Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [185]
“I finally talked myself into practicing dialect and putting up with having my hair curled twice a day, but the thought of singing gave me the shudders. I dodged the voice teacher, Arthur Rosenstein, for weeks. After I started taking lessons, I used to duck practice as much as I could. Then I just said, ‘Oh, what’s the difference?’ and let the old baritone rip.” He also took lessons in playing the vielle, the ancient stringed instrument—something of a cross between a mandolin and a hurdy-gurdy—on which Manuel accompanies himself.
However daunting the role of Manuel seemed, the project had its compensations. Vic Fleming was inspirational and rugged, tall and natty with a poetic streak. Lionel Barrymore was Tracy’s boyhood idol, whom he had first seen onstage in Kansas City at the age of sixteen. Twelve-year-old Freddie Bartholomew was a born actor—untrained but with tremendous screen presence—who had developed enough of a following to merit first-featured billing in a picture that had no stars. Tracy’s contract guaranteed him first-featured billing, and he had to sign a waiver in order to make the package work.
Preliminary filming had commenced nearly a year earlier, when a six-man crew left California for Massachusetts to make process backgrounds and incidental shots of the fishing fleet in and around Gloucester. Purchased on the scene was a two-masted schooner called the Oretha F. Spinney, which they rechristened the We’re Here of Kipling’s novel. With the M-G-M crew on board, the ship set sail for Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, where, as Fleming described it, “shots of the fishing fleet in every conceivable sort of rough winter weather” were filmed. The men then brought the ship down though the Panama Canal and sailed it up past Monterey and San Francisco to Coos Bay, Oregon, making fog shots along the way. By the time the cast and crew assembled on the morning of September 30, a second schooner, redubbed the Jennie Cushman, was moored alongside the We’re Here in the harbor at Avalon. A company of seventy-five crowded onto the two schooners, the ships trailing barges, water taxis, and speedboats, looking for fog and finding, for the most part, bright sun instead.
Captain J. M. Hersey and his crew got their first look at the actors when they clambered aboard the We’re Here at 7:30 a.m. “Of the whole bunch of them, Christian Rub looks most like a fisherman,” Hersey observed. “Tracy was sore because he had no sooner got aboard than a makeup man wanted to curl his hair.” Under the direction of cinematographer Hal Rosson, the morning was spent building a parallel out from the port rail to support a camera platform. Tracy, in a dory, practiced pulling into camera range for the scene in which Manuel scoops young Harvey out of the water. “This would be all right,” he said, “except for the hair curling business. It’s a wonder they don’t use perfume on me. Also, I’ve got to get in a few more licks on those oars. I handle a dory like a washerwoman.”
The fog, which had been thick all morning, began to break, and the afternoon passed without getting a single shot in the can. They dismissed the company at four o’clock, returning to Avalon, and tried again the next morning with only marginally better luck. The fog held long enough to get the scene in three takes, Rosson covering it from the barge, the camera platform, and the deck above. Tracy was impressed by Freddie Bartholomew’s dedication to the role, jumping over the side of the boat in order to get what he considered to be sufficiently wet after having been shot with a hose and doused with a bucket of water. “The kid can take it,” he said admiringly. “I hand it to him.”
Again the fog cleared, and the adult cast spent the rest of the day learning to cut bait. Part of the ship’s forecastle had been converted to a schoolroom for Bartholomew, his stand-in Ray Sperry, and sixteen-year-old Mickey Rooney. “We had a full schedule,” Rooney recalled, “a long shoot every morning, then art, history,