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in The White Sister, Leo Carrillo in Manhattan Melodrama, Walter Connolly in Father Brown, Detective. Casting a lead actor as the priest in San Francisco would be a bold move, giving the conflict over Mary a sizzling undercurrent of sexual tension. When the idea of playing Father Mullin was first broached to Spencer Tracy (who was anticipating Mob Rule as his next picture), he was, as Louise put it, “a little dubious about doing a priest.” Not only did he feel a terrific sense of responsibility in representing the church to a mass audience, but there was also a hesitancy that grew from his own conviction that maybe he should never have become an actor in the first place. It was a thing he almost never spoke of, but Pat O’Brien heard him say it on more than one occasion, and he repeated it once to Shakespearean scholar and author John McCabe.

“What was it, do you figure, Pat, that made Tracy such an unhappy man?” McCabe asked O’Brien one night over drinks at the Lambs Club. “It’s a real mystery, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not,” O’Brien replied. “At least three times Spence told me why it was.” According to Pat, Tracy had never lost the deeply held nostalgia many Irish Catholic boys felt for the idea of being a priest, like one of the bright, enviable Jesuits from their prep school days. “Each time he told me he was pretty much in the bag, but he was telling the truth. I can remember once when he was looking out over the ocean, nuzzling a bottle, when he told me this. His unhappiness—he said—was that always deep down he had the feeling that perhaps he had spurned his real vocation—to the priesthood.”

As Tracy once explained it, “I was seventeen, maybe sixteen, and I was going to a Jesuit school—Marquette Academy. And you know how it is in a place like that—the influence is strong, very strong, intoxicating. The priests are all such superior men—heroes. You want to be like them—we all did. Every guy in the school probably thought some—more or less—about trying for the cloth.”

Had there, in fact, once been a calling? And was he now being asked to act a role he had spurned in real life? “I was awful scared of playing a priest,” he later acknowledged in an interview. “Sure, I couldn’t see myself in that part—or other people accepting me. I was afraid people would get mad at me for trying to play something like that.” To Van Dyke he put it more bluntly: “I’m a Roman Catholic and you know the thing that happened not long ago [meaning the affair with Loretta Young]. I wouldn’t have the crust to play a priest.” It was Van Dyke, he said, who talked him into it, who told him that he’d make him “eat” those words. “I honestly didn’t think I ought to try it. I said I’d go ahead if I had to, but I didn’t like the idea one bit.”

On January 24, 1936, the decision was announced by Edwin Schallert in the pages of the Los Angeles Times: “Instead of two stars of the first magnitude, San Francisco, [a] depiction of the old days in the great west coast city, is to have three luminaries. As is known, Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald for some time have been assigned to this cast, and yesterday Spencer Tracy was added … Start of San Francisco is programmed as soon as Gable returns from Mexico, which will be in about a week. Gable and Miss MacDonald have never previously appeared in a picture together, and casting Tracy with the stars is also an innovation.”

Tracy had known Gable since 1929, when he replaced him in the troubled play that came to be known as Conflict. The following year, Gable was offered the role of Killer Mears in the West Coast production of The Last Mile. The offer had come from the husband-wife producing team of Louis MacLoon and Lillian Albertson, for whom Gable had worked off and on since 1925. Albertson caught Gable in New York, where he had just closed in a play at the Eltinge Theatre. Tracy was rounding up guards and executing hostages next door at the Harris, but Gable hadn’t yet seen him.

“Here we were,” said Gable, “working alongside each other, and I couldn’t see his play and he couldn’t see mine—while mine lasted—because