibly crowding him at a time when he felt particularly vulnerable to bad publicity. He laid out Sheilah Graham one day over a “veiled allusion in the column regarding his private life” and he was rapidly adopting Kate’s policy of never talking to the press, ever.

Ingrid Bergman, in costume for Gaslight, visits the set of A Guy Named Joe. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)

Tracy’s irritability became the stuff of legend during the making of The Seventh Cross, in part because there were an unusual number of observers on the set. “I never tried missing a scene when Tracy was playing,” Hume Cronyn said. “His method seemed to be as simple as it is difficult to achieve. He appeared to do nothing. He listened, he felt, he said the words without forcing anything. There were no extraneous movements. Whatever was provoked in him emotionally was seen in his eyes.” Said Zinnemann, “When a signal from the M-G-M grapevine said that he was about to do an important scene, all the young hopeful contract players would sneak on the stage and, lost in awe and fascination, would watch him from protective darkness.”

The Seventh Cross was unusual for a Tracy picture in that he played the first thirty minutes with no dialogue. On the run, the guards and their dogs after him, the SS keeping watch, George Heisler is a hunted man, desperate and worn. To achieve the effect, he submitted to a Prussian haircut and a gray-toned makeup job accentuated by the fact that he had dropped eight pounds in as many weeks. When a writer from Time magazine dropped by the set in January 1944, Tracy described himself as “a box of chocolates broadened out into a character actor” and explained the drop by noting that the war had curtailed his normal supply of sweets. By the time Signe Hasso, the Swedish actress, arrived to play the last act as Tracy’s love interest, he was tense and withdrawn at times but had settled into a more comfortable frame of mind, helped, perhaps, by the fact that Karl Freund had fallen ill and had been replaced for a spell with Robert Surtees.

“To work with Tracy was the easiest thing in the world,” Hasso later wrote. “We rehearsed once and that was it. I remember the director, Fred Zinnemann (it was his first big picture) got a bit nervous about only one rehearsal, but Tracy said, ‘I know my lines. Signe knows hers. Let’s have a cup of tea while they set the lights. And you too, Fred. You need a cup of tea.’ Fred wasn’t so sure that he needed any tea, but, of course, off he went for a tea session, where no work was discussed. We talked about life in general, and Fred grew more and more nervous. However, when the scene was lit and the camera ready to shoot, we did it in one take. And Fred was again happy.”

When Frederick Othman, Hollywood correspondent for the United Press, visited the set, Tracy was in a pretty good mood, noting dryly that this was the first time in years that a man and wife—meaning the Cronyns—had played a man and wife on the screen and just as well, too. He then charged Jessica Tandy, making her American film debut, with walking into a scene just to take her husband’s paycheck away from him. This, he suggested, set a bad precedent, even as Tandy herself blushed and denied the whole thing. Only once she was out of earshot did he allow that Tandy was “one of the finest actresses ever to get into the movie business.”

Relaxing in his dirt-caked pants, his torn sweater and greasy leather jacket, he went on to discuss work in general, saying that although a film actor made a lot of money, he usually earned every cent in the loss of many of the joys that other people took as a matter of course. Sunshine, for instance. “I think, probably, that the only man who can be happy all the time under contract to a movie studio is a dumb one, the really dumb one who signs up to act for five years and who does exactly that, without a care or a worry about the sort of thing that is handed him. There are some people like that in pictures, and I think they are the only ones who have licked the problem of being happy, though in Hollywood.”

A Guy Named Joe was released during the filming of The Seventh Cross, having drawn rave reviews in press previews arranged hastily to get the film onto the market as M-G-M’s Christmas attraction. Van Johnson’s callow performance sounded a sour note to only a few of the New York critics, who overall lauded the film for its deft management of a difficult subject and decried only the Breen-induced ending that caused it, in the words of one reviewer, to “virtually explode” in her face. The trade notice in the Hollywood Reporter diplomatically suggested that the finale would satisfy the majority of audiences, “although there can be debates about who should get the girl.” Bosley Crowther, less forgiving, condemned “a finish that is as foolish as anything we’ve seen—and which thoroughly negates the film’s philosophy, which is against heroic stunts and one-man shows.”

