Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [121]
Colleen Moore, who had played in films with John Barrymore, Fredric March, and Jean Hersholt, thought Tracy the best of the lot. “He was the greatest actor I ever worked with,” she said. Fittingly, Tracy’s most affecting scene in the film was played opposite Moore in the moments following the birth of their son. In the script, Sally’s face is very white, her eyes unusually big and dark. She smiles at him but does not speak. Tom sinks to his knees, takes her hand, and speaks gently: “My son … my son. I’ve got a son. Oh, Sally, they’ll never stop me now. Thank you …” On the set, Howard trusted his actors’ instincts and gave them wide latitude with the unfolding of a scene. Tracy entered in something of a trance, still processing the momentous news that he was now a father. He dropped to his knees at the bed. “Sally, are you all right? I’ve got a son. You gave me a son.” Moore’s face was toward the camera, her eyes closed, but as Tracy spoke, she found it impossible to maintain her composure. “We finally had to shoot it with my back towards the camera because every time he did his scene, I cried so hard because he was so good. No actor ever did that to me.”
When it came time for Tracy to recite the Lord’s Prayer, Howard moved in close, keeping Moore’s face entirely out of the shot. “Our Father … Who art in Heaven…,” he began haltingly, sticking to the spirit of the scene if not necessarily the text. “Thank you, God. Thank you for your kindness … for Thine is the power and the glory, for ever and ever.”
As Tracy later told Clifford Jones, the actor playing his adult son: “This isn’t a business about making faces. You have to concentrate … and listen … because the camera is there picking up your thoughts.”
On location for The Power and the Glory. From left: William K. Howard, Colleen Moore, screenwriter Preston Sturges, and Tracy. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
“In 1933, I was 21 years old,” wrote Lincoln Cromwell,
and about to graduate from UCLA. I had applied to and been accepted at the medical schools of both the University of Southern California and McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. McGill was my first choice, but I didn’t have the funds to attend either school. At this point, almost miraculously, the man who was to become a patron and sponsor entered my life.
Until then, I had never heard of Spencer Tracy. He was just beginning to become known and I wasn’t much of a moviegoer. Yet, one spring morning I found myself sitting on the porch of his house in Westwood, sipping lemonade with Spencer and his wife, Louise. At the end of that conversation, which lasted a couple of hours, Spencer informed me that he would underwrite all expenses for my first year of medical school at McGill and, if I proved successful, would pay for the rest of my medical education. There would be a price, Spencer said. I was to write him a weekly letter, telling him what I was learning and describing my life at McGill. Thus we entered into a pact that was to last five years.
In Brentwood, Cromwell and his family lived next door to a Mrs. Brumadge, who in turn shared the hometown of Enid, Oklahoma, with Dr. Howard Dennis. Concerned a promising student might have to forgo medical school, Mrs. Brumadge boarded a bus one day and rode into town to ask Dr. Dennis if anything could be done. “Denny,” as Spence liked to call him, was a good friend, the quiet man with the wavy brown hair and the glass eye who routinely patched him up whenever he was injured at polo. He understood Spence’s need to make his good fortune count for something and that he had thought of putting a boy through medical school as if to fill the slot he had himself abandoned when he fell in with the Mask and Wig. Tracy, Cromwell learned, had wanted a son to accomplish the great things in life he knew he never would and was unable to shake the notion that the deep sense of disappointment he felt was the same as what his own father must have felt toward him. “There would be people he would meet,” Louise said, “professional people, doctors and