Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [187]
“You can’t write songs.”
“I don’t write ’em. I just find ’em in my mouth.”
“A song can’t be any good like that—when you just make it up.”
“Say—that best kind songs.” He taps his chest. “When you feel good inside—like, like trade wind—she just come out.”
“Aw, people learn songs. Songs aren’t just inside of people like that.”
“Say, sometime a song so big and sweet inside I can’t get ’im out. And then I look up at stars and maybe cry, I feel so good.” And then he peers searchingly into Harvey’s eyes and says, “Don’t you ever feel like this?” And when the boy returns the same sullen and belligerent face as before he says, “No, guess you don’t.”
The challenge with Manuel was to put him across as a genuinely happy man without making him seem like an idiot. Tracy gained his screen effects largely out of the strength of his own personality, as the actor’s art, at its most basic level, is the bringing of something of one’s self to a role. He wasn’t a character actor in the sense that Paul Muni was, yet here he was in makeup with his hair curled, reciting his lines with the suggestion of a Portuguese accent. It was absolutely essential to avoid an air of masquerade in the part, and Tracy portrayed Manuel’s strength and good nature as a gift from God. Manuel is curious, philosophical, humble but never subservient. Fleming seemed happy with the attack, but it was Tracy’s first time with Fleming and he wasn’t so sure he could trust him.
Freddie Bartholomew could sense Tracy’s insecurity: “I had warm feelings for Spencer Tracy, but there was—curiously—a sense of competitiveness that he felt towards me. I’m not trying to say that I was wonderful and he wasn’t—I don’t mean that at all—but I think he felt that, ‘Ooh, wait a minute. The kid’s running off with the picture and this is not necessarily a good idea.’ ”
They were back out on the ocean in November, midchannel with the Cushman, the Bluegill, the Flying Swan, the Elizabeth K. Brown, and nine other schooners brought down from Seattle and the Alaska halibut fleet, the dories putting overside and pulling away, a storm approaching steadily from the northwest. With a ten-day leave of absence, Tracy pulled alongside the We’re Here one day to show off the Carrie B. “Slick as a whistle,” he said proudly. “A forty-footer that will sleep six, and that I can handle myself if necessary. Captain Hersey came over in a dory and I showed him around. He even took the wheel for ten minutes and admitted that she ‘wasn’t so bad.’ ”
Tracy wanted everyone to see the new boat, and Dick Mook wrote of one particular Sunday afternoon when he took a group of friends out past the breakwater at Wilmington and had trouble getting back. “There is a drawbridge that must be raised to let sailing vessels into the harbor. We came back late in the afternoon when traffic across the bridge was at its heaviest. Naturally, traffic was held up while the bridge was raised to let us through. But Spence, new to navigation and knowing little about steering, couldn’t quite get the boat through.” Motorists waiting to cross the bridge grew irate, honking their horns and raining insults down on the captain of the Carrie B. One driver caustically advised Tracy that he could get the boat through if only he would turn it on its side. “Spence,” said Mook, “flushed a lobster red.”
Shots of the dories racing back to the We’re Here were made on November 20, Harvey falling in as he tries to pass a heavy trawl tub to the deck. Fleming spent at least an hour rehearsing the shot, wanting it on the first try so as not to leave Bartholomew in the cold water any longer than necessary. “Stubby Kruger, out of camera range, was all ready to dive in if Tracy had difficulty hauling Freddie back into the dory,” Captain Hersey recorded,
but Freddie was sure everything was going to be all right. The kid has nerve, all right. A second dory was ready to race over if there was any hitch, and Mr. Fleming himself had a leg over the rail and wouldn’t have hesitated to drop in. Tracy’s dory came up alongside. As he reached for