Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [192]
Around the time of the Academy Awards banquet, Tracy was shooting battleground scenes in Chatsworth, a short drive from his Encino ranch on the same five hundred acres where exteriors for The Good Earth had been filmed. The winners, announced with considerable hubbub on the night of March 4, 1937, surprised practically no one, in part because they had been accurately handicapped in the trades as well as in the Los Angeles Times, giving the Best Actor nod to Paul Muni and Best Actress to Luise Rainer for her performance as Anna Held in M-G-M’s The Great Ziegfeld. With Metro claiming the most employees among the academy’s voting membership of approximately eight hundred, it was widely presumed that Rainer would win the award, as Norma Shearer, nominated for Romeo and Juliet, already had one. “Critics,” according to the Hollywood Citizen News, “generally were of the opinion that Spencer Tracy as the priest in San Francisco ran Muni the closest race and that had he been placed in the [new] category of Supporting Actor he might have won that hands down.”
Van Dyke finished They Gave Him a Gun in twenty-four days, remarkable given the logistics of the shoot. Tracy completed his scenes on March 20 and spent most of the following week lolling on the Carrie B waiting for the inevitable punch list of retakes that followed every Van Dyke production. He was back at work on the twenty-ninth when Susie had her tonsils and adenoids out at Good Samaritan Hospital. Then, granted a six-week leave of absence, he prepared to enter the hospital himself, placing a natural gift for morbidity on full display as he hopelessly garbled the doctor’s prognosis and convinced himself he had cancer.
“I haven’t been telling people because I wanted to wait until it was over,” he confided to Howard Sharpe, who had just completed a multipart biography of him for Photoplay, “but I’m going into a hospital tomorrow and I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of coming out of it. Except in a hearse. And if I do come out, I may never be able to speak again.”
What doctors had actually told him was that there was a fifty-fifty chance his vocal cords would be damaged as a result of the surgery. Overall, they assured him, the operation was “not serious” and the only threat to his life would be in the unlikely event the gland was malignant. All the same, he spent the morning of April 6 finalizing his will and concluding morosely that he couldn’t afford to die. “They take everything, one way or another,” he told Sharpe. “I don’t know what Louise and the kids would do.”
He went to Confession, then entered the hospital with only a hardcover novel to keep him company. (“Hope [I] come back to finish this nice book,” he wrote that night in his datebook.) His sole visitor the next morning was Jean Harlow, who told him she’d dropped around “for a game of handball.” The surgery took all of thirty minutes, and Tracy seemed slightly disappointed the gland wasn’t cancerous. Howard Strickling’s office put out the news that Tracy had simply had his tonsils out, but someone from the Associated Press reached Dr. Clarence Toland, who actually performed the operation, and most AP members accurately reported the surgery was to correct “a chronic thyroid ailment.”
While Tracy was in the hospital, They Gave Him a Gun was sneaked in Huntington Park. Harry Rapf had eliminated all the antiwar lines, save one, and that one line got such a terrific ovation at the preview that Eddie Mannix ordered all the others restored. No one seemed particularly