Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [204]
The minute the others left the table, Tracy leaped up from his seat, grabbed Loy by the arm, and walked her across the field to where a car was waiting to take them back to their hotel. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “What’s going on here?” He fumed silently for a time, then blurted it out: “Well, goddamn it, you know what would happen when I went with them. When they get off that plane, the first thing they’ll do is head for a bar. You know I can’t do that.” Then it dawned on her: he was afraid of falling off the wagon.
Said Loy, “Gable and Fleming didn’t understand this; I mean they refused to understand and had simply kept ragging him. Rather than risk a relapse, Spence had sat there in front of all those men and taken it. ‘You know I can’t do that,’ he repeated in the car to Riverside, trembling with anger. I tried to comfort him: ‘Yes, darling, I know you can’t do that, I know. Calm down, now. Quiet down.’ He was so mad I resolved then and there not to let him out of my sight.”
She suggested an early dinner at the eccentric Mission Inn, hoping to keep him “out of harm’s way” by eating before the others got back. “We were finishing a very glum dinner when the prodigals returned. ‘Look at ’em!’ Spence growled. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ They had indeed gone to a bar and got clobbered. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do now?’ He answered ominously, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ As we passed their table, Gable and Fleming were being relentlessly buoyant. I stopped to blast them, but Spence, after a very curt nod, bolted. When I ran after him, he had vanished.”
Loy got her friend Shirley Hughes and combed the downtown bars, but they couldn’t find him anywhere. The next morning, Tracy didn’t show for work, and everyone suddenly assumed the worst.
We were stuck there on location unable to shoot without him while calls buzzed between March Field and M-G-M. “My God,” Victor moaned to Benny Thau, “we’ve got a situation on our hands!” I thought, “Yeah, you sure have, and you damn well deserve to have one, too.” A few minutes before noon, Spence strolled nonchalantly onto the set, bid everyone a jaunty good morning, and went to work. When Gable and Fleming started threateningly toward him, I headed them off, took them aside, and gave ’em hell: “Haven’t you clowns done enough? How dare you do a thing like that? You know he has to be careful. Where are your brains?” I really laid them out while Spence worked smugly on.
At the core of Test Pilot was Tracy’s mother hen relationship with Gable, a quality Fleming sought to emphasize in his notes, a level of camaraderie and affection between men normally reserved for stories of war and dire sacrifice. That Tracy managed a kind of primal jealousy between Gunner and Loy’s character, Ann, is a testament to their on-screen chemistry and the way the two men were balanced under Fleming’s knowing direction. Where Loy has Gable’s attention, his interest in all things sexual, Tracy has his heart, and the perilous work they do together bonds them in a way that no woman ever could. Tracy understood the equation, had worked it through to an extent that Gable, perhaps, had not. That he saw their interaction for what it was is clear from a comment he made in the fall of 1957, while attending a screening at the home of actress Laraine Day. The picture was Bombers B-52, and as it started, one of the massive old B-17s used in the earlier movie rolled into view. “That plane was used in the picture Test Pilot,” he said aloud, “in which Myrna Loy and I were both in love with Clark Gable.”
On location for Test Pilot with Myrna Loy and Clark Gable, 1937. (PATRICIA MAHON COLLECTION)
Gable, as it turned out, was living at the Beverly Wilshire while making the picture, so over the course of production Tracy spent a lot of time with Joe Mankiewicz. The urbane, pipe-smoking producer didn’t drink, which made his house at the beach a safe haven as well as a handy place to flop.