CHAPTER 16
The triumph of Boys Town enabled John Considine to get approval for a project he had long wanted to do, a biography of Thomas Edison split into two movies—one his boyhood, the other his years at Menlo Park. To play the Great Man, Considine had at his disposal the nation’s top male stars—Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy. He assigned Dore Schary, who had shared an Academy Award with Eleanore Griffin for his work on Boys Town, to develop both pictures in collaboration with Hugo Butler.
As subsequently rewritten by Talbot Jennings and Bradbury Foote, the screenplay for Edison, the Man, bore no greater resemblance to Edison’s life than Boys Town had to Father Flanagan’s, but it afforded Tracy the kind of inspirational role he was now actively seeking, and he embraced it with rare ebullience. On October 24, 1939, he and Howard Strickling boarded a train for Chicago at the invitation of Henry Ford, who had been Edison’s neighbor at Fort Myers and who had reconstructed Edison’s original laboratory complex on the grounds of his Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. From there the men traveled to New York and West Orange, where they spent the day with Edison’s widow and his son Charles, now assistant secretary of the navy.
Tracy was particularly cheered by nine reels of film provided by General Electric, pictures made in the twenties of Edison reenacting experiments, relaxing at his estate in Florida, being interviewed before a radio microphone by E. W. Rice, Jr., the late president of General Electric. Hearing Edison’s voice as an old man was of less use to Tracy than seeing his walk, his smile, his expressions when conversing with others. Tracy was taller by a couple of inches, but in overall appearance remarkably similar to the man shown in photographs from the 1870s. “We will make these changes,” Jack Dawn, the head of the M-G-M makeup department, decided. “Tracy’s hair will be parted on the right instead of the left and will be combed downward across the head instead of upward. We will make his eyebrows a little more bushy and his forehead slightly larger. There’s practically nothing to it.”
Dawn’s conception of Edison at age eighty-two was similarly spare; the first test was shot on November 20, and Tracy, when he saw the results, thought them “pretty good.” After the nerves and privations of the previous year, he was embarking on a job he genuinely found enjoyable, and his mood around the studio as well as at home was uncharacteristically buoyant and relaxed. With Louise resting in Santa Barbara, he had the kids to himself. He swam, lunched on the patio, played tennis with John, and dined with his mother.
It couldn’t last.
On Friday, November 24, he made the forty-minute drive to the studio for lunch, a habit he picked up when he wasn’t working to keep abreast of developments. “If I were to believe everything I read about myself and the roles I’m supposed to be lined up for,” he said, “I’d go crazy. Not only does M-G-M buy about twelve stories a year for me—if you’re to believe what you read—but all the other studios have options on my services too. This may sound flattering, but to me it’s just confusing.”
He learned that day that Edison had been postponed in favor of yet another version of I Take This Woman, and his mood blackened accordingly. Bernie Hyman, the original producer, had thrown out the first sixty pages of Charlie MacArthur’s original story and turned it, in the words of MacArthur’s longtime collaborator, Ben Hecht, “from a civilized comedy into a Darkest-Metro soap opera.” Tracy was glad when the picture was shelved. “It was so bad,” he told Gable, “we had to make retakes before we could even put it on the shelf. And when we put it on the shelf, we had to promise the other pictures there that it was only for one night.”
He officially got the word the following Monday, and spent the entire day in conference with the new producer, Larry Weingarten. No one was deluded as to the artistic merits of the film, but Metro had close to $1 million tied up in it thus far, and the goal was to get the thing into releasable shape. There was also Mayer’s championing of the project, Lamarr being for him the equivalent of Goldwyn’s Anna Sten, a personal obsession whose appeal was always somewhat lost on the public. Lamarr’s first M-G-M release, Lady of the Tropics, had flopped at the box office. “They didn’t want me to make I Take This Woman,” the Old Man told the actress defiantly. “Well, now we will make it.”
On the set of I Take This Woman with Louise and Susie. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Whole sequences would be salvaged from the earlier version, while enough new material would be shot to substantially reshape the story. Tracy returned to the studio on December 1 to fight with Eddie Mannix over the requirement that he make the new scenes, but it was a losing battle considering there was no possible way to remove him from the picture without completely reshooting it from scratch. The only consolation was that the new material would be directed by Woody Van Dyke, who was sure to finish the thing as quickly and cheaply as possible. (“There’s nothing wrong with it that $200,000 or $300,000 can’t fix,” Van Dyke had reportedly said.) Tracy returned to Encino, where a nervous stomach plagued him all weekend. Filming resumed on Monday, December 4. “Worse than ever,” he wrote in his book.
Van Dyke was in rare form. “[Y]ou did one rehearsal, you shot it, and you printed it,” said Laraine Day, who had been with the picture all along. “That was it. There was no fooling around with anything. You just knew your lines. You could blow your lines, you could change them all over, and he wouldn’t change printing it. As long as you hit your marks, Woody Van Dyke would say ‘Print it’ and he would finish the picture in 23 days.”
Weingarten, who had already done a picture with “One-Take Woody,” knew his routine all too well. “Now Mr. Van Dyke was an alcoholic,” he once explained to a roomful of film students, “but he was right there all the time. But you could set your watch the moment he left the studio. At five o’clock he was out the door and went for the alcohol. And we used to run out of sets. We’d have five for the day, and the art department would call screaming, ‘He’s going to be through!’ What are they going to shoot next? And if another set wasn’t ready, out he went.”
As Tracy announced to Sheilah Graham when she walked on the set one day, “This is where I came in—a year ago!”
He saw a rough cut of Northwest Passage on September 22 and, despite all the misgivings, thought it a “great adventure.” Stromberg still had a lot of tinkering to do, and Tracy would spend a total of thirty-two days on retakes. The prospect of a second film grew remote when Germany’s invasion of Poland closed off much of the European market. Even so, the studio had a backlog of other pictures in the queue for him—one after another—and as he looped the last strands of dialogue in early January 1940, he put Leo Morrison to work seeking a substantially greater amount of time off between pictures. As part of the ensuing negotiation process, he was obliged to endure a three-hour session with L. B. Mayer—an experience he would happily have dispensed with had there been a way to get around it.
Tracy’s relationship with Mayer had always been cordial but distant, and he was anxious to keep it that way. He never allowed his judgment to be superseded by Mayer, and Eddie Mannix once told him that Mayer didn’t like him because he knew that Tracy was “onto him.” Any dealings he had with the studio, he once said, were through Mannix or Benny Thau, the soft-spoken Austrian who handled contractual matters, or very occasionally through Nicholas Schenck, Mayer’s boss, who made the big decisions regarding the talent on the lot. Tracy’s deal permitted him six consecutive weeks of vacation in the first, third, fifth, and seventh years of the agreement, and eight consecutive weeks in the second, fourth, and sixth. But it never quite worked out that way, and so far in the current year he had been permitted just four consecutive weeks.
The studio, for its part, was unwilling to sacrifice any measure of flexibility without building incentives into the deal that would serve to keep Tracy sober and available whenever he was supposed to be working. On January 9, 1940, Tracy met with Thau, who agreed to three consecutive months of vacation if he would do Edison, the Man, and The Yearling first. That plan lasted only long enough to get him on board for another picture with Clark Gable, and soon he found himself committed to three in a row: Edison, Boom Town, and The Yearling. On February 21 Thau and Mannix agreed to four weeks off between Edison and Boom Town, and as much as four weeks off between Boom Town and The Yearling (which would be another location shoot, tougher to accommodate). After The Yearling, Tracy was to have four consecutive months with pay. Through Leo Morrison, Thau offered a $25,000 bonus, returnable only were Tracy unable (or unwilling) to appear in Boom Town. Further, should he “take sick” after Boom Town and not do The Yearling, he would get only three months’ vacation, not the four he would otherwise have.
Comfortable enough with the accommodation and girded for the work ahead, Tracy began Edison, the Man on January 15. With the concurrence of director Clarence Brown, he chose to play Edison as the beneficiary of divine guidance, a man doing God’s work for the benefit of mankind. “He was a very prayerful guy, you know, in his own way,” journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns pointed out. “I don’t think it was a church way particularly, but he said to me—I’m remembering the wonderful little talks we had when we were both working at Metro—‘You know, God showed Edison how to light up cities.’ He got very excited about the people he was playing and the characters he did.”
