Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [184]
They prevailed upon him to take the script home and read it to Louise, who passed on virtually everything he was asked to do. Louise listened, as she always did, and said that she laughed at the idea that he could ever be anything but on the level. “I was in the stock company where he got his first part,” she told Ida Zeitlin of Modern Sceen magazine. “He had no tricks, no technique, he didn’t know how to make up and looked awful. What carried him through was his great sincerity and naturalness, which he had from the start. If Spence has any fault in acting, it’s that he doesn’t let himself go. He’s always afraid of being ‘hammy,’ so rather than over-play, he under-acts.” Then, echoing George M. Cohan, she said, “Whatever he’s done, I’ve always felt he had more to give, and in this part he’d have to let himself go and give it.”
Louise’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, Tracy still fretted over the matter of an accent:
I went to see every picture in town where an actor might be found speaking an accent—saw Eddie Robinson, Muni [in Black Fury], others. Then we scoured San Diego trying to find a Portuguese sailor to use as a model for Manuel. Finally we found our man. The chap came to the studio to see me. He was Manuel. The expression in his eyes, the way he walked, the way he sat, the way he used his hands, his knowledge of boats. Then he began to talk, and … he spoke better English than I do. When I asked him what he thought about my calling the kid my “leetle feesh,” he looked at me patiently—and a little pityingly—and said, “Do you mean little fish, Mr. Tracy?” I gave up.
By August Tracy was thinking of buying a boat. They had talked about it, he and Louise, and he told her he’d give up polo because a yacht would cost “a lot of dough.” She said, “So what? You don’t spend it in other ways. You may as well have your fun … I wish you wouldn’t give up polo, either. What’s wrong with having two sports?” Not knowing the first thing about navigation, he drove to Newport Beach and tried out a power cruiser, then went sailing the following week on a craft called Landfall.
When they decided to experiment with a new school, pulling Johnny out of Hollywood Progressive, he decided a boat would be too much of an added expense and gave up on the idea. Despite a thirty-four-mile drive each way, Johnny and Susie entered Brentwood Town and Country School in September 1936. “Susie,” said Louise, “was only four and, ordinarily, I do not think I should have started her to school so young, but she, too, needed companionship, and I learned that there were quite a number of even younger children there in nursery school.”
They made three days of tests for Captains Courageous in early September, Tracy’s skin darkened and his hair curled with an iron. “One day,” he remembered, “just after I’d had my hair curled, I walked down the stairs at Metro and heard a scream. I looked up, and Joan Crawford said, ‘My God, Harpo Marx!’ ” Eddie Mannix nearly talked him out of taking the role by warning him not to attempt an accent. “You’ll fall on your ass,” Mannix predicted. After viewing the test footage, Tracy agreed and urged Fleming to test “a couple of other fellows.” Then Sam Katz settled the matter by telling him that if he didn’t take the part, they wouldn’t make the picture at all. Tracy was still getting used to the idea when word spread on the morning of September 14 that Irving Thalberg had died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-six.
All the good things that had come to Tracy in that last year were the result of Thalberg’s faith in him. It bothered him that Riffraff hadn’t turned out better, but he liked to think that what had come since—Fury, especially, and San Francisco—had justified the trouble Thalberg had taken in bringing him to the studio. He attended the funeral at Wilshire Temple on the morning of the sixteenth, then drove himself out to Riviera and devoted the rest of