Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [177]
But with the motivating sequence removed from the picture, Lang was left to flounder when questioned about the surrendering of Joe Wilson. “I’ve often been asked if Tracy gives himself up because of social consciousness or something like that,” he said to Peter Bogdanovich in 1965. “I don’t think so. I think this man gives himself up because he can’t go on living with an eternal lie—he couldn’t go through life with it. It’s too easy an explanation to say social consciousness makes me do something. One acts because of emotions, personal emotions.”
Fritz Lang left M-G-M a bitter man, blaming Joe Mankiewicz for the cutting of a key sequence and the sweetening of the climax. After the film’s release, Mankiewicz approached him at the Hollywood Brown Derby and offered his hand in friendship and congratulation, and Lang, to his later regret, refused it. His dislike of Tracy was more subtle, as he never had anything but praise for Tracy’s performance in the film. Yet he told Mankiewicz’s biographer, Kenneth L. Geist, that Tracy’s alcoholism had indirectly delayed the picture. “My friend Peter Lorre, a former drug addict, explained to me that when people are deprived of a craving, they turn to something else—Lorre to drink, Tracy to whorehouses. I assume that’s where he’d disappear after lunch, since he didn’t come back till four o’clock. I’d be sitting there with the whole crew, wanting to work, when he’d arrive and say, ‘Fritz, I want to invite the crew to have coffee.’ ”
Tracy’s habit was to have a rubdown at lunch—and a brief nap if he could manage it—but he was present throughout for Fury and only a conflict with the San Francisco company could have deprived Lang of his services. Mankiewicz, furthermore, thought Lang’s insinuation ludicrous. “I don’t think Spence went to whorehouses!” he erupted when asked to comment on Lang’s statement in 1992. “He was much too busy with the ladies! If there ever was an actor who had no reason EVER to go to a whorehouse, it was Spencer Tracy!” He called Lang’s statement “the most unbelievable lie” and then went into the business of the three-hour delay. “How can that be? When Clark Gable was late one half-hour, forty minutes late, on a Victor Fleming movie … Eddie Mannix showed up on the set. Because the [assistant director’s] report goes in: ‘Mr. Gable showed up at such-and-such a time …’ And they come right down. ‘Why were you late?’ Clark, forty-five minutes late, and they ate his ass out. Those stories … if he didn’t show up til four o’clock, what did the crew do? These things are impossible, but they are believed.”
Though Tracy thought Fury a “great document” and a “powerful movie,” he maintained a respectful silence on the subject of its legendary director and vowed never again to work with the man. “Fritz Lang, the director, is a German,” he said tartly in his only public comment on the subject, “and has a technique all his own.”
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1 Wellman’s claim to the contrary, this was the only documented fight between the two men.
2 It was Hopkins who once referred to one of the M-G-M producers as “the asbestos curtain between the audience and the entertainment.”
3 “It’s all very well for you directors to want to make pictures with messages in them,” Lang said he was told, “but just remember that Cinderella paid this company $8 million last year—and $8 million can’t be wrong.” The Cinderella story on the current schedule, of course, was San Francisco.
CHAPTER 12
The Best Year
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Louise Tracy saw little of her husband over the spring of 1936. He was, in fact, in the midst of shooting both San Francisco and Fury when it came time, after years of renting, to move the family to a place of its own.
The Tracys bought in the rural flatlands of the San Fernando Valley, a sprawling region that encompassed practically everything north of the Cahuenga Pass and south of Santa Barbara. A single-story ranch house with two bedrooms, the residence was modest compared to the Cooper property, eight acres on a two-lane road called White Oak just north of Ventura