Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [126]
Man’s Castle did not come together easily. The start of production was delayed two weeks with the advent of a technicians’ strike, then actress Helen MacKeller, originally cast as Flossie, fell ill, causing her scenes to be reshot with Marjorie Rambeau. The delays forced out Minor Watson, committed to John Golden for a play in New York, and Arthur Hohl took his place as the lecherous Bragg. Borzage, too, tended to work more deliberately than most directors, preferring rehearsal to speed, mood to stagecraft. “That Frank Borzage had a way with actors,” said Loretta Young, who felt she finally “proved she could really act” in Man’s Castle. “He made you believe your part and this intensity came over on the screen.”
The film’s centerpiece was Stephen Goosson’s spectacular Hoover Flats set, an artful assemblage of old cars and ramshackle huts topped with plywood and corrugated sheet metal and weighed down with bricks, washtubs, cracker boxes, and broken chairs. Crowded into the largest stage on the Columbia lot and set against a cubist mosaic of junk and weeds, it descended in forced perspective to the East River and the Manhattan skyline beyond, a sort of makeshift resort for the downtrodden, at once both vast and intimate.
Production got under way on July 28, 1933, not long after Tracy was observed moving into an apartment at the Chateau Elysée. “Irritable as a bear” when preparing for a role, he had come to relish the advantage of sleeping at Riviera, where he could concentrate on the business of perfecting a character. Away from the chaos of the movie set and the distractions of a home life that included two small children, he could study the script as late as he liked and still get in his stick-and-ball practice.
That all changed when Carroll Tracy came west and moved into the ivy-covered “Grand Hotel of Golf” with his new bride. By the time the boys’ aunt Jenny arrived with her daughter, Jane, for the summer, Mother Tracy was also living at Riviera and taking her meals in the dining room that overlooked the course. Jenny and Jane Feely took the room next door to Carrie’s, bringing the total number of family members on the property to five. After wrapping The Power and the Glory, Spence retreated to the relative privacy of 712 Holmby, at least temporarily.
Family portrait, 1932. (SUSIE TRACY)
Jane’s first memory of the house in Westwood was of year-old Susie in the yard in a playpen. There was a pool and a pair of servants named Felix and Bessie. Spencer wasn’t around much, but Louise was unfailingly solicitous and kindly.
Jane admired Louise’s elegance and poise, the way she carried herself and the way she spoke. “Her diction was so perfect, so beautiful. There was a little bit of a formality to her that attracted me. She seemed to me to be kind of an actressy sort of person, and I admired her because I was at that stage where I thought people in the theatre—actors and actresses—were kind of superior to the rest of us.” Louise was a little taller than Jane, but they wore the same dress size. “I inherited her clothing, always. We always got the two big boxes from Aunt Carrie and Louise. I got through high school and two years of college in her good clothes. And beyond that.” A check also arrived each month from the time of Bernard’s death in 1931. “Sometimes it would be late and [Mama] would write to Louise because we got to depend on it. And it varied in size; sometimes it was $50 and sometimes $75 and sometimes $100.” Jenny Feely tried to tell Louise one time how much their generosity had meant to them. “Aunt Jenny,” Louise said calmly, cutting her