Edison’s son asked that his father not be made to seem “too perfect” in the picture—cigars, he noted, had been substituted for chewing tobacco—and he suggested some leavening traits for the character, a certain tactlessness and, at times, downright rudeness that Tracy was able to incorporate into his performance. Everyone, from Henry Ford on down, commented on Tracy’s striking resemblance to the old man. For his part, Tracy found the picture a joy to make, and he was uncommonly accessible when journalists visited the set. One day, Gladys Hall pulled a “quickie” questionnaire on him, testing his patience:
What was the first job at which you earned money? And what did you buy with it?
“Selling newspapers in Milwaukee. A ham sandwich.”
What was the outstanding incident of your childhood?
“When I tipped the ice box over on my brother.”
When do you want to retire from the screen? And what would you do then? That is, do you have any special plans for the future?
“Tonight. That answers the first half of your question. I have no special plans for the future. I only want to sleep and eat, eat and sleep. That answers the second half.”
Have you any special fears?
“Yes. I’m afraid of Garbo. Put that down.”
Have you ever been so discouraged that you contemplated abandoning your career? If so, when?
“Yes. About fifteen minutes ago. Just after the last scene.”
What do you consider the most useless sport or pastime?
“Staying awake.”
What is your favorite book?
“Steinbeck’s Red Pony.”
Your favorite flower?
“A rose … aw, I don’t know. Put down anything. What the hell’s the difference?”
Sheilah Graham came upon him one day as he was handing a one-hundred-dollar check to Woody Van Dyke. “It’s a bet I had,” he explained. “I bet Woody that I Take This Woman would never be released.” Quickly changing the subject, he mentioned The Yearling and Billy Grady’s nationwide search for a boy to play Jody. “Whoever he is,” said Tracy, “he’s a star already. The part is so surefire that the boy should be put under contract for five years right away—without waiting for the picture to be completed. Three or four years ago, Mickey Rooney would have been fine for the part, but I can’t see him cuddling a fawn now … not unless Fawn was the name of a girl.”
The studio pulled a sneak preview of Northwest Passage in New Rochelle (five hundred cards, Tracy noted) but was unable to get the picture into theaters until February 1940, as the demand for prints of Gone With the Wind was taxing the capacity of Technicolor’s processing plant. After seeing it, author Kenneth Roberts discharged his agent, but the preview notice in Daily Variety was wildly favorable, describing it as “the kind of stuff male audiences look for but seldom find. Very little romance. A few flashes only of a few women. No lovemaking. No dalliance. No man-woman emotional problems. Tough, hard stuff in the morning of America, during the French-Indian War, when frontiersmen now known as patriots had to be about their bloody chores in settling the right of sovereignty over a continent.”
When Metro finally did release the picture (“as one would release a wounded duck,” Roberts suggested) it was warmly welcomed by both the public and the critics, some of whom considered it worthy of a place alongside Selznick’s masterpiece as one of the signal achievements of the talking screen. The world premiere in Boise predated its New York opening by several weeks, and anticipation began to build as a national ad campaign revved an otherwise lethargic market. Northwest Passage opened big at the Capitol Theatre, where it remained through Holy Week, eventually posting worldwide rentals in excess of $3 million. Coming hard on the humiliation of I Take This Woman—which was a critical as well as commercial disaster—it was good news for Tracy, who hadn’t had a hit for his home studio in eighteen months.
With Edison in the can, he drove to Palm Springs for a long weekend at La Quinta and was introduced by Tim Whelan to Greta Garbo. “It would be a pleasure, Mr. Tracy, to play in one of your pictures sometime,” Garbo said to him. “And I would be delighted to play even a butler in one of your films, Miss Garbo,” he responded. Garbo had been contemplating a biography of Marie Curie, the Polish scientist and discoverer of radium, for a couple of years, and Tracy’s participation would ease the concerns of Eve Curie, youngest daughter of the title character, who feared the casting of Garbo as her mother would overshadow the equally important work of her father, Pierre. But with Boom Town looming, it would take the unlikely postponement of The Yearling to make it happen.
Tracy spent his fortieth birthday golfing with Eddie Mannix and producer-director Victor Saville, newly arrived from England. Three days later he started Boom Town, a big, brawling tale of Texas wildcatters originally purchased for Gable, Tracy, and Myrna Loy in the heady days following the release of Test Pilot. Tracy had no objection to doing the picture, and despite the tensions between them on Test Pilot, he and Gable maintained a genuine affection for one another. “They spent half their time, each one trying to understand the other,” Adela Rogers St. Johns said. “Gable looked at Tracy as the greatest actor in the world. He would stand at the edge of the set and watch him in utter admiration of the acting ability … Tracy adored Gable, as everybody did. He would say, ‘Can’t act, doesn’t care, and everybody loves him better than any actor that was ever born.’ ”
When Gable attended the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind, Tracy shot off a congratulatory wire:
“GONE WITH THE WIND” MAY BE THIS YEAR’S GREATEST PICTURE BUT I STILL REMEMBER “PARNELL.”
The principal screenwriter on Boom Town was John Lee Mahin, who had as his source a novelette from Cosmopolitan magazine called “A Lady Comes to Burkburnett.” With Myrna Loy unavailable for the part of the lady, producer Sam Zimbalist took the extraordinary step of borrowing Claudette Colbert from Paramount, thus reuniting the two Academy Award–winning stars of It Happened One Night. Hedy Lamarr campaigned for the fourth role, a seductress who didn’t appear until the top of the third act, and the picture suddenly took on a size that made it one of the most anticipated of the season. Early on, the Metro sales team decided to showcase Boom Town as a solo attraction at premium prices, the rationale being its stellar cast made it “like four pictures in one.”
For Tracy, it wasn’t a particularly difficult shoot. Many of the exteriors were done in process, and the only real location work was a two-day stretch at the Taft oilfields near Bakersfield. Wardrobe, contractually the responsibility of the actor on a modern-dress picture, became a matter of swapping out clothes with genuine laborers. “Larry Keethe, our wardrobe man, thought I was crazy when we bought a bunch of new work clothes and went down to a building project around here, looking for a couple of workmen about my size. We traded the new outfits for those a couple of guys were wearing. They thought I was crazy, too. But you can’t look like a worker in the oil fields, walking into a picture in brand-new dungarees. They must be baggy and faded from sweat and dirt and many washings.”
Tracy amused himself bantering with Gable, who usually gave as good as he got. When the King stalked onto the set during an early rehearsal, he delivered his first line but went up on the second. “Can you imagine that?” Tracy moaned with an exaggerated sigh. “The guy’s memory is down to one line now!”
Later, Gable took a shot at Tracy while chatting with Harry Evans of Family Circle magazine. “Say,” he said, pretending not to notice his costar was within earshot, “did you hear that Tracy is going to do Ninotchka on the air with Rosalind Russell?” Evans, playing along, said that he had heard such a rumor but doubted his ears.
“Well,” said Gable, hoisting his left eyebrow quizzically, “that should be a new experience for radio listeners. That Russell is smart, you know. Let him try to underplay her, and you know what will happen? He’ll drop his voice a little, and she’ll drop hers. He’ll take his next speech a little softer, she’ll whisper a little lower. He’ll mutter his next line, and she’ll murmur. The listeners will be twisting the knobs off their dials trying to hear what’s going on. And suddenly they’ll hear nothing, not a sound.” He paused a moment to observe Tracy. “And that,” he concluded, “will be the first time on record that two radio performers will have voluntarily gone off the air!”
Claudette Colbert thought the back-and-forth between Gable and Tracy “better than a circus” but acknowledged that Tracy’s technique—what Louise called “that natural thing”—took some getting used to. “Here’s how it goes,” she said of her heaviest scene opposite him.
