Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [128]
Four weeks into the matter, it became apparent there was something more to the separation than just “growing incompatibility.” Man’s Castle was made over the hottest days of summer, turning the uncooled soundstage with the Hooverville set into what one visitor described as a blazing inferno. Takes had to be aborted as perspiration beaded on the foreheads of the actors, and more work got done at night than during the oppressive afternoon hours. At the tender age of twenty, Loretta Young already had fifty films, an annulled marriage, and several high-profile relationships to her credit. (“I’ve always been very susceptible to men,” she once commented, “and all of them were gorgeous.”) Small and slight, with light brown hair and an underdeveloped figure, her fortune was her face, a tableau of Catholic innocence, soulful blue eyes, and full lips, convincingly virginal, yet old enough to radiate sex appeal, sensual and restrained.
“Spencer and I were such complete strangers that we hadn’t even seen one another on the screen previous to our being cast together in Man’s Castle,” she said at the time. “I admired his work so much during rehearsal that I went to see several of his recent pictures. He later flattered me very much by telling me that he had done the same thing.” She had worked with some of the screen’s finest actors, Walter Huston, John Barrymore, and the late Lon Chaney among them, but she had never met anyone quite like Spencer Tracy. “Such fire, the talent blazed at you.” The company worked late one night when the picture was about ten days along. “Spencer asked me if I would care to dine with him and run over some of the dialogue. I accepted and we went to the Victor Hugo restaurant. A columnist saw us there and the next day we read the first of the romantic reports.”
Stephen Goosson’s Hoover Flats set for Man’s Castle, which covered 21,000 square feet, lent size and color to an otherwise intimate love story. Here Tracy and Loretta Young, age twenty, pose with director Frank Borzage, 1933. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Young, who went by her given name, “Gretchen,” among friends and family, made little secret of her infatuation with Tracy. Borzage, in fact, may have encouraged it, knowing it was helping the film. (“The story was a trifle,” she said, “but we lived it.”) For once she didn’t push her scenes, sensing the camera was picking up the underlying emotions between them. It was also picking up what Tracy was thinking, a trickier proposition as he was as cool as the character he was playing. Yet she could whisper in his ear and his expression would speak volumes.
“I believe,” he said, “that the first time I ever really became conscious of Loretta as a girl, as a woman, was the first time she noticed me as a man—to feel sorry for. She watched me lunching on the lot. She could see that I was feeling kinda low … And so, that day Loretta came over to me and out of the goodness of her heart asked if I would like to drive out to her house and have a glass of beer. We were knocking off early. I told her I would. I did. We sat in the garden two or three hours, Loretta, her mother, and I. We talked and had a lot of laughs. It was pleasant. It was fun. Life seemed sort of decent again.”
Tracy took to calling her “little ol’ Whoosits,” which was what the character of Bill called Trina in the story. His confidence and command of the role played out in stark contrast to his own personal diffidence. Acting was the one thing he could do in which he had unshakable confidence. Cursed with a sensitive nature, he was all too aware of his inadequacies