Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [183]
Tracy did his best to be courteous to the various reporters Howard Strickling’s people brought to the set, but he had never grown comfortable talking about himself and, after four years of doing so, felt he had run out of things to say. When one asked, “In what have you found your greatest happiness as an actor?” he answered, “In the cashier’s office.” As columnist Sheilah Graham, newly arrived in Los Angeles, observed, “he would do his best to smile at me, but I knew he wanted me to ask my questions and be gone.”
In Honolulu, Tracy discovered coconut cake and coconut-flavored ice cream and, being on the wagon, ate continuously, particularly sweets. “One day,” Louise recalled, “Spencer said, ‘I’m beginning to gain weight. You’ll have to watch that for me.’ And with that he dumped the problem in my lap. In spite of one diet and another of energy-giving but supposedly non-fattening foods, his weight continued to go up. I discovered through a friend that between meals Spencer was downing three chocolate ice cream sodas in one sitting.” When he began Libeled Lady on July 13, Tracy recorded his weight as 180 pounds. Since he wasn’t carrying the picture, there were a lot of days off. On the twenty-first he baled hay and saw his weight drop to 177. On the thirty-first—Louise’s birthday—he played polo and tipped the scale at 178.
He went into the picture knowing he’d be doing his next assignment under protest, and when, in July, his commitment for The Plough and the Stars was very publicly canceled, it was, the New York Times reported, because “an unrevealed script is being rushed that is planned to give Tracy his most impressive role.” That role, developed over the preceding six months, was that of the Brava fisherman Manuel in Victor Fleming’s planned picturization of the late Rudyard Kipling’s only American novel, Captains Courageous.
Fleming, forty-eight, had been directing movies, westerns in particular, since 1919, and had previously been a cameraman, first for Allan Dwan and Marshall Neilan, later for the Army Signal Corps. In 1929 he teamed with writer-turned-producer Louis D. “Bud” Lighton to make The Virginian. Fleming landed at M-G-M in 1931, and Lighton joined him there four years later. Almost immediately the two men began work on a screen version of the Kipling story. Much of the casting was settled early on: Lionel Barrymore as Disko Troop, the captain of the We’re Here, Melvyn Douglas as Kipling’s rail tycoon, updated to the director of a modern steamship line, Freddie Bartholomew, Metro’s David Copperfield and Selznick’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, as the spoiled rich boy who is whipped into shape during a summer season on the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic.
The eventual screenplay, the collective work of four men, shifted much of the story burden to Manuel, the simple Portuguese fisherman who, in Kipling’s novel, rescues young Harvey from the water. Whoever played the character would need his skin darkened and would have to master an accent. Tracy wanted no part of it. “Fought against it like a steer,” he admitted. “Thought the characterization would be phony. Didn’t see how the pieces would fit together. Didn’t know where I could borrow an accent.”
Tracy’s only work in dialect had been for The Mad Game, and that he had dodged by playing the scene in a hoarse whisper. “I’ll be leaping all over the continent with the dialect,” he warned Lighton and Fleming, both of whom assured him a character who had lived for years among the Gloucester fishermen could easily have picked up any of a dozen different accents. “I’ve always played rough-and-tumble parts,” Tracy added. “This story’s religion or something. Those scenes where he talks about his father—suppose I don’t bring ’em off?