I’ve tried to commit suicide, and I’m half hysterical and trying to explain my action to Spencer. After weeping and carrying on and just about knocking myself out, with him just standing there, I declare that he can never understand. “You could never know what it means to love anyone so much!” I scream. And after I stop on this high melodramatic note, he nods that big head of his a few times, sticks his chin out, looks up and away, and murmurs, “Yeah, yeah. I wouldn’t know about that.” And steals the whole scene! Not a person in the audience will remember what I said. The way that man underplays everybody keeps the audience listening for him to speak.
Production was moving along beautifully when, on April 25, Gable was injured in the staging of a fight. Toward the end of the picture, Square John tries to knock some sense into Big John, who has gone off with the exotic Karen Vanmeer. (“In between the rough stuff,” said Tracy, “I had to sit around while the King played love scenes with Hedy Lamarr.”) Tracy later described the mishap to his friend Stewart Granger:
One evening we tried to finish off a fight sequence, but there was one shot left over for the following morning, Gable taking a punch on the chin from me, off camera. I told them that I’d be goddamned if I was going to get up at the crack of dawn just to stand off camera and have my fist pass in front of Gable’s chin and told them to get someone else. They got a fighter, a real boxer. They stood him next to the camera and told him to throw a punch as Gable approached, but to “pull” it an inch away from Gable’s chin. Did he understand? Sure. Did he need a rehearsal? Hell, no. Okay. Camera, action, and the boxer let one go, forgot to pull it, and knocked Gable down. There was a stunned silence as Gable lay on the floor spitting out teeth. The boxer looked in horror at the movies’ most valuable human being whom he’d just disfigured. He took off out of the studio, out of L.A., and some think out of the country. He was never seen again. Gable accused me of fixing the whole thing. I just told him he needed a new set of teeth anyway.
Gable famously wore dentures; he would occasionally pull them out to shock people, particularly women who seemed just a tad too admiring. The blow damaged his upper plate and split his lip, which required four stitches. Tracy had nine days off, time he passed swimming, playing tennis, and doing a retake in old-age makeup for Edison, the Man. On May 1 he marked two full years on the wagon, and the following day tipped the scales at 192 ½ pounds—his heaviest ever.
He thought Edison a “good little picture—not great” but didn’t think it stood much of a chance commercially. So when plans were finalized for the world premiere in Orange, New Jersey, he made the unusual decision to go east to support it. The schedule on Boom Town was arranged to create a seven-day window in which he wouldn’t be needed, and on May 12 he and Louise left on the Super Chief in the company of Howard Strickling and his wife.
The Edison premiere, the centerpiece of a three-day celebration, was spread over six theaters and was practically a replay of the Boys Town event in Omaha. A crowd of twenty thousand movie-mad fans flooded the Oranges, forcing Tracy to creep into the gala ball at the local armory through a back door. The crowd on the outside began to chant “We want Tracy! We want Tracy!” And with the mob pounding on the walls and hanging from the windows, Tracy became aware that he had lost his collar button—either to a fan or to the commotion itself—and was having a tough time holding his neckpiece together. Most of the four thousand dancers on the floor of the ballroom joined in a hunt for the button before photos could be taken with the Edisons, Governor A. Harry Moore, and other distinguished guests. When the crowd outside refused to disperse, it was arranged for Tracy and his leading lady, actress Rita Johnson, to wave to the throng through an upper window, an appearance that triggered fifteen minutes of wild cheering.
There was scarcely time to see anything in New York, but Spence and Louise caught a performance of There Shall Be No Light—with Lunt and Fontanne—on their last night in town. Back in California, Tracy settled into the final days of production on Boom Town while giving interviews in support of Edison. Significantly, he talked to author-educator John Erskine, who challenged him on notions of art and artifice and “whether the ideas of experience furnished by our pictures are complete and true; whether the ideals are high enough or important enough for adults.” Impressed by the amount of process work being employed on Boom Town, Erskine asked whether it was good to accept “the doctrine that accuracy of information was the same as truth to life.” In other words, was realism achieved in any meaningful sense by photographing actual places for backgrounds?
“Of course not,” said Tracy. “That sort of thing gives us authentic information about a place, but realism, as I understand it, must be contributed by the actor, not by the camera.” Asked if he thought the drive for such “historical accuracy” was the result of showing audiences too many newsreels and travelogues, he said, “Of course. It’s a good thing too—in its place. We all like to see places as they really are or were. But a play is something else.” He thought a moment. “I’d go even farther. The portrayal of a character is not only separate from the background, or scenery. It may also be, to a certain extent, separate from the most notable accomplishments of the character. In portraying Edison, for example, it wasn’t enough to tell the audience what they already knew: that Edison invented his light bulb. Even when he wasn’t accomplishing anything, in the intervals between achievements, he must have been recognizable as a great man. I kept asking myself, ‘What was he like when he wasn’t inventing?’ ”
“That’s all very well for great men,” Erskine said, “but what about the lesser folk?”
“The same for them,” Tracy replied. “In Grapes of Wrath, for example, the characters are terms in a social and economic problem, but they are also human beings, and they would be individuals even if the problem didn’t exist.”
“But how can a character be portrayed as ‘great’ aside from what he does?”
“Well, sometimes a man is great because of what he refuses to do, and sometimes the character of a famous man is revealed in small things which his fame overshadows. In the Edison film, for instance, the inventor’s courage and persistence count for more than his success. To build up the real Edison, we tried to suggest those little ways of friendship, those instincts of loyalty and justice, which made the men in his laboratory devoted to him, and I had to indicate his qualities in his manner, in so far as I could, even when I was saying or doing nothing in particular.”
“Even so,” said Erskine, “how true to history were you? Did you give the real Edison?”
“My idea of Edison.”
“Then the portrait isn’t realistic?”
“Realism,” said Tracy, “is always someone’s idea of reality. It gets the name of ‘real’ when the audience agrees it is true. If I can’t convince the audience, then the portrait won’t seem real, no matter how true it is.”
The day he finished Boom Town, Tracy left by rail for Chicago and his first visit in eighteen years to the campus of Ripon College. Professor H. P. Boody had sought his return as early as 1927, and regularly thereafter. In 1936 there was talk of awarding Tracy an honorary degree, and in 1939 a movement to bring the premiere of Northwest Passage to Ripon drew the support of Wisconsin governor Julius Heil. On November 6, longtime Ripon president Silas Evans wrote Tracy at M-G-M, advising him the trustees wished to confer upon him “a form of doctor’s degree” appropriate to his achievements and trusting that he would “consider it an honor” to receive such a degree. Responding by wire, Tracy assured Dr. Evans that he would indeed appreciate the honor and could come after completion of the Edison picture “in about eight weeks” or, if he preferred, during commencement. “I shall arrange to be there if I have to fly and can stay only a day.”
There followed a flurry of proposals and counterproposals, first regarding Northwest Passage, later Edison, the Man, and the possibility that Tracy could stop at Ripon on his way home from New Jersey. Boom Town, now ten days behind schedule, intervened, and so the plan was shifted to commencement on June 10, 1940, with Edison having its Wisconsin premiere at the five-hundred-seat Campus Theatre. As Frank Whitbeck went on ahead to supervise arrangements, Tracy, accompanied by Carroll, boarded a train east for Chicago.
In Milwaukee they stopped at the University Club, where they caught up with Gene Sullivan, a prominent attorney and Carroll’s brother-in-law. Nibbling Milwaukee rye bread, Tracy met the press, nervously running his hands through his graying hair and talking excitedly of Louise’s racehorse, Holsworthy. (“Twelve starts and win or place every time!”) He revealed to the group that he had given up polo and was amused to know that Gus Christy was still at the Athletic Club. “What’ll you have to drink, boys? Come on, don’t be bashful!” Then, glancing out a window toward Lake Michigan, “Some fog, eh? I didn’t recall Milwaukee was so damn foggy, but I’m glad to be back.”
Somebody asked whether he might return to Broadway. Reflectively, he said, “I don’t think so … Every time I see my friend [George Jean] Nathan, he tries to lure me back to the stage, saying he’ll find a great play for me. But I guess not. I’ve never lost interest in the stage though. I get to New York to see the plays … The stage is still the best place for training an actor, don’t forget that. Any youngster who wants a Hollywood career should go there by way of New York or some other stage—playing in stock, what there is left of it. Don’t go to Hollywood to begin. What chance is there out there? They’ve got no facilities for training actors.”
