Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [149]
Playing opposite Clara Bow, still a big box office name, was a vastly different proposition from propping up a newcomer, and Tracy came to regard Marie Galante as a throwback to the days of Society Girl and Painted Woman, when the purpose of the picture was to showcase the girl and he was kept offscreen until the second or third reel. Sheehan had Sonya Levien and Samuel Hoffenstein do a polish on the Nichols screenplay, revising Marie’s lines so that a non-English speaker could handle them, and then Henry King had suggestions when he came aboard as director. Reginald Berkeley, known for his work on Cavalcade, did his own version of the script, juggling concerns from the German, Japanese, and Panamanian governments over how their nationals were to be portrayed. Subsequently, Berkeley’s work was enhanced and emended by John Zinn, Jack Yellen, and Seton I. Miller. All told, twelve writers had a hand in rendering Marie Galante completely unrecognizable by the time it reached the screen.
When Tracy was carted off to the hospital the day before filming was to commence, it was agreed he would be unable to render services until the second week in July and his contract was extended accordingly. The picture was held, even though Henry King had an entire reel’s worth of action to shoot with Ketti Gallian before Tracy would be needed. Then, after a week, with Tracy still hospitalized, Sheehan announced that he was replacing him with Edmund Lowe.
Loretta Young, meanwhile, was in the hospital herself, recovering from elective surgery of an unspecified nature and getting the word out, as best she could, that she and Spence were kaput. “Speaking of TRACY,” Lloyd Pantages wrote in his column of July 5, “his romance with LORETTA YOUNG is COMPLETELY at the ‘Commander Byrd at the Pole’ stage—you know, FRIGID.” Earlier, Spence had shown up at Loretta’s hospital, flowers in hand, wobbling from room to room, and she had locked herself in the bathroom while Josie Wayne got rid of him.
The final scene in the relationship came a few weeks later, during a charity match at the Uplifters Club. Loretta attended with a party of friends, and Eddie Cantor, acting as master of ceremonies, introduced her to the crowd. Tracy was astride his horse in midfield. “At the mention of Loretta’s name,” said Jack Grant, who was present that day, “Spencer involuntarily rose in his saddle as though shot. He gazed in her direction for a long moment before he was aware that as many eyes were observing him as were looking at Loretta.” He trotted his pony off to the sidelines and made himself as inconspicuous as possible. That afternoon, it was reported, he played with particular ferocity.
Marie Galante finally got under way on July 13 with Tracy back heading the cast. Berkeley had just submitted his final version of the script, a loose compendium of everything that had come before, but Henry King still wanted a junior writer on the set, uncertain as to what Ketti Gallian could actually handle in the way of dialogue. “[S]he was not an experienced actor,” King explained. “She didn’t know how to go from one thing to another and how to create emotions.” A lengthy test King shot of her was excellent, and whatever Sheehan thought of Tracy at that particular moment in time, he felt that Ketti Gallian was potentially the biggest of stars and that she deserved the best possible support, which the forty-four-year-old Edmund Lowe decidedly was not.
Tracy felt a grudging affinity to the white-faced Gallian, who was ordered to stop using the American slang she learned from Maurice Chevalier and constantly hounded about her weight. (She was caught bingeing on chocolate bars out behind the stage, and the studio assigned a “secretary” to bird-dog her every move.) One crucial scene required her to cry, and when she told the director she couldn’t do it, King took Tracy