Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [203]
Since Gable and Tracy rarely socialized off the set, it was widely assumed they didn’t like each other and that their supposed friendship was a sham, an invention of Howard Strickling’s publicity machine. By most accounts, though, the two men genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, and it was only by necessity their relationship was professional in nature and not as personal as it might otherwise have been. Gable’s drinking habits were widely known, and shortly after Tracy began working on the Culver City lot, the two men went off for lunch one day and disappeared. The studio, Tracy later told a coworker, sent people out looking for them, but nobody could find them, and they were gone two or three days. “I don’t know where the hell we were,” he said.
After he swore off alcohol in December 1935, Tracy kept a respectful distance, joking and lunching with Gable5 but resisting the after-hours invitations and the entreaties to go on hunting and fishing trips. Tracy had no stomach for hunting—as a kid he had killed a bird and never forgave himself—and the boozy world Gable inhabited with such aplomb would very quickly have proven lethal to the equilibrium Tracy struggled to maintain. “If you went out to Gable’s place,” said publicist Eddie Lawrence, “everything was king-size—all the glasses. You were drunk with one glass.” As Joe Mankiewicz put it, “You couldn’t be around Clark without drinking.”
Much of Test Pilot was shot on location at a variety of airfields in and around Los Angeles. San Diego’s Lindbergh Field stood in for Mineola, Alhambra for Wichita. The film’s opening scenes were made at Burbank’s Union Air Terminal, where John Tracy was introduced to Myrna Loy. (“What picture do you remember her in?” his father prompted. “Whipsaw!” responded Johnny.) Despite one Oscar nomination and the prospect of another, Loy thought Tracy needier than when she last worked with him. He seemed unsure of his performance opposite Gable and disinclined to accept Fleming’s assurances.
Gable had no pretensions when it came to his acting, and his admiration of Tracy’s singular gifts was boundless. “I always try to be my best with Spence the first take, and let that be the print,” he once told John Lee Mahin, “because if I start fooling around he’ll kill me.” Gable’s makeup man, Stan Campbell, could remember a sequence that Tracy, riding in the back seat of a car, dominated while Gable and Loy held the foreground. “Any other star but Clark would have had them cut that shot,” Campbell said, “but Clark was never jealous of his fellow players. When the film was screened, he said, ‘Look at that guy Tracy, sitting there doing nothing and stealing our scene.’ He thought it was wonderful that Spence showed up so well.”
If Fleming’s attentions toward Gable left Tracy feeling isolated, he must have felt even more so after an incident at Riverside’s March Field drove a wedge between them. After spending a crisp January morning shooting exteriors, the principals were invited to have lunch with some of the officers, who wanted to fly Gable, Fleming, and Tracy over to Catalina in one of the B-17 bombers being used in the picture. Myrna Loy, who wasn’t part of the conversation, overheard Tracy decline with thanks. “I noticed that the fliers seemed to understand what he was about, but Gable and Fleming started in on him, ragging him for not going. You know how men are. They made all sorts