He and Whitbeck made the two-hour drive to Ripon the next morning, and at noon he became the honored guest of the school’s seventy-fourth graduating class. Having donned cap and gown, Tracy was escorted to Ingram Hall, where he posed for pictures with Silas Evans, Professor Boody, J. Clark Graham, and a number of former classmates, including J. Harold Bumby, Tracy’s former teammate and the man who witnessed his audition before Franklin Sargent in 1922. After a commencement address from Dr. Gordon Laing, dean emeritus of the University of Chicago, everyone moved outside to accommodate a crowd estimated at 2,500 for the actual ceremony. Professor Boody spoke first: “Today marks for me the close of 25 years of teaching at Ripon College, and I consider it a most happy coincidence that on this anniversary I am permitted to present one of my former students for an honorary degree—one whose friendship and loyalty have been more precious to me than rubies, and whose rise to the top of his profession I have watched with ever-increasing pride and admiration.”
Boody presented Dean Graham, under whose guidance Tracy’s first public performances were given. “Spencer Tracy, the world knows you as many people, for in your time you have played many parts. But Ripon College knows you in another role—that of the eager youth who spoke his lines impromptu to the cues of life. That youth we remember with affection, both for himself and the great promise that he displayed even then … The task of the actor, as Shakespeare remarked, is, and ever has been, to hold the mirror up to nature to interpret the deepest passions of the human soul, and thereby cleanse it through pity and terror in the classic Aristotelian sense. To that distinguished company you indubitably belong.” Silas Evans spoke of Tracy’s sincerity and intelligence, his mastery of his art. “Your acting has not only been highly entertaining,” he said, “it has been thoroughly educational, and on behalf of the board of trustees of the college, it gives me great pleasure to present the degree of Doctor of Dramatic Art, with all the privileges and duties appertaining thereto.”
Tracy moved to the microphone. “There are some things I intended to say,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. “I wanted to thank Dean Graham and Professor Boody in particular for the great confidence they displayed in me and for their help. And if through my work I have done some small justice to their confidence, I am happy indeed. There are some other things I wanted to say about Ripon, but it seems that when you get to them you don’t say them. Perhaps it’s better this way … I had intended saying something to the graduating class. Please bear with me, because when you come back, you’ll feel this too. I’d like you to accept from me a ‘God bless you all and give you strength to carry on.’ ”
The ovation that greeted his remarks continued as the procession slowly made its way to the president’s home for a luncheon that included Mayor Carl Zeidler of Milwaukee. He was then whisked back to West Hall, his old campus home, where he was presented with a small golden gavel in commemoration of his time as leader of Alpha Phi Omega. Following a reception at the home of Professor Boody, he was driven out to the Green Lake home of Harold Bumby, now a successful industrialist whose various enterprises included a major interest in Speed Queen. A sitdown dinner for fifty was staged at the Bumby household, where the guests included Lorraine Foat Holmes, who hadn’t seen him in several years. He looked heavier, she observed, and grayer, but was still very much the Spence she always knew.
Accepting an honorary doctorate at Ripon College, June 10, 1940. Left to right: Silas Evans, college president, Tracy, Professors H. Phillips Boody and J. Clark Graham. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Tracy said, “This day will live with me as the greatest so far in this part of my life.” Walter Monfried, long the Milwaukee Journal theater and music critic, would also remember it, but for a somewhat different reason. At the end of commencement exercises, Monfried made his way to a telephone and called the Journal. “I have the Tracy story,” he said. “Do you want to take it now?”
“Hell, no!” his city editor replied. “Italy has just gone to war against France and England—Tracy can wait ’til tomorrow!”
With its top-heavy assortment of players, Boom Town opened in New York over the Labor Day weekend and handily played to more people than any single attraction since Gone With the Wind. Tracy made a quick visit east, ostensibly to support the picture but in reality to meet with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who received him in the Oval Office on September 16, 1940.
The president, who was in a close race for a third term against Wendell Willkie, thanked Tracy for his help in shoring up support within the film industry. Pat O’Brien had just been elected chairman of the “Hollywood for Roosevelt” committee, and although Tracy generally disapproved of actors giving off their political preferences, he agreed to lend his name to the cause, as had Myrna Loy, Thomas Mitchell, Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Humphrey Bogart, and Jimmy Cagney. Robert Montgomery was O’Brien’s counterpart on the Republican side, and his constituents included Walt Disney, Fred Astaire, Lionel Barrymore, Gary Cooper, Jack Warner, Bing Crosby, Irene Dunne, and Louis B. Mayer.
While in Washington, Tracy fielded the usual questions at an afternoon “press party” arranged by the studio. Asked again if he ever thought of going back to the stage, he replied, “Another picture like I Take This Woman and I might have to in order to eat.” He said that any play that came along for him would likely have to wait a couple of years. His next picture, he told the group, would probably be Tortilla Flat, followed by The Yearling. What he didn’t say—doubtless because he didn’t want to answer the questions that would inevitably follow—was that he would be starting the Boys Town sequel in the space of a few weeks.
The studio was pressuring him to do Dr. Ephraim McDowell, the story of the pioneering American surgeon, and had already put novelist and biographer Gene Fowler to work on a script. Tracy didn’t like the story and didn’t much care to do another period picture, nor, for that matter, another biography. He had a tense meeting with Eddie Mannix on October 17, followed by a session on the twenty-first with Mannix, Benny Thau, and Neil McCarthy. It was the opening salvo in negotiations over a new contract, and Tracy went through the motions of doing costume and makeup tests while a sometimes heated discussion ensued.
At first, Father Flanagan was dubious about a second picture. Given the drop in contributions after the first picture appeared, he worried a second could sink the entire enterprise. Broadway’s Gene Buck, a close friend and the president of ASCAP, advised him privately on the matter of a sequel: “I think you got a rotten deal, which I deplore and which I believe eventually will straighten itself out … Please do not, for any consideration at the moment, without first thinking it through, lend your name or your institution to any second edition.” Eventually the studio pledged to build a dormitory with some of the earnings from the film, and a check for $35,000 was cut in June 1939.
The formal contract for a second Boys Town film was signed in February 1940 and called for a cash payment of $100,000. John Considine promised “completely a new story” that would follow the lives of some of the boys as they “step out of Father Flanagan’s Boys Town into the world, and will portray the continued interest of Father Flanagan in the life of his wards even after they leave Boys Town.” Considine, who was accompanied to Omaha by screenwriter Jim McGuinness, promised the new picture would be made on “quite an elaborate scale” and that “a great deal of the filming” would take place in Nebraska. In the middle of a building campaign, Father Flanagan heralded the signing of the new deal: “The large debt of our Home will be reduced by the amount to be paid us, and we will be given another opportunity to present to the world the humanitarian and character-building work that is being done in Boys Town.”
Tracy said nothing when presented the script, provisionally titled Boys Town Sequel, and Louise, who thought the original “stuffy,” saw no point in trying to talk him out of it. The film went into production in Culver City on November 4, 1940, and Considine’s assurances to the contrary, there would be no location work for either of its two stars. As it progressed, it was as if the movie was made under a complete publicity blackout. There were no on-set visits, no interviews given, no advance ballyhoo approaching the scale of the first production. Louise was gone much of the time, Johnny having returned, at age sixteen, to the Wright Oral School in New York City, and Tracy seemed more focused on preparations for his next picture than on the work at hand.
Tracy’s first conference on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde took place on November 8, 1940, when he met with Eddie Mannix, producer Victor Saville, and Vic Fleming, who was set to direct the picture. Saville’s original idea had been to star Robert Donat, who was to have made the film at the former Alexander Korda studios at Denham. Donat was said to be “enthusiastic” and, moving forward, M-G-M acquired the rights to Robert Louis Stevenson’s original story from Paramount, where previous versions had been made in 1920 and 1931. The war intervened, and Saville settled in California while Donat chose to remain in England.