Whatever the picture’s failings, both Tracy and Dunne were praised elaborately, the Reporter noting how Tracy’s abilities “permit him to make more out of a simple ‘gosh’ than many actors achieve from a Shakespearean soliloquy.” Its arrival triggered a powerful rush at the box office, leading to seven strong weeks at the Capitol Theatre at a time when the public’s demand for “demilitarized” fare was growing. With total billings of $5,363,000, A Guy Named Joe surpassed even San Francisco to become Tracy’s highest-grossing film ever. In early January, with a new contract almost ready to sign, Tracy told columnist Harrison Carroll he was refusing all assignments for at least three or four months because he wanted to visit camps and bases instead. “I worked on A Guy Named Joe for eleven straight months,” he said, “and you can’t go on tour with retakes, extra scenes, and work hanging over your head. When I visit camps next time, I want to feel I don’t have to hurry back.”

He backed that statement with a formal letter to Benny Thau, advising the studio, in effect, that at the completion of The Seventh Cross he would be leaving for an indefinite period. A few days later, Eddie Mannix took him aside and agreed that after he finished the picture he would be permitted “a certain number of weeks” to go abroad and entertain the troops and that upon his return he would have a four-week vacation before having to start another film. The new contract, which took effect on February 26, 1944, guaranteed him six weeks’ vacation at the completion of each picture and paid $5,277.52 a week or, given the agreed-upon limitation of five productions in any two-year period, approximately $110,000 a picture—good money for a major star, but by no means top dollar.⁵ It should be noted, however, that Tracy averaged little more than one picture a year during this period, so his actual compensation worked out to roughly $250,000 a film. It was a moot point anyway, as a presidential anti-inflation order signed in 1942 limited the nation’s heavy earners to an annual income of $25,000 after taxes.

As it turned out, Mannix’s generous assurances of time off were conditional, for he and the rest of management were eager to have Tracy play Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, the story of the famed 1942 raid over Japan that had been turned into a best-selling book by Captain Ted Lawson and the Hearst Syndicate’s Bob Considine. Tracy had repeatedly rejected the role, which had him presiding over briefings and little else. “Anybody could go on and do that,” he complained to Louise. “It’s silly. Why should I do it?”

Producer Sam Zimbalist settled on Paramount’s Brian Donlevy to play Doolittle instead, but Donlevy lacked Tracy’s power at the box office and the studio had an investment of nearly $3 million to protect. In November 1943 an item was fed to Louella Parsons assuring her readers that Tracy would indeed be playing the Doolittle role. “Spence is a smart boy,” Parsons commented, “even though the part doesn’t have as much footage as Captain Ted Lawson’s (the role Van Johnson will play).” He was still resisting the assignment in February 1944 when filming began on M-G-M’s massive Stage 15, where a section of flight deck from the U.S.S. Hornet had been fabricated to hold an actual B-25 Mitchell bomber on loan from the army.

The Seventh Cross finished on March 8, with Tracy agreeing to just four weeks off in lieu of the six to which he was now entitled. On April 9 he would start Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo—a three-week job—and do whatever retakes were required for Seventh Cross. Then he would have eight consecutive weeks to tour as he pleased.

¹ It’s worth noting that there was no character named Joe in A Guy Named Joe. The title came from a famous remark by General Claire Chennault of the Flying Tigers: “Boys, when I’m at the stick, I’m just a guy named Joe.”

² Well, not quite. Hedda Hopper, aware of his cozy relationship with Louella Parsons, reported on Tracy’s aborted trip at the top of her October 27 column: “What happened to the Alaska Trip? What caused him to change his mind? The boys up there are starving for entertainment and they’ve been waiting to welcome him for many months.” It was just the sort of humiliating publicity he feared.

³ Zinnemann had codirected, with Curt Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Robert Siodmak, People on Sunday (1930), a well-regarded and widely seen German feature that was also one of Billy Wilder’s earliest writing credits.

⁴ “I think Spencer was afraid of emotion beyond a certain point,” Mankiewicz said, “and even devotion beyond a certain point. I think he distrusted himself because he was afraid of what might happen if he took a drink.”

⁵ By way of comparison, Claudette Colbert’s deal with Paramount called for $150,000 a picture.