In New York, Howard Dietz was incredulous; Metro didn’t make horror pictures, and certainly not with their top stars. Jekyll and Hyde was different, in that it had always been an important stage vehicle—notably for Richard Mansfield—and the two Paramount versions had featured John Barrymore and Fredric March, respectively. When Donat’s participation became impractical in the spring of 1940, Saville naturally thought of Tracy as the studio’s only credible candidate for the title role. Tracy resisted the part at first, unsure of how he’d handle it, and relented only after Fleming got involved and proposed to do something new and daring with the idea.
Frank McHugh could remember a night at one of the regular Boys’ Club dinners when Tracy said he was considering the picture and asked the others if they thought he should do it. Lynne Overman spoke up and advised against it.
“Why?” asked Tracy.
“You would not be good in it,” he said quietly.
Tracy, a bit of indignation now creeping into his voice, asked, “Why would I not be ‘good in it’?”
“Nobody,” said Overman, “ever is.”
John Lee Mahin, Fleming’s frequent collaborator, had been on the project since April, working under Saville’s direct supervision and sticking closely to the 1931 screenplay by Percy Heath and Samuel Hoffenstein. Tracy, as it turned out, had an entirely different conception of the character, one that was intensely personal and, to him, painfully obvious. “I will never forget,” said Adela Rogers St. Johns, “the time that he explained to me that … there was supposed to be some magic, evil drink that Dr. Jekyll invents that turns [him] into Mr. Hyde. And this is a magic formula. And Spence said, ‘Nothing but liquor. That’s all. He’s just trying to show you that you can be Dr. Jekyll, and if you drink enough booze you end up in the gutter as Mr. Hyde. That’s all there is to it—it’s just booze.’ And I said, ‘Well, you ought to know.’ And he said, ‘I do know. That’s why I’m telling you!’ ”
Tracy elaborated:
I had always been fascinated by the story and saw it as a story of the two sides of a man. I felt Jekyll was a very respectable doctor—a fine member of society. He had proposed to a lovely girl and was about to marry her. But there was another side to the man. Every once in a while, Jekyll would go on a trip. Disappear. And either because of drink or dope or who-knows-what, he would become—or should I say turn into?—Mr. Hyde. Then in a town or neighborhood where he was totally unknown, he would perform incredible acts of cruelty and vulgarity. The emotional side of Jekyll was obviously extremely disturbed. The girl, as his fiancée, is a proper lady. But as his fantasy whore, the girl matched his Mr. Hyde. She would be capable of the lowest behavior. The two girls would be played by the same actress; the two men would be me.
Tracy had the idea of doing the transformations from Jekyll to Hyde entirely without makeup, as he remembered Barrymore having done them in 1920: “The change was not essentially physical. It went deeper than that. It was his soul that turned black. As a matter of fact, Mr. Hyde would have been better able to carry out his diabolical crimes had he been handsome, suave, polished. Not only that, but a handsome Mr. Hyde would have been more believable and the contrast between his appearance and personality more interesting.”
On December 16, he dined with Saville, Fleming, and Mahin, and they ran the silent Jekyll and Hyde. Barrymore, they discovered, did the transformation in one shot but, once established as having changed to Mr. Hyde, relied on makeup to put across the effect. The look was in some respects subtle and in other ways outlandish, with putty fingers extending the hands and a phony chin accentuating the actor’s scarecrow frame. The results inconclusive, the men decided to make a test to see if a strictly cerebral version of the story was even possible. Meanwhile, with Mahin’s completed script in the bank, Saville turned to journalist and playwright John L. Balderston, whose name had been associated with some of Hollywood’s most prominent horror pictures, including Dracula and Frankenstein. Balderston reviewed Mahin’s work and began framing the problem by setting forth the dual nature of man and Plato’s metaphor of the soul as a charioteer driving two horses—the good horse and the bad horse.
On December 23, Tracy, who had just finished with the Boys Town sequel, shot a test of the initial transformation scene as written by Mahin. The following day, Christmas Eve, he screened the test and sadly pronounced it “no good.” Said Mahin, “They made tests without makeup, but he couldn’t bring it off, he couldn’t contort his face enough.” Fleming thought they’d have another go after the first of the year, but Tracy’s enthusiasm for the part evaporated. Convinced he could never pull the thing off and would simply make a fool of himself, he started maneuvering to get out of the commitment. Fleming kept him on board, certain they were onto something extraordinary, but Tracy remained unhappy for the balance of the project.
During his time as director of Gone With the Wind, Fleming had been the object of a campaign by David Selznick to interest him in a new contract player, the Swedish import Ingrid Bergman. Selznick made sure that Fleming saw Intermezzo, Bergman’s American film debut, and that he subsequently considered her for a role in his first picture to follow GWTW, which Jekyll and Hyde would likely be. Bergman, twenty-four, was already at work at M-G-M in a picture called Rage in Heaven, and on December 18 she shot a test for Jekyll and Hyde with actor Edward Ashley as Dr. Jekyll. Bergman was apparently tested for the part of Beatrix, Jekyll’s fiancée and traditionally the ingenue part in the play. She was, however, “fed up” playing nice girls, and when she saw the test, her instincts told her the better role would be that of Ivy the barmaid—Miriam Hopkins in the 1931 version—and she put in for that part instead. As Saville remembered it, “Ingrid came to Fleming and me and suggested the roles should be reversed and she should play the prostitute. The idea was immediately appealing. The obvious photogenic purity of Bergman would react to the evil part of the good Dr. Jekyll.”
By late January, Bergman was set for Ivy but the part of Beatrix was yet to be cast. In fact, much of the supporting cast was still in question, except for Donald Crisp and the English actor-director Peter Godfrey. Tracy, Fleming, and Saville had broken the characters of Jekyll and Hyde into numbered variations and were making—and remaking—tests of each. Tracy’s Jekyll makeup was generally okay, but the Hyde makeup was still to be tested. The Jekyll wardrobe was ready for fittings, but the Hyde wardrobe was at a standstill until Tracy, Fleming, and Saville could agree on the amount of padding for each of the four changes in the script—which was being rewritten.
On the matter of the transformations, it seemed as if every department on the lot had been mobilized to come up with a solution. The Cartoon Department would have a preliminary test by the end of the month, and cinematographer Paul Vogel was trying various methods suggested by tint and lab specialist John Nickolaus. Olindo Ceccarini, an authority on color photography as well as sound, had pretty much exhausted the possibilities of blue light, while Jack Dawn’s makeup department was preparing a test of hand transformations. Nobody had yet undertaken to watchRouben Mamoulian’s 1931 version, in which the initial transformation was accomplished with a filtering method keyed to colored makeup. Apparently no one wanted to be influenced by—or accused of merely copying—a version that was not simply well regarded but had actually won an Academy Award for Fredric March.
Increasingly nervous and unhappy, Tracy dreaded the start of the picture and was unable to get to sleep most nights until two or three in the morning. On January 28 he took Johnny to the studio to see “the Jekyll & Hydes of old” and to watch all of the tests he had made. “Pred[ict] Jekyll & Hyde will be bad,” he wrote in his book later that night. “Picture & I will get panned by critics. This will be big bust.” Louise dragged him off to La Quinta for a long weekend—he had given her a new Lincoln Model 57 coupe for Christmas—and they spent their days on the tennis court. (“Weeze won the championship,” he noted.) They drove home, stopping at Pomona on a Sunday night to see a preview of Men of Boys Town.1 “Too saccharine,” he concluded. “Dull and unbelievable. Will not do as well as original.”
Fleming had Jekyll and Hyde laid out so as to shoot all the Jekyll script first, then all the Hyde script, and then the transitions from Jekyll to Hyde and vice versa. Still lacking final decisions on Hyde and the transformation scenes, he was nevertheless able to begin filming on the morning of Tuesday, February 4, 1941. Tracy, in a miserable mood, commemorated the occasion in his book: “Start of Jekyll & Hyde, what may well be the worst picture ever made. It will get panned, I will get panned—It will flop!”
Since both Fleming and Tracy wanted a closed set for the Hyde passages, it was thought best to get the press in and out early while Tracy was still in the guise of Dr. Jekyll. Cast at the last minute as Beatrix was M-G-M contract player Lana Turner, whose previous output for the studio had been limited to B-picture romances and musicals. Given Bergman’s earlier roles and Selznick’s stewardship, it was assumed that Turner would be playing Ivy, not Bergman, so there was an element of surprise in revealing Turner to the world as the virginal daughter of Sir Charles Emery.
Fleming spent four days shooting the ornate dinner party at which Jekyll first expounds his theories of good and evil, Beatrix demurely seated to his left. The table was designed to accommodate twenty guests and was divided into three sections so that one section could slide away to enable intimate shots of the other two. On the third day of coverage, director George Cukor brought W. Somerset Maugham to the set. With Tracy in his soup-and-fish, Cukor explained to the eminent British author that he was in the process of remaking Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When Tracy had finished playing the scene for the umpteenth time, Maugham turned to his host and asked, “Which one is he now?”
Maugham, perhaps, had heard there wasn’t going to be any “ape makeup” in this version of the story. “We’re going to try to make Hyde a believable man,” Tracy told John Chapman, syndicated correspondent for the New York Daily News. “When the picture was first proposed I even suggested that Hyde never be pictured, except maybe the back of his ear or something like that, but it didn’t work out. But he’ll be a recognizable human being.” Visitors found that Tracy wasn’t as interested in discussing Turner as he was her luminous costar. “The Hyde part isn’t believable when you come right down to it. But if the audiences are convinced, I think it will be because of Ingrid Bergman. There is an actress! I don’t throw the word ‘great’ around—just use it on Helen Hayes and a couple of others—and I think Miss Bergman is great. She’ll make Hyde. It’s like Captains Courageous. Here I was with an accent picked up from all parts of the world, and I wasn’t believable. But there was Freddie Bartholomew looking at me wide-eyed and believing—so the audience did, too.”
Eager and passionate, Bergman loved the role of Ivy and worked hard at it. “Ingrid,” said Victor Saville, “came to my office most mornings to perfect her accent—we decided on the very posh upper-Tooting style—‘Ouw, yereversonice, aren’t yer.’ ”
Tracy saw Ingrid Bergman as the key to putting his Mr. Hyde across on screen. She campaigned for the role of Ivy and worked hard on her accent. (SUSIE TRACY)
Tracy’s fascination with the actress soon extended to their off hours as well, and with Bergman’s husband in Rochester studying medicine, she had a lot of free time on her hands. The two first dined together on March 21, fittingly after all the Jekyll scenes had been completed and Tracy was now working exclusively as Hyde. He had taken a room at the Beverly Wilshire and was spending most weekends sailing with Jimmy Cagney. They dined again the following week, and again the week after. They celebrated his forty-first birthday on the set of the picture, with Myrna Loy and Mickey Rooney stopping by for cake. Louise took him to dinner that night at Ciro’s (with the Disneys) and then left the following day for New York to check up on Johnny.
With Louise out of town, Tracy began dining with Bergman almost every night and continued to do so after the picture finished on April 12. Bergman, for her part, thought Tracy “wonderful” as a leading man and recorded as much in her diary. “I watched her relationship with Spencer on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” said John Houseman, a vice president for Selznick with responsibility for bringing Bergman along as an actress. “But that’s not uncommon in this business.”
Fleming, whose work on the film was careful and studied, may have stirred the pot by investing the picture with a strong undercurrent of sexual tension, boldly Freudian in its exploration of the unconscious mind. The intensity of the scenes between Ivy and Hyde, their imagery and sadism, became the film’s most daring break with the versions of the past. (“So this is what has destroyed the world from the beginning, this poison, but it is a pleasant thing,” says Hyde.) With Bergman, Tracy was alternately solicitous and petty, conscious of giving her everything she needed as an actress, yet terrifically uncomfortable with the material and Fleming’s approach to it.
By agreeing to play Hyde with makeup, Tracy surrendered his actor’s instinct to Fleming’s conception of the role, and it was never a satisfactory fit. Still, he managed Jekyll without the ramrod stiffness of Fredric March nor the matinee posings of John Barrymore. What he brought to the part was a profound normality that could be distorted and amplified as Hyde took control; the connection between the two sides of the character had never been as blatant. When first in the grip of his dark side, Jekyll examines himself in the mirror as a medical doctor might examine a patient. At once astonished and yet altogether fascinated, he says, “Can this be evil, then?” and bursts into a nervous laugh.
Taut and unblinking, Hyde takes unrestrained glee in the languid terror of Bergman’s Ivy, all breathless and slow as if snared in a trap from which she can’t possibly escape. The design of the makeup wasn’t as outlandish as for previous incarnations, more an exaggeration of Tracy’s own familiar features, in keeping with the notion that it was Jekyll’s soul that turned black. The most obvious embellishment was a grotesque set of false teeth. Said Victor Saville, “We had to make six sets of teeth as the fangs fully developed—booming voice of Tracy from the stage, ‘Bring on the choppers!’ ”
What Fleming and Mahin ultimately produced was a deft exercise in sadomasochism, something very different from the exploration Tracy had first imagined, a sort of tour of the psyche of an addict, the emotional need, the physical intolerance, the divide between the security of home and the debauchery of the street, the shame and self-loathing that withered the spirit, the mortal sin that, in the judgment of the church, killed the soul. Finding the intersection between actor and character—characters, in this instance, for he took to referring to himself as “we” around the set—was an abnormally draining process, fluid and imprecise and inordinately dependent upon Fleming’s oblique direction. “It isn’t often,” said Tracy, “that an actor is actually emotionally upset by a role. Mr. Hyde is one of the few I have played that took everything out of me.”
The transformation scenes remained a problem, and as of April 7 they were yet to shoot the first time Jekyll takes the “dope” (as Saville, in a nod to Tracy’s concept, always referred to Jekyll’s mysterious potion). The final days were in some ways the toughest, as Hyde’s zeal begins to leave him, and all that is left is an unconstrained fury, bottled lightning in a corroded shell of a man. Tracy spent his days on the set barely speaking to others, his only respite his evenings alone with Bergman. It rained constantly during the course of the shoot, and his mood could not have been lifted by the release of Men of Boys Town, which came just days before the finish of the picture.
Katherine Brown, Selznick’s story editor, came west with Bergman’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Pia, and Spence had all three to the ranch for a weekend. One night they went to King Vidor’s place for dinner and then, as Tracy later noted, “ditched the guests.” Their time together was rapidly drawing to a close: Bergman was preparing to do Anna Christie in Santa Barbara under John Houseman’s direction, while Tracy would be going east for the start of The Yearling. On his last day in town, a Monday, they played tennis in the morning, were apart in the afternoon, but together again for dinner, the tenth such occasion in the space of two weeks. The following day, Tracy boarded the Super Chief for Chicago, expecting to be gone for at least eight weeks.
In mid-February Tracy lunched with Nicholas Schenck, the diminutive “general” of the Loew’s empire, and accepted the terms of a new deal that would expressly limit the number of pictures he could be required to make in a given year. The seven-year contract, which paid $5,000 a week, held the studio to three Tracy pictures in the first, third, fifth, and seventh years of the agreement, and just two in the second, fourth, and sixth. In addition, Tracy would be permitted, under certain conditions, to return to the legitimate stage in each of the even years of the pact. His billing, which in the past had always been “first featured,” was now for the first time spelled out as “that of star or as that of a co-star with one or more other co-stars.” The new agreement, which was signed on April 15, 1941, retroactively took effect with the start of Jekyll and Hyde.2
The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ tale of a boy’s life in inland Florida, was an immediate sensation when it was published by Scribner in March 1938. Sixty thousand copies were sold in the first month alone. M-G-M snapped up the picture rights for $30,000, and by September all the particulars were in place: Tracy would play Penny Baxter under Victor Fleming’s direction, with Gene Reynolds taking the role of Penny’s son, Jody. John Lee Mahin, who fell in love with the book and urged the studio to buy it, was at first to write the screenplay, but then Mahin clashed with producer Sidney Franklin, who said Mahin “didn’t realize the sensitivity of it” and had him put off the project.
Franklin, who was producing the film version of Paul Osborn’s Broadway success On Borrowed Time, induced the playwright, who was new to screenwriting, to tackle The Yearling. Osborn, as it turned out, was an inspired choice, sensitive and knowing, and his script, completed in July 1940, was a masterful job. Second-unit work began the following January, as a full Technicolor crew, battling bugs and humidity, struggled to get shots on film that matched the fanciful compositions of California-based sketch artists.3 By the time Tracy arrived on May 2 at Ocala, where the company had leased a farm, some members of the dispirited crew had been on site nearly four months. Tracy and Fleming were worn out as well; having just finished Jekyll and Hyde, neither man had as much as a week’s vacation before nature mandated the start of The Yearling.
Tempers were short from the beginning. The principal problem was the yearling itself. Since most deer are born within a narrow May–June window and grow quickly, the studio’s animal handler, a former elephant trainer named George Emerson, conspired to have a small fleet of does timed to give birth in successive weeks so that Fleming and company would always have a newborn available. Breeding began in October 1940; Emerson presided over a small zoo on Lot 4 and gathered a veritable menagerie of trained animals for use in the film. When it came time for shooting to begin, they were all loaded into a pair of rail cars especially designed for the movement of livestock and transported to the central Florida location.
In the two years since the film’s announcement, fifteen-year-old Gene Reynolds had grown too old to play Jody, and a hectic search was launched to find a replacement. Billy Grady hit nine cities in twelve days and shot tests of maybe thirty kids. It was, however, the first boy on his first stop in Atlanta who bore the most uncanny resemblance to the author’s conception of what Jody should look like, and twelve-year-old Gene Eckman was ultimately given the part. Imported to Culver City for training, Eckman was enrolled at the studio schoolhouse with instructions to spend as much time as possible with the deer being raised by Emerson on Lot 4. The boy was allowed to read the script but told not to memorize the dialogue. Josephine Dillon, Clark Gable’s first wife, was given the task of coaching him and moderating his thick Georgia accent.
“We will not be able to take tests of clothes with Spencer Tracy and the boy until this coming Monday,” Sidney Franklin advised his brother Chet, who was directing the second-unit work in Florida, “which is unfortunate, but there is nothing we can do about it. He has been playing Mr. Hyde to such an extent that we’re afraid to put him with the boy for fear he would tear him to pieces. It seems to be affecting his disposition, so we have to leave the poor guy alone until he gets out of character which we hope will be Monday.”
Fleming made some tests, simple process shots on a treadmill in which Tracy and Eckman were seen ambling down a forest pathway. Said Eckman, “I remember Victor Fleming told me, ‘Gene, stop looking at Spencer Tracy like a star. He’s your father.’ It was one of the first scenes I made with Tracy and he was very nice. I remember he sat down at that point to help me get over this awe of him … We worked it out so that we could carry on a conversation and I wouldn’t feel so out of place.”
Though author Rawlings had sent him a warmly inscribed copy of The Yearling when he was first confirmed for the role, Tracy was physically wrong for the part of Penny Baxter and he knew it. In the book, Penny is described as having “grown to maturity no bigger than a boy. His feet were small, his shoulders narrow, his ribs and hips joined together in a continuous fragile framework.” Tracy, on the other hand, was broad and solid and weighed nearly two hundred pounds. Publicist Eddie Lawrence was assigned to accompany him to Ocala, and Lawrence caught up with him just as he was emerging from a projection room after running the tests. “Spence,” Lawrence began, “what a pleasure to do this journey with you—” Tracy cast a burning eye in Lawrence’s direction and, in a voice dripping with disgust, said, “Looks like I ATE the boy!” and stalked off.
Casting for the part of Ma Baxter was contentious, Fleming being dead set against the popular favorite, British stage and film actress Flora Robson, who had the long, plain look the story demanded. “Fleming was violently pro-Nazi,” said Anne Revere, the New York–born actress who was instead given the part. “This was ’41, we hadn’t entered the war … and he was violently opposed to the English and anyone who was interfering with the boys over there. So he wouldn’t have her, he was against all English.” Revere had played a one-day bit as an aggrieved mother in Men of Boys Town and gained Tracy’s endorsement. Fleming initially told her she had the “wrong bony structure” for the role but tested her anyway. “When they put Spence in the part,” she said, “they tried to make him look small by getting everything else very big … They took me and duped me up; they put great platform shoes and a big bosom on me, and tried to make me look very large.”
For Tracy, the experience was a replay of Northwest Passage, but in a climate not nearly as agreeable, the palmetto and scrub holding in the heat like a damp blanket. “He is, with the possible exception of Mr. Fleming, the hardest-working man on the 79,000-acre lot,” Sidney Whipple observed during a visit to the set for the New York World-Telegram. “He routs himself out of bed at 6 o’clock in the morning and thereafter is in the field. He worries and frets and deprecates his own talent. He rehearses his lines and practices for constant improvement in his action. He squats in the sun-baked cornfield for interminable conferences with director Fleming. He completely submerges himself in the character. When he disappears after a 12- or 14-hour workday, it is either to engage in further conferences with Mr. Fleming over the script and tomorrow’s shooting or, more rarely, to engage in a little fishing in nearby Lake George. This is his only recreation.”
Fleming, even with the deliberate pace of production, wasn’t getting what he wanted. “I was only on the set twice,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings said in a letter to a friend,
and I could tell Fleming wasn’t satisfied with Anne Revere or the boy. He was very nervous, taking sleeping tablets, etc., and felt he could handle things much better on the Hollywood sets. The wind registered on the sound track, not sounding like wind at all, etc. The boy,Gene Eckman, in looks and personality seemed quite all right, but the sound man had me listen in, and it was true, as he complained, that the boy was not enunciating and his lines were not registering. Tracy was bored and morose, Anne Revere is not Ma Baxter as I visualize her, but had a fine pioneer look and I thought she was all right, but she didn’t seem too “put out” emotionally in the one scene I saw her do.
“I will be the first to say I was not ready for it,” Anne Revere acknowledged. “I hadn’t had enough experience in pictures. But I was not the cause of the debacle. First, they couldn’t understand the kid. And Spence would laugh and say, ‘Well, I’m only a hundred pounds overweight.’ The whole thing started to look absurd! So finally they packed it up and took it home.”
Tracy commandeered a new Cadillac the production manager had purchased and, hiring a driver, proposed that he and Eddie Lawrence ride over to Jacksonville to catch a train. When they got to Jacksonville, Tracy told Lawrence he liked riding in the car and was in no hurry to get home. “You know, Eddie, American Airlines goes through St. Louis—we’ll go to St. Louis.” When Lawrence said that he was going to call the studio, Tracy said grandly, “Oh, forget the studio!”
Said Lawrence, “He loved to needle you—a lot. So finally, going through Georgia, I saw this old fashioned praline factory, and they had big bags of pralines hanging down. And I knew Spence, so I gave the boy six bucks (or whatever it was) and I said, ‘You take Mr. Tracy over—’ and in the meantime I called the studio. They said, ‘Good God, where is Spencer?’ Because this was after [it was known that he had] periodic problems … I told ’em, ‘Look, I’ll keep in touch with you. There’s nothing else I can do. Tracy’s fine—he hasn’t had a drink.’ ”
With Gene Eckman and Anne Revere in one of the few stills to emerge from the Florida location of The Yearling. (ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES)
From Atlanta they moved on to Nashville, where they put up for the night at the Hermitage and, with M-G-M’s pull, got the Presidential Suite.
And then the next morning Tracy said, “Look, we’ll go to Chicago.” I said, “All right, Spencer, we’ll go to Chicago.” So we went up through all that wonderful country…[and] we got to the Blackstone Hotel. And they scared me to death. The guy who took the bags said, “Oh, Mr. Tracy, I’m the one who bought you the booze, remember?” Oh boy, here we go, here we go, here we go. But we didn’t. I had the most wonderful four days with Spencer. He was warm, he was friendly, we walked a lot, went to the lake… Helen Hayes was in town, and he called her and we had dinner at the Ambassador East, and I remember she kind of laid him out. He was talking about, oh, he wanted to go back into theatre. And she said, “Spencer. Sunday matinees, you know. And night shows? I don’t think you’d care for that.” But it was a pleasant time until finally Spence said, “I guess we’d better get home.”
Tracy objected when Lawrence said that he would get him a compartment and take a roomette for himself. “No, no, no,” he said. “A compartment to sit up in, and a compartment to lie down in, and I want you to have a compartment. Three compartments.” As soon as they boarded the train, Lawrence, remembering his first encounter with his charge on the set of Riffraff, sought out the porter. “Look,” he said. “This compartment? You never, never knock on the door, never, never bother the occupant. Don’t even make up the beds.” That night on the Chief they ordered steaks, and Tracy, who marked three years of sobriety on May 1, made the only reference Lawrence ever heard to his alcoholism. “Eddie,” he said glumly, “I’d love to have a glass of beer. But you know if I have one beer I’m gone.”
Back at the studio, there was a hot session over the fate of The Yearling. “How can I,” Fleming reportedly asked, “make a picture whose essence is that people love each other, when no one in the cast loves anyone or loves being down there or loves making the picture?” The next day, Eddie Mannix floated the possibility of King Vidor taking over as director, and Tracy, who was friendly with Vidor but not particularly close, made no objection to the idea.
Tracy made another test with Gene Eckman on May 27, and Eckman, he acknowledged, was “better” than before. However, according to Sidney Franklin, the studio was “more or less turning against the boy and the mother” and the problem of quickly recasting the roles became the film’s undoing. In June, Tracy appeared in tests with actresses Frances Farmer and Ruth Hussey, both as possible replacements in the part of Ma Baxter, but the animals were growing and the time for returning to Florida had passed. The Yearling, for reasons of weather and landscape as well as wildlife, had to be filmed in the spring. The decision to postpone it was made on June 13, 1941. The studio’s total investment at the time was estimated at $500,000.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had its first sneak before a paying audience on June 18, but Tracy simply noted the event in his datebook with a question mark. One thing was certain: the scenes in which Jekyll turned into Hyde didn’t work and would have to be redone. Editor Harold Kress recalled that when he was first assigned the film he asked, “What about his changes?” They had hired, he discovered, some thirty animators to put close-ups of Tracy on cells because someone had sold Victor Saville on the idea. “Well,” said cinematographer Joe Ruttenberg, “there were many tests made … thousands of dollars spent on making experiments with certain chemicals that certain lights would change, and it didn’t work out at all.”
Tracy resisted playing Mr. Hyde with makeup and regretted doing so for the rest of his life. (SUSIE TRACY)
On July 14 Tracy returned to the studio to confer on the effects for Jekyll and Hyde. With the press preview only a week away, the changes would have to be made quickly. “We dissolved,” said Ruttenberg of the ultimate—and most obvious—solution. “We sat him down, tied his shoulders and put his head in one of those old fashioned still photographer’s gadgets to keep his head steady, and we kept grinding one or two frames at a time as the make up was being changed … It took hours … same position … It was like doing an animated film, you know.” Tracy, said Ruttenberg, patiently submitted to the tedious process of filming all three of the on-camera transformation scenes over the course of two long days. “He was very uncomfortable and very cooperative. He realized how much trouble it was.”
Tracy saw Ingrid Bergman the night he finished with the new transformation shots, unconvinced they would make any difference and still fretting over his performance. The trade showing took place in Los Angeles on July 21, and the early returns were a lot more positive than he expected. Daily Variety faulted the film’s length, suggesting that Fleming held his scenes “beyond their fullest realization” but nevertheless pronounced the picture exceptional in every respect. The Reporter called it a “master screen work” and praised the “magnificent” performances of both Tracy and Bergman. “Tracy wisely chooses to play Hyde with the smallest application of makeup, and his face, though radically altered with the assistance of Jack Dawn’s creations, is no longer a visage designed to haunt little children. Tracy’s interpretation reaches deeper into the characterization, and his playing makes it more memorable for not being merely another protean feat. His Jekyll and Hyde is the top portrayal of a top actor’s career.”
Tracy was in San Francisco with Bergman when Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had its world premiere at New York’s Astor Theatre on Tuesday, August 12, 1941. The following day, he saw the notices in the metropolitan dailies and carefully listed the good versus the bad in his book. “Worst panning for an actor ever received?” he wrote. “The horrible notices of ‘Mr. Hyde.’ He! he! All bad for [the] picture business [in] New York.” To be sure, the reviews were generally slams, and Tracy took the brunt of them, Bergman and even Turner coming off considerably better. Ted Strauss, in the Times, said that Tracy’s portrait of Hyde was “not so much evil incarnate as it is the ham rampant.”
Archer Winston in the Post chimed in by calling the role a “ham’s holiday,” and Cecelia Ager reported laughter at the Monday press screening in P.M. “They laugh,” she said. “It’s funny, watching Mr. Tracy’s sweet, strong face with the iron jaw that yet flexes with emotion take on the look of Frankenstein’s Karloff, Teddy Roosevelt, Victor MacLaglen, and finally Gargantua the Great, in orderly progression. (It’s just as funny when he does it backwards).” A scene of Hyde spitting grape seeds drew razzberries, and humorist Harry Hershfield, seated near Lee Mortimer of the Mirror, was heard to remark that he didn’t know Abbott and Costello had been “suddenly substituted for Spencer Tracy.” A few fell to the other side: Howard Barnes, Eileen Creelman, and Norton Mockridge all thought him superb, but the overall consensus was that Tracy’s Hyde was over the top, and it became a shame that would never leave him.
Fortunately for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the public didn’t care what the critics thought, and the picture opened strong, the first Tracy picture to play the upscale Astor since Captains Courageous. Nicholas Schenck wired the ranch:
WE ARE DOING THE BIGGEST BUSINESS OF ANY FILM THAT EVER PLAYED THE ASTOR. THIS INCLUDES “GONE WITH THE WIND,” “PYGMALION” AND “GOODBYE MR. CHIPS.” ALSO TODAY’S BUSINESS WHICH TOOK PLACE AFTER THE NOTICES IS BIGGER THAN YESTERDAYS WHICH WAS IN ADVANCE OF THE NOTICES PROVING THAT WE ARE A SUCCESS … THE PEOPLE THAT WE HAVE QUERIED COMING OUT OF THE THEATRE UNIFORMLY SAY THE PICTURE AND YOUR PERFORMANCE ARE EXCELLENT.
Rain and cooler weather made the film strictly SRO at most performances, and it held to its remarkable pace in its second and third weeks as well. The studio, however, knew it had to do something about the laughs the picture drew, and Tracy’s datebook entry for August 15 reads as follows: “Studio cutting ‘Jekyll & Hyde’—but not en[ough]!” He was still holed up at the studio on the eighteenth (“Hydeing” as he put it) and the editing wasn’t completed until the night of the twenty-first, the improvements still nevertheless in time for the critical Labor Day weekend, the traditional start of the new season.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde went on to broader critical acclaim elsewhere and worldwide billings in excess of $2 million. Tracy, however, could never reconcile the film’s success with the critical roundhousing he endured in New York. Perversely, he took to quoting the Abbott and Costello line whenever the subject of the film came up, erroneously attributing it to Cecelia Ager.
Dick Mook told him that he didn’t seem himself at all, that since winning the Oscars he was only preoccupied with topping his own performances. Tracy didn’t agree with that, but he took a moment to formulate a response.
“It wasn’t the awards,” he said finally. “Naturally I was flattered, but when I stop to think of some of the others who’ve received the awards, I don’t take them too seriously. Perhaps I do worry over my work, but it isn’t for fear I won’t get another award. It’s because I’m bothered about the poor parts I’m getting … I guess maybe I’m near the end of my rope. I’ve been in pictures almost twelve years now, and I’m not a juvenile anymore. Well, it was fun while it lasted and neither the stage, nor pictures, nor Hollywood owes me a thing. In fact, they’ve all been mighty good to me.”
1 Tracy’s title, for which he was awarded fifty dollars.
2 Contrary to legend, Tracy’s M-G-M contract never called for top billing.
3 Fleming had been so impressed with the continuity sketches of William Cameron Menzies on Gone With the Wind that he had key sequences for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde designed in the same manner. For The Yearling, he had the entire screenplay sketched